Livens Leo. Sing a Song of Sixpence for piano

London: Oxford University Press, 1922. — 8 p.Son of the English artist Horace Mann Livens, Leo Livens was a virtuoso concert pianist and composer. He wrote mainly for his own instrument and his most celebrated works were based on nursery rhymes: Sing a Song of Sixpence and Little Polly Flinders.
Together with his sister, Evangeline, Leo Livens (1896-1990) was a piano pupil of Tobias Matthay. Livens was a precocious talent - his set of Impressions were published by Anglo-French when he was not yet 20. He taught piano at the Royal Academy of Music in London from 1922, but his career was cut short by mental illness, and he died in Shenley Mental Hospital, Radlett. This piece is one of the best encores by a British composer that I know. It is very much in the salon style of Fritz Kreisler and Eduard Schütt, and as such it is more Viennese than English. Note the birdsong as the 'four and twenty blackbirds' appear from the pie!Sing a song of sixpence
A pocket full of rye
Four and twenty blackbirds
Baked in a pie
When the pie was open
The birds began to sing
Now wasn't that a dainty dish
To set before the kingThe king was in the counting house
Counting out his money
The queen was in the parlour
Eating bread and honey
The maid was in the garden
Hanging out the clothes
When down came a blackbird
And pecked off her nose
medium difficulty, intended for student of music universities