And Then Some. Voices of Pevensey community fill St. Nicolas Church with the song to the Whale.
An extraordinary day in Pevensey on 23 August 2015.
People gathered at Normans Bay where the Pevensey Whale was beached, to watch Chris Watson, sound recordist with the David Attenborough programme, Life on Earth as he listened in and recorded the sound of the Sea.
At the historic 800 year old St. Nicolas Church in Pevensey in the afternoon, the community came together to record their ‘Song to the Whale’, the recording engineered and produced by Chris Watson and from Cambridge, the magical Rowena Whitehead, choir leader.
After the recording, there was a moment of shared silence and awe, witnessed by the walls and fabric of the precious church.
It was one of those moments that the 70 people gathered are unlikely to forget.
It is possible to share something of the story of the Pevensey Whale without a religious response.
Without question, whatever your faith or humanist sense of the world, that afternoon captured something special in preparation for the opening of Whale Hall in the summer of 2016.
The haunting beauty of the song cycle echoes down through history. Set inside St. Nicolas Church there is physical presence to the building that carries the sound like precious cargo.
The recording of the song to the Pevensey Whale was posted to Youtube (11 November), by the Cambridge University Museum of Zoology. It is proof of the magic and power of the Whale to bring everyone together in silent celebration and awe.
The ‘soundscape’ is to feature as part of the installation at Whale Hall. People entering the two storey atrium will look up and see the skeleton of the famous finback Whale suspended in mid air and hear the sound of the people of Pevensey and their ‘Song to the Whale’.
The YouTube sound segment ‘Song to the Pevensey Whale’ forms part of the documentation of the journey of the Pevensey Whale to Cambridge.
Simon Montgomery
editor, Bay Life
