‘an amazing musical spark’ – Stevens and Pound
This autumn, BBC Radio 3’s award-winning Delia Stevens and three-time BBC Radio 2 Folk Musician of the Year nominee Will Pound will be collaborating on a concert that fuses folk and classical ideas.
Ahead of their performance here at the Carole Nash Hall on Saturday 21 September, we caught up with percussionist Delia Stevens to learn a bit more about the project, and about the music they’ll be playing.
Can you tell us a bit more about yourself and your career as a musician?
Will and I come from very different worlds, each steeped in centuries of tradition. I grew up as a classically trained percussionist studying scores passed down generations of musicians. Will on the other hand, is a self-taught folk harmonica and melodeon (a type of accordion) player who learns orally but does not read sheet music.
Both of us have used these starting points as a springboard to take our respective genres forward, often creating politically informed works. For example, I made a project called AlgoRhythms, inspired by the proliferation of technology into our privacy and its emotional fallout, and Will created a project where he learnt a folk song from each of the 27 states of the European Union in reaction to the cultural vandalism of Brexit.
How did your collaboration as Stevens & Pound first get started?
Given that we had both already been designing these projects in reaction to the world around us, I think we met each other at a really good time of our respective trajectories in our careers, but most importantly, within 30 seconds of jamming together there was an amazing musical spark.
We had already seen each other perform at Shrewsbury Folk Festival and Will had worked with the globally-renowned percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie before and knew he wanted to work with a percussionist again. He dropped me a message on Instagram (very modern) saying he would love to work together one day. I had a residency as Artistic Director of a concert series at Leeds University exploring their science research and marrying it to music, so I invited Will to be a part of a concert exploring “Multiscale Modelling” where you throw lots of different science at one problem to try and find a deeper truth.
After the concert we had a chat on the way home and decided that we really have to keep this collaboration going as it isn’t everyday you find such a strong musical chemistry. Not wanting to recreate a project too close to our existing outfits, we decided to create a duo where we take the folk music which inspired classical composers (such as Vaughan Williams or Gustav Holst) and reimagine them for the 21st century, taking the music of the past into the future.
How do you go about choosing the music for a concert like this?
2024 is the 150th anniversary of Holst’s birth and his musical soulmate was Vaughan Williams. This programme is inspired by both composers, firstly featuring Vaughan Williams’ iconic The Lark Ascending (originally written for the violin) and Holst’s St. Paul’s Suite (originally written for string orchestra).
As a percussionist, I never really got to play this music, but have been listening to this music since I was a teenager, geeking out on the compositional brilliance of these works. The way we learn the scores (as Will doesn’t read) is that I analyse the music and identify the parts that really form the core identity of the piece, record these on the vibraphone and send them to Will who then memorises them by ear. We then get in the studio and spend days reworking, jamming and improvising around the original composer’s ideas – often focusing on the real folk feel that can get lost in the limitations of a written score back – and see what we come up with. Anything goes and we give ourselves a real creative free rein. The results can be wild.
Our most ambitious reimagination yet is Holst’s Planets Suite – originally for a huge symphony orchestra. We feel very strongly about the power of music to alter the conversation around the climate and so when we performed the piece with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and the Royal Northern College of Music this Summer we invited a climate activist to help us write a new movement – Earth: The Silent Planet (as Holst omitted the movement from his original suite). We are Earth Percent Artists. meaning we include the planet as a writer on all of our royalties, splitting a percentage of every piece we write with charities protecting the planet.
We’ve also written some originals of our own in response to these works – namely “Larking” and “Ascending” and also throw in some fun tunes like The Sailor’s Hornpipe (which we’ve transformed into a rave) and Norwegian Wood.
What do you hope audiences will take away from the show?
I hope they will realise that classical and folk music are not static traditions. Holst and Vaughan Williams were part of a movement to write down folk music, but it is always a medium that will alter from town to town, depending on who is interpreting it. I feel like classical music can often suffer in spontaneity from being immortalised in the score (which seems to keep the score), but that really the spark that the composers were experiencing when they were creating was a true moment of creative ingenuity. These genres don’t always need to be presented as a museum, but can be brought into the 21st century. We are trying to cultivate a sense of total joy and freedom whilst paying homage to these incredible pieces of music.
“Every man who counts is the child of tradition and a rebel from it” – Holst
Catch Stevens & Pound: Ascending Tour on Saturday 21 September, 8pm.
