As part of World Mental Health Day on Tuesday 10 October, Head of Music Performance Dan Harding will be giving a free lunchtime concert exploring tranquil piano repertoire aligned with scenic landscape photography.
Come and enjoy a break from it all, with a half-hour recital of meditative piano music, including works by Olafur Arnalds, Philip Glass, Chick Corea, Richard Rodney Bennett and Yumiko Morioka.
The live piano music will be accompanied by scenic image projections in a darkened concert-hall, opening up the opportunity to immerse yourself in some breathtaking music and photography for a meditative odyssey for the ear and the mind.
You can take a listen to some of the pieces which will be included in the recital on a dedicated playlist on Spotify here which includes the beautiful Komorebi byYumiko Morioka, the title being a Japanese word describing the effect of sunlight filtered through trees.
Admission is free, more details online here: the recital starts at 1.10pm, all welcome to enjoy an immersive experience on the day.
The latest film by the Faversham-based company, Kent Creative, promoting excellence in arts and culture across the county, features an interview with Your Loyal Correspondent, talking about extra-curricular music at Kent, the social aspect of music-making, the Colyer-Fergusson Building, and more.
Filmed a few weeks ago, it also features Minerva Voices, our upper-voices chamber choir, in rehearsal as it prepares to sing Choral Evensong at Canterbury Cathedral; one of this year’s Music Scholarship students having an instrumental lesson; and photos from the recent concert by University Chorus and Symphony Orchestra.
Many thanks to Nathalie Banaigs for creating such a lovely way of highlighting extra-curricular music at the University, and all we do.
As a reflective tribute to the late Queen Elizabeth II, Head of Music Performance, Dan Harding, plays the gently meditative Farewell to Stromness, written by a former Master of the Queen’s Music, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies.
The piece was written by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies CH CBE (1934 – 2016), who from 2004 to 2014 was Master of the Queen’s Music, a position previously held by composers including Sir Edward Elgar and Arnold Bax, and most recently by Dame Judith Weir. The piece was premiered in 1980, and rose to particular popularity after being performed at the marriage of the then Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall in 2005 in an arrangement for strings.
The village of Stromness lies on the largest of the Orkney Islands, off the coast of Scotland, where the composer lived and worked.The piece was also performed at the service of thanksgiving for the life of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II on 12 September, 2022 at St Giles’ Cathedral, Edinburgh.
Filmed in the Colyer-Fergusson Building on the University of Kent’s Canterbury campus.
I heard a piece of music on BBC Radio 3 Breakfast this morning and instantly burst into tears. (And no, I’m not going to tell you what it was.)* It was one of those unexpected moments when music reaches out and gets under your skin, and from nowhere there’s an immediate emotional response for which you’re wholly unprepared. It’s what music does best, one of its greatest powers: to move you when you least expect it.
Image: Jeremy Bishop / Unsplash
It made me reflect on why the music had affected me so much; I’d heard other pieces throughout the morning, but nothing had struck me quite so forcefully until that moment. The piece was a wonderfully intimate song – just voice and piano – small-scale, but operating with an emotional weight far greater than chamber music from two performers might suggest. And I realised it was because, at this moment, I have two huge pieces whirling around in my head – Haydn’s Nelson Mass and Fauré’s Requiem – that we’re preparing for forthcoming concerts here in the Music department, and which I’m in the midst of rehearsing.
Image: Varun Gaba / Unsplash
The way my brain operates is that, as we gradually draw closer to a performance (the Haydn is in three weeks’ time), it starts to bring the repertoire to the surface and keep it moving through my inner ear, often to the point where the relevant pieces are all I can think about during the whole day. It’s a way, I suppose, of my working through to check that I really do know them before stepping out to conduct them; but it’s also a way of really ensuring I’ve understood the emotional landscape of the music, expressed in its harmonic language. Have I really grasped the import of that diminished chord ? Why is the movement in the cellos and basses at that bar so important ? What’s the effect of that interrupted cadence there ? Why are the second violins playing that particular note when the firsts are playing THAT one ? What does it all mean ?
I think it was Britten who observed that musicians have a thinner layer of skin, so that they can experience the emotion of music more readily (or something like that). For me, this is definitely the case the nearer I get to a performance, as the music continues to sound throughout my imagination each day as the concert draws closer. If the music is to have any chance of operating successfully, then you have to have fully explored its emotional ebb and flow throughout the rehearsal process; you have to have opened yourself up to the harmonic implications in the score, to the emotional terrain it is exploring, in order to bring that out during rehearsals. The musicians have to know why that note, that chord, even that beat’s rest, is important; to understand where their contribution fits into the larger whole, and what effect that should have on the listener. And you can only do that if you’ve made yourself readily accessible to the music’s demands, in order to share them with the musicians and then (hopefully) to the listener. It’s about creating space for emotional honesty – for you as the conductor, for the performers, and for the audience – for which the music is asking; making yourself emotionally susceptible, able to be alive to all the harmonic / emotional nuance in the music to be able to draw it from the performers.
Image: David Clode / Unsplash
So it seems that those unexpected tears provoked by the piece on the radio came because of the emotional terrain to which I’m opening my ears at the moment ahead of performing the Haydn and the Fauré – two contrasting pieces rich in emotional expression, particularly the latter – and that means I’m obviously in a heightened state of susceptibility towards other music at this point too. It will become increasingly heightened the nearer we get to the concert (aided in no small way, I am sure, by pre-concert nerves…), but it should hopefully mean that, when we come to the performance, we will be taking the listener through the emotional odyssey the composer has asked us to realise in the white-heat of performance.
I’ll just have to be wary of listening to the radio until then…
* (If you’ve read thus far, then perhaps you deserve to know; it was Mel Tormé and George Shearing in a live performance of It Might As Well Be Spring, alright ?! Thanks, Petroc Trelawny…!)
One of the pleasures of engaging digitally with people this past year has been catching up with various alumni and finding out how they have been creatively active at a time when creativity and the arts has been facing real challenges.
My guest earlier is no exception – former Music Scholar Lena Younes, who graduated in 2011 having read Drama and Theatre Studies and History at Kent, singing with the Chamber Choir and at the Jazz @ 5 sessions on the old Gulbenkian cafe stage.
Lena releases her first single, Hold Your Heart, at midnight tonight (or will have done, depending on when you read this…), and I took the opportunity to chat to her about her writing process, the challenges of remaining creative during the past year, and the influences on her music. Watch it online here – my thanks to Lena for taking part.
This week’s episode in our podcast series is the first of several featuring Hugh Huddy, who, with his wife Madeleine, is the creative force behind Radio Lento, a podcast series presenting wonderfully evocative soundscapes recorded in the natural environment. From dawn chorus in the Forest of Dean to shingle beaches at Folkestone, each Radio Lento episode presents an immersive listening experience, offering, in Hugh’s own words, ‘weekly sound postcards from beautiful places.’
In this first episode, Hugh reflects on the challenges of recording the natural world; the concept of authenticity and being true to the practice of capturing the environment in sound, in single, unedited takes; and similarities between listening to soundscapes and to music, and the idea of defeating time.
Former Erasmus student and musician, Laura Osswald, recently spoke about her experience at Kent, and her involvement in extra-curricular music during her time at the University, in an interview with the Dean of Internationalisation, Anthony Manning.
Laura in the cello section of the Symphony Orchestra, performing in Colyer-Fergusson Hall
Laura’s interview is part of a series, My Journey to Kent, in which students share their experience; Laura highlights the value of the threated Erasmus programme, and how being involved in music helped form friendships which still endure.
Because it does. Doesn't it ? Blogging about extra-curricular musical life at the University of Kent.
You can take a listen to some of the pieces which will be included in the recital on a dedicated playlist on Spotify here which includes the beautiful Komorebi byYumiko Morioka, the title being a Japanese word describing the effect of sunlight filtered through trees.
In this first episode, Hugh reflects on the challenges of recording the natural world; the concept of authenticity and being true to the practice of capturing the environment in sound, in single, unedited takes; and similarities between listening to soundscapes and to music, and the idea of defeating time.
