As part of Women of the World Festival we present Life Cycle a set of songs about the traumatic, funny and surreal process of becoming a mother. In this song cycle Toby Litt’s spare, unflinching words combine with Emily Hall’s beautiful, emotionally charged music across 20 songs, that act as chapters in the story of new motherhood.
Emily Hall, composer of Life Cycle, and Olly Coates, one of the performers, talk about how they worked together.
What drew you to each other as collaborators?
OC: Emily has been writing cello parts with me in mind for many years now. It feels special for an amazing composer to be writing not just for an instrument but for a player too; the messages between composer and performer are much deeper than the simple notation on the page, because she knows how I’m likely to react.
John Reid is the pianist for this project because he is the most sensitive and probing pianist around. The way he works with a singer such as Mara Carlyle works on many levels – his playing is beautiful both in its own right and in the subtle patterns of tension and release over long lyrical lines.
Mara Carlyle, without wishing to be banal or to use a cliché, has the voice of an angel. It led Jon Snow to make one of her records a Desert Island Disc. Toby’s words and Emily’s music together constitute a role which they have conceived for Mara to interpret. Her introspective musicality and soft tone has a devastating impact on audiences, in all contexts, muddy festivals or concert halls or clubs- I personally think her voice is at one with Emily Hall’s music, which is folky, childlike, profound, disarming, witty, tragic and also none of these things.
What was the process of making the work?
EH: I have been collaborating with Toby Litt on songs since about 2006 and having both experienced parenthood fairly recently we decided we wanted to write a song cycle about that incredibly changing and emotional transition into motherhood. When Opera North commissioned me and Toby to write some songs for their ‘Words and Music’ series in June 2010, we saw this as our chance to make this project happen. The songs turned out well, so Opera North commissioned us further to extend the song cycle to a 45 minute piece, which is what we’d always intended, and this is the full cycle that is being premiered at the Women of the World festival.
Mara Carlyle, Oliver Coates and John Reid have become an integral part of our song writing and these songs are very much written specifically for Mara Carlyle’s voice and Oliver and John. It is always more than giving these musicians the music and asking them to interpret them, we workshop them together and the songs are shaped to them and by them. We are so fortunate to have Netia Jones on board who is brilliant and completely specialises in staging song cycles.
What do you hope the audience will take from the performance?
OC: I just want people to hear this. I wish it had been one of the events in my Harmonic Series, but it needed the support of Opera North and Southbank Centre to bring it to life. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever done. If anyone wants to know what it’ll be like I guess I can only try and communicate that it is the most brave and simple music which sets heartbreakingly clear and truthful lyrics by Toby. Netia Jones is the only director / film-maker sensitive and musical enough to turn this from a song cycle into a continuous and immersive total experience. It doesn’t last long. The themes to me are loss, hope, love, ambivalence, focused on a woman’s life, but they are also universal and transferable to all our lives: it has the potential to mean a lot to anybody who can come. I know this because of people close to me who have heard it and begged to have recordings to listen to over and over again.
Soundclip: ‘I am alone’, written by Emily Hall and Toby Litt. Commissioned by Opera North. Performed by Mara Carlyle, Oliver Coates and John Reid.
Find out more & book tickets for ‘Life Cycle’ at:
http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/find/music/gigs-contemporary/tickets/life-cycle-57102
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