Voicing The Dawn

 

Voicing the Dawn

Garden of Guido Gezellehuis, Sept 19th 2021.

To a wonderful concert early on Sunday September 19^th in the large green space of the garden of Guido Gezelle’s house in Rolweg. I didn’t make the 7.00 a.m. first concert which I was sad to have missed as it began in darkness and was magically re-imagined as the sun rose.

The astonishingly creative and imaginative music for the concert was the work of Stevie Wishart, an English composer who lives part-time in the Ardennes. As a performer on the violin and hurdy gurdy [see below] her roots are in early music and improvisation, though her early experience was playing with leading free jazz improvisers in London, Berlin, New York and Australia. During this period she launched her own mediaeval music ensemble, Sinfonye, which won the MA Festival competition in Brugge in which annual major early music competition she was eventually included on a panel of judges and was also a judge at York Early Music Festival.

Stevie Wishart

“Voicing The Dawn” was composed in the Belgian Ardennes in 2019 and began with her recording the actual birdsong in the dawn chorus. She revised it this year and also composed Murmurations 11. Her process of composition is described in the recent publication, “Songs of Time and Place: Birdsong and the Dawn Chorus in Natural History and the Arts.”

Members of Pluto's Ensemble were often 
scattered around the garden, in ones and twos,
always amazingly on cue with their 
individual sounds/singing.

The concert, set in a magnificent garden as the first light blooms, suggested sounds of awakening birds softly mingling and growing with the light. Stevie used Guido Gezelle’s words; Clement Janequin’s evocative 16^th century Chant des Oiseaux was incorporated to analyse and re-interpret the dawn chorus and with Murmurations, suggest the awe-inspiring synchronised flight of a flock of birds. Thus we were presented with dual 16^th and 21^st century visions of this early morning avian harmony.

Pluto’s Ensemble under the direction of counter tenor, Marnix de Cat, provided the varied and inspiring song and bird sounds, sometimes accompanied by real bird song. It provided an inspirational start to the day and the Concertgebouw is to be congratulated on its initiative in commissioning Stevie Wishart to compose this singular work.

Pluto's Ensemble, ensemble as it were.
Directed by Marnix de Cat.

Clement Janequin 1485-1558
Particularly famous for his polyphonic chansons.

The mediaeval hurdy gurdy, not played at the concert but one
of the instruments played by Stevie Wishart.
The hurdy gurdy has multiple strings normally which give a 
constant pitch accompaniment, resulting in a sound 
similar to that of bagpipes. 

Song of the blackbird begins.

S