by Sam Ellis
The bright morning light immediately dimmed. Lofty stained-glass windows shaded the world in cool greys and browns. Breaths suddenly became visible against the Oude Kerk’s cold masonry. Filing into the church as part of a rag-tag group of tourists, older churchgoers, and typical art types, I followed the herd into the quire, whose walls were already lined with early-birds who’d managed to nab a pew. Along with the rest of the latecomers, I sat on the paved stone floor, waiting patiently.
Set on its side, resting against a chair in the centre of the room, lay a cello.
We all settled in our places, waiting for the music to start. However, much to our surprise, we were told to ignore the obvious, asked to leave the quire, abandon the cello — seemingly the purpose of our early rise — and congregate in the transept. Here, Mariette Dölle, the creative director of the Oude Kerk, gave her introductory speech.
We were all here to attend a morning concert from Australian cellist and sound artist, Anthea Caddy. Dölle explained the rationale for the concert. She spoke of how the morning is seen as a time for serenity and silence — a space felt virtually across a range of interconnected actors who, together, have decided that sound is understood to be a disruption. It was at this point that I noticed the two huge parabolic speakers. Standing about ten feet high, their matte black form and clean lines an alien juxtaposition with the Sixteenth Century architecture. Caddy aimed to challenge this notion, Dölle continued, and “investigate sound as a physical phenomenon in space” (silence #39).
Playing her cello within the quire, the purpose-built speakers — designed in close collaboration with media artist and engineer Miodrag Gladovic — would pick up Caddy’s performance, and transmit it in a concentrated beam of soundwaves which would reverberate off the church’s architecture. We were encouraged to move about the room and explore how our experience of the sonic texture of Caddy’s performance changed depending on our physical location within the church. We dispersed, and listened out for the low, rumbling opening phrases.
It seems kismet that the concert opened in an unplanned contradiction with our ingrained social script of what it means to be a good audience member. We immediately surrounded the cello as an obvious sounding object; we patiently sat cross-legged; we made polite, yet hushed, conversation with others so as to be ready to applaud when Caddy eventually entered. Caddy’s performance successfully highlighted and destabilised various norms regarding sound, space, bodies, and their interactions with one another. Here, after the fact, I find myself trying to tease out and explore some of the embodied confrontations incited by her performance.
“It’s 4:18 a.m.
At this very moment, on this very street,
seven different people in seven different flats
are wide awake.
Can’t sleep.
Of all these people in all these houses,
only these seven are awake.
They shiver in the middle of the night
counting their sheepish mistakes.
Is anybody else awake?
Will it ever be day again?
Is anybody else
awake?
Will it ever be day
again?”
(Tempest, 7-8, formatting as in original text).
A work which explores the morning as a space of underused potential is Kae Tempest’s long form poem
Let Them Eat Chaos, which opens with the reader crash-landing from space into a London housing estate in the early hours of the morning. Only seven strangers are still awake, each in their own flat. The poem intertwines their individual inner monologues, each reflecting on personal struggles, with vivid depictions of grander problematics including the global financial crisis, ecocide, state brutality, and the politics of migration. Such, Tempest gives space to the intimate, seemingly walled-in, personal politics of individuals, while simultaneously relating these to the wider societal issues from which they result, thus revealing the hidden tethers that bind these seven strangers together. One of the crucial draws of the poem is that, within its diegesis, everything happens at exactly 4:18 a.m., a time where we, the accidental onlooker, can see the traces of human interaction — we see the evidence of its existence, but cannot see the full extent of thing itself. In Tempest’s poem, the morning is a space already engraved with life. The groundwork has been laid, yet no one is physically taking up space — they’re out of sight, locked in their flats — so the reader is free to peer into individual lives and see their interconnectedness. However, this affords us a privileged position. The seven, dotted around the estate, remain isolated, oblivious to the interwovenness of their experience.
Silence exists in contrast with noise. In fact, silence is often thought of as the absence of noise. Furthermore, we are universally immersed within sound, its vibrations a constant stimulus — while we may be able to shut our eyes, we cannot deafen ourselves to sound. Hence, the constructed nature of silence is often overlooked. While it might be understood as the deliberate absence of noise, silence is always heard.
The Oude Kerk, the oldest building in Amsterdam, sits in the centre of De Wallen; it is the centre of the city centre. Being inside its walls is to be held in the eye of the storm, its forced serenity both contrasting with, and constructed by, the hustle and bustle outside its walls. Keeping in mind the understanding that the morning is sonically marked by softness, while also appreciating how this contrasts with the Oude Kerk’s geographical location within the heart of the busy city centre, the weight of the silence inside the Oude Kerk becomes deafeningly overpowering.
Both the silence of the morning, and how this is further constructed by geography of the church and its interior were critically investigated during Caddy’s performance. As the beams of sound were flung from the speakers, they bounced wildly around the architecture of the church’s interior and, depending on your location within the church, you heard markedly different timbres and tones. Standing in front of the speakers was an almost deafening experience, the sound too concentrated and direct to be comfortable listening. This sonic shock alerted me to the fact that I must adapt and question my conventional approach to listening. Such, as a listening audience, we began to explore the building, listening for the sweet spots of concordant harmony or the moments of tension where sounds clashed — uncovering them in dusty corners, behind stone pillars, and under unassuming arches. Taking a moment to appreciate the strange sight of listeners-at-play — some with their ears pressed to the skirting boards, others standing in place, rolling their heads on their necks hearing the diversity of their sonic environment with even the slightest movement — I began to appreciate that we were not just hearing Caddy’s performance. Rather, the architecture of the church, the structure that once signified silence, was suddenly brought into conversation with Caddy’s cello. We were hearing Caddy’s performance post-translation, spoken back to us by the church’s walls, floors, windows and columns. And, upon encountering this translation, our understanding and use of our surroundings completely changed. The highly codified space, whose history of ritual and tradition had dictated how one should behave, was completely disrupted and redefined by Caddy disobeying its implicit sonic doctrine. By letting the church interior speak to us, we were invited to explore completely new ways of traversing its physical space, and were tasked with finding new ways to listen. We wandered the space not as an historic church, with all its associated rules and norms, but rather as sonic terrain that was yet to be fully mapped.
As people trawled the floor, letting their ears guide them, I found a spot where I felt comfortable, closed my eyes, and decided to try staying still. As I began to listen more closely, I noticed how even though I wasn’t moving, the soundworld I was immersed in was still dynamic, the timbre of Caddy’s performance in constant flux. Opening my eyes, I realised that the church’s interior wasn’t quite as static as I had previously assumed. There were people milling about, forming clusters, and making dedicated circuits around the perimeter. Everyone that populated the space was resonant in some way or another, the sound waves also bouncing off of their bodies and being picked up by my ear. We were all at once, both a listening subject, and a sounding object. We were all entangled with one another, each individual’s movement having a tiny, yet significant, impact on others’ sonic experience.
I mentioned that
Let Them Eat Chaos affords the reader a privileged position insofar as they are able to recognise the hidden bonds between individual experience. Caddy executed a performance that democratised this perspective. The barrier between listening subject and sounding object was torn down, leaving in its wake a murky space where each person was both at once. Individual milieus colliding, and vibrating together. Each person in the room was, on a sonic level, enmeshed with every other body within the space. Not only was
silence #39 a fascinating sonic experience, it worked to highlight the interconnectedness between bodies and space suddenly identifiable when you are afforded the space to listen closely.
