Starfish is a song for tenor, piano and electronics based on a haiku.
Relics of the sea,
Dark viridian woodland.
Blanched red glow of sand.
It was first performed by James Geer (tenor) and Nicholas Brown (piano) at the Mumford Theatre, Cambridge in February 2016, accompanied by time-lapse seascape painting by F.C. Heathorn.
Here is the programme note from the first performance:
In 2009, I left London for Norfolk. Soon after my arrival, I wrote a short haiku/song about finding a four-armed starfish on Holkham Beach in winter. In February 2016, I reworked the song by expanding the vocal line and developing the accompaniment for piano and electronics. Cut-up fragments from the text (Relics of the sea/Dark viridian woodland/Blanched red glow of sand) are delivered by the tenor voice as if they had been washed ashore with the sea foam. This reworking marks the second of my collaborations with the artist, F.C. Heathorn, following my sound installation based on regional field recordings for her exhibition of landscape paintings, In Arcady (Yallops Gallery, Norwich, 2015).
Starfish is therefore a piece about the effect of relocation on creativity, particularly the influence of the Norfolk landscape on my compositional practice. When I wrote the original song, my creative identity was still tied to London. I didn’t quite anticipate the effect this coastal landscape would have on my work over the next six years. And so this reworking is a kind of meditation—not only on landscape, but also on the possibility of artistic change. We go to schools and colleges to learn about our art. But what we can’t quite control is that whatever kind of artist we become, our work will speak of where we live.
February, 2016
This programme note is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.