The Albion Project
A unique collaboration with composers Orlando Gough and Gabriel Prokofiev
About the Project:
Over the last year, we have been able, with the aid of an Arts Council England grant, to commission some ten composers to arrange significant works of British music for Fretwork. They have ranged from Worldes Blis, arranged by Orlando Gough, to Sailing By, arranged by Cevanne Horrocks-Hopayian. The next stage in the development of the project will be to create a musical narrative, employing digital manipulation and other technical wizardry to enhance and comment on the live music of the viols. As things currently stand - and no one is making any confident predictions at the moment - a first outing for this unique project will be in the wonderful medieval hall of Dartington Estate on Monday 26th July.
Orlando Gough writes: The viol was invented in the late 15th century, the love-child of the vihuela and the bow. For two centuries, it was a crucial component of music making, particularly in England. This coincided with a golden age of English composition so there is a wonderful repertoire of viol music from the period: Byrd, Tallis, Dowland, Gibbons, Purcell....
Then, for two centuries, the viol went underground, pushed there by the increasing success of the violin family (mostly on grounds of volume), before being rediscovered in the 20th century. Despite some new viol music (a large proportion of it commissioned by the uniquely adventurous consort Fretwork), the viol feels like a historical instrument, and a hidden one at that, an instrument whose potential is still relatively undiscovered.
So we’re proposing:
a viol consort and an electronic artist (Gabriel Prokofiev), who provides soundscapes and beats and samples, as well as live-sampling the consort and creating loops and transformations, playing a continuously evolving sequence of arrangements (you could call them cover versions, you could call them remixes) of all kinds of British songs and instrumental pieces, from Dunstable to Purcell to Elgar to Noel Coward to Britten to Blur, and beyond;
some of these arrangements very straight-forward, some much more twisted; some very vivid, up front, some ghostly, barely there;
so that it should feel like coming across a box of photographs in the attic - some immediately recognisable, bringing back memories, some blurred, compromised, almost disintegrated;
the arrangements to be written by a group of composers who represent a cross-section of modern Britain; in such a way that some of the music will reflect immigrant styles (reggae, bhangra, grime etc);
and the music will be infused with the tension between our hazy sense of our own history and the reality of modern Britain.
Works currently arranged:
Anon: Mirie It Is - Orlando Gough
Anon: The Cruel Mother (Down By The Greenwood Side) - Sarah Dacey
Holst: Jupiter (from The Planets) - Gabriel Prokofiev
Gavin Bryars: In Nomine
Napalm Death: When All Is Said And Done - Orlando Gough
The Clash: London Calling - Gabriel Prokofiev
Elgar: Land of Hope & Glory - Blasio Kavuma
Radiohead: Everything (mostly) in the right place - Ewan Campbell
Annie Lennox: No more ‘I love you’s’ - Genevieve Murphy
The Sugarbabes: Overload - Yfat Soul Zisso
William Lawes: In Nomine - Talvin Singh
M J Cole: Sincere - Blasio Kavuma
Ronnie Binge: Sailing By/Delia Derbyshire: Blue Veils & Golden Sands - Cevanne Horrocks-Hopayian
Souzsie & the Banshees: Spellbound - Max de Wardener
Kate Bush: Running up that hill - Sally Beamish
TBC - The Mad Professor