Between the Ears - looking forward to 'Horse' ...
Post categories: Between the Ears, Radio 3
|17:05 UK Time, Wednesday, 23 November 2011
The Uffington Chalk Horse
Radio 3 listener blogger Rosalind Porter looks ahead to next Saturday's Between the Ears, recorded at the Free Thinking Festival ...
It was a rare treat to have the opportunity of watching the live performance of Between the Ears' in Hall 2 at The Sage Gateshead. Entitled Horse – the work was inspired by the famous Uffington White Horse chalk carving in Oxfordshire which is believed to have been constructed more than 3000 years ago.
Horse consists of words by Northumbrian poet Katrina Porteous and sound by renowned synthesizer pioneer and composer Peter Zinovieff, who has taken the noises of a Cornish chain ferry and remixed them to provide the musical element of the piece. It is scored for two voices (Katrina Porteous and actor/directr Steve Robertson) and 2 computers.
About half an hour in length, this piece was a truly dramatic experience, a journey through the mists and myths of history. Zinovieff’s sound world was frequently choral and vocal in effect, totally belying its mechanical origins. At another point an initially innocuous clunking noise gradually developed in importance to vividly evoke the horse’s hooves clattering over the ground. The two narrators faced a demanding routine involving evocative whispering, declamatory shouting and the highly effective fast repetition of words between them. Particularly effective was the contrast of text and music used both lyrically and percussively for heightened emotional impact. The sheer intensity of Horse demands total involvement from the listener.
This was an extremely virtuosic performance and will certainly make for gripping radio when it is broadcast on 26 November at 9pm on Radio 3. Highly recommended!
Comment number 1.
At 21:19 27th Nov 2011, gala wrote:Deserves listening to in the dark with the wind howling round.
But why is my enjoyment tempered by knowing that it was written by a poet from the other end of the country? When so much in the write up is made of a sense of place, knowing that there are Northumbrian dialect words in here takes me away from it.
Sorry.
One of my favourite places in the world.
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Comment number 2.
At 18:45 29th Nov 2011, northcountrypoet wrote:That's an interesting comment. Don't really agree though. Most of the dialect words I could make out come from Anglo Saxon which was used throughout England in the past. Maybe the idea was just to give the feeling of an older language? If poets should only write about the places they come from, or in the language of the places they write about, does that go for the times they come from, too? An interesting question.
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