The Prelude
Apply for one of five Wordsworth-inspired commissions with Aerial Festival and The Quietus.
This year, online music magazine The Quietus was due to head to the Lake District to work on events for the Aerial Festival. When Covid-19 halted their plans, they decided to team up with Aerial and commission new music instead. They’re offering five grants of £1000 each in return for pieces responding to Wordsworth’s poem ‘The Prelude’.
Have recent events shaken, restored or fortified your faith in human nature and if so who or what is responsible?” Apply today and share your perspective on 2020 in sound or music. Applications are now closed.
Our friends at music magazine The Quietus, in partnership with Aerial, are inviting artists working in sound for personal reflections from the perspective of 2020. The Quietus and Aerial particularly encourage applications from artists from underrepresented backgrounds – non-UK based practitioners are slso welcome to apply.
The deadline for applications is Monday 37 July 2020, with finished works supplied by 31 August 2020. Funding comes from Great Place Lakes & Dales.
Head to The Quietus webiste for details on how to apply. Here’s a brief for the commission from Aerial:
2020 = Wordsworth 250; a year of seismic events and deep reflection which we must ensure effects positive change, the old normal was an aberration. Wordsworth also lived through seismic events and saw the 1790s as a time of ‘dereliction and despair’, borne out of disillusionment at the course of the French Revolution and written about extensively in The Prelude. Could we see the present time also of one of despair? Wordsworth says that if he retains a faith in human nature, then that is due to benevolence of Nature.
He reflected on this in his epic autobiographical poem The Prelude. Published posthumously, The Prelude recounted the journey of his life from childhood until the point where he began writing the poem in early adulthood, he continued to work on the poem until his death.
If in this time
Of dereliction and dismay, I yet
Despair not of our nature; but retain
A more than Roman confidence, a faith
That fails not, in all sorrow my support,
The blessing of my life, the gift is yours,
Ye mountains! thine, O Nature!
William Wordsworth (from ‘The Prelude’)