Article about Jem's Score for a Hole in the Ground project

[Zuzana]

Good vibrations
The Back Half
Suzy Klein
Monday 5th June 2006
New Statesman

Full URL

New Music - A former Pogue is defying his critics to show the way forward for contemporary composers, writes Suzy Klein

In the middle of the ancient forest of King's Wood in Kent, you can hear, if you listen closely, water slowly dripping. A pipe sits at the mouth of a ten-metre-deep chamber in the ground, and as the droplets fall and splash from it, they hit water bowls and tuned percussion buried within, ringing them like bells. Magnified via a seven-metre-high brass horn that sticks straight out of the ground and stands among the trees, the sound carries far into the wood.

This is the composer Jem Finer's latest sonic adventure, Score for a Hole in the Ground. As a founder member of the Pogues, Finer may have an unlikely pedigree as a champion of new music, but since leaving the band he has worked on ever more expansive projects. His acclaimed Longplayer, for instance, began on 1 January 2000 at Trinity Buoy Wharf in London and will continue, without repeating itself, for exactly 1,000 years. A mix of electronic and acoustic sounds, the piece is generated by a computer program written by Finer himself.

For his latest work, however, he has gone in the opposite direction, away from technology and towards a dependence on the natural environment. Many composers would baulk at the idea of using such uncontrollable musical materials as earth, gravity and water, but as Finer explained when I accompanied him on a visit to the site for the piece, it's all part of the fun of composing. "I enjoy the randomness of what might happen. A computer program will have glitches in it that I might not have foreseen; the water drips in this piece will be determined by forces other than me. But whether I'm working with a computer or with natural forces, I like the fact that it's a kind of collaboration."

Finer takes as his focus the idea of time and place, forging music bigger and more long-lasting than any human performer could sustain. Once it is completed this autumn, his mega-instrument for Score for a Hole in the Ground will continue to "play" until it naturally decays. In the interim, the trickles and sploshes of water, along with the noise of birdsong, leaves and wind, will become part of the landscape: mesmeric, meditative, elemental.

"I wanted to have a hole deep enough that it would take more than a lifetime to fill with drips," he says. "Score for a Hole in the Ground is both a piece in its own right and also a musical instrument."

Were this music to be found in a temple garden in Japan (its reliance on water draws heavily on Shinto and Buddhist rituals), it would be celebrated, even revered. But it is in a wood near Faversham and its composer is more Kentish Town than Kyoto; thus it has attracted its fair share of criticism. Last year, the proposal for Score for a Hole in the Ground won Finer the inaugural New Music Award, funded by the Performing Right Society Foundation. The prize was an enviable £50,000 with which to realise the project. Almost as soon as the winner was announced, however, Finer's piece was widely criticised for not being "real music". One Telegraph writer questioned whether there was any "music per se" in the New Music Award.

Creatively treating and arranging sounds is the defining feature of music, and to dismiss it as anything else is shockingly retrograde. It seems bizarre that more than 50 years after John Cage's seminal 4'33" (in which a pianist sits at the piano and plays nothing for precisely four minutes and 33 seconds), the debate about new music has not moved on. There is a tendency among some critics to be wary of the new, or to talk about contemporary music in such alienating terms that most people feel that it is not for them.

Since Cage, we have had the electronic music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, out-of-synch tape loops from Steve Reich, and pieces for laptops from Jennifer Walshe. Finer's work is a continuation of these exploratory approaches. As he sees it, Score for a Hole in the Ground "is, in a sense, a completion of a cycle that has seen the digitised exploration of sound and music return to its prehistoric roots - the harmonics of the environment". In other words, even holes in the ground owe a debt to musical precedent and tradition.

His critics would also do well to remember their music history. Let's not forget that Mozart (whose music seems to us the epitome of balance, harmony and classical elegance) was also, once, a cutting-edge composer. Operas such as Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro surprised audiences with their depictions of erotic love and sex. Many characters had at their core a violent conflict and psychological depth previously unseen on the operatic stage. Shockingly, four, five, six or more characters might all talk at once. This was alien, unknown and exciting new music.

Many will say that contemporary music is thriving in the UK, that our concert halls are full and our composers are writing world-beating new music. True, but go to a few new music concerts and you will see the same faces time and again. There is an audience, but it is not as large or broad as it could be. Yet go to the Mostly Mozart festival, or an opera at the Royal Albert Hall in London, and you will see a completely different crowd - a bigger and more inclusive group of people, brought together by their appreciation of something that to them is meaningful, moving, unthreatening and enjoyable. New music has not quite achieved the same relationship with the wider public. Several millions might have heard John Williams's film scores, but fewer have heard a note of John Adams or Harrison Birtwistle. Fewer still would recognise the names of contemporary British composers such as Brian Ferneyhough, Michael Finnissy or Thomas Adès.

Though it is vital to have a connection with our past through its music, it would be a mistake to neglect the music of our own time - particularly while we consume contemporary art, cinema and literature with such relish. New music can and should stand as an eloquent reminder of our potential and an exploration of the world we inhabit. In Finer's case, it also happens to be rather beautiful. New music is out there to be enjoyed by all of us: we just need to pause among the dappled leaves - and listen.

Score for a Hole in the Ground will be open to the public from September at King's Wood, near Faversham, Kent. [http://www.scoreforaholeintheground.org]

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© New Statesman 1913 - 2006

[CraigBatty]

So seriously, seriously cool....

[MacRua]

Good vibrations
The Back Half
Suzy Klein
Monday 5th June 2006
New Statesman

Either Jem works on time machine as well, or certain vibrations are too positive....

[CraigBatty]

Good vibrations
The Back Half
Suzy Klein
Monday 5th June 2006
New Statesman

Either Jem works on time machine as well, or certain vibrations are too positive....

SpoOoOoOoOky. But then, I'm 24 hours into the future (whilst still living 200 years in the past)... So now Agent Z has access to articles BEFORE publication, eh? Hmmm, sehr interessant.

[Zuzana]

So now Agent Z has access to articles BEFORE publication, eh?

Even before they are written, but hussshhh.

[Zuzana]

And one more on the same topic:

Jem Finer
Epic sound sculptor

Sunday June 11, 2006
The Observer
Sean O'Hagan

excerpt from Come on, feel the noise article - full article here

Jem Finer describes himself as 'a music, artist and composer', but that doesn't quite do justice to the ambitious nature of his recent work. Best known as the quiet man of the Pogues, he co-wrote many of the group's greatest songs and still plays banjo on their fitful live outings. A YBMA in spirit, if not in age, these days most of his time is taken up creating music of an altogether more conceptual nature.

His best-known work is the truly epic Longplayer, a 1,000-year-long composition that, as I write, is playing in a lighthouse in east London, and will continue to do so, without repetition, until 31 December 2999. It took four years to create the computer programme for Longplayer; his current project, Score for a Hole in the Ground, is very much a reaction to that often overwhelming undertaking.

'Longplayer involved four years of sitting in front of a computer screen using less and less of one's body,' he elaborates, 'and engaging less and less with the world. I came out of the experience wanting to do something that still dealt with time through music, but I wanted to do something more organic and unstructured this time around.'

Initially he had the inspired idea to build a huge hourglass several stories high, and let sand slip slowly though it on to an array of percussive objects. Again, the projected timespan was epic, but so too was the cost. He chose instead to go looking for a vacant hole in the ground, a disused mine shaft or nuclear waste silo, from which sound would emanate though a giant amplification horn. That idea did not work either. 'We looked at an 80ft-deep well and a 200ft-deep mine shaft but in both cases the acoustics weren't good. Now we are building our own hole in a wood owned by the Forestry Commission in Kent.' Finer has employed a team that includes a structural engineer, an acoustician and someone who goes by the nickname, 'Paul, the Human Digger'. The giant horn is being made by a company in Nottingham from long-lasting Cor-Ten steel, and, in its rusty state, will blend well with the local landscape whatever the season.

'It's designed to be unobtrusive in every way, so that the sound is ambient with the forest,' says Finer, 'The music will be produced by water dripping on to underground chimes, and emerge through this old-fashioned-looking horn that resembles the ones used by 78rpm gramophones.'

To ensure an ample supply of water, Finer has created a large dew pond of the kind that local farmers used to dig and line with clay. The basic principle is that the dew will seep through the earth on to the chimes, and the sound will then be amplified by the horn. 'It's based on the music made by water chimes in Japanese temple gardens and, though it is epic in scale, it should have a similar kind of intimacy. It's a piece of sound sculpture I would ideally like people to come upon while out walking in the woods. I want it to be beautiful and mysterious, almost organic. That's the most important thing.'
Sean O'Hagan

Jem Finer's Score for a Hole in the Ground will be presented on 24 September.

http://www.scoreforaholeintheground.org

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Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

[Zuzana]

Pop: Earth, air, water and Finer
The Sunday Times
August 20, 2006
Full URL

The former Pogues man Jem Finer is unleashing the music of the elements. Stewart Lee is intrigued

The musician and artist Jem Finer arrives in the car park of King’s Wood, near the village of Challock, Kent, on a wet Sunday afternoon in early summer. Deep inside the forest, on the side of a hill, is a 23ft-deep concrete shaft, constructed at Finer’s behest after he won a commission from the Performing Rights Society (PRS) for a piece called Score for a Hole in the Ground. It is raining heavily. Finer locks the boot of his estate car and puts on a cagoule. “Have you got waterproofs?” he asks. “It’s about an hour’s walk.”

I was lucky enough to be invited onto the judging panel last year for the inaugural PRS Foundation New Music Award. Finer, a former member of the folk-punk band the Pogues, was already familiar from his Longplayer project, a 1,000- year piece of music that rearranges itself, via computer software, in Trinity Buoy Wharf Lighthouse, Docklands. His new proposal included a crudely sketched drawing of water dripping down a shaft, hitting pivoted, resonating bowls and sending notes up into the ether through a giant brass horn. One proposed site was a remote, disused Staffordshire mine shaft, and there was something attractive about the idea of an abandoned industrial space being adapted in this way. Though he provided little scientific supporting evidence, Finer had thoughtfully sketched tiny notes emerging from the horn, so we knew the design would work.

We set off through the woods, already soaked. But why are we in Kent? “Well, I liked the idea of the mine shaft with a big brass horn coming out of it, like a sort of colliery band, and I found some amazing holes,” Finer says. “I looked down an 80ft well in Staffordshire, and the feeling of negative space was incredible, but when I leant over and shouted into it, the sound was sucked into the old bricks, like acoustic sponges. I panicked at that point and thought it wasn’t going to work.” Finer, who now has the air of a geography teacher who has lost his way on a school trip, gets his bearings before heading deeper into the wood. “Next, I looked down a 250ft lead mine. At the bottom, you could see water rippling, but again it was the same non- acoustic phenomenon. In the end, the decision was made for me. I would have to construct the sound hole myself.”

For Finer, the sudden change of direction wasn’t insurmountable. “One of the things I love is when you make plans for something, and when you’re in the process of carrying them out, unexpected things occur and the whole thing starts to develop a life of its own.” Finer’s team began to construct a shaft in King’s Wood, which already houses some site-specific sculptures commissioned by the Stour Valley Arts organisation. Finding your way through the forest to the sound hole is half the fun: the journey creates a mounting sense of excitement. As we crest a hill, the rain subsides momentarily and we see a steel plate lying amid the bluebells in a little clearing overlooking a valley. A sign reads: “Warning. Deep Excavations.” Deer shadow us in the woods.

We bend down to drag the metal cover off the shaft. “It’s very heavy. Pull it from one corner.” As the sheet scrapes the hole’s rim, the silo resonates reassuringly. “Hello, hello,” one of our little party shouts, as echoes of her voice bounce back. Stones and pebbles are dropped into the exposed corner of the hole, and thunder as they land.

As Finer watched the last of the concrete collars being lowered into the shaft, a tremor made him lose his balance; he remembers swaying uneasily at the edge of the 23ft drop. Though shaken by the experience, he is self-aware enough to find the idea of the conceptual artist falling fatally into his own hole darkly comic. “The first new thing,” he explains, “was having to make sure the hole didn’t get too full of water, so you get into real Stone Age plumbing stuff. But what have changed most are ideas about what the instrumentation would be. In the original proposal, it was going to be Tibetan singing bowls with water dripping into them, but I just got hold of a book called La Musique de l’eau, by an instrument-maker called Jacques Dudon, and there are some brilliant things in that.”

Beautiful though the site of the sculp- ture is, I miss the connotations of the original proposal. I liked the idea of reappropriating an industrial space. I liked the devotional aspect of the water striking the Buddhist bowls, reminded of Larkin’s line, “If I were called in/To construct a religion/I should make use of water.” But, following Finer’s law of unexpected consequence, the site seems to be constructing its own narrative, with its own unseen implications.

We walk up the hill a little. “It’s slippery round here — be careful,” Finer says. “Let’s see how much water is in the pond. Good. That’s a relief. It’s nearly up to the top of the pipe.” We’re looking at a low, clay-lined depression from which a feeder pipe supplies the hole. In Finer’s original proposal, rain was the source of the sound hole’s water. But, as the record summer temperatures have shown, we can no longer rely on rain. So, the team has constructed a dew pond, an artificial reservoir traditionally favoured by farmers of chalky landscapes such as those in which the wood is situated. On the way out of King’s Wood, we see a gen-uine ancient dew pond and the remains of prehistoric flint mines. Score for a Hole in the Ground suddenly begins to seem at home, part of a continuing process.

Nonetheless, it’s a long journey from the Pogues, isn’t it? “Not really,” Finer says. “In the Pogues, we took a timeless tradition, Irish folk music, and, hopefully, reinvigorated it, but it didn’t sound dated. After four years of programming Longplayer, I found myself consumed by digital technology, and I wanted to get back to a more physical involvement with play- ing music, to be involved with physical materials and the earth. I’m continually curious about music and sound and modes of composition.”

Last month, the giant steel horn was brought from a Nottingham foundry and installed in the hole. On September 24, Score for a Hole in the Ground will open to the public. Now, it’s time to trek back through the wet woods. “I feel very excited indeed,” Finer says. “This is actually happening. And it’s actually working. It’s not just leaking away into the ground.”

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Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Ltd.

[Michaelo]

Interesting stuff. Thanks Zuzana.
I think it should be great when he has finished.

[Christine]

And yet another long article here: http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/musi ... 222932.ece Well worth the read.

[Shaz]

And yet another long article here: http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/musi ... 222932.ece Well worth the read.

It's an interesting feature. Shame they used a picture of Terry, instead of Jem!

[Christine]

Good grief, the Independent ought to be ashamed of themselves. But how come you see a picture, and I don't?

[Shaz]

Good grief, the Independent ought to be ashamed of themselves. But how come you see a picture, and I don't?

I've got the print copy, not the online one!

[elf]

Did anyone see BBC Breakfast this morning?! There was a very short-but-sweet piece on the finished "Score for a Hole in the Ground" - it looks amazing!
There seems to be some more positive press coming out, especially this piece in the Guardian: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/culturevult ... e_gro.html

[Zuzana]

And in BBC news:

Water and horn make forest music
Tuesday, 19 September 2006
Full URL



An award-winning music and art installation that plays the sound of dripping water through a gramophone horn is on display in a Kent forest.
Jem Finer, an ex-member of The Pogues, won £50,000 to construct "Score for a Hole in the Ground" when he was given the PRS Foundation's New Music Award.

The 7m-high (23ft) steel horn at King's Wood rises from a shaft where water drips onto steel discs and blades.

People can see the "post-digital work" at the wood near Challock from Sunday.

Mr Finer has described it as "both music and an integrated part of the landscape and the forces that operate on it and in it".

He won the New Music Award in July last year, and has spent the intervening period finding a suitable location and then actually making "Score for a Hole in the Ground".

Japanese inspiration

The shaft, or "acoustic chamber", was dug and then reinforced with concrete rings.

It is topped with a dew pond which was lined with clay.

"Water's dripping [from the pond] and striking an array of percussive instruments," said Mr Finer.

His work was inspired by suikinkutsu - Japanese garden ornaments where water drips through a hole in an upturned pot and makes a ringing sound inside.

Charlotte Ray, from the PRS Foundation, said the King's Wood installation made "a special sound because it uses natural forces as the performers in this piece".

"As the seasons progress then it's always going to be different," she added.

[-nate-]

here's another, actually written by Mr. Finer:

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic ... 23,00.html