tuba and fixed media
9 minutes
Commissioned by Patrick Yeh
program note
“Ice has a memory. It remembers in detail and it remembers for a million years or more.
Ice remembers forest fires and rising seas. Ice remembers the chemical composition of the air around the start of the last Ice Age, 110,000 years ago. It remembers how many days of sunshine fell upon it in a summer 50,000 years ago. It remembers the temperatures in the clouds at a moment of snowfall early in the Holocene. It remembers the explosions of Tambora in 1815, Laki in 1783, Mount St Helens in 1482 and Kuwae in 1453. It remembers the smelting boom of the Romans, and it remembers the lethal quantities of lead that were present in petrol in the decades after the Second World War. It remembers and it tells — tells us that we live on a fickle planet capable of swift shifts and rapid reversals.
Ice has a memory and the colour of this memory is blue.”
– Robert Macfarlane, Underland (pp. 337-338)
The Blue of Time considers the densely layered, collapsed, and crystalline structure of ice and how it captures, stores, releases, and filters a diary of our planet. The electronics material of The Blue of Time was created through application of recursive recordings techniques within a tuba. Field recordings of falling snow were played into the bell of a tuba and recorded at the mouthpiece receiver. That recording was then played into the tuba and recorded again. And again. And again. In a process akin to snowfall compacting into glacial forms, the sound of the field recording began to densify into the overpowering and overlapping resonance of the ecosystem of tuba and sound.