Jem Finer
For:
Score for a Hole in the Ground
Find out more by visiting:
www.scoreforaholeintheground.org
New Music Award 2005 winner: Score for a Hole in the Ground by Jem Finer
“A former Pogue is defying his critics to show the way forward for contemporary composers.” Suzy Klein, New Statesman
Transporting a ten metre high steel structure up a steep incline in the middle of wood, and then installing it over a seven metre deep well, may not at first glance appear to be a musical endeavour. But the well is an acoustic chamber, and the steel structure is a horn.
This is Score for a Hole in the Ground by Jem Finer, winner of the 2005 New Music Award, a ground-breaking initiative launched by the PRS Foundation in 2004.
Since winning the £50,000 award in July 2005, Jem spent his time researching, designing and constructing this ambitious project, which was presented to the public on Sunday 24 September 2006 in King’s Wood, Challock, near Ashford in Kent (for details of the location, click here)
Looking like an outsized flower reaching up through the trees, the horn amplifies sounds from within the well: tuned percussion, bells and chimes are played by drops of falling water.
“Can a hole dug in a forest be a musical instrument? Yes.” Richard Morrison, The Times
Jem describes the project as “both music, and an integrated part of the landscape and the forces that operate on it and in it, a ‘post-digital work’ relying on nothing other than the planet and its weather systems to create a composition of indeterminate duration and score.”
The creation of the work included the building of a dew pond and the excavation and construction of a 7m deep acoustic chamber. The use of the cylindrical chamber enables Finer to achieve the exact acoustic properties he requires. The horn has been made of corten steel with a shape modeled on an old gramophone trumpet, transported to the site on the back of a truck from Nottingham. Aesthetically, its colour and organic form harmonise with the beech trees of the forest.
Score for a Hole in the Ground serves as a stark contrast to our age of digital reproduction, which the New Music Award hopes will stimulate debate about the nature of sound and the boundaries of music.