stations (palimpsest)

A palimpsest is a parchment manuscript whose original ink was scraped off so the sheet could be reused for a new document, a common practice to conserve costly parchment before the development of book printing. stations (palimpsest) is similarly made of overwritten material: originally a semi-complete sketch for a collage-based work for string quartet, now partially replaced by a transcription of a slowed-down field recording of Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City. The remnants of the collage material, quotations from Sibelius’ Voces Intimae and Beethoven’s String Quartet no. 13 among others, peek in weakly through the sounds, sometimes being blurred and convoluted as if two radios in the bus terminal were competing for frequency dominance. Classical music such as Beethoven’s Cavatina has been played in Port Authority and other stations as a socially coded form of hostile architecture. Hidden under the charming music, ostensibly meant to calm busy commuters, is the real purpose of marking the place as “elite” and thus unwelcome to the homeless, as part of the gradually tightening enclosure of public spaces. The music thus becomes “overwritten” by the reality of the social situation in which it is heard.