Recent work by Composer and violinist Amanda Johnson

Amanda Johnson Composer - Recent Music

Violin, Jal Tarang and synthetic sounds created from data collected from a weeping willow tree.

Created for Etruria Industrial Museum's Canal Festivals Trail, 2023, funded by Arts Council England

Weeping Willow

A collection of field recordings made in Sheffield the weekend of Le Grand Depart where we took our son Oscar (2) to watch the race. Also incorporating recordings of the attendant Yorkshire Festival including musicians in the amazing Colourscape and Kidology's ace bicycle bell scultpture - https://soundcloud.com/kidology-arts

Sonic Postcard From Le Grand Depart - Sheffield 5th/6th July 2014

'Aria of Canaries' was recently installed at the National Mining Museum for England and is now part of their permanent collection. It was exhibited as part of the Yorkshire Festival to celebrate the Tour de France in Yorkshire, Summer 2014. Funded by Arts Council England, it comprises of a large scale artwork accompanied by this piece of sound art/music.
the heart-breaking story of this colourful bird, exploited by man due to its' beautiful song. Snatched from their home in the Canary Islands and forced to live in cages, descending daily into the mines, the freedom and sometimes the lives of these birds were sacrificed to save the lives of miners.

Aria of Canaries

Soundtrack from 'Crate 39', currently on display in Buxton Museum and Art Gallery - the story of an evacuee boy singing and playing with objects he has found inside a lost crate. The evacuees came from all over the UK seeking sanctuary in Derbyshire. They found physical freedom and were shielded from many of the effects of the war, but many were unhappy.

Safe from Harm - For Buxton Museum and Art Gallery

Winter "Has the End Begun?" is part of “SEASONS OF CHANGE”, a radical new song cycle written by 4 composers. It was inspired by “Free Trade Songs” for the League Bazaar 1845 by Eliza Flower (1803 – 1846)and commissioned by ELECTRIC VOICE THEATRE (www.electricvoicetheatre.co.uk/) with funds from The National Lottery Heritage Fund & Hinrichsen Foundation.

I was inspired to write this song after listening to one of Eliza Flower’s Free trade Songs , Winter Promise, in which she sets the words of her sister, Sarah Flower Adams, to music. The sisters were radical feminists who fought for human rights, particularly those of women and poverty-stricken families.

To find out more and for the full text please go to https://www.elizaflower.co.uk/amanda-johnson/



Winter "Has the End Begun?" by Amanda Johnson

Far away across the land
there’s a boy who keeps the hourglass
He’s as blind as blind can be
and he has all the answers

He’s a sparrow sometimes a dragonfly
the other days a little boy who sits in the glowing of the moon
he swallows dusk and gives birth to fireflies
he has all the answers there is

Oh little blind boy
you keep the bones and eat the flesh
a giant kept inside your body’s cage
there’s a fire burning right between your fingers
and it burns all the answers

What runs in your veins
is evil and is sacred
it’s more running sliver than blood
what keeps you from turning into a haze forever
is the beating of your heart

Little blind boy, his satin skin is turning blue
break the hourglass and run
little blind boy, has all the answers there is
he sets the fire to the sun


photo: German Lorca

Cataract

Awakenings

Funded by Arts Council England. Music for  'Disruptive Pattern', an installation, exhibited at Creswell Crags and Chesterfield Museum, inspired by the Dazzle patterns used on ships during WW1. 
The music uses repeating patterns which gradually shift in time to signify normal family life and freedom cruelly disrupted by war. 
Both the visual exhibition and the music highlight the way disruptive pattern was used to blur the outlines of objects in order to confuse and disorientate the viewer.

Dazzle Music

Sounds of the world at war during the blitz, a time when freedoms were compromised in the hope a better life in the future, much as in the lockdown now.
Part of a WW2 art installation in Buxton art gallery in early 2015.

WW2 Blitz

A musical Suite in four movements inspired by the cave lion bones in Buxton Museum, Derbyshire, composed using data from ancient Cave Lion DNA. The music explores the movement, freedom and power of this now extinct animal.
Funded by Arts Council England and supported by Sound and Music via the Francis Chagrin award. The piece uses audio recordings made inside Foxhole cave and around High Wheeldon Hill and the National Trust kindly helped me to record the music in Foxhole Cave in the Peak District.

From a Roar to a Whisper - No 1 - On High Wheeldon

From a Roar to a Whisper - No 2 - The Ice Cave

From a Roar to a Whisper -  No 3 - On The Prowl

Lullaby of the Larks is a memorial to the people captured and killed in an Iron Age massacre at Fin Cop in the Peak District. While this historic event happened over 2500 years ago, it has chilling similarities with recent events in the media. Have we learnt nothing in that time? The music, by composer Amanda Johnson is based on the song of the many larks which make the hill their home. 

During recent excavations at the iron-age hill fort of Fin Cop, near Bakewell, archaeologists found the 2500 year-old remains of a woman. Marks on her bones suggested that she had been executed and the way her body was laid suggested that she was thrown into the ditch that surrounded the fort and the fort wall pushed in on top of her. Everywhere the archaeologists dug along the line of the wall they found the remains of women, children and babies who had all suffered a similar fate.
The evidence suggests that in all probability the women and children of Fin Cop were killed in an act of genocide and that as many as 400 of them still lay undiscovered beneath the hill fort’s thin soil. The theory is that the men of Fin Cop were defeated in battle elsewhere and that the victors committed the atrocity. So far, the remains of 16 individuals have been recovered and they are kept at Buxton Museum.

Funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund and installed in Buxton Museum, Derbyshire, in 2018, alongside 16 paintings by artist Richard Johnson and some of the remains of the recent excavations of the hill, including a tiny ancient lark bone.

Lullaby of them Larks

Lullaby of the Larks

Music for reflection, which was installed alongside a large piece of visual art , a reflective coal mirror, in the newly renovated private chapel of Wentworth Woodhouse, Rotherham in February 2020. 
The piece allows the audience to contemplate the perceived freedoms of the deer and her calf, the aristocratic family of the house and the miners, who made the building of the stately home possible. The title references a personal memory of a former gamekeeper to the estate of a female deer and her calf walking across a seam of coal in the morning sunlight. The coal had been polished to shine like glass, ahead of a visit by King George and Queen Mary. 
A partnership project between Wentworth Woodhouse Preservation Trust and Rotherham Early Help, funded by Arts Council England and Wentworth and Elsecar Great Place.

Hind Of The Morning

Composer and musician based in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, UK
Finzi Scholarship Award Holder, Francis Chagrin award 2017 
I compose contemporary classical music  for acoustic instruments and/or voices combined with recorded environmental sounds. My work explores themes of migration, travel and identity.

Weeping Willow

Amanda Johnson (Musician and Composer)

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