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.