Bennett - The Wilderness Voices (Belfast, 2026)

Ed Bennett - The Wilderness Voices

Sonic Lab, Sonic Arts Research Centre, 12th March 2026

Ed Bennett is a composer who some might associate more with loud and often dissonant contemporary music, mainly with his large scale orchestral works and in genre defying experiments with his Decibel Ensemble, but those are just one side of his efforts to express the themes and ideas that he has for his music, and there is another side to his work that can be just as effective, adventurous and experimental in an altogether quieter more meditative minimalist register. Reflective maybe, but still with an unsettling edge that gives you pause and refuses to let it simply slip over you.

We saw two sides of the composer's range recently in two works with a similar environmental theme both related to the sea. Premiered at the Brilliant Corners Festival in Belfast in 2025, All Earth Once Drowned with poet Cherry Smyth and the Decibel Ensemble managed to simultaneously celebrate the power, beauty and wonder of the sea while expressing anger at the catastrophic impact of environmental waste on this precious resource of nature. On the other hand a recording of Strange Waves in 2023 written for eight cellos, field recordings and electronics, the cellos all played in a multi-tracked recording by Kate Ellis was a more meditative piece drawing you into the sea, so to speak. Ed’s latest piece The Wilderness Voices uses a similar soloist layering technique, this time with the voice, supplemented with electronics.

Where Kate Ellis' cello was perfect for the rhythms and variable moods of the sea, the layered singing of mezzo-soprano Michelle O’Rourke brings an essential human element to the sentiments that form an integral part of the subject and mood of the new piece. As the composer explained in the introduction to the world premiere performance of the work, The Wilderness Voices started out with an environmental theme - clearly something that is foremost in the minds of many artists at the moment - but the death of his father at the time of composition played a part in how the piece developed. In the case of Kate Ellis on Strange Waves, the Covid pandemic lockdown made it easier for one musician to play all the parts, but there is also something surely of it being a matter of why seek more than one musician when you can have the best play all the parts? In the case of The Wilderness Voices there is a similar thought of why use more than one singer when Michelle O'Rourke can do it all herself. It's probably more a case however that the nature of this new work is very much more related to personal sentiments that can only be expressed by the human voice, or indeed an array of single human voices seeking to, well, presumably find a way out of the wilderness.

That's certainly more of a challenge to get that across in a 'live' performance, but it was one that Michelle O'Rourke proved capable of controlling to impressive effect. And there could hardly be a more suitable sound environment for the premiere of the work than the Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queen's University in Belfast, with its superb custom-built acoustics and speaker system capable of integrating the voice and electronics. Composed as a six-part 40-minute piece, the first section consists of gently introducing you into the sound world of a live vocalisations with a few echoing pre-recorded layers. The piece develops across each of the six parts, a low subsonic electronic boom introducing a drone like electronic backing in the second part, integrating and building with the layers and echoes of the multiple tracked voice recordings triggered by the singer.

Perhaps the layering of elements in Brian Irvine's musical-theatre piece Where We Bury the Bones was still in my mind from a performance at the Lyric Theatre the previous evening, but there seemed to be a similar searching quality to the work using considerably fewer elements, seeking not necessarily to reconcile the various layers of the voice, but to find a connecting theme that allowed all of them to co-exist and express itself in a way that words alone would be inadequate to describe. Gradually however, midway through the piece, a phrase formed from the vocalisations; "I am here now". Not an answer, not a revelation, but an acceptance of the only essential truth that one can say for certain about anything, that you are here now in the present.

There is comfort in that thought, but - how can I say this without sounding like I am denigrating the work? - you could almost see it as a meditative piece that brings you to place of self-awareness of being here and now in the present. Being Ed Bennett however the purpose of The Wilderness Voices is not to take you to a comfortable soothing place, and the fact that a piece of experimental contemporary music can be described as beautiful need not suggest that it is in any way compromised. The subsequent section may find that rhythmic pulse of affirmation, but soon the voices start to lose their coherence again - at least as far as words and rhythm are concerned - and the electronic interference takes over to a level of dissonance that comes close to feedback. Low feedback that eventually subsides, the emotions checked, a reassertion of control, the work ending with the formation of a new realisation and truth that needs to be similarly confronted and accommodated, the single word 'you'.

External links: Ed Bennett, Queen's University Belfast

Bennett - All Earth Once Drowned (Belfast, 2025)

Ed Bennett - All Earth Once Drowned

Brilliant Corners Festival, Belfast

Ed Bennett, Cherry Smyth, Xenia Pestova Bennett, Kate Ellis, Tom Challenger, Martyn Sanderson, Neil McGovern, Barry O'Halpin, Damien Harron, Steve Davis

The Black Box, Belfast - 2nd March 2025

It's probably a sign of the times, but recently there seems to be an upsurge in contemporary composers taking an interest in and having a greater engagement with pressing matters in the world today. That at least has been my recent experience with Northern Irish composers, looking at the state of the world from a local and universal perspective, whether it be the specifics of the political and social climate of this province (Anselm McDonnell's 'Politics of the Imagination' or Conor Mitchell and the Belfast Ensemble) or the environmental issues facing us all. This year's Hard Rain SoloistEnsemble's Ink Still Wet programme saw a whole host of new commissions taking nature as an inspiration, not so much to highlight climate crisis specifically, as much as to remind us of the importance of nature, its structures and how it literally affects everything around us. There can surely be no more pressing issue that needs to be addressed or at the very least highlighted.

Ed Bennett, originally from the seaside town of Bangor in Northern Ireland, has also recently recorded an album with Kate Ellis of the Crash Ensemble, Strange Waves, where he notes how "the sound of waves has been ever present in my life". If you didn't know Ed Bennett, you might think this work with a solo cellist would be a minimal affair, but typically of Bennett, while wanting to retain and highlight the evocative qualities of that instrument, he has Kate Ellis play eight cellos. Not all at once evidently, but using multitrack recording with the composer providing additional field recordings and electronics. A single cello wouldn't be enough to connect with the sheer vastness and incomprehensibility of the sea or characterise his own personal relationship with it. And perhaps eight cellos could only take that so far because the sea has again proved to be the inspiration for Bennett's latest work, All Earth Once Drowned.

And indeed Bennett takes his exploration of the importance of the sea to himself, and to us all, much further in this latest work, commissioned by Moving on Music and the Arts Council NI and presented in the 13th edition of Northern Ireland's Brilliant Corners Jazz Festival. Can you really integrate a new music composition into what is primarily a jazz festival? Well, yes, especially since the festival incorporates boundary stretching avant-garde, experimental and improvised music as part of the programme. Although composed and played from a score, Bennett’s Decibel Ensemble does it all, drawing on musicians from a jazz and improvised music background as well as contemporary classical and experimental musicians. It's a crossover of disciplines and styles that is essential to the purpose of this work and how Bennett wants to treat the subject.

The chief motivation for All Earth Once Drowned lies in texts written by Northern Irish poet Cherry Smyth. She provides a reading of the texts here at the performance of the work at the Black Box in Belfast accompanied by Bennett's score, and with that vocal element to the fore the subject and content of the work is much more upfront. It's about the beauty of the sea, the majesty of the sea, the unknowability of the sea and the destruction of the sea. "The sea is shut?" Cherry calls out in astonishment at one point in the fifth section of the six part 70 minute piece, and then repeats the phrase in increasing indignation and disgust, an expression of sheer disbelief that something as immense and vital and as part of everyone's life as the sea can be, and in some places has been, has been placed off limits due to environmental pollution.

Confronted with the immensity of the subject, not just the mystery of the seas but the potential destruction of the seas, Bennett accordingly upscales the instrumentation and the sound world from already expansive use of eight cellos in Strange Waves, employing his Decibel Ensemble for All Earth Once Drowned. If you've heard his Decibel Ensemble work before, you will know what to expect. If you haven't, the name gives you a clue. It's a ten piece line-up that is required for this work in performance at the Black Box, the stage of the venue unusually extended to accommodate the ensemble - and even then it was a tight fit. The instrumentation includes two saxophone players, trombone, guitar, cello, piano, percussion, drums and vocals, with Bennett himself conducing and managing the electronics. It has a tendency to get very loud but exploits the full dynamic range that the ensemble offers across the whole work.

It needs that kind of instrumentation for the immensity of the subject; the sea, its importance, its mystery and its many moods. Sometimes the brass front line of Tom Challenger, Neil McGovern and Martyn Sanderson sounds like the roar of the sea or the blow of the fetch, sometimes like distant foghorns carrying across the water, Barry O'Halpin's guitar providing textures, Xenia Pestova Bennett's piano sunlight and splashes rippling on the water. Damien Harron on percussion and Steve Davis on drums were capable of whipping up a storm out of nowhere. Davis did much the same with his own Stephen Davis Unit at the Brilliant Corners festival last year with a likewise counterintuitively roaring depiction of nature inspired by the Wicklow mountains in The Gleaming World. Throughout however it's again Kate Ellis’s cello playing that provides the rhythmic force of the tides, the hidden undercurrent, constant and insistent, its sad theme slowing and fading as the sixth part draws to a close.

Although composed there would appear to be a degree of openness and improvisation in the performance, which again is in accordance with the unpredictability of the seas. You would get that anyway with the individual qualities of the performers and the interaction between them, as well as the unpredictability of what happens in a room full of people. There was an energy to the live performance at the Black Box that has to be felt between the performers and the audience. The ensemble could however probably have done without the unexpected intervention of the fire alarm going off at the start of the sixth section, shutting down the lights and the power. It wasn't as if content the piece and its message needed any assistance in raising the alarm bells than the ultimatum already delivered emphatically by Ed Bennett, Cherry Smyth and the Decibel Ensemble.

External links: Brilliant Corners, Ed Bennett

NI Opera Shorts

Various - NI Opera Shorts

NI Opera, 2012

Fergus Sheil, Rachel O’Riordan, Giselle Allen, Alex Connolly, Doreen Curran, Paul Carey Jones, Mary McCabe, Eamonn Mulhall, Aaron O’Hare, Gemma Prince, Marcella Walsh

The MAC Belfast, 29 June 2012

Our Day by Conor Mitchell and Mark Ravenhill.
Jackie’s Taxi by Ed Bennett and Stacey Gregg.
The Girl Who Knew She Could Fly by Christopher Norby and Frank McGuinness.
Driven by Deirdre McKay and Richard Dormer.
May Contain Flash Photography by Brian Irvine and Owen McCafferty.

The most ambitious project undertaken yet by the recently formed NI Opera, following an award-winning season that wasn’t exactly short of innovation or experimentation - NI Opera Shorts is a bold venture into the risky territory of contemporary opera. Commissioned as part of the London 2012 Festival celebrations around the summer Olympics, NI Opera Shorts consists of five new short opera works - each running for no more than 15 to 20 minutes - showcasing the work of five local composers, written with local, UK and Irish playwrights. Despite the considerable differences between them in terms of approach, style and tone, there was however a remarkable consistency and coherency that arose out of bringing them together in this way, a fact undoubtedly due to a large extent to the creative team’s vision of the concept and the exceptional performances of the singers and the Ulster Orchestra.

Each of the five short works however has its own dramatic impact, particularly when condensed down into the highly-charged form of the opera short. Our Day by Conor Mitchell and Mark Ravenhill has perhaps the most intense experience in terms of its subject and how it relates most directly to the Troubles, but it’s also extraordinarily ambitious in how it concentrates all complex history and emotional content of that experience into one day and into 15-20 minutes of musical and vocal expression. Dealing with the reaction of one family to a British soldier found wounded on the street, the fear, suspicion, hatred and pain is felt on both sides, mixed in with deeper natural human feelings of grief, loss and compassion that have been suppressed or twisted beyond all recognition. Ravenhill sets this one moment of concentrated feeling moreover on one day in 1972 - at the height of the Troubles when, like that famous Christmas football match on the WWI trenches, all Northern Ireland stopped and came together to celebrate the Olympic gold medal win of Mary Peters, a positive moment of beauty, amazement and achievement that throws the twisted reality of what is happening on the streets into perspective.

The raw emotion of that moment is ratcheted up to an almost unbearable level of tension - I could feel myself clenched up in my seat - as guns are waved and shot, as voices are pitched against each other in hatred and fury almost to the level of a scream, with Conor Mitchell’s discordant and aggressively disturbing atonal accompaniment matching the extremity of all those complex, contradictory feelings compressed into such a small time-frame. It put me in mind of Strauss’ Elektra for the intensity of feeling, and dissection of moment-to-moment conflicting emotions, and I daresay you could even apply twisted family archetypes to the arrangement of the protagonists, so rich in allusion is the piece. A large part in putting this across relied on singers being pushed to their limits, and really, the work of Giselle Allen, Marcella Walsh and Eamonn Mulhall was extraordinarily powerful and genuinely chilling.

Ed Bennett and Stacey Gregg’s Jackie’s Taxi is, by contrast, much more up to the minute with the everyday reality on the streets of contemporary Belfast. It may throw in all the expected topical buzzwords of Facebook, blogs and references to Steve Jobs, but it does so in a way that is specific to present-day Belfast - or at least certain parts of it. I never thought I’d see the day when Belfast hoods, millies and spides would appear on an opera stage, but Jackie’s Taxi successfully manages to do that, and do it in a naturalistic way that doesn’t feel too forced or over-dramatised. The language is appropriately as colourful as the subject matter. Sung in English, in chanted lines with strong Belfast accents, it wasn’t always easy to follow the narrative context - something to do with a taxi driver who makes a few drug deliveries on the side complaining about the hazards of her profession and the standard of her clientele - but musically, with Ed Bennett’s Steve Reich-like percussive rhythms, Jackie’s Taxi captured the Belfast beat much better than any of the other pieces, without having to resort to evoking folk or traditional arrangements. In the music, you can sense the pulse of Belfast, the tension and aggression, the humour and the tendency to enjoy a good moan and it fitted perfectly with the use of language and the content, the staging and choreography ensuring that the piece functioned fully in operatic terms.

I felt that this comprehensive operatic dimension that was evident in the first two pieces, was missing from Christopher Norby and Frank McGuinness’s The Girl Who Knew She Could Fly. McGuinness is one of Ireland’s finest playwrights, and his evocation of two parents commemorating the death of their daughter at the site where she jumped to her death from a motorway bridge was beautiful in its concision as a short drama piece. The monologues of the two characters interweave without ever fully connecting, reflecting how each of them is caught up in the torment of their own shattered lives, caught up in a dance of death and despair that holds them together yet keeps them separate. Those sentiments are expressed just as lyrically in Christopher Norby’s Avro Pärt-like score, but it all felt too interiorised and the whole piece never came together in operatic or dramatic terms, the two singers - finely sung by Doreen Curran and Paul Carey Jones, the voices beautifully arranged for the score - looking out for the most part towards the audience over the motorway. The sound of passing cars and the daughter’s voice added additional textures and tone to the work, but if there was a wider dimension to the relating of the circumstances to the daughter’s death, it was difficult to grasp from this single performance.

Evidence however that a dramatic monologue can be operatically expressive (in the manner of Schoenberg’s monodrama Ewartung or Frid’s The Diary of Anne Frank) was provided here by Deirdre McKay and Richard Dormer’s Driven. Like Mitchell and Ravenhill’s Our Day, the success of the work lies in how it bridges the complex relationship between the interior and the external, between what drives one to unfathomable actions in response to a distorted view of nature that has been corrupted by war. Driven relates to the figure of Blair Mayne, a highly-decorated soldier who survived dangerous WWII operations and was named as a threat by Hitler, yet this man comes to meet his death driving a red Riley car at speed down a road in County Down. Entering into the mindset of Mayne, the inner conflict, the nightmarish visions that plague him, his attempts to come to terms with his experiences was powerfully expressed by Eamonn Mulhall and vividly put across through his pacing on the all-purpose staging through effective choreography and lighting. The whole piece was given a perfect musical expression in McKay’s driving Nyman-esque chugging cellos and blaring brass that blended the furious churning of memories and impressions with the momentum of the speeding car. An occasional lilt of traditional Irish arrangements could be detected underlying parts of the score - the only work to draw from such sources - but it was used meaningfully and lyrically in the context of the work. For a monodrama to work so well, it demands a compelling performance on the part of the singer and the orchestra and Driven was consummately dramatic, operatic and emotionally charged.

Drama was predominately to the fore in Brian Irvine and Owen McCafferty’s May Contain Flash Photography, but coming from the pen of one of Northern Ireland’s foremost and most successful contemporary playwrights, that’s not unexpected. The strength of McCafferty’s writing here is the same as in his regular dramas, finding an authentic tone and language for the province’s sense of humour and tying it into a peculiarly absurdist outlook that reflects the self-awareness of hopeless cases who would like to believe that somehow they can overcome the odds - as many have done - but somehow realise the dream itself can be more than enough. Here in May Contain Flash Photography, a family watch a curious alternate-reality lottery where the balls relate to emotions, colours and materials rather than to numbers, hoping that the winning combination will change their lives. The humour is a little hit and miss (and not always each to catch on a single run-through), but humour is difficult to achieve in an opera in any case, particularly in such a short piece. It’s fairly ambitious however to attempt this with a relatively large cast of six characters, all of whom have distinct dreams and expression, but the interaction was exceptionally good. Musically, I wouldn’t have thought a Britten-like style of scoring would have worked in such a context, but Brian Irvine fitted the musical arrangements to the drama very well, the composer particularly strong in bringing the whole range of voices, feelings and overlapping monologues together into a harmonious whole.

What was most memorable about the NI Opera Shorts however wasn’t the quality of the individual contributions, but the sheer variety and the broadness of the scope that they covered. It was thrilling to see the diverse range of ideas that these individual voices brought to the project - an impressive showcase of contemporary Northern Irish opera work that one would rarely have the opportunity to hear performed - but despite the wide spread of musical and dramatic approaches, there was actually a wonderfully complementary diversity to the project as a whole that reflected so many aspects of Northern Irish history, personality and culture. A lot of credit for allowing that to happen has to go to the NI Opera’s artistic director Oliver Mears for pulling this hugely ambitious work together and to the stage director Rachel O’Riordan, who met the considerable challenge of making one stage set suit five very different works, but also found the most effective means of putting each of them across in terms of mood and theatrical presentation.

The highest credit of all however must be given to Fergus Shiel and the Ulster Orchestra who brought these short intense works fully to life in all their rhythmic and lyrical complexity as well as their often difficult serial discordance, switching tone between one work and the next with scarcely a pause other than to adjust to the varied instrumental requirements of each piece. In the relatively small venue of the newly opened Belfast MAC, the audience were able to witness the intricacy of the orchestra’s performance of those arrangements, and it was impressive to behold. The intimacy of the venue (one hopes it will be used again for similarly smaller-scale and even local operatic works in the future) means that there is nowhere to hide any weaknesses, and in this respect the singing of such difficult works must also be judged to be of the highest order, with some fine new talent on display as well as the reliable strengths of Doreen Curran, Paul Carey Jones and Giselle Allen. I’ve yet to be disappointed by anything that the recently formed NI Opera have put on, but with the opening work of their second season, they continue to take on fresh new challenges. Their most ambitious project so far, NI Opera Shorts was another resounding success.