Artists who feature in a new season of sound art @blackswanarts and beyond. Bring your ears and an open mind!

LISTEN artists

Conch short extract
from Lotus/Conch/Parasol Sound Journey total time on CD  32’18’’
 
The Conch announces the possibility of complete transformation of all by clearing negative thought.
Candida - Conch, Kharkhiraa Undertone singing.  
Michael - Morin Khuur, Khöömii Overtone singing.

Conch (short extract) from the Ashtamangala Album

LIVE RECORDING on 3 August 2013
Ian Pace (piano)
Late Music York, Unitarian Chapel, York
Commissioned for Late Music Festival with funds from PRSF.

RETURN OF THE NIGHTINGALES 
for solo piano and nightingale (2013)

Along with the rose, the nightingale is one of the principal images used in classical Afghan poetry and song. It is the bird of hazar dastan, ‘a thousand stories’, singing rad ba rad, varying its song ‘turn by turn’. The combination of live birdsong and music is considered to give Afghans the greatest musical enjoyment. The score is prefaced by the following Persian Sufi text:

'Ajab tarana e sar karda am darin golshan, Khoda konad ke na sazad falak khamush mara'

I have started to sing a wonderful song in this flower-garden like a nightingale
I hope the movement of the stars (destiny) does not make me silent again.

It is used as a direct reference to the devastation of Afghan culture during the period of the Taliban when musicians were silenced or exiled, and to their re-emergence following the Taliban’s expulsion from 2001. The text also suggested a simple musical narrative: 
-  a lone nightingale’s song is accompanied by a classical Afghan song, a tarana 
-  its obliteration by a violent and mechanistic depiction of warfare
- the gradual reassertion of the tarana and the nightingale with an accumulation of birdsong and trills interlaced with fragments of an Afghan rag, increasingly ecstatic and resonant. This eventually dies away to reveal the nightingale’s song.

The musical material has been derived from three sources. The opening melody is a transcription of an Afghan tarana sung by Ustad Amir Mohammad, recorded by ethnomusicologist John Baily during a Herati wedding party on 12 September 1974.  Many of the rhythmic patterns are taken from Afghan musicians’ improvisations made in response to hearing Messiaen’s Le Loriod, recorded by John in Herat in 1994. The trill-saturated conclusion was inspired in part by Ian’s tremendous performance of Scriabin’s Tenth Sonata which I heard in 2004, and contains fragments from this work. 

Return of the Nightingales is a purposely uneasy work. It combines ‘natural’ birdsong with constructed music, and contemporary Western and traditional Afghan musical sources on an instrument that is only designed to convey the former with any subtlety or authenticity. The ecstatic climax is ‘my’ resolution expressed in European terms...an outsider’s response.

The piece is dedicated to John Baily, who together with his wife Veronica Doubleday, has worked tirelessly to preserve Afghan music. His video documentary, Return of the Nightingales (2012) celebrates the fabulous work undertaken by the Afghanistan National Institute for Music. Its mottos are:
BUILD LIVES THROUGH MUSIC 
REVIVE AND PRESERVE AFGHAN MUSIC 
TRAIN FUTURE MUSIC EDUCATORS
 ESTABLISH INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE 
ASSURE MUSICAL RIGHTS



Klänge-Farben 25

Return of the Nightingales for solo piano and nightingale (2013)

Music to accompany large silk-screen prints by Mike Collier - one of which is included here, but bear in mind they're a metre square and LUMINOUS colours! - first exhibited at Cheeseburn Grange Sculpture Garden, Northumberland in August and September 2017, and then at Allenheads Contemporary Arts, Platform A Gallery Middlesbrough, Drawing Projects UK in Trowbridge, and at the Listen! Festival at Black Swan Arts in Frome. The prints and the music are both responses to digital visualisations of birdsongs from the dawn chorus at Cheeseburn. More details available on the various sites where the work is documented. The title is taken from "All these things are mine" by Edward Thomas, c. 1911, and refers to the singing of a blackcap . . . which is not one of the birds in the project, but it's a lovely quote.

. . . singing every minute high up in golden-green blossom . . .

Three movements played without a break, part of a collaboration with Mike Collier, Geoff Sample, and Alex Charrington, this is music for a set of 14 prints made by Mike and Alex, based on sonograms by Geoff. I have written this solo piano piece based on melodies derived from Geoff's sonograms of individual birdsongs. Rather than imitating the song of the birds, I have "translated" Geoff's visualisations (sonograms)into medieval neumatic notation, which the sonograms themselves resemble, and then translated the medieval into modern notations, and then composed freely with this material. The first section is based on transcriptions of redstarts, the first to sing in a typical dawn chorus, then a flourish leads into the main dawn chorus - blackbirds and robins, joined by wren, chaffinch, and dunnock, finally a tranquil evening chorus dominated by wood pigeons. The title, as has become normal for these collaborations with Mike Collier, is from a poem by Edward Thomas. The image is the third of Mike's images from the sequence of fourteen. Mike's exhibition of prints with my music has been seen (and heard) at National Drawing Centre, (Trowbridge, Wilts), Platform A Gallery, (Middlesboro), Allenheads Contemporary Arts, Black Swan Arts, (Frome), and Cheeseburn Grange, (Northumberland). 

The pianist here is Kate Williams.

Here's a link to Mike's artist website.
http://mikecollier.eu/
Connected to this project is a co-edited book by Mike and myself with John Strachan called "Songs of Time and Place: Birdsong and the Dawn Chorus in Natural History and the Arts", published by Gaia Project Press in collaboration with Art Editions North and Bath Spa University. ISBN: 978-0-9932192-9-0.

Out Of The Wood Of Thought That Grows By Night . . .

LIVE UNEDITED RECORDING - Duncan Honeybourne (piano) 2012
Seconf movement of a four movement work:

LUNAE Four Nocturnes for solo piano Sadie Harrison (2012)

Lunae is a set of four pieces which share many of the characteristics of the nineteenth century piano Nocturne popularised by composers such as Field and Chopin. It also draws on works written in the early twentieth century where ‘nocturnal sounds’ were incorporated into evocations of the night, most notably by Debussy and Bartok.

Nocturne II Lachrymae is based closely on John Dowland’s Lachrymae Pavan for lute. Written as an ‘In Memorium’, the piece is slow and melancholy, being prefaced by a quote from Lithuanian poet Valdas Daskevicius: ‘Love is the silence in which I remember you and repeat you’. The theme is heard in many guises, representing the sadness of loss, the hope of a remembered dream and a sad reawakening. It is dedicated to Pamela Parr, an extraordinary epigraphist and adventuress who died in 2012.

MVT 1 at 
https://soundcloud.com/sadie-harrison-composer/lunae-1-around-and-a-round

Out Of The Wood Of Thought That Grows By Night . . .

bennetthogg