#707: A requiem for Sycamore Gap

Robert MacFarlane has finished work on “The World Tree”, the libretto for a long choral work originally inspired by the felling of the Sycamore Gap Tree.

Matthew Whittall and Robert Macfarlane’s large-scale choral work The World Tree traces an arc from the Ice Age to the present day from the perspective of a single tree, and stands as a powerful statement against humanity’s callous exploitation of nature.

The CD came out on Friday this week....

In 2025 Robert MacFarlane  wrote:

My text is currently being set to music by the Finnish-Canadian composer Matthew Whittall, and will have its premiere in Finland in November this year, performed by the @helsinginkamarikuoro and conducted by Nils Schweckendiek. We expect it to travel subsequently, including for performance on or near Hadrian’s Wall itself.

In the text, I pull the temporal lens right back to the re-beginning of trees and forests at the end of the Pleistocene & the beginning of the Holocene: the first movement is called “Glacial Maximum”. I am interested as much in the longue durée of human-forest relations in Northern Europe as in the acute intensity of the Sycamore Gap Tree’s felling, and the outpouring of love, grief & anger it prompted. The final movement, which borrows its title from the great Ursula Le Guin, is called “The Word for World Is Forest”, and imagines a future forest flourishing on the uplands where that one tree once stood.

Between these two movements come eight others with titles such as “Wildwood”, “Song of the Axe” and “Pollen: a Polyphony”. Matthew is working at white-hot intensity on the score as I type, and the early music I am hearing from him is extraordinary.

And Whittall said:

“I didn’t want to produce simply yet another contribution to the climate debate. 

My original idea was to write some kind of nature-related work, a setting of an original English text, and back in 2019 I contacted the English writer Robert Macfarlane, whose natural-philosophical works I have long admired. To my great excitement, he was keen on the idea of a collaboration, but then the pandemic came along and a whole array of other things got in the way too, and when we eventually returned to the idea in 2023, the iconic Sycamore Gap Tree on Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland, England, had recently been illegally felled by a pair of eco-vandals. In light of this, it felt logical to let the piece form a kind of requiem for the tree in particular and man’s often destructive relationship with nature in general. 

When Macfarlane showed me the first drafts of the text, we quickly realised that the overall piece needed a deeper approach, even if its central idea remained the same.”