A time to build will be music for eight singers and saxophone quartet, exploring the relationship between people and the buildings that they create.
New work by Christopher Fox
Each performance of the work will take advantage of the acoustic and spatial characteristics of the space in which the performance takes place, the musicians moving within the space to create a unique, exciting and immersive interplay between live music and architecture.
Nothing evokes our aspirations as people and societies more clearly than the buildings we make. Even the remains of buildings are reminders of how vulnerable we are to the forces of time and nature and A time to buildwill explore both the construction and destruction of buildings. The singers will sing words by architects, from the ancient Latin of Vitrivius to texts by Mies van der Rohe, Zaha Hadid and Maya Lin. There will eye-witness accounts of catastrophe – Pliny’s description of the end of the city of Pompeii, Emma Burke’s reporting of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake – as well as writings about the rediscovery of lost cities.
Buildings, and the materials from which they are made, come in every shape and size and the music of A time to build will reflect this. Over about 40 minutes there will be a sequence of different sections, some filling the performance space with sounds, others focusing attention on individual voices and instruments and particular parts of the space. To quote Zaha Hadid, what we want to create is ‘a layering of all our intentions’.