Riccardo Pes
Cellist • Composer
SCOTLAND ARTISTIC RESIDENCY - ARTS COUNCIL ENGLAND
Cello between landscape, tradition and environmental research.
Music and Nature
Cello Solo Draws
Attention to Climate Change
About the project
Supported by
Music & Nature is an Arts Council England supported artistic research project developed across Scotland’s Highlands and coastal landscapes.
Inspired by the relationship between music, place and environmental awareness, the project brings together solo cello performance, composition, fieldwork and natural soundscapes. From the Sycamore Gap Tree to the North West Highlands, Riccardo Pes explores how classical music can become a way of listening to landscape, memory and the urgent fragility of the natural world.
This project was made possible thanks to the support of Arts Council England and the National Lottery.
THE ORIGIN
Lament for the Tree
In 2023, following the unlawful felling of the Sycamore Gap Tree in Northumberland, I composed Lament for the Tree as a response to a place of deep collective memory.
Suggested by my dear friend Brenda Neece, the piece draws on the Gaelic tradition of the lament — a form connected with grief, remembrance and healing. Through the cello, I wanted to give voice to the loss of a landscape that had touched people across the UK and beyond.
The response to the piece opened a wider artistic question: can music carry the memory of a place? Can sound describe a landscape almost visually? That question became the seed of Music & Nature.
Located in Northumberland, near the borderlands between England and Scotland, the Sycamore Gap Tree became for me a symbolic threshold: between memory and landscape, grief and creation, place and sound.
The Journey
The residency
Between September and October 2024, Riccardo Pes travelled across Scotland to explore the dialogue between folk traditions, climate awareness and the natural world.
The residency became a space for listening, performing and composing in response to landscape — allowing the cello to become both an instrument of memory and a voice for environmental reflection.
Kylesku
Kylesku had lived in my imagination long before I first reached it. In 2011, I wrote a piece inspired by the traditional Scottish tune The Waters of Kylesku. The composition, 2 maybe 100 down in Kylesku, was written as a two-part canon for an orchestra of 110 cellos and later performed in Rome.
At the time, Kylesku felt almost unreachable — a distant, imagined place shaped by sound, memory and fascination. More than a decade later, through the Music & Nature residency, I found myself travelling through those very landscapes with my cello.
What had once existed only as a musical image became a real encounter with place. Returning to Kylesku was not simply a geographical journey, but a way of reconnecting with an earlier intuition: that music can sometimes anticipate the landscapes we are destined to meet.
The Unesco Geopark
The North West Highlands Geopark offered one of the most powerful natural settings for Music & Nature: a remote landscape shaped by ancient rocks, lochans, mountains, coastal formations and long stretches of silence.
Its geological depth and vast open spaces became an essential part of the creative process. Rather than acting simply as a backdrop, the landscape became a place for listening — a space where the cello could respond to wind, water, distance and the physical presence of the land.
During the residency, this environment helped shape the relationship between sound, memory and place at the heart of the project. The Highlands became both a source of inspiration and a form of artistic dialogue, inviting reflection on nature, fragility and the long timescales of the earth.
Travel Log
Field videos
Scotland
Nordic Breath: A Cello’s Ode to the Winds of Stac Pollaidh
THE WATERS OF KYLESKU at Kylesku
'Malcolm Ferguson' Atop Mountain Suilven (Scotland)
"Off I Go" (Official Music Video) | Debut Track from "Mystic Trails"
Tour 2025
A journey across Scotland and the UK, bringing Music & Nature from the landscapes that inspired it to local communities, cultural venues and concert spaces.
The 2025 tour followed the thread of the residency through places connected to landscape, memory and environmental awareness — from Northumberland and Kylesku to Durness, Ullapool, the Isle of Skye and London.
