Accrete

Accrete (2021) is a site-specific studio composition and sound installation for multi-tracked Medieval rebec and two sopranos, created as the culmination of a year-long residency with the architecture practice Mary Duggan Architects. The work is a sonification of a historic church site - The Old Rectory - in the City of London, translating the site's history and topography into music.

The work's harmonic material was derived from the measured frequency response of the site's bell-tower room, identifying which pitches its acoustic resonated and which it dampened. Its structure was mapped from the schedule of the practice's renovation works: periods of activity and inactivity, with individual trades translated into harmonic areas that overlap and dovetail. Layers of history - ancient and contemporary - are thereby accreted in the music itself: dense strata of Medieval rebec, an instrument contemporary with the site's original church, giving way fleetingly to two sopranos incanting a thirteenth-century Old English poem. The work was presented as a reel-to-reel tape installation in the bell tower that inspired it, in a series of intimate installation-performances for the London Festival of Architecture 2021. Accrete investigates how architectural acoustics, site history, and construction process can function as compositional determinants, and how historical instruments can be reactivated within site-responsive contemporary practice.