https://www.phf.org.uk/artist/karine-polwart-and-pippa-murphy/
Karine Polwart and Pippa Murphy are a co-composing partnership that explores landscape and memory, mythology and scientific inquiry, via folk song, spoken word, sound design, electronics, and formal orchestrations. They’re fascinated by ritual and resonance, and by blurring the lines between speaking and singing, acoustic and electronic, and live and pre-recorded sound.
Pippa is a composer, sound designer and producer who combines orchestras, singers and instrumentalists with ambient soundscapes and bespoke sound palettes. Specialising in film, theatre, installations, live-electronics and multimedia collaboration, her work has been received throughout the world, in art galleries, theatres, opera houses, concert halls and public spaces as well as on TV and digital media.
Karine is a Scottish singer, songwriter, storyteller and composer whose work encompasses traditional and original song, spoken word, poetic musical essay, audio documentary and community singing. Her compositions have entered the repertoire of UK choirs, and she has written for film, theatre, and animation.
Polwart and Murphy create work together that cannot be made in isolation, drawing on their distinctive musical practices and skillsets. Together, they won Best Music and Sound at the Critics Award for Theatre Scotland 2017, for Wind Resistance. Their companion album A Pocket of Wind Resistance was shortlisted for Scottish Album of the Year 2018 and won a New Music Scotland Award for Innovation. Recent commissions include Seek the Light (2022), a suite for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and Windblown (2021), a Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh residency to mark the felling of its longest-lived plant.
We’re delighted to be the first ever joint recipients of a PHF Composers Award. Our collaborative writing over the past seven years has pushed us beyond our separate genres and skillsets as makers, bringing a lot of curiosity and joy. But the challenges of the past few years have sidelined our joint creative practice in favour of pragmatic, solitary, brief-led work. The award is an unexpected gift of breath and time for us - time to explore, re-charge and be kind on our bodies too. We’re hugely grateful and excited.
WINDBLOWN, 2021
A standalone piece which also forms part of a larger commissioned work for the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. 4 minutes 46 seconds duration (1 minute 30 seconds preview). Windblown was installed in RBGE in summer 2022 and has been performed multiple times on Karine’s UK tour dates with Dave Milligan (who features here as pianist) at venues including Glasgow City Halls, Bristol St George’s, Saffron Hall and Sheffield Crucible.
THE MOOR SPEAKS, 2017
A track from the 2107 album Pocket of Wind Resistance. 4 minutes 37 seconds duration (1 minute 30 seconds preview). This work reflects Polwart and Murphy’s interest in litany and ritual, and was written not for live performance, but as a companion piece to Wind Resistance, a live theatre show which had theatre runs in Edinburgh, Perth, Glasgow, Belfast and Dublin.
LIGHTSEEKERS, 2020
A ‘postcard’ narrative work in progress which includes a layered vocal section rooted in Latinate names for lunar features. 5 minutes 37 seconds duration (1 minute 30 seconds preview). Polwart and Murphy’s use of scientific Latin is a feature of several of their compositions, including a Sphagnum Mass (for mosses). This ‘postcard’ approach also informed their co-composition for the three-part BBC Radio 4 series, Seek the Light.
LULLABY FOR A LOST MOTHER, 2017
Featuring harp played by Corrina Hewat, this song is one of Polwart and Murphy’s more traditional, ‘songlike’ works which departs from the folk and spoken word style the duo is best known for. 1 minutes 39 seconds duration.