Butterworth was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Oxford, where he pursued a legal career. After meeting Vaughn Williams and Sharp he left college to dedicate himself to music. He spent a short period at the RCM and was active in music criticism and the collection of English folksongs and dances. This research aided his development as a composer in that he began to blend folksong characteristics as well as some actual folksong material into his work. His orchestral rhapsody A Shropshire Lad (1912) contains no direct quotations, but the melodies are simple and clean as in the folksong form. ~ Lynn Vought, Rovi