Ear to ground eye to sky
A music and video project about the North Pennines.
Composer Andy Jackson worked with the local community to write a new composition for Stanhope Silver Band and early brass ensemble His Majesty's Sagbutts and Cornetts. Digital artist Rachel Clarke from Twisted Digits UK worked with young people to make an animation about the North Pennines landscape and its people.
These new works were premiered at Wolsingham Church as part of Stanhope Silver Band's Festival of Brass. You can hear the music and watch the animation by clicking here. The pieces were commissioned by the North Pennines AONB Partnership's Living North Pennines Project and funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and One North East through Museums Live.
To provide inspiration for the new compositions in music and film, we collected colours, shapes, sounds, anecdotes, ideas and responses about the North Pennines landscape and its people. Several events helped us to do this, including three concerts with We're Brass, a brass quintet from Weardale. These concerts were in novel places designed to fire people's imaginations, and included playing on the steam train at the South Tynedale Railway in Alston and concerts in Blanchland Abbey and St Romald's church in Romaldkirk.