Once there was not, a miniature song cycle from John Woolrich, will premiere at Folkstone New Music on 25 September with Claire Booth and Christopher Glynn. The recital, in The Green Room at The Grand, will also feature Woolrich’s Stendhal’s Observation and Ophelia Songs, as well as a ‘The Voice of the Rain’ from Oliver Knussen’s Whitman Settings.
A 7-minute collection of four songs, Once there was not sets excerpts chosen by Woolrich from prose works by Zoe Gilbert – themselves created in response to Gilbert hearing the composer’s string quartet cycle A Book of Inventions. Woolrich says of the piece,
The piano part isn’t an ‘accompaniment’: the singer and the pianist often share the same musical line which hops alternately between voice and keyboard. The music is predominantly spiky, sharp edged and brittle: ‘listen, thin song there’.
The world of dream, hallucination, and a predilection for the fragmentary are key preoccupations in Woolrich’s work, exemplified in this new set of miniatures. Gilbert described her own instinctive response to Woolrich’s quartets as “automatic, subconscious… so that the dream logic of fairy tale rose in response to heard musical shapes and emblems, and was speckled with memory and preoccupation.”
Booth has given numerous performances of Woolrich’s song output over the years, including Stendhal’s Observation at Wigmore Hall in November 2024 ; she premiered the song with Huw Watkins at Kings Place in 2009. She performs the laconic 2-minute miniature again with Jâms Coleman at the Oxford International Song Festival on 13 October.
Woolrich’s songs – including Stendhal’s Observation – also appear in Folkestone at Kollektiv on 4 September, with Sarah Parkin and Lara Dodds-Eden performing A Singing Sky and The Unlit Suburbs, as well as Tansy Davies’ setting of John Clare Destroying Beauty.