Work
An Axe for the Frozen Sea
for orchestra
Films, Audio & Samples
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About
There were three distinct images in my mind while writing ‘An Axe for the Frozen Sea’: small unspecified creatures, trapped, moving under an opaque film; Caspar David Friedrich’s painting ‘The Sea of Ice’, which strikingly depicts a frozen shipwreck obscured under giant shards of ice; and the slow creaking of rigging on a large sailing ship on a cold winter’s night. All three are imaginary. I have never been on such a ship or seen an iceberg (much like Friedrich, who, without the advantage of photography, observed river ice instead, which is why he painted the ice so strangely). The title, ‘An Axe for the Frozen Sea’, is a quote from one of Franz Kafka’s letters.
KM