Quartet for a Landscape

Quartet for a Landscape is a film documenting a site-specific sound installation. The work began as a composition for the Icelandic baroque ensemble Nordic Affect, premiered at Mengi, Reykjavik, on 16 October 2021: music of long, sustained notes, punctuated occasionally by the harpsichord, in which the microscopic qualities of the instrumental timbres can speak and be heard. On 2 November 2021, a recording of this performance was played back, at dawn, through a single speaker installed at Stanage Edge, a rock formation on the border of Derbyshire and South Yorkshire. The film - a documentation of that installation - is the final work.

The film investigates the boundaries between the technological and the ecological, the cultural and the natural, the contemporary and the ancient. A single static speaker - a familiar yet radical object - reproduces the frozen moment of live performance within the landscape, dwarfed by the rockface; environmental 'noise' is reconstituted as part of the musical. Nothing happens in the film. Instead, a space is opened in which the rate of our noticing can change: tiny, almost imperceptible alterations in light, colour, and instrumental or natural sound become perceptible. The view encompasses only stone, earth, and sky — as solid and material as the wood, gut, hair, and steel of the baroque instruments. As the ensemble moves gradually higher and quieter, onto the harmonics of the open strings, the sounds of wind and birds remain: outlasting, and quietly permanent.