January 18, 2000

• January 18, 2000 (Time: 12:45 Palmer Station time). Stichting Logos Foundation, Center for New Music Production, Concerto Antarktissimo, contemporary music from Ghent, Belgium--live via satellite to Palmer Station.

Palmer Station was treated to a live avant-garde concert, via satellite, from Ghent, Belgium at lunchtime. Voices, flutes, viola, clarinet and mysterious sounds filtered through the "All Call" system on Station. It was a wonderful sensation to be standing in the hallway listening to music from the Tetrahedron Hall while looking out over the icebergs and porpoising penguins in Arthur Harbor. Different sensory worlds--as if in a dream!

The Logos Quartet (Left to Right) Godfried-Willem Raes, Karin DeFleyt, Joachim Brackx, and Moniek Darge.

Charlie Petit, who is on assignment at Palmer Station for U.S. News and World Report, filed this story for the coming issue of the Antarctic Sun.

Palmer Station, just north of the circle on the Western Antarctic Peninsula's so-called banana belt, may be the least Antarctic of America's outposts on the continent. But for a brief interlude on January 18 its 40 residents were in the most Antarktissimo place in the world -- if you don't count Belgium.

That's because a live broadcast by the Logos Quartet of Ghent, Belgium, of its newest composition, Concerto Antarktissimo, resounded throughout Palmer Station via satellite link to its all-call loudspeaker system. With voice, flute, clarinet, violin, and a fiddle made in the style of Mali in Africa, the quartet filled the air with its own Avant-Garde version of what it sounds like down here. The entire station fell silent as the composition swelled, squawked, and trilled from the speakers. Men and women who spend most of their time on such science as counting penguins, gathering microbes from the ice, and measuring the sun's radiation, or keeping this place running, agree one and all that they have never heard anything quite like it.

To be sure, the composition, with interludes of silence broken by eruptions of vocalization and instrumental mimicry of seals and penguins, didn't much resemble the music more commonly played on the stereos around here. Bob Farrell, station manager, said "It was neat that they did it live, and some of the sounds really were like the ones we hear. I wish we could have heard it while we were outside." It was not for everybody. "Bizarre,'' was one comment. But the clear majority got a big kick out of the 15-minute lunchtime broadcast. "I like this kind of music, to tell the truth,'' said a pretty fair Palmer banjo player, Laboratory Operations Supervisor Rob Edwards. "It stretches the idea of musical sound. Some people think you should take it seriously, when all you need to do is enjoy it." The unusual hookup was a thank you to Palmer resident Doug Quin. A specialist in recording the actual sounds of the natural environment, he is here as part of the National Science Foundation's Artists and Writers Program. The concert, he said, "was clever, original, and charming.'' In his internet log he is keeping of his stay here, Quin wrote, "It was a wonderful sensation to be standing in the hallway listening to music from the Tetrahedron Hall (in Ghent) while looking out over the icebergs and porpoising penguins in Arthur Harbor. Different sensory worlds--as if in a dream!"

This is the second time Quin, of Petaluma, California, has been in Antarctica on the artist's program. Last time he went to McMurdo, in 1996. He arrived at Palmer on the R/V L.M. Gould December 8 with his assistant, Steve Dunbar (a former ASA-man well-known at McMurdo, where last summer he was lead field safety instructor). Since then they have jumped into a Zodiac inflated boat nearly every day to explore the many islands nearby. There they have met a boisterous collection of residents. The deep rumbles of elephant seals, bickering din of Adelie and Chinstrap penguin rookeries, trilling of seals underwater, and harsh cries of darting skuas all went into his collection of tapes. Also into it went such non-living noisemakers as Marr Glacier, rumbling and crashing new icebergs into Arthur Harbor. To augment the area's innate symphony, Quin set up a wind harp on the biology lab to harvest ethereal tunes from the prevailing westerlies.

All the while, a lot of the rest of the world has gotten a share of the sounds that brought him here. Quin has been live on America's National Public Radio, plus outlets around the world including stations in New Zealand and Germany. On New Year's Eve Belgium got a listen as it relayed to its listeners a live interview with Quin from Palmer Station mixed with his recorded material. Earlier in his visit, on December 18, Quin took part in a live discussion of his work down here with an exhibition in Antwerp. Joining that discussion were members of the Logos Quartet in Belgium, who have been friends of Quin's for 20 years. They were so charged up by his subsequent Antarctic Peninsula millennium show that they reciprocated with their new concerto.

The musicians, formally of the Stichting Logos Foundation Center for New Music Production, are Karin De Fleyt (flute), Joachim Brackx (voice), Godfried-Willem Raes (clarinet), and Moniek Darge (voice, fiddle from Mali, violin). It is yet to be learned what reaction, if any, Palmer's natives will have should they some day hear the enthusiastic interpretation of their vocalizations by these artists from a far off continent.

Click here to listen to an MP3 sample of Concerto Antarktissimo.