EPISODE 1: Can you listen like a beginner?
For 43 minutes, professional cellist Melody Giron plays Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cello Suite No.1 in G Major. Or rather – she plays parts of its prelude, over and over, searching for her tone. The ending never arrives. The beginning returns again and again, maintaining a state of perpetual preparation. Listen with us to Cally Spooner’s DEAD TIME (Melody’s Warm Up), 2022. Will you unlearn the melody? Can you listen like a beginner?
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Episode 1 is composed of fictional writing and collected fragments of conversations that took place on March 26, 2024, during The Poly Listening Club at Zurich University of the Arts. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or deceased (apart from the artists), may or may not be purely coincidental.
Sound piece: DEAD TIME (Melody’s Warm Up), 2022, by Cally Spooner
Texts: Barbara Preisig
Sound design: Ronja Svaneborg
Proofreading: Bram Opstelten
Speakers: Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, Mathieu Dafflon, Kris Decker, Alisha Dutt Islam, Emma Murray, Jarina Müller Frischkopf, Barbara Preisig, Alexander Prince Osei, Maria Rebecca Sautter, Ronja Svaneborg
Special thanks to:
Cally Spooner, the speakers, Felix Friedrich, Marcel Bleuler, Minda Deol, Laura von Niederhäusern, BA Fine Arts Theory II Class Spring 2024, and the participating audience
EPISODE 2: What’s the sound of climate change?
Hearing the grass grow, the drought, the flickering of a heat wave; listening to the melting of ice and the rise of sea levels. How does climate change sound? Where should I listen first, and how? Do I need suitable recording devices, or just a vivid imagination? Let us listen to a sound piece that may bring light to the dark, or rather: sound to silence – Water-Drought Patterns by Eleni-Ira Panourgia, created in 2023.
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Episode 2 is composed of fictional writing and collected fragments of conversations that took place on May 7, 2024, during The Poly Listening Club at the Zurich University of the Arts. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or deceased (apart from the artists), may or may not be purely coincidental.
Sound piece: Water-Drought Patterns, 2023, by Eleni-Ira Panourgia
Texts: Barbara Preisig
Sound design and edit: Pascal Lund-Jensen
Proofreading: Bram Opstelten
Speakers: Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, Kris Decker, Emma Murray, Jarina Müller Frischkopf, Barbara Preisig, Alexander Prince Osei, Maria Rebecca Sautter
Special thanks to:
Eleni-Ira Panourgia, Kris Decker, the speakers, Felix Friedrich, Marcel Bleuler, Minda Deol, Laura von Niederhäusern, and the participating audience
EPISODE 3: How can we listen in a non-extractive way?
We join a small gathering of friends on a balcony: Fran to your left, Sid and Moon to your right. It’s an early summer evening; the air is filled with birdsong and the sound piece Fuengu (2021) by Hong-Kai Wang. For this project, the artist explored the musical heritage of Tsou Taiwanese composer Uong e Yatauyungana, using listening as a way to familiarise himself with the Psoseongana landscape. Together with Wang, we ask: how can one listen without taking anything away from that landscape? How to listen in a non-extractive way? Is it possible to hear without interest? And is there a way of hearing that is better – or worse? Who decides?
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Episode 3 is fictional writing inspired by the conversations that took place on June 4, 2024, during and after The Poly Listening Club at Zurich University of the Arts. Any resemblance to actual persons living or deceased is purely coincidental.
References mentioned in the radio play:
Minato Chihiro, Landscape Theory: The Changing Memory of the Earth and Japan, Chuo Koronsha, 2018.
Amer Kanngieser, “listening as taking leave,” in: Seedbox Environmental Humanities Lab, 15 January 2021, https://theseedbox.mistraprograms.org/blog/listening-as-taking-leave/
Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.
Sound piece: Fuengu, 2021, by Hong-Kai Wang. Originally performed at the Colomboscope Interdisciplinary Arts Festival in Sri Lanka: https://www.colomboscope.lk/athousandchannels-episode-five.
Texts: Barbara Preisig
Sound design: Ronja Svaneborg
Proofreading: Bram Opstelten
Speakers: Emma Murray, Jarina Müller Frischkopf, Alexander Prince Osei, Maria Rebecca Sautter
Special thanks to: Hong-Kai Wang, Aio Frei, Cannach MacBride, the speakers, Marcel Bleuler, Minda Deol, Laura von Niederhäusern, Kris Decker, Felix Friedrich, and the participating audience
EPISODE 4: Is listening a performance?
--Think about a song you loved as a teenager. Try and remember. How it loved you back. --You can read Ronja Svaneborg’s score-based work Do I need to move my lips to be part of the choir? like a poem. Or you can perform it. With me, with yourself, with those people over there, or with a collective body stretching across time, distance, and environments. How would the voices interact, attune, resonate? And is my listening itself the performance? Come, listen, find out.
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PDF: Do I need to move my lips to be part of the choir
Sound piece: Do I need to move my lips to be part of the choir?, 2024, by Ronja Svaneborg. Performed together with the audience at The Poly Listening Club on April 18, 2024, at Zurich University of the Arts.
Texts: Ronja Svaneborg and Barbara Preisig
Sound design: Ronja Svaneborg
Proofreading: Bram Opstelten
Speakers: Emma Murray, Maria Rebecca Sautter
Special thanks to:
The speakers, Marcel Bleuler, Minda Deol, Laura von Niederhäusern, Felix Friedrich, and the participating audience