A Month of Sundays
“The most salient sound in the Christian community is the church bell. In a very real sense it defines the community, for the parish is an acoustic space, circumscribed by the range of the church bell. The church bell is a centripetal sound; it attracts and unifies the community in a social sense ...” R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our sonic environment and the tuning of the world, 1977
A Month of Sundays installed in St. Andrew's Church, Sedbergh, June 2010
A Month of Sundays is a multi-media installation which I made at the invitation of the 2010 Sedbergh Music Festival, and it ran in St. Andrew's Church from 5 to 19 June 2010. it involves an eight-channel, computer-controlled sound setup and eight large eight-colour screenprints. the sound part of the installation works with recordings of St. Andrew's Church bells, both in action - through field recordings of the bell ringers on a number of Sunday mornings, made in different parts of the town - and as the sound content of programmed patterns.
here is an excerpt from a binaural recording of the installation in St. Andrews (3' 40", 5 MB, 192 Kbps CBR).
the screenprints were made in spring 2010 at the print workshop of the University of Cumbria in Lancaster and were made possible by a placement under the AA2A scheme, for which I am very grateful. the colours and shapes are distributed using simple rules inspired by bell ringing – one stripe of each colour per image; follow a colour through the images and its size decreases; each colour is the top or bottom colour only once. the placement of the colours in each image was done once these rules were followed. the recordings were mostly made in and around Sedbergh during winter and spring 2010. the bells are programmed to play the change ringing method ‘Plain Hunt Major’, which is the shortest eight-bell method and the only one short enough for this piece.
thanks are due firstly to the clergy, PCC and congregation of St. Andrew’s for allowing me the privilege of working in such an amazing space, and to Tony Reed Screen and the Sedbergh Music Festival. thanks also go to Helen Colledge, Audioworks, AA2A, the staff and students of the University of Cumbria, Susan Sharrocks and Stephen Skomp of the Sedbergh bell ringers, Colin Blakey, the Roof Box Company, Andrew Allan and Ian Hutt, Intermorphic Software and Martin Valentine of Sedbergh School.
you can click on the thumbnails below to see higher-resolution images of the prints in the installation.
