String Quartet

Commissioned by and dedicated to Nordic Viola for their project 'John Rae and the northern telegraph route'.

.- / -... .- -.. / .. -.-. . / -.-- . .- .-. / “a bad ice year” takes its
starting point in the nineteenth-century plans for a
northern telegraph route connecting Europe and
North America through Shetland, the Faroe Islands,
Iceland and Greenland.

In 1860, the Orcadian Arctic
explorer Dr John Rae travelled aboard The Fox to
investigate the conditions along the proposed route.
The work follows an imagined voyage towards
Greenland.

At first, the land cannot yet be seen. The
vessel moves across the open sea, through calm
waters and an immense, uncertain landscape.
Gradually, Greenland and its different forms of ice
emerge. The Greenlandic words sermeq (glacier),
iluliat (icebergs) and sikut (sea ice) are encoded in the
music through Morse code.

The title comes from a statement recorded in
Qaqortoq in October 1860 by Mr Dorph, a retired
assistant who had served in Nanortalik in South
Greenland. By then, he had lived in the district for 41
years and had acquired extensive knowledge of ice
and navigation conditions along the southern
Greenlandic coast. His observations were included
among the testimonies gathered in connection with
John Rae’s investigations for the proposed telegraph
route.

Dorph described 1860 as an unusually severe “bad ice
year”. The drift ice remained along the coast far
longer than usual, making hunting and travel difficult,
even by kayak.

His historical observation becomes
musical material: the Morse code for A BAD ICE YEAR
appears in rhythms, repetitions, interruptions and
signals passed between the four instruments.

The music moves between stillness and unrest,
distance and proximity, beauty and danger. Morse
code becomes both a means of communication and a
trace of uncertainty: a signal travelling across great
distances, always carrying the possibility of disruption,
distortion or disappearance.

The historical phrase “a bad ice year” also resonates
differently today, in a time of rapid climatic change.
The work therefore closes with an open question: