Song cycle for Soprano, Violin and Piano by Gavin Higgins.
Speak of the North is as vast a song-cycle as the skies beneath which it strides. In it, Gavin Higgins asks how we relate not just to northern landscape, but to the feeling of being at the border, near the limits of human community. At first, the land sweeps us off our feet. The whole range of the piano and the violin’s virtuosity drives the singer on into the wind. But the cycle is not just about gulping great breaths of weather like the exhilarated romantic poets. Folk in the North work in industry; they go for a night out in Manchester; they grow old; they wonder who they really are. Higgins leads us to a border between organic growth and cold, fixed reality. He shows us how the heart of the North lies beyond the border, beyond prosperity, where people live precariously, on the edge of exploitation.
In Higgins’ music, the ‘folk’ is instantly alive in leaping fifths and sevenths. These musical gestures, like the open strings of the violin, frame the narrative, and set up harmonic resonances that build to soundscapes of Pennine-like breadth and airiness. Higgins requires the violin to play with extensive use of overtones, and arpeggios that drive a melody and echo its harmony; in his two arresting arrangements of Northumbrian folksongs, the violin takes on folk techniques explicitly. The violin in Speak of the North is wild and haunted like Emily Brontë rushing into the hills, or Katie Hale, whose heart, if we listen to it, is full of ‘water, the raucous gathering of clouds’.
The first three songs establish a central musical idea: spacious rising vocal lines that leap down through a fifth then up on a seventh, later extended to a ninth, with widely spaced chords in the piano. In another characteristic feature, the piano’s sustain pedal draws out acoustic shadows from the voice, haunting us with it as the music unfolds. The sustain pedal sets up whispered reminders of the emotional journey that lies behind and ahead of us.
In the second song, we hear the wind ‘speaking’ to the singer, in overlapping arabesques between piano and violin. Then, as Emily Brontë channels the delighted singing of moorland birds, the third song expands into a huge chord sequence in piano and violin, a massive statement of these romantic, rushing explorations of the Pennines, before her melancholic introspection takes over. Already, we are not simply triumphing in the landscape; like Emily, the spirit of the North foresees its own sorrow.
There is an interlude in ‘Mancunia’. Setting the urban pastoral of Michael Symmons Roberts, Higgins makes us hear distant techno beats, as the singer views the city’s vibrant life from above. Then the vision comes to earth, because ‘what keeps this city alive is you’.
Now we are in the North Pennines. The piano gives to Katrina Porteous’ ‘Sedimentary’ a lurching, deep-toned voice, ‘like a brass band’. The violin enters late in the song, to draw our ears to the trembling fragments of ancient life in this geology. This music is punctuated with a wistful three-chord phrase which comes back, in a gentler mode, in the next song, when Zoe Mitchell imagines a conversation between Hadrian’s Wall and the famous sycamore tree. Mitchell, writing before the tree was tragically felled in 2023, imagines it invading the earth with its roots and personality; the wall answers coldly, challenged by the tree’s assertion of liberty and life. To our ears, hearing the words after 2023, the dialogue is something like the conversation in Housman’s ‘Is my team ploughing’, where an icy message comes to us from beyond death, because it is the wall that has the last word: ‘ “I endure… You cannot know” replied the wall.’
In a second setting of Katrina Porteous, ‘Two countries’, we are at a border. Rhythms in violin and piano echo Scottish folk music. Where are we now, what side of the line? Are we looking North and longing for it? Or are we oblivious to the border, a hiker walking along the wall? Accompanied only by the violin, the meaning of the oak tree in Porteous’ poem, and the sycamore in Mitchell’s, is deepened: ‘Sair Fyel’d Hinny’ is a Northumbrian song about a man talking to an oak tree as he reflects on his old age. The violin follows the simple folk melody, emphasizing his growing frailty, drawing the bow high over the finger board, ‘like a distant folk fiddle’.
In the expansive setting of Katie Hale’s ‘Offcomer’, a host of northern visions and landscapes are hurled together, in fast-moving dramatic recitativo. As Hale’s poem turns once more to the distinctive hues of the moor, the grand chord sequence which announced the triumphant landscape of the Brontës’ Pennines returns. The singer considers her uncertain roots, her confused heritage. When we listen to her heart, the clouds come to life, thundering with sound.
Finally, we are taught, in a beautiful setting of Tony Williams’ ‘How good it sounded’, that this is all a dream. The piano gently remembers the arresting chords of the opening of the cycle. This is the limit of the romantic North: the dream melts, though it sounded so good.
Or, perhaps, more real and more difficult, the journey ends with social exploitation. Far from those impassioned Brontë sisters, we meet a different female figure, and with her the real-life anxiety of the North. In ‘Here’s the tender coming’, a Northumbrian woman worries about the press-gang that will snatch her husband away to war. The song foreshadows later fears: the miner’s wife waiting for news after a pit disaster; the mother in a post-industrial town waiting for a son who’s not come home from the pub. All this exploited, precarious North is suggested in this song, set with violin music which is at once gentle, angular and introspective. This is the North, after all: human hardship; fear for the future. The lingering melody leaves us beyond the border, in this fragile northern home, clinging on.
Julian Wright, 2025 ©
