the whirligig music project and the listening garden
Photo credit Eleanor Mills/Jim Kellough
In 2006 I began to take an interest in creating compositional ideas that engaged participants in listening to their environments and interacting with nature. As a Deep Listener, I am interested in fostering environmental awareness through the listening sense gate.
The Whirligig Music Project was conceived after a visit to Vollis Simpson’s Whirligig Farm in Wilson, NC. I was transfixed by the towering structures and sat like a tiny ant at the corner of the field watching the wind engage the giant spinners in a variety of colorful performances.
My own experiment began shortly afterwords. The current installation model with which I am working is a series of lightweight spinners installed in natural environments. Participants (musicians currently) engage in the composition by listening with presence in the environment, and responding with sound when the wind blows their assigned spinners.
In 2008 I received a grant from the Durham Arts Council to create and document this project. See below for video from the debut performance at Durham Central Park on September 28, 2008.
The Listening Garden
Photo credit Chuck Johnson
The Listening Garden is an outgrowth of The Whirligig Music Project. As I created the temporary installation for the first performance of The Whirligig Music Project, I realized that the installation itself had merit as a tool to draw people to a public space they might not otherwise notice. The Listening Garden creates a space for people to interact with the sound environment and each other in the park. You can click here for more photos of the September 08 installation of The Listening Garden in Durham Central Park. You can click here to read comments that visitors to the Durham installation left in the guest book.
Photo Credit Chuck Johnson
The Listening Garden workshops and residencies
Groups come together to create their own Listening Garden at churches, schools, camps or neighborhood parks. Together we learn more about our environment through listening for site specific sounds and exploring potential locations for our installation. Groups may choose to create wind driven sound makers such as wind chimes to accentuate their version of The Listening Garden. Every project will be custom designed to meet the needs of your organization.