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 ©

Speak of the North is a song cycle about place, landscape, borderlands, and belonging. Set to poems by a range of Northern poets such as the Brontë sisters, Michael Symmons Roberts, Zoe Mitchell, Tony Williams, Katrina Porteous, and Katie Hale, the cycle looks at what it means to be Northern. With songs about the Peak District, Manchester as seen from above, coal mining landscapes, an argument between Hadrian’s wall and the sycamore gap tree, and some Northumbrian folk songs, Speak of the North is a sprawling journey through both the physical and imagined landscape of Northern England.

Gavin Higgins, 2025 ©

Speak of the North! A lonely moor
Silent and dark and tractless swells,
The waves of some wild streamlet pour
Hurriedly through its ferny dells.

Profoundly still the twilight air,
Lifeless the landscape; so we deem
Till like a phantom gliding near
A stag bends down to drink the stream.

And far away a mountain zone,
A cold, white waste of snow-drifts lies,
And one star, large and soft and lone,
Silently lights the unclouded skies.

That wind is from the North, I know it well;
No other breeze could have so wild a swell.
Now deep and loud it thunders round my cell,
Then faintly dies,
And softly sighs,
And moans and murmurs mournfully.
I know its language; thus it speaks to me –

– – –
Awaken on all my dear moorlands
The wind in its glory and pride!
O call me from valleys and highlands
To walk by the hill-river’s side!
– – –
For the moors, for the moors, where the short grass
Like velvet beneath us should lie!
For the moors, for the moors where each high pass
Rose sunny against the clear sky!

For the moors, where the linnet was trilling
Its song on the old granite stone –
Where the lark – the wild skylark was filling
Every breast with delight like its own.

What language can utter the feeling
That rose when, in exile afar,
On the brow of a lonely hill kneeling
I saw the brown heath growing there.

It was scattered and stunted, and told me
That soon even that would be gone
It whispered, ‘The cold walls enfold me
I have bloomed in my last summer’s sun’.

Mancunia at night looks like embers from above,
but hold the dive and it reassembles, cools,
coalesces into districts, flyovers, a motherboard,

now stadiums like unblinking eyes,
car lots set out as piano keys, parks with lake wounds,
counter-flow of arteries in red and white,

the bass clef curves of cul de sacs
in outlying estates, then factories with starting guns
of smoke that sting and make you squint,

now you can pick out individual cars, nags’ heads
down in dark fields, glow of dressed shop windows,
drunks on their tightrope walk home,

black poplars’ ragged tops, roof tiles, kerbstones,
air that drops from ice to cloud to everything a city
cooks at once until the road meets you

face‑to‑face, down and under, slower, denser
and the clay arrests you, holds you as a pulse for good,
so what keeps this city alive is you.

This is a layered landscape,
Scarred
And heaved wide open to reveal
Its inmost part,
The cumulative quick of its
Recording heart.

Tumultuous and barren,
It lies hacked
Or hollowed; age on age,
Its history stacked
In horizontal bands of grey and ochre,
Cracked

By deep descending fissures
Reaching down
Into the lightless crunch of dense
Compacted stone,
The graveyard of lost continents
Remade as one.

Here, ferns and forests, and inhabitants of oceans,
Dumb and blind,
Have found themselves unstrung, and slowly
Redefined
As grit beneath the fingertips.
Through time,

the dust of distant planets
Knits in scars
With all the creeping, quivering things
That seed and spark
And tremble on the edge of life like the
Remotest stars.

You’re history, said the tree to the wall;
the last crumbling remains of empire.

You are the invader, replied the wall.

I am the conqueror, said the tree to the wall;
sending platoons of seeds across my territory.

I stand alone, replied the wall.

I chose this valley, said the tree to the wall;
stretching my roots under your scored foundations.

I belong here, replied the wall.

I am growing taller, said the tree to the wall;
you’re a lonely stone sentry outstripped by a sapling.

I remain, replied the wall.

I am a survivor, said the tree to the wall;
I host the resurrection of each turning season.

I endure, replied the wall.

You’re the one they blame, said the tree to the wall;
insensate barrier, stone-deaf to the rough bark of liberty.

You cannot know, replied the wall.

This is the oak tree that should not be here.
It stretched its blind shoot from the ungrazed fell last year.
In the spring of no lambs, it fixed its grip on Bradley’s,

Snaking pale roots through the soil, a volunteer
To fortune on the bare hill. When it grows tall
And crazed with age, the hiker on the Wall

Above the farm will pass, oblivious
As now to what it means – this doubtful peace,
This border drawn between two warring countries.

Sair fyel’d, hinny, Sair fyel’d now;
Sair fyel’d, hinny, Sin’ I ken’d thou.

Aw was young and lusty,
Aw was fair and clear;
Aw was young and lusty,
Mony a lang year.

Sair fyel’d, hinny, Sair fyel’d now;
Sair fyel’d, hinny, Sin’ I ken’d thou.

When aw was five and twenty,
aw was brave and bold;
But noo aw’m five and sixty, a
w’m byeth stiff and cuald.

Sair fyel’d, hinny, Sair fyel’d now;
Sair fyel’d, hinny, Sin’ I ken’d thou.

Thus spoke the awd man
to the oak tree:
Sair fyel’d is aw
sin’ aw kenned thee.

I come from a land that was nobody’s land
and anybody’s. I come from a war
of accents and blood, from heather
taking root in the bones of clans,
while the wind whispers
the old names. I come from a land
where villages are crumbled and sunk, where stories
disturb the bottoms of lakes.
I come from a land of drownings.
I come from a land where water
is ammunition hurled from the sky. My childhood
was a scrap yard of animals,
of death and disinfectant, of 4x4s and smoke.
I come from a land where rivers
unburden themselves
into farms and villages, where they carpet the city
in a rainbow of diesel and mud.
I come from the fire and the flood.
I come from a land of scythed vowels, of consonants
let tumble like ghylls down the backs of throats. I come
from a land of poems trudged across the fells
like coffins. I come from a naked land, a land
veined in stone, baring itself to the wind. My land
is bracken and gorse and the slow
gorging of ticks. My land
is height and electric skies, is water
locked behind dams.
I cannot hold my land; it is a voice thrown
back across the valley. It speaks
with the deep-throated roar of fighter planes.

No, I am not of this land. My skin is a prairie,
my hair and eyes an Irish peat and sky,
my bones a midlands town.

But put your ear to my chest.
Between my stereo heartbeats, you will hear
water, the raucous gathering of clouds.

Once I had a country of my own.
The trees there grew to a huge size.
The smell of the woods sounded like laughter.
The air tasted of the earth.

It was a dream, a long and wonderful dream.
For years it kissed me in English and sang
‘I love you’, and stroked my head,
And though I know it wasn’t true,
How good it sounded.

Here’s the tender coming, pressing all the men;
Oh dear hinny, what shall we do then?
Here’s the tender coming, off at Shields Bar,
Here’s the tender coming, full of men-o’-war.

Hide thee, canny Geordie, hide thyself away;
Hide thee till the tender makes for Druridge Bay.
If they take thee, Geordie, who’s to win our bread?
Me and little Jackie better off be dead.

Here’s the tender coming, stealing off my dear;
Oh dear hinny, they’ll ship you out of here.
They will ship you foreign, that is what it means;
Here’s the tender coming, full of red marines.