In Conversation With a Space
At the centre of an amphitheatre, you step inside your own echo. You no longer hear your voice in dull, unvarnished tones amplified by the chamber of your body. Instead, you catch its reflection, clanging bright and foreign from the tiered seats. For an instant you hear your words from outside yourself, as if they are not your own. Every amphitheatre has this sweet spot. Step to the side and you’ll miss it.
♪♫ ♪♪♫ ♪♫♬ ♪♫♪
Playing music has changed the way I think about space. I whistle softly in tall stairwells, letting the notes spiral up, half in hope of a reply. In the soundproofed confines of a practice room, my instrument’s voice is dry and fine as lawn clippings. Against the wooden floors of an old recital hall it grows rich with newfound courage. A room is not a passive thing, but a character of its own.
♪♫ ♪♪♫ ♪♫♪
In the eighties, a trio of musicians climbed down into the empty Dan Harpole Cistern in Port Townsend, Washington State. They hefted their instruments through a manhole and descended over four metres into the subterranean gloom. I can imagine the cistern’s poignant, heavy silence as they introduced small and human noises to the space; the thin, metallic clank of the ladder, the scrape of their breath. Perhaps they laughed, as they climbed, sending the sound showering down like meteorites. Perhaps their voices remained low and cautious, eliciting only the hum of an echo. Perhaps they did not speak at all. They reached the floor and found themselves in a forest of stone-pillared darkness. Here, in the heart of the cistern, they began to improvise. And the cistern began to sing.
The three—Pauline Oliveros, Panaiotis, and Stuart Dempster—would go on to form Deep Listening Band. Oliveros described the cistern as a fourth member of their ensemble. The space was playing with them, as they made music in dialogue with their own echoes. The notes the musicians played were not as important as the way they listened. ‘Musicking’ became a collaboration with a space.
♪♪♫ ♪♫♬ ♪♫♪
The full reverberation of a friend’s open string will send a hum through the body of my instrument. Classical strings hold their own acoustics; they too, are rooms. Bodies in which sound resides, brought to resonance by the contact between bow and string and bridge and the chamber of air that exists between smoothly joined panels of sympathetically vibrating wood. There are photographs of a cello that show the instrument from within, a wooden space like an attic lit by sunbeams falling through the swirled f-holes of the front plate. This is the first home of my sound, a small garret of air brought to life.
Helmholtz resonance, they call it. The way you can blow across the top of a half-empty bottle and hear a low tone. The springy air inside an enclosed space meeting with the current of your breath to create a kind of music.
♪♫ ♪♪♫ ♪♫♬ ♪♫♪
The first time I heard an orchestra was in the undercover area beneath my primary school where we gathered, weekly, for assemblies. The space was open to the sides, the old concrete floor polished to a shine by the steps of many feet. The orchestra played some simple tune I can’t remember, the music ricocheting like a handball off the brickwork pillars and the low ceiling created by the underbelly of the building above. We shifted, cross-legged and restless on the ground. It was the first time I’d experienced the golden warmth of a fundamental string ensemble sound. A whole family of timbres blending as one. I wanted to step inside that sound and make it my own. I became a cellist.
Many years later, I travelled to Western Queensland with an orchestra. The group was a mix of fledgling players and professionals; fellow students, our professors, and musicians with established freelance and orchestral careers. We landed in Longreach, on Iningai land, the airport a single building beside the tarmac. From there we drove on to Winton in Koa land, our instruments riding shotgun. Beyond the tinted, dust-daubed windows of the bus the outback stretched towards a seamless horizon, interrupted only by brief cross-stitches of scrub. Distance amplified by an unending sky.
For the open-air concerts we set up stages, microphones, lights. The audience was an anonymous patchwork of shadows. Winter chill nipped at my fingers and the voice of my instrument was stolen by the wind. I continued with the motions of playing, the music transmuted through a labyrinth of cables and directed outwards by distant speakers. It was disconcerting to feel so removed from my own sound, playing against the empty walls of the night.
On our last morning, before dawn, some of us took our instruments to the edge of town. My cello bounced on my back as I lugged a plastic motel chair along the wide, quiet streets. We arrived in a field behind the petrol station as the sun began to rise. The landscape lay open before us, blonde stubbled grass bisected by a road that drifted off towards the horizon. We huddled in a circle facing each other and began to play, layering harmonies and wandering through melodies. Eyebrows raised as I picked up the tempo, asserting a driving rhythm in the bass. My friend grinned and launched into a quick, spirited tune—the timbre of her viola full-throated and bright. The improvisation took shape. Out here, the music seemed something small and strange, our sound turning to mist and disappearing into the cold air like breath. After only a few minutes, two strangers crossed the field towards us. ‘We heard you from the petrol station.’ The sun grew warmer as we improvised for our small audience. The sound rose and fell out of existence without leaving a trace. Yet for a moment it had been heard, and that was enough.
♪♫ ♪♪♫ ♪♫♬ ♪♫♪
Oliveros talks about listening as a phenomenon distinct from the physical process of capturing vibrations as sound. Listening happens as we translate what we hear into meaning. I listen to a recording of her music and am reminded of that outback horizon, endless landscape. There is a slow, solemn theme, emerging with the brass-like timbre of a sunrise. The music illuminates—rather than obfuscates—the noises in the background beyond my headphones. It holds space for all the teeming sounds of the world.
♪♫ ♪♪♫ ♪♫♬♪
You step into the centre of an amphitheatre. You close your eyes, listen.
♪♫ ♪♫♬ ♪♫♪
The composer John Cage famously challenged audiences to open themselves to a new kind of listening by writing the music of silence. For four minutes and thirty-three seconds, a pianist sits before a dormant instrument with their eyes on a stopwatch and does not make a sound. Cage’s work emerges in the space created by this quiet. The music is incidental—a car horn on the street outside, a footstep, a whisper, a laugh. A bird that begins to sing. The room itself holds the sounds gently, as if cupped in the hollow of a palm. Gradually, we accept this invitation to listen.
♪♪♫ ♪♫♬ ♪♫♪
Standing still in the centre of an amphitheatre, you become aware of the internal rhythm of your heartbeat, keeping time.
♪♫ ♪♪♫ ♪♫♬ ♪♫♪
In the depths of the Dan Harpole Cistern, the musicians of Deep Listening Band recorded how long it took for the reverberation of a sound to fade from existence. The accented note produced by a popping balloon boomed through the space for a whole forty-five seconds. Longer than most of us can hold a breath. Longer than most of us can hold eye-contact with a stranger.
♪♫♬ ♪♫ ♪♪♫
Performance has changed the way I think about connection. In an ensemble, the upbeat of a shared breath becomes part of a conversation without words. It takes a different kind of knowing to anticipate, match and respond to a colleague’s every gesture. Regardless of how well you know someone outside the rehearsal room, the placement of a final chord transmits a tacit solidarity. You are joined, for a moment, in the creation of a sound.
The theorist Christopher Small questioned the way we approach artistic practice, arguing that music itself should be understood as a verb. To music. Music is not a finite object encased in the hard shell of a noun. Through performance it becomes a softer, social process, unfolding in movement. In the way a sound travels through a space and through time. Lose focus for a second and you’ll miss it.
Music is a giving and receiving between musician and listener; between musicians who become listeners themselves. Small advocated for the term ‘musicking’ to encapsulate this activity he believed was central to our very humanness. He tugged at the horizons of language to find vocabulary for that which no words can describe.
♪♫ ♪♪♫ ♪♫♬ ♪♫♪
Recently, I returned with my new ensemble to the quiet, weekend grounds of my primary school to take headshots against the bricks. We unpacked and posed in front of the old pillars, instruments cradled by our sides. My friend tucked her violin to her chin and wandered about, letting the glide of her bow spin out a melody through the space. The sound was a cool, ethereal shimmer—edges polished off against the concrete floor. A staff member passed by to see what we were up to. She laughed. ‘I thought I was hearing a ghost sing.’
♪♫ ♪♪♫ ♪♫♪
Like our instruments, we are bodies of sound. We speak words into existence and send them out into space. For Pauline Oliveros, language is just another kind of listening. A culturally coded way of making meaning from sounds modified between lips and tongue, articulated off teeth. We laugh across linguistic barriers, a noise amplified through the narrow passages of vocal tract resonators—the throat, the nose, the cavity of the mouth—chambers in this room of a body.
♪♫ ♪♪♫ ♪♫♬
In the centre of an amphitheatre, you take a breath. You speak, and know that in the echo of your voice, your words will be understood. The claim that you can hear a pin drop from anywhere in an ancient amphitheatre is a myth. A team of researchers tested whispers, dropped coins, match strikes, discovering that these small sounds could only be heard from close to the source. Speaking to the back row of an amphitheatre has always relied on the human projection of a voice.
♪♪♫ ♪♫♬ ♪♫♪
I am still waiting for a reply from the top of the stairwell. My sound travels upwards and returns in rebound, profound in the proportions of the space. I whistle another note, higher this time, which blurs to harmony with the first. For as long as it takes the sound to dissolve, I am musicking, in conversation with a space.
♪
♪♫
♫♬
♫
♪♫ ♫♬ ♪♫ ♪♫ ♪♪♫ ♪♫♬ ♪♫♪
Emily Winter is an emerging writer and musician raised on stories in Magandjin (Brisbane). Her fiction has been published in Jacaranda Journal and received recognition in the shortlist of the Glendower Award for an Emerging Queensland Writer. She enjoys musicking with Cerulean Collective, an ensemble that champions new works by Australian composers.
Playing music has changed the way I think about space. I whistle softly in tall stairwells, letting the notes spiral up, half in hope of a reply. In the soundproofed confines of a practice room, my instrument’s voice is dry and fine as lawn clippings. Against the wooden floors of an old recital hall it grows rich with newfound courage. A room is not a passive thing, but a character of its own.
In the eighties, a trio of musicians climbed down into the empty Dan Harpole Cistern in Port Townsend, Washington State. They hefted their instruments through a manhole and descended over four metres into the subterranean gloom. I can imagine the cistern’s poignant, heavy silence as they introduced small and human noises to the space; the thin, metallic clank of the ladder, the scrape of their breath. Perhaps they laughed, as they climbed, sending the sound showering down like meteorites. Perhaps their voices remained low and cautious, eliciting only the hum of an echo. Perhaps they did not speak at all. They reached the floor and found themselves in a forest of stone-pillared darkness. Here, in the heart of the cistern, they began to improvise. And the cistern began to sing.
The three—Pauline Oliveros, Panaiotis, and Stuart Dempster—would go on to form Deep Listening Band. Oliveros described the cistern as a fourth member of their ensemble. The space was playing with them, as they made music in dialogue with their own echoes. The notes the musicians played were not as important as the way they listened. ‘Musicking’ became a collaboration with a space.
The full reverberation of a friend’s open string will send a hum through the body of my instrument. Classical strings hold their own acoustics; they too, are rooms. Bodies in which sound resides, brought to resonance by the contact between bow and string and bridge and the chamber of air that exists between smoothly joined panels of sympathetically vibrating wood. There are photographs of a cello that show the instrument from within, a wooden space like an attic lit by sunbeams falling through the swirled f-holes of the front plate. This is the first home of my sound, a small garret of air brought to life.
Helmholtz resonance, they call it. The way you can blow across the top of a half-empty bottle and hear a low tone. The springy air inside an enclosed space meeting with the current of your breath to create a kind of music.
The first time I heard an orchestra was in the undercover area beneath my primary school where we gathered, weekly, for assemblies. The space was open to the sides, the old concrete floor polished to a shine by the steps of many feet. The orchestra played some simple tune I can’t remember, the music ricocheting like a handball off the brickwork pillars and the low ceiling created by the underbelly of the building above. We shifted, cross-legged and restless on the ground. It was the first time I’d experienced the golden warmth of a fundamental string ensemble sound. A whole family of timbres blending as one. I wanted to step inside that sound and make it my own. I became a cellist.
Many years later, I travelled to Western Queensland with an orchestra. The group was a mix of fledgling players and professionals; fellow students, our professors, and musicians with established freelance and orchestral careers. We landed in Longreach, on Iningai land, the airport a single building beside the tarmac. From there we drove on to Winton in Koa land, our instruments riding shotgun. Beyond the tinted, dust-daubed windows of the bus the outback stretched towards a seamless horizon, interrupted only by brief cross-stitches of scrub. Distance amplified by an unending sky.
For the open-air concerts we set up stages, microphones, lights. The audience was an anonymous patchwork of shadows. Winter chill nipped at my fingers and the voice of my instrument was stolen by the wind. I continued with the motions of playing, the music transmuted through a labyrinth of cables and directed outwards by distant speakers. It was disconcerting to feel so removed from my own sound, playing against the empty walls of the night.
On our last morning, before dawn, some of us took our instruments to the edge of town. My cello bounced on my back as I lugged a plastic motel chair along the wide, quiet streets. We arrived in a field behind the petrol station as the sun began to rise. The landscape lay open before us, blonde stubbled grass bisected by a road that drifted off towards the horizon. We huddled in a circle facing each other and began to play, layering harmonies and wandering through melodies. Eyebrows raised as I picked up the tempo, asserting a driving rhythm in the bass. My friend grinned and launched into a quick, spirited tune—the timbre of her viola full-throated and bright. The improvisation took shape. Out here, the music seemed something small and strange, our sound turning to mist and disappearing into the cold air like breath. After only a few minutes, two strangers crossed the field towards us. ‘We heard you from the petrol station.’ The sun grew warmer as we improvised for our small audience. The sound rose and fell out of existence without leaving a trace. Yet for a moment it had been heard, and that was enough.
Oliveros talks about listening as a phenomenon distinct from the physical process of capturing vibrations as sound. Listening happens as we translate what we hear into meaning. I listen to a recording of her music and am reminded of that outback horizon, endless landscape. There is a slow, solemn theme, emerging with the brass-like timbre of a sunrise. The music illuminates—rather than obfuscates—the noises in the background beyond my headphones. It holds space for all the teeming sounds of the world.
You step into the centre of an amphitheatre. You close your eyes, listen.
The composer John Cage famously challenged audiences to open themselves to a new kind of listening by writing the music of silence. For four minutes and thirty-three seconds, a pianist sits before a dormant instrument with their eyes on a stopwatch and does not make a sound. Cage’s work emerges in the space created by this quiet. The music is incidental—a car horn on the street outside, a footstep, a whisper, a laugh. A bird that begins to sing. The room itself holds the sounds gently, as if cupped in the hollow of a palm. Gradually, we accept this invitation to listen.
Standing still in the centre of an amphitheatre, you become aware of the internal rhythm of your heartbeat, keeping time.
In the depths of the Dan Harpole Cistern, the musicians of Deep Listening Band recorded how long it took for the reverberation of a sound to fade from existence. The accented note produced by a popping balloon boomed through the space for a whole forty-five seconds. Longer than most of us can hold a breath. Longer than most of us can hold eye-contact with a stranger.
Performance has changed the way I think about connection. In an ensemble, the upbeat of a shared breath becomes part of a conversation without words. It takes a different kind of knowing to anticipate, match and respond to a colleague’s every gesture. Regardless of how well you know someone outside the rehearsal room, the placement of a final chord transmits a tacit solidarity. You are joined, for a moment, in the creation of a sound.
The theorist Christopher Small questioned the way we approach artistic practice, arguing that music itself should be understood as a verb. To music. Music is not a finite object encased in the hard shell of a noun. Through performance it becomes a softer, social process, unfolding in movement. In the way a sound travels through a space and through time. Lose focus for a second and you’ll miss it.
Music is a giving and receiving between musician and listener; between musicians who become listeners themselves. Small advocated for the term ‘musicking’ to encapsulate this activity he believed was central to our very humanness. He tugged at the horizons of language to find vocabulary for that which no words can describe.
Recently, I returned with my new ensemble to the quiet, weekend grounds of my primary school to take headshots against the bricks. We unpacked and posed in front of the old pillars, instruments cradled by our sides. My friend tucked her violin to her chin and wandered about, letting the glide of her bow spin out a melody through the space. The sound was a cool, ethereal shimmer—edges polished off against the concrete floor. A staff member passed by to see what we were up to. She laughed. ‘I thought I was hearing a ghost sing.’
Like our instruments, we are bodies of sound. We speak words into existence and send them out into space. For Pauline Oliveros, language is just another kind of listening. A culturally coded way of making meaning from sounds modified between lips and tongue, articulated off teeth. We laugh across linguistic barriers, a noise amplified through the narrow passages of vocal tract resonators—the throat, the nose, the cavity of the mouth—chambers in this room of a body.
In the centre of an amphitheatre, you take a breath. You speak, and know that in the echo of your voice, your words will be understood. The claim that you can hear a pin drop from anywhere in an ancient amphitheatre is a myth. A team of researchers tested whispers, dropped coins, match strikes, discovering that these small sounds could only be heard from close to the source. Speaking to the back row of an amphitheatre has always relied on the human projection of a voice.
I am still waiting for a reply from the top of the stairwell. My sound travels upwards and returns in rebound, profound in the proportions of the space. I whistle another note, higher this time, which blurs to harmony with the first. For as long as it takes the sound to dissolve, I am musicking, in conversation with a space.
♪
♪♫
♫♬
♫
♪♫ ♫♬ ♪♫ ♪♫ ♪♪♫ ♪♫♬ ♪♫♪
Emily Winter is an emerging writer and musician raised on stories in Magandjin (Brisbane). Her fiction has been published in Jacaranda Journal and received recognition in the shortlist of the Glendower Award for an Emerging Queensland Writer. She enjoys musicking with Cerulean Collective, an ensemble that champions new works by Australian composers.