CENTRAL PARK: A PICTURE-IN-SOUNDS
A Tribute To The Musical & Actuarial Works Of Charles Ives
Mat Smith, 2021 – 2023

“My God! What has sound got to do with music?”

- Charles Ives, Essays Before A Sonata (1920)

‘Central Park: A Picture-In-Sounds’ is a site-specific performance piece, for one or more performers aged between ten and 95 years old. It is a tribute to the multi-disciplinary work of Charles Ives that will be published in 2024.

To execute the piece, each performer will refer to a map of Central Park divided into areas representing the life expectancies listed in an 1874 US insurance industry mortality table. Each performer will identify an area of the Park corresponding to their life expectancy in 1874 and make a field recording lasting precisely eight minutes and thirty seconds.

First performance notes by Mat Smith

30 June 2023, 13:47

I was 46 years old when I performed ‘Central Park: A Picture-In-Sounds’ for the first time. Looking at the life expectancies table and my divided Central Park map, this indicated that I should perform the piece in the area surrounding Strawberry Fields and the John Lennon Imagine memorial.

It is an area of the park that I knew would have a specific sonic signature, given that there is invariably someone sat on a bench near the memorial playing Beatles songs on an acoustic guitar. On this occasion, a guitarist was delivering a folksy rendition of ‘Come Together’ as I walked past. I took a photo of the Imagine memorial. I couldn’t help myself. I’m a perpetual tourist.

I decided to find a spot a short distance from the memorial along a relatively wild path, strewn lightly with bark chips. A small lump of schist rock offered a place to sit and a flat enough surface to position my recording device.

The rock protruded out the top of a hill with the cycle way just visible some fifty metres below. After I began the recording I looked down toward the path, where a steady stream of cyclists and pedestrians moved across my field of vision. Occasionally, I would pick up snatches of conversation between two or more people, while the sound of cycle bells approximated an infrequent rhythm. At one point, a pedicab whirled past, bringing with it a blast of tinny music from a Bluetooth speaker hung over the handlebars.

A maintenance engineer was using a hose on some plants. A grey-haired lady skipped through the fine spray, looking to cool down in the humid Central Park heat. The guitarist at the Imagine memorial was strumming something I don’t recognise. The sound of his voice and strings gently wafted in my direction but were too far away to be intelligible.

As I looked forward toward the path, I could see only tranquility. Serenity. Quiet. Calm. I was surrounded by a canopy of green leaves which created dappled patterns on the ground in front of me, imperceptibly shifting thanks to the lightest of breezes.

The gentle sound of birdsong was everywhere. Two inquisitive pigeons landed to my right, took a look around and wandered off before returning to go though an elaborate courting ritual of small pecking kisses and placing their beaks on each other’s neck feathers. All you need is love, indeed. Maybe this quiet spot on a small outcrop of schist was a sexual playground and favourite mating location for pigeons. In time, they were replaced by a pair of sparrows darting quickly through the dusty ground, and they in turn were replaced by a foraging squirrel.

Behind me was the ceaseless throb of 8th Avenue. Car horns. Sirens. The revving of engines. The restless, sleepless city and its multitude of comings and going. Planes fly overhead, probably at set intervals, taking people out of the city for the Independence Day weekend or decanting more tourists into Manhattan.

The dense sound was like thousands of bodies in constant motion, moving defiantly toward somewhere, each one determined to make as much noise in the process as possible.

As I listened intently, the Park seemed to take that cacophony and convert it to stillness. I breathed deeply and felt a sense of calm that stayed with me, long after the performance was finished, as I exited into the heaving throng of people on Fifth Avenue.

Acknowledgments

The composer would like to thank the following people who contributed to the creation of this piece:

Michael Hallen, for the sourcing and mailing of paper Central Park maps in 2021.

Rob Andrew FFA, for supporting the actuarial interpretation of the 1874 mortality table.

Reed Hays, for creative encouragement and with whom I engaged in an earlier exercise in active environmental listening in Times Square on 23 October 2017 at 6:00am.

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