Histories and Herstories Composers Part 7

Lisa Robertson

Lisa Robertson is a composer from the West Highlands of Scotland. Although her community on the Morvern Peninsula is technically on the mainland, many aspects of life there are similar to life in the Northern Isles. The easiest way to get there is by ferry, (Corran ferry near Fort William or via the Isle of Mull). It is a coastal landscape with a similar ecology. The landscape is frequenty battered by storms and extreme weather, building a resilience into the close-knit communities. The sea is central to life here, providing jobs in fishing, tourism and transport and this fosters a strong sense of the importance of environmental protection for the communities.

The sea features strongly culturally, too, as does traditional music-making. These, along with seabirds, are the elements that figure most prominently in Lisa’s piece “Machair” for string quartet.

Machair is low-lying pastureland in the north-west of Scotland and Ireland. There is a balance between the wildness of nature and the managed traditional grazing that happens on the land. In many ways it is symbolic of mankind working with, rather than against nature. As it is low-lying, it is vulnerable to climate change and rising sea levels

In her piece, Lisa reflects this interaction between mankind and nature by combining human and natural sound. She transcribed the calls of twite, dunlin, lapwing, redshank and sanderling and took material from the Gaelic song, “Oh who will take this yearning from me.” In this song, the female singer tells of how the people who wronged her would like to see her taken “down the Machair”, or to the graveyard. The players are asked to hum, linking human with natural sounds. The final element in the music is a dark and foreboding gesture in the cello that appears periodically in the music. This represents the threat of climate change.

Lisa is currently undertaking a PhD at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland with Emily Doolittle and Bill Sweeney. Her music has been included in the programmes of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra with Thomas Dausgaard and the Slovak Sinfonietta as well as the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, Red Note Ensemble, Hebrides Ensemble. Her music has also been played in festivals including Cheltenham Festival, West Cork Chamber Music Festival, Sound Festival, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and on BBC Radio 3 as well as performing her own solo violin piece at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2019. She is featured in the August 2020 edition of BBC Music Magazine’s ‘Rising Stars’ column. You can learn much more about this exciting young composer and listen to more of her music here: https://www.lisarobertsonmusic.com/

Histories and Herstories Composers Part 6

Jocelyn Hagen

Jocelyn Hagen ©Jenn Cress

I was introduced to “Sofðu Unga Ástin Min” by my friend and pianist Arnhildur Valgarðsdóttir when we played together in Reykjavik last year. In pre-Christian times, before the year 1000, children from large families struggling to feed many mouths would be left outside to die in the cold. This sad yet beautiful melody may have been sung by a mother as she bade farewell to her child. If you want to know more, Arnhildur talks about this song in this radio programme, part of Linda Buckley’s award-winning “Mother’s Blood, Sister Songs” series for Athena Media.

Looking around the internet for a version of “Sofðu Unga Ástin Min” I came across a beautiful version by Jocelyn Hagen, which you can hear here.

This was commissioned by the North Dakota State University Challey School of Music for the NDSU Concert Choir and their conductor, Dr. Jo Ann Miller, who has Icelandic roots. I’m very grateful to Jocelyn for allowing me to arrange this version of “Sofðu Unga” for string quartet.

Jocelyn Hagen composes music that has been described as “simply magical” (Fanfare Magazine) and “dramatic and deeply moving” (Star Tribune, Minneapolis/St. Paul). She is a pioneer in the field of composition, pushing the expectations of musicians and audiences with large-scale multimedia works, electro-acoustic music, dance, opera, and publishing. Her first forays into composition were via songwriting, still very evident in her work. Most of her compositions are for the voice: solo, chamber and choral. Her melodic music is rhythmically driven and texturally complex, rich in colour and deeply heartfelt.

In 2019, choirs and orchestras across the country are premiering her multimedia symphony The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci that includes video projections created by a team of visual artists, highlighting da Vinci’s spectacular drawings, inventions, and texts. Hagen describes her process of composing for choir, orchestra and film simultaneously in a Tedx Talk given at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, now available on YouTube. Her dance opera collaboration with choreographer Penelope Freeh, Test Pilot, received the 2017 American Prize in the musical theatre/opera division as well as a Sage Award for “Outstanding Design.” The panel declared the work “a tour de force of originality.”

 In 2013 Hagen released an EP entitled MASHUP, in which she performs Debussy’s “Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum” while singing Ed Sheeran’s “The A Team.” She is also one half of the band Nation, an a cappella duo with composer/performer Timothy C. Takach, and together they perform and serve as clinicians for choirs from all over the world.

Hagen’s commissions include Conspirare, the Minnesota Opera, the Minnesota Orchestra, the American Choral Directors Associations of Minnesota, Georgia, Connecticut and Texas, the North Dakota Music Teachers Association, Cantus, the Boston Brass, the Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra and the St. Olaf Band, among many others. Her work is independently published through JH Music, as well as through Graphite Publishing, G. Schirmer, Fred Bock Music Publishing, Santa Barbara Music Publishing, and Boosey and Hawkes.

You can find out much more about Jocelyn and her music here. If you would like to buy a copy of her wonderfully haunting choral version of “Sofðu Unga”, you can purchase it from this page. For the string quartet version, contact me directly or get in touch with Jocelyn from her website.