Introduction
On 16 October 2021, the Icelandic Baroque ensemble Nordic Affect premiered Quartet for a Landscape at Mengi in Reykjavik. The piece consists of long, sustained notes on the Baroque strings, punctuated by single pitches played on the harpsichord. The aim of this sparse texture is to allow the microscopic qualities of the instrumental timbres to speak and be heard; slight, almost imperceptible changes in bow pressure, the quality of the musical intervals, the ringing-out of the gut strings’ natural overtones, the idiosyncrasies of the harpsichord’s timbre and decay, and so on. Nordic Affect’s performance at Mengi was recorded and on 2 November 2021, I played this recording, at dawn, through a single speaker installed at the rock formation Stanage Edge on the border of Derbyshire and South Yorkshire in England. This installation was filmed.
In the film, a single speaker stands, static, in the landscape: a familiar yet radical object, reproducing the frozen moment of the live musical performance. Traditional boundaries are eroded and categories interpolated: the technological sits (alien) within the ecological; the ‘cultural’ exists against, and in the context of, the natural; the contemporary and dominatingly ‘modern’ (speaker) is dwarfed by the ancient (rockface); environmental ‘noise’ is reconstituted as a part of the musical. Nothing happens in the film. Instead, a space is opened in which the rate of our noticing can change. Incremental alterations in light and shade, in colour, and in sound (both ‘natural’ and ‘musical’) can be perceived. The rock formation is a refuge. Our view (in the film) encompasses only stone, foliage, earth, and sky, solid and material as the wood, gut, hair, and steel perceptible in the sound of the Baroque instruments. Finally, as the ensemble’s music becomes gradually higher and quieter (transitioning onto the glassy, natural harmonics of the violin, viola, and cello), the sounds of wind and birds remain, outlasting and quietly permanent.
Quartet for a Landscape is a work about noticing, and about the entanglement of the historical, technological, and ecological. This noticing is imperative in a time of accelerating ecological destruction. As Anna Tsing et al write in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, ‘Somehow, in the midst of ruins, we must maintain enough curiosity to notice the strange and wonderful as well as the terrible and terrifying… such curiosity … means working against singular notions of modernity [asking:] How can we repurpose the tools of modernity against the terrors of Progress to make visible the other worlds it has ignored and damaged… [to] notice landscapes of entanglement, bodies with other bodies, time with other times’.
Historical instruments, as I will attempt to show in this paper, are well placed to facilitate such noticing. Revival, after all, is a productive mode that challenges flatly teleological notions of ‘progress’. Further, historical instruments sound something of their natural and material qualities. While they are bound up with institutions of history and ‘culture’ (museums, the conservatoire, and so on), they are able to reappropriate that historicity and cultural meaning in new contexts. Their quiet, fragile sound mediates – through close recording – a sense of intersubjectivity; of the body of the player, the moment of playing, and of our experiences as bodied listeners.
And so, Quartet for a Landscape navigates these ideas. What follows is writing about the composition, performance, installation, and film that constitute the work so far. I hope to avoid what Paul Carter calls ‘poetic writing about art, which merely perpetuates the process/study split’ (Carter, 2004). Rather, this multimedia essay is a continuation of ‘the work’. Sections contain either writing (both autoethnographic and exegetic) or digital media, and can be navigated in any order. This process of navigation, interaction, reconstitution, and understanding is, itself, a part of ‘the work’.
