Nottingham Composer Receives Second Ivor Novello Award Nomination for Outstanding Musical Achievement
A University of Nottingham composer has been nominated for a prestigious Ivor Novello Award, the UK’s leading classical awards for songwriters and composers, for the second year in a row.
Dr Duncan MacLeod, Associate Professor in the School of Music, has been nominated in the ‘Best Sound Art’ category at the Ivors Classical Awards 2024 for his soundwalk composition Orasaigh. The Classical Awards are when Ivor Novello Awards are bestowed to celebrate creative excellence in British and Irish composing for classical and sound art.
The geolocative acousmatic soundwalk composition, titled Orasaigh, was developed in 2023 as part of the exhibition ‘Orasaigh’ – a collaboration between poet Steve Ely, photographer Michael Faint and composer Duncan MacLeod.
This is the second time that Dr MacLeod has been nominated for a prestigious Ivor Award. Last year his soundwalk Machiar was nominated in the same category for the Ivors Classical Awards.
I’m deeply honoured to be nominated for an Ivor Novello Award at The Ivors Classical Awards – being acknowledged by fellow composers and sound artists through The Ivors Academy is truly humbling. It has been a great privilege to work with Steve Ely’s evocative poem, and I’m immensely grateful to Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Arts Centre for commissioning this project, along with the University of Nottingham AHRC Impact Accelerator award, without which this work would not have been possible.”
Dr Duncan MacLeod, Associate Professor in the School of Music
Commissioned and developed last year, as part of a University of Nottingham Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) Academic Residency with Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Arts Centre in the Western Isles of Scotland, the project draws upon the landscape around the tidal island of Orasaigh, located on the coast of South Uist at Boisdale.
Ely’s visionary poem, whilst always remaining anchored in the island, roams widely, exploring a range of themes related to Uist and the wider world – sea level rise, the crisis of the ‘sixth extinction,’ history, culture, politics, conflict and class. Faint and MacLeod vividly capture the spirit of the place through their respective mediums, creating an independent yet complementary subjectivity.
As with Ely’s poem, the soundwalk is rooted in the landscape through the presence of soundscape compositions, utilising immersive field recordings captured on location. Elsewhere, material for bass clarinet and highland bagpipes, along with creative reimagining of archival sound recordings from Uist, draws upon the Isles’ rich musical heritage through Gaelic song and pibroch (an art music genre associated with the great Highland Bagpipe).
The work of the three artists combines and interacts to produce a uniquely evocative response to a rich and resonant landscape that affirms the vitality and resilience of the human spirit. The island itself becomes a dual symbol of precarity and hope in the crisis of the Anthropocene.