they have the fish — Lara Agar

They have the fish, you love the fish (2024)
duration 21’00”
For sextet (fl, cl, vln, vla, vc, pno.) + fixed media electronics
Commissioned by Explore Ensemble and Britten Pears Arts

First Performance
Explore Ensemble, Aldeburgh Festival, 18th June, 2024

‘If you are squeamish, don't prod the beach rubble’. Lara Agar points to this quote from Sappho
(translated by Mary Beard), in introducing her new work, They have the fish, you love the fish, Agar’s
piece gets straight to chamber music’s magical ability to traverse both personal and worldly scales.

Growing up along the Suffolk coast close to Aldeburgh, Agar’s new work presents a semi-autobiographical reflection of her childhood landscapes and inscapes. Ambling and pondering on life on the east coast, she takes pocket recordings, fragmented field sources, and makes sampled instruments of bones found on the beach. Interspersing these sonic artefacts among the acoustic ensemble, she brings memory to confront reality; future to face past. Her working notes reveal a parallel poetry:

memories and witness of decaying seals
often carcasses — (birds)
nature is not kind
light is often
power station alarms
so the blades of grass were untrodden, red tipped, the most beautiful place on earth graced only by light
and lightfoot. baby heather, and the horse and the trees were there, and thousands of lichen
desperate and hopeless attempts to save something that was beautiful
one attempt destroys the last
intent with love
relationship to environment
un-intervention and non-disturbance — newly damaged terrain

- Nicholas Moroz, programme note for They have the fish, you love the fish