Our 2nd online session was a success – 44 people!
The online choir is working really well, and a decent substitute for the real thing during lockdown.
I’ve got a quite elaborate set up in my spare room to deliver the sessions!
Very proud of our new publication, the book and double CD Refugium. The Stonegate Singers recording of my composition Through The Gate features as part of it. The book has been created with archaeologists Dr Ben Elliott and Professor Mark Edmonds.
Big thanks go to all who supported our Summer Concert which has raised £500 for St Nicholas Field’s Nature Explorers programme of family activities! Judging by the feedback we’ve had, the audience thoroughly enjoyed the diverse mix of classical music masterfully performed by pianist Matthew Palmer and cellists Sarah Sigsworth, Catherine Strachan and Frances Jones, as well as songs from around the world sung by The Stonegate Singers , and Brinley Price’s nature-inspired poems. Also thanks to Lewis Outing for great photos and to all the helpers!
We had a fantastic performance on Tuesday night at the Joseph Rowntree Theatre, as part of the Community Choir Festival that’s been running there for the past 10 years.
The choir sounded amazing, and we’ve really got to a whole new level in terms of performance, tuning and the quality of the sound we’re making.
We’ve had some very strong new member come too, who’ve really made a difference to how the choir sounds.
Looking forward to the next chapter…
We had a great time performing as part of Canopy of Voices at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and I was even interviewed by BBC Radio 3! The piece was the product of Manasamitra, an artistic collective directed by South Indian singer and composer Supriya Nagarajan (see here: http://www.manasamitra.com/). James Cave was the main composer for the piece, working alongside Supriya and Duncan Chapman, with text provided by the poet Shash Trevett.
Stonegate Singers director Jon Hughes is also running York Big Sing this summer, and he ran a workshop in Rowntree Park on Sunday, followed by a short Stonegate Singers concert in the Park!
We had a lovely concert at the Unitarian Chapel in St Saviourgate on 30th June, to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of St Nicholas Fields Nature Reserve and Environment Centre. The Unitarian Chapel filled up and the audience was very appreciative of the varied programme. Thea Jacob who came along summed it up well: “It was a wonderful evening and represented St Nicks brilliantly: inspirational, uplifting, purposeful, celebrating the richness and beauty of life and each person’s equal importance and value as a thread in the fabric of our world.”
Big thanks go to all the performers: David Hammond on piano, Sarah Sigsworth on cello, community choir The Stonegate Singers, who sang songs from around the world as well as the premiere of David Hammond’s choral arrangement of ‘Haiku for St Nicks’ written by local poet Brinley Price, Brinley himself read a couple of his other poems inspired by St Nicks, and Cliff Wilton read out extracts of the Tang Hall Tip 1939-1947 poem. Equally warm thanks go to Lewis Outingfor taking beautiful photos, all the event helpers, and especially to those who came along and helped us raise £600 on the night!
We had lots of fun on Wednesday last week recording my compositions ‘Through the Gate’ and ‘Forming, Rising, Running’ for the recorded version of Refugium. Our recording will form part of a sound installation version of Refugium that will run in the British Library’s grand entrance hall on December 8th.
It will also be used for the CD of Refugium, which should appear in December 2017.
We had a brilliant day yesterday performing Refugium at Creswell Crags. The choir arrived on a coach from York at 2pm. We rehearsed 3-4pm, and then they had a tour of one of the main caves at Creswell with a guide. The performance was 6pm – 7pm outdoors in the limestone Gorge. Perfect weather, and around 150 people turned up to see us sing.
The piece used an 8 speaker outdoor ambisonic sound system set up in the Gorge, with the choir singing 3 new pieces as part of the 1 hour long sound fabric. I composed the 3 pieces using text drawn from conversations with people at Creswell, and J. Magens Mello’s original scientific papers written about the gorge in 1875.
The Stonegate Singers 