- Venue
- Dorchester Abbey
- Location
Thin Air
Dorchester Abbey
23 May 2007
We aren’t used to silence, patience and reflection; aspects that places like Dorchester Abbey lend themselves to.
Thin Air very subtly inhabited the spaces at the east end of Dorchester Abbey. I explored the chalk paths of the labyrinth first, triggering thin, pure, voices, sometimes speaking, sometimes singing, sometimes repeated. The quest to find new sounds and combinations tempts you into a slow dance; stepping back and forth to see if you were the trigger, or someone else in another chapel, or if the repetition was pre-conceived by the composer.
At sudden moments sounds co-incide and become richer, multi-layered and very beautiful, with voices seemingly drawing from all around you. Just as you sense a pattern, it is gone.
Thin Air was just that; a delicate and elusive meditation on capturing an essence of life, its energy and its passing, particularly within this eight hundred year old building. Somebody in the visitor’s book talked glowingly of ‘pre-reformation polyphony’ but that seemed a very robust description of something very contained, minimal and feminine.
A part of me was disappointed – I had expected fuller stories, non-musical sounds, memories. But this was a very exquisite distillation of all this to single words, notes, angel sounds, and importantly, silence, that our movements through the space layered into music.
Seeking out new sound beams made all of us visitors explore and criss-cross the architectural space in a less linear way than we would normally. I became very aware of the many words around the building: graffiti and memorials that themselves, like the sound piece, are in the process of dissolving back into the stone. Recent hand-written prayers: “pray for him, that his struggle is at last successful”, “watch over them please, and my tiny angel now in your care”, give glimpses of the human emotion and anguish which is still being absorbed into the building.
A few weeks ago Taverner and Rutter debated on the Today programme whether one needed to be a ‘believer’ to compose religious music. Ottaway, is, like Rutter, I think an agnostic. Yet her music even, when seemingly random and participatory, seems to have an innately religious quality. There is a sense of a great humility to but also an unerring quest for some universal truth, which she seems most comfortable in exploring through a collective response in a particular place; a communal, ever-changing hymn to the human condition.
Jo Plimmer ã
