Creating “Windfarm” – On a Wing and a Prayer, Shetland

On a Wing and a Prayer, a  two-year project on the changing habitats of the north begins with a one-hour performance with percussionist, composer and sound artist Renzo Spiteri in Shetland on 20^th September in the wonderfully atmospheric Boat Hall at Shetland Museum, looking out over the harbour in Lerwick: a setting where the forces of nature can be very much in sight and sound during performances!

Tickets are available via Eventbrite.

Podcast

Renzo and I got together with composer and podcaster Aileen Sweeney of Ear to the Ground to talk about our work together and about what you can expect at our performance. This is the first in an occasional series of podcasts and I would love to hear your thoughts on what I might include in future episodes. You can contact me here.

Windfarm

The climax of our performance in Shetland will be a piece called Windfarm. It’s our most complex piece, so I thought it might be nice to delve into it a little more deeply than we had time for in the podcast.

Interestingly, the origins of the music came long before the subject matter. Renzo and I first met at UHI’s Shoormal Conference in Mareel in 2019. We were eager to meet and improvise with each other, exploring the points of intersection in our practice – and then the pandemic hit!

Undaunted, we started swapping material online, improvising layer upon layer to each other’s work. I have to ask myself, would we have thought of working in this way if we hadn’t been compelled to? Out of adversity grows innovation and new ways of thinking – obviously now most of our creation is taking place in the same room, where we can discuss and try out new things together, yet this online sharing allows us to work in a more sustainable way, pushing our ideas forward between meetings without the need to travel all the time.

One of the pieces we developed online, suspended sheets, had some quite incredible, metallic sounds. I had a lot of fun responding on the viola d’amore  (a new instrument for me at the time) exploring some edgy harmonics, resonances and special effects that blended and complemented the metallic sounds Renzo was producing.

We both felt that there was much to develop and take forward from these initial ideas. By now, the Viking Windfarm was taking shape and concerning us both in terms of the impact on the landscape and wildlife, pollution in water sources and the effects of subsonic sound on human physical and mental health.

At this point I’ll introduce 2 caveats. Firstly and most importantly, I am not against wind energy. We need to have cleaner forms of energy BUT we do need to carefully consider scale and the  impact on both nature and people. Secondly, whilst Renzo does live in Shetland, I don’t. It’s therefore not my place to judge these particular developments,  though my own area, too, is in dialogue with SSEN on a number of projects. Instead, in our music, we seek to convey our own reactions and emotions and hope that these can be a vehicle for other people to start their own conversations on what is happening up on the moor.

There were three elements in our music that drew our thoughts and our ears to the windfarm: the edgy, metallic sounds of the percussion and a special effect on the viola d’amore, the deep, ominous low frequency groans in the music akin to the low-frequency rumble around a windfarm (research on the effects of this on human health ìs ongoing) and the processional nature of the melodic material, which made us think of the footprint of humankind on the landscape.

I sent our musical sketches to poet and long-term collaborator Lesley Harrison. Her poem put into words exactly this sense of unease, of trampling rough-shod over the land and the almost sinister feel of these windmills when crammed into a small space (though weirdly I find them quite graceful in small numbers.) Lesley’s words fed back into our music, providing more impetus to the material.

The finished piece will be quite a deep, complex texture, I think, drawing in all these levels of inspiration and our mixed emotions. There’ll be a mix of live sound and field recordings, instrumental effects and excerpts from Lesley’s poems woven into the musical texture.

Our programme doesn’t only deal with gritty environmental issues. There’s also space for peace, reflection and optimism in our programme, too. We’ll start with a piece called “Serenity” which is evocative of the peaceful shoreline with the sound of the sea and the tjalder (oystercatcher).

We’re also incorporating ancient traditional tunes and hymns from Fetlar and the Faroe Islands as well as Faroese composer Kristian Blak’s Drrrunnn, which evokes the very similar soundscapes of Shetland’s neighbours to the north.

On a Wing and a Prayer cards by Orla Stevens

Orla Steven’s striking image for the On a Wing and a Prayer project incorporates windfarms, the sea, seabirds, weather and Scotland’s native woodlands. All issues that we’ll be exploring over the next 12 months.

It’s now available as a greetings card and all profits will be ploughed back into the project. You can buy them online here and at the performance. If you don’t have a paypal account, drop me a message in the contact page and I can arrange payment and delivery for you.