Performed by
Violin I: Tingwei Tan
Violin II: Wilford Goh
Viola: Thomas Ang
Cello: Jonathan Dodd
(Reading Session)

String Quartet (excerpt)(2015)

Icefield is a borrowed title from one of David Harsent’s poems in Fire Songs, where the semantic field is profusely musical and compelling visuals are depicted. Haunting landscapes that revolve around the abnegation of life, emptiness, and carnage are pronouncedly described, but yet seem starkly illusory. Reality and hallucination are blurred. 

Icefield (from Fire Songs)

A place of ice over ice, of white over white
and beauty in absences. There was a time when the only sound 
was the wind calling its ghosts, when the skyline was set

clean as a scar on glass, when your heartbeat slowed 
with the cold, when your dreams brought in a white bird 
on a white sky and music that could only be heard

from time to time on the other side of night.
Now the horizon’s a smudge; now there’s a terrible weight 
in the air and a stain cut hard and deep in the permafrost.

Breakage and slippage; the rumble of some vast 
machine cranking its pistons, of everything on the slide; 
and the water rising fast, and the music lost.

David Harsent

[http://poetrysociety.org.uk.gridhosted.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/1012-Harsent-web.pdf]

Houw Ping