Elena Mendoza: Inside Metropolis

In Inside metropolis I use recordings of external sounds from various cities (Valencia, Berlin, Madrid, Vienna…) which interact with the orchestra in a collaged form. The focus is particularly on the spatialisation of these city sounds throughout the entire concert hall, as well as their diverse musical relationships with the orchestra. The poetic idea behind the aesthetic enhancement of more or less incidental city sounds is based on a small excerpt from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities:

»Sometimes, all I need is a clearing in a boundless landscape, a flash of lights in the fog, the conversation between two passers-by who meet in the crowd, to imagine that from here I will piece together the perfect city, built from fragments mingled with the rest, from moments separated by intervals, from signals sent out without knowing who receives them. If I tell you that the city to which my journey is destined has no continuity in space and time, is once looser and once denser, you must not think that one could stop searching.«

In this sense, I imagine an acoustic window: from the auditorium, a glimpse into an imaginary city composed of many fragments—into a personal utopian place, after which one, like in Calvino, cannot stop searching. In today’s world, which suddenly feels dystopian due to the various present crises, the idea of utopia has become, for me, a matter of survival. The title Inside metropolis is deliberately ambiguous, referring both to the city sounds within the concert hall and to this inner utopian place.

(Elena Mendoza)