2 hours ago
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I’m a harmonica and accordion player and one half of folk-classical duo Stevens & Pound. As a multi-instrumentalist I am rooted in a folk tradition that is oral, aural and communal. Music and song are passed down by ear, either through recordings or – more fun – traditional music sessions. Here, players and singers get together to share, swap and play tunes, drawing from a repertoire that is always evolving. While collections of tunes are certainly notated, their scores act as a skeleton – providing the basic architecture of pitch and rhythm but rarely offering explicit guidance on how the music should be played.
Delia Stevens and I are about to head out on tour, performing with the Britten Sinfonia and Robert Macfarlane in a new work called The Silent Planet, a recomposition of Holst’s Planets suite. It’s the culmination of 18 months of rehearsals and revisions, and the score for this 60-minute work, orchestrated by Ian Gardiner, totals 165 pages and includes Earth, an entirely new composition.
I have co-written this piece, but have never read the score; in fact, I do not read music.
I am hardly alone in this. The non-reader tradition boasts a star-studded cast, including Paul McCartney, Hans Zimmer, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and Taylor Swift. No one could claim these musicians have been held back by their inability to read music. Aural mastery can be just as potent a force as visual literacy.
For me, reading music was a skill that simply never took root, compounded by my challenges with dyslexia. I spent years believing that this was a permanent barrier, locking me out of engaging with complex scores or longer pieces of music. After all, a classical work by a composer such as Bach or Handel is conceived as a comprehensive blueprint – the notation, often layered with Italian performance terms, explicitly tells the performer how to approach dynamics, tempo, articulation and expression. It is a full instruction manual.
The challenge is intensified in large-scale collaborations. My early experience with the brilliant Sinfonia Cymru brought this into sharp focus. We were rehearsing a project that included my work The Reckoning and Stevens & Pounds’ arrangements of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, which toured last year across Wales. I found myself adrift when the conductor used terminology that was unfamiliar to me. I had to be clear with the ensemble that I was a beginner in this new language of tuttis and legatos, and they could help me out by replacing or translating classical terms. That said, the gap in jargon works both ways. The folk world has its own detailed lexicon of terms: jigs, hornpipes, slip jigs, reels, slides and polkas to name a few. These distinct tune types are differentiated primarily by their rhythm and time signature, and they correspond to various regional folk and céilidh dances, often possessing nuanced sub-classifications essential to a deeper understanding of the repertoire.
I like to think of Stevens & Pound, the duo classical percussionist Delia Stevens and I formed in late 2022, as multilingual in spirit. Since then we have been on a mission to rethink major classical works. Our goal is not simply to play cover versions, or compensate for my lack of reading, but to lean into the dynamism and freedom that playing by ear brings. Taking The Planets, The Lark Ascending and other pieces into the sub-genre we have created recreates them in unexpected ways. We intentionally reimagine familiar works, whether they’re from the classical canon or other genres, because it gives the audience an immediate point of connection before we take them on a completely fresh, transformative musical journey.
The Lark Ascending was our first foray into this territory. Its meditative, improvisatory nature made it a relatively safe starting point, and it was here that we developed our system for re-engaging with the original scores, based on voice-note recordings from Delia that I learn by ear.
Perhaps lulled into a false sense of security, we decided to follow this up with Holst’s monumental masterpiece. This has proved the biggest test yet for our system – and my brain. The technical demands are so great that I had a wide range of custom harmonicas built by Seydel, Suzuki and other harmonica companies, so rather than just playing the work on a chromatic harmonica I gained different timbres, techniques and sounds to bring the pieces to life.
The same goes for my accordion: I had to develop new techniques and learn different scales and chord progressions that wouldn’t usually be played on a diatonic instrument. Even more daunting than the technical hurdles was the psychological obstacle of tackling such a complex score without the ability to read it.
Yet learning by ear and resisting the explicit instructions of a score has become my greatest strength: it forces me to approach the music laterally, bringing my own sound world and a unique, personal voice to the work – a voice that is not confined by the dots on the page.
This is not a question of right or wrong: I’ve always challenged the notion that classical players can’t play folk, or folk musicians can’t play classical. Whether you call our tour dates gigs or concerts, the two genres are far more interlinked than we have been led to believe.
Two amazing composers who recognised and embraced these connections feature in the first half of our programme: Percy Grainger and Benjamin Britten. Despite their mutual admiration – Britten dedicated his Suite on English Folk Tunes to Grainger – the pair only met once: at Cecil Sharp House in London, the headquarters of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. That says something in itself.
