Accrete (2021)

Installation for the London Festival of Architecture 2021

As the culmination of my year-long residency with the architecture practice, Mary Duggan Architects, I created a new musical work translating the history and topography of a 13th Century bell-tower site in the City of London into music for multi-tracked Medieval rebec and two sopranos. Taking the practice’s renovation of the site as its starting point, the project sought to distill the building’s various timeframes, narratives, and histories into music.

The building’s history fascinated me. A church was established on the site at Martin Lane around 1250. Partially destroyed in the Fire of London in 1666, that building was replaced by a Huguenot chapel, itself demolished and replaced by the current building in the 19th century. These layers of history, typical of London’s dense and changing topography, appealed to me, as did the interior of the tower - architecturally the most redolently liturgical of the current building’s features and, acoustically, a peculiar space; tall and narrow.

To make Accrete, I first measured the frequency response of the bell-tower room; testing to see which pitches resonated more fully, and which were dampened by its acoustic. This formed the basis for the harmonic material of the piece. Then, the music’s structure was dictated by the schedule of Mary Duggan Architects’ works on the site - periods of activity and inactivity, with trades (translated into harmonic areas) overlapping or dovetailing one into another. Layers of history, ancient and contemporary, were therefore accreted in the work. The music consists of dense layers of Medieval rebec (an instrument popular around the time a church was originally established on the site), that gives way only fleetingly to a moment in which two sopranos incant a 13th Century Old English poem.

For the London Festival of Architecture 2021, we presented Accrete in a series of intimate installation-performances in the bell tower that inspired the work. Ticket sales raised money for Help Musicians UK. Below is a short film documenting the event.