When You Need a Kindred Spirit: Promoting Song Settings of Poems by L.M. Montgomery
You might recognise the name L.M. Montgomery, but if not, you’ve likely heard of Anne of Green Gables, one of her most famous and beloved stories. I’m a big fan of Montgomery’s work, but working on a commission featuring her poems earlier this year has been a wonderful way to discover even more of her writing, deepening my appreciation for her beautiful talent.
I had the absolute pleasure of working with Project Mauve on a bespoke commission to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of L.M. Montgomery, and a tribute to her work. For this wonderful project I worked on the photography, videography, and the creation of a promotional plan and digital album cover.
I was also very kindly invited to the recording studio (which the audio production graduate in me absolutely loved) to see the process of the recordings in action.
In this guest blog post, Ruth Carlyle from Project Mauve reflects on our time of working together and the value of finding a kindred spirit…
Sometimes you need a kindred spirit to work with you on a project – someone who understands what it is that you are trying to achieve and believes that you can make it happen.
I confess to having had a love of the works of Lucy Maud Montgomery since I was a child. I first read them with my maternal grandmother. When I got married, part of my bonding with my new family was to read the Anne of Green Gables series with my mother-in-law and her mother. We exchanged copies of the books and talked about the stories and the life reflections they inspired.
With Montgomery’s writings, it is not just the witty, heartwarming and sometimes tragic tales within her novels, but the music of her language. Anyone who has read her books will have heard the crash of Anne Shirley’s slate over Gilbert Blythe’s head, or trembled at the shattering of the Penhallow jug. As readers, we hear the lilt of the breezes blowing through the trees and stop to listen to the waves on the shore.
Montgomery’s poems are less well known and I wanted to use the 150ᵗʰ anniversary of her birth to arrange for some of her poems to be set to music. I approached David Barton and Tim Knight, both of whom accepted commissions to write new song settings of poems. Promoting recordings of L. M. Montgomery’s poems is a somewhat niche activity. I felt that I needed to work with someone who had an appreciation (and ideally a common love) of L. M. Montgomery’s works, a love of music and a love of the natural world that Montgomery evokes in both her poetry and prose. In short, I needed a kindred spirit.
Happily, I found Clementine Rose. She was happy to provide me with a bespoke offer. In my case, I needed:
A promotional plan
Photography and videography for social media
A short video, using music from one of the new recordings.
Clementine worked with me to check what I needed. She applied her photography and videography skills to generate high-quality images. She wrote a plan outlining a wide range of promotion ideas and produced a beautiful video to the specification that I needed.
If you would like to hear the EP of L. M. Montgomery song settings, you can find The Old Home Calls on all commercial platforms and also free listening on Soundcloud and iTunes, which you can find here.
In keeping with Montgomery’s interest in the natural world, Clementine has kindly agreed to continue to work on photography during the coming year to help to promote the work through the seasons. A kindred spirit indeed!