Aeolian harp pieces

Sanctuary of Sound is a composition with a duration of 72 hours, performed in an open space in the open air, demarcated by 8 wind harps: an architectural space without roof or walls, in which the listener, sitting or lying in the grass, is invited to open the senses and surrender to a potentially infinite variation of sound in time and space. The performer is the wind, which makes the strings of these sound objects vibrate and thus makes a continuously moving palette of overtones audible, which moves with the wind. The gust of wind that you feel on your skin can be heard directly in the movement of the sound in the wind harps. Music made on the basis of overtones is something that has occupied composer Miranda Driessen for years. Listening to these sounds is fascinating and comparable to looking at the ever-changing colour shades of light at sunrise or sunset. Sound, time and space are quantities within this that require demarcation and structure. To do this, Driessen used principles from the architecture of Dom Hans van der Laan and the Plastic Number. With these, she calculated different orders of magnitude, each with its own tuning or sound ratio. The points in time at which the tuning of the wind harps changes in Sanctuary of sound form, as it were, a door to other sound/time-space, each with its own characteristic and atmosphere. The performance of a piece of music with such a duration, left to something as unpredictable as the weather, is not without risks: what if it rains, or there is no wind? Accustomed as we are to controlling nature, we now see the limits of this approaching us. In doing so, we are asked to look beyond the boundaries of our personal lives and to think about what we want to leave behind for future generations. This applies not only to nature, but also to culture. In any case, this work reaches beyond the boundaries of the life of the maker of the 8 wind harps, Jan Heinke, who died last April at the age of 53. For this composition, Miranda Driessen drew further inspiration from ideas that were already discussed centuries ago: the tuning of the strings in Pythagoras, ideas about consonance and dissonance from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ideas about time in John Cage and sound development in Eliane Radigue. The work thus emerges from a stream of human creativity that spans more than 2500 years. In that light, 72 hours is a minuscule fraction. Time and space are essential to allow the spirit to continue to blow.