TIERCE

TIERCE is four short pieces for my voice and physically modelled bells. It is named for the tierce, the inharmonic minor third inside every cast bell: the dark glow that makes a bell sound mournful when nothing sad has happened. Each time a motif returns, the music has changed shape.

The pieces travel from a long white arc in A Phrygian (Halo, Os Blanc), through a Balkan additive metre on the augmented second (Mother Tongue) and a bell scored from the silence around its strikes (La Cloche n’a Jamais Sonné), to Crowned in Glass, which plugs the bells into a soundsystem.

The films give those changes a material form: an imperfect ivory halo, a bronze tongue inside amber rings, an interrupted bell that never fully appears, and a crown that breaks into glass. Across the four, resonance becomes a way to think about the body, language and fragile structures.