Living Steam: Performance Space = Representational Space

Living Steam: Project Description

Living Steam was a site specific installation for the Kew Bridge Steam Museum. A kind of concerto for 8 channel tape and live steam engines, the piece has a duration of 20 minutes and ran on the hour every hour for two weeks over Easter 1999. Listeners were free to wander among the engines and come and go as they pleased, constructing their own individual experience.

The piece was composed for an eight channel surround system and was designed either to be played on its own (on weekdays) or as an accompaniment to the live sounds of the working steam pumping engines (at weekends, when the museum is “in steam”). In particular one performance was given in which the live engines were specifically co-ordinated with the tape. It is this version of the piece on which I will focus for the most part.

The intention was to include the environmental sounds, which had been the inspiration for the piece, in the musical experience and to encourage an appreciation of the musicality of those sounds, even after the composed music had come to an end. It was therefore considered important to allow visitors to hear the engines on their own as well as in the context of the piece. Consequently the piece was programmed hourly for twenty minutes.

Kew Bridge Steam Museum is housed in a former pumping station which supplied Thames water to south west London throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The museum houses many large stationary pumping engines including the Grand Junction 90, the largest working beam engine in the world.

Four engines were recorded as source materials for the piece. Three of these, the Waddon, the Eastern Amos and the Dancer’s End engines are housed in the main Steam Hall where the piece was installed. The fourth, the massive Grand Junction engine has its own hall connected to the steam hall by a short corridor. The sounds were processed and composed in the studio and then returned to the Steam Hall for performance.

Even on weekdays, when the engines were static, the installation enhanced the atmosphere of the hall giving a strong impression of the engines in motion. The piece functioned both as illustration and interpretation, realistic recordings gave an idea of the actual engine sounds, while the processed sounds enhanced the perception of the machines as something beyond the merely mechanical. Like great dinosaurs of the industrial age the engines were brought to life by the music.

At weekends the ambiguity arising from the combined live sight and sound of the real engines and the sounds emanating from loudspeakers concealed in the engine enclosures created a unique symbiosis of sound and space in which the environment was as much a part of the musical experience as the music was a part of the environment. The live sounds also provided an element of variation as no two performances were exactly the same. During the special performance the three engines in the steam hall that had been used in the piece were successively started up as the piece progressed so that by the end all three were working. The Grand