wind, silence and the sounding of otherwise mute harps
I’m writing this text on a visit to Aberystwyth, a seaside town in West Wales where I grew up. I am staying in a flat next to the harbour and tonight there is a strong breeze. The boats are jostling and bobbing on the water, flags are flapping, runners are slapping against the masts in a repetitive rhythm, and the cables of the boats are whistling in the wind, sounding not dissimilar to an Aeolian harp.
My most vivid memories of the sound of wind come from my childhood in Aberystwyth: blustering around my ears as I stand on the beach, rushing the leaves of trees in the woods behind our house, driving the rain onto the flat roof of my bedroom, rattling the cables in the street lights, gusting the dust and debris on the floor, rustling the dry grass on the dunes and howling through the cracks of windows. Of course we all have similar experiences of these sounds, but I sometimes felt the sounds produced by the wind were being played only for me. This is what I felt when I was playing my harp outside and the wind suddenly began to caress the strings. It was a chance occurrence as the harp had to be placed at a specific angle and the wind had to blow in a particular direction, with a certain velocity, for the instrument to sound. These sounds were at times loud and at other times discreet. They could sometimes only be heard when I pressed my ear to the soundbox to hear the resonances within the harp.
The two wind harps, wind harp (#2) and wind harp (#3) that I have situated in Herzele form an extension of my interest in silence and sound, and are dependent on temporary states in the atmosphere. They display the basic constituent parts of a wind harp: one has a frame, resonating chamber and strings, the other has a soundbox two bridges and strings. The soundboards are original from reclaimed harps: the larger of the two is from a harp made by Salvi and the second, the older of the two, is from an unknown maker. They are instruments that do not need human agency to play them. When it is calm or when the wind only blows a light or gentle breeze, the objects remain silent. In fact they are often mute and only sound on random occasions which are contingent on the wind direction and speed. The dynamics also rely on the strength of the wind on any particular day: the stronger the wind the louder the sound. They are also open to the destructive forces of nature - of wind, rain and damp which will all change the characteristics of the sound.
My interest in working with the parts of a harp as sound-making objects began around ten years ago, when my concert harp soundboard developed a crack. I asked the harp repairer to remove the soundboard intact as I had a suspicion that I would find ways of re-sounding this ‘silenced’ object. I’ve since used this soundboard and other salvaged harp parts to explore different ways of making sound. Many of these harp parts are over a hundred years old, cracked or riddled with woodworm, and have outgrown their use as musical instruments. I try to find ways for the elements to sound these objects by building wind harps, setting a harp on fire, recording rain on the soundboard, playing metal harp strings with dry ice and dipping a harp into the sea with a hydrophone inside its soundbox. One of my main interests in working with these harps is to try and find ways of extending the duration of a harp note. Typically, when a harp string is plucked, the sound decays following the initial activation. I have uncovered and worked with many different ways of sustaining a note - by attaching bray pins to the strings, and activating the strings with bows, EBows, mallets, string, mini fans or office fans. Fans of course ‘play’ the strings by generating wind. In this context in Herzele, the wind will be playing the instruments and will carry the potential of playing and sustaining long, uninterrupted sounds.
This experiment with the soundings of otherwise mute harps will also be marked by long periods of silence. I’ve been working with silence, stasis and quiet thresholds in music for many years, and this initially formed part of an attempt to avoid narrative, emotion and expression. But this investigation also brought to my attention the broad range of quieter dynamics, from silence through to the barely perceptible. The silences between the sounds also became important parts of the shape of the music. As did the question of what happened when a sound stopped: the listener would often only become aware of the presence and density of a sound when it was no longer there. This particular installation forms an opportunity to reflect on the form and temporality of encounters between sound and silence.
The two harps were made with the assistance of Peter Evans. Thank you to Angharad Closs Stephens, Luea Ritter and ARPIA.
