Tomorrow night (Thursday 13th July) we will be gearing up for the latest Centenary celebration in the form of a musical and poetry event called ‘Charles Causley: A Musical Celebration’. Our writer in residence Cahal Dallat had this to say about what to expect from tomorrow evening:
“Having spent 3 months on new settings of Causley poems I’ve been working on 2 fronts: song settings, using newly composed and traditional tunes, which will be premiered on Charles Birth Centenary on Thu 24 Aug, and musical settings as background while poems are read. And it’s these we’ll be premiering in tomorrow night’s concert, one very Tudor, another modal and Celtic, and a more modern composition/theme for one of Charles’ best-loved poems…”
The event will begin with a pre-concert talk by Cahal and Anne-Marie Fyfe which Cahal also describes for us:
“The pre-concert talk should be great fun as it draws together so many of the strands I’ve been exploring in my Causley Trust residency and so much of the legacy of folk/traditional airs/ballads/dance-music that Anne-Marie and I have talked about – in relation to poetry and literature generally – in our performances in Britain, Ireland and the US for many years.
And much of it focuses on our own native Glens of Antrim, which had an amazing source of inspiration for Irish and British and American poets and composers at the turn of the century, a place very like Cornwall in its unspoilt remoteness, authentic lifestyle, natural beauty, fairy lore…
So yes, there’s Causley, and Yeats and Joyce and Robert Graves, and more composers than you’d ever guess who were pupils of Stanfords and who followed his lead of including traditional airs in classical music – Vaughan Williams, Holst, Gurney, Goosens and so on. And Charles Causley’s interest wasn’t just in ‘ballads’ though we’ll mention a few of his, and some of the others he published during the 1960s ‘ballad revival’ but he was a classical pianist himself and his sheet music collection at Cyprus Well – and his record collection, both folk and classical, shows just how interested he was in the music of these islands.”
This discussion is followed by a concert featuring the Dante Quartet alongside Celtic poets and local musicians with Causley poetry taking centre stage. The event takes place at Launceston Town Hall from 6pm-10pm, wit tickets available at : www.dantefestival.org
We hope to see as many of you there as possible.
