After Thea Musgrave, Green, and Robert Macfarlane
We are the irruption of noise into music:
ariosos disintegrate in our hands
while discordant clusters round low F
shake the earth beneath our feet.
Our symphonic scores rot,
violins are resurrected as trees,
but that tremolo F remains below all
and remains to the last,
persistent as fossilised plastic
or a nuclear legacy radioactive
for 10,000 years.
Note: Green is a short piece for twelve strings by Thea Musgrave, commissioned by the Scottish Ensemble, and first performed in 2008.