Work
Horizon Fields
for piano trio
About
Horizon Fields takes its themes from the large-scale art installation Horizon Field Hamburg by Antony Gormley. Comprising an enormous steel platform suspended 7m above the ground of the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, its mirror-like black epoxy surface created striking reflections of both the hall’s architecture and the city beyond. For visitors who walked across it, this provided the illusion of teetering on the surface of a deep, dark (perhaps frozen?) lake. Furthermore, any sudden or coordinated movements from the participants would also initiate a gentle rocking motion in the entire structure.
Gormley’s themes of floating planes suspended in architectural space, mirror-form reflections and gentle oscillations have been freely interpreted to form the core sonic ideas and musical behaviours of this piano trio. The piano is the initiator of movement in the structure, sending out small ‘ripples’ of colour that the strings sustain, echo, vibrate and pulse. A static C-sharp returns throughout the work as a pedal—a flat plane or ‘artificial horizon’, if you will—around which the techniques of echo, reflection/inversion, interference and repetition form an ever-intensifying musical expressivity.