Bingham: Choral Works

Description

Judith Bingham (b. 1952) Salt in the Blood • The Darkness Is No Darkness The Snows Descend • The Secret Garden • First Light  Judith Bingham was born in Nottingham, grew up in Sheffield and had already been composing actively for many years when she entered the Royal Academy of Music in 1970 to study composition and singing. Her teachers included Alan Bush and Eric Fenby, later Hans Keller, and Erich Vietheer (for singing).Her individual musical voice soon attracted attention and led to many requests for works, notably for the King's Singers, Peter Pears and the Songmakers' Almanac. In 1977 she won the BBC Young Composer Award and from 1983-96 she was a regular member of the BBC Singers, for whom she has written eleven works: at the end of 2005 she became their Associate Composer.While her orchestral and choral works have made a wide impact, Bingham has won particular acclaim for her scores for brass – ensemble, band and solo; she is also fast becoming recognised as a major composer of organ music. In 2005 her huge orchestral piece Chartreswas selected for the Encore project and conducted by James MacMillan. She was the 2004 winner of the Barlow Prize for choral music, and has won three British Composer awards in 2004 and 2006 for choral and liturgical music. New projects include works for St Paul's Cathedral, the BBC Singers, choirs in Utah and Albuquerque, an organ concerto, and a series of violin pieces for Peter Sheppard Skaerved. Composer's NotesSalt in the Blood (1995)British folk-song is a ghostly form of time travel. The oral rather than written tradition underlines its mysterious and powerful pull. It was at the Last Night of the Proms in 1994, during the traditional rendition of the Henry Wood Sea-Songs, that I decided I wanted to write a piece about the sea and shanties. The idea stagnated until I read in John Masefield's Sea Superstitions about the fatal quarrel of two Norwegian sailors as to who was the better dancer. From this basis I invented a ghost story which features four traditional shanties and three invented hornpipes.Life at sea is of course dominated by the weather – I have done some sailing myself and know that your life becomes the weather. When you see old photographs of tall-masted ships and their crews, there is a sense of organic harmony with the weather and the environment that modern sailing cannot provide. The story of the piece follows weather patterns, the different moods of the story being reflected in the changing weather.The text of this piece was hard to put together. The shanties form the backbone of the piece, but having decided to tell the story through them I had to write most of the verses myself. The rest was made up of fragments from diaries and log books, the Beaufort Scale (written in the nineteenth century and curiously poetic), fragments of Bram Stoker's Dracula and my own words. I used the women's voices to represent the disem