ARTISTS TALKING

Score For A Hole In The Ground, winner of the PRS Foundation New Music Award, follows Jem Finer’s earlier work, Longplayer (1999), a musical composition of precisely determined form and duration. Whereas Longplayer runs for 1000 years before repeating, Score... is of indeterminate duration and unpredictable form, generated entirely by the natural forces of rainfall and gravity. Its presence, in the heart of King’s Wood, Kent, is striking and elegant. Jem has suspended percussive instruments in a seven-metre deep hole in the ground. A dew-pond nearby collects atmospheric moisture, which slowly drips into the hole, striking the instruments as it descends. Emerging from the hole is a seven-metre high steel ‘trunk’ ending in an HMV-style gramophone horn, acting both as mechanical amplifier and visual signal drawing the visitor towards the piece.

Score... is an extraordinary and wonderful piece of work. As a ‘curator of time’, I had expected to muse on the indeterminate duration of the score, the complex timing of nature, the pushing back of temporal horizons using what Stewart Brand has termed ‘mechanisms and myths’. And I did think about those things, later, but my response in front of the piece itself was much more personal. I was expecting to hear Score... before I saw it, imagining a dramatic, stentorian presence amongst the trees. But at first I could not hear the sound at all, so I was forced to wait and think and look around, searching for the aural sweet-spot.

After a while I found it, at the base of the horn, which, instead of funnelling sound up and out, had drawn me in and down. It was a gestalt shift, like those ‘magic eye’ perceptual transformation pictures, and suddenly there was sound all around me, and what delicate and mysterious and eloquent sound it was. Jem had forced me to take time to experience his work, to slow down before hearing the elemental music of rain and dew and gravity and depth: to wait awhile. Score... made me think about my own time, and that is a thought I needed to have.