Jane Bastion, known and admired for her stark, poetic silhouette portraits — each one a distilled meditation on identity, memory, and presence — has taken a bold detour with her latest project: “Ring Roads and Radiators: Three Tone Poems for Trumpet, Violin, and Euphonium.”
Gone (but not forgotten) are the black-cut figures against pale fields. In their place: sound. Not just sound, but a narrative impulse, one that reaches beyond the static frame. Bastion’s new tone poems don’t abandon her portraiture; they translate it — from shape to motion, from line to phrase, from silence to the echo of a brass note beneath a flyover.
A New Kind of Silhouette
For longtime followers of Bastion’s visual work, this will feel like both a departure and a continuation. These three pieces — performed by the lean, unexpected trio of trumpet, violin, and euphonium — are portraits too, but now rendered in sound. They don’t describe people, exactly. Instead, they conjure moments that feel like people: moods, selves, what might be called inner climates.
The inspiration, as Bastion has said, came from “the loops and lonelieness of the M25” and the symphonic storytelling of Richard Strauss. If that sounds contradictory — suburban motorways and late-Romantic decadence — that’s precisely where these tone poems live: in the tension between the banal and the operatic, the arterial and the intimate.
“Red on Rain-Soaked Concrete”
The opener starts with a stark trumpet motif — urgent, disoriented — over a scratchy violin line that feels more drawn than bowed. Then the euphonium enters like a slow breath of fog. You can almost see the wet pavement, the tail lights, the outline of a figure waiting by the barrier. It’s classic Bastion — not descriptive, but suggestive. A portrait not of a person, but of the space around them.
“Orbital Mythologies”
Here the Strauss influence is clearest. Themes circle and collapse, like cars on the outer loop. The trumpet postures, the violin teases, the euphonium grounds. There’s playfulness here, even satire. But underneath, as always in Bastion’s work, lies the sense of a watcher: someone seen just once in a mirror, or remembered from a blurred photo.
“White Underpass, Blue Light”
The final piece is the most abstract — and the most painterly. The violin scrapes across silence like chalk on metal. The euphonium speaks in half-phrases, slow and full of longing. The trumpet, at last, thins into near-nothingness. It’s a portrait of absence, of someone who’s already gone. The final minute is so delicate it feels like a drawing made with breath.
A New Chapter, Not an Abandonment
What’s remarkable is that Bastion hasn’t left her original medium behind — she still creates silhouette portraits, now sometime exhibited alongside these tone poems. The pairing is illuminating. The new works make you hear the portraits differently. The portraits make you see the music.
If her silhouettes were always about the edges of identity, these tone poems explore what happens inside those edges — the flux, the noise, the hidden narrative. This isn’t a reinvention. It’s an expansion.
Verdict
Jane Bastion’s first foray into music is a quiet revolution — not a rejection of her visual work, but a new voice for it. These tone poems are strange, spare, and haunting. With just trumpet, violin, and euphonium, she has carved sonic silhouettes that linger long after the final note.
