Over the past few months, I have had a wonderful time working on my latest composition – a three dimensional Live Music Sculpture for St Paul’s Cathedral, which will be premiered on Friday July 12 as part of the City of London Festival. The work has been scored for 26 individual voices and French horn players, each positioned in different locations throughout Christopher Wren’s great building. Some will be placed in the famous Whispering Gallery and others in triforium galleries, 30 metres above the cathedral floor. The audience will experience the work from wherever they happen to be standing in the cathedral and are free to move through the space at their own pace.

My Live Music Sculptures are site-specific works, which combine music, time and sculpture within complex architectural spaces to explore 360-degree aural perception. In St Paul’s Cathedral, my aim was to harness the unique acoustics and dimensions of the space and create something which was so attached to the fabric of the edifice that it could not function anywhere else. In a Live Music Sculpture, as well as having harmonic, melodic, rhythmic and textural implications, every single note that I compose must also emerge from a specific geographical location within a space. So, miniature cardboard models and diagrams can often be found on my desk next to the manuscript paper!

I find the relationships between music, time and architecture deeply fascinating. Music weaves its way through time in a series of complex aural markers which are capable of transforming seconds into minutes and hours into eternity. But music actually shares its ability to manipulate temporal perspectives with architecture’s ability to transfigure spatial perspectives. Goethe observed that architecture is ‘petrified music’, but for composers, his idea might seem more poetic in its inversion: music is fluid architecture.

In order to get close to Goethe in musical terms, we need to begin to conceive of temporal and spatial perspective as exactly the same thing - just like Einstein did in his relativity theories. The nature of this delicate relationship between humanity, space and time has been exquisitely captured by many writers including important contributions by Thomas Mann and TS Eliot. It has been explored in music more recently on the concert platform by Elliot Carter, Peter Maxwell Davies, Simon Bainbridge, Luciano Berio, George Crumb, Anthony Payne and Pierre Boulez. For me, the question is probably the most fascinating and pressing one that music is capable of posing, and in order to ask it myself, I realised that I required a very specific form which I could develop predominantly outside the concert hall. Over the past few years, through many experiments and a great deal of thought, this form has defined itself as Live Music Sculpture.

Just like the aural illusions created by my recent work for the walkways above Tower Bridge, where the sheer distance between instruments at opposite ends meant that sounds developed through space as well as time, I hope that the music heard in St Paul’s will transform the dimensions of the space and that the space will transform the dimensions of the music. With any luck, as well as being a thought provoking experiment, the work will turn out to be a very beautiful, emotional and aesthetic experience for everyone who hears it.

And if you do come and listen to the work, please carry with you a final thought for the marvellous musicians who give voice to the sounds that slowly seep through the space from those dizzying high-level galleries. Don’t look down!
Samuel Bordoli

Samuel Bordoli’s new work, Live Music Sculpture 3: St Paul's Cathedral, will be performed five times on Friday July 12 (11.30, 13.20, 14.20, 15.20, 16.20) as part of the City of London Festival. For more information, visit: colf.org/whats-on/612-live-music-sculpture.