Harbour Symphony

TOM HAMILTON

Sound Symposium, 2006
St. John's, Newfoundland

Harbour Symphonies are a distinctive feature of the Sound Symposium, bringing together the disparate communities of ship crews and experimental musicians to perform a daily noon hour concert of ship horns that echoes across St. John's harbour and can be heard throughout the city core. More than any other element of the festival, the Harbour Symphony highlights the Sound Symposium's focus on the windswept land- and soundscapes of Newfoundland's wild and rocky coastline. All participants in the Sound Symposium are invited to create compositions for ship horns and are given a workshop in which a simple graphic score system is explained.  Since it is impossible to predict how many ships will be in the harbour on a given day, and which ones will participate, there is a strong chance element to each composition:  the actual performance may or may not include all the elements that the composer has written into the score.  For the organizer, in this case composer Paul Stapleton, each morning of the Sound Symposium entails a frantic bicycle ride from ship to ship seeking permission to allow a festival volunteer to play their horn that day.

Here, in a casual video taken from the roof of a downtown car park, is the Harbour Symphony entitled "Gold Standard" written by New York electronic music composer Tom Hamilton and performed on July 13, 2006. Tom dedicated the work to the late Sound Symposium founder Don Wherry. Overlapping long drones and short blasts from ships on both sides of the harbour create an immersive polyphony.

The 2006 Sound Symposium also featured Hamilton's sound installation London Fix – Music Changing with the Price of Gold which is available as a CD on Muse Eek ‎– MSK 118.  The installation linked electronic music output to the fluctuating values of gold in real time.