OH! AH AH PREE TRRA TRRA (2019)
Soundwalk, Workshop and Participatory Voicing. Café Oto, London UK

... It’s a hot summer day in London, July. Mile End, the east side of the city on the Central and District lines. Turn right up the steps. Mile End Road. Right on to Southern Grove, then into Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park, a woodland cemetery, also known as Bow Cemetery. Wild flowers, tall grasses, flowering shrubs, leafy climbers grow around and over the lopsided gravestones that crack and fall into each other and onto the ground.
We take a small path through the green. We walk around the western side of the park, heading south. Tiny gravestones emerge from the leaf litter Forecast 1888, Rose 1876, The Family Grave of Thomas Fuller, Our dear Mother Amelia Wheeler who fell asleep in 1914. Even smaller paths track off to the left and right, into shadow. In some parts, it’s hard to avoid stepping on the graves. As we walk, we listen and are being listened to; as we look, we see and are being seen.
We listen. We read the scores as we listen. Reading and listening and reading and listening. It is difficult to silently read the phonetic words as the sounds in the words and the birds calling above trigger our tongues to move in our mouths, our lips to shape vowels and consonants silently.
Then we voice the scores. The sounds we make are human. Our attempts are within earshot of the birds we are trying to voice...

Readings

Donna Haraway Staying with the Trouble (2016)
(kin-making, pigeons as creatures of empire)

Salomé Voegelin The Political Possibility of Sound (2019)
(listening and geography)

Deborah Bird Rose Val Plumwood’s Philosophical Animism: attentive interactions in the sentient world (2013)
(paying attention, the crocodile)

Audio excerpt 02 Participatory Voicing

N MEMOR     OF
            ILL AM                      V INN
WHO DIE       AN      AR      9          0          EARS
  ALSO EL ZAB         TH       WIN
WI E OF  T     ADOVE

THE                THE    LIFE HE

JOHN
MASTER MARINER
DIED  JANE
SACRED

Know my redeemer
Niece of the above
Daughter of the above
Husband of the above

The City of London and Tower Hamlets Cemetery (also known as Bow Cemetery)

Historically most people were buried in their local churchyards, but the growth of London during the Industrial Revolution meant the city’s churchyards were becoming overcrowded. An Act of Parliament in 1841 allowed companies to buy land for purpose-built cemeteries that would be situated outside the City of London area. Prominent London businessmen formed the City of London and Tower Hamlets Cemetery Company, purchasing 27 acres of land. The cemetery was laid out on drained open fields, with winding paths and ornamental trees, by Thomas Wyatt and David Brandon who were also responsible for the design of two chapels, later demolished by the Greater London Council as part of the cemetery’s conversion to a public park in the 1960s.

During the Second World War the Cemetery suffered severely from enemy air attacks directed at the City of London and the docks. The two chapels and many of the memorials were damaged or destroyed. By 1966 the Cemetery was overgrown and the original Company was on the verge of bankruptcy, compulsory purchase and closure by the Greater London Authority, who were given permission to turn it into a grassed public park by an Act of Parliament. However due to intense local opposition to the clearance of the gravestones, the plan was dropped. The London Borough of Tower Hamlets took over ownership in 1986.

Source Cemetery Info

Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park Bird Records

At least 60 species of bird are recorded in Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park, or flying over it, each year and the total site list for the last few decades is 89 species. The woodland supports up to 30 breeding species, notable amongst these are Green and Great Spotted Woodpecker, Sparrowhawk, Blackcap, Chiffchaff and the occasional Song Thrush and Common Whitethroat. The park has an exceptional reputation for overwintering Firecrests, which have been seen almost every year for the past decade, and attract a number of visiting birders. Robert Watts and Paul Barham are the main recorders of birds in Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park.

Source Cemetery Info