During the current GBS hiatus I have spent a lot of time in the GB studio and elsewhere, recording music, but also thinking about it a lot.
I recently heard a radio documentary, (or acoustic film as he would have it), by St. Johnsman and producer Chris Brookes. Brookes is a writer, producer and sometimes theatre director who makes unusual shows for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and other eclectic radio outlets. As someone who has dabbled in this format a bit, I find his work fascinating.
Great radio is a bit of a lost art these days. For most us of radio is a fleeting moment, something heard amidst the cacophony of everyday life, offering tidbits of news and information, or snatches of songs and music. And yet even in some of our lifetimes, it was not like this. From the 1920s until well into the 1960s, radio was the dominant communication medium in the world. Whole families gathered around the crackling speakers, transported by exotic sounds carried into their homes from far away. In an era where few people traveled far, and movies were still in their infancy, radio was their outlet to the wider world.
Skillful use of sound effects and good writing can stimulate the imagination in the same way a good book can. Your own imagination is always more vivid than anything you can see on a screen. Most of us have lost the ability to listen without prejudice. We never really listen to anything; there are too many other visual distractions, or we are so used to watching our entertainment that we no longer have the patience to use sound to develop our own images. Children still have that ability - watch their faces sometime when they are listening to a skilled storyteller. Brookes was born into a pre-TV world, and somehow he never lost the ability absorb the world with his ears.
He has won many awards for his work, and rightfully so. His production What We Might Have Been recently won a Gold Medal from the International Radio Awards. It is a mesmerizing piece. Like many students of Newfoundland history, (myself included), Brookes is obsessed by the fate of the Newfoundland Regiment in World War I, in particular its virtual annihilation during the battle of Beaumont Hamel. The Regiment was a unique body of men - it had been recruited amongst the brightest and best of the Newfoundlanders of that era. An entire generation of Newfoundland’s best educated and most capable young men were wiped out in a single morning. Brookes uses sound to recreate the battle and its surrounding emotional and political climate. Later, he illustrates how that one event tipped off a chain of disasters that ultimately lead to Newfoundland surrendering its own independence. For a Newfoundlander it makes for uncomfortable listening. Almost a hundred years later World War I still looms large in the psyche of this Island, far greater than any other event in our history; Brookes shows us why.
One of his more recent projects was a documentary called Hark!. It starts from a fascinating premise, the idea that every sound ever made is still is out there somewhere in the atmosphere. Brookes and his collaborators use this proposition in an attempt to recreate a soundscape for Elizabethan England. For example, what did Shakespeare’s voice sound like in his own theatre? Or how did church bells affect people when they were the loudest things anyone could even imagine? It is an appealing idea, and the producers have a lot of fun with it. At the same time, the platform idea has a lot of resonance to my own work.
When given some context, traditional music can offer a small window into the past. At their best, old songs can offer a glimpse into our ancestors psychology - what made them happy, what they thought was exciting, what sort of stories they liked, or what made them sad. Even instrumental music can sometimes give us a few clues to their lives, as by its very transference from hand to hand we learn what our predecessors found valuable. My ancestors left no diaries or paintings, no novels, poems or plays. Their music is all I have. Still, it is a wonderful thing to imagine that I am sharing even that with them. Brookes has gone a lot further - he imagines what those spirits of our past heard. And how they heard it.
Turn the lights off, and tune into
www.batteryradio.com. Then stop everything else, and really listen.