Each of the composers has written a programme note to accompany their Composeher work. Read about Rebecca’s piece, Within The Living Eye, below.

The poet Kathleen Raine (1908 – 2003) was drawn to the landscape of Northumberland and the Lake District. Her first collection, Stone and Flower (1943), was published with illustrations by her friend, Barbara Hepworth.

Her large collection of poetry spans the decades from the 1940s until shortly before her death in 2000. A lot of Raine’s poetry approaches the ‘sacred’ through art, reflecting on various theologies, Indian spirituality, Buddhist philosophy and that of Jung and Plato.

Kathleen read Psychology and Natural Sciences at Cambridge. She believed God could be revealed in our landscape and in nature, and sought a spiritual, poetic life, rather than the ‘falsehoods’ of materialism and secular frivolities. She saw the imagination, the heart, humanity and the natural world as being the most precious aspects of life.

Raine’s meditative and lyrical poems belong to the tradition of William Blake, on whose work she wrote. Often seen as a prophet and visionary poet herself, her work explored the intersection of science and mysticism and has today even been described as ‘eco-poetry’.

The composer is grateful to Faber Publishing for permission to use these texts, from Kathleen Raine Collected Poems (Faber 2019).

Background to the composition

I have long been fascinated and captivated by Raine’s world-view and poetic craft.

The song-cycle Within The Living Eye is a ‘love-song’ to her remarkable poetry. Sharing her outlook, I strived to reflect Raine’s belief in the power of our landscape and our relationship with it, and with all living things. Her precise observation, evocative language and deftness with vocabulary have a visual immediacy and power that I always found irresistible, and with enormous potential for musical expression.

It is a curious and poignant thing that, between the piece being commissioned and its completion in May 2020, the global coronavirus pandemic took over and changed our world as we knew it.

Raine’s themes of reverence for and communion with our earth, and a fervent desire to protect it seemed to acquire a deeper significance during that first lockdown, when we saw fewer cars and aircraft, heard birdsong more clearly and found a deeper appreciation for our gardens and woodlands. Long may that prevail, for both our mental wellbeing and the survival of our natural world.

The composing of the piece and working with this text at that strange time became even more meaningful, and I thought continually of the wonderful creative community of this special choir, and how the words and music would hopefully resonate with them too.

On the music

Wishing to have the chance to explore these remarkable words and sentiments further, and to share them with the wider audience they deserve, I selected six of Raine’s poems chosen from volumes spanning five decades of her career for the choral song-cycle, Within The Living Eye, commissioned by the GSA Choir in 2019.

The poems were selected, ordered, and movements composed to build a narrative structure which leads the listener through themes of loss, yearning for knowledge, love, the divine presence in nature and the responsibility of humankind towards our world.

The movements are brought together coherently through a shared harmonic soundworld, narrative functions of rhythmic drive, melodic motifs which are present throughout, use of intervallic relationships and pacing, using voices separately and in harmony.

Within The Living Eye

I – The Wilderness (from The Hollow Hill, 1964)

The song-cycle opens with a mysterious, bleak and sombre tone.

There is a distinct desolation and emptiness, a feeling of grief at something lost, yet a determined yearning for those hills. A key theme of Raine’s work and this piece; the hills, the land represent knowledge.

A swaying, uneasy pulse endures. Rising ‘Scotch snap’ figures (short note paired with longer note) emphasise a striving throughout. Brooding harmonies and sweeping lines are shared between the parts (upper voices depicting springs ebbing away through mournful falling lines) but it is the basses who express the most heartfelt line, rising, optimistic.

Bare open fifths portray the majesty of the ancient land with a section of alto plainchant (harking back to the composer’s Agnus Dei, The People’s Mass, 2002).

This opening poem outlines so clearly many of the things treasured by Raine; the power and optimism of nature, urging the reader / listener to notice, understand and want to preserve…

At the close, the voices converge on a rich cluster chord with a striving towards understanding: the ‘inexhaustible hidden fountain.’

II – At The Waterfall (from Stone and Flower, 1943)

Whilst the relentless yearning is not yet resolved, there is a calmer more static feel here. This could be Aira Force, near Place Fell overlooking Patterdale in the corner reaches of Ullswater in the Lake District, close to where Raine lived.

A higher, more translucent texture in sopranos and altos represents the clear water. Pure, open fifths bring a sense of light and stillness. The peace is interrupted by the noise of wind, in onomatopoeic effects and rhythmic trill-like features.

The protagonist longs to hear the wind and water, to feel alive and at one with the landscape and its elemental forces.

III – Strange Evening (from Stone and Flower, 1943)

Warmer colours are introduced, ushering in a loving sentiment. The protagonist revels in the simple beauty of a sunny evening walk through a field of ox-eye daisies. The immediacy of the imagery inspires a pure love-song to the land.

The melody is deliberately lush and passionate with a rhythmic lilting in five beats in a bar. We are now firmly in a major key; added intervals of seconds in the chordal accompaniment bringing a close, rich harmony. All voice parts have a share in the lead melody, which is earnest and passionate. The closing line, ‘the blue unbounded of the living eye’, yielded, in part, the title of this song-cycle.

IV – Childhood Memory (from The Hollow Hill, 1964)

The bright optimism continues in a new texture: two characters in dialogue, with sopranos (occasionally joined by altos) in conversation with the lower voices. A resolute D major melody with strong leaping intervals captures the innocence and open-mindedness of youth. This contrasts with the discordant cynicism of the answering voice in lower voices. A dismissive adult? The child, now grown-up, looking back on that innocence and now bitterly realising the fragility of our ecology? Rich harmonies and an aleatoric passage (notes randomly selected by singers from a given selection) paint a vivid aural image of whirling stars and constellations.

The bitter warning prevails to close the movement in a serious mood: ‘chasms of inhuman darkness veiled.’ What can be done to preserve what is dear to us?

V – Spell Of Creation (from The Year One, 1952)

There is a hushed, whispered urgency, a quietly forceful rhythmic impetus, driving relentlessly onwards as the protagonist is determined to highlight so many precious natural jewels. Here, there is slight deviation from the text, to set up a rhythmic gesture which begins the whirlwind of images.

Raine’s incredible poem, a heady concoction of brilliantly vibrant images, a kaleidoscopic, telescopic journey through our natural surroundings was a thrilling text to set.

Pitch intervals open in and out as the richness of treasures is revealed. The heart of the song-cycle; melody and harmony reach their impassioned climax in the setting of key images: love, grief, the bird of gold, sun, fire, sky before taking off again as it begun, a relentless reminder of our plethora of precious natural lifeforms.

VI – Say All Is Illusion (from The Presence, 1987)

For the final movement, thematic strands are drawn together as unison voices summarise and make their conclusion on what has preceded. Has the living eye, witness to all nature and feeling learned and understood?