Michael Price: 'The more time passes since 1914-1918 the human stories get more relevant'

It was here that the Emmy Award winner wrote the four chamber works that comprise The Seasons (1914-1918), released on CD this week. Price explains that the idea for the album began percolating when he and his family moved out of London to the market town of Berkhamsted five years ago. Being closer to the seasons was something he felt he was missing in the capital. “It was something that I felt was emblematic of my experiences as a child in Batley, growing up in Yorkshire, where it was very seasonal, and I was exploring a way to write about the seasons,” he says.

Losing both of his parents within a year of each other made him reflect further. “As many people in this season of their own life will experience, when your parents pass away and you become the eldest generation it’s time for celebration (of them). They were great parents, me and my brother miss them a lot, but I didn’t want to write something super specific or entirely particular about Mum and Dad.

“I’d often been drawn to the literature around the First World War, it just seems to be the more time passes since 1914-1918 the human stories around that time don’t seem to get less relevant, they seem to get more and more relevant. You see a reflection of people, whether they were soldiers who went away to fight or whether they were the people left behind and the soeciety moved on during and after the war. So my thought then was to combine the two thoughts, the seasons but also First World War remembrance, and to create something that was based on literature and poems of the time but then to make almost like a musical journal.”

The first piece, featuring Connaught Brass, is based on a poem by Alice Meynell and seeks to capture the innocence of the summer of 1914. The second, set in spring 1915 and inspired by the Edward Thomas poem In Memorium, is performed by The Galliard Ensemble and reflects the unease “as it starts to dawn that it’s not going to be over by Christmas”. By third, based in winter 1917, “the bleakest part of the war”, sets three more Thomas poems, Snow, Thaw, and Lights Out, to music played by The Gesualdo Six. The album concludes on Armistice Day in November 1918, with May Wedderburn Cannan’s poem Paris, November 11th, 1918 set to a reflective piece performed by the Solem Quartet.

“There’s almost like a forwards and backwards through the seasons in this piece as a whole,” Price says. “The thought then was should it be the same instruments all the way through, should it all be just for orchestra. I wanted to make the seasons very distinct and very specific, for each to have a sound world of their own and a sense of place of their own, so I put together the idea of each of the seasons having a different chamber group – we’ve got brass quintet, wind ensemble, string quartet and a choir.”

Each was recorded at a different church. “I don’t have a specific faith but I’m fascinated by the buildings and the ritual of the predominantly Christian religion in Britain,” Price says. “There’s a beautiful poem by (Philip) Larkin called Church Going where he describes going into a disused church and feeling cynical inside but by the end of the poem he goes it’s ‘a serious house on serious earth’, he kind of goes even if you don’t believe, the very fact that so many events have happened in these churches over the years, that so many people have celebrated their weddings and christenings and funerals and so many people are buried around in the churchyards that these buildings hold this sacred space. So I wanted to record in churches not in studios.”

Price hopes that anyone listening on headphones “will really get a sense of the acoustic on this – each of the spaces is different”. The largest church in London was reserved for the brass. “In my imagination, you can also hear the temperature,” he says. “It was freezing when we did winter with the choir, everyone was muffled up in scarves. What I wanted to do was create this really rich experience where the peices of music can just be listened to on their own terms, you don’t necessarily need to have all of this backstory, but it’s all there to be discovered. There are specific poems that inspire the instrumental pieces, even though you don’t hear them. There are three poems by Edward Thomas – he’s really a nature poet rather than a war poet, but he’s a fascinating poet. The pieces that the choir are singing were written by him in late 1916/early 1917 and Edward Thomas himself died fighting in the war at Arras in 1917. That sense of winter in Arras is incredibly poignant, he died in the conflict that he was writing about.”

The Seasons (1914-1918) is out now on CD and streaming. A vinyl edition of the album will be available in 2027, along with a documentary film. https://www.michaelpricemusic.com/