New CD - Time, Space and Change - a close look at Winter in Cuckmere
Time, Space and Change
Métier MSV 28597
Cuckmere | Media Vita | Sinfonia
MUSIC BY ED HUGHES
NEW MUSIC PLAYERS | ORCHESTRA OF SOUND & LIGHT | NICHOLAS SMITH
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Release 13 March 2020
Cuckmere: A Portrait 30:31. Media Vita 10:34. Sinfonia 30:23. Duration: 71:37
My new CD comprises first recordings of three works. Born in the UK in 1968, I am Professor of Composition at University of Sussex, founder of the New Music Players, and co-founder, with producer Liz Webb, of Orchestra of Sound and Light.
Commissioned by the Brighton Festival and conceived with filmmaker Cesca Eaton, Cuckmere: A Portrait (2018) is a musical portrait of the landscape near Lewes in East Sussex where I live. This continuous symphonic sequence was designed to be heard alongside Eaton's film which purchasers of this disc can view via an online link provided within the CD booklet. In the music, as Eleanor Knight comments, 'though there are fleeting moments of reflective stillness in Hughes’ Portrait, the piece is about movement; movement across a landscape, movement within the landscape, and movement that is the unstoppable flow of the river, the passage of time and the changing of the seasons.'
The use of aerial photography (shot by Fergus Kennedy) in the film is spectacular, and one of my favourite episodes is in the Winter sequence.
In the interlude between Autumn and Winter, the music closes in on a handful of core instruments (flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano) and in a series of icy harmonies, frostily extended through electronic treatment, evokes the static, seared and defamiliarised landscape below with its fingers of inlets and pools locked in by ice and snow. The drama of distance (height of overhead shots to ground shots) is dramatised by the distance between the high flute and the low gravelly instruments of the lower ensemble. The music beats out as the waves crash the shore.
Link to audio clip of the Interlude
This segues into a spectacular sunrise as drone shots approach the haven over misty cloud and snow. Here I enjoyed using slow moving harmonies and the richness of percussion, horn, muted trumpet and chiming strings. The main theme in the violin borrows the Mozartian idea of a melody with enormous gaps (2 octaves) which to me conveys the drama of space in this beautiful environment on my doorstep. The recording, made live by the brilliant team of producer Simon Weir and engineer Morgan Roberts, is both expansive and detailed.
https://soundcloud.com/ed-hughes-4/04-hughes-cuckmere-a-portrait/s-pPP8X