Bedford Reader 11th

The Song of the White Horse is the original 1983 pressing of the album subsequently reissued (by Voiceprint and Classicprint) as Star Clusters, Nebulae & Places in Devon/The Song of the White Horse. Originally issued on Mike Oldfield's short-lived eponymous label, it is comprised of just two pieces of music - both of which can now be referred to as the title track. Originally composed in 1971 and performed by Bedford and former Soft Machine keyboardist Mike Ratledge, "Star Clusters, Nebulae & Places in Devon" was titled for Bedford's discovery that the stars that are visible today are only now shedding the light that was originally emitted during the Bronze Age; it is, accordingly, a lengthy piece that seems fully aware of the mysteries inherent in such vast distance…

To most people, David Bedford is best known for his work with Kevin Ayers and Roy Harper, but Bedford was already a composer with avant-garde credentials before teaming up with them. The title track, for example, is a piece for ten acoustic guitars, with elephants represented by a moistened thumb dragged across the back of the soundbox; the "Nurse's Song" is actually a setting of the Blake poem, with a bass guitar accompaniment by Mike Oldfield (with whom Bedford had worked in the Whole World). Every track here is scored for unusual ensembles, such as "Sad and Lonely Faces," which has six pianos and four woodwinds, behind Ayers intoning a poem, or "Some Bright Stars for Queen's College," with 80 voices and 27 plastic twirlers. In some ways, it's a product of its time, when boundary-pushing in modern classical music was the norm, not the exception…

Filmed in June 2013 during three extraordinary performances that took place during the Aldeburgh Festival, “Peter Grimes on Aldeburgh beach” takes place in the heart of the town that inspired it and is the film interpretation of Britten’s “Peter Grimes”, the most successful opera of post-war Britain. Based on George Crabbe’s 1810 poem ‘The Borough’, Britten’s powerful and masterful evocation of the North Sea in all its moods has become inextricably linked with the Aldeburgh that was home to Crabbe in the late eighteenth century and Britten in the twentieth, and where both poem and opera were written.