Jeoffry: The Poet's Cat - an event to launch the publication of the new book by Oliver Soden. скачать в хорошем качестве

Jeoffry: The Poet's Cat - an event to launch the publication of the new book by Oliver Soden.

In collaboration with Wild Plum Arts An event launching the publication of "Jeoffry: The Poet's Cat" by Oliver Soden, which took place on 24 September 2020 at Aldeburgh Church. The book is published on 6 October 2020. Oliver is conversation with Lucy Walker (Head, Public Engagement at Britten Pears Arts), and reads from his new book. In collaboration with Wild Plum Arts, the event also hosted the first performance of a newly-commissioned piece by Arthur Keegan-Bole entitled "Jeoffry," performed by Lucy Schaufer and Christopher Gillett, and made publicly available for the first time in this film. Extracts of Britten's "Rejoice in the Lamb" were performed by Christopher Gillett and Julian Larkin (the extracts are reduced for rights reasons). Composer's note on "Jeoffry": This piece tries to reflect two sides of Christopher Smart’s poetry about Jeoffry, his cat. The text reveals a pure joy in simple observations about his cat alongside a deeply reverent tone which underlines the whole work. This is neatly summed up in Oliver Soden’s biography of Jeoffry where he observes that the poem “like most visions,… hovers on the border between the absurd and the sublime” (pp. 81-82). Musical material was derived from the four-note organ theme at the start of Benjamin Britten’s setting of the Jeoffry poem but also features samples of cats morphing into harmonic colours with lines and textures akin to congregational hymns and sung psalms. The structure is akin to a mosaic or kaleidoscopic, with text juxtaposed from various sections in the poem supported by harmonic clouds that drift by (always morphing, never stable) and with vocal lines dissolving into and emerging out of the electronic accompaniment. Oliver’s beguiling book revealed to me that the poem is missing one whole side of an antiphonal structure (the poem that survives includes lines beginning “for…” but there should be corresponding lines beginning “let…”) Elena Passarello has invented a (charming and rather beautiful) possible version of the missing text in Animals Strike Curious Poses and one short line (“Let love be his keep”) from this imagined antiphonal response is included within this piece. My thanks go to Wild Plum Arts for commissioning the piece and to Lucy Schaufer and Chris Gillett who worked with me during the writing process, providing vocal samples for the embedded electronic elements and shaping the dots. Thanks too to Oliver Soden whose beautiful book was the starting point for the whole project and which introduced me to the rich world of Christopher Smart’s beloved Jeoffry.