A FILM exploring the life of English composer, country dancer and folk song collector George Butterworth is to be shown at Otley Courthouse.

George Butterworth: All My Life’s Buried Here is a documentary that tells the story of Butterworth’s life from his earliest childhood through to his final hours and death, during the First World War, at the age of just 31.

The film will be shown at the Courthouse at 3pm on Sunday, September 22 when the screening will be followed by a live question and answer session with the director.

It follows Butterworth on his journeys to collect folk songs and shows what he discovered when he went out into rural England - and how this informed his own music. The audience also finds out why Butterworth once described himself as a ‘professional Morris dancer’ and what led him to destroy so many of his own compositions before he died.

Tracing his journey to its tragic conclusion, the film goes with Butterworth into the trenches of northern France where he was killed in 1916 at Pozières, during the Battle of the Somme.

Butterworth was a leading member of a radical group of composers in the Edwardian years whose music was profoundly influenced by the traditional music of the English rural working class. On his death he left behind a glowing reputation and a handful of exceptional musical compositions, including such still-popular works as The Banks of Green Willow and Rhapsody, A Shropshire Lad. He bequeathed his personal collection of more than 300 English folk songs, tunes and dances to his close friend Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Since his death the composer’s life and music has suffered from a mixture of misrepresentation and mythologising: something All My Life’s Buried Here seeks to correct by drawing on ‘a treasure trove of never-before-seen archival material, new footage, and...the testimony of his contemporaries and expert commentators’. The film also features music by a host of talented singers and musicians. Tickets cost £7 or £6 for Courthouse Friends.

An adaption of Henry James’ famous novella, The Turn of the Screw, meanwhile will be presented at the Courthouse on Saturday, September 14. Box Tale Soup Theatre Company combine human and puppet performances to bring the gothic horror story to life.

The show takes place from 7.30pm on Saturday, September 14 and tickets cost £12. For tickets visit www.otleycourthouse.org.uk, call (01943) 467466 or pop into the Courthouse on Courthouse Street, Otley.