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Malvern Elegy (Orchestral + Spoken 2023)

by Mark Ellery Griffiths

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about

“Malvern Elergy” comes with a long story.
In the early 70s we moved to a village just outside of Worcester, England. I was in my early teens. Our house was less than quarter of a mile from the composer Edward Elgar’s birthplace, I could more or less see it from our living room. At the time I wasn’t interested much in music, much less so the classical kind. My main interest then was in birds and botany, so I joined a local naturalist group. The Malvern hills are very ancient and are more or less plonked in fairly flat arable land and were, and to an extent, still is, a wildlife hot spot. We visited many times but I soon discovered that many of the exciting birds and animals that used to live on the bracken covered hills were already extinct. It felt as if I had just missed the opportunity to experience them. And since the 1970s there have been more species lost from the Malvern hills.
Edward Elgar was fond of walking on the Malverns and composed some of his music while out there. Later Vaughan Williams and his friend Holst also rambled there regularly. As I grew older I fell in love with the English music of the early 20th century, in particular the wistful pastoral works of Vaughan Williams.
“Malvern Elergy” takes these two threads and weaves them together. The music is composed of about five short sketches for orchestral music I wrote but never really finished, with choir and bassoon lines to bridge between them. The music has been treated so that it sounds as if it has been sampled off a record. The only sample from a record is at the start, it’s the sound of a needle going down. All that follows is original. The narrative imagines what those composers would have seen and heard and perhaps taken for granted. It names those species I had just missed and those that have since followed and mourns their passing.
The narrative is:
“Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Holst, they would have all seen or heard on their walks in the Malverns, the Turtle Dove, the Red-backed Shrike and High Brown Fritillary, all gone now. “

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released November 25, 2023

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Mark Ellery Griffiths UK

I'm a UK based synthesist / electronic composer musically active since the late 70s, prior to 2020 I used my original name, Mark Griffiths. Having been interested in nature since I was young, the natural landscapes around me have had a profound influence. Much of my music now fuses acoustic with electronic instruments although I also have purely electronic music too. ... more

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