Release date: 5 September 2025
Quiet Wild is a musical landscape of the distinct compositional voices from Royal Birmingham Conservatoire’s recent and current doctoral composers. Performed by Timothy Lines (clarinet), Rose Redgrave (viola), and David Quigley (piano), the album explores new terrains of compositional thought where each of the pieces move through each other to provide an intimacy of understanding in their refracted parallels.
The album opens with Aidan Teplitzky’s Wuthering Derive, a musical wandering through Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights that draws on psychogeography to understand the hidden worlds of a loved pop song to find a sense of place. Such wandering is continued in Francesca Fargion’s All the Other Songs where the three instrumentalists weave in and around Francesca’s voice to create a lilting and shifting narrative of fluid musical lines.
Explorations of relationships continue in Chloe Knibbs’ Flight Lines, where a dialogue between Knibb’s original music and that of Marie Jaell, a 19th century French composer, come together to consider the habits and patterns found within the treatment of historical women composers in the concert hall of today.
Moving from the spaces created in cultural rituals towards Chinese art, Chang Ge’s Unchanging Changes translates the visual abstraction found in artist Ding Yi’s Appearance of Crosses into a sonic spatial environment of shifting harmonic and rhythmic material. From abstraction to defined processes, James McIlwrath’s oppe og ikke gråter, roughly translated as “up and not crying”, provides a personal musical journey to rediscover the joy to be found in musiking.
Finally, Nicholas Olsen’s Plaque and Tangles continues this seeking of emotional understanding through musically processing the journeys faced by those who care for loved ones with Alzheimer's and the loving dedication to be found in their relationships.
Quiet Wild provides an evocative journey through six musical landscapes that delve into hidden spaces and hushed sonorities, effortlessly unveiling a tactile and arresting narrative that captures Birmingham’s distinct musical identity.
RECORDING CREDITS
Recorded at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire on the 7 and 8 of November, 2024
Engineered and mixed by Matthew O’Malley
Cover image © Aidan Teplitzky
Catalogue no: BRC028