The Reef

With its oceanic topic and use of data sonification as a composition technique, The Reef is a sister work to El Canto del Mar Infinito (2020) and La Danza Invisible del Agua (2021). It belongs to a series in which the sea is given part of the authorship. Where the earlier pieces translated the surface and the deep into chamber forces, The Reef turns the lens onto a single ecosystem and a single recording - a swimmer moving slowly toward a coral reef in the Mu Koh Lanta National Marine Park, Thailand.

The recording is short and spectrally narrow, but it has its own dramatic arc - approach, arrival, immersion - and that arc gave the composition its shape. Computer-based analysis was used to translate the changing colours of the reef into pitch and register, and the procedural structure of the swim into the formal rhythm of the piece. Two pianists trace this material across two grand pianos, sometimes in close imitation, sometimes in opposition, the way two divers might read the same reef differently.

The visual layer was created by Andre Veloux in close conversation with the score. After the music was finished, a MIDI rendition was sent to Veloux, who derived a colour bar code by mapping hexadecimal bytes from the source sound files to a Lego colour palette - a deliberate constraint that allowed the digital work to be rebuilt as physical artworks, brick by brick. On screen, those bar codes resolve into abstract surfaces whose timing is locked to the music; on a wall, the same data becomes sculpture.

The piece is also a question. The slow chromatic erosion in the score is the sound of the reef bleaching. But the analysis also extracted the brilliant living colour of the ecosystem, and that material is in the music too. The work paints the damage; it also paints what is still there. The hope is that the listening audience leaves the hall a little less able to look away.

Maybe it is not too late to do something? Maria Kallionpää, programme note