suono di sogno

The master, seeing the maps, recognises the buildings, houses and spaces between them, reading them like an indeterminate musical score. It, cleverly disguised as a map, indicates the hypothetical sound of the city's intimate voice; its notes and timbre, as well as the silence inherent in its vast open spaces. On the relationship between city and self, between city and language, between city and sound, between city and hope, between city and dream, many books have been written; both the young and the old perceive it as a library*; there is a book in this library to which both make particular reference; this book has allowed them, to dream of the possibility of manifesting these relationships in experience. They both realise that their encounter in a small town on the outskirts of the Australian desert has greatly facilitated this attempt. The younger one, drawing a map of the town of Mildura in a series of signs that appear on the paper like hieroglyphics, perhaps like an idiosyncratic alphabet, attempts to describe both the structure of the environment and the possible routes** through it. The elder interpreted these signs as the notation of a musical text, read between the sounds of the keyboard; this reading includes the spaces between the signs and the signs themselves, instinctively conveyed in the sound of the city. The result of this collaborative project is the mapping of Mildura as a series of hieroglyphic signs interpreted as sound notation. Imagining that each sound and note heard, as Italo Calvino exhorts us, corresponds to a sun-drenched wall, a path, a tree, a tall building or a garden shed; the frequent silences, parks, gardens, vacant lots, vineyards, urban voids... We hope that sitting and listening to these sounds will facilitate a sense of wonderment about how each of us perceives the world around us and how we can share our visions together with those we consider fellow travellers on this strange human journey. The process by which we arrived at this musical insight pays respectful homage to the mysterious practice of mapping the lines of song and is a pale primal shadow.

Performance