Look Park is full of the sounds of nature and human life — birds chirping, cars passing by. A new sound installation encourages visitors to consider the park in a fresh way through original musical compositions.
The Etchings Festival, a celebration of contemporary music, is hosting the Sound Walk, its first-ever outdoor installation, at Look Park in Florence through early September. The Sound Walk features six compositions: one each by Etchings Fellows Alejandro Lobo, Cole Nagoda, Edric Saphire, Jordan Timmins and Tian Jiang; and one by guest artist Amaury Acosta, also known as King Klavé.
“I was very happy to see how game the composers were to take on the challenge,” said John Aylward, founder of Etchings Festival. “It’s not every day you get asked to participate in something like this. Usually, composers at music festivals are asked to compose chamber music for live concerts, so this is a very different kind of request, and they just ate it up.”
Each of the compositions is situated at a different location in the park, marked by a green sign that includes a biography of the composer, a statement about the piece and a QR code that guests can scan to listen to it.
“These particular pieces are not your typical Spotify playlist,” Aylward said. “These are not pieces that exist as background music that one would work out to or hike to or rock climb to. They exist as pointed pieces that invite deep listening, so the idea is to experience them as connected to the park rather than anything that plays alongside your park experience.”
Guests can pick up a map of the Sound Walk at the entrance to the park, which is helpful because a number of the signs are difficult to see from the road. In fact, Aylward described the Sound Walk as a “musical treasure hunt.”
The sign for Jiang’s “Aqueous Confessions,” for example, is situated inside a grove of trees overlooking Willow Lake. Timmins’ “when the birds fall silent” is underneath a large spruce tree in a field. Aylward and his team paired each of the compositions with a specific park landscape, with the exception of Saphire’s “History of a Bridge,” which the composer specifically requested be placed at the threshold to the park’s covered bridge.
The first installation many guests will see, though, is located right next to the road by Pooh Sticks Bridge. Alejandro Lobo’s “Where it Collides” combines sounds he recorded throughout New England and processed with snippets from documentaries and advertisements about pollution or other practices that hurt the environment, as well as samples of Maurice Ravel’s “Jeux d’eau” and “Une barque sur l’océan.”
Lobo got the idea for his composition from thinking about his relationship with parks in Delaware, where he lives, and in Costa Rica, where his dad is from.
“I wanted to explore that connection and the way those things influence and change each other, and the easiest message for me to latch on to in that regard was a message of care and treating nature delicately, because we have much more power over nature than it has over us,” he said.
This was Lobo’s first time composing a sound installation. While he previously composed location-themed music for traditional concert halls, Lobo noted that this interactive installation functions differently. This is “almost more like art than it is music in some ways,” he explained, emphasizing that visitors have total autonomy over their experience and can simply walk away whenever they choose.
“The length of the piece doesn’t always have to be the full length [that a listener experiences]. People control how much they listen to, where they listen to it,” he said.
A setup like the Sound Walk, then, offers “a different form of absorbing media” that is more self-guided, Lobo said. “I think that’s something that’s growing and something that [the Etchings Fellows are] interested in doing — we just haven’t been asked to do it yet” outside of this festival, he said.
Now that he has this site-specific project under his belt, Lobo is eager to expand on the concept. He has “a lot of interest in doing more of these and taking it to larger extremes with how I can integrate space into my music and create my own projects, even without institutional support or location support. … It’s the start.”
On the day the Gazette visited Look Park, it was raining, so there weren’t a lot of people there at all, let alone taking part in the Sound Walk. Aylward, however, had gone with a group of people who were part of the festival not long ago, and what stuck with him, he said, was how the sounds “interfused in my listening,” he said.
On the day the Gazette toured the installation, rain had cleared out any crowds. Aylward, however, had visited the grounds with a group from the festival shortly before, and what stuck with him was how the sounds “interfused in my listening,” he said.
“Each piece became the piece and the park all at [once], and something about the idea that the park is this living, breathing entity itself resonated with me,” he said. “It’s not like listening to a piece of music in your bedroom.”
Admission to Look Park is $5 per passenger vehicle Monday through Thursday, and $10 Friday through Sunday. Season passes are available for $80, or $65 for seniors. The park is open daily from dawn to dusk. To listen to all of the Sound Walk compositions online, visit eccearts.com/qr-direct.
