Music in the Urban Landscape
I recently went to Bowtie Park, an art park situated along the Los Angeles River that’s hidden behind office parks and residences, scorching and unoccupied. Besides trying to see the giant obelisk carved out of the ground, I wanted to imagine the opera Hopscotch that was partly staged in this location and used the LA urban landscape as a backdrop (more on that below).
There is a rich tradition in which other artforms interact with and are inspired by cities and landscapes beyond live performances in town squares. Performance artworks are inspired by everyday sounds and many urban spaces are enriched by musical language and installations. Here are my favourites:
1. Motation, Lawrence Halprin
Landscape architect Lawrence Halprin and his wife Anne Halprin, a dancer, incorporate dancing and its movement into their descriptions and design of landscape. Halprin invented “motation”, a diagrammatic score that illustrates movement in time and space, which uses musical notation as a framework. Motation allows Halprin to design and interpret space with emphasis on the importance of human movements and interactions with urban space.
2. The Wave Organ, San Francisco
At a tiny jetty along the San Francisco Bay is a curious object that is half concrete pipe and half rock carving. Commissioned by the San Francisco Exploratorium in 1986, Peter Richards and George Gonzalez created a sound sculpture that captures music made from the flow and ebb of the waves and tides. Adjacent to the wave organs are stone steps and seats, allowing visitors to take in the tranquility of the bay with wave music. The sculpture transmits natural sounds that might otherwise be ignored.
3. “Lachrimae”, the Highline, New York
Music can also be embedded into landscapes. Overlooking the Hudson Yards trainyard’s massive infrastructure of grey and steel, one can hear heavy, dissonant sounds. At first, the sounds can be easily misinterpreted as noise from the tracks, but in reality it’s artist Susan Philipsz’s seven-part soundpiece “Lachrimae”. Based on the image of a single falling tear, the soundpiece subtly resonates the contrast between the vast view of the Hudson River and the sounds from constant construction and trains.
4. “Concerto for Buildings”, Make Music Festival, New York
The urban fabric itself can also be transformed into musical instruments! Twice a year, Make Music New York hosts festivals on the winter and summer solstices. Last summer, the “Concerto for Buildings” was performed by two youth ensembles (Face the Music and Mantra Youth Percussion). The concerto was created by using the hollow facades of the cast-iron buildings on Green Street in Soho as percussion instruments. The result was a playful cacophony of sounds from the street as music composition.
5. Hopscotch, Los Angeles
Back to Hopscotch, the aforementioned mobile opera. Hopscotch is an ambitious opera in which audiences traversed the sprawling city in a fleet of limos. The scenes took place in the vehicles and at designed sites in eastern and downtown Los Angeles. In a city with a reputation of being car-dependent, the opera take advantages of the unique experience driving in urban LA through summits, deserts and concrete, as well as the city’s diverse spatial fabric in the steps of City Hall, Chinatown Central Plaza, Evergreen Cemetery and the Bradbury Building. Hopscotch is intrinsically linked to the urbanscape of Los Angeles. My favorite music writer Alex Ross described the opera as “a combination of road trip, architecture tour, contemporary-music festival, and waking dream”.
We love our urban spaces for a variety of reasons, which are based on our overt and subtle interactions with the everyday landscape and the people who occupy and move through them. Experiencing these fabrics through art heightens our sense of listening and awareness of movements that we don’t usually recognize.
And may I interest you to end this piece by listening to Soundwalk 9:09, a composition of sounds from sidewalks by Pulitzer winning composer John Luther Adams? I promise it’s worth a listen.
Site&Seek is a blog series by Projexity. We’re sharing projects and processes that impact our built environment. (Post by Gloria Lau) Follow Site&Seek on Instagram.
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