#ed baxter

This piece, Second Sketch for Ascent and Descent, follows a Fibonacci sequence whereby the length of each section is mathematically determined in advance. It comes in at 26 minutes 27 seconds, 10 minutes 10 seconds longer than the First Sketch (realised in May 2014 at the Science Museum with Dudley Sutton). These works are part of a long-projected and partly abandoned work, bits of which also appear in The Spiral (2010) and Suspension of Belief (2009). The process is slow and proceeds by fits and starts. Here, in Glen Nevis, I worked with Resonance colleagues Peter Lanceley (guitar, voice) and Michael Umney (piano), as well as local musicians Charlie Menzies (fiddle) and Miriam Iowerth (xylophone). Charlie proved to be a powerfully engaging person. The amount of his performance used is modest, while Miriam contributes even less. Each, though, is essential and to my mind nailed, as it were, the entire piece. At the core of this, though, is the sheepdog trial specially conducted for us by Ewen Campbell, the choreography of which combined in my mind with the infant plot line of a play we witnessed by Jetson Joelson-Gilchrist. Childhood as an idea emerged, or at least took solid shape, only in the early 19th century through the writings of Wordsworth and De Quincey, at the same time that they absorbed and distilled the ideas about Nature suggested in the prolix homespun philosophy of Walking Stewart. All these thoughts run through the brief text which Tam Dean Burn as always brings life, placing it entirely in the realm of the radiophonic, which is the only place this post-expressionist work – with its combination of disparate and even contradictory elements – can really make sense. The song provides a coda suggestive of a certain impotence or incomprehension in the face of the deteriorating global political situation, the background hum of which seemed to me to be unavoidable even in this overwhelmingly imposing landscape.