EDEn: the music of edward picton-turbervill

I’ve known Ed for several years, having (almost) overlapped at University and subsequently crossing paths frequently on London’s musical scene.

I had been admiring Ed’s compositions from a distance – particularly the numerous very finely-crafted songs for voice and piano (which I’m delighted to see receiving high-quality recordings of their own) – when a chance conversation between us about a larger-scale work ended up providing the catalyst for this whole project.

We chatted about him wanting to work on an environmental-based, multi-movement work which could reflect the human exploitation (and destruction) of our planet using both sacred and secular texts. I had already been thinking about a nature theme for an LCS concert at Easter 2025, and this seemed like a perfect fit. The hour-long programme was prefaced by a few unaccompanied choral pieces by other composers before Ed’s premiere. It’s fair to say this was one of the most extraordinary responses from an audience I’ve ever experienced: the sold-out hall rose to its feet spontaneously and the feeling that the music had touched people was palpable.

Out of Eden had been launched into the world, and we both felt it deserved to be recorded, especially as so much work had been put in by the musicians learning it for the premiere. Ed and I had to plan the repertoire for the remainder of the disc. Acting as a prelude to the album, the two choral pieces which open the disc are both beautifully conceived and the sound-world created by Spell of Sleep is nothing short of magical. Following is the instrumental Songs of Eden, which I’m delighted Ed was keen to write. It sets the mood for what follows, as well as profiling the unusual combination of instruments we had at our disposal. The textures and sonorities Ed creates are hypnotic and very beautiful.

Ed’s own programme notes best describe all this music, so I’ll avoid providing an inferior commentary. What Ed is too modest to admit is just how incredibly skilled and efficient his writing is. Listening back now it’s hard to believe Out of Eden is scored for just a few instruments (organ, piano, percussion and violin) alongside the choir and soloists. The colours and textures are endlessly surprising and inventive and Ed has the amazing ability to make it all sound like a massive symphony orchestra. I sincerely hope this modern masterpiece enters the mainstream repertoire and will be picked up by choirs across the land: it deserves to be.

Michael Waldron

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When deciding what to pair with Out of Eden on this disc, my mind went immediately to Kathleen Raine’s poetry, and in particular her Spell for Creation. I have always felt an affinity for her writing, and her mystical sensitivity to the land (which foreshadows spiritual ecology) made her poetry seem to me a perfect complement for Out of Eden. I quickly settled on the idea of a part-song to showcase London Choral Sinfonia, and in hunting for a companion poem, I came across the Spell of Sleep, which I thought would work perfectly as a kind of Alto rhapsody, with the choir, piano and organ providing a sumptuous backdrop to Katie Bray’s voice. I imagined it as a spell of protection for my Goddaughters, and kept them in mind whilst writing.

Michael Waldron suggested that it might also be nice to write a small instrumental suite of music that would be more readily digestible for a listener, and so the Songs of Eden were born. For inspiration, I turned to the apocryphal speech given by the Suquamish Chieftain Seattle in 1854. Although Seattle almost certainly did give such a speech, none of the surviving versions is seen as a particularly reliable indication of what he might actually have said. Nevertheless, I have long found the speech a moving example of a powerful and profound environmental ethic, which seems to surface through the variant versions. Seattle’s reproach of the settlers paints a radiant vision of a land thronging with the ghosts of his people, where the soil is made of the ashes of his ancestors, and the whole Earth is humming with vitality, sacred and inviolable. Each movement of Songs of Eden is based on a line from the speech, with the lines rendered into a single word for the titles.

As for Out of Eden, I trace its origins to Heidelberg in September 2016, when I boiled over with frustration, stormed out of a lecture on environmental economics, crossed the street to a piano shop, and sat down to play. It was at this precise moment that I realised whatever my contribution to the environmental crisis might be, it wasn’t going to be writing economic policy. A few years later, as part of my application for a creative fellowship in Oxford, I proposed the idea of writing a Requiem for the natural world. I envisaged a duet with an extinct animal, and wrote Silent Spring, which eventually came to form the basis for Out of Eden. In Holy Week of 2024, it struck me that the Lamentations might be a better framework for the piece of art that I wanted to create than the Requiem; the text is an intense mixture of grief, shame, and desperation, and I felt that mirrored my feelings on the environmental crisis more closely. I had mentioned the idea in passing to Michael in a meeting in January that year, and in September he asked me to write the piece to be included in the Easter Festival at Smith Square in 2025.

The original Lamentations are thought to have been written to mourn the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, adopting aspects of the older Mesopotamian City Laments, which date from 2000 BCE onwards. This text was later famously repurposed by Tallis, Byrd and others, who found a resonance in the texts, and used them to express a profound sadness at the loss of the Catholic faith in England. I was very attracted by the thought that my piece might join this long line of using ancient texts to address present fears.

As a chorister, I sang the psalms every day; the words took root somewhere deep inside me, and their repetition was a core part of my education. Even as a child I was drawn to the beauty and drama of the language in the Old Testament, and so it seems entirely natural to me that I would use these texts to speak about the crisis. Indeed, the major creative act in writing Out of Eden was actually the conception and construction of the libretto – once the text felt right, the music followed. I think these texts still speak so directly to us precisely because they are abstract. As the American Theologian Walter Brueggemann says, ‘the Old Testament Prophets hardly ever discuss an issue. They go underneath the issues that preoccupy people to the more foundational assumptions, which can only be [reached] through very elusive language’.

Since my MPhil, I have wanted to get to the roots of the environmental crisis, and over many years of reading, listening, talking and thinking, I have come to view it primarily as a crisis of relationship. I do not believe it will be solved by technical means, but only by fundamentally altering the architecture of our society’s relationship with the natural world. It seems to me that the way we relate to the Earth is deeply and intrinsically flawed, and that the manifestation of this mistaken pattern of thought on a planetary scale has become inimical to our wellbeing.

We have achieved marvels over the last century, but at what cost? We have long since uprooted ourselves, transgressed planetary boundaries, and find ourselves spinning in the zero-gravity derangement of end-stage capitalism. I feel that the gospel of growth currently preached by economists is nearly as outlandish as the resurrection narrative, and a good deal more destructive.

As the novelist Jarett Kobek writes, to be alive in the 21st century is to have been ‘born into complex and impossible systems of unfathomable evil’ – we are, paradoxically, both wholly responsible and yet essentially powerless. Confronted by the immensity of the challenge, I believe that most of us have (quite understandably) chosen to look the other way. I have written Out of Eden to try and help us to look the situation calmly in the face, and I hope it will be a cathartic experience for the listener.

The first movement gives the context of the Fall, and the second forces us to confront the results of our actions. The last Kauai O’O, a Hawaiian bird which you will hear singing in the second movement, died in 1987, within the lifetime of many who will read this. This extinct bird’s song forms a leitmotif throughout the rest of the work. The third movement is an outpouring of grief and a cry for God’s help, which goes unanswered. The fourth movement opens with a moment of self-reflection; for me, the image of Death seated on a white horse has always called to mind the echoing absence of the mega-fauna, and all our extinct Hominid brethren.

The second half of that movement is conceived as a participatory and sacramental act of penance. I believe we must acknowledge our complicity if we are to move forward; whether the request for forgiveness goes out to our neighbours, the Kauai O’O or God, I don’t think it much matters.

Having asked for mercy, the piece begins to turn towards the light. The Trisagion is a gesture of humility, an acknowledgment that we are one among many, and a rejection of the rampant anthropocentrism that shapes our view of the world. Ezekiel’s vision of the Valley of the Dry Bones is a potent metaphor for the Earth’s power to heal itself, and that movement ends with some sublimely beautiful words of comfort from God, reframing the curse from the first movement.

Can we solve this crisis? I don’t think so anymore – I think we must live through it. In many Native American cultures, the whole of creation is understood as medicine, and the collapse of the global ecosystem may be the most bitter medicine of them all. We will eventually either change, or we will die. I want to use my voice as an artist to mark the magnitude of the unfathomable loss that we are living through, which now seems to me unstoppable. I want to bear witness to it, to acknowledge our brothers and sisters who are passing away all around us. I have poured sixteen years of preoccupation into Out of Eden – it is my testimony. It is an acknowledgement of our complicity, a desperate cry for help, a call to wake up, and a vision of hope.

Edward Picton-Turbervill