2026 | Prepared piano and vibraphone, with gongs and optional electronics

About the Composition

Iron Ore Train was inspired by a journey through West Africa, during which I crossed the Sahara and travelled through Mauritania. We drove through vast stretches of sand and spent nights camping in the desert.

In Mauritania, I encountered the iron ore train, one of the longest trains in regular operation in the world. With more than 200 wagons stretching over two and a half kilometres, it carries iron ore from the inland mines to the Atlantic coast and also provides transport between remote communities.

I never had the chance to ride it myself. But seeing it in the desert made me imagine what it would feel like to travel on top of its wagons through the Sahara.

The composition grew out of that imagined journey, together with memories of the landscape, the drifting dust, the heat and the long hours of waiting. The train’s movement finds its way into the more rhythmic passages, while the beginning and end reflect the peculiar sense of time I experienced in the desert.

The quiet middle section returns to the nights we spent under the open sky. I had never seen stars so big, or a sky so completely filled with them. The musical phrases follow the lines of constellations visible in the Mauritanian Sahara.

Of course, the reality of riding the train can be much harsher than my imagined journey: noise, iron ore dust, sand, heat and cold. But that contrast between an enormous industrial machine and the stillness of the desert was precisely what fascinated me.