The Hex Project

This is in its very early days. In two parts.

Part One. A series of songs, based on the wonderful folk song archive on Wiltshire Council's website. At the turn of the century, a fellow called Alfred Williams went round collecting Wiltshire folk songs. But he was a poet and interested only in the words, so he didn't make a note of any of the tunes. So there is this vast archive (check it out here) of (mostly) words without tunes. No doubt there are some people who will be able to work out what tunes went with some sets of words, folk songs (being no respecters of county boundaries) tending to appear in variant forms all over the country. But from my point of view, this is a vast collection of lyrics waiting for tunes to be put to them. A gift to a songwriter, especially a lazy one. I am mining this collection. Avidly.

But being the slightly autistic, system-obsessed freak that I am, it is not enough just to write a few songs based on these lyrics. Oh no. There has to be some kind of structure. So my plan is to write, based on lyrics from the Williams collection, six songs in each of the six modes (alright, alright, I know there are actually seven modes but I can't get my head round the seventh at all, it sounds pretty weird, and medieval music theorists ignored it as well), giving a total of thirty-six songs in all. I am about four songs into this project. As I say, early days. Now I have this lovely website, I might try and make a rough recording of some of them and post them here.

Part Two. Find other musicians to form a sextet to play these songs. (See what I mean about being system-obsessed.) This band will be called The Hex Sextet (or maybe The Sex Hextet, or is that a whole other kind of band?). I would love it if this band can also be actors, so we can perform Lydia Shears live. That would really make my day. We'll see how that goes.