I Hate the Lake District by Charlie Gere

Author:Charlie Gere [Gere, Charlie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781912685110
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2019-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

This notion of the musicality of stones reminds me that in the museum in Keswick in the north Lake District there are a number of ‘lithophones’, or ‘rock harmonicas’. One, dating back to 1785, ‘consists of 16 stones embracing two diatonic octaves plus one note’.14 These stones were found by a local publisher of maps, Peter Crosthwaite. Eight were discovered on the bed of the river Greta and eight on nearby Skiddaw peak. Some decades later another native of Keswick, Joseph Richardson, produced a larger lithophone, with an eight-octave range. By the time he had finished building his instrument in 1840 it had reduced his family to poverty, but he was able to recover financially by firstly touring the North of England, then playing in London, including a performance at Buckingham Palace in 1848, in front of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. He and his family went on to tour all over Europe and nearly made it to the United States, though this fell through because of the illness of Robert, the youngest and most talented of the family band, who subsequently died. There were other ‘rock’ bands from Keswick, such as that of Daniel Till and his sons, who did tour America and whose Musical Stones are now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

In the early 2000s, Keswick Museum was approached by Grizedale Arts and asked if they would collaborate with New York musician and artist Brian Dewan. With the help of Jamie Barnes, the duty officer at Keswick Museum, Dewan composed an hour-long suite of seven ‘movements’ for the Stones. This was performed on a special frame and sound box using thirty-one of the sixty-one stones, on the shores of Coniston Water, across from Brantwood, John Ruskin’s house, as part of the Coniston Water Festival in 2005, which had been revived by Grizedale Arts. The performance, which was amplified, could be heard across the lake and in Coniston, and also on a specially set up short-wave radio station. One of the results of this revival of the Stones was to be featured in a BBC documentary presented by Evelyn Glennie, entitled, predictably perhaps, ‘The World’s First Rock Band’, and which also featured one of the oldest lithophones from a museum in Paris.

That the performance was directed towards Brantwood was not an arbitrary decision. Ruskin was fascinated by rocks and stones and was a keen amateur geologist, among other things, and was so impressed by Richardson’s Musical Stones, remarking that they had given him ‘a new musical pleasure’, that, in 1884, he commissioned a set to be made for him by William Till, Daniel Till’s son. However, other sounds made by tapping rocks were far less welcome for Ruskin. ‘If only the geologists would leave me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses’.15

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