Sound Art

Sounding architectures

The author’s scholarship spent at the iASK (Institute of Advanced Studies, Kőszeg) provided an opportunity to develop an old idea: to make musical sketches entitled “Sounding Houses” along the parallels of music and architecture.

This is how the first composition was written, based on the facade of the Hrcaded house on Jurisics Square in Kőszeg. The concept and the examples of music in Kőszeg can be heard here.

It is also part of the idea that these sketches should not only be part of a one-time and individual program, but also the initiators of a broader creative musical game. For this reason, Sounding Houses is part of the iASK Music Workshop's accredited music teacher training program called ’Sounding City’. And since the idea of such work with the Pauline monastery ruins was conceived in the above institute, it is fitting that the architecture of the Salföld church should also be given a musical explanation.

The inner wall of the sanctuary of the church gives a “sheet music”

In this case, since the remains of the building do not have a well-articulated exterior facade, the inner wall of the sanctuary of the church gives a “sheet music”. As with the Kőszeg facades, we now read the “wall sheet music” in a traditional way from left to right. The first experience is that the walls are quite “porridge”, even here there is little clear architecture. Most of all, the triple spacing arcs of the high-pitched launches of the arches are the most tangible visual elements. After this, the dark doorways and arches below, as well as the window openings above, and finally a carved Gothic window frame in the third arched window on the south wall of the sanctuary remained intact.

Unstructured wall raster

So The musical elements represent all these. In what way? The largest surface - and thus the basic layer of the music - is the unstructured wall raster, which inspired the following idea: this should be a constant, almost noisy sound mass consisting of many Gregorian recordings played on top of each other, symbolizing the centuries-old the memory of the sounds sung “in total” between the walls, and the melodic arcs could be “planted” on this. The "raw material" of the wall is a Christmas Gregorian chant from the Pauline antiphonale (MR 8), once recorded by Schola Hungarica (Magyar gregorianum 2, 1979)

The motifs corresponding to the architectural shapes

The image shows the music editing interface, on which the motifs corresponding to the architectural shapes can be well identified: the three-arc splitting melodies of the store launches, the vault of the windows filled with held sounds, and the rotating, repetitive melody of the circular window frame carving.

When the music was done, we gave it the title ’Saecula saeculorum’, which means: forever and ever. With a simple illustration, we put it all into the October soundscape recorded at the time of the pictures. I wish we could walk this soundwalk on the border between reality and imagination live once!

Saecula Saeculorum

Contact

Csaba Hajnóczy

hajnoczy@mome.hu

Sources

Impressum

Presented on the UNESCO Week of Sound 2021

Central European Network
for Sonic Ecologies

Balaton-felvidéki
National Park