The Ephemeral City: Songs for the Ghost Quarters

Katt Hernandez

Abstract The towers of the Stockholm skyline twine with radio transmissions, flying out over the city, drifting down through the streets and sinking into the underground telephone system below. Stockholm has buildings that have been there for centuries, but is also full of modern and contemporary architectures, all jostling for their place in parallel collective memory. In taking the city up as a subject, this artistic PhD project in music expands allegories to these architectural instruments into the world of the mechanical and the electrical. By taking up and transforming the materials of the cityscape, this project spins ephemeral cities more subtle than the colossal forces transforming the city. The aim is to offer those materials, wrought into music and sound works, for urban dwellers to deepen, remember, evoke and envision their own ephemeral cities. The themes in the project are drawn from urban memory and transformation, psychogeography and the ghosts of the imagined city, aiming to empower a sense of place beyond commercial forces, through the fleeting, subtle and imaginary. There are three questions the artistic works of this project reflect on and address. The first is about the ability of city-dwellers to regain or create some sense of place, history or belonging through the power of their imaginations. The second reflects on the possibility for imagined alternatives to re-empower a sense of place for the people who encounter them. The third seeks out the points where stories, memories, or alternative futures are collective, at what point are they wholly individual, and how the interplay between them plays out in listening. There is an improvisatory practice in how we relate to urban environments: an ever- transforming inter-play between the animate and inanimate. Each individual draws phantoms of memory and imagination onto the cityscape, and this yields subtle ways people can be empowered in their surroundings. The artistic works of this project are made to illuminate those subtleties. They are comprised of a group of compositions, improvisations, artistic collaborations and sound installations in music and sound. I have created them utilizing modular synthesizers, field recordings, pipe organs, multi-channel settings; PureData and SuperCollider programs; string ensembles with hurdy-gurdy, nyckelharpa or violin, and; sound installations. This choice of instruments is as an allegory to the architecture of Stockholm. The final result is a collection of music and sound works, made to evoke the imagined city. Taken as a whole, the works of the project create an imaginary city–one possible version of The Ephemeral City–to argue that the evocation of ephemeral space is a way to empower urban dwellers. The mechanism of that empowerment is the force of imagination, immune to the vast forces tearing through the fabric of Stockholm life by virtue of the ghostly, transitory and mercurial, as compelling to the inner eye as brick and mortar to the outer life. Populärvetenskaplig sammanfattning Kyrkspirorna och tornen på Stockholms horisont blandar sig med radiosändningar som flyger ut över staden bredvid privatiserade våglängder, driver ner genom atmosfären och sjunker ner i det övergivna underjordiska telefonsystemet. Stockholm har byggnader som funnits där i århundraden, men är också full av den mest moderna och samtida arkitektur. Allt konkurrerar om sin plats i det kollektiva minnet. Det här konstnärliga doktorandprojektet i musik tar upp och omvandlar stadsbildens grundmaterial, skapar bilder av staden, mer subtila än de starka krafter som är i rörelse; där staden förändras så snabbt och på ett sätt som ofta skapar maktlöshet. Syftet är att erbjuda material, bearbetat till musik och ljudverk, för stadsbor att fördjupa, minnas, frammana och föreställa sig sina egna efemära städer. Ämnena i projektet är tagna från urbana minnen och omvandlingar, psykogeografi och andarna i den efemära staden. Syftet är att möjliggöra en upplevelse av tillhörighet och hemmahörande som sträcker sig bortom kommersiella krafter och istället framhåller det flyktiga, subtila och imaginära. Projektet tar sig an tre frågeställningar: Hur kan musik och ljudkonst möjliggöra ett återtagande av tillhörighet och platskänsla genom kraften i individens fantasi? Hur kan alternativa inre bilder av staden förstärka en upplevelse av tillhörighet och platskänsla? När blir berättelser, minnen och alternativa framtidsvisioner kollektiva, när kan de delas med andra och när är de helt individuella? Det finns ett improvisatoriskt samspel mellan det levande och det materiella i staden vilket möjliggör subtila sätt för de boende att återfå inflytande över sin omgivning. De konstnärliga verken i det här projektet är gjorda för att belysa dessa subtiliteter, centrerade runt ett antal kompositioner, improvisationer, konstnärliga samarbeten och ljudinstallationer. Med användande av modulära synthesisers, fältinspelningar, piporgel, multikanaluppsättningar; PureData- och SuperColliderprogram, stråkensembler med vevlira, nyckelharpa eller violin och ljudinstallationer. Valet av instrument och material är en efemär metafor för Stockholms arkitektur. Slutresultatet är en samling musik och ljudverk, gjorda för att belysa den imaginära staden. Tagna som en helhet, skapar verken i projektet en imaginär stad – en möjlig version av Den Efemära Staden – för att kunna argumentera att detta frammanande av ett efemärt rum är ett sätt att stärka de boende genom fantasins makt, immuna mot de starka krafter som förändrar livet i Stockholm, med hjälp av det drömlika, omformande och flyktiga. Lika övertygande för det inre ögat som tegelsten och murbruk är i den yttre världen.

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26th January, 2016: Kungl. Musikhögskolan, Stockholm

After decades, the new music school building at Kungl. Musikhögskolan (The Royal College of Music, or “KMH”) has finally opened its doors to the public, and inaugural events are happening in every hall and atrium. In one of the new concert halls, Lilla Salen, is a magnificent, permanently installed work. Its composer is William Brunson, who has been devising it for the better part of seventeen years.

Not long after arriving in Stockholm in the early 80s, Brunson became the producer at the city's oldest new and experimental music organization, Fylkingen, for five years. There he was instrumental to the design of a unique, new intermedia hall; an octagonal theater with a floating dance floor, a video projection room, a small control room and electronic music studio, a dressing room with theater entrances, and a height-variable quadraphonic system of Meyer UPA 1A's, as well as an additional four UPA 1A speakers to create more configurations.

The Swedish Broadcast Ethos is a presence in both halls, as Brunson got to know engineers and producers at the Swedish Radio during his time at Fylkingen, organizing the broadcast of many of the organization’s concerts, and took in as much of their skill and lore as he could. Then, there is the composition itself.

It is called Klangkupolen (The Sound Dome). It drops from the ceiling with motors in three cascading rings, with a total of 29 Genelec 8050 speakers, including a central “Voice of God” at the top–and there are an additional 16 Genelec 8050s one may set up on stands to create a fourth, lower ring. Klangkupolen also has four huge Genelec subs, each occupying a corner of the carefully designed room, acoustically tuned for the most exact, palpable listening experience with music for speakers. Here, the nearly impossible work of spatialized low bass frequencies is even possible, as some of the students try out the very first year the composition is in operation.

Brunson’s composition, told as an on-going dream to students over a decades of teaching at the conservatory, has affected the fabric of spatialized music throughout the city of Stockholm. A few years before, two of his former students, Marcus Wrangö and Magnus Bunnskog, founded the Audiorama listening salon. This room had a dome of two rings, with 17 Genelec 8050s, and four Genelec sub-basses buried in the floor. The Klangkupolen is a step up from that, even as Elektronmusikstudion (Electronic Music Studio, or “EMS”), the national electronic music studio complex for Sweden, re-designed two of its studios to match these configurations more closely, and the 2017 Svensk musikvår (Spring of Swedish Music) festival built a similar structure out of a varied group of speakers at Fylkingen for an evening of electroacoustic music. The design of the Lilla Salen looks eerily familiar to me, as if Fylkingen has passed into a kind of heaven. The magnitude of its dome is a direct conversation with Audiorama, in turn inspired by it. In New Zealand, Clovis McEvoy, John Kim, David Rylands and John Coulter write and obtain the plans and specifications from Brunson, and build their own 29 speaker model of Klangkupolen, using a plywood geodesic dome, in an old industrial building, in the middle of the New Zealand wilderness.x Space begets space begets space; potentials as composition, composition as place.

The ephemerality of this particular and unique spatial composition lies in its nature as a set of potentials. Before his passing in March of 2022, Brunson had worked tirelessly trying to finish a work around the idea of Hope: the one creature that did not escape Pandora’s Box. He felt he had failed in his task, but I disagree; instead of building a traditional, fixed-media piece, he built Klangkupolen. What could be a more eloquent expression of hope in music than such a composition, not stating one person's musical ideas, but ready to send forth a myriad of as-yet unimagined musics from generations to come?

Kungliga musikhögskolan (Royal College of Music, or "KMH")

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This is an excerpt from Vädersolsmodernitet (The Sun-Dogs of Modernity). This headphone mix was made in a model of the Klangkupolen, build by Gerhard Eckel in 2017. The whole piece can be listened to here.

This is an excerpt from Skogen är bäst på bild (The Forest looks Best in Pictures). The whole piece can be listened to here.

Almost all of the large scale EAM works in this project were made in the studios at KMH. Above are two examples. There are more in the Repository of Music and Sound Works.

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26th January, 2016: Kungl. Musikhögskolan, Stockholm