Ashby-de-la-Zouch beekeeper joins youth arts collective for bee-themed album
The Telling of the Bees is a five-track album made by Youth Landscapers Collective with David the Bee Farmer.
Pic: Youth Landscapers Collective
An Ashby-de-la-Zouch beekeeper has joined up with a youth art collective to create a free five-track album.
The Telling of the Bees, released April 1, was made by Youth Landscapers Collective (YLC) and David the Bee Farmer, a beekeeper and educator based in the National Forest.
The album is the soundtrack to YLC's outdoor installation, also called The Telling of the Bees, a dark sound and light installation produced for and shown at the Timber Festival in the National Forest in July 2021.
The group has performed the show at St Mary's Church in Nottingham as part of Nottingham Light Night 2022.
With David's help, YLC collaborated with some real-life bees – from the Boothorpe Bee colony, located just half a mile from the site of the Timber festival.
With UK bee populations declining, the piece seeks to unite people with their native pollinators.
There was a time when bee-keeping families in Europe followed a curious tradition.
Whenever there was a birth, death or news, someone went to the hives to tell the bees so they could share in the family's celebrations or mourning.
The piece was inspired by the curious myths and extraordinary facts about bee behaviour and the nature of their collective intelligence.
The four sections: hive, orientation, flight and swarm, follow the cycle of bee activity over a year.
Supported by composer Rebecca Lee, YLC drew on the information learned from David and the Boothorpe bee colony to shape the music.
They composed harmonies to sing in the key of the Boothorpe bees' hum, put microphones inside the hives to record the bees' movements and collected sounds from the woodland nearby.
They used them to imagine the kaleidoscopic bee's perspective of a flight amongst the trees and flowers.
They also used the algorithms for bee swarms to control the movement of the sound.
The processes are interwoven using scores controlled by computer software to create their shifting ecosystem.
For more information, visit the website here.
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