Music which evokes energy, toil and labour, but which also tells of community; the beating heart of industrial heartlands.
Bringing together music for string quartet with archive recorded sound – and featuring new work from composer William Marsey and arranger William Newell – this concert from the Solem Quartet documents and celebrates the rich history of industry in the UK.
Industry has been central to the story of the UK – and the western world – since the nineteenth century. And tied to industry is community; communities who were forged in the heat and struggle of labour, and who so often celebrated their togetherness with music.
In this concert, we embark on a musical narrative. Part I begins in a time before industry: we hear sounds of nature, pastoral folk songs in the form of Ca’ the Yowes and The Water of the Tyne, and the rhythm of work in a Western Isles’ waulking song – all of which will, as industry takes over, drowned by the clamour of machinery.
The contained energy in the perpetual motion of Benjamin Britten’s Quartet No. 2 ‘Vivace’ lights a match, the ignition from which a revolution will follow, while the full-throttle nature of Julia Wolfe’s Dig Deep evokes the intensity and grit of tough industrial work.
“I think of music as a strategy for mustering enthusiasm and joy. It’s a way of setting the world in order, a method of carving up time in a way that, seemingly by magic, changes our frame of mind, energises us, and gives us courage and reassurance.” In her programme note for Enthusiasm Strategies, which begins Part 2, Missy Mazzoli neatly summarises why music, and music-making, persists, especially as an antidote to hardship.
“Enthusiasm and joy” can be found in the playing of Tom Clough, virtuoso Northumbrian pipe player and composer who worked as a miner in Newsham; and the warmth and comradery of community is heard through an archive recording of a Llangynwyd pub in 1976. Interacting with newly-arranged live accompaniment by Solem Quartet violinist Wiliam Newell, these historic recordings come to life.
Throughout the concert, William Marsey’s chorales, commissioned for this concert, offer respite and reflection through a contemporary lens on the recordings and programmatic music. Marsey’s Be Nice To See You gently reminds us of the composers’ roots in his hometown of Hartlepool, and his enduring connection to it, employing recorded quotidian conversations with the composers’ parents.
The concert ends with that post-industrial anthem from Manchester, a live recording of Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ with a new musical framing, proving music’s unique power to unite industrial communities in defiance and celebration.