Clapping Music & the potential for Hammers…
I’m working on developing a composition for Hammers – it’s all very tentative at the moment, but I’m working with the idea of conversation or communication, between two. It’s provisionally called Hammer Chorus…
I’m taking my cue from memory – when I visit the bog these days there’s always some point where I very strongly recollect the sounds of the hammers that brought the walkway into being. There would have been people dispersed across the tracks of the walkway, the initial skeleton, laid down onto the heavy bog oak sleepers. Small teams would choose their spot, and begin laying down the planks – hammering & chatting into the day. So there would be a lovely echoing of hammering, an accidental percussion, canoning into the atmosphere – and at some moment or other, for some reason or other, all of the impacts would merge into one beat, just a moment. The beats would all move forward toward that centre point, and then move away… and off into the apparent randomness again.
I really want to explore this phenomenon – and I think this really is quite a big idea, one that will demand a bit more time & learning on my part. But for now I’m going to experiment with the idea of simply picking a couple of counting patterns and over laying them… I have the help of a very fine jazz musician, and while we were recently chatting about all of these ideas he reassuringly mused:
” Things happen at different rates, they always come around eventually”
Steve Reich seems to in tune with this sentiment:
Though I’m not aiming for a Steve Reich level just yet!
