Cape Spear brought to life in sound

As night fell at Cape Spear National Historic Site Saturday about 200 people had gathered beside a ticket table with a sign that read "Sound Symposium." Even in the dark, it was not cold - with a warm wind flying over the ground and through the crowd.

They waited, holding roughly sketched maps titled "Breaking the Waves," provided in return for their ($10 general) admission. The maps showed the historic site - its lookout points and Second Wolrd War bunkers circling the lighthouses on the hill.

Car horns began to sound in the parking lot. Drawn to the patterned noise, the crowd came to a circle of parked cars, their drivers being conducted on their honks by German composer Moritz Eggert. A few minutes and Eggert finished the symphony, turning to his audience to introduce "Breaking the Waves," a musical experiential soundscape of Cape Spear.

The audience was given one hour to take their maps and go explore the site. It was approximately 10:30 p.m. when a vuvuzela was sounded - by an individual wearing a war-time gas mask - and the clock began ticking. People set out in all directions, heading to the "room of echoes" or the "silent corridor" in one of the concrete bunkers, or to an open stage and lookout point with 12 percussionists in front of another.

Sound Symposium participants were scattered throughout the site - faces of provincial musicians including Patrick Boyle, Bill Brennan and Curtis Andrews giving performances, mini-concerts at bunker entrances and on lookout ledges. "But also doing little theatrical actions during the show (the one-hour exploration), so that somebody would suddenly be in a room and someone would play with a saxophone suddenly or someone would play a violin or somebody would talk in Vietnamese," Eggert said.

Eggert spoke with The Telegram after conducting a closing piece with the bulk of the participating musicians. The piece was created specifically for the event - with crescendo after crescendo, wave after wave of sound. It was made all the more dramatic by the light echo of real waves rushing up against the rocks only a few feet away.

The entire experience, mapped by Eggert, ran at times from eerie to exilerating, with a seriousness resulting from the military aspects of the event - the gas masks, the bunkers.

"I thought that this is a place built for war and you can't completely ignore that," Eggert explained of his soundscape experience.

"I wanted to have that as a theme, as a kind of memory that lingers on that people don't really want, but it's still there - the guns are still there, the bunkers are still there."

Yet Eggert provided breaks from the serious, military aspect by adding areas that allowed for "humanity, individual response." You could play some drums in one room, rub or tap water glasses in another, or simply make noises in the echoing corridors - sometimes having them returned from a faceless voice around a corner.

It was an abandoned space brought back to life.

It was the closing event for the international festival of new music and arts.

afitzpatrick@thetelegram.com

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