Michael Price - Whitsun

Whitsun expands work he started on 2014’s track ‘Easter’, where church bells in Venice were transformed into shimmering piano textures, but for Whitsun, the sound world that drives the piece is that of his childhood in Yorkshire.

Brass bands and chapel choirs spilled into the streets on high days and holidays, and away from the bustle of town were the sounds of the moors and the sea. The sense memory of piano practice in an echoing school hall early on a winter morning is recreated with haunting fragments of Beethoven, and the ghosts of hymn tunes from school assemblies. With family reaching back many generations in industrial Yorkshire, the connection to place also produces darker tones within Whitsun, chronicling the now empty churches, chapels and textile mills, once at the heart of the community.