What remains of everything we hear? Words, sounds come back to us in memory, by will or in spite of ourselves. The opera singer Gérard Théruel remembers a sentence, a fragment of an opera he sang so much.
SERIES BY HEART – THE SOUND THAT REMAINS wishes to stimulate reflection and create creations around the sound memories and oral cultures of the world. What words, poems, lullabies, slogans, songs… do we remember by heart? What sounds marked us, are we able to imitate orally? Seemingly unimportant, these fragments that we keep deep inside us and know how to recite with our own voice, constitute living archives of what we retain, voluntarily or not, from our world as and above all from that of others.
Extract by heart from this episode: “Pelléas et Mélisande”, opera in five acts (12 tableaux) by Claude Debussy, libretto by Maurice Maeterlinck, conductor Jean Claude Casadesus, Lille Opera Orchestra, 1996.
WHAT DO YOU REMEMBER?
What remains of everything we hear, what don’t we forget? Monica Fantini wishes to multiply our perceptions and listenings of the world and to meet everyone. She collects and records texts or songs learned by heart from people of different languages, backgrounds and ages by evoking the context and the memories they bring to light… Assembled and intertwined, these fragments will also compose sound mosaics memories from the five continents within the framework of sound installations in Europe and Africa.
And you, what do you remember? If you wish to participate and meet Monica Fantini, you can write to this address: [email protected]
LISTEN TO THE WORLD, EVERYONE
Both a radio program broadcast every Sunday in the RFI news bulletin and a participatory platform, “Listen to the world” lets us hear the cultures, languages and imaginations of the world through sounds from Africa, America, Asia, Europe or Oceania. Hundreds of shows to listen to, while the participatory and scalable platform www.ecouterlemonde.net offers sound postcards and recordings. To date, 245 sound recordings are available for free access.