Description
This song is taken from my song cycle Speak of the North for soprano, violin and piano. This arrangement of Sedimentary for tenor, cello and piano was made for the 2025 Critics Circle Awards, first performed by John Findon, Laura van der Heijden and Mishka Rushdie Momen at the London Coliseum, on the 24th September 2025. Sedimentary, set to words by Northumbrian poet Katrina Porteous, describes the geological conditions that make up the British Coalfields; a landscape that would eventually be occupied by towns and communities each with a pit or colliery at its heart. Those pits have now been closed, the mines filled in, and the communities neglected by successive governments. But the landscape remains, 'scarred and heaved wide open'. c Gavin Higgins