Pottery and claypipe

The third week of my winter residency at Scottish Sculpture Workshop and I've drafted all poems I intended to write. Today, I spent some time reflecting on the overall theme and narrative of the poems. I am thinking of The Music That Dances, the working title I have given them, as a series of poems inspired by the idea of a woman visiting her cousin in search of family stories. In a way, it is the story of one family leaving the land in search of a better life in the city whilst relatives stay behind and the growing gap between these two families in terms of the life they live and the way they relate to the land where they have their roots. Longing to fill in what is written between the lines of records of birth and death, the daughter of the family who left for the city visits her cousin and asks him to take her to the house where she was born. Here is one of the poems:

 
Pottery and Claypipe

Digging up the story

Buried beneath the stones

Unravelling layer by layer

Pottery and claypipes

Used by the men and women

Who played their fiddle at ceilidhs

Turned hay in the fields

The story builds up

As my trowel brushes away

Yet another sheet of soil

Like an archaeologist

Evidence I’m looking for

Evidence of stories passed

On to me by mother, grandmother

Evidence of lives lived

Of stories burning inside

Shared by neighbours around the fire

Pottery by claypipe, the story

Buried beneath the stones

Builds up, layer by layer

Copyright text, poem and image Petra Vergunst

The music of poetry

Most people consider poetry and music to be distinctly different art forms with the expressive qualities of poetry deriving from the narrative and meaning created by words whilst the expressive qualities of music arise from the emotions, atmospheres and drama expressed through sounds. Through words poets can express exactly what their work is about. Composers, on the other hand, lack this opportunity. These people would thus argue that poetry and music are distinctly different. I couldn’t agree less. In this blog I will present one counterargument by exploring the music inherent in poetry.

Working on Wind, Willow, Water revealed the proximity of poetry to music. When I wrote this poem I was not only looking for words that would describe the floodplain, I also wanted the poem to sound well, to be full of rhythm and tension. But even more music inherent in the poetry surfaced when even I recorded the poems. The heightened speech that I used to recite the poem emphasised pitch, rhythm, dynamics - and silences. Together this created the pattern of climax and relaxation similar to that what a composer is looking for in his or her music. The soundscape of the video poem Wind, Willow, Water thus not only consisted of the sounds created on a treble recorder, it also consisted of the music created by the poem.

In creating a poetic soundscape for Wind, Willow, Water I noticed that at times the actual meaning of words was less important than the sound and rhythm they elicited. The very title, for example, consists of three words that alliterate on the letter w to create an undulating and fluid experience. As these words are repeated, the meaning of these words gradually become less urgent than their sound and the imagery those sounds conjures up. Other poets have worked with onomatopoeia to create a similar effect. The poet Billy Letford (see video, copyright William Letford), for example, opens his poem There's Hunners O Burds On The Roofs with made-up words that, I imagine, resemble the sound of a flock of starlings on the roof of a building in a city. 

The landscape between poetry and music is a continuum on which the performance of poetry can be a musical affair that, at times, goes beyond the meaning at times. During my residency at SSW I want to explore the landscape between the two poles to find my own way to express the music inherent in poetry and, ultimately, to create a poetry performance that sings like music.

Copyright text Petra Vergunst

Darkness and isolation

A new year and new challenges. The first two months of 2014 have brought the exciting opportunity of a residency at the Scottish Sculpture Workshop in Lumsden to develop a piece of performance poetry as part of their winter residency programme.

The theme of the winter residency programme, ‘Darkness and Isolation’ raises a lot of questions. What kind of isolation are we referring to? Isolation can be physical, environmental, social, political. Some kinds of isolation can be factual, many other kinds are more a feeling, an experience, a perception. Isolation is also a relative concept and we need to ask ourselves in relation to what we feel isolated. These questions are particularly important to me as my background is in rural development. Surely, living in remote rural communities can be isolated in a physical sense, but I question whether inhabitants necessarily feel isolated socially and culturally. The Land Reform legislation has even taken a step towards addressing issues of political and economic isolation by giving communities the opportunity to buy land hand and thereby take control over a communities’ destiny. Though many communities feel this may be too big a step, this legislation may effect their experience of political and economic isolation. At the same time, city living can be an isolated experience as many people hardly know their neighbours and the less well-off are marginalised. The poet Meg Bateman captures this particularly well in her poem Remoteness in which she describes where you can find remoteness nowadays: “in the towerblocks between motorways/where people are removed,/ edged out from power”.

As part of my project Said in Stone last summer, I wrote around twenty poems in which I tried to capture the experiences and stories related to stones of a variety of real and imagined people in Grampian. When I reflected on these poems it struck me that, in one way or another, most of the poems dealt with issues of – what I call – embeddedness, that is, the experience of belonging to a certain place, time and community. To me, embeddedness and isolation are head and tail of the same coin. Though equally contested, I feel that embeddedness may have more positive connotations than isolation. During my residency at SSW I will thus use the term isolation to respond to the theme ‘Darkness and Isolation’.

To add to the art forms that I can use in my community music work, and because I enjoy writing, I’ll work in the medium of performance poetry during the residency. When I wrote the poems for Said in Stone and for the video poem Wind, Willow, Water, the musicality of poetry stood out for me. In carving out my own approach to performance poetry I want to capitalise on this musicality and borrow ideas from performance art about ways in which perceived barriers between a performer and the audience can be broken down through the creative use of space and giving the audience a role in the performance. I will showcase my work during an informal performance on Friday 14 February at SSW.

Other posts about the residency at Scottish Sculpture Workshop are:
The music of poetry 
Pottery and claypipe

What is in a poem?
Creating and recreating

Copyright text and image Petra Vergunst

Wind, willow, water

Increasingly, students of the Open College of the Arts meet up amongst themselves locally. It may be difficult to find students studying the same art form locally, and some of us may find this disappointing. Meeting up with students of other disciplines, however, also has its advantages in that it allows for debate between different art forms and draws attention to the overall debate  that is shared by drawing, painting, photography, creative writing and music students alike. Yiannitsa Cegarra and Petra Vergunst, a photography and music composition student from Aberdeen, decided to take their discussions a step further and set up a small collaborative project in which they would work together on a video.

The video Wind, Willow, Water combines photographs by Yiannitsa Cegarra with words and sounds by Petra Vergunst. It is the product of a collaborative project that started with a morning of fieldwork in the floodplains of the river Dee at Newton Dee, Bieldside. The video expresses the shared experiences and feelings about the place and reflections on doing fieldwork together. What struck Yiannitsa and Petra was the contrast in expressive opportunities of their media as photography produces still images whilst poetry and music are time-based media that can communicate movement and change. They found this contrast between stillness and movement reflected in the landscape. To communicate the calmness of the river landscape, they chose to work with a limited number of images, words and types of sounds and develop these organically.

Yiann says: Wind, Willow, Water has been my first project in collaboration with another OCA student. I must say that it has been invaluable to have worked with Petra. It has reinforced the importance of communication and engagement with another student face-to-face and in particular how the flow of ideas and experiences are shared. Also, I have realised that a higher level of commitment is needed as I haven’t experienced working with another artist before; it was something I was prepared – and needed – to do, and I found it very exciting. I came to know how different disciplines work and I was amazed at how Petra was able to create such pieces – both the poem and the soundtrack – by remembering her experiences from Newton Dee and the feelings gathered through my images. At the start I got to feel the place, which was new to me, and then set out to gather evidence of everything I saw while pre-visualising how I would process the images. I gave Petra sets of colour and black and white versions of the photographs to choose from to see if it was in accordance to our shared experiences of the place. The best bit for me was listening to her poem for the first time, absolutely magical; and then work with my images in harmony – which was tricky. The soundtrack came in last and it wraps up the project entirely; it reflects our experience of the land in nearly all senses – visual, feeling and sound. I cannot emphasise enough how important it has been for me to work with Petra, it has given me the strength to be confident as an artist and it has opened new ways of engaging and creating work that takes me out of a limited comfort zone. I think that our project Wind, Willow, Water is a good starting point for collaboration across disciplines in our studies and I hope that there will be many to come in the future, and I also hope that it will inspire other OCA students to work in partnership.

 

Petra says: This collaborative project with Yiannitsa has been very exciting. What we aimed for was an integration of art forms, not one of us responding to the work of the other. We did fieldwork together and discussed our ideas on a regular basis. Doing fieldwork together was a real eye-opener. Yiannitsa took out her camera and started taking photographs while I was not sure what to do. This made us realise how a photographer needs a landscape to produce his or her art while a composer is looking for remembered feeling, that is, the experience of a place, something that not necessarily has to be recorded whilst out there. In the end, Yiannitsa sent me several photographs that I took as a starting point for my poem, a recording of which Yiannitsa then used to create a first video. Following a discussion she decided to make several alterations, after which I eventually added sound effects (using a treble recorder). In a way, the project was as much about the process of collaborating as producing an actual video. What helped us a lot was sending each other links to work that we felt was relevant to our joint project – more than once a WeAreOCA blog. We even went to the premiere of Chris Dooks’ Tiny Geographies, a film based on still images of landscape with a soundtrack consisting of found poetry. This shared frame of reference helped us look critically on what we were doing ourselves. Collaborating with Yiannitsa has been important for my development as an artist. Not only has it made me do things that were out of my comfort zone and reflect on things I take for granted as a composer of music, it also revealed the kind of questions artists – irrespective of the art form they are working in - are dealing with. I very much hope that this project has been a first step in a longer process of collaboration – with Yiannitsa and others.

See also:
The music of poetry

Copyright text and video Yiannitsa Cegarra and Petra Vergunst

Kenn and the salmon

Performed at the banks of Dunbeath Water, the chamber opera Highland River, based on Neil Gunn’s novel of the same name, portrays the young boy Kenn’s relation to the river of his childhood. As a young boy, he prevails after a long struggle with a salmon and his parents use the fish to pay off the family’s debts with the local grocer. A few years later, his older brother Angus invites him to poach salmon further upstream, an illegal act that could lead to repercussions from the gamekeeper. As an adult, Kenn returns to the river of his childhood to reflect on his childhood memories and the sense of place and time these embody. The site-specific chamber opera Highland River touches upon themes of physical and spiritual growth and a deeply felt sense of place and time that Kenn’s childhood experiences of salmon, the river and the wider landscape conjure up. Performed in the open air, the voice of the baritone, clarinet, violin and cello will merge with the rushing of the river and the whisper of the wind.

The video beneath contains an extract from the opera from the first act. The young boy Kenn’s mood changes abruptly when he spots a salmon in the river. For a moment he is paralysed by fear of the gamekeeper, but soon his mind turns to killing the fish and finding a stone. His confidence soon grows as he throws stones at the salmon to disturb and catch it. The fish responds furiously and, in first instance, Kenn dashes back. In a moment of reflection, he considers how the salmon must have swum up the river. Kenn throws another stone at the fish and manages to pull it on the grass. Using the full weight of his body, Kenn eventually masters the fish and kills it. As the salmon dies, Kenn’s body comes to a rest and he looks in wonder at the hands with which he managed to land and kill the salmon.

 

Copyright text and music Petra Vergunst

Remembered feeling

Remembered feeling, a term used by visual artist Marian Leven, describes the feelings a place evokes in one’s memory. Pitcowdens, a composition for brass quintet, is about the feelings and imaginations a forest croft in the northeast of Scotland elicits for composer Petra Vergunst. For years she has visited the croft - as a destination of walks, to plant trees and to study and share its history. Though abandoned since the mid 20^th century, the contours of the house, the byre, the fields and the well are still visible in the landscape. For centuries the farmer and his family and farmhands worked the land in daytime and played the fiddle and sang bothy ballads at night. Pitcowdens is based on one of those bothy ballads, The Dying Ploughboy. In this song, one of the farm workers feels his end is near and says farewell to his master and the land he used to work. In a way, he bid farewell to a way of life and working the land as farming retreated to the more fertile lower-lying grounds along the river Dee half a century ago. To express her remembered feelings and imaginations of the forest croft Petra Vergunst has taken the first four notes of this ballad – the sequence of the tonic, mediant, subdominant and dominant – as a motif to create a sense of longing, the rhythm of working the fields, and more lyrical passages that allude to the bothy ballad.

Alongside her work as a freelance community musician, Petra Vergunst has studied music composition with Patric Standford at the Open College of the Arts. Inspired by theatre, performance art and poetry, her compositions often combine music with narrated or sung texts. To reinforce the narrative character of her music she likes to resemble musical utterances with spoken ones. Like thoughts, these utterances then develop organically and are arranged in the form of monologue or dialogue. A number of her compositions have been successful in competitions and were performed professionally. Three (for alto flute), inspired by Elizabeth Blackadder’s painting Still Life, January 1972, has been performed in Aberdeen Art Gallery by Richard Craig during sound 2013. Pitcowdens (in an arrangement for flute, oboe, bassoon, horn in F and cello) was shortlisted in a competition by the St. Andrews New Music Ensemble and subsequently played by the ensemble in a workshop led by Sally Beamish. Frozen River (flute, trumpet, cello) was played by The Red Note Ensemble during Noisy Nights in Edinburgh and Aberdeen.

Pitcowdens, in an arrangement for flute, oboe, horn in F, bassoon and cello, can be listened to here.

Copyright text and music Petra Vergunst

Highland River

Highland River is Neil Gunn’s famous 1937 novel about Kenn who makes a pilgrimage to the source of Dunbeath Water, the river that shaped his childhood, and, in a way, to the sourse of himself and his cultural heritage. For my level three composition course with the Open College of the Arts, I have developed this novel into a site-specific chamber opera for baritone, clarinet, violin and cello. The composition of this opera has been an exciting process that involved a iterative rounds of interpretation of the original novel.

Along Dunbeath Water

Composers of opera have diverging ideas on whether or not to write their own librettos, Benjamin Britten, for example, insisted on collaborating with librettists. Wagner, on the other hand, wrote his own librettos as he felt that the development of a libretto goes hand in hand with the composition of the music and decisions about staging. Whatever stance is taken, the libretto for an opera  necessarily is a simplification of the original text, and therefore highly subjective. That is, developing an existing work into a libretto for an opera involves interpretation.

For reasons similar to those of Wagner, I have written the libretto for my chamber opera Highland River myself. The guidance from OCA stipulated that the opera was to last around twenty minutes. As a result, I would only be able to include a limited number of passages from the novel. For me, Kenn’s intimate relationship with place, time and community is central in Gunn’s book. I thus selected passages from the novel that expressed this theme convincingly and that, together, would present a coherent storyline. The coherence of the storyline was enhanced by choosing only a small number of dramatic themes that would recur in different scenes and were given distinctive thematic material. One of these is the fear for the gamekeeper, a fear embodying a sense of community based on a fear for the laird and his gamekeeper in the wake of the Clearances. When in the first act the young boy Kenn catches a sizeable salmon, the heroic act had to be kept quiet for the community for fear of repercussions from the gamekeeper. In the second act this fear is made explicit in the story of Lachie-the-Fish, the older brother of Kenn’s friend Beel who only narrowly escaped being caught poaching red-handed, a story shared by Kenn and his older brother Angus when they themselves are on a poaching trip.   

'Kenn and the Salmon' in the harbour of Dunbeath

Yet, the selection of passages from the novel to include in the libretto represents but one level of interpretation in the composition of an opera. Equally important are the musical ideas and staging considerations that necessitate the inclusion of certain passages of the book to the exclusion of others. The part of the novel that moved me most is when the young boy Kenn, annoyed that his mother has woken him up to fetch water, arrives at the river and spots a large salmon. After a lengthy struggle he manages to land and kill the fish. In the opera this scene features prominently in the first act and is regularly referred to in subsequent acts. Though this scene is treated at length in Gunn’s novel, it does not recur as emphatically later on in the novel. Compositional considerations thus altered the relative importance of scenes in the opera.

Perhaps surprisingly, writing the synopsis and programme notes – and this blog – involved yet another cycle of interpretation, this time involving reflections on my interpretation of Gunn’s novel. Without giving too much away the programme notes had to capture the essence of the opera in just a few lines. The development of the libretto and score seemed to involve the divergence of ideas, which had to be made convergent in the synopsis and programme notes. Ultimately, the synopsis and programme notes helped to tie up loose ends and re-assemble the jigsaw.  

From the above it would not come as a surprise that my opera, though based on Neil Gunn’s novel, tells a distinctly different story. At times verging into an arts-led inquiry on Gunn's treatment of the idea of embeddedness in place, time and community, the process of interpreting the novel has been an exciting, iterative process of creating narrative and meaning. Naturally, the question arises whether it is legitimate to interpret the novel in such a way – a question quite similar to whether a performer is allowed to interpret the work of a composer freely. For The Turn of the Screw, Britten and his librettist Myfanwy Piper tried to recreate rather than interpret the novel by Henry James, yet they did decide to write a new prologue for the opera to make it work on stage. I reject the idea that it is possible to stay true to the original novel. In reworking a novel for the stage one necessarily engages in a subjective process. What I’ve tried to do is make explicit how this process of interpretation unfolds and what the interpretation consists of. When writing an opera based on an existing novel interpretation is inevitable. Whether such interpretation is legitimate is not a valid question. A more valid question, however, is whether such interpretation, and the degree to which the original novel and opera deviate, is justified by conceptual and creative decisions.

Copyright text and images Petra Vergunst