Yorkshire inspires Ben’s musical journey
University of Huddersfield Master’s alumni and conducting tutor Ben Crick recently played a key role at the opening night of the prestigious new Bradford Live entertainment venue.
Ben conducted the Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra for the live event, featured on the BBC’s The One Show, that also included a varied array of talent including poet Ian McMillan, renowned tenor Aled Jones, ex-Bradford City footballer, manager and TV pundit Chris Kamara and the BBC’s Bantam of the Opera choir.
Under Ben’s baton, the orchestra performed A Northern Score, with words by Ian McMillan and scored by Ben, who hails from Highburton a couple of miles from the university.
For Ben the evening was the perfect culmination of welding his passion for music, his love of Yorkshire and a desire to produce something substantial from his MA, which he has recently completed at the University of Huddersfield.
“Ian had written these poems about 20 individual people from the North, so I wrote this 50-minute symphony which goes under his words,” says Ben.
Chris Kamara and Aled Jones appeared on stage with Ben Crick at Bradford Live.
The Bradford Live venue was packed for the opening event on Yorkshire Day
Ben is a conducting tutor in the University of Huddersfield's acclaimed music department.
"What is fantastic is this is joined up thinking between academia and industry. I didn't want to do this ivory tower stuff, where you do these academic qualifications that never see the light of day. It was linked to the industry, and I also wrote with Stewart Worthy, my supervisor.
“We performed it with Skipton Camerata, which I started 20 years ago, and then it was recorded for Radio 3, and it’s also on Spotify. Then we were invited to perform it in this great new venue, on Yorkshire Day, so my academic pursuit ends up being played for 3,000 people as part of the City of Culture celebrations.
“It's how academia should work. Academia should create stuff that then goes into the real world.”
Ben’s love of music stems from lessons at school where he began to learn the cello. A degree from the University of Leeds followed, and persistence paid off when he started the Skipton Camerata with backing from the Skipton Building Society. An earlier collaboration with Ian McMillan yielded Ice Cream – The opera, and Ben has also staged a Yorkshire dialect take on The Barber of Seville.
He became a BBC Music Fellow, and his relationship with the University of Huddersfield began when music lecturer David Milsom, a member of the Skipton Camerata, suggested he help out back in his hometown.
"It is fantastic that over 2,000 people bought tickets to see classical orchestral music and a lot of new composition, in the middle of Bradford. It's sort of counter-intuitive, people won't think Bradford can do that, but our area, Yorkshire, can indeed do that and that's the game we have to play."