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

Jami Sieber - Maenam
Spiral System - Elephant
Carbon Based Lifeforms - Flyatta Dig
Ephemaral Mists - Midnight Kiss
Geotic - Riding Thermals
Shira Kammen - Downstream
Aaron Spectre - Dulcimer
Phil Thornton - Meditation
Kaya Project - When Only Sand Remains (Tripswitch remix)
Desert Dwellers - You Can See Forever
Ott - Smoked Glass & Chrome
Randon Myles - Water
Kiran Ahluwalia - Vo Kuch
Kaya Project - Saranghi Breaks
Shpongle - I Am You
Kaya Project - Under A Spell
Brian Eno - An Ending (Ascent)
Steve Roach - Palace Of Nectar

Note to teachers/instructors who would like to download this for use in their classes. You can donate here if you wish - https://www.paypal.me/mayawaska

Vinyasa [Mix]

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

These are a few excerpts that I had recorded in London in October 2011 by the wonderful Quintin Christian at Musicland Studios London.  

Bach Cello Suite 2 - Prelude (Extract)

The Cello Player