A Field of Scarecrows (1998)

Programme Note

“Imagine riding a motor bike down a long, leafy country lane” Paul said to me. “What can you hear?” Immediately, I recognised a parallel with the sound of trombone multiphonics, but I was wrong to think of Doppler effects. Paul was not thinking of sounds gone by, but of those tiny ‘bites’ immediately beside the ear - bird song, snap of twig, crunch of weight on gravel, nearby stream, wood doves, wind-whipped at speed. “Imagine the ear as a camera” he said, “snapping each fraction of present time as you travel. I think the effect would be destabilising. That is what I am trying to write.”

The original idea A Field of Scarecrows came from a dream, in which scarecrows were dancing in a summer field full of hay bales. Paul abruptly stopped the car one day and jumped out excitedly. “This is it, Jane!” he said. “This is my field of scarecrows.” I gazed in amazement across the golden stubble, so still in the sunshine. Not a sound nor a scarecrow in sight.

Perhaps the contrast of these images accounts for the lyrical delicacy and disembodied eeriness which can be heard simultaneously in the music. Paul was later the remark a chillier foreshadowing - he could hear his illness, which must also have been present, undiagnosed at the time of writing. Yet this is the piece that discovered multiphonics in the birdsong upon which it is based, and the only piece into which Paul incorporated improvisation and the spoken word. These elements conciously pay tribute to the musicians for whom it was written; the ‘field’ of the title being a harmonic field. And the scarecrows? All the the mind’s ear.

©️ 2002 Jane Keenan