A unique listening experience on the moors

Keighley News features The Unthanks' take on Emily Brontë's poetry.

Brontë fans are being offered a unique listening experience as they walk across the famous moors above Haworth.
They will be able to hear songs specially created by leading folk group The Unthanks from poems written by Emily Brontë.
The Emily Brontë Song Cycle features musical versions of 10 poems by the writer of Gothic masterpiece Wuthering Heights.
It was written and recorded using Emily Brontë’s piano in her home at the Parsonage, by Unthanks composer, pianist and producer Adrian McNally, and performed with sisters Rachel and Becky Unthank.
The group were commissioned to create the ‘audio experience’ by the Brontë Society as part of a year celebrating the 200th anniversary of Emily’s birth.
Visitors to the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth can hear the song cycle from December 17, and can book in advance by visiting bronte.org.uk/whats-on.
The song cycle will also receive its live premiere at Leeds Town Hall on December 21 at a concert by the Unthanks.
The Emily Brontë Song Cycle, funded with support from Arts Council England, will be available on record from The Unthanks.
As the Brontë Parsonage is now a publicly-accessible museum, the writing and recording had to take place after nightfall.
Adrian McNally wrote the music for the whole record during his first evening at Emily’s piano, a rare example of an early 19th century five-octave cabinet piano.
The days of the residency were spent working on the songs on a German upright at nearby Ponden Hall - another house associated with the Brontë family - before testing his work in progress on Emily’s instrument at the museum each evening.
Several weeks later, McNally returned to the Parsonage with Rachel and Becky Unthank to record the songs, late into the night.
Kitty Wright, executive director of The Brontë Society, said: “This year we have celebrated the 200th anniversary of Emily’s birth with four stunning new commissions covering film (‘Balls’, Lily Cole), poetry (Patience Agbabi), visual art (Kate Whiteford), and now music.
“It is wonderful to bring the year to a close with this work by The Unthanks.
“The time spent by Adrian creating the song cycle has been a pleasure to witness as it came to life in the museum, bringing music back into the rooms where the whole family had enjoyed the same piano so many years ago.
“The link between Emily’s words and the wild surroundings of the moors has an eternal fascination for visitors and we look forward to how the song cycle and listening experience brings a new interpretation to the well-trodden paths around the area the Brontes knew so well.”
The Unthanks selected the Emily Brontë poems that spoke to them most, including ‘Shall Earth No More Inspire Thee’, ‘High Waving Heather’, ‘Lines (The Soft Unclouded Blue of Earth)’ and ‘The Night Is Darkening Round Me’. [...]
The Emily Brontë Song Cycle, subtitled Shall Earth No More Inspire Thee, is available from the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth from December 17 until March 31.
From now, people can pre-book to reserve headphones for the day they visit the museum.
They will experience the Emily Brontë Song Cycle while treading in the novelist’s footsteps through the churchyard and over the dramatic moorland she and her siblings were inspired by.
Taking in views of Top Withins, the ruined house location which many believe to have been Emily’s inspiration for Wuthering Heights, audiences will simultaneously journey through her poems and the landscape that inspired her, accompanied by this newly-commissioned music written and recorded on her original piano.
The song cycle will be available from The Unthanks under the title Lines - Part Three ‘Emily Brontë’, on ten-inch vinyl, CD and download, exclusively from the-unthanks.com and the Brontë Parsonage Museum shop from December 7. It will be on general release in other shops from February 22. (David Knights)

And more Emily Brontë-inspired music as Drowned in Sound looks at Kate Bush's first four albums.

Bush has always had a kitsch appeal that has a complicated relationship to her musical appeal, probably because it’s easy to understand the kitsch and difficult to really understand the music. I'm not sure I've ever really read anything that’s cracked the power of ‘Wuthering Heights’ (the song), but easy enough to comprehend ‘Wuthering Heights’ (the video). [...]
And ‘Wuthering Heights’, her debut single, most famous song, and sole number one, sounds borderline comical if you stick to the mundane facts.
You can call it a musical adaptation of Emily Brontë's sole novel, but is that really why it works? It’s easier to laugh it off as an eccentric endeavour than really interrogate its power, than admit the way she sings the word "window" is genuinely astonishing, than contemplate the fact she’s somehow drilled her way into deeper emotional chambers simply inaccessible by most artists. I think maybe the key to ‘Wuthering Heights’ - and most of her music - is that it goes too far: the voice, the dance, the subject matter; anybody else would have stopped way before; it’s Wagnerian in scale and intensity, only tangentially bound to the mortal form of a pop song. It’s beyond most artists’ imaginations to write this sort of stuff, and I think it’s beyond most writers’ imaginations to write about this sort of stuff. [...]
But detail and polish were always her thing, in a good way, and to say she'd bottled nothing of her youth would be wrong: both ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘The Man with the Child In His Eyes’ have a gorgeous gaucheness. At the end of the day it still just about nudges classic status, but it would be eclipsed soon enough (plus sue me but the ’86 ‘Wuthering Heights’ is way better). (Andrzej Lukowski)

And more Kate Bush on Lonely Planet:

Fans of the music legend Kate Bush have a chance to pick up some merchandise for a good cause at a pop-up shop in London.
The store will launch at Coal Drops Yard in King’s Cross and run from 5 to 9 December, with all of the profits from sales going to the national homelessness charity Crisis. Famous for hits like “Running Up That Hill” and “Wuthering Heights”, the new shop coincides with the release of newly remastered versions of her music catalogue and the publication of the lyric book ‘How To Be Invisible’ by Faber. If you’re looking for the perfect gift for a Kate Bush fan, the shop will be offering up the vinyl, CDs and book, as well as some exclusive special items. [...]
If you want to experience even more Kate Bush, she recently contributed to a permanent visitors trail connecting the Brontë sisters’ birthplace in Thornton, the Brontë family parsonage, and the Brontë Parsonage Museum at Haworth. (Alex Butler)

Daily Mail reports that,

Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas look passionate for each other in two new Vogue photos released after their splashy wedding in India [...]
And to celebrate their union, the two posed for Vogue's new January 2019 cover.
On Monday two new images of the power couple from the shoot by Annie Liebovitz were shared. The images evoked Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. (Sameer Suri)

Mystery Scene Magazine interviews writer Carrie Smith.

Who is inspirational to you as a writer? What other writers have helped you on your journey? I am a very eclectic reader, but some of the writers I tend to go back to again and again are Jane Austen, Margaret Atwood, Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre), PD James, Patricia Highsmith, and Agatha Christie. (Robin Agnew)

While Diario 16 (Spain) also interviews writer and translator Gloria Fortún:

Tu escritora preferida de todos los tiempos. Charlotte Brontë. (Carlos Asensio) (Translation)

Qué leer (Spain) interviews writer Santiago Posteguillo.

¿Qué lee en su tiempo libre Santiago Posteguillo, que no esté relacionado con su trabajo? Que no esté relacionado con mi trabajo como escritor, muchos libros para mis clases de literatura en la Universidad Jaume I de Castellón, donde imparto clases desde hace veintiséis años. Por ejemplo libros de literatura africana para mi clase de literaturas del mundo en lengua inglesa, u obras de Orwell para la clase de segundo de introducción a la literatura o releo a Hemingway, Oscar Wilde o las hermanas Brontë para la asignatura de cuarto. A parte, si puedo, leo novelas que escriben mis amigos escritores como Javier Sierra, José Calvo Poyato, Sebastián Roa, Margarita Torres, Jesús Maeso, Antonio Pérez Henares, Almudena de Arteaga, Luz Gabás, María Dueñas, etc. cuando puedo. Mucha novela histórica española. (MB) (Translation)

On BuzzFeed, you can find out 'Which "Wuthering Heights" Character You'll Marry Based On Your Random Preferences'. On The Sisters' Room, Maddalena De Leo discusses the meaning of birds in Wuthering Heights.

And let's end up with good news for Lily Cole's film Balls:

Balls is in Official Competition at next year's BAFTA-qualifying @LSFF and nominated for Best British Short! Congrats @lilycole and the cast and crew! https://t.co/3Z3LUn7Six #LSFF2019 #shortfilm #womeninfilm #filmfestival pic.twitter.com/HKapeJ9rQ9

— Fury Films (@furyfilms_ltd) December 3, 2018