Jurassic Seas : Sonic Traces
2016

The Somerset Levels are a land borrowed from the sea. Long before humans fished or farmed this land it was sea. During the Jurassic period it was inhabited by predatory air-breathing marine reptiles known as ichthyosaurs. Fossils of these creatures have been found in blue lias stone around Glastonbury and Street.

The piece starts with the sea. A sea which always threatens to return and overrun these low-lying lands. The piece then assembles a mosaic of sonic traces which mingle the actual and the imaginary but are all sounds which would have been encountered on the Somerset Levels at various times throughout its history:

• the calls of pelicans – bones from many pelicans have been discovered during excavations, indicating that there was a significant population of pelicans in the area;
• a snatch of the ‘Seed of Love’, the first folksong collected by Cecil Sharp for his 1905 collection ‘Folk Songs From Somerset’;
• the sound of steam trains which would have been a constant sound on the levels until the Glastonbury to Wells line was closed in 1966;
• the sounds of planes and helicopters, a constant and unpleasant reality on the levels today;
• snatches of imaginary music from the Iron Age villages;
• natural sounds of wind, rain and birds.

The piece ends with a return to the sea.