Imagine a Canon (radio, 2025)
Image by Lindsey Appolis
50-minute sound composition for radio commissioned by Cashmere Radio for Deutschland Funk Kultur’s Klangkunst series. Listen here. Translation of the German text available here.
Imagine a Canon takes the form of an experimental lecture that invites listeners to reflect on the narratives shaping our cultural identities. The title, which returns in different refrains throughout the piece, refers both to the single-string instrument called a “canon” and to the idea of a cultural canon, a collection of works deemed valuable or authoritative. This instrument sits at the centre of the story of Pythagoras plucking a single string to deduce laws of acoustics, a story that later became part of the myth of Western cultural and intellectual superiority.
The work is composed entirely from the artist’s own recordings of six pianos in Berlin, captured over six years. These instruments range from very old to brand new, and their voices intertwine with the artist’s narration and two early experimental recordings from Carl Stumpf’s Phonogramm Archiv.
Across these years, the artist was examining how musical knowledge is formed within the broader history of colonial power, and how the piano has figured in Europe’s cultural expansion. The piece also brings in figures who shaped ideas about sound in the period leading up to and during the first German Empire: Hermann von Helmholtz, a foundational thinker in acoustics, and Carl Stumpf, an early proponent of what was then called “comparative musicology.” Stumpf was among the first to use wax recording technology for his research, establishing the Phonogramm Archiv. In the work, Helmholtz and Stumpf’s theories of consonance and dissonance become metaphors for sameness and difference.
Berlin itself forms an essential backdrop - Stumpf and Helmholtz were based in Berlin for large parts of their careers. As the city grew into a cultural and intellectual centre in the late 19th century, it also hosted colonial exhibitions and, most notably, the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, where colonial and aspiring colonial powers partitioned African territories without a single African representative present. These histories resonate through the piece, raising questions about who gets to define not only what counts as beautiful, but also who counts as human.