Discord, MA (2023)

"Much is published, but little printed. The rays which stream through the shutter will be no longer remembered when the shutter is wholly removed. No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert."

"In truth, our village has become a butt
For one of those fleet railroad shafts, and o'er
Our peaceful plain its soothing sound is -- Concord."

"I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges."

Discord, MA is a multi-channel soundscape composition exploring the past and present soundscapes of Walden Pond, popularized in the 19th century by Henry David Thoreau, an American transcendentalist writer. The piece critically engages with the dominant romantic perception of the site, seeking instead a more complex and transversal form of attunement with the layers of its natural and cultural history. Thoreau’s diligent work in bringing attention to natural environments (and their soundscapes) would not have been possible without his reliance on extractivist industry, specifically graphite mining. Therefore, the piece’s departure point is a pencil from his and his father’s factory, a tool Thoreau used to map the pond and its surrounding territory and then write and edit the passages of his influential book. Today, graphite constitutes the major component of batteries used in various devices that surround us, including sound recording equipment. Through this, environmentally-concerned artists and researchers attempt to bring attention to the effects of climate change and the Anthropocene. The piece highlights this paradox, using sound to reveal how noise, extraction, and depletion of natural resources might be an inherent flip-side to many endeavors concerned with environmental protection and awareness; how one’s silence is always someone else’s noise.

At the same time, the piece proposes a new reading of Thoreau's seminal work in the context of current concerns related to climate change and its global and local effects. Using transversal listening techniques -- by approaching present soundscapes as gateways to multiple other sonic, geological realms and temporalities, past and future -- the piece finds resonance with Thoreau's relational thinking about environment as an entity at once locally originated and yet globally interconnected.

The piece is entirely based on field recordings made in the immediate and remote vicinity of Walden Pond through various creative and critical engagements with the site and its history performed between September 2022 and April 2023. The premiere took place on April 17 at Holden Chapel, Harvard University and featured a guest appearance by William Teixeira, a cellist, professor at the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul, and a Visiting Researcher (Fulbright Junior Faculty 2022/2023) at Harvard University.

Thanks to John Pax, manager at Sound Media Lab at the Department of Music, Harvard University and the staff at Walden Pond State Reservation. The piece was part of my 3-year postdoctoral project funded by the Swedish Research Council entitled 'The Art of Walking and Listening through Time, Space, and Technologies,' 2020-2023. The project was also part of my Fulbright Visitor Scholarship received from the Fulbright Commission in Sweden for 2022-2023.