Katrina Porteous and Peter Zinovieff: Horse

Northumbrian poet Katrina Porteous and composer and synthesiser pioneer Peter Zinovieff have created a new work for the BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking Festival, inspired by the 3,000-year-old Uffington chalk figure that leaps across the Oxfordshire landscape. Scored for two voices and two computers, Horse mixes the sound of a Cornish ferry with human voices, to conjure echoes of the Cretaceous sea, the dragon beneath it, and recollections from our deepest past.

Katrina Porteous has written eight long poems for national radio in the last decade, together with many shorter pieces. She has been described by senior features producer Julian May as ‘extending the boundaries of the genre’. Peter Zinovieff is the inventor of the legendary VCS3 synthesizer, used by Pink Floyd and Brian Eno, and has inspired and collaborated with many writers and composers, including Harrison Birtwistle, for whom he devised the libretto of The Mask of Orpheus. He has derived the music for Horse entirely from the sampled sounds of a chain ferry.

This event is free but ticketed. For tickets, call 0191 443 4661 or see www.thesagegateshead.org.

Entry: Free but booking required

Time: 7:30pm