A highly respected editor of English folk songs and hymns, composer Elizabeth Poston received her musical education at the Royal Academy of Music. She served on the music staff of the BBC and wrote several film scores, including one for a 1970 film version of Howard’s End. (In fact, she lived in the house that was the subject of the E.M. Forster novel.) Jesus Christ the Apple Tree employs an anonymous 18th-century text from New England. The tune is one of fresh simplicity and melodic fluency, greatly resembling a folk song, and it is harmonized in an appealingly archaic style. The melody is constructed in such a way that it may be overlapped, in the manner of a round.