Dreams of Peace & Freedom : Part I
Albion
Words & Music by Sue Casson
Magna Carta
Words from the conclusion of the Magna Carta
Music by Sue Casson
David Maxwell Fyfe :
Robert Blackmore
Lead singer : Lily Casson
Played and sung by Sue Casson
Recorded at
Lana Banana Studios
Engineered by Henry Willard
Albion Forlorn - a closely-blended 3 voice reverie inspired by Natural Law with words and music by Sue Casson leads into her musical setting of a passage from the Magna Carta interwoven with excerpts from a speech made by David Maxwell Fyfe to the American Bar Association in 1957 when they visited Britain to unveil a plaque to Magna Carta at Runnymede.
Part I of Dreams of Peace & Freedom explores Maxwell Fyfe’s life-long dedication to Natural Law.
We could find no sole poem to set, so gathering images from the Shakespeare he loved and the atmosphere of the Waverley storybook, I blended them with lines from John Donne (with which he is quite likely to have been familiar) adding some of my own as a bridge to make an unaccompanied three voice reverie.
We first introduced this setting of lines from Magna Carta (translated from the original Latin) in our Edinburgh show, the year before the Magna Carta 800 celebrations. The speech Maxwell Fyfe made to the American Bar Association, included a quote from Horace, a Greek statement of the power of Natural Law.