JO QUAIL’S FESTIVAL COMMISSION TO AIR
The cellist will unveil The Cartographer at Roadburn in April, with album to follow.
Prog Award-winning cellist Jo Quail will debut her latest composition, The Cartographer, at the envelopebusting Roadburn Festival, in Tilburg, Netherlands, on April 23, with an album to follow on May 6 via the By Norse label.
The five-movement composition was specially commissioned by Roadburn owner Walter Hoeijmakers in 2019, and it’s taken two years to materialise because of the Covid pandemic. Quail played at the 2019 festival, backing MONO, Myrkur and At The Gates, but she and Hoeijmakers had discussed the idea the month before, at the World
Metal Congress in London.
“Walter wanted to explore the heaviness that’s prevalent in classical music from my perspective,” Quail tells Prog. “There was no time limit or boundaries, which is extremely liberating and a little bit frightening as a composer. If you’re writing for a film, you have the film… but in my initial proposal I felt that 45-50 minutes would be the ideal length as, in my opinion, after that we need to take a breath.”
The Cartographer began as a five-line poem, based on a signature Quail theme of cardinal energies: earth, air, fire, water and spirit. The musical details of the piece are being kept strictly under wraps until the debut performance at Roadburn, but Quail teases that the composition involves prime numbers, with the music mapped to the piece in unique, clever, and very progressive ways.
In March she unveiled a snippet of the composition, subtitled The Terrain, which featured her cello plus powerful brass, violin and vocalists too. For the performance itself Quail will be joined by 16 musicians, including members of the innovative Crossbones trombone collective. Quail’s instructions to her live players sound tantalising: “At some point in the [lyric-less] score, one [vocal] direction is, ‘sing like starlight’. Similarly for my violinist:‘You are the birds, fly as high as you can!’”
The winner of the Limelight trophy at the last Prog Awards back in 2019, Quail says she straddles many musical worlds: “I’m normally a soloist playing to baroque fans in a classical setting, contemporary music fans at Hellfest, and I received
Prog’s Limelight Award. I think that’s why Roadburn were interested in me.” She’s also recently toured with Amenra, AA Williams and Wardruna. JK
“There were no boundaries, which was liberating and a bit frightening.”