The performance ended as it began - in a major key with the sound of bells.
Over to Mark from the FraKctured site. . .
On Monday evening 12/12/05 at St Andrew’s church, Sutton-in-the-Isle near Ely, Cambs, UK, around 75 people gathered for a service of thanksgiving and celebration for the recovery of Stephen Tebboth after a road traffic accident in May. Rev Mark Amey began by welcoming Stephen and Sarah, their family and friends, Robert Fripp and team and everyone in attendance. James de Winter then made a short, rather funny, introduction and then Robert played.
For the next forty-five minutes we were treated to what can only be described as sacred music of the highest quality. The Soundscapes soared up among the vaulting and reverberated around the nave (St Andrew’s is a large church) and are, in all probability, reverberating there still, if we only had instruments to detect them.
Beginning with the sound of gentle or distant bells the music that developed, strongly grounded in a major key, was the very essence of sweetness but was in no way sentimental. There was an acerbity like lemon peel in cheesecake that made easy or lazy listening quite impossible. No perfect cadences here - nothing to offer any expectation, using the grammar and syntax of diatonicism, of what’s coming. For me, the music seemed to come from nowhere at all - it seeped from the walls - this due to the placement of four speakers, one in each corner of the nave, and me, by chance, in a pew at the end of a row that was half-way down the aisle, exactly at the center.
Robert was very focused, very still. He seemed to be listening rather than playing Or rather, he seemed to me to be responding to what he was hearing. The audience was completely silent. It was fairly cold in the church but not unduly so. I don’t, in all honesty, recall all of the music clearly. Partly I don’t have that gift of musical recall and partly I just got lost in myself and my thoughts.
At the center of the performance Robert completely changed the tonality (I think it was one of the Ocatonic scales) and produced music reminiscent of Arvo Part or maybe Bartok - rather detached and frigid - with compassion but not sympathy. At one point my right knee began to tremble and I was suddenly aware of my body and of some very low frequencies that seemed to be swooshing around. I shifted position and got lost in the music again.
Then an absurd thing happened - Robert made a musical joke. It was definitely meant to be funny. He played a single (IE not looped) musical phrase - a descending series of short, ascending/descending glissandi with a sound like a fly buzzing. It woke everyone up and brought us back to attention - there were even a few stifled giggles. It was exactly as though one of the carved grotesques had suddenly sprung to life on its very high corbel and bounced down onto the vaulted clerestory and down again into the nave - fizzing and farting as it went! An extraordinary moment. It happened in an instant and was over in a flash. The music continued as though nothing had occurred - stately and dignified and very, very beautiful. Whatever it was, was gone.
There was much warm applause at the end and there was a collection for the Lewin Rehabilitation Unit at Addenbrookes Hospital, Cambridge at the South door on leaving the church.
A high quality, print-ready poster for the event is available as an Adobe Acrobat .pdf file here: SoundscapesA4poster.pdf - 3,382KB
