Foghorn Requiem

Commissioned by The National Trust in 2011 Foghorn Requiem is a landscape-interactive musical composition for the Souter Lighthouse Foghorn, highlighting the passing of the foghorn from the British coastal landscape. Foghorn Requiem is performed by the ships horns of a flotilla of sixty vessels on the North Sea, three onshore brass bands and the Souter Foghorn itself. Foghorn Requiem pursues an inquiry into the complex interactions between sound, atmospheric physics and landscape, and it’s impact on the experience of the listener. It investigates the foghorn as a sound associated with time and distance that is uniquely shaped and encoded by the changing atmospheric conditions and innumerable echoes and reverberations of the particular geographic landscape through which it travels. Extending methodologies developed in ‘Black Shoals’ and ‘Most Blue Skies I+II’, Foghorn Requiem involves complex atmospheric, acoustic and landscape interaction modeling to incorporate atmospheric conditions and the physics of distance, space and landscape directly into the musical composition. Custom software simulates all of these effects, allowing the composer to work with a new musical element; incorporating the reverberation of the landscape as a timbral element in the composition. The final composition features synchronized, controlled acoustic blending of sounds originating miles apart, with conventional local sounds. Foghorn Requiem was the flagship event for Festival of The North East. It was viewed by an estimated audience of more than 8.000 and received considerable nationwide and international press, radio, television and peer reviewed coverage. On June 22nd 2013, more than 50 ships gathered on the North Sea to perform an ambitious musical score, marking the disappearance of the sound of the foghorn from the UK’s coastal landscape. Foghorn Requiem was performed by three brass bands, ships at sea and the Souter Lighthouse Foghorn. Conducted and controlled from afar, ships sounded their horns to a score taking into account landscape and the physical distance of sound. The composition, performed live to audiences on the coastal cliffs, was played across a space of several miles around Souter lighthouse.