Liquid
Architecture
David Peretz · Music for monuments and spaces of memory עברית
About the work
Goethe called architecture frozen music. I melt it back: music for monuments, sculptures and places of memory that does not play from a stage but is spread across the space. One voice in each place, and the listener hears the work by walking through it.
How it works
Speakers or headphones. Hidden speakers for a shared live event, or GPS headphones that leave the site silent.
The walk is the score. Every voice loops at its own length. Hurry, stop or linger, and the music changes with you. Only at the heart of the work do all the voices meet.
One voice, one place. Each speaker, or each point on a GPS map, plays a single line of the music, like one musician in an ensemble.
Four works
2017 Mitzpor Arad · Yigal Tumarkin
2015 Donkey, Now Negev Museum of Art
2014 Andarta Be'er Sheva · Dani Karavan
2013 Spaces The rooms of a new house
2017 · Arad · Yigal Tumarkin's Mitzpor sculpture
Mitzpor
For the sculpture's 50th anniversary, I spread a composition across the ridge path that leads to it. Ten speakers were hidden along the path and inside the sculpture, each playing one voice on its own loop. Only inside the sculpture, where Daniela Turgeman's voice rose from the concrete, did the whole work come together.
It was commissioned for one evening. The residents of Arad asked for it again, and it was restaged at the sculpture several times at the audience's request.
10 speakers · 200 m of ridge path · no walk sounds the same
2014 · Be'er Sheva · Dani Karavan's Negev Brigade Monument
Andarta
From a ceremony to the Louvre
In 2014 Be'er Sheva marked fifty years since work began on the Negev Brigade Monument, so that Dani Karavan could celebrate with the city. It started with a poem I had written about the monument, where I grew up; the organisers asked me to perform it at the ceremony, and then to compose all of its music.
I wanted each element of the monument to become a different instrument, so that only someone standing at its centre would hear the whole work. Electricity and weather made it impossible to spread the piece across the site in time, so the premiere was performed live at the monument with the ensemble We Are Ghosts. The idea waited three more years, for Arad.
Dancer Yoko Imazaka heard the original composition and decided to dance to it. With video artist Shimon Bokshtein she made Andarta, a video-dance film shot in the monument itself. In 2019 it was one of five finalists, out of 100, in NOW YOU SEE ME at the Louvre Museum, with a jury chaired by Sir Anish Kapoor, and the audience favourite.
2015 · Negev Museum of Art
Donkey, Now
A soundtrack for five sculptures in the exhibition, by Menashe Kadishman, David Gerstein, Boaz Arad, Rivka Margolin, and Varda Givoli with Ilan Gelber, delivered through the museum's iHeart ART app. A lesson in finding music inside the material: the hollows in Kadishman's donkeys, the wings of Gerstein's.
Commission a work
New works for monuments, sculptures and memorial sites: for anniversaries and openings, as permanent listening walks, or with video and dance. Every work begins by listening to the place.
Write to me:
David Peretz is an Israeli composer, multi-instrumentalist, journalist and photographer based in Be'er Sheva. He hosts the weekly radio programme Bein HaShmashot on Galei Tzahal, writes for Israel Hayom, lectures at Sapir Academic College and the Rimon School of Music, and chairs the Music Committee of the Mifal HaPais Council for Culture and Arts. · davidperetz.bandcamp.com
