Birdsongs
2024 – 2025: Birdsongs is a creative project inspired by the works of Oliver Messiaen. It continues the collaboration between Exeter House School, Salisbury Cathedral School and Salisbury Cathedral, established through three iterations of Evening Songs (2016/2019/2024) and Planets (2023). It sees new groups of young people from both schools learning how to work together and understand each other. A series of workshops culminated in a relaxed public sharing in the cathedral on 2 May 2025.
Pupils have been experiencing Messiaen’s musical language, full of birdsong and colour. He saw colours when he heard certain chords, and mixed these together to create his own original musical palette. The project explores the students’ own chromesthesia, with workshops encouraging them to make their own songs inspired by Messiaen’s harmonic language, themes, modes, and rhythms.
Participants have been encouraged to listen out for birdsong in their daily lives, making recordings that can be used to inspire their own songs. Having started working with Howard as individuals or pairs, the groups are growing and the project is gradually being joined by other musicians: soprano, guitar, saxophone, percussion and virtuoso international recorder player Piers Adams, who will be playing these newly-composed tunes to and with the participants in a way they could never have imagined.
Participants experienced both Messiaen’s music and their own in Salisbury Cathedral, where they performed together with the workshop musicians and experienced the wonders of the cathedral organ.
Alongside and integrated with this work is another project: the Eagle Concerto. La Folia has commissioned Howard to write a concerto for Piers Adams for his modern ‘Eagle’ recorder which has a sound powerful enough to soar above orchestral instruments.
The world premiere of this will be performed alongside a baroque programme at St Thomas’s Church, Salisbury on June 4 2025. This is a La Folia production presented within and supported by Salisbury International Arts Festival. The programme will also include orchestrations of music composed in the Birdsong project, providing an extended audience for the participants’ work.
Tickets can be booked here.
Birdsongs participants will have the opportunity to attend rehearsals where they will be actively welcomed to interact with players, some of whom they will have made music with throughout the project. The concert itself is also open to participants who wish to attend with their families.
Voices in the Landscape
2021 – 2024: a project carried out by La Folia in partnership with Chase & Chalke Landscape Partnership Scheme. The aim was to create and collect songs from the musical memories and imaginations of people who live in or near Cranborne Chase and the Chalke Valley on the Wiltshire/Dorset border.
Sessions were led by La Folia musicians with the artistic direction of Howard Moody. Participants ranged from school groups and young community groups to community choirs and individuals, including new residents from the Ukraine. Through a series of workshops, they made melodies and songs inspired by their experience of the rural landscape, creating a living “folk” culture.
All the song writing and musical recollections were experienced spontaneously, without referring to written books or scores. The idea was to catch a sense of what lurked in the participants’ inner ear or long term memory in order to discover what music is sung in the area today, over a hundred years after Vaughan Williams collected traditional folksongs in the Fox and Goose in Coombe Bissett.
The project culminated in a Voices in the Landscape Song Book. La Folia musicians sought inspiration from the songbook with live performance and improvisation at an event celebrating the Chase & Chalke Landscape Partnership scheme, held at Larmer Tree Gardens in summer 2024.