Exploring the Music: Stuart MacRae & Eli Tausen á Lava Podcast

Podcast

I’m delighted to introduce our first two composers on John Rae and The Northern Telegraph Route: Stuart MacRae from Scotland and Eli Tausen á Lava from the Faroe Islands. You can hear them talking about their new pieces, Communications and Reach, in this week’s podcast, which is on soundcloud here.

Communications by Stuart MacRae for small ensemble

Stuart MacRae writes:

In writing this piece I was influenced by John Rae’s account to the Royal Geographical Society of his exploratory journey across Iceland in 1860 to seek the best route for a proposed Northern Telegraph connecting Britain and North America. In it we hear the voice of an experienced explorer with a purposeful and focused mission and an appreciation for the hospitality of the people who lived along the route he traversed. He had, no doubt, encountered far more challenging and remote circumstances in his earlier Arctic explorations, but there is nevertheless a sense of mystery and adventure in his descriptions of the extraordinary landscapes he saw.

In Communications, rather than attempting to portray specific events or places, I imagine a journey into unknown landscapes and the sudden changes accompanied by each milestone: turbulent and cloudy glacial rivers giving way to vast fields of rubble; valleys topped by eerie lava fields, and the sense of the still living geology of the island.

I imagine the form of the music as a line of communication – one idea suggesting another, passing on its energy to a different musical expression, in one direction, always transforming but never returning to the source. There are also moments of warmth, in recognition of the people Rae encountered and their goodwill, and the piece ends in slightly quizzical fashion; a connection broken or caught in a loop, perhaps suggesting a contrast between the enduring nature of the landscape and the ephemerality of the human endeavour, which was never completed.

Reach by Eli Tausen á Lava for string quartet

Eli Tausen á Lava writes:

Reach is inspired by the account of Dr. John Rae’s 1860 expedition to survey the proposed route for a northern telegraph line connecting Europe and North America via Shetland, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, and Greenland. One particular detail of Dr. Rae’s journey stood out to me: while in the Faroes, he climbed the mountain Skælingur in very rough weather. Not only that: he deliberately chose the more difficult of two possible routes up the mountain.

This brought up associations to the concept of pilgrimage, i.e., undertaking an initiatory journey, usually to a sacred destination. The end of such an ordeal is often anticlimactic, with the realization that it was the journey that was sacred, not the destination.

The title of the piece refers to several meanings of the word “reach” — such as reaching for, having reached, or out of reach — while also bringing up associations to the vast land- and seascapes encountered by Dr. Rae on his journey.

Tickets – Tickets are still available for our performances. Click here https://nordicviola.com/forthcoming-performances/