Echoes: a wandering concert

Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, Paris

On 14th May 2022, the SONCITIES research group reunited once more with musicologist Eric de Visscher for the final realisation of his research residency, Musée Polyyphonique, held at the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine (Paris).

ECHOES: A wandering concert, followed and developed key ideas that had emerged from our combined workshop in March, From the City to the Museum: Listening to Urban Architecture. On that occasion, workshop participants had asked how the spaces of display interact with the rhythms of urban life and sought to position a future for the museum and its public that is mediated by the polyphonic voice.  Now, for two forty-five-minute performances, a new audience was summoned to hear the museum anew, as a living architecture, via three distinct yet interwoven musical paths.  

Three musicians were invited to take over spaces of the Mural Paintings and Stained-Glass Galleries and make a critical sonic response to the museum’s sequence of recreated chambers, cupolas, side chapels and crypts.  Operating across voice, oud, and harnessing an electronic repertoire of concrete sounds, the soprano Eléonore Lemaire, composer Youmna Saba and the sound artist Matilde Meireles each made an initial response, working separately and remotely from their geographical bases - Paris, Beirut and London.  

Details of the performance were conceptualized from plans and only tested in situ during an intense rehearsal the night before.  My particular privilege was being present for this evening of preparation, wandering through the empty galleries with a tuning fork, witnessing a collaboration across countries come together in an immediate and vibrant liveness. 

On the night itself, visitors were welcomed and guided by the mesmeric voice of Eléonore, who, with vocal and bodily agility moved quickly through the cloisters, sometimes visible and sometime not but always audible, leading the audience first to Youmna, then Matilde, before converging under the cupola. Reflecting, playing and stretching the performative conditions of the space, ECHOES suggested a different way to encounter the museum, albeit contemplating details of an image whilst listening to the fading vibration of the oud, experiencing the energy of a standing wave, or being engulfed by the sounds of the city outside.

It was presented as part of the annual European Museum Night, and you can listen to Eric De Visscher talking more about the performance to Radio France here.