Musical invocations of Englishness can mean anything from Elgar to Davey Graham to the Sex Pistols. They can be nostalgic and pastoral, mournful or dystopian. In classical settings, “Englishness” often translates as something tweedy and bucolic, inspired by modal folk music and suspicious of continental experimentation. On this album, five contemporary British composers write music inspired by the South Downs near Brighton, and all seem palpably “English” in some way. Yet all defy tradition, and many link with broader trends in jazz and the avant garde.
Many of these pieces draw from written sources, sung by Rachel Farago. Shirley J Thompson provides minimalist backing for a 1773 poem about the English countryside by the African American writer Phillis Wheatley. Evelyn Ficarra sets an abstract verse by modern-day Brighton poet Valerie Whittington to a terrifying orchestration inspired by the chirruping of larks. Ed Hughes’s epic Sky Rhythms uses a 1937 diary entry from the Mass Observation Archive, with a twitchy orchestral accompaniment that’s pitched somewhere between Michael Nyman and Henry Cow.
