Malvern Elergy (Spoken word / orchestral, 2023)

 

 

In the early 70s we moved to a village just outside of Worcester, England. I was in my early teens. Our house was less than quarter of a mile from the composer Edward Elgar’s birthplace, I could more or less see it from our living room. At the time I wasn’t interested much in music, much less so the classical kind. My main interest then was in birds and botany, so I joined a local naturalist group. The Malvern hills are very ancient and are more or less plonked in fairly flat arable land and were, and to an extent, still is, a wildlife hot spot. We visited many times but I soon discovered that many of the exciting birds and animals that used to live on the bracken covered hills were already extinct. It felt as if I had just missed the opportunity to experience them. And since the 1970s there have been more species lost from the Malvern hills.
Edward Elgar was fond of walking on the Malverns and composed some of his music while out there. Later Vaughan Williams and his friend Holst also rambled there regularly. As I grew older I fell in love with the English music of the early 20th century, in particular the wistful pastoral works of Vaughan Williams.
“Malvern Elergy” takes these two threads and weaves them together. The music is composed of about five short sketches for orchestral music I wrote but never really finished, with choir and bassoon lines to bridge between them. The music has been treated so that it sounds as if it has been sampled off a record. The only sample from a record is at the start, it’s the sound of a needle going down. All that follows is original. The narrative imagines what those composers would have seen and heard and perhaps taken for granted. It names those species I had just missed and those that have since followed and mourns their passing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctko8Qbm1Zk

The narrative is:
“Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Holst, they would have all seen or heard on their walks in the Malverns, the Turtle Dove, the Red-backed Shrike and High Brown Fritillary, all gone now. “ 

 

Forget-me-nots (Modular 2024)

 

 

The bulk of the source material used in “Forget-me-nots” are recordings made from six to nearly twenty years ago. They are all forgotten in some way, either that I had made them at all and were discovered lurking on hard disks, or that I remembered having them but have no idea now how they were made. Most of the recordings were isolated sounds then stored away as examples or because they might be of use one day. Some were derived from completed tracks, now isolated and re-contextualised.

Curating and arranging the sounds for this new work led to thinking about my composer memory (which is very much on decline) and the relationship between the artist and their creations over time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiMgzarKHY4

 

Free download from https://markdaltongriffiths.bandcamp.com/track/forget-me-nots-modular-2024

 

Four Birds (musique concrète & modular 2024)

 

Since I was a child in the 1960s, I’ve had an interest in nature. By the time I was nine or ten, I realised something was wrong, many of the apparently common birds and insects in my nature books were nowhere to be seen. I didn’t understand then how ecologically impoverished the English countryside was compared to the previous decades when the books were written.

What I had experienced was an outcome of Shifting Baseline Syndrome. The concept is that without memory, knowledge, or experience of past environmental conditions, current generations cannot perceive how much their environment has changed because they are comparing it to their own ‘normal’ baseline and not to historical baselines.

In psychology it is referred to as ‘environmental generational amnesia’.
What we consider to be a healthy environment now, past generations would consider to be degraded, and what we judge to be degraded now, the next generation will consider to be healthy or ‘normal’. The result is our tolerance for environmental degradation increases and our expectations for the natural world are lowered.

“Four birds” explores that environmental loss through sound, taking recordings of birds, then manipulating and synthesising them as an analogy for our increasingly inaccurate memories.

Soon these natural sounds will only exist as distorted and mis-remembered fragments as our memories fade over time. At some time, we will forget their songs and finally we will forget what we forgot.

 

Recordings of Turtle Dove, Skylark, Yellow Hammer & House Martin from the British Library archive (Creative Commons Attribution 4 international licence). Other recordings are my own from 1982-2022)

Cover: Illustration of a turtle dove (Streptopelia turtur) by John Gould and Elizabeth Gould, 1832-1837 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGZuFl9hCC8