Two tracks UNSUNG: UNSUNG & UNSUNG: BLUE LIAS
Music by Sun Keiting. Libretto by Teresa Howard
Strange and haunting music and sung beautifully,
from the album called VIOLA DIALOGUES: STORIES.
Performers Erin Hodgson and Conrad Sclar
Science and art are woven together in a woman’s desire for recognition. The inspiration for this song comes from extensive research by Teresa Howard and Sun Keiting on Mary Anning, the nineteenth century Paleontologist. Mary spent her short and productive life extricating the fossils of prehistoric creatures from the Blue Lias limestone cliffs of Lyme Regis. Her ground-breaking discoveries became the focus of early scientific papers and discussions on pre-historic life and evolution and her fossil finds adorn many museums today, including the London Natural History Museum, but it is not until recently that she has been credited for her work – she was unsung.
There are two movements in this piece, Blue Lias and Unsung. In Blue Lias, three subsections build a scene: Blue Lias, Folk, and Climb. By reimagining an English Folk tune, the music pictures the geological formation of the same name and tells the story that once happened on the Jurassic Coast. The movement Unsung is an experiment with ideas around the nature of a name being “unsung”, physicalizing the silenced mouth and the frozen motion in order to invoke Anning’s emotional journey.
The links on Bandcamp are here: