ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author hears the fuller presence of the temple’s sonic room, augmented subtly by the serial rooms around it, as though the event is happening inside another, which in turn exists within another and so on, rather like Matryoshka dolls. The idea behind the work was actually to collaborate with a small section of landscape — in this instance, a Northumbrian burn — and out of that collaboration to create a composition. In the years up to his death in 1994, he developed and tended a garden on the shingle beach, a postmodern and context-sensitive place that even today forms an oasis in an eerie landscape where the detritus of the Cold War decays amidst tide and weather-shifting circumstances. Composers have long sought to turn landscapes into auditory forms through music, sometimes reflecting the visual, at others directly seeking to create a sonic version.
