I am delighted to present the film of Hymn To The Manhattan Bridge.

On June 21st 2011, I played a theremin under the Manhattan Bridge for 24 hours, starting and ending at midnight.  Sensors on the bridge above me registered the passing of each cyclist, creating a moment of silence for everyone who cycled over the bridge that day.  This film is a record of that day.

I have been looking at photos of DUMBO, this area of Brooklyn, preparing for the approaching hurricane Irene.  I am struck how different it all felt when I was there, only a few weeks ago.

I thought I was going to do a quick retrospective of Hymn To The Manhattan Bridge, but I haven't - mainly because it took me quite a bit longer than I'd expected to get back to normal after the excellent but exhausting New York experience.  And then other things came along that had to be dealt with first.  However... the good news is that one of those things has been the film of Hymn To The Manhattan Bridge; it's finished and ready for public perusal.  It's a big file that's uploading now, so once that's happened I'll put it up here, most likely tomorrow.

In the meantime, here is a short my-eye experience taken during my 24 hours playing music within the Archway under the Manhattan Bridge.  

The road digger had an air horn alert thing that killed all sound around it - it was quite painful to walk near it.  Someone said it was my nemesis - how can you make slowly developing textural music with that racket going on? - but it really captured something of the manic buzz of the area for me - the trains, the trucks, the roadworks.  Here's a little two-part film - the digger doing its skraaark! thing, then my theremin-created musical response.

This phone camera video is in no way a taster for the full film.

I'm going to upload some audio from Hymn to the Manhattan Bridge over the next couple of days.  The internet feed carrying the live audio stream was very intermittent and then failed completely after around 6 hours, so only those in The Archway will have heard what happened as the piece progressed.  

It's all about trains.

Click here to go to the Hymn to the Manhattan Bridge connectivity page, where you'll be able to listen live to the piece as it runs, and even see what I'm looking at from time to time as well.  If I remember to turn my phone camera on, that is.


The piece is going to run from midnight to midnight Eastern Daylight Time throughout June 21st 2011, which is 5am on June 21st until 5am on June 22nd in the UK.  Connections will come online close to midnight in New York.

It's a noisy, buzzy place, New York.  Going to be interesting.

I'm delighted to announce that on Tuesday 21st June 2011 I will be playing the theremin under the Manhattan Bridge, in a 24 hour collaboration with the cyclists and pedestrians who cross the bridge on the longest day of the year.  Or in other words - I'm at it again.

This is part of Make Music New York, the annual festival that will see over 1000 free musical events take place throughout the city on June 21st, the longest day of the year, and I'm very pleased that they've invited me to be part of it.  I'll be writing up something a bit more in depth over the next day or two, and sorting out the live-streaming page too - yes, once again I'll be streaming all 24 hours of the audio live on t'internet.  And tweeting and everything.

I've just arrived in New York and made my first recce to the site.  I'd done plenty of work in advance so I was able to walk to it and around it without ever resorting to a map - there are so many online resources now (Google street view, Youtube, Flickr and so on) that you can do a pretty comprehensive recce without ever getting close to the place.  But they can't tell you what it actually feels like in the flesh.  What immediately struck me was the sheer scale of the bridge, and the vibrancy it was generating while I was there.  It feels so bigger than I was expecting, and was positively buzzing with life when I walked around it (11pm) which could pose a few interesting problems - as the trains go over the noise is incredible, bouncing off the local buildings so violently you can almost see the sound waves, so making subtle ambient music is going to be a challenge.  And the bridge really is bloody enormous - despite all my meticulous planning I did wonder if I'd brought long enough cables.  Look how far it is from the cycleway to the street level in the pictures below - I know it's about 100ft but it feels much more.

Here are some photos and videos I took.  The green glow shows The Archway, where I'm going set up, and the next one shows where I'm going to mount the sensors on the cycleway 100ft up.

I first came across composer Edward Williams when I was asked by the fishing-and-oh-so-much-more website Caught By The River to review his excellent music for the 70's BBC series Life On Earth, released for the first time last year on Trunk Records.  While I researched that review I was surprised to discover that he'd invented the Soundbeam, the electronic instrument played without touch in a similar way to a theremin.  (When I say 'researched', what I really mean is 'read in the press release'.)  I'd played a Soundbeam some years ago - a music therapist friend had one - and thought then about trying something out with it, but that idea faded away.  It was its reappearance into my consciousness that triggered the London Bridge event.  I wondered what it would be like to combine it with a theremin, a duet played entirely without touch, and everything just rolled from there.

I've not met Edward Williams - he wasn't at Soundbeam HQ when I went up there to see if this Bridge thing would work - but a couple of days ago I came across this interview with him, where he talks about inventing the Soundbeam.  I found the ending of this clip remarkably moving.  What a brilliant, lovely man.

(Click on the picture to be taken to the interview)