The Catch Club Sings to Suck Poor Mortals Dry

Choral music from the 18th century has to try pretty hard to be revived by modern choirs, let alone get radio play and recordings.  But William Hayes (1708-1777) found a way.  Trained at Gloucester Cathedral as an organist, he spent most of his career at Oxford, both as an organist (at Magdalen College) and composer.  He helped build the Holywell Music Room, Europe's oldest purpose-built music room, and was elected a "Privileged Member" of the Nobleman's and Gentleman's Catch Club.  A catch is a short piece of imitative counterpoint for two or more voices (usually at least three), and often contain a phrase in words that is revealed by overlapping or intersecting, oftentimes subversive or crude.  Hayes was no stranger to catches and glees (the source of the Glee Club), and he got an award for this leaf:

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However, the leaf I'd like to focus on is much more hilarious.  The vampire legend as we know it today didn't branch out from its Transylvanian homeland until the mid-18th century, which we all know was the birthdate of the gothic novel (The Castle of Otronto).  As the Western England Hoity Toity must have seen vampires as a quaint, amusing quirk of backwards folk, a catch was inevitable.

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Published in Hayes's second book of "Catches, Glees and Canons" in 1765, The Thirsty Vampires (or Thirfty, as I don't have that old-fashioned light "s" letter) couldn't be more appealing as a proto-horror curiosity.  I love that vampires were thought as a plausible explanation for tuberculosis, and the notion of piercing graves baffles me.  The moral appears to be a wish to drink as much wine as possible in life so as to become a vampire in death and drink wine forever; I have no idea why that's not a movie.  I'm no expert on how to sing these pieces, and I've been unable to track down instructions, so you're on your own as to how to perform it properly.  I was able to find a midi recording, though, but they've chosen a lute setting and it doesn't fix the problem of hearing all the words at the same time.  Just go here and click the yellow speaker button, clearly sourced from an educational PC program from 1996, which was of course the intention of William Hayes when he wrote the piece.

~PNK