Originally posted at Resonate Magazine :
Andrew Ford writes about his work The Drowners for baritone voice and chamber orchestra, about to be premiered in London on 10 March. The same concert by the UK-based Ruthless Jabiru includes a premiere of a work for strings, percussion and tape by Rosalind Page.
In my sequence of songs, The Drowners, a surfer struggles against the rip (or dreams he does); a drowning man is dragged back from the cold North Sea by his wife, as his laughing child watches from the beach; a toddler drowns in a well in the 19th-century colony of Augusta, Western Australia; grieving parents are visited by the wraiths of their drowned children; a man, out of his depth all his life, drowns when he swims ‘too far out’; the King of Naples is believed to lie at the bottom of the sea, his eyes having turned to pearls. You might be forgiven for thinking I have an obsession with drowning.
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Music | It’s no surprise that Messiaen was a prisoner of war when he first made use of birdsong, writes Andrew Ford
Sat, 10 Mar 2018, 17:00