Not in fact a plant, but a lichen. I saw some of these little beauties when I took shelter next to a damp rock on a wet, sullen winter’s day in the Affric Hills.  Now I’m quite fascinated by lichens, which seem to surround us in their huge variety wherever the air is clean enough.
 
A lichen is a symbiotic association between a fungus and an alga. The fungus provides the structure for the alga to grow in, while the alga provides nutrition for the fungus; without one, the other could not survive, and they grow very slowly together.
 
When I began to think about a starting-point for my piece for the TRANSPLANTED project, this symbiosis really appealed to me. The two instruments (violin and cello) would play music that intertwined, and when one changed direction the other would follow. Sometimes it wouldn’t be clear which instrument played which notes, the two sounding as a single organism; at other times they would drift apart, only to reunite.
 
I worked at the piece in short bursts spread over a couple of months, making very little attempt to develop or extend music I’d already written: the point was to create this sense of following, of dependency, whatever the material, season or terrain; so I allowed the music to wander, changing pace and looping back but always consisting of one sound made up of two entities.
 
The name seems to suggest the beauty of a flower, which would certainly be appropriate, but maybe it has something to do with war (bellum). If any Latin scholar out there wishes to enlighten me…
 
The piece is to be paired with Hawthorn from Oswald’s Airs for the Seasons, and I was pleased to see that this piece also uses elements of ‘following’, with its imitative openings and quasi-canons. So the two should sit nicely together!
Stuart MacRae
 
Recorded by Pete Harvey June 2021

Image © Laurie Campbell

Cladonia Bellidiflora - Stuart MacRae

From 'Airs for the Seasons' c. 1755

TRANSPLANTED sounding wild plants in music

Recorded by Pete Harvey June 2021

Image (c) Laurie Campbell

Heather Bells - James Oswald

For this new composition for violin and cello, inspired by James Oswald’s Airs of the Seasons, my chosen flower is Heartsease (Viola tricolor). As I read about this plant, I was fascinated in its cultural history and rich assortment of common names. I noticed that in their variations, these suggest a range of intonations and rhythms. Entwining together the flower’s names, my score will be an invitation to play these, abstracting words into sounds, transplanting language into music.
 
The names, mostly associated with love in its many forms, journey the length of the British Isles and carry local folk meanings. I love the way they veer from sacred and romantic names, to suggestive or bawdy ones. They have a vernacular sprightliness to them that lends itself to sound. The music picks up this interplay between the sexual and spiritual, and, after the French root of our name Pansy from Pensée, literally meaning ‘thought’, I make reference to the troubadour songs of courtly love.
 
My usual practice is to work by means of vocal demos, which I overlay and then translate into a score. Here, rather than writing musical notes, I am applying the names directly onto the stave. The final notation will be visual – other recent pieces have emulated spinning wheels, birds in flight – and this score will resemble the shape of the plant, like the heart-shaped score by the Medieval French composer Baude Cordier. The form of the violin and cello also resembles the Viola tricolor, which share a common etymological root.
Hanna Tuulikki

Recorded by Pete Harvey June 2021

Image (c) Laurie Campbell

Heartsease - Hanna Tuulikki

Lukkaminnie's Oo or 'Grannie's Wool' is the Shetland name for Bog Cotton or Cotton Grass. For this piece, we might imagine ourselves on a rather boggy, island moor in high summer, with white tufts of bog cotton all around. It is a calm and sunny day, and because of the bright sun there are, for the moment, only a few active midges. Suddenly one of those strange, miniature whirlwinds, which occur from time to time in such places, rushes past. Then we return to the previous atmospheric calm.
David Ward

Recorded by Pete Harvey June 2021

Image © Laurie Campbell

Lukkaminnie's Oo - David Ward

My favourite place is the Botanic Gardens in Glasgow. My mind and eyes are refreshed after a visit to the flowers and plants there. No clover there, however. I would associate that more with my early childhood summers on my uncle's farmland in Dorset. So, in imagining spring clover I allowed these memories to colour my vision and tried to grasp the 'sublime' that Keats and the Romantics offered. In this new duet we are indeed 'in clover' as the old phrase suggests; idyllic, bucolic, munching the evidently slightly hallucinogenic flower on an ideal warm spring morning. As in real life, idylls never last and soon there's competition for the clover - and the buzzing and biting textures of the middle section suggest that a cow's life is not always a happy one!
 
This commission pairs my 'Clover' with Oswald's 'Primrose'. So in the music of the new piece there are allusions to the older one. I took Oswald's falling fourth and rising sixth, his rising volume and pitch of scale passages, his passage built on falling semitone and rising minor third and his use of some dotted rhythms as some of the building blocks for my own quite different style of piece.
 
Well, that's enough for now - I must get out there and munch some clover! 
Eddie McGuire

Recorded by Pete Harvey June 2021

Image © Laurie Campbell

Clover - Eddie McGuire

Juniper is very rare in my homeland of Shetland but funnily enough one of the three places it does grow is in my native Fair Isle which is a tiny island to the south of Shetland. It has a population of 70 but over 240 species of flowering plants. Not bad for an island of only 3 miles...!! 
I love the fact that Juniper is prickly and edgy. The berry's flavour is strong and has to be used sparingly so a little miniature piece about Juniper is highly appropriate. It's also a hardy plant that grows in so many different environments around the world. If plants could talk then this one would surely speak a thousand languages! It's this kind of dexterity and broad reach that fascinates me about music. 
The piece I have written is like a dance piece with a little drama unfolding. Intense and unforgiving rhythmic music. Like the plant it's fun, beautiful, therapeutic and medicinal if treated with care and consumed in small doses.....;-) Chris Stout

Recorded by Pete Harvey June 2021

Image © Laurie Campbell

The Juniper Run - Chris Stout

WATER MUSIC source to sea - Set 06 -
Invention 7 - J.S. Bach
Dynröst - Chris Stout arr. Sequoia

REFLECTIONS

WATER MUSIC source to sea - Set 05 -
Changeless and the changed - David Fennessy 
Whale, Bow, Echo - Alex South & Sequoia

ECHOES

WATER MUSIC source to sea - Set 04 -
the ebb - Stuart MacRae
The Waves - Timothy Cooper
Fisherman's Prayer - Chris Stout arr. Sequoia 
Prelude from Solo Cello Suite No. 1 - J. S. Bach

WATER MUSIC source to sea - Set 03 -
The Estuary - Timothy Cooper
Reclaiming the Spirit (excerpt) - Sarah Hopkins 
Souch o’ da Laebrack - Chris Stout arr. Sequoia 
Invention 13 - J.S Bach

ESTUARY

WATER MUSIC source to sea - Set 02 -
Clõta’s Song - Lisa Robertson
The Burn - Timothy Cooper
Lochbroom - Mairearad Green arr. Sequoia
Invention 4 - J. S. Bach
The Trows o’ Truggles Water & Clubbi Shuns - Chris Stout arr. Sequoia

RIVERS AND LOCHS

WATER MUSIC source to sea - Set 01 -
Water Droplets - Jean Sibelius
Invention 6 - J.S. Bach
End of Rain and Clear Sky - Alastair Savage

RAIN

Primrose from 'Airs for the Seasons' by James Oswald. We played this as part of our TRANSPLANTED - sounding wild plants in music project. 

Recorded by Bob Whitney at the RCS, Glasgow 2014

 Image © Laurie Campbell.

Primrose - James Oswald

Sundew - Judith Weir
August 17, 2014
Having not lived near the Scottish countryside for many moons, I asked Sonia and Alice to nominate a plant for my composition. I’m so glad I asked them. They found me a species which is so exciting that it deserves its own three-act opera.
 
Sundew (Drosera) is found near bogs – an acidic habitat where mineral nutrition is limited. The plant supplements this deficiency by producing a sticky deposit in which insects are trapped – and slowly eaten! The flowering part is beautifully eyecatching, hence the deceptively pretty name; and you wouldn’t blame any insect for attaching itself to the plant’s tentacles, attracted by what looks like tasty beads of dew. But gradually the plant’s jaws close over the exhausted insect…
 
Sonia and Alice forwarded some wonderful short videos of this process, taken from the BBC’s incomparable Wildlife site . Viewing time-lapse photography in these extracts was the key to my composition.  Each of the 36 bars of the music can be understood as a time-lapse study of Sundew’s nutrition-gathering behaviour. Often one instrument encloses and digests the music of the other. Occasionally one player tries to struggle free (in music the performers have rightly compared to the stabbing strings in Hitchcock’s PSYCHO).  At other times both exist motionless, stuck to each other. In the final bars, a lucky insect (the violin) escapes from the goo and flies off into the ether.

Recorded by Bob Whitney at the RCS, Glasgow 2014

Image © Laurie Campbell

Sundew - Judith Weir

It took me quite a while to find the right plant to take as the starting point for my contribution to the Transplanted project. I needed to find something with which I could make an emotional as well as a purely intellectual or aesthetical connection. I had been thinking about Dandelions in general for a few reasons –childhood memories of course, the incredible transformation that occurs during their life cycle and also the fact that they have often been considered rather plain and even ugly. Quite by chance, I came across an article relating to the discovery of the Taraxacum Pankhurstianum; a unique species of Dandelion found on the remote island of Hirta, part of the St. Kilda archipelago. I was immediately struck by the idea of its existence in this apparently inhospitable environment (there are no trees on Hirta) and was reminded of the strong impression this unique place made on me when I briefly visited there a few years ago. One theory suggests that the flower may have been brought to Hirta by the Vikings and I couldn’t help but be impressed by how this resilient plant has survived on a rock in the middle of the ocean and outlasted the human inhabitants there who have come and gone.

The music I have composed no doubt reflects something of the remoteness of St. Kilda and is characterised by a very exposed use of airy natural harmonics and open strings throughout. My intention was to keep things as simple and unadorned as possible. I was attracted by the economy of means in the Oswald Airs and surprised at how substantial pieces of music could be squashed onto a single page of manuscript. This has been translated, or transplanted if you like, into my score by the use of tiny repeated cells which in my mind, have also taken on some of the physical characteristics of the fabulously delicate and complex seed head of the humble Dandelion.

The title comes from a chapter 'The changeless and the changed' in the book The Life and Death of St. Kilda by Tom Steel.
David Fennessy

Recorded at the RCS studio by Bob Whitney

Image © Laurie Campbell


The Changeless and the Changed - David Fennessy

Alice Rickards violin and Sonia Cromarty cello / Sequoia: connecting music, nature and people.

Sequoia

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