World Premiere
World premiere of the first Limestone Lithophone Concerto at 6pm Monday 22 June at the Grassington Festival.
Soloist Polly McMillan with Skipton Camerata will perform the concerto specially written by Thomas Lydon for this Lithophone.
Please come along and bring your children. Tickets from www.grassington-festival.org.uk.
or support us through Crowd funding https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/the-lithophone-project
and tell all your friends!
The Lithophone is made up of Carboniferous Limestone bars cut from the Great Scar Limestone Group and the Park Limestone Formation. These particular bars were cut and polished by Burlington Stone as part of the Ruskin Rocks project led by Professor Bruce Yardley www.ruskinrocks.org.uk. They have been fine tuned to The Equal Tempered Chromatic Scale by Bobbie Millar of Quarry Arts. Bobbie is also currently a Visiting Researcher in the School of Earth and Environment with Professor Paul Glover. The frame is being made by Dovetailors.
The project “The Song of the Sea that Was” is funded by the Arts Council England and the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority (YDNPA). The project partners are the YDNPA, Purple Patch Arts, Skipton Camerata and Quarry Arts. Quarry Arts is also designing a robust Lithophone for the YDNP Malham Visitor Centre. This will consist of boulders of local stone, including Limestone from the Great Scar Limestone Group, Greywacke and Gritstone, cut to form musical instruments for visitors to play.
Quarry Arts has developed out of Yorkshire Quarry Arts. YQA was formed in 2003 at the University of Leeds by Professor Jane Francis, Bobbie Millar, Dr Kia Ng and David Walker Barker. Quarry Arts is supported by an advisory group including Professor Richard Williams OBE, Dr Andy Evans and Ric Green from Opera North. Quarry Arts recently made a Blue Slate Lithophone for Clitheroe Castle Museum and is currently working on Quarry Tales: Clitheroe www.quarryarts.org.uk. It is also involved in the Ingleborough Dales Landscape Partnership bid to the HLF.
