Drawing musical inspiration from the South Downs

It’s a bit of a cliché to say that the land writes the music, says Rogate-based composer Damian Montagu.
Damian MontaguDamian Montagu
Damian Montagu

But at the very least, the South Downs are a massive inspiration.

His new album A Walk Into Reverie is released on CD and digital formats through Absolute Label Services. He hopes it will build on the success of his earlier album, In A South Downs Way, a collaboration with actor Hugh Bonneville which reached the number one spot in the UK classical charts.

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The eleven compositions on the new album are led by Damian with strings performed by the Tippett Quartet and piano by Rob Sword, with brass arrangements and performances by ex-Paul Weller trumpeter Stewart Prosser, who co-produced the album.

“We are in Rogate,” Damian says. “We have been here about ten years. What happened was that we were living in London and we have got three children and it made a huge amount of sense to live here. I had always been based in a London studio and so when we moved, I built a studio in the garden.

“We just fell in love with the South Downs. It’s really hard to talk about place, but it is that combination of woodland that we can access from the house, the number of footpaths that you can use.

“In some counties the walkways are blocked up, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. I have never lived anywhere with such access.

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“I tend to walk alone with my dogs, and it is that process of not being interrupted by other people on the Downs that gives you such a beautiful place for meditation and for writing music, and the album hopefully reflects this. If I am walking, within ten minutes of the walk I am lost in thought, but what happens to me is that rather than thinking about anything and everything, I am hearing melodies. I use a phone to record them. It is the only time I use a screen when walking. I have to capture it, and when I am walking, I can hear the orchestration. I can hear the whole thing, but when I get back I have only got the melody. The ones that stick are the ones where I can still hear the full orchestration.”

This album is the second in the Walk Upon England project, led by Damian and Stewart, which aims to be a celebration of the English countryside as a source of creativity in music and poetry. At its heart is music inspired by walking within the beauty, scale and atmosphere of the country’s unspoiled panoramas and habitats.

A Walk Into Reverie is envisaged as allowing the listener to tune into this rural idyll, relax and take their own half hour walk in their mind’s eye, buoyed by the evocative music. The digital version of the album offers the whole body of music as a continuous piece, the A Walk Into Reverie – Continuous Meditational Mix for Walking, which heightens that sensory experience and underlines the physical connections and sense of place.

Damian said, “Spending time in this wonderful landscape is both a productive and meditative experience. We are living in a new digital age; one in which we can now become overloaded by screens and excessive information and technology. I very much hope that this album will help to transport people to the kind of peaceful and reflective space that I found myself in whilst writing it.”

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The first album featured spoken word from Hugh: “He contributed original words of his own. This album this time is just pure music, though I think the second album keeps the ideas and the ethos of the first album alive. It is more dreamlike, though.

“The word reverie is really important because it captures just how deeply you can get into meditation through walking.”

The album features artwork by Sussex artist Jonathan Pocock. It has been released on the Walk Upon England label, supported by Absolute Label Services.

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