For the first time, the UK’s world-leading classical music festival, the BBC Proms, is coming to Nottingham, and it will feature an original piece of orchestral music written by a University of Nottingham academic.
Dr Elizabeth Kelly, Head of the Department of Music, was commissioned to write a new orchestral composition for BBC Proms Nottingham: Music of Sherwood Forest, which will become part of musical history on Sunday 8 September, when Nottingham Royal Concert Hall hosts its inaugural BBC Prom with the BBC Concert Orchestra.
Dr Kelly’s nine-minute-long original score entitled Lace Machine Music takes inspiration from Nottingham’s industrial past and the city’s lacemaking industry, which she researched with support from local collections, curators and lace industry professionals.
Nottingham and lace making are intrinsically connected. It was during the 19th century that innovators in the city refined more advanced machines which twisted threads together to create lace in the same way that it is woven by hand. These ‘Leavers’ lace machines – which require up to 32 processes of design and production – are still considered some of the most sophisticated textile machines ever produced. Complex lace patterns are encoded in a series of punch cards, and Dr Kelly met with Ian Emm, the UK’s last Card Puncher who took her to Cluny Lace in Ilkeston – the last Leavers lace factory in the UK. It was there she got to hear and see the very loud machines running and speak with the workers.
She explains: “I was intrigued by the idea that there is a connection between a lace factory, where a range of skilled workers come together to produce intricate lace, and the orchestra, which brings together a diverse array of highly-trained instrumentalists to produce intricate music. Both the lace trade and orchestra were booming at the same historical moment. I decided to translate aspects of machine lacemaking into my composition.”
Alongside the first-ever performance of Dr Kelly’s Lace Machine Music, the orchestral scores chosen for the concert have a strong local feel to them. This thrilling first visit by the Proms to one of the country’s finest acoustic venues, the Nottingham Royal Concert Hall, offers a varied and vibrant programme inspired by local history, legends and local artists.
Conductor Anna-Maria Helsing will lead the BBC Concert Orchestra in a celebration of local Nottingham legendary hero Robin Hood, which provides the concert’s opener, with the overture to Doreen Carwithen’s colourful score to the 1954 film The Men of Sherwood Forest and Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Oscar-winning music to The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Errol Flynn.
The programme will also feature Nottingham pianist, Clare Hammond, who provides the virtuoso thrills in Sergey Rachmaninov’s perennially popular Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, while Jean Sibelius’s atmospheric and purposeful Symphony No 3 in C Major will complete the line-up.
Proms Nottingham: Music of Sherwood Forest, starting at 4pm, builds on the BBC Concert Orchestra’s partnership with the University of Nottingham and Nottingham Trent University, which began in the Autumn of 2023 and supports a range of activity, including regular orchestral residencies in the city in association with the Nottingham Theatre Royal & Royal Concert Hall.
Tickets for the event range from £12 – £41 and can be purchased here. The concert will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and forms part of the Proms 2024, Proms Around the UK.
More information is available from Dr Elizabeth Kelly, Associate Professor in Music Composition and Head of the Department of Music, via elizabeth.kelly@nottingham.ac.uk
Notes to editors:
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World-premiere of music composed by Nottingham academic for BBC Proms celebrates city’s lace heritage – University of Nottingham
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