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Liza Lim: Shallow grave

for ‘Neolithic’ ceramic horn and alto trumpet

(2023)

There’s an image that sticks in my mind: March 2022, 12 days into the war in Ukraine, a military brass band stands around a bomb crater playing into the hole. The image echoes on in our times of extreme and often incomprehensible violence and I’ve been thinking a lot about music’s power to address and reach into a hole in the ground and pull back up some life energy from what has been destroyed. The power of music to speak to the dead, to reach back in time and unwind something; to make passages for the living; music as a living knot in time between the ancestral and the unborn—these are some basic themes of recent work.

Shallow Grave is in two parts. In the first part, Marco Blaauw plays a ‘Neolithic’ horn, a replica of a 3,000-year-old terracotta horn excavated from a rock shelter in Vallabrix, Southern France, made by ceramic artist André Schlauch as part of the European Music Archaeology project. It’s shaped like an animal horn but I think of it as a lump of earth with a mouth. The second part of the piece, for the low-voiced alto trumpet in F, is music of bitter and sardonic humour for an imaginary ‘Punch and Judy’ show.

Liza Lim