These are walking scores. Each one is a single sheet you can print, take outside and follow with other people. They tell you where to go, how to arrange yourselves on the pavement and what to listen for as you pass. They are loose on purpose. Nothing is timed and nobody conducts.
I make them for streets I already walk, mostly around Harrogate, and they move to any town built on a Victorian grid. Print one, find a couple of friends and go out for a quarter of an hour. If you walk one, I would like to hear how it went.
Squeak at the futility of existence
An artist’s method for a sound walk for three people. Mowbray Square, Harrogate. About fifteen minutes.
What the work is
Three people walk one Victorian block and come back to the door they left. They carry a single sheet of paper. On it, one line runs left to right, turns at the bend and comes back. That line is the three of them. Where it opens out they walk abreast. Where it closes to one they walk in single file. Seven numbered circles mark the stops, and each stop asks them to look at something or listen for something. At the fourth stop they cross the road and squeak at the futility of existence, once each, any pitch, no rehearsal.
Nothing is timed and nobody conducts. The pavement does most of the conducting anyway.
This score will move to any town with a Victorian grid-iron layout, and it needs no permission and no equipment.
Those grids share the conditions the piece runs on. Corners meet at right angles, so a walk of four turns brings you back to your own door. Streets were cut one way for carriages, so traffic arrives from a direction you can learn to hear before you see. Terraces of matching height hold the sound in and hand it back. Pavements are wide enough for three people and then narrow at a lamp post, a stair rail or a shop front. Most blocks take about fifteen minutes at a slow pace, and there is glass at street level to stop in front of.
