Author: taragh

Clarity & Hart Agency

Communications and website design exclusively for low-carbon shipping

Since November 2020

I set up Clarity & Hart as part of the ecological concern of my total work. The amazing team at C&H advises on communications, creates designs and provides tracking. We also design websites from scratch, e.g. www.grayhoundshipping.com. We are proud to have collaborated with sail cargo companies in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, the UK and Central America. I am also co-founder of Guild of Ships, a bookings and circular economy platform that serves the sail cargo/travel sector.

Knoydart: Striations and Horizons

Knoydart Peninsula

August 2020

Knoydart is the uppermost of the peninsulas that make up the Rough Bounds in Northwest Scotland, an area intruded by deep sea lochs (including Scotland’s deepest, Loch Morar) and characterised by mountainous horizons. They overlay each other like lines of music, and the striations in the rock provide other melodies. Work in progress.

Photograph © Bill Carslake (Knoydart Peninsula 2020)

I Musicanti: Beethoven Violin Concerto

Introducing lunchtime concert series at Imperial College, London

5 November 2020,  12.45pm

Concert available on YouTube. Bill gives an introductory talk (starting at 00:48) about the collaboration between Beethoven and violinist Franz Joseph Clement that produced this radiant and intimate concerto. I Musicanti perform it in an arrangement by Carl Hinde for string quintet, with soloist Tamás András.

RAH! Podcast at Manchester Metropolitan University

Science and Art: Climate Change and The Singing Glacier

Manchester Metropolitan University

June 2020

Part of the Science and Art series. Poet Helen Mort and Physical Geographer Kathryn Adamson share their experiences of East Greenland and discuss how science and art can interlock to communicate the effects of climate change. Featuring an extended extract from The Singing Glacier.   

Farnborough Symphony Orchestra

Farnham Maltings, Farnham

14 March 2020, 7pm

Glinka, Ruslan and Lyudmila Overture; Prokofiev, Violin Concerto No. 1 with soloist, So-Ock Kim; Stravinsky, Firebird (1945).  An all-Russian programme featuring one of music’s sublime endings – Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto no. 1, with acclaimed violinist So-Ock Kim.

Cancelled due to Covid-19

‘Lamb’ at Future Sun: Nashashibi/Skaer

S.M.A.K. Gallery, Ghent, Belgium

30 November 2019 – 16 February 2020

‘Lamb’ is a new film by Nashashibi/Skaer with a soundtrack created by Bill, mezzo soprano Olivia Ray and Rosalind Nashashibi. The footage from a lambing shed was shot by Lucy Skaer on Lewis and Harris in the Outer Hebrides. 

Mountain Hare

Photograph © Bill Carslake (Cairngorms 2018)

Listen here to the premiere given by Farnborough Symphony Orchestra on 22 January 2022, recorded by Haresh Patel. Perusal score €20. Hire score and parts by negotiation. For orchestra: 2222; 4200; timp; strings. In three movements, total duration 19 mins. The first and second movements can be performed separately or as a pair. There could also be a version in the pipeline for cl, vln, vc and pno.

A Finzi Scholarship project. Inspired by two solo camping trips looking for Mountain Hares in the Cairngorm mountain range, Scotland. Bill also wrote a travel essay, Composing with Hares (see extract below).

Over the course of his two trips Bill connected with these elusive animals. He also saw golden eagle and red deer. Mountain Hare is inspired by the land, the movements of the hares themselves and his experiences in this large subarctic area. The second movement in particular reacts to the power of the wind.

Note about hares. The Mountain Hare, Lepus timidus, is a survivor from the last ice age. It is related to Arctic and Greenland hares. There are isolated Mountain Hare communities in the Alps, Ireland and Scotland – each genetically distinct. The Brown Hare, Lepus europaeus, arrived in Ireland and the UK thousands of years later.

It was a hare encounter in Ireland that tipped me into a piece. Shortly before the Greenland trip, I was up Mount Shehy in Co. Cork on a blue-skied day in July. From the top, I enjoyed the sparkling coastline of diamond inlets, stretching to the south and north past Bantry Bay. Below me, tightly packed green fields competed with hedges for luminous sheen. 

I turned to reenter the seclusion of the mountain range. As I descended from the lip, I disturbed two large, russet-gold forms in the heather. They rose up side-by-side as if one, and flowed down the mountain’s pelt – I could hear their outer flanks scything the grass. They ran as if sewn together. Now they turned in tight formation, doubled back, split, and shot up the rise, breaking the horizon as two vanishers in a rim of sun. 

The Shehy range takes its name from the Irish, Cnoic na Seithe, meaning ‘Hills of the Animal Hides’. Perhaps Shehy was in on the feint, accustomed, as Emily Dickinson has it, to ‘Indicating, by no Muscle – / The Experience’ (Bloom on the Mountain). For I was caught in a golden confusion. Startled by their manoeuvre, I recognised them as foxes… no, huge hares?… no, foxes. I had to box my senses and remind myself: long ears, short tails. As they flamed into the sky I realised I had just seen the fabled Golden Hare. If I had been hunter, their noble strategy would have bamboozled me and saved the life of one. As it was, their perfect duet played with my mind. 

More extracts here.

More Fieldwork Pieces

The Singing Glacier

For baroque ensemble. Collaborative response to glaciers, commissioned by The Little Baroque Company. In 2016 Bill and the poet Helen Mort climbed in East Greenland.
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The Singing Glacier

Photograph © H. Spenceley, Pirhuk – Greenland Mountain Guides (Greenland expedition 2016)
Violin, Flora Curzon; voice, Helen Mort; piano, Bill Carslake

A collaborative response to glaciers in East Greenland.

Commissioned by The Little Baroque Company to celebrate its 10th anniversary. Perusal scores for the two baroque ensemble versions: €20 each. Hire parts for each by arrangement, please enquire.

In 2016  Bill went to Kulusuk, East Greenland with the poet Helen Mort for an exploratory climbing expedition. They were joined later by the film-maker Richard Jones.

The piece combines instrumental music by Bill, new poetry written and spoken by Helen and film taken by Richard and others in the team.

It has been performed live at Poetry in Aldeburgh and Totally Thames festivals, the Daniel Corkery Summer School, the Manchester Metropolitan University Place Writing Festival and featured on the RAH! Podcast at Manchester Metropolitan University.  There are three versions:

  • 12-piece baroque orchestra: 2ob, 2tpt, 2horn, 1fg; congas; vln1, vln2, vla, vc; theorbo
  • 4-piece baroque orchestra: 1ob/recorder/percussion (1 player); vln; vc; theorbo
  • Modern violin with piano, as featured in this recording

This recording features Flora Curzon on modern violin and Bill on piano. It reprises their performance with Helen at the Daniel Corkery Summer School in 2017.

In 2019 Hercules Editions published Helen’s poems as The Singing Glacier, including a conversation between Helen and Bill, some of the musical score, paintings by  Emma Stibbon RA, and an essay by the literary geographer, David Cooper.

The Singing Glacier also exists as a schools education project including: word and poetry challenges devised by Helen, two Greenlandic bone games purchased in Kulusuk, musical composition games devised by Bill, and the short film below, created by Richard to inspire children (and adults!) featuring Matt and Helen Spenceley, our amazing guides from Pirhuk – Greenland Mountain Guides.

Short film about the context of The Singing Glacier, featuring Helen and Matt Spenceley of Pirhuk – Greenland Mountain Guides.

More Fieldwork Pieces

Icicle

Part of the project, ‘The Singing Glacier’. For violin, viola and glockenspiel.
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Mountain Hare

Finzi Scholarship piece inspired by Mountain Hares in the Cairngorms. Classical orchestra version (2,2,2,2; 4,2,0,0; timp; strings) and potential chamber version (violin, cello, piano, clarinet). Bill also wrote a travel…
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Icicle

Photograph © H. Spenceley, Pirhuk – Greenland Mountain Guides (Greenland expedition 2016)
Violin, Helen Kruger; viola, Virginia Slater; keyed glockenspiel, Bill Carslake

Written to raise the profile of the Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for The Singing Glacier. For violin, viola and glockenspiel (keyed or normal). There is an additional performance option for this piece: after the second time through, it can be repeated ad libitum and, each time, more notes are omitted, at the players’ discretion. PDF perusal score €10; hire parts €20 per set per performance, plus postage, with rates negotiable if being repeated on tour.

More Fieldwork Pieces

The Singing Glacier

For baroque ensemble. Collaborative response to glaciers, commissioned by The Little Baroque Company. In 2016 Bill and the poet Helen Mort climbed in East Greenland.
Read More

Mountain Hare

Finzi Scholarship piece inspired by Mountain Hares in the Cairngorms. Classical orchestra version (2,2,2,2; 4,2,0,0; timp; strings) and potential chamber version (violin, cello, piano, clarinet). Bill also wrote a travel…
Read More

Circus

Photo
Photograph © Paddy Ryan (white-necked raven above Mt Kilimanjaro)
Extracts from Circus. Piano, Sarah Latto; soprano solo, Catherine Shaw

In 2014 Bill walked up Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania. Sitting beside his tent at basecamp, he watched white-necked ravens duetting, mid-air. This included flying in mirror formation – one upside down beneath the other – parting, then soaring directly towards each other and clasping talons. This aerial display in the oxygen-poor air at c. 5800m left a lasting impression and inspired the poem Circus which he set for SATB choir, solo soprano and solo piano for a commission from King’s School, Worcester. The piece is currently being revised.

More Fieldwork Pieces

The Singing Glacier

For baroque ensemble. Collaborative response to glaciers, commissioned by The Little Baroque Company. In 2016 Bill and the poet Helen Mort climbed in East Greenland.
Read More

Mountain Hare

Finzi Scholarship piece inspired by Mountain Hares in the Cairngorms. Classical orchestra version (2,2,2,2; 4,2,0,0; timp; strings) and potential chamber version (violin, cello, piano, clarinet). Bill also wrote a travel…
Read More

Particles 1, 2 & 3

The Particles series is about the viscosity of air, which sparkles around us, pushing against everything we see. Particles 1, 2 & 3 exist in two versions: for solo violin with different orchestral sections (Particle 1 – double basses; Particle 2 – violas; Particle 3 – second violins); and also for cl, vln, vc, pno, as arranged for Alisios Camerata, Zagreb. The Alisios Camerata performance of Particle 2 at Banff Centre can be watched here. There is an additional arrangement of Particle 2 for youth orchestra, written for London Music Masters, in which professional tutors play the demanding passages.

The cl/vln/vc/pno performance set is available for hire at €30 per performance (lower rates available for tours). Performance sets for the original setting (solo violin + orchestra) can be hired by agreement.

More Chamber Music

London Life

A suite of five movements for clarinet, violin, guitar, double bass, harpsichord and timpani. Written as sound-tracks for short films produced by Sands Films. Now available as a concert suite.
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London Life

Photograph by Ichigo121212 

A suite of five movements for cl, vln, gtr, db, hpscd*, timp*. Commissioned by Sands Films Studios as sound-tracks for short films. Now available as a concert suite. *The harpsichord part can be played on piano (preferably upright) and the timpani part on a smaller drum if necessary. Perusal set of PDFs €20. Score/parts sets for hire at €10 per movement per performance (negotiable rates for repeated performances on tour).

London Life mvnt 4. Clarinet, Ewan Bleach; violin, Max Bailey; double bass, Dave O’Brien; production (including sampled guitar, harpsichord and timpani) Anthony Weeden.

More Chamber Music

Particles 1, 2 & 3

Cl, vln, vc, pno. Also in version for solo vln and orchestral sections (dbs, vlas, second vlns). Inspired by the viscosity of air. It sparkles and dances around us, pushes…
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Lamb (Nashashibi/Skaer)

Short film by Nashashibi/Skaer with sound-track by Bill, mezzo-soprano Olivia Ray and Rosalind Nashashibi. Footage of a lambing shed from the Island of Lewis and Harris shot by Lucy Skaer.

Lamb featured in the Nashashibi/Skaer exhibition, Future Sun at S.M.A.K Gallery, Ghent, Belgium, November 2019 to February 2020. It can be hired from Lux.

More Music for Screen & Stage

Composing with Hares

Photograph © Bill Carslake (Cairngorms, 2018)
Place writing

In 2018/19 I took two solo camping trips in the Cairngorms and one in the Peak District to research mountain hares for a composition, supported by the Finzi Trust. The composition is called Mountain Hare, for orchestra. The orchestral premiere was on 22 January 2022.

I wrote an extended travel essay called Composing with Hares about the process of camping and composing in the largest subarctic landscape in the UK. You can read extracts from this below. While in the Cairngorms, I met with Anna Fleming (Time on Rock, Canongate 2022) and our conversation features in her essay, Dances with Hares, in the anthology, Women on Nature, edited by Katharine Norbury.

As we sup tea in the cold wind, Bill asks, “How would you represent a mountain hare on the stage?” I pause, turning the unusual question over like a pebble in my mind and a surprising metaphor leaps out. A disco ball. Hares catch the eye in a dazzle of (almost ridiculous) movement. The hare’s myriad nature – running, hiding, watching, relaxing, frisking, quaking, yawning, bathing – are flashes of a thousand glittering faces. And beneath this reflective exterior, something is hidden. There is always an aspect of the hare that remains unseen, unknown. They are creatures of the mountain.

(Extract, Anna Fleming, Dances with Hares, from Women on Nature, edited by Katharine Norbury, Unbound 2021)

In a 13th century poem about hares, translated in the 20th century by Seamus Heaney as The Names of the Hare, seventy-seven names are given for the brown hare, Lepus europeaus. Whether it is in awe or jest is unclear, but it gives an idea of the hare’s status in western folklore. Amazingly the heart weight in relation to body weight in both brown and mountain hares is bigger than in most animals, including humans, dogs, cheetahs, lions and whales. This large heart allows them to start fast and stay fast for a long time. At 40 miles per hour their front legs don’t even touch the ground! This heart could also be the source of their fabled intelligence and wisdom. In the beautiful Buddhist tale of the Selfless Hare the Bodhisattva is reborn as a hare. Sakra, Lord of the Heavens, comes to earth to test the virtue of the hare and its three friends – the otter, jackal and monkey. Sakra meets each separately. “I am hungry.” The otter, jackal and monkey each give the food they were looking forward to eating. The hare has only grass, so it asks Sakra to create a fire, then leaps into it to offer his body as a meal. The astonished Sakra puts the fire out and rewards the hare by painting it on the moon, so that its bravery shines everywhere.

1) When it stops, it is your nonchalant drummer beating with its paws on the ground – we still don’t fully understand why. Feel and hear the footpad tap on a slightly caking peat surface… Now imagine having the hearing of those great, swivelling ears. Consider that the hill is endless drums. Peat skin taut above sloshy, resonant mass; or thin peat clinging to echoing rock. How deep does the mountain hare hear and tell? Take the dome of St Paul’s. Upend it, submerge it, and whisper in the gallery with your feet. Now smell in colour, and see in detail a mountain and heather-filled orb of a couple of kilometres. With your big amber eyes on your elegant head you can almost see the full round. What a session!

2) In winter the plateau can be one of the most exposed and seething skins in the mountain body of the UK. You walk, but the wind will throw you to the ground. Sometimes you will crawl. Imagine for a moment that you are sitting with a mountain hare on the aperture edge of a Bunsen burner on maximum power. In your terror, as you try to maintain your hold, you can feel the assault on your always-open ears. Your nose’s inability to close doesn’t help. In winds as powerful and constant as this it is a wonder that the mountain hare sits calmly beside you, flattening into the iron. In its ‘form’ on the Cairngorm plateau – by the subtlest body alignment – it experiences such quietness that it becomes the eye of the storm. Some years ago, in a strong wind on a mountain in Glen Cannich I laid my head in a hare form and was astonished to find pin-drop silence.

3) For a virtuoso of concealment like the hare, the open ‘tundra’ landscape of the plateau is home and hiding. I could see plenty of pellets. Away from the tourist trail and un-trampled by humans, these remote tops provide less food, but for the variety of vegetation they are hard to match. There are miniature willow and birch trees which, at a height of one inch, hold out tiny red and gold autumn leaves to catch the light and breeze. Yellow grasses whistle above squat banks of red sorghum moss, glowing like coral. Scattered rocks sport bleached lichen, and glint with embedded flecks of quartz. It’s a bedazzling beauty when the sun’s at play. A heavenly field. What a place for a first sight! But after walking two miles further eastwards I was still – to my eyes at least – alone on the hill.

4) [Referring to the memorial service in Notre Dame after the Paris bombings.] Paris was numb. Gradually [the organist] Latry released low, husky, indeterminate waves into the gloom. He graded these until recognisable pitch and volume held sway. Music and urgency increased and entered the hearts of over 6,000 of us, seated below. The playing grew in speed and richness; the sound took on a dangerous edge. The colours darkened and the volume increased, until it became the angriest, most violent music I have ever heard. I was furious, and I wasn’t alone. Just when I wished the anger and pain would end, imperceptibly the sounds softened, curved, became solemn and warm. A beautiful melody emerged from the texture, becoming less clothed, less weighed-down and simpler as it soared. Now it was song-like and – after a brief, missed heartbeat – it was joined by the choir who, we realised, were processing down the side aisle. We had been guided and allowed to grieve.

Yes, I know, God’s silence never breaks, but is that really a problem?
There are thousands of voices, after all. 

(Mary Oliver, Whistling Swans, extract.)

Stravinsky and why a composer composes

Photograph © @ruralexplorer

Parallel Worlds – notes on the historical context and music of The Firebird by Igor Stravinsky

Article

As part of the ‘lockdown’ provision for the Farnborough Symphony Orchestra community, Bill wrote an in-depth exploration of the piece that would have been performed in their March concert, cancelled due to COVID-19. In Parallel Worlds he explores the motivation and meaning behind the piece that made Stravinsky an international star overnight: his ballet score for the Ballets Russes’ The Firebird, performed in April 1910. 

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Elizabeth

Music Director for the Royal Ballet productions in 2016 at the Linbury Theatre and in 2018 at the Barbican Theatre. 

Farnborough Symphony Orchestra

Musical Director of Farnborough Symphony Orchestra since 2018. Recent programmes have featured works by Charlotte Bray and David Matthews. The inaugural Farnborough Symphony Orchestra Young Composers Competition in 2019 was won by Sam Gooderham with his piece, Candlewright 

Imperial College Sinfonietta

Musical Director of Sinfonietta since 2013. The orchestra champions innovative programming and staging dispositions and tours annually. A very welcoming orchestra, it is open to players from outside Imperial College, so contact if you are interested. 

Royal Oman Symphony Orchestra

Guest conductor for various programmes from 2009 to 2012. This also afforded the opportunity to explore the Al Hajar mountains.

Wolsey Orchestra

Bill has a long and fruitful relationship with Wolsey Orchestra, performing with world-class soloists in the grand old Corn Exchange in Ipswich, and the stunning acoustic of The Apex in Bury St Edmunds.

St Albans Symphony Orchestra

Bill has collaborated with SASO on large-scale programmes including Mahler, Symphony no. 5 and Elgar, Symphony no. 1.

Junior Royal Academy of Music and Junior Guildhall School of Music

Bill taught and coached for seven years at JRAM and now teaches conducting occasionally at JGSMD. 

Benslow Music

Adult education course

Bill has run this wonderful baroque music course with Theresa Caudle since 2010.  Open to all amateur baroque enthusiasts – with bursaries available for young professionals – it is a chance to work intensively on a different repertoire area each year. The next course is 21-24 September 2020. 

Jackdaws Music Education Trust

Music projects in Somerset

Co-leading the annual ‘Song Story’ and ‘Summer School’, composing and arranging music inspired by a different composer each year, working with Special Educational Needs schools across Somerset (Song Story) and chidren in the Frome area (Summer School). 

SEN projects with Patrick Stockbridge

Creating stories with music since 2011

In this unique professional partnership Bill and Patrick create immersive musical performances with students in Special Educational Needs schools across the UK. Their work has been the subject of a BBC Radio 4 documentary, When Words Fail, Music Speaks.

Private coaching

Coaching in conducting, composition, singing, theory and writing.

More about private coaching

Lockdown Lyrics

Photography ©Bill Carslake

A response to ‘lockdown’ in the UK during the COVID-19 emergency

Poetry

For nine consecutive days from 24 March 2020 Bill wrote a new poem or ‘lyric’. Each has three lines of nine syllables, creating ‘999’ for the state of emergency. These lyrics are set to music for two voices and cello.  He also wrote a three-part Rainbow Round and a three-part Bell Canon.