TRAVELING

MUSIC

The proliferation of smartphones and noise-canceling headphones has multiplied opportunities for ultraprivate musical experiences. Traveling Music inverts this trend by infiltrating otherwise quiet public spaces with live music to be experienced socially. Acknowledging and building on the common use of boom boxes and car stereos—which sometimes, annoyingly, amplify private sounds in public—the city of Bordeaux, France, hosted a public outdoor concert in which performers and audience were mobile: sound consumed the entire metropolis.

Conceived in collaboration with Julia Wolfe, composer and founder of the contemporary classical music group Bang on a Can, and performed by an ad hoc orchestra of three hundred performers, the composition relied on several troupes of musicians traveling in vehicles and on foot throughout the city over the course of two hours. The performers periodically converged at predetermined sites to play together in full orchestration. Crowds organically gathered and dispersed, enjoying chance musical encounters. Groups of mobile performers accumulated trails of listeners who followed the musicians in an impromptu parade.

Performers included a guerrilla-style street band of winds, brass, and percussion that rode through town on pedicabs; one hundred musicians from Bordeaux who played an array of horns, trumpets, and trombones, providing a musical accent in specific locations; and two hundred schoolchildren with bicycle bells. Another part of the piece, an ambient track of music, was broadcast over radio. At certain times, listeners throughout Bordeaux were invited to hold their radios out their windows to become part of the urban orchestra: the soundtrack echoed throughout the city.

In contrast to the finely tuned acoustics of a concert hall, the unique effects of the city’s materials—glass, steel, brick, concrete, and vegetation—transformed the music in unpredictable ways. Imagined as a Situationist dérive, the piece encouraged city dwellers to forsake their everyday preoccupations and take unplanned journeys through the varied soundscapes of the city.