Commissioned by Festival of the North.

VIEW SCORE

Read the Poems

Fray is a body of work created in response to traditional textile manufacturing processes at the Ardanalish Mill, Isle of Mull. Fray interweaves digital and acoustic sound, projected video, poetic text and a ‘virtual orchestra’, in order to draw parallels between woven fabric and the social and natural environments. I initiated this research as part of my 2023 Associate Artist residency at An Tobar and Mull Theatre on the Isle of Mull.

“Fray captivated me with its sustained emphasis on metaphors of stitching and fabric as a means of investigating social and
historical hierarchies; it’s an intricately structured pamphlet
and the accuracy of its descriptions reminded me of Elizabeth Bishop.” —John McCullough

One of my aims was to achieve a closer integration between my poetic/written output and the musical/sonic dimensions of my work. This exploration was pursued under the auspices of an Arts Council DYCP grant, and involved experimenting with motion sensing technology, and also, more broadly, re-thinking my compositional process—conceiving of it less in terms of ‘exemplary works’, and more akin to a weaving practice, the routine production of humble pieces of cloth.

“These poems, filled so much with place, do exactly this — they trust to the exact description, to the plain music of the line. Yarns, wools — there is a wonderful tactility to the work.” —Niall Campbell

Fray Installation — stereo audio / video projection onto 100 year-old woven wool/cotton blanket (Dry Water Arts, Northumberland 25/10/25)

Experimenting with video projections, digital audio and live weaving with motion-sensing @ An Tobar and Mull Theatre (Isle of Mull).

FRAY — complete projection video (dur 40′)

FRAY_score_sketch (Handwoven Handmade Button)

“Piano Weave” — a snippet of one of my collaborative sessions with weavers & spinners at An Tobar & Mull Theatre, as part of my Associate Artist Residency.

Weaving and fabric-themed creative eco-writing workshop @ Dry Water Arts

Intermedial poem for BSL signer, ensemble, soundtrack and printed text.

READ Lockdown Lyric

SCORE 1 (A3 print)

SCORE 2 (A4 print)

Soprano Alison McNeill

Listen: *SANCTUARY_audio preview

(score in preparation)

Sanctuary is a bird-inspired work commissioned by Amble Development Trust.

Accessed via the bird trail app currently being developed by Animmersion, Sanctuary draws connections between the avian and the human by transforming people’s singing voices into ‘birdcalls’ and birdcalls into human-like vocalisations. The result is an audio work scored for a hybrid ensemble of singers, musical instruments, digital sounds and an unlikely chorus of people and birds.

Technically, the soundtrack element employs digital tools to alter the pitch and duration of audio material: bringing birdcalls into the human vocal range and sending human voices into the birdcall register. Sounds have been gathered from a variety of sources, including recordings of local people whose ‘birdified’ voices form part of the sonic texture.

Listen to SANCTUARY (Preview)

Title
Eight Bells (Extract 01:24)

Description
Work for solo violin and soundtrack.

Total Duration
25′

Commissioned by:
Rednile Projects & North Tyneside Borough Council

Performances:
St. George’s Church, Cullercoats, 02 June 2018.
Shimmer Festival, Whitley Bay, 05 & 06 November 2018.

Violin: Helen Critten

This “Sound Painting” is inspired by John’s time as artist-in-residence at the Dove Marine Laboratory and by his interactions with the scientists working there, the local marine environment, and the communities of Cullercoats. John wanted to include data from the Dove Marine Laboratory into the musical concept and has succeeded brilliantly in adding a new dimension to Peter Olive’s work on biorhythmicity – a kind of counterpoint. (Jane Delaney, Director Dove Marine Laboratory)

Eight Bells was commissioned by Rednile Projects and was premiered by Helen Critten on 2nd June 2018 at St. George’s Church, Cullercoats, UK.

Comprising a set of eight variations for solo violin and soundtrack, and loosely based on the traditional folk song The Cullercoats Fish-Lass, the piece is partly commemorative: marking the centenary of the famous American artist Winslow Homer, who, during the late nineteenth century, was for almost two years a resident of the coastal village of Cullercoats.

The piece triangulates three north east coasts of auto/biographical significance. The first connects me to Homer—I was born not far from Cullercoats. The second, Portland, Maine, is where Homer had his studio. The third, Pelion, Greece, is my mother’s birthplace and where I live and work for part of the year. I’m collecting sounds from these three locations, in particular those persistent “soundmarks” that connect the present to the past.

I’ve departed from convention in avoiding figurative representations. Rather, my score incorporates data from marine research as a way of portraying the sea (see below).

Eight Bells and the accompanying poem Time and the Ragworm were featured in Manchester University’s Life Sciences Podcast Series 2 Episode 5.

Rehearsing Eight Bells with Helen Critten at St. George’s.

LISTEN TO Eight Bells

28/04/18

A variation on The Cullercoats Fish-Lass—the “Volos fish-lad”, selling door-to-door. I use his megaphone cries at the end of Eight Bells:

Volos fish-seller audio extract

The bell at Agios Efstathios, Kissos, Greece: one of several I recorded.

agios efstathios bell audio extract

20/04/18

Recording the sound of the sea at Agios Ioannis on the Pelion coast of Greece.

08/03/18

An initial response here to Peter Olive’s co-authored paper “Tidal, Daily and Lunar-Day Activity Cycles in the Marine Polychaete Nereis Virens“: a simple audio representation of the interacting diurnal (24 hr) and tidal (12.4 hr) cycles. This will form a backdrop to the solo violin.

day/tides audio extract

I’m indebted to Joanne Allen (Lead Teacher in Fine Arts and Technology at Scarborough High School, Maine) who braved snow and ice in order to capture this recording of the sea near Winslow Homer’s studio at Prout’s Neck.

sea@prout’s neck audio extract

Joanne is associated with the Winslow Homer Studio restoration project, which is managed by Portland Museum of Art. The audio will form part of the final mix of Eight Bells.

18/02/18

I can’t do justice here to the inspiring conversation I had today with the generous Peter Olive at the Dove Marine Lab. Professor Olive studies the biological clocks of marine organisms, most notably Nereis Virens (ragworm). Not only a marine scientist but a musician too, Peter talked about the “rhythmicity” of marine creatures: their biological adaptation to both circadian and tidal cycles. The inherent musicality of this “counterpoint” wasn’t lost on him, nor the poetic (Keats’ Endymion) and mythological significance of the Nereids he studies. The strange morbidity of the ragworm’s once-in-a-lifetime mating frenzy gave me food for thought too, not least in relation to the commemorative and ecclesial focus of my piece.

A poem after Olive et al:

Time and the Ragworm

Sensors bristling, a water nymph
—virgin still, in chiffon skin,
afraid to eat for fear she’s eaten—
appeases her species' superstitions
with a curl of her fillet-body.

Admiring herself (and knowing better
the time of day than either you or I,
and of night, and month too, and even
of life itself, for she has not yet found love),
she leaves her seabed hide in search of food.

'Swim me and I shall be swum,' she sings.
Breathe me and so shall I be,' she cries,
addressing that myth which says size
is no protection against a gluttonous Tern
and petite Cinderellas are guaranteed 

a Prince Charming to carry them off
—over the tide's bell-curve—
to a place where, brushed like a comb,
their blue-veined bodies will attract
more than mere paper and balloons.

12/02/11

Taken from the Biotechnology Journal article on Bacterial Olfaction by Professor Grant Burgess and Dr Reindert Nijland, the images below are part of an experiment that shows that marine bacteria are capable of detecting smells. The colour gradations show how this occurs in a “distance-dependent” manner. In other words the closer to the source (left 6 wells) the sniffing bacteria are the stronger the effect.

(Photos: Dr Reindert Nijland)

I’m currently representing some of this graphical data in the violin part of Eight Bells: creating scalic passages with an ever-decreasing tessitura.

A poetic response to the Burgess and Nijland paper:

Bacterial Olfaction

Ammonia gave you away,
and that swatch of red
in infinite regression
—like a sunset or
pungent rosé. 

I waited long for eyes
to verify that volatility,
which the noxious land
had me sniffing like a
cultured sommelier 

in every place from
the folds of your pyjamas
to the gaps between your toes,
for a hint of that supernatent:
that nutritious sea

wherein our five-ish senses
ran wild and our metabolisms
uncorked a heady musk
for neighbours and ailing
sailors alike.

"Will ye buy? Will ye buy?"
cried the fish-lass,
and the guys in the lab (seeing
I could hear too) insisted
I must also have caught 

that thick-calved cry,
which proved beyond doubt
we'd been no less nosey
then than any Armstrong or
Charlton since.

04/02/11

The venue for the first performance of Eight Bells: St. George’s Church, Cullercoats.

19/01/18

I met researchers at the Dove Marine Laboratory—a research facility of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and a partner in the Eight Bells project—with a view to finding possible connections, analogies and links between the lab’s ground-breaking studies of the marine environment and my musical homage to Homer.

08/01/18

For Christmas I was given Elizabeth Johns’ book Winslow Homer: The Nature of Observation. One painting in particular stood out. Entitled Eight Bells, the work’s theme of navigation—of finding one’s bearings—resonated strongly with me.

10/12/17

I attended Rednile’s Factory Night at the Dove Marine Laboratory. During the event I got the idea of creating a seascape that would employ data relating to research carried out at the Lab.