Score for a Hole in the Ground

Imagine yourself standing in the heart of a Medieval forest. A cool breeze blows around your body and the surrounding branches whisper secrets in your ears. You close your eyes for a moment and carefully listen, purposefully trying to focus your awareness on the most distant sounds. You notice something slightly out of place in the forest’s soundscape. An unnatural sound, random, finely tuned; metallic, yet at the same time, wet. The thin conversation of swords fighting comes to mind but you cannot put your finger on exactly what it is…

Wanting to discover “it” without “it” discovering you first, you carefully make your way through the trees toward the sound. Before you know it, something magical…

“Score for a Hole in the Ground” is a musical installation that, with the help of gravity and water, plays an autonomous, ever changing musical composition. Water droplets, from a reservoir uphill, plummet down an underground shaft to sonically burst on metal disks. The impacts are amplified by a gigantic gramophone-like horn which towers overhead.

Jem Finer, the artist and composer, designed his instrument around the similar, but ancient, Japanese ceremonial tool called the Suikinkutsu (literally meaning “water harp chamber”). Interestingly, even when there is no water to fuel the metallic music, the horn, “acting in reverse as a “microphone,” picks up ambient sounds of the forest and passing planes. Altered in tone by the acoustics of the hole they can be heard, if one listens very carefully, quietly reverberating underground.”

Jem’s idea, now built in the middle of the Kingswood Forest, UK, was proposed to the PRS Foundation for New Music, the organization who awarded the funding for the project’s realization. An eloquent video was created to propose the concept.

Jem Finer is also the person responsible for the “Longest concert ever” - entitled Longplayer, which still has about 990 years left before it’s conclusion.

Sources: Score for a Hole in the Ground and Stour Valley Arts