The point of departure for the composition was a Canadian research project of the same name, launched in the 1960s by the World Soundscape Project under the direction of composers R. Murray Schafer and Barry Truax. The title The Library of Disappearing Sounds is a poetic allusion to the fruits of that project: hundreds of field recordings from around the world, made as researchers sought to capture unique or vanishing soundscapes. Each of the dozens of recordings I listened to sounded like a sliver of reality snatched from a chance moment in its maker’s life. Many came with brief notes marking the point at which something particularly remarkable or unusual occurred.
The source offered countless ways of developing the composition. I chose instead to take a personal, sentimental path, and ask: which sounds have vanished from my own acoustic environment? Visual memories—and memories of taste or smell—come back far more readily. Sound, however, is like touch: in recollection, it seems the most elusive of all. The work is thus grounded in memories of sounds, in the very processes of reflection and analysis, and in the attempt to capture a corresponding bodily tension. Any element of sound imitation occupies something less than a secondary place; so too does the idea of a catalogue, immediately suggested by the word “library.”
The Library of Disappearing Sounds is premiered by the European Workshop for Contemporary Music, a joint-venture of Warsaw Autumn and Podium Gegenwart | Deutscher Musikrat, conducted by Rüdiger Bohn.