What does Antarctica sound like?
It is a simple question, but a difficult one to answer. Antarctica is a place most of us will never see, and yet it plays a crucial role in the systems that sustain life on Earth. It is remote, but not separate. Silent, but not empty.
Voices from the Frozen World is a concert built around this tension: between distance and connection, imagination and knowledge, sound and science.
At its centre is a collaboration between music and research. The programme brings together works inspired by the Antarctic landscape and its histories, performed by soprano Naomi Rogers and pianist Patrick Hemmerlé, alongside contributions from marine ecologist Jennifer Freer (British Antarctic Survey), whose work focuses on the fragile and complex ecosystems of the Southern Ocean.
The musical programme includes a range of works, each approaching Antarctica from a different angle.
In Antarctica is a song cycle by Edward Nesbit, which draws on the diaries of Scott’s expedition, offering a human perspective on exploration, endurance, and perception at the edge of the known world.
Alongside it are two of my own works:
Cumha an Nàdair is inspired by Irish sean-nós singing and Scottish keening — a form of vocal lament once performed at funerals. Reimagined in a contemporary context, the piece extends this idea of lament beyond the individual, towards a growing awareness of the damage we are doing to the natural world.
A Tale of Light and Fear, based on a poem by Jennifer Freer, turns instead to the microscopic scale. It explores the daily vertical migrations of plankton in the Southern Ocean, where light becomes both a source of life and a source of danger. What emerges is a world structured by rhythms that are invisible to us, yet fundamental: cycles of light and darkness, growth and predation, movement and stillness.
Alongside the music, Jennifer Freer will offer some insight into the scientific context behind the programme, bringing into focus some of the processes that lie behind its images and ideas.
Rather than attempting to “represent” Antarctica, this concert is an invitation to approach it indirectly: through sound, through text, and through the knowledge that reshapes how we hear both.
In the end, it is less about a place than about how we come to perceive it.
More info and tickets can be found here. I hope to see you there!
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