A companion piece to his earlier Britain's Bitterns (2007), Marcus Coates' Cadences was a special commission for the unique sound-wall at The Collection in Lincoln. A further reflection on bird-life, temporal change, and the inexorable loss of a particular landscape, Cadences consists of a series of 'last chords' from a number of well-known orchestral pieces from what might be called the English pastoral tradition. Moving across the full extent of the sound-wall in the gallery, these discrete and isolated sounds, plangent but strangely affirming, flow like water, or gather like birds in flight, before finally landing and coming in to rest. Miniature epitaphs for a mygone England, these swelling, looping chords, always at the point of ending but never actually fading, form a significant metaphorical echo of our equally persistent myths of Englishness, and the significance of landscape to national identity.
Cadences
Marcus Coates
Audio, 14-minute loop, 2007
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