The South Holland Symphony is a project with the London Mozart Players and three communities in the South Holland district of Lincolnshire. Over the next few months I am going to be composing an orchestral piece for the orchestra based on material generated by participants in workshop sessions. The project aims to create a new piece of music which reflects the particular landscapes and people of the area.
May 12th Workshops………………
Here are a couple of things from last weekends workshops in Spalding and Holbeach.
The Spalding piece is played by a large group using instruments and voices speaking lists of sounds that they associate with their locality. This will become transcribed and mixed with drawings of horizon lines (as in the Field Of Sprouts piece) to create a section for full orchestra……
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Holbeach Fog
In a small workshop with three enthusiastic young people we created this section of music. At the end the fog will lift and become a very low sound (double bass rumble) and very high one (Violin harmonic) with transcriptions of birdsong in the middle. The fog music is always falling and is an exploration of the idea of the land becoming inundated , in the past by the sea and now by the fog……………..
This is an orchestral simulation played by computer so some of the sounds are not accurate representations of how it will sound when played by the LMP.
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Demos: As part of the preparation for this I created these two short pieces for string quartet which were performed at LMP concerts.
1: Horizon melody and a field of sprouts…….. uses the contour of the landscape in this photograph to generate a melodic line played by the first violin, the second violin plays an accelerating and decelerating pulse following the edge of the field while the lower parts play rotating material based on the shape of the plants…..
which sounds like this
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2: Rural Scene with Red Arrows……is an arrangement of this field recording for string quartet
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the quartet version
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sonogram of field recording
with thanks to LMP players
Nicoline Kraamwinkel (Violin)
David Angel (Violin)
Simone Van der Giessen (Viola)
Sebastian Comberti (Cello)