More information about the Borderlands event, titles and themes of Liz’s music featured……………

Anam Cara - a meditative song with nourishing words in Sanskrit, Arabic and Irish. The audience is encouraged to take part, blurring the divide between performer and audience. The words are:

Om Nama Shivaya. Salaam. Anam Cara.

Borderlands - new music for string quartet inspired by three photographs that (for me) conjure up images of dragons, channelling energy of magical imagination and of crossing borders - both physical and mental.

1. Dragon Moon Over Hay Bluff

2. Dragon Coils at British Camp

3. Dragon Waves at Filey Beach

Poems by Jo Shapcott: Pig, Elephant Woman and Watching Medusa
Singer Suzie Purkis sings these dramatic realisations of Jo Shapcott’s quirky poems, each with its own delicious tragi-comic twist.

I Should Have Been Sea poetry by David Hart
Much of my work as a composer has been inspired by David Hart’s poetry. This stanza is from the book length poem Crag Inspector. (First performance)

Harebell this delicate solo for violin was inspired by the delicate but resilient harebells that grow on the windy top of the Malvern Hills.

Ben Hartley Notebooks

1. A New Beauty 2. Old Ben Dances

Ben Hartley was a reclusive artist who painted on old brown parcel paper, capturing moments of his life in rural Devon. His notebooks are full of tender observations:

Week of wetness and a new beauty
That of brown autumn-winter
The dock leaf, the dandelion, and the cow in the field.

Cello Suite

Also inspired by Ben Hartley’s art and words, this is a collection of short cameos including portraits of pigs, goats and chickens woven through Liz’s reflections of the psychedelic medieval plainchant of Hildegard of Bingen.

Tide purl

This short piece captures the play of evening light on water at low tide on Druidstone Beach, Pembrokeshire, and the oscillating forms of the sand on the beach are mirrored in the music that expands from a single note moving up, down and outwards using only thirds.

To submit your creative response after the event just email Liz: liz@lizdilnotjohnson.co.uk before July 1st 2024.
If you have any questions do get in touch.

More info here

Three photographs that inspired Borderlands for string quartet. Photo credit: Liz Dilnot Johnson

I should have been sea.

I should have been grey-green sea

turning and turning at no

fraction of a moment ever

the same as it was before

or ever will be but itself

inescapably. I am sea

in the moment I say I want to be

and I am defeated

utterly.

David Hart (from Crag Inspector)

More about Liz:
Liz Dilnot Johnson is an award-winning composer and co-muser living on top of the Malvern Hills. Her music is performed all over the world and ranges from exquisite miniatures to large-scale multi-faceted works that blur boundaries and encourage interactions between different cultures and art forms. ‘She has an extraordinary intuition for what works’ Jeffrey Skidmore (OBE). Borderlands is Liz’s 60th Birthday celebration.