Architectural Research Quarterly

Table of Contents - 2002 - Volume 6, Issue 03  


Insight

Sligo Air

Lawrence Parque a1
a1 Lawrence Parque is a composer and landscape architect working in San Francisco. He helped develop Lawrence Halprin's environmental notation system and has taught intermedia and design research at San Francisco State University. As a composer of new music he worked at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College and studied North Indian Classical Music with Ali Akbar Khan

The performance piece Flux in the Sligo Air is a suite for movement artists and electro-acoustic music. It was composed in response to the unique atmosphere of Sligo, a town of 16,000 inhabitants in the northwest of Ireland, and its place within the surrounding landscape. I was inspired by Sligo's architecture and the sky, landscape and sea into which the town is so naturally and uniquely integrated. My study of space perception in architectural terms and its correlation with musical processes led to a contemplation of the relationship of the town's buildings to each other and the spaces (streets) they inhabit in the same manner as tonal phrases might become related to each other, or to a drone. Flux in the Sligo Air is not an analogous translation of architecture into music, however, but an attempt to capture those ever-changing senses which one may experience within a space. The town's natural condition and evolution, the new and the old at many points in time, serve as carriers of ideas of sense and felt knowledge which transcend the purely physical.