Thank you to everyone who came to our summer concert, SeedSpell, in July 2025!
It was a wonderful evening for Cambridge and Leith Hill Timeline Choirs, performing songs and readings from mankind’s centuries-old traditions of celebrating nature. The concert drew on themes of the evocation of remembered landscape, the symbolism of plants and herbs, and the freedom of birds in flight – on traditions of using nature to heal ourselves, and in return, our duty of careful stewardship of the natural world – and ideas about the fragility of our environment, and how we both define it and destroy it with human presence.
Two of the pieces we sang were commissioned by the choir for the University Library’s Curious Cures exhibition, which runs until December. You’ll also be able to hear them soon as part of the exhibition.
‘Flowers’, with music by composer Hannah Conway and librettist Hazel Gould, reinterpreted a C14th Anglo-Norman treatise on women’s reproductive health and menstruation, Sicom Aristotele Nous Dit (MS O.2.5 ff.123r-124v, at Trinity College Cambridge), which teaches women to use herbal remedies for ‘les flours des femmes’ – ‘the flowers of women’. The other, by composer Charlotte Baskerville, is a C15th ‘Charm Against Rats’ (from MS 457/395 f.1v, at Gonville & Caius College), invoking the Virgin Mary, St Gertrude, and St Nicasius to control nature at its most inconveniently exuberant!
Our next performance will be at Mill Road Winter Fair, Cambridge, on Saturday 6th December 2025.