Woodlands Farm

About Cecilia McDowall

Educated at Edinburgh and London universities and a prize winning student at Trinity College of Music, Cecilia McDowall has a distinctive style which speaks directly to listeners, instrumentalists and singers alike. With music commissioned and performed by leading choirs including the BBC Singers, the City of Canterbury Chamber Choir and the Joyful Company of Singers, Cecilia has been short-listed for the British Composer Awards in two categories, the Liturgical section and the Making Music Award. In 2005 her cantata Christus natus est was performed at the Gewandhaus, Leipzig on Christmas Day and broadcast live on Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk. Recordings of her music may be found on the Dutton Epoch label.

Cecilia and Christie Dickason have had a happy collaboration. Their work together has ranged from children's opera to a piece involving seven narrators, a counter-tenor and a rap artist. Five Seasons, a cantata with music by Cecilia and words by Christie Dickason was first performed by the Bournemouth Sinfonietta Choir in Sherborne Abbey on 18th November 2006. Inspiration for the work arose from visits made to five organic farms in the spring of 2006, Woodlands being one.

Visit Cecilia’s website www.ceciliamcdowall.co.uk

Five Seasons

A cantata to celebrate the organic landscape

Music by Cecilia McDowall
Words by Christie Dickason

Chamber Choir
Oboe/Cor Anglais
String Quartet
Harp

i The Shimmer
ii Grading Eggs
iii Grace Before Meat · Introit
    The Darkening · Dies Irae
iv Sheep in the Mist
v Dance for the Feast of Everything That Grows

Our brief was simply a 'Celebration of the Organic Landscape'. But how do you go about writing a piece about 'organic landscape'? There were no prescriptions or rules, for either us or the farmers we visited on five residencies in May and June 2006. 'Is this what you want?' they asked. 'Is this it?' All we could say was 'YES! Everything is still possible. Everything is vital.' Our five, very different, research visits became a long, slow unfolding of generously given riches. We filled notebooks and cameras, and kept a journal. Our challenge: how to boil it all down into twenty minutes.

So much is now involved in managing the land organically - simple joy, philosophical principles, politics and funding, financial struggle, agricultural practice, education, conservation and preservation. The power of natural beauty - tempting though it is - avoids urgent issues facing the organic movement. After visiting the five farms and hearing what the farmers had to say about the many issues, we finally settled, with great difficulty, on just a few themes which we nested within the framework of the dominating seasonal arc of the organic year.

Our 'five seasons' correspond roughly to spring, summer, autumn and winter, but with a centrally placed fifth season of the heart. The cantata was first performed in Sherborne Abbey on 18th November 2006.