The Poet's Favourite Places: for six voices and fixed media (field recordings)

JULIAN PHILIPS The Poet’s Favourite Places (2025)
for 6 voices & field recordings

1. Helpston
2. Langley Bush
3. Swordy Well
4. In Hilly Wood

The Poet’s Favourite Places forms part of an ongoing creative response to the life and work of poet John Clare (1793-1864), following on from Melodys of Earth and Sky (2022) for violin and clarinet, or the song cycle Love Songs for Mary Joyce (2016). Here the concern is for four of Clare’s ‘favourite places’, explored through musical settings of associated Clare texts. These settings are then placed in dialogue with field recordings of these favourite places as they are now, recordings collected by the composer during February 2024.

Inevitably, The Poet’s Favourite Places mines familiar Clare themes: immersion in nature, sentimental attachment to a particular tree or bush, reminiscences of childhood experience, bitterness towards that great trifle, ‘man’. But it also hopes to explore the uncanny timeslip between how these favourite Clare places might have been experienced in the 1820s and how they are now, in a period of climate degradation and global warming.

The Poet’s Favourite Places is written in a ¼ comma meantone tuning, fully exploiting this temperament's just major and minor triads, but also deploying its lack of enharmony as a way of generating untempered, microtonal inflections. Perhaps just another way of exploring the uncanny timeslip by illuminating Clare’s pictures in sharper and more vivid colours.