Wiltshire musicians to perform alongside top folk group
2:00pm Monday 20th February 2012 in News By Nigel Kerton
Folk supergroup Bellowhead is creating a brand new piece for the music club for Wiltshire string players aged four to 18, which will be premiered at Swindon’s Steam Museum on Sunday March 4.
The award winning, 11 piece folk band that has won the BBC Radio 2 folk awards Best Live Act five times will perform live with 120 young Wiltshire musicians, and the concert be the culmination of six months of intensive folk workshops for the young string players.
The steam museum concert will be the start of a co-ordinated weekend of live music events nationwide, from Lands End to the Shetland Isles and Belfast to Birmingham, across the UK, called Music Nation.
Music Nation is devised and led by the BBC to celebrate the richness, diversity and excellence of Britain's musical life and this weekend of music on March 3 and 4 will be the first countdown event to the London 2012 Festival.
Percussionist Peter Flood from Bellowhead has composed a piece of music called 'Vici' specially for Superstrings inspired by the work of Alfred Williams, the folk song collector and author known as the Hammer Man who worked at Swindon Railway works of which part is the steam museum.
Flood said: “Alfred Williams was completely self educated and his life was essentially one long struggle. His is an inspirational story.”
The organisers of Superstrings,Tanya Cochrane and Iona Hassan, have collaborated with BBC Radio 3 presenter Verity Sharp, who lives at Woodborough. Verity, who will present the show at the steam museum, said: “Unlike Scotland and Ireland where indigenous music continues to flourish, the English tradition was broken, and nowhere is this more apparent than in Wiltshire.
“This is another aim of our project to raise the profile of the tunes that belong to our county by using the work of the collector, Alfred Williams and by also asking composers to write new music for songs that have lost their melodies along the way.
“Young musicians all over the county will be involved in learning this new music and the piece will then exist for the benefit of future generations.”
The workshops have been held in Marlborough, Woodborough, Salisbury and Market Lavington.
Tickets for the concert at the steam museum are £20 and can be obtained from: www.steam-museum.org.uk
