Music walk for Brighton Festival Ditchling Museum of Art+Craft

I’m making a music walk/sound trail for the Brighton Festival, the Ditchling Museum of Art+Craft, the South Downs National Park, using technology provided by the Echoes Interactive Walks App.

I have lived in Lewes for the last 17 years and have grown to love walking the South Downs and exploring the footpaths and trails with my family. My wife Liz is a brilliant map reader and I must credit her with planning this walk. The sense of scale and the vistas offered by walks in this landscape are very special. It is a special place which offers walkers a sense of home through repetition and familiarity but with endless variations of light, shape and colours – which feels musical. In addition a couple of years ago I studied some Sussex folksongs transcribed by Butterworth in 1912, while working on a piece (Flint) for a fine Sussex ensemble ‘The Corelli Ensemble’. Something of the lyrical sensibility in these songs have shaped the tunes, melodies and harmonies in my recent music. So this new composition is shaped by my personal experience of the South Downs and perhaps some of the songs and music associated with it.

Since I first left university I have worked with my ensemble, the New Music Players. This band is my main “instrument” I think – the musicians are some of the most outstanding classical musicians working in the UK today. To record the music for this App, we brought the band together in a special socially distanced recording a few weeks ago at St John’s Smith Square, London, for the first time since lockdown. It was very exciting to hear the music jumping off the page and being interpreted and shaped by these great players.

The composition ranges from very clear and transparent harmonious music through passages which are more dense and complex. I personally like to compare these musical effects to changes in light and weather as you walk through changing landscape, with changing perspectives around you. So although music is its own medium, because it is time-based, I think it can convey something of the feeling of being on a journey or a ‘trail’.

My previous Cuckmere sound walk reflected changing seasons and so, although nothing like Vivaldi, contained some musical effects that reflected winter as well as summer! In this walk we are aiming for more of a narrative or through line, and also the sense of discovering objects in the Ditchling museum’s collection which, like the music, are complementary but don’t duplicate the landscape which you’re seeing directly while out on the trail.

I hope the App will be seen as enjoyable and fun, both as a trail to ‘discover’ some new music and artistic objects from the museum’s collections, and also perhaps to suggest a novel way of experiencing the Downs and thinking about how the landscape is reflected in art.

I think the collaboration with the Festival, with Ditchling Museum, with Echoes Interactive Apps, and with Sussex University are all very positive, especially because it’s enabling the creation of music and work for great classical performers, at a time when we still can’t enjoy many live indoor concerts.