ircam Centre PompidouBill Fontana
Silent Echoes. Notre-DamePremiere 2022

Press release
September, 2022

© Bill Fontana

IRCAM
1 place Igor-Stravinsky
75004 Paris
www.ircam.fr#ircamWednesday, October 12—Monday, November 14, 2022
Center Pompidou, South terrace of the Museum, level 5
Simultaneously at Arter gallery in Istanbul
through December 4, 2022 (arter.org.tr)

New presentation of the installation

DirectorFrank Madlener
Director ofCommunications andPartnerships
Marine Nicodeau

Since the early 1970s, Bill Fontana has focused his work on the amplified sound ofchosen objects and places, interweaving discreet sounds into subtle acoustic
landscapes. Following the fire on 15 April 2019 at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, theartist designed a live sound sculpture for ten channels at the IRCAM studios, using
seismic accelerators attached to ten of the cathedral’s bells. Reduced to silence during
the restoration works to the building, the bells nevertheless remain extraordinary
recesses of sound. Each bell responds through its tonality to the noises of therestoration worksite and the murmurs of the city. Broadcast in real time, these multiplesounds are fashioned into an ensemble relayed through thirty loudspeakers.

Press office
Opus 64
Valérie SamuelClaire Fabre
T. 01 40 26 77 94
c.fabre@opus64.com#SilentEchoesv
ertigo

Following its premiere in June of this year as part of IRCAM's ManiFeste festival, thisnew sound sculpture by Bill Fontana is presented to the public for the second time on
the South Terrace on the 5th floor of the Centre Pompidou, facing the towers of NotreDame de Paris. Fontana's sound sculpture can also be heard in Istanbul until December4th.This is a co-production by IRCAM and the Centre Pompidou, in partnership withthe public body overseeing the preservation and restoration of Notre Dame Cathedral,
which granted access to the worksite.
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Bill Fontana
Silent Echoes. Notre-Dame
Sound Sculpture
Premiere 2022, Commissioned by IRCAM-Centre Pompidou
Exhibition commissioning Marcella Lista, chief curator,
New Media Collection at Musée national d'art moderne-Centre Pompidou
Production Bill Fontana Studio.
Coproduction Coproduction IRCAM, Centre Pompidou

In partnership with

With the support ofBill Fontana
Born in Cleveland in 1947, Bill Fontana studied Music and Philosophy at the New
School for Social Research in New York, then travelled to Australia, Japan andGermany before devoting his time to composition. He began to create soundsculptures in 1968. These sculptures showcase the urban environment as a living
source of musical information, with the common power to evoke a visual image inthe listener’s mind.
His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York,the Tate Modern and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His most famousworks include: Distant Trains, Satellite Ear Bridge Cologne-San Francisco, The
Sound of an Unblown Flute, Panoramic Echoes and Acoustical Visions of theGolden Gate Bridge, in addition to Sound Island at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris in
1994, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Normandy landings.
www.resoundings.org

2Sculpting soundCourse of Bill Fontana's workby Marcella Lista
During his studies in the 1960s at the New School for Social Research in New York,Bill Fontana met John Cage and rapidly developed an interest in music as aconscious practice and an extension of hearing. He soon set aside musicalcomposition to record the sounds emerging from the environment, using thetechnique of field recording, and gradually built up a vast sound library which hecontinues to enrich to this day.
Following the Fluxus movement and its characteristic musical iconoclasm, hedesigned a founding work in 1972, entitled Sound Sculpture with Resonators. The
work consisted of amplifying the echoes produced naturally inside various everyday
objects, which the artist placed on a New York rooftop, exposed to the sounds ofthe city, broadcasting them in real time inside the building. Abstracted from theirsource, the sounds reveal accidental harmonic textures, both enigmatic andunpredictable, which are in turn spatialised in an empty room. Bill Fontana’s
concept of sound sculpture is derived from an idea developed by Marcel Duchamp
in a brief note jotted down among the papers of La Mariée Mise à Nu par ses
Célibataires Même: ‘Musical sculpture. Sounds lasting and leaving from different
places and forming a sounding sculpture which lasts.’ While this notion rapidly
became an essential aspect of his artistic language, his fascination with theprinciple of projecting sound matter in a remote place from its point of origin also
remained a key feature.
In 1980, Bill Fontana installed microphones under the suspension bridge whichlinks Cincinnati to Covington; the vibrations from passing vehicles produced adrone of variable frequencies and intensity which Fontana retransmitted in realtime through loudspeakers set up on a public square next to the Center forContemporary Art in Cincinnati. In 1990, he transmitted the sounds of a nearby
forest, threatened by the building of a dam, through seventy loudspeakers placedon the esplanades of Vienna’s museums. In 1994, his first major installation inFrance already involved a Parisian monument. Sound Island, commissioned by theCity of Paris and the Ministry for Culture, broadcast the live sounds of Normandy
the coast, captured by microphones and hydrophones, at the Arc de Triomphe on
Place de l’Étoile.

…/…
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A discursive space emerges from this in situ technique which interweaves two
distant places, with all their sensory, cultural and political resonances. Placing
acoustic exploration at the forefront of his work, Bill Fontana also reveals therichness of sonic material at the edge of human hearing. The seismic
accelerometers currently attached to the bells of Notre Dame appeared in his workin 2006, when he amplified London’s Millennium Bridge in the Turbine Hall of theneighbouring Tate Modern. His in-depth exploration of the harmonic structure ofbells began in 2007 with Panoramic Echoes, which reactivated the chimes of thehistorical MetLife skyscraper in New York. For the first work in the Silent Echoes
series in 2009, the artist turned to the bells of Kyoto’s Buddhist temples,transmitting the echoes they produced when still. The intimate listening to theconstant vibration of these ancient instruments, the immersion in the wonder ofmatter, also echoes John Cage’s philosophy: ‘Music is continuous, only listening isintermittent.’ For Bill Fontana, musical sculpture is a visual idea rooted essentiallyin duration: ‘It is also a temporal concept’, he wrote in 1978, ‘which contrary to aperformance has neither a beginning, middle nor end, but offers a continuum in thesame way as a physical object.’
The recent emergence of video in Bill Fontana’s work also serves as acomplexification of representation rather than a direct illustration of the places
evoked. From the patio of the Centre Pompidou, the aerial view of Notre Dame
Cathedral creates a unique situation, calling on all the senses. Visitors can create
their own composition as they move through the thirty loudspeakers, which subtly
reproduce the sounds of the ten bells and foster dialogues between them. One canmeasure the difference between the eye and the ear, between the physicalperceptions of the here and now, the city's soundscape reflected in the harmonics
of each bell, and all the sights to take in from this extraordinary viewpoint.

Silent Echoes. Acoustic Visions, 2022 © Bill Fontana

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A word from the partners
About the public institution in charge of the conservation and restoration of Notre-Dame de Paris
CathedralThe public institution in charge of the conservation and restoration of Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral,provided for by the law of July 29, 2019, was created on December 1, 2019. Placed under thesupervision of the Ministère de la Culture, it ensures the conduct, coordination and implementationof studies and operations contributing to the conservation and restoration of the cathedral. Its missionis also to promote the site and the trades and know-how that contribute to it, particularly through theimplementation of cultural programs with an educational vocation, in France and abroad.
More info on www.rebatirnotredamedeparis.fr
Follow the news of the construction site on Facebook and Instagram @rebatirnotredamedeparis

About Orange
Orange is proud to provide financial and technical support for the Silent Echoes. Notre-Dameinstallation. As part of the Group's support for the restoration and outreach of the Notre-Dame deParis Cathedral, Orange has committed to working with IRCAM and artist Bill Fontana to keep thecathedral's ten bells, which have been silent since the fire of April 15, 2019, ringing and hearing.
Thanks to Orange Events, Orange is making available to the project all the power of its network andits capacity for innovation to allow visitors of Silent Echoes. Notre-Dame to live a unique experience.

Practical information
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