In 2008, as part of a Henry Moore Fellowship at the Royal Academy of Music, Jim Aitchison created a response to Shibboleth, the astonishing giant crack created in the floor of the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern by the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo. Filmmaker Immo Horn captured the performance delivered into the length of the crack by violinist Peter Sheppard Sk?rved. The composer?s response to this black axe stroke placed at the heart of our art establishment was conceived as a single line in sound and as a largely linear, continuous, homogenous musical form performed as a physical transit of sound, violently interrupted at approximately 2/3rds of its length. The composer writes: ?Apparent to the listener are 2 contrasting areas of material: one of explosively violent insertion and separation, another continually and delicately crisscrossing, like the crosshatched wire inside the fissure.?

There is a further important element: as the music progresses ever more intensely to the climax, the violinist vocalizes an intense scream, an intervention of fundamental human sound slashed across the edifice of invoked musical tradition. The incongruity and discomfiture of the symbolism is intended.

The piece has been performed many times since 2008, including by Philippa Mo in 2015 at CAST in Helston, Cornwall, and at Porthmeor Studios in St Ives.