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. “ 

 

Three narratives.

I've got behind on the blog.These are three narrative tracks, all electronic but different in their origins.

"I thought I had lost my friend" Originally recorded a version of the track in 2008, the non vocoder parts created on the Wiard 300 Series and MXR Pitch transposer. I was always unhappy with the vocoded part so I finally re-recorded that in 2021 and re-mixed the synthesiser parts.

The original notes for the track read "The text for the track came from a dream recorded 30/6/2007. It is only a part that appears to deal with the fragmentation of the self into a number of personas, hero, scientist, servant and victim. It’s no co-incidence that the personas are within a graphic novel, they are literally “paper thin”

I thought I had lost my friend (Bandcamp link) 

 

"This house is like a Ship"  This track is about someone that becomes convinced that their house is a ship to the point that they stop looking out of the window to see that is not so. The words are their internal dialogue.

It’s an old track revised, originally based on thoughts about how easy it is to lose touch with reality and how isolation can lead to being trapped in your own thoughts. It seems perhaps appropriate at a time when many people have been isolated for weeks or months.

Narrative

"Sometimes this house is like a ship,
my room a ship's cabin,
with the creaking of the timbers and the ebb and flow of light it seems as if I am on some kind of immense sea.
I travel forever.
I hardly ever look out of the window these days, I know the sea is there...it's just waiting there, immense, impassive and primal.
Windblown or becalmed, I travel forever
Windblown, becalmed”

 

This House is like a Ship (Bandcamp link) 

 

 

"Feedback Occurs" Apart from the vocoded text all the sounds in the piece where generated or processed using feedback loops. This included Karplus Stong tones and runaway feedback on a MXR Pitchshifter.

 

Feedback Occurs (Bandcamp link)