David Lumsdaine: Big Meeting
David Lumsdaine
the present work is intrinsically of, while transcending, its time, as vividly as that of its subject. Thus 'a day in the life' is compacted into 60 minutes - the eight tracks taking the listener...
David Lumsdaine: Big Meeting
David Lumsdaine
Purchase product
the present work is intrinsically of, while transcending, its time, as vividly as that of its subject. Thus 'a day in the life' is compacted into 60 minutes - the eight tracks taking the listener...
About
It is David Lumsdaine’s 80th birthday this year. Lumsdaine was born in Australia and moved to the UK in 1952. The Durham Miners’ Gala is a large annual gathering associated with the coal mining
heritage/miners’ trade unionism. It is locally known as "The Big Meeting".
Big Meeting is an extraordinary collage of voices, speeches, songs, brass bands and their electronic transformations, which David Lumsdaine constructed from location recordings of the 1971 Durham Miners’ Gala – a record of one of the last of the annual meetings before the county’s pits were closed. Over the last forty years David Lumsdaine has composed a body of strikingly original music, including Aria for Edward John Eyre (recorded on NMCD007), Hagoromo, Mandala 3, Bagatelles, Mandala 5, Garden of Earthly Delights and Kali Dances. His work is influenced not only by the music of other traditions and cultures, but also the music of the natural world. At its heart, his music embodies his experience of the Australian landscape - the variety of its shapes, rhythms, colours and textures: the vitality of its creatures; its sudden violence; its sense of unlimited space and time.
His passion for the natural world and its conservation expresses itself more literally in his archive of birdsong and recorded soundscapes, many of which have been released on CD.
Contents and tracklist
- David Lumsdaine
Awards and reviews
May 2011
the present work is intrinsically of, while transcending, its time, as vividly as that of its subject. Thus 'a day in the life' is compacted into 60 minutes - the eight tracks taking the listener from arrival in the city to the racecourse for political speeches, then on to a vivid evocation of the fairground...Replete with Lumsdaine's electronic additions and built-in silent spaces, it leaves an impression way beyond the merely documentary.
6th August 2011
This montage of sounds and brass bands from a Durham Miners’ Gala 40 years ago gives insight into a world that’s gone...It has the lively slice-of-life atmosphere of Charles Ives, but the intervening decades have given it something more. Now it seems like a time capsule of a vanished world.
