It is David Lumsdaine’s 80th birthday this year. Lumsdaine was born in Australia and moved to the UK in 1952. The Durham Miners’ Gala is a large annual gathering associated with the coal mining
heritage/miners’ trade unionism. It is locally known as "The Big Meeting".
Big Meeting is an extraordinary collage of voices, speeches, songs, brass bands and their electronic transformations, which David Lumsdaine constructed from location recordings of the 1971 Durham Miners’ Gala – a record of one of the last of the annual meetings before the county’s pits were closed. Over the last forty years David Lumsdaine has composed a body of strikingly original music, including Aria for Edward John Eyre (recorded on NMCD007), Hagoromo, Mandala 3, Bagatelles, Mandala 5, Garden of Earthly Delights and Kali Dances. His work is influenced not only by the music of other traditions and cultures, but also the music of the natural world. At its heart, his music embodies his experience of the Australian landscape - the variety of its shapes, rhythms, colours and textures: the vitality of its creatures; its sudden violence; its sense of unlimited space and time.
His passion for the natural world and its conservation expresses itself more literally in his archive of birdsong and recorded soundscapes, many of which have been released on CD.
