A Chime for the New Year!
January
“A Chime for the New Year”
Eliza Flower (1803–1846)
from
“Songs of the Months”
published by A J Novello, December 1834
for solo voice and piano
performed by
Julian Stocker – Tenor
Frances M Lynch – Piano
Hither, hither, come all and bring
To the year’s first born a welcoming.
ELECTRIC VOICE THEATRE wish 2024 will bring peace, light and music to everyone, and particularly those who need it most.
O light and music, we well can bear
The falling snow and the chilly air,
If you are here!
In nature the flower of this month is the crocus representing renewal and good cheer
Julian Stocker
our January Singer!
I’ve been singing tenor with Electric Voice Theatre since 1994. I have taken part in many projects, singing roles such as the Samurai Warrior in Alejandro Viñao’s “RASHOMON: the opera”, and Prof. Crick in “The Franklin Effect”. I have featured regularly in EVT’s Minerva Scientifica project, and coming originally from north London it has been a particular pleasure discovering the music of a fellow north Londoner, Eliza Flower. Away from EVT I am often to be found singing in the choir stalls of Westminster Abbey, or at Maida Vale with the BBC Singers.
Outside of singing, I like nothing better than going on a long country walk with my Wheaten Terrier, Charlie!
Our archive of music and science by women is here for you and will continue to bring hope for the future in the light of past treasures.
Please join us this year on our many projects UK wide and online. Scroll down to see what’s coming up and to look back with us at 2023.
Everyone at EVT would like to thank you for all your support during this quite tricky year for us. Thanks to you we’ve had sell out live and zoom events, vastly increased numbers playing our online recordings music and podcasts on soundcloud and youtube, and have managed to raise enough funds to take our Eliza Flower project further than we thought possible.
2024 for EVT includes – extended Young Singers Programmes combining virtual and live sessions allied to performances in London, Harlow (Essex) and Newcastle for the Flower Project.
Booking for the Young Singers Programme in January are closed, but please sign up for our February sessions here;
Bookings for the Feb 25th Harlow performance of “Flowers of the Seasons – Power, Politics and Poverty” open on January 8th – more details here.
There will be more community and school events to sign up for with huge thanks to ongoing support from Conway Hall, The National Lottery Heritage Fund and SCOPS Arts.
We began 2023 with Eliza Flower’s Songs of the Months – workshopping them with Pascal Theatre Company at St Pancras Community Association and beginning to record and release them each month, performed by our EVT singers and many on our Young Singers Programme.
Our Virtual Choir started again in February and contributed with their usual dedication and verve to our zoom performance – Flowers of Spring in April. We later had a short Christmas season – and a private party for ourselves on zoom – and we wrote a Christmas song together – do listen to it! We had a great deal of fun putting this together and our Gaudete for you too!
Our Misfolding Project with Sussex University was exhibited live in Brighton over 6 days in April – we loved performing live, and being around the exhibition with the scientists to chat to folk who came to see the films by the 4 commissioned composers tackling the science of misfolding in dementia – which you can see here
We began a very important partnership with Conway Hall Ethical Society in London – running one of our Young Singer’s Programmes there in June, and giving a sell out performance of Eliza Flower’s music in October (the first concert of her music in 200 years and the first ever for this important composer in the history of Conway Hall itself) and appeared on BBC Radio 3’s “Free Thinking” to discuss the Flower legacy and perform some of her music.
We added 3 new Podcasts to the series: – Misfolding (an Alzheimer’s research project); Flowers of Spring (a conversation with Oskar Jensen about the composer Eliza Flower); and Songs for a Statue (which features chats (and songs!) with many of the key people behind the wonderful statue for Mary Anning in Lyme Regis). We had hoped to bring another out dedicated to Mary Somerville – but despite some fabulous input from astronomers, historians and the Royal Astronomical Society, there hasn’t yet been time to create it…..!
With the help of the Hinrichsen Foundation and The National Lottery Heritage Fund we commissioned and performed 4 new works from women composers in England alongside our programme of community and public events.
