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Brazen Head

Another contemporary-music CD – Distant Voices, New Worlds, Songs, Landscape and Histories – brings together the Sky Rhythms of Ed Hughes, Shirley J. Thompson’s Hymn to the Evening, Evelyn Ficarra’s What Larks, and Rowland Sutherland’s Modes from the Downs (the latter two pieces, both written three years ago).  In Sky Rhythms, Ed Hughes adapts words taken from the Mass Observation Archive Day Survey, from 1937 – an interesting and involving weaving together of everyday thoughts, worries concerning the world situation, and an evocation of Sussex – of England. Here are some extracts (the words of one, Mary Robinson):

I live in a seaside bungalow town, in a furnished bungalow,

Very small and draughty,

but fortunately,

looking out across open fields and country

to the South Downs…

… To the news’ agents

Daily Herald Placard

Stalin might do something to make our bread dearer

Further depressed by news in paper

which hopes that England will not let France down…

… The air is splendid,

we get whatever sunshine is going,

and witness superb skyscapes,

Felpham, where Blake lived, is near…’

A modern ‘Lark Ascending,’ a contemporary ‘Land of Lost Content,’ a ‘Paradise Postponed,’ or the paintings of John or Paul Nash, Evelyn Mary Dunbar, John Piper, Eric Ravilious – all of these thoughts and associations came into my mind in this strongly modern setting, which includes electric guitar, as well as flute and clarinet. Expertly performed, this production by Sussex musicians (ensembles, The New Music Players, The Orchestra of Sound and Light) shows that the landscape inspiration in our artistic DNA is unbroken.

A mellow tonality of summer warmth and wandering can be enjoyed in Shirley J. Thompson’s An Hymn to the Evening (a setting of Phillis Wheatley, from the eighteenth century) and in Matthew Sheeran’s Languet Anima, in which echoes of fourteenth-century music gently appear and drift for an all-too-brief three minutes — a piece reminiscent of modern orchestral settings of Byrd or Dowland.