A Guide to 'Triquetra' - 1. Creating The World

The best stories start with "once upon a time" and this is no different.
Once upon a time, there was nothing, so says the Prose Edda, before it begins to describe the creation of the world, from the meeting of the realms of Fire and Ice and how that created the germs of Life in water droplets through to the fallen giant Ymer giving his very flesh and bones to the creation of the material world. If that wasn't enough, Othin casts down the Midgard serpent Jormungand, that gigantic offspring of Loki, into the ocean around Midgard, surrounding this new earthly creation by biting his own tail.

18th Century title page for the Prose Edda

This story, written down in the 13th century, is believed to have strong roots back into earlier older stories, passed via oral traditions, from the pre-Christian period of Scandinavian history.
For us, and for Triquetra, we wish to charter the story arc of the change from paganism to Christianity and so found this a natural starting point. Such dramatic storytelling from the quill of the 12th-13th century skald Snorri Sturluson also finds a natural mirror in the interpretation of meteorological and cosmic phenomena of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

The Chronicle is a determined attempt to document the history of the English people. Begun in the late 9th century during the reign of Alfred the Great, himself a champion of the ideals of literacy and the spreading & storing of knowledge, it was maintained long after his passing and contains a detailed and colourful interpretation of the perceived ill omens & final devastating effects of the first viking raid on Lindisfarne in 793 AD.

Lindisfarne Abbey today

This is the first point England really felt viking presence and raiding activity and as such, we felt it worth drawing real life and myth together, the fiery dragons in the sky and the dragon headed ships coming from overseas.

To get a good detailed idea & explanation of the sheer power of the Old Norse language here as well as the Old English counterpart, I recommend this recent BBC Radio 3 broadcast on 'Nightwaves'. This short piece (starting at 22:45) features extracts from the Triquetra sound piece alongside Dr Eleanor Barraclough's excellent piece on the sound of spoken Norse and Old English word, how colourful and descriptive they are, hinting at what makes them compelling for so many people.

Triquetra at the Illuminating York Festival

Triquetra: The Shield Wall

Ross Ashton (of The Projection Studio) and myself were delighted to have won a commission from the Illuminating York Festival this year to bring the early medieval period of Scandinavian & English history to life.
For followers of my blog and my work, you will know that this is not unfamiliar territory for me - 'Contours', a quadrophonic sound installation focusses on the sounds of the languages of Old Norse, Old English and their modern descendants in Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, English and Icelandic. It also worked specifically with the poetry of the Poetic Edda and Beowulf to construct a sonic atmosphere that worked with the roots of skaldic storytelling and ritual. The aim was to focus on the father of the Norse gods, Othin/Odin as the generator of myth, story & tradition through a digital oral tradition.

Triquetra takes a different view. This time we position ourselves firmly in history to look at the fascinating story of Harald Bluetooth, Sweyn Forkbeard & Canute the Great, the three kings of the Jelling dynasty who oversaw enormous political and religious change amongst the lands that connect to the North Sea.
I decided from the outset to return to the original languages of Old Norse and Old English and I feel enormously privileged to have been supported by volunteer academics and students from a number of universities, who really wanted to support this project. The knowledge base this country holds of this material is rather humbling and worthy of mention, so my thanks go to the universities of Aberystwyth, Cambridge, Sheffield, Warwick and York for being the home and teaching centres for such an amazing period of literature and history. Named thanks will come to those individuals later!

I decided to let the texts themselves tell the story and when you listen you're as likely to hear history chronicles as well as poetry, not to mention some solid sagas from Iceland. It took 6 months of research and reading to select the parts that referred to the story specifically, such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as well as passages which capture something of the attitude and philosophy of both the vikings and the Anglo-Saxons they set out to plunder and rule over!
I was able to build on the knowledge base I had built through 'Contours' and take it out even further. The sharp-eared amongst you will also hear me re-visit certain fragments of early music that were heard in Contours, re-arranged and placed into a new context within this piece.

The audio experience, I hope, is a rich one.
The visual experience is a striking one and already many images of the projection are circulating through all forms of media.

I finish this post with some links to some of those images and articles before I present you with my online guide to Triquetra & its history for the curious!

I do hope those who are able to come to York over the next four days will be able to experience this piece which is very special to both Ross and myself.

Triquetra projected onto Clifford's Tower.

Written article on some background to how Triquetra came to be

PDF brochure of Illuminating York 2013

Illuminating York website

To see more pictures, go here for Ross' photostream of The Projection Studio works.

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You can also follow Ross Ashton on Twitter by searching for @projstudio

It's Because I'm A Londoner: Olympic Projections on Parliament -1948

This post is a long time in coming but I feel the timing is right. As Olympic fever has now settled in 2013, we are perhaps in a better frame of mind to listen to this period of history with more clarity and given the current economic situation, more poignancy.
If you recall, last year I spoke about the process through which I created the 1908 section of the London Olympics son et lumiere on the Houses of Parliament.
Part of that piece, created in collaboration with The Projection Studio, was also dedicated to the 1948 Olympics and it is this that I wish to start covering here.
The 1948 section and other related recordings I recreated are indicative of the power of the audio archive, and it is to archives and archivists everywhere that I dedicate this post.

Clement Attlee with future voters, from Sunday Times article

1948 felt like another world after studying 1908. Unlike 1908, more original audio material existed and tracking this down and hearing it formed a core part of my research. 1948 falls into an era before television was embraced by the majority of the population, when cinema newsreel was a key source of news, where radio brought entertainment, music and the opportunity to hear the voice of royalty or of the Prime Minister. We had gained access as a population to the voices of well known figures.

Against our modern daily diet of soundbites and spin, the Home Service broadcast by the Prime Minister Clement Attlee offers a distinct contrast (see bottom of post for link).
He speaks with a certain honesty, the truth about the nation having little to give at that time, about the difficult ravages of war but spoken by someone who had been there experiencing it along with everybody else. And yet with all that, also spoke about how Britain wanted to welcome the Olympic athletes and provide them with everything they could. An enormous challenge, eloquently expressed to the nation, on the day before the Olympics began.

A decimated City of London, January 1942

kindly shared here by the Imperial War Museum

London was not given the Games in 1948 because they had money and facilities to stage the event, but because despite it all, even with rationing and after a war, they were prepared to use and give everything they did have, no matter how small. The Games were nicknamed the Austerity Games as a result. This section of the sound piece then told the story of triumphing against the odds and didn't hide the struggles involved either. It was human will that made the 1948 London Games.

I wanted to hear from those same people directly involved and so used recordings from various sources: interviews with athletes, those who staged the Games, newsreel coverage, even sports commentary from one of Fanny Blankers-Koen's gold medal winning races and that wonderful radio broadcast by Clement Attlee, addressing the nation and the world beyond it.

Musically, I made a deliberate choice to underline their stories with swing music. It is a genre of music distinctly from that era - we are all familiar with its sound. But, when I considered it further, when heard beside those daily lives of difficulty and loss, I felt it revealed something of human resilience that the most popular music at that time was up tempo, up beat music to dance to.

Here is a link to the Clement Attlee Home Service broadcast:
The 1948 Radio Broadcast of Clement Attlee welcoming the athletes to Britain
To provide an wider context to his speech and the character expressed, it is worth noting that it was only 23 days before this broadcast that the NHS was founded by Attlee and his government. This move radicalised health care within the welfare state system. Coincidentally, that system is generally accepted to have begun the same year as the previous London Olympics, in 1908, with the passing of the Old Age Pensions Act under Asquith's Liberal Government.

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