Bradford is this year’s City of Culture and as one of the events of the festival, this morning, in time to greet the sunset, except it dawned cloudy and cooler than of late, some 300 people assembled in the quarry next to the Cow and Calf above Ilkley and on the edge of Ilkley Moor for the start of The Bradford Progress. However, far from the popular song in the title of this piece, we were treated to Handel’s ‘Eternal Source of Light Divine performed by 27 members of Paraorchestra and a Counter-Tenor, the falsetto song commanding absolute hush. Mindful that one can’t fully appreciate or be present for live a performance whilst videoing it, I took only a short sample of the performance.
Then, the Commoners Choir took over. Based in Leeds and led by Boff Whalley, former guitarist in Chumbawumba, the Leeds punk/anarchist band catapulted to unexpected fame with their chart hit “Tubthumping“, which is not a song about drinking but the resilience of the Working Class (“He gets knocked down, but he gets up again…”). I was too taken with listening to the choir harmonies this morning to really take in the lyrics but I heard a reference to Noam Chomsky…
The choir were then going to walk across Ilkley Moor to continue with a series of performances across today and tomorrow culminating in Millenium Square, Bradford.
In other news, my friend and poetry collaborator, Melissa Lemay, who runs an online Journal called Collaborature, published an interview with me that we recorded a few weeks ago. As an experiment, she recorded our Zoom call and then had the AI integrated with Zoom, transcribe it. This worked in so far as it kept track of our separate voices, and was surprisingly accurate and yet there were many misheard words that made editing quite arduous for her and she had to refer a few passages back to me for clarification. You can read the interview here.