Stuart O'Hara & Marianna Cortesi premiere composer Morag Galloway's 'When You Were Seven' as part of the opening weekend of our 2023/24 season.

Poem:
When you were seven,
the kitchen glowed amber in the glass
as you slipped through the soft blue garden
like a blackbird chuckling into dusk.
Air, damp and calm as mushroom, strok’d your skin.
Your skirt grew heavy,
And in the lane,
orange sun, sinking, dazzled your lashes,
lifted shadows through your hair.
Your name cried out behind you,
like a seabird for the sea,
and you thought
“If I don’t go now, when?”
- Ann Heath


Recording by Jude Clark

When You Were Seven (WP)

As part of the Late Music 2023-24 Series opening weekend. 
 Stuart O'Hara & Marianna Cortesi perform MA Composition student George Hetherton's 'First Warm Day' (WP).

Poem:
First warm day
Sun curls along the terraces like a happy drunk
It stumbles over tiny shadows in each splash of moss,
the leaves of weeds, the gutters bright with wet
Daffodils in stunted pots fling their leaves out wide
and bask, heads nodding
at a sky clear as a wine glass
washed and waiting on a filthy sill.

Starlings whistle through yellowed nets
in shiftless windows and,
this warmth seeps, unseen, unexpected
so that paving sighs
and streets stretch out
to rub against another in their sleep.
Today is fragile as cupped earth
rich fallow crumbling away.
Mundane and miraculous
as the sun settling in the city
drifting down through leaves and rooves and blossom
only to warm the concrete,
only to call the bees.
- Ann Heath

Recorded by Jude Clark

First Warm Day (WP)

As part of our opening weekend of the 2023/24 season, the Delta Saxophone Quartet (DSQ) brought a programme of music by composers who have been important in their development over the past 40 years. To celebrate our joint 40th anniversary with the DSQ, they premiered Paul Honey's Cold Ovens and a number of other pieces written for saxophone quartet and mezzo-soprano Frances Gregory. 

Programme Note:
This poem was written after seeing a black and white photograph of a long queue of women resolutely standing on icy pavements waiting to buy bread. In the poet's imagination, these doughty women are transfigured into an image for words that are waiting patiently to find their place in a poem that is yet to be written.

Recorded by Jude Clark

Cold Ovens (WP)

To celebrate the 70th Anniversary of Dylan Thomas' death, Professor John Goodby and Associate Professor David Lancaster presented the programme 'Singing Dylan Thomas: I sang in my chains like the sea' on Saturday 4th November 2023. The programme consisted of new settings of Dylan Thomas, performed by Christopher O’Gorman (Tenor) & David Pipe (Piano).

Programme Note
1.  For as long as forever is
2. Clown in the Moon
3. Mr Waldo’s Song

My choice of poems for ‘Cwmdonkin Songs’, named after the street in Swansea where Dylan Thomas grew up, offers a range of his poetry; these three short settings attempt to respond with differing musical approaches.  ‘For as long as forever is’ (1938) contains a stream of disconnected images; while their meaning is often quite obscure, they are united through their play on sounds.  ‘Clown in the Moon’ is a modest, romantic piece of juvenilia, sad and wistful, with some outbursts of teenage angst auguring the poet’s later existential concerns. ‘Mr Waldo’s Song’ from Under Milk Wood (1954), a ballad in a much more popular vein, reveals Thomas’s humanity, even his humour, with its joviality and double-entendres. (RS)

1.	For as long as forever is

For as long as forever is 
And the fast sky quakes in the web, as the fox in the wave,  
With heels of birds and the plumed eyes, 
Shakes in its stride the partridge fence and the sea-duck rows,  
And a flame in the wheel jumps the nave,  
As a dozen winds drop the dark by the one moonrise,  
And the stag through a trap grave,  
Forever the hunted world at a snail's gallop goes. 
 
Over the packed nests now, the snare and the she-bear's floes,
Through the cat's mountain and the cave 
By the market and a feather street near the townspires, 
Narrowly time's slow riders shave.  						

2.  Clown in the Moon 

My tears are like the quiet drift
Of petals from some magic rose;
And all my grief flows from the rift
Of unremembered skies and snows.

I think, that if I touched the earth,
It would crumble;
It is so sad and beautiful,
So tremulously like a dream. 

3.  Mr Waldo’s Song
 
In Pembroke City when I was young 
I lived by the Castle Keep
Sixpence a week was my wages
For working for the chimbley sweep.

Six cold pennies he gave me
Not a farthing more or less
And all the fare I could afford
Was parsnip gin and watercress.

Did you ever hear a growing boy
To live so cruel cheap
On grub that has no flesh and bones
And liquor that makes you weep?

Sweep sweep chimbley sweep
I wept through Pembroke City
Poor and barefoot in the snow
Till a kind young woman took pity.

Poor little chimbley sweep she said
Black as the ace of spades
Oh nobody's swept my chimbley
Since my husband went his ways.

Come and sweep my chimbley (2)
She sighed to me with a blush
Come and sweep my chimbley (2)
Bring along your chimbley brush!

Cwmdonkin Songs

Performed on Saturday 4th November by Christopher O’Gorman (TENOR) & David Pipe (PIANO) at Late Music Concerts, York. Programme curated by Professor John Goodby and Associate Professor David Lancaster called 'Singing Dylan Thomas:
I sang in my chains like the sea'.



Ilex or holly is a woody evergreen shrub associated with unconditional love, wise decisions, immortality, tenacity of life, and cycles of growth. Often used as part of Christmas decorations as a symbol of Christ’s crown of thorns and the crimson berries as a symbol of his blood, is used at this time to remind Christians of death and rebirth. In the spring, holly has white four-petaled flowers which could be it’s ‘snowy breast’, a symbol of hope and purity. (HJ)

You hold the ilex by its stem
And touch its petals one by one;
You make them glad and tender them
With lifted fingers to the sun.

The flower will not join the sky;
It was the oracle that told
You how the stem and leaves should lie,
Stem close to white, and leaf to gold.

And now the sun denies it rest,
You will have tears to carry bearer.

The ilex has a snowy breast;
There is not any flower fairer.

Recorded by Jude Clark

You Hold The Ilex By Its Stem (WP)

Lecturer of Music and Education at Sunderland University, composer, cunductor and researcher.  

This selection of work spans my undergraduate and postgraduate degrees and now my professional endeavors.

My work tends to draw upon literature, history, myth etc. with strong programmatic elements.  These are just examples of instrumental works.

Contemporary composers, performed live.

Concerts of new music on the first Saturday of each month, March to October.

New tracks tagged #Wordsetting