On Friday 16th February, Graham and Jenni will be on HCR104fm’s Spotlight programme around 8pm with Melanie Green to talk about Cracked Voices and the upcoming performances. If you’re not in the local area, catch it online here.
We’re delighted to be able to share the dates of the premiere and second performance of Cracked Voices.
The premiere of will take place in the Music Recital Hall of Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge on Saturday 10th March at 7.30pm.
The second performance will be held at Royston Methodist Church, Queens Road, Royston on Saturday 28th April at 7.30pm. This performance will include the premiere of Meridian School’s Cracked Objects – art songs written by students based on objects on display at Royston Museum.
To buy tickets for these performances please head to the Tickets page.
Following our call for performers earlier in the year, we’re pleased to be able to share our fabulous Cracked Voices performers with you! We’re delighted to be working with Ian Beadle, Donna Lennard, Sue Pettitt and Ralph Woodward to bring Cracked Voices to life.
Top row: Donna Lennard, soprano and Ian Beadle, Baritone. Second row: Ralph Woodward, pianist and Sue Pettitt, clarinettist.
Ian Beadle – Baritone
Ian Beadle was born in Hertfordshire and studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama where he obtained a BMus (Hons) degree and Guildhall Artist Masters, as a scholar under the tutelage of Professor John Evans. In 2012/13 he was a part of the English National Opera’s Opera Works programme. Operatic experience includes the Bridegroom The Vanishing Bridegroom (British Youth Opera), Figaro Le Nozze Di Figaro (Opera Brava), Des Grieux Le Portrait De Manon, Belcore Elisir D’Amore and William Dale Silent Night (Wexford Festival Opera), Masetto Don Giovanni, Marco GIanni Schicchi, Quinault Adriana Lecouvreur, Jake Wallace La Fanciulla Del West (Opera Holland Park), Valentin Faust (Winterbourne Opera). Ian sang Bass soloist in a Messiah at the Palau de la Música, Valencia for the Philharmonia Chorus.
For more information on Ian, please see www.ianbeadle.co.uk
Donna Lennard – Soprano
Donna Lennard grew up in Bedford, and trained at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, attaining an MPerf with Distinction, and on ENO’s ‘Opera Works’ programme. Her operatic roles include Frog in How the Whale Became (ROH), Selene in Tycho’s Dream (Glyndebourne), Alice in Airborne (Nova Music Opera), Despina in Così fan tutte (Cooper Hall Emerging Artists), Yellow in The Anatomy of Melancholy (bodycorps), Catfish in The Catfish Conundrum (The Music Troupe for Tête à Tête), Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro, Frasquita in Carmen, and Pamina in The Magic Flute (Opera Loki). Other stage work includes performing in the UK tour of May Contain Food with dance company, Protein, and the role of Madame Viardot in Salon Musical, a project initiated by pianist Marc Verter that recreates French salon concerts from the late 19th Century.
For more information on Donna, please see www.donnalennard.co.uk
Sue Pettitt – Clarinet
Sue came down from Lancashire in 1987 to study clarinet under John Stenhouse and Nick Bucknall at Trinity College of Music. After graduating with an FTCL in 1991 she started to work for Hertfordshire Music Service which she does to this day. Sue is the head of Royston Music School and conducts the North Herts and Stevenage Windband. She is also in great demand as an orchestral and pit musician across the whole of the South East. When not involved in the musical world she can be found chasing her young puppy around the garden trying to stop it from digging up the lawn!
Ralph Woodward – Piano
Ralph Woodward grew up in Durham, and studied Music as Organ Scholar at Queens’ College, Cambridge. He is now Musical Director of the Fairhaven Singers, Full Score and Orchestral Score. He has played concertos on three instruments, worked in over 25 countries, and conducted the London Mozart Players, City of London Sinfonia, The Parley of Instruments, English Chamber Orchestra, and Britten Sinfonia. He carries out a wide range of editorial tasks for Oxford University Press. Past projects have included work with Vladimir Ashkenazy, Emma Johnson, Iestyn Davies and Cradle of Filth, and an appearance on ITV’s Grantchester. Ralph also manages a cricket team and is a keen badminton player and a good steady drinker.
For more information on Ralph, please see www.ralphwoodward.com
The Doing History In Public website is currently carrying a post on Cracked Voices.
Doing History in Public is a collaborative blog written and edited by graduate historians (mainly at the University of Cambridge). Graham was delighted to be invited to share information about the challenges behind researching and writing Cracked Voices.
On Monday 9 October, Graham held a workshop at Royston Museum with ten students from Meridian School. We explored the stories behind objects and students chose objects they would like to write about in their own song cycle.
We can’t wait to help them develop their ideas further…
Many thanks to Royston Museum for welcoming us in (even into their storeroom!).
Booking is now open for Graham’s Royston Arts Festival creative writing workshop: Everything Changes: a writing workshop exploring place and time. It will take place at Royston & District Museum & Art Gallery on Saturday 23 September 2017, 2- 4.30pm (£5, Book your place now. )
About the workshop: Whether you’re a beginner in creative writing or a more advanced writer looking for ideas, this half-day workshop will help you shape a setting for your story, blog or poem. Using historic photos from the Museum’s storeroom, it will provide an opportunity to discover how a sense of change and place can inspire your own writing.*
About the workshop leader: Graham Palmer is a member of the National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE) who has published three books with CUP. He is currently working on a historical biography and a sequence of poems which will form the basis of a new song-cycle, Cracked Voices, with local composer Jenni Pinnock.
*This workshop may also prove useful to those preparing for the Creative Writing element in the GCSE English exam.
Age 15+
Our first educational workshop got a mention in this week’s Royston Crow (Thursday 3rd August) – click here to read the article.
Educational workshops form a central part of the Cracked Voices project. We want to show what a fabulous and accessible medium art songs are, and what better way to do it than to support students in writing them?
On a hot Thursday morning, the Cracked Voices team descended upon Meridian School, Royston for an introductory workshop. The aim was simple: to come up with an entire song in one morning! We had a helping hand in that Graham had written a chorus-type text out, but other than that the material was to be created entirely on the day.
The session began with a quick discussion on Cracked Voices: the song cycle, what we’re doing, and how we wanted the students to be involved. Then the writers got to work on creating their own verses to include in the song – pairs of 10 syllable lines about the items they wanted to go into the memory box. In the meantime, the musicians had a brief theory blitz on art songs, text setting and analysis with Jenni before jumping into the composing!
Having decided on rough rhythms for the text, the musicians separated out to improvise ideas, before coming back together to piece the chorus together a line at a time.They then worked out some chords for each bar or phrase, and hey presto – a chorus was born! They also blitzed a quick melody line that might work with the verses.
After a quick break the writers joined the musician to share their work. They had created four stanzas of four lines each – finding the right ideas and fitting them into 10 syllable lines had proved a challenge, but one they had risen to. They had also made the decision to rejiggle the order of the choruses, meaning some last minute changes on the music side, alongside some quick improvisation on the rhythms of the verses. After rehearsing the song a few times through, making changes and edits as we went (suggested by musicians and writers alike) we recorded the final song.
Thanks to Jenny Warburton, Nick Smith and Meridian School for letting us run the workshop – we’re looking forward to the next one in October! Thanks also to the Arts Council’s Grants for the Arts for funding the workshops. Pictures used from the @MeridianPAD Twitter feed with permission.
Missed Jenni and Graham on Jeremy Sallis’s ‘Lunchtime Live’ on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire ? Catch up here (2’19+). Includes part of ‘The Devil & The Draper’ premiere sung live by the Meridian School chamber Choir, Royston.
Our call for performers is now live! We’re looking for a soprano, a baritone, a pianist and a clarinettist to perform Cracked Voices in 2018. For more details please see the call page.