With Symphony for one hundred citizens and a traffic light, Heleen and Thomas are creating a large-scale urban symphony of daily urban sounds. They are working with one hundred city dwellers from all corners of Antwerp, each of whom plays their own ‘instrument’. On stage there are no violins, woodwinds or drums, but cars with rumbling engines, a sunny outdoor café with clinking glasses, barking dogs, a wheeled suitcase bumping over the cobblestones, a singing street guitarist, a road worker using a drill, a clock striking 12, chirping birds…. Taken together, all of these instruments on the stage of the Blauwe Zaal in DE SINGEL form a sculptural collage of the city.

The composition follows in the footsteps of participatory experiments in Russia conducted in the period between the two world wars. Known as the ‘Hooter Symphonies’, they were initiated by musicologist Arsenii Avraamov. Earlier, Avraamov had asked the Russian authorities to confiscate and destroy all pianos, in order to finally put an end to the music of the bourgeoisie. After experimenting with steam whistles from factories, he ultimately created a spectacular noise symphony to celebrate the anniversary of the Russian Revolution in the Port of Baku on 7 November 1922. The orchestra consisted of sirens, factory engines, a choir of horns from busses and cars, machine guns, and a gigantic organ made out of steam whistles. During the actual performance of the piece, however, things went wrong. The composition itself was too complicated and the distances between the different sections of the orchestra were too great for streamlined communication. As a result, it was impossible to create a unified artistic experience.
 
In collaboration with composer Heleen van Haeghenborg, Thomas Verstraeten wants to continue this fascinating research. The goal, however, far surpasses the gimmick of the Russian experiment: to create and perform a new, contemporary piece of music, using the sounds of the city as basic material. Its structure will be that of a classical symphony and the sounds will be treated as instrumental groups with transparency and clarity, contrast, variation, themes, etc.

Besides being a musical performance of an artistically high-quality, professional composition, this project will again be a unifying, community-building event in which very diverse people from the city’s different communities come together to make music.

Symphony for one hundred citizens and a traffic light is an urban portrait, an aural collage of the city that attempts to formulate an answer to John Cage’s question: “Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?”