Birmingham Contemporary Music Group: The Open Fund for Organisations
BCMG is one of the world’s foremost new music ensembles, with a global reputation for shining a light on both undiscovered and emerging contemporary musicians and composers. For its 2020-21 Season, BCMG has commissioned Christian Mason, an emerging British composer, to set a specially written, many-layered text by renowned librettist Paul Griffiths. The new piece, The Singing Tree, will explore musical metaphors for arborescence, organic growth, transformation, and reaching for light as a way of contemplating both the relation between humans and nature, and nature and the divine. Comprised of 3 movements with a total duration of approximately 30 minutes, the piece will include up to 30 instrumentalists, choir, and 5 vocal soloists.
The world premiere is currently planned for January 2021 in Birmingham. In addition to the premiere, the project will include a digital engagement campaign to bring audiences closer to the music, and special masterclasses as part of NEXT, BCMG’s innovative new programme to train the next generation of contemporary classical musicians.
In the words of Christian Mason ‘The concept for this piece is very close to my heart… The beautiful imagery and structural variety of the text (based on the form of a tree: root, trunk, branch and leaf) is a direct inspiration which opens my music up to fresh expressive possibilities and situations with which I haven’t previously engaged.’