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ARTS  MUSIC Lost and found Jackie Morris tells Marianne Brown how music has changed the way she sees the world Top: Jackie Morris painted portraits of the musicians “to connect [them] with the wilder world”. Instead of being ‘spirit animals’, the musicians become ‘spirit humans’ of the birds. Interspersed: Morris painted the ink sketches during the performances. www.jackiemorris.co.uk Over the last few weeks I have been playing a piece of music over and over again, picking apart the chord changes and key modulations in my head as well as committing the lyrics to memory so I can sing along. My neighbours might not be so appreciative of my enthusiasm, but the song has caught me and won’t let go. The song is called ‘Heartwood’ and it forms the opening track of a new album, Spell Songs, released in July. The album is one of the latest incarnations of the book The Lost Words by Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane, which began as a response to the removal of everyday words connected to Nature from a popular children’s dictionary because they were not being used enough. Gilded watercolours combined with poems (“spell songs”) were created to conjure up these words again into the public consciousness and draw attention to our growing disconnection with the natural world. The book has certainly made an impression, and since its publication in 2017 a huge variety of projects have 52 Resurgence & Ecologist September/October 2019
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sprung from it, from the working of the words in braille in embroidery stitches to the decorating of a hospital. The project collected together eight musicians – Karine Polwart, Kris Drever, Julie Fowlis, Beth Porter, Rachel Newton, Seckou Keita, Kerry Andrew and Jim Molyneux – in a cottage in the Lake District, where over a number of days they spun music from the artwork and words of the spell songs. “It’s a curious mix of the rhythm of language, the rhythm of colour, the rhythm of shape – painting as sound,” Jackie Morris tells me. “Of all the work I’ve done in my life it has been the thing I’ve enjoyed most.” Morris has worked collaboratively on many projects, but this one was different, she says. “I’d never before experienced what it was like to work in the same space with a group of musicians,” she continues. “Hear them pull ideas out of the book, turn images to sound: the stepping up and the stepping back, the interplay between the spoken voices and the voices of their instruments. It was an utter delight to see people cooperate.” This cooperation had resonance with the wider world outside the gathering, she adds. “When you look at what’s going on in the world of politics with the lack of cooperation, with the stepping up of the nonsense that is spoken and the game-playing and the one-upmanship and the ego, what I saw here was a group of amazingly talented people who were working together and enabling each other, bringing forward and stepping up when they needed to, all those skills... Just astonishing. It made me realise what a loss it is that music is so crushed in schools these days. It’s becom- ing something again for privilege rather than for everyone. If musicians and storytellers taught politicians some of these skills, I think we would have far better governance than we have now.” Issue 316 Resurgence & Ecologist 53

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ARTS  MUSIC

Lost and found

Jackie Morris tells Marianne Brown how music has changed the way she sees the world

Top: Jackie Morris painted portraits of the musicians “to connect [them] with the wilder world”. Instead of being ‘spirit animals’, the musicians become ‘spirit humans’ of the birds. Interspersed: Morris painted the ink sketches during the performances. www.jackiemorris.co.uk

Over the last few weeks I have been playing a piece of music over and over again, picking apart the chord changes and key modulations in my head as well as committing the lyrics to memory so I can sing along. My neighbours might not be so appreciative of my enthusiasm, but the song has caught me and won’t let go.

The song is called ‘Heartwood’ and it forms the opening track of a new album, Spell Songs, released in July. The album is one of the latest incarnations of the book The Lost Words by Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane, which began as a response to the removal of everyday words connected to Nature from a popular children’s dictionary because they were not being used enough. Gilded watercolours combined with poems (“spell songs”) were created to conjure up these words again into the public consciousness and draw attention to our growing disconnection with the natural world. The book has certainly made an impression, and since its publication in 2017 a huge variety of projects have

52 Resurgence & Ecologist

September/October 2019

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