A prom date

Elizabeth is an Associate Professor in Music Composition and Head of the Department of Music at the University of Nottingham. She joined the Department of Music in 2015.

How did your Proms commission come about?

In early 2024, I was approached by the BBC Concert Orchestra and BBC Radio 3 to compose a new work for the first BBC Prom to be held in Nottingham, and I gladly accepted.

Can you share your insight on composing a piece of music?

When I was invited to compose a new work for the first BBC Prom to be held in Nottingham, I knew immediately that I wanted to celebrate the city’s heritage as a global capital of lacemaking and industrial innovation through my composition.

Before I began composing, I researched the Nottingham lace industry and aimed to learn as much as I could about lace machinery and what it was like to work in a lace factory, including the industrial soundscape. I spoke with former and current lace professionals and experienced lace machines in action at the Nottingham Industrial Museum and Cluny Lace, the last Leavers Lace Factory in the UK, which is based near Nottingham in Ilkeston.

At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the 1760s, Nottingham inventors introduced machines to knit lace. During the nineteenth century, Nottingham innovators refined more advanced machines capable of twisting threads together to create lace in the same way that it is woven by hand.

By 1841, Nottingham ‘Leavers’ lace machines combined these twisting machines with ‘Jacquard’ machines, which enable translation of complex lace patterns encoded in a sequence of punch cards. These sophisticated (and enormous!) Leavers lace machines are still considered some of the most complicated textile machines ever produced. There are up to thirty-two processes involved in designing and producing lace with a Nottingham Leavers Lace machine, all of which were undertaken by dedicated workers. 

I was intrigued by the idea that there is a connection between a lace factory, where a range of skilled workers come together to produce intricate lace, and the orchestra, which brings together a diverse array of highly-trained instrumentalists to produce intricate music. Both the lace trade and orchestra were booming at the same historical moment. I decided to translate aspects of machine lacemaking into my composition:

1. As you move from the Jacquard punch cards at one end of a Leavers lace machine along the twisting mechanisms where the lace is produced, you encounter different sounds. My interpretation of these mechanical sounds can be heard particularly in the percussion section in my composition, propelling the orchestral ‘machine’.
   
   
2. A melodic fragment first articulated by the principal trombone in the opening, my musical ‘Jacquard punch card’ pattern, eventually evolves into a ‘lace waltz’ twisting its way up the orchestra, emerging out of the mechanical sounds.
   
   
3. When a rack of lace was completed, a brass bell on the machine would ring. As the Nottingham lace industry declined through the twentieth century and factories shut down, the bells stopped ringing.
   
   For me, there was a poignant connection between these brass bells and the ‘Little John’ brass bell, the deepest bell in the UK, which has rung out the hours from Nottingham Council House since 1927. I heard echoes of the lace factories as I listened to the Council House bells ring in my flat while I composed. Bell sounds frame the composition.

Is it extra special to be able to compose for a Nottingham-themed and Nottingham-performed Prom?

I grew up in Los Angeles, but a circuitous life journey brought me to Nottingham nearly a decade ago, when I took up my post at the University of Nottingham and moved into a flat on the edge of the historic Lace Market. Lace Machine Music is my love song to the vibrant, noisy, inventive city that has become my home.

I think many people do not appreciate the global significance of the Nottingham lace trade. From 1750 to 1900, the population of Nottingham increased from around 10,000 to 240,000 as the lace industry boomed. Global appetite for Nottingham lace and machinery led to an influx of foreign merchants, workers, and government officials and the establishment of multiple foreign consulates within the city.

Nottingham lace has featured in royal wedding dresses and continues to adorn couture fashion to this day. Beyond fashion and decoration, UK machine-made lace has been used in shoulder implants, MRI machines, the International Space Station, the balloon for the Mars lander, 3D holographic projections and military decoy equipment. Computer programming pioneer Ada Lovelace, (estranged daughter of Nottingham poet Lord Byron), was famously inspired by Jacquard punch cards.

Historically, lace industry workers, who were predominantly women and included children, often worked and lived in very challenging conditions. However, when I spoke to current and retired lace workers, they told stories about the friendships that blossomed in factories as conversation cut through the mechanical din. The different workers across the lacemaking design, production and finishing processes developed specialist skills, some requiring years of training. Many of these skillsets are now being lost.

Lace Machine Music is dedicated to Nottingham lace industry workers, past and present. Working together, they created lace recognised globally for its sophisticated beauty and innovative production methods.

I am particularly delighted that Lace Machine Music is set for premiere by the BBC Concert Orchestra. In 2023, the University of Nottingham and Nottingham Trent University began a multi-year partnership with the BBC Concert Orchestra.

As part of this partnership, the BBC Concert Orchestra has two residency weeks each year in Nottingham, which give university students a range of opportunities to see the orchestra in action, including opportunities to observe rehearsals, play side-by-side and compose new works for the orchestra. The Concert Orchestra has already become a vital presence in Nottingham's cultural life, and we are delighted that this Prom will provide a global platform to showcase our region.