No longer there.
with thanks to Heather Fickweiler (House Assistant, Torre Abbey) and Lois Jenkins (House Assistant, Torre Abbey)
Friday, 13 March 2015
Sensing Disorientation (i): The Cloister: a Pond and a Grassy Slope
No longer there.
with thanks to Heather Fickweiler (House Assistant, Torre Abbey) and Lois Jenkins (House Assistant, Torre Abbey)
the journey from Irrational Disquiet to Sensing Disorientation
From late autumn until early spring, Torre Abbey is closed to visitors.
Its windows are veiled, or hidden by shutters and the rooms are kept in
gloom or darkness to protect the collections. By February, I began to
visit the abbey every day. The weather was so cold I wore layers of
clothes in anticipation of the freezing interior, but found that all the
rooms were pleasantly warm, kept at a steady temperature and carefully controlled humidity
all year round to preserve the museum and its contents.
I looked for places to sit and draw where I could find enough available light. I was invited to open shutters and turn on lamps, but the pools of daylight were so beguiling and they faded towards the end of the afternoon, clearly marking the track of the day.
Work continues in the building – cleaning, restoration, some new installations – but in the vast space, it’s never clear where sounds are coming from. I listen to footsteps and indistinct laughter and make recordings of the distant noises.
Wednesday, 4 March 2015
Hidden House: The Museum Installation
A container for significant fragments. The ceiling lowered by the Cary family to make room for their grand dining room above; the floor raised to re-configure a space within a space for a new museum installation.
Thursday, 15 January 2015
Hidden House
Re-imagining "Hidden House" (from the title of a permanent display in Torre Abbey)
a parallel curating of an already curated space within a museum
curation overlay / layered curation / parallel interpretation / overlaid interpretation
I
was shown this space: a ceiling above a ceiling, pierced, preserved,
suspended. There are many more spaces behind spaces: windows behind
walls; staircases stepping onto staircases.
I had been filming
in empty rooms behind hidden doors.....and now I wonder about catching
sounds - something balanced between a systematic study and an irrational
disquiet - like the disturbance you feel when you sense movement in
your peripheral vision.
I heard it inside the corner of my ear
with thanks to Joseph Harvey (Custodian, Torre Abbey)
with thanks to Joseph Harvey (Custodian, Torre Abbey)
Wikipedia
"Perhaps the best embodiment of Wikipedia's democratic aspirations can be found in its structural design. The abundance of footnotes and hyperlinks uniquely positions the site as something like a live annotated bibliography. This is not a call for the neo-liberal potential of immaterialized, 'social' networks but a reminder that Wikipedia is able to redirect its millions of readers from standardized encyclopaedic entries to a multiplicity of interpretations and resources. It is here that Wikipedia's social formation has the potential to enact a meaningful model of diversity: embracing multiplicity and discursiveness rather than reducing entries to a singular, utopian concensus."
from History 2.0, Olivian Cha, Frieze no.168, January - February 2015
Wednesday, 14 January 2015
Benedictus
Lynne Humphries, Sculpture Conservator; Phil Harper, Museum Installation; Amelia Marriette, Torre Abbey's Keeper of Art
‘Benedictus’ from Missa Salve intemerata by Thomas Tallis performed by
Winchester Cathedral Choir conducted by David Hill. Courtesy of Hyperion Records Ltd, London.
"'Benedictus' may refer to....The second part of the Sanctus, part of the Eucharistic prayer" From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
'During his first years in office, Qalawun faced a quickening tide of Mongol aggression. The Ilkhan Abaqa took advantage of the disarray afflicting the Mamluks to send a sizeable raiding force into northern Syria in 1280, prompting the general evacuation of Aleppo'
The Crusades, Thomas Asbridge (publ. Simon&Schuster 2010)
'we meet a British citizen. Syrian in origin, born in France who was hit in a bomb blast. He says
"We are in hell, just go outside, the city is flattened," he said. "There's nothing. It's every single day. Every single day, every single hour. There's no people any more. No cats, no insects. Nothing left."'
Nick Paton Walsh, CNN, Return to Aleppo, June 2014
"'Benedictus' may refer to....The second part of the Sanctus, part of the Eucharistic prayer" From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
'During his first years in office, Qalawun faced a quickening tide of Mongol aggression. The Ilkhan Abaqa took advantage of the disarray afflicting the Mamluks to send a sizeable raiding force into northern Syria in 1280, prompting the general evacuation of Aleppo'
The Crusades, Thomas Asbridge (publ. Simon&Schuster 2010)
'we meet a British citizen. Syrian in origin, born in France who was hit in a bomb blast. He says
"We are in hell, just go outside, the city is flattened," he said. "There's nothing. It's every single day. Every single day, every single hour. There's no people any more. No cats, no insects. Nothing left."'
Nick Paton Walsh, CNN, Return to Aleppo, June 2014
Friday, 14 November 2014
Sanctus
Lynne Humphries, Sculpture Conservator; Phil Harper, Museum Installation; Amelia Marriette, Torre Abbey's Keeper of Art
Beer stone fragments: from 16th century Effigy; deliberately broken 23 February 1539 by Sir William Petre, a Secretary of State to King Henry VIII; excavated from Torre Abbey's grounds 1986-88, returned to Torre Abbey June 2014
‘Sanctus’ from Missa Salve intemerata by Thomas Tallis performed by Winchester Cathedral Choir conducted by David Hill. Courtesy of Hyperion Records Ltd, London.
The Sanctus (Latin: Sanctus, "Holy") is a hymn from Catholic liturgy.
In Western Christianity, the Sanctus forms part of the Ordinary and is sung (or said) as the final words of the Preface of the Eucharistic Prayer, the prayer of consecration of the bread and wine. The preface, which alters according to the season, usually concludes with words describing the praise of the worshippers joining with the angels, who are pictured as praising God with the words of the Sanctus.
from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Thomas Tallis (c.1505-1585)
Spem in alium • Salve intemerata (Mass and motet) Considering that Thomas Tallis was the finest English composer of his generation, it is surprising how little we know about his life. The first time we hear of Tallis is in 1530 when he was organist at Dover Priory in Kent: by then he was clearly a respected professional musician. We also know that Tallis was described as being ‘very aged’ in 1577 and that he died in November 1585. Taking these three pieces of information together, the consensus is that Tallis was born around 1505 (thus placing him in his mid-twenties while working at Dover, in his early-seventies when he was described as ‘very aged’, and in his eightieth year when he died). Hardly conclusive, but there is not much else to go on.
The motet Salve intemerata is a setting of a long prose prayer to the Virgin Mary and is written for five voices in an expansively Catholic style. We know nothing of Tallis’s whereabouts when he wrote this large-scale motet, but we do know that the oldest manuscript in which the motet survives was copied in the late 1520s and that the words are recorded in a Book of Hours which appeared in 1527. Yet in spite of its early date, Salve intemerata shows Tallis writing music of considerable fluency and invention, quite an achievement for a composer in his early twenties. With a composition portfolio that contained a work as substantial and proficient as this one, it is not difficult to see why Tallis was appointed to Dover Priory as a young man.
In 1535 Dover Priory was dissolved, and Tallis’s job with it. By 1537 he was working at the church of St Mary-at-Hill in London. St Mary-at-Hill was an important musical foundation, and from there Tallis seems to have begun his association with the English royal court (in 1577 Tallis was described as ‘serving your royal ancestors for forty years’). It is at this time that the Missa Salve intemerata may have been written. The Mass borrows heavily from the motet, particularly in the Gloria and Credo, yet it shows that Tallis’s style had matured in the intervening years. More concise, direct, and vocally more pragmatic than the lengthy motet, the Mass is his finest pre-Reformation achievement. The reason that the Missa Salve intemerata is not better known today is that one of the voice parts requires reconstruction (the Tenor part-book has been lost). Fortunately the missing part is the one directly above the lowest voice, the easiest one to reconstruct within this texture.
By 1538 Tallis was a senior member of the music staff at Waltham Abbey in Essex, but yet again Tallis’s job dissolved along with the Abbey in 1540. Undeterred, he moved to the newly-founded secular establishment at Canterbury Cathedral, where he sang as part of the choir of twenty-two men and boys. The Reformation had a profound effect on English church music, most tangibly during the reign of Edward VI when late-medieval Latin polyphony, as exemplified by the Salve intemerata and its Mass, became outlawed. Tallis maintained his craft and his compositional voice, and provided the Church of England with largely homophonic music to English texts. He was, above all, a pragmatist, and he allowed the intimacy and directness of expression which this new style required to give another dimension to his compositional vision. Indeed, turbulent though this English liturgical revolution must have been to a lifelong Catholic, Tallis accepted the new musical order and learnt from it.
Spem in alium • Salve intemerata (Mass and motet) Considering that Thomas Tallis was the finest English composer of his generation, it is surprising how little we know about his life. The first time we hear of Tallis is in 1530 when he was organist at Dover Priory in Kent: by then he was clearly a respected professional musician. We also know that Tallis was described as being ‘very aged’ in 1577 and that he died in November 1585. Taking these three pieces of information together, the consensus is that Tallis was born around 1505 (thus placing him in his mid-twenties while working at Dover, in his early-seventies when he was described as ‘very aged’, and in his eightieth year when he died). Hardly conclusive, but there is not much else to go on.
The motet Salve intemerata is a setting of a long prose prayer to the Virgin Mary and is written for five voices in an expansively Catholic style. We know nothing of Tallis’s whereabouts when he wrote this large-scale motet, but we do know that the oldest manuscript in which the motet survives was copied in the late 1520s and that the words are recorded in a Book of Hours which appeared in 1527. Yet in spite of its early date, Salve intemerata shows Tallis writing music of considerable fluency and invention, quite an achievement for a composer in his early twenties. With a composition portfolio that contained a work as substantial and proficient as this one, it is not difficult to see why Tallis was appointed to Dover Priory as a young man.
In 1535 Dover Priory was dissolved, and Tallis’s job with it. By 1537 he was working at the church of St Mary-at-Hill in London. St Mary-at-Hill was an important musical foundation, and from there Tallis seems to have begun his association with the English royal court (in 1577 Tallis was described as ‘serving your royal ancestors for forty years’). It is at this time that the Missa Salve intemerata may have been written. The Mass borrows heavily from the motet, particularly in the Gloria and Credo, yet it shows that Tallis’s style had matured in the intervening years. More concise, direct, and vocally more pragmatic than the lengthy motet, the Mass is his finest pre-Reformation achievement. The reason that the Missa Salve intemerata is not better known today is that one of the voice parts requires reconstruction (the Tenor part-book has been lost). Fortunately the missing part is the one directly above the lowest voice, the easiest one to reconstruct within this texture.
By 1538 Tallis was a senior member of the music staff at Waltham Abbey in Essex, but yet again Tallis’s job dissolved along with the Abbey in 1540. Undeterred, he moved to the newly-founded secular establishment at Canterbury Cathedral, where he sang as part of the choir of twenty-two men and boys. The Reformation had a profound effect on English church music, most tangibly during the reign of Edward VI when late-medieval Latin polyphony, as exemplified by the Salve intemerata and its Mass, became outlawed. Tallis maintained his craft and his compositional voice, and provided the Church of England with largely homophonic music to English texts. He was, above all, a pragmatist, and he allowed the intimacy and directness of expression which this new style required to give another dimension to his compositional vision. Indeed, turbulent though this English liturgical revolution must have been to a lifelong Catholic, Tallis accepted the new musical order and learnt from it.
from Naxos
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