Freya Waley-Cohen announces Autumn 2024 season including three world premieres and debut album release Spell Book

Highlights include:

• The Archipelago Collective celebrates the 10th anniversary of the San Juan Island Chamber Music Festival with the world premiere of Waley-Cohen’s new work on 6 September 2024

• Baritone Roderick Williams and pianist Chris Glynn give the world premiere of Waley-Cohen’s The Moon, The Moss & The Mushrooms at the Two Moors Festival in October 2024

• The London Philharmonic Orchestra and its Principal Conductor Edward Gardner give the world premiere of Mother Tongue on 6 November 2024

• Debut album 'Spell Book’ released on NMC Recordings on 25 October 2024

British-American composer Freya Waley-Cohen, known for her instinctive use of colour in music, invites audiences on a journey into soundscapes inspired by folklore, history, and the natural world with her forthcoming Autumn 2024 season. Waley-Cohen embraces her unique sound-world, collaborating with some of the most innovative artists of this generation, exploring the rich tapestry of folklore and history, and weaving them into her highly anticipated work, 'Spell Book.'

Waley-Cohen reunites with Tanglewood alumni Sophie Baird-Daniel and the Archipelago Collective for the world premiere of a new work celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Annual Chamber Music Festival on San Juan Island (6 September). This 10-minute septet is about her anticipation of the San Juan archipelago, and the freshness of imagining its rhythms, sounds, tides and moons.

Baritone Roderick Williams and pianist Chris Glynn will give the world premiere of Waley-Cohen’s The Moon, The Moss & The Mushrooms at the Two Moors Festival (3 October). Co-commissioned by the Two Moors Festival, Shipston Song, and Music in the Round, this 20-minute song cycle is set amidst the mystical landscapes of Waley-Cohen’s family home of Exmoor. It intricately weaves together poetry and writings by Coleridge and William Wordsworth, written during their time on Exmoor, with local fairy folklore rewritten by Waley-Cohen to form the song cycle, using fragments of stories surrounding the Exmoor pixies, earth ogres and well dwellers.

Waley-Cohen’s debut album Spell Book is set for release on NMC Recordings on 25 October. The album is centred around the complete ‘Spell Book’ and includes several of her occult inspired chamber works. Recorded with Manchester Collective, the dramatic song cycle sets feminist spell-poems from Rebecca Tamás to music and is performed by an all-female ensemble and includes mezzo-sopranos Katie Bray and Fleur Barron, soprano Héloïse Werner, and harpist Céline Saout. Also on the album is the string trio Conjure, performed by Tamsin Waley-Cohen, Ann Beilby and Nathaniel Boyd as well as larger chamber works Talisman and Naiad, performed by the Manchester Collective.

The London Philharmonic Orchestra and its Principal Conductor Edward Gardner will give the world premiere of Waley-Cohen’s Mother Tongue at the Royal Festival Hall (6 November). This will be her most significant orchestral work yet and is inspired by the idea that language holds all of the history and culture of its people and can be seen as an ancestral or even parental figure. It explores how a nation’s political and cultural history becomes interwoven with its everyday speech, and yet language is the mediator between our own internal world and the outside we call reality.

Freya Waley-Cohen says: "My debut album with NMC is the culmination of a project instigated by Rebecca Tamás’ poetry and the strange dreams I had after reading it. Out of these dreams were born not only the song cycle Spell Book but also several pieces engaging with ideas around ritual, myth and magic. I’m very excited to invite listeners into this world which I have found so inspiring and intoxicating.

In trying to write about this season as a whole, I returned to a passage of writing by Rebecca Tamás. The three new works that have their premieres coming up this autumn take no conscious inspiration from her poetry, but I was amazed to find how much this passage in her White Review Essay seemed to touch on a lot of what I had been meditating on while writing them, so I’m going to share a quote here: ‘I don’t know what happens in, between and around the glinting membrane of the world, the spaces of snow, of glass, of roses, but my body and mind tell me that there are inhuman voices, light leaking through in shards, the smell of sun and plant matter…. I know it’s possible for me to know what’s there, without ever being able to express it, in language, or even to myself’. That glinting membrane, those shards of light - that’s what I hope to conjure in my music. In Mother Tongue, my most significant orchestral work to date, I tried to look directly at the unexpressible, the idea of language as a mediator between self and other, and the way it passes down identity and heritage like a secret ancestor. As one of my other favourite poets, Jack Underwood, writes ‘‘the outside world, various and ready, runs parallel to the creativity of our inner lives, each tramline steering the other. And somehow, language mediates."