Peaceline Perspectives at Classical:NEXT 2024... Creating Context in a Listening Space
In a world full of visual noise Hard Rain SoloistEnsemble's 30minute listening arc brought their Berlin audience on a unique Belfast journey...
Last night, on the stage at Saalchen, in Holzmarktstrasse Berlin, Belfast’s Hard Rain SoloistEnsemble brought a new concert format to life. Our 30 minute programme featured three pieces by Belfast composers interwoven by sound pieces featuring voices and stories from Belfast. It was unforgettable!
I am in my 10th (and final) season as conductor of the ensemble, so I am perhaps(!) a little biased, but seeing this world class ensemble finally play on a world stage, for an audience of distinguished classical music professionals and colleagues…well that was a bit special.
But our road to Berlin started in October 2023…
The Beginning of the Classical:NEXT Journey
At the start of October 2023 Aisling Agnew, Hard Rain’s artistic director asked me to put a programme together for our showcase pitch for Classical:NEXT, the world’s premiere classical music conference, which brings industry professionals from across the world together every year to exchange ideas. Hard Rain have been embedded in the Belfast music scene for over a decade - this is our 11th season, so we decided to lean into our Belfast roots, and create a programme featuring music by Belfast composers.
The Music…
Belfast, and Northern Ireland has many fantastic composers, and it has been our privilege to regularly collaborate with them on premieres and repeat performances of their works over the past decade. So choosing who we would feature in the showcase was no easy task.
The proposed showcase programme was to be maximum 30 minutes, so I eventually whittled the music down to three pieces by composers who all have deep Belfast roots…
Elaine Agnew’s Green was commissioned and premiered by Hard Rain a few seasons back, and its lighthearted interplay would be the perfect start to the concert. Inspired by the green shoots of nature that continued to appear undeterrred during the COVID pandemic, it seemed apt given Northern Ireland’s recently reconvened Assembly…
Next would be Greg Caffrey’s evocative for peace comes dropping slow, taking its inspiration from Yeats’ poem The Lake Isle of Inishfree. Greg is the founder and former artistic director of Hard Rain SoloistEnsemble. His piece features performance directions “like an air raid siren”, “wild” and “like a bomb dropping”, and the music is vivid with driving rhythms and beautiful descending lines. It would bring our audience into a completely different space after Green.
To finish? Well it had to be Eduard Zatriqi’s War Games, the winning piece in our inaugural Peter Rosser Composition Prize in 2016. Eduard is a hugely talented emerging composer from Belfast, but with roots in Albania. His piece is a response to the war in Syria which dominated the news in 2015-2016. His music is coloured by the personal experiences of his own family in the 1999 Albanian war. War Games is uncompromising, brilliantly composed, and is a complete workout for ensemble…and conductor!
Weaving Sound Pieces…
But it wouldn’t be enough to just present 3 pieces at Classical:NEXT. The showcase spots are highly sought after, so we would need something extra to bring the concert experience to the next level. During the lockdowns in 2020, I had rediscovered a love of audio storytelling.
My dad had been a radio officer in the merchant navy, so we grew up listening to stories of his adventures around the world. But he also continued his own love of radio, and we would spend hours listening to voices from across the globe through his very elaborate (and ever growing!) amateur radio set up.
So, I thought, wouldn’t it be amazing to bring the voices of Belfast to the heart of Berlin? We were bringing the musical voices, so why not the voices of peacebuilders, musicians and others, who would not usually feature in the media narrative about Belfast and Northern Ireland?
The final part of the programme puzzle fell into place. I would use short sound pieces featuring stories from Belfast as a way of contextualising the music. There would be no visuals, just the creation of a listening space, where each audience member could create their own context for the music based on their individual lived experience. The stories would act as catalysts, but in a completely open, non prescriptive way. Each listener would craft their own narrative journey.
Peaceline Perspectives: Voices from a Divided City was ready for submission to Classical:NEXT!
Success, a deadline and collecting the audio…
And so in January 2024 came the e-mail. Our programme had been chosen for a showcase performance. We were delighted, and Aisling immediately set about fundraising to cover the costs of the trip. But the sound pieces had yet to be created - the showcase was coming up in May!!
I decided to create alternative narrative perspectives around some of the most contentious issues in Northern Ireland: parades, flags, marching bands and, of course the interface barriers (peacewalls) that physically separate the communities in Belfast.
I set about recording the audio, organising interviews, going out with my Zoom recorder to record the St. Patrick’s Day Parade and the voices of the spectators on the streets of Belfast. I interviewed Aisling, our artistic director, about her formative experiences in the 39th Old Boys flute band.
Then came the interview with peacebuilder Dympna McGlade, who has worked in cross community dialogue for over 30 years. Her lived experience of building bridges and bringing people together made for an astonishingly compelling narrative.
Once the raw material was collected, I created the pieces, crafting the stories so that they would come across in less than 2 minutes each! For two of the pieces I worked with soundscape composers Robert Coleman and Georgios Varoutsos from SARC, the Centre for interdisciplinary research in Sound and Music, Belfast. They would underscore the voices with soundscape and other sound elements.
The sound pieces…
Glas (the gaelic word for green)
I recorded all the material for this piece on the streets of Belfast during and after the St. Patrick’s Day parade 2024. Thanks to all the people who let me point a microphone towards them! Right from the start of the short piece, we get a sense of two ways of looking at things, good and bad points about the parade, the equality of green and orange, and the similarities of the Irish and Nigerian flag, viewed with nostalgia for home, that common denominator amongst all immigrants.
Space to Breathe
The piece opens with audio taken from a 1990s documentary featuring the trailblazing and visionary Belfast flautist and teacher Billy Dunwoody, as he settles his 39th Old Boys Band down to start their regular weekly rehearsal. Our artistic director Aisling was actually there the day the footage was recorded, and she shared her story of how she got started on the flute, and joining the band, just a week after her first lesson with Billy!
The piece also features the voice of James Galway, the world famous flautist who learned in the band. This snippet is from Aisling’s own podcast The Flute NI in which she interviewed James Galway. There was a lovely sense of completing the circle hearing Galway’s voice in Berlin - he played principal flute in the Berlin Philharmonic under Herbert von Karajan.
Composer Robert Coleman underscored Aisling’s narrative with field recordings from the site of the old band hall on Donegal Pass, as well as musical collages created from Aisling’s own recordings.
If This Wall Could Talk
Dympna McGlade came to the Hard Rain offices for this interview, and shared a remarkable story of how she brought community workers from both sides of the peacewall (interface barrier) together to talk through their differences and find ways to work together. Her story about how a glass of water can symbolise the massive changes that have happened at grass roots level in Belfast is simple, but incredibly powerful.
Composer Georgios Varoutsos has worked extensively around the Peacewall in Belfast. He underscored Dympna’s story with field recordings from both sides of the wall, as well as recordings of the wall itself, made with contact microphones. So we are actually hearing the wall talk!
A 30 minute listening arc…
Bringing narrative/soundscape together with cutting edge contemporary music was a risk. I am so grateful to the Classical:NEXT team and audience for the opportunity to try out this new format. It was amazing to hear the audience reacting to the stories, and to experience the intense listening level during our subsequent performances of the pieces.
The hope is that, by creating a space for active, engaged listening, we can bring this necessary skill back to our daily lives, for the good of everyone.
PS: A huge thank you to our funders Culture Ireland, Arts Council Northern Ireland and Belfast City Council for supporting our trip to Berlin. Thanks too to Irish Arts Council and the Culture Ireland team at Classical:NEXT for their help throughout the conference. And a big thank you to Classical:NEXT for the opportunity to bring the music and voices of Belfast to the heart of Berlin.