“Seasons of Change”
A radical new song cycle
inspired by “Free Trade Songs of the Seasons” Eliza Flower (1803 – 1846)
Commissioned by
ELECTRIC VOICE THEATRE
Composed by
Frances M Lynch, Anna Appleby, Lilly Vadaneaux, Amanda Johnson
Seasons
of
Change
Our four Flower Composers worked together to create a song cycle reflecting both the seasons and the politics of power and poverty in the shadow of environmental crisis.
The work was premiered on Oct 27th 2023 at Conway Hall in London, as part of our performance of “Flowers of the Seasons – Politics, Power & Poverty” celebrating Flower’s music.
We continued to tour to Harlow & Newcastle in early 2024 and gave 5 performances of the pieces which were also explored by students, school pupils and young singers in our accompanying workshops. This video shows the whole song cycle from clips of some of the live performances.
“Introduction”
based on the poem “Summer Recollections”
Sarah Flower Adams
Spring “Rachel”
Frances M Lynch
for tenor, hand percussion & sampled nature sounds
Summer “Future Dream”
Anna Appleby
for fixed media, tenor, soprano & loud hailers
Autumn “A Day in Autumn”
Lilly Vadaneaux
for solo voice
Text: R.S. Thomas © Elodie Thomas
Winter “Has the End Begun?”
Amanda Johnson
for soprano, tenor & recorded sound
Text: Hattie Johnson
PROGRAMME NOTES
Spring “Rachel”
Frances M Lynch
for tenor, hand percussion & sampled nature sounds
My Spring song was inspired by Rachel Carson’s influential book “Silent Spring” which so long ago told us what to expect if we didn’t act immediately. That was 1962, and we didn’t- so now people are noticing that the longed for sounds of Spring are starting to go amiss. I often wonder what she would say if she was here now.
As I created the music after the other composers had finished I was able to quote little pre-echoes of their pieces as a way of unifying the cycle.
I made a short introduction which is a setting of lines from a poem by Flower’s sister, Sarah Flower Adams, “Summer Recollections” in which she longs for the peace and beauty of summer during a wet and stormy, dull and urban winter. The tenor reads the poem while a modern soundscape of traffic, busy streets and bad weather is played, giving way to birdsong and finally the cuckoo call of Spring.
Summer “Future Dream”
Anna Appleby
for fixed media, tenor, soprano & loud hailers
I created a 3-minute song called ‘Future Dream’ in response to Eliza Flower’s song ‘Summer’. I made it as an environmental protest song, in response to Flower protesting the issues of her day.
‘Future Dream’ is a poem I wrote from the perspective of Gen Z climate protestors, campaigning for the use of renewable energy, with a hopeful vision of a different world.
The music combines my own voice in a distorted track which powers on insistently for the whole duration, while the two singers increase in intensity and ferocity throughout with loudspeakers, eventually bursting into song.
You went and chose the gas and oil
Monetised survival
We still have rain and wind and sun
The future dream has just begun
Autumn “A Day in Autumn”
Lilly Vadaneaux
for solo voice
Text: R.S. Thomas © Elodie Thomas
When I came across R.S. Thomas poem ‘A Day in Autumn’, I was drawn to the ambiguity of ‘the long cold’ and the way autumn is presented as a liminal space between the known and the unknown. I wanted to explore the multiple possible layers of meaning for autumn that arise from this ambiguity, encompassing memory and the passage of time. The piece, intimately scored for solo soprano, is quite introspective. Though the poem carefully avoids the use of the first-person pronoun ‘I’, we still feel as if we are viewing the scene through the eyes of an individual, in a still moment in time.
I was also struck by Thomas’ intensely beautiful description of nature and found inspiration in the paintings of glowing autumn scenes by Eliza Flower’s contemporary, John Atkinson Grimshaw. Flower celebrates the beauty and freedom of nature in her ‘Songs of the Seasons’, particularly in the song for summer, which depicts the joy of a brook ‘widening to the sea’. I took a melodic fragment from its melismatic vocal line of flowing quavers as the starting point for my piece, here representing the flowing of consciousness and memory.
Winter “Has the End Begun?”
Amanda Johnson
for soprano, tenor & recorded sound
Text: Hattie Johnson
In “Free Trade Songs of the Seasons”, Eliza Flower refers to political policy changes that inflicted hardship on those struggling with poverty. Likewise, ‘Has the End Begun?’ uses the changes that take place during Winter as an analogy to the far reaching consequences of climate change and the increasing difficulties felt by many families this year.
Since the Summer now burns the land and skin
The cold has become a comfort
The journey towards the end has begun
The set of events leading to the final day
Have been set in motion
They were written out a long time ago
Once the speaker starts to read aloud
It is decided, the end has begun
But Has the end begun?
With grateful thanks to our funders
The National Lottery Heritage Fund – National Lottery players,
Hinrichsen Foundation and Ambache Charitable Trust
SCOPS Arts Trust
and our partner Conway Hall Ethical Society
Flower’s “Free Trade Songs of the Seasons” was published by Novello to support the Anti-Corn-Law League at their extraordinary Bazaar, held over 17 days in the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in 1845. The texts of the songs are by her sister, the poet, Sarah Flower Adams who is best known for penning the hymn “Nearer My God To Thee”. They worked together, not just artistically but also in radical politics, fighting for the rights of workers, women, enslaved people, and particularly for the poor and their struggle to survive in the face of high food prices and low wages – a struggle sadly mirrored today.
THE FLOWER COMPOSERS
SPRING
Frances M Lynch writes for choirs, music theatre, art exhibitions, plays, instrumental ensembles and electronics. Some of her scientific works have been played on BBC Radio 3, including Superposition of State (quantum physics), Virus in Molecular Mode and “Minerva Mathematica”. Collaborations with visual artists include “Miss Amy-Lloyd Folding“ (2023) commissioned by Serpell Lab (Alzheimers’ research) University of Sussex and Firmament which has 4,700 Youtube hits. She has written for Historic Environment Scotland, Great Tapestry of Scotland, The London Gaelic Choir, Barefoot Opera, Science Museum and more. Her stage work “Scottish Superwomen of Science” won 5 star reviews at Edinburgh Fringe.
SUMMER
Anna Appleby (born in Newcastle upon Tyne) is a Manchester-based composer and songwriter. Her classical work has been performed all over the world and she continues to compose spiritual, hard-hitting, melodic and rhythmically-driven work for orchestras, opera companies, choreographers, contemporary music ensembles, soloists and choirs. She also has an experimental electronic music alter-ego called Norrisette. Recent premieres include an opera, Drought, for the BBC Philharmonic, an award-winning collaborative youth opera for Glyndebourne, Pay the Piper.
AUTUMN
Lilly Vadaneaux is a composer, pianist and choral singer currently studying Music at Clare College, Cambridge. She attended Junior Guildhall from 2011 to 2021, where she studied composition with Paul Whitmarsh and Jeffery Wilson. She has also received mentoring from composer Roxanna Panufnik. Lilly was a winner of the NCEM Young Composers Award in 2013 and 2018 and the CASS Saxophone Composition Prize in 2016. She was also highly commended in the 2016 and 2019 BBC Young Composer Competition. Lilly has been commissioned to write new works for the West Wicklow Festival (2019) and the Opera Cameratina Festival (2022).
WINTER
Amanda Johnson is a composer and violinist based in Sheffield with an MA in performance. She composes music which explores the themes of migration, identity and freedom, combining recorded sound with instruments and voices. She recently worked with The National Trust, Sage Gateshead and Britten Pears Arts and her music has been performed at venues including the Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Art, Wentworth Woodhouse and The National Media Museum. It has featured in radio broadcasts in the UK, USA and Switzerland and collected into three public collections. In 2017 she received the Francis Chagrin award and a Finzi Scholarship in 2019.
