Collaborative Compositions

In the last few years Julie has worked closely in collaboration with a range of musicians here at Symphony Hall and the Town Hall and at a number of venues at home and abroad. At the beginning of her residency she worked with the composer Andrew Downes and with children from local primary schools to create the libretto for Songs of the Skies. Her first commission at Symphony Hall was to create the Amorous Organ sequence which she performed at Symphony Hall with the Organist, Gordon Stewart.

Julie has always enjoyed playing with words and music and even before her residency here began she performed a sequence of Through the Eye of a Crow on Symphony Hall Level 3 Foyer with the harpists and vocalists, Sam Fox and Steph West, performed regularly at Moxhull Hall Folk Club where she met the singer Serena Howard Douglas and the guitarist Chris Matthews who recorded Julie’s song Carousel with both Julie and Serena singing!

During her residency here she has continued to work with the Jazz musician Dutch Lewis with whom she had performed a voice and saxophone duet, Metro Motion live on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb. Most recently Dutch improvised a haunting melody on bass clarinet to accompany a performance of Wasted Lives for the Nightmare on Clarendon Street performance and CD. The poem Nightmare on Clarendon Street was also set to music as song by Gabrielle Byam Grounds who has also written musical arrangements for Julie’s poems, Postcards from Nairn, Criccieth and A Letter to my Daughter. Gabrielle, Director of English Serenata, commissioned Julie to create a poem inspired by Howard Blake’s Flute Quintet. This poem, As Snowflakes Fall can be found in the Christmas section of this site.

In the Midlands region Julie has performed with such groups as the Veya Quintet for Warwick Festival. Further afield her poetry has been translated and set to music. The most recent example of this is the setting of Falguni Bharateeya’s translation of her poem Inuit Snow Song to music by the Indian composer and musician Nikhil Joshi who lives in Gujarat, India. Her Ballad of Guy’s Cliffe has been scored as a song by the composer Steve Tromans. Another version of this poem as song will be composed soon following a commission by Guy’s Cliffe House in Warwickshire.

Most recently, supported by the National Lottery Fund through Arts Council England, Julie has been working with Steve Tromans on the exciting new project The Piano Room with composer and pianist, Steve Tromans. Following her recent residency in Spain, which was supported by the Arts Council and with stipends from the artists’ retreat Can Serrat she is conducting research which she hopes will lead to the creation of a libretto for the Gospel of Mary. Inspiration for this came in the mountains of Montserrat, a place which Julie terms as a ‘Theatre to Theotokus’. Although much of the libretto may well be taking its inspiration from research into Gnosticism and into the role of Mary Magdalene before it was reinterpreted by a patriarchal church.

Some musical collaborations in written and in audio form are available on Julie’s website www.julieboden.co.uk. Here are the written forms of some of Julie’s poems that have been performed, during the time of her residency here, with music:

Amorous Organ