common ground
We sat on one of the benches surrounding the column, a monument to the Revolutionary War dead that sits at the highest point of Fort Greene Park. Laid around the column’s base were various percussion instruments: tam-tam, tympanum, snare. Some people sat around expectantly, exchanging knowing looks. Others peered at the drums, confused. To those who knew, these bells were the start of “Crossing Open Ground,” a piece composed by John Luther Adams in 2023 and performed for free on the occasion of the Longplay Music Festival. To those who didn’t, the bells merely announced the morning’s end, the encroachment of a new topography onto the weekend’s habitual noise.
The bells continued. More musicians appeared. They formed a loose perimeter around the monument, carrying trumpets and trombones and French horns, bassoons and piccolos and flutes. As the bells rang back and forth, they raised their instruments and blew softly through them—just hard enough to amplify their breath without producing any notes. Like the bells, this was not quite yet music so much as the precondition for it, a simple coordination of breath. After a while, they all took several steps forward and stopped.
The performance continued like this, inaugurating itself in slow procession. The musicians breathed, rang bells, and crept forward, gradually growing louder. Eventually the bellringer began to beat his bell with a drumstick. The brass and woodwind breathing turned to blasts of melody. The music began to take a grander, more familiar form without losing the initial feeling of incipience. It felt less like the musicians were crossing open ground than clearing the way for something else, a crescendo that contracted toward its peak. I have no idea how long it took for them to arrive at the column, but at last the bellringer was standing before a drum. A man appeared before the tam-tam. Out of view, someone beat on tone bars that sounded like a railroad crossing signal, blinking on and off and on, a fanfare for a train that would never arrive.
The sound of trumpets climbed into the spring sky. The drums rolled and the tam-tam crashed. The railroad light blinked off and on. Even at its climax, the music avoided catharsis or resolution in favor of creating something else: an attitude of expectation, a common ground. A man standing next to me said it sounded like a call to arms, but to me it suggested the opposite, how order can be imposed without violence, just bodies and movement and breath.
The only conflict came at the height of the performance, when a woman produced a small, salmon-colored drone from her bag. She connected it to her phone and sent it screaming above our heads, into the midst of the performers and audience, who now existed as one, fellow members of the space that the music had marked out. The drone made a horrible, high-pitched noise, impossible to tune out. People glared at her but she just stared into her phone, through the drone’s eyes, as if she’d be safe from judgment if she kept her gaze there.
The effect was ruinous. The drone sucked up the clarity of the brass, bored into the soundscape like an insect. As it surveilled the crowd, people frowned and looked around for the operator. A child tried to chase it away like a gull. After a minute or two, a man approached the woman and asked her to take it down: “It’s really loud.” Still the drone whined above the music. A woman approached with a different tack: “You know, I don’t think drones are allowed in the park…” The drone pilot explained that she was recording a video for the father of one of the musicians. When that failed to yield any sympathy, she began to call the drone back. As it descended toward her, a third and final man approached—briskly, fuming—and jabbed his finger at her: “Shut that thing the fuck up! Thanks a lot for fucking ruining this experience for everyone! Shut it! the fuck! up!” By this point the drone was already hovering over the woman’s open palm, which she had extended about six inches in front of my face, like she was giving it to me. The drone landed in her hand and fell silent and the music all around us reemerged.
Soon after the drone was banished, the music crested and began to subside. The musicians left the percussion behind and continued their slow march to the opposite side of the monument, diffusing to the periphery without remaking their perimeter. The music died back into its beginnings, breath and bells, before disappearing entirely. After a long and lovely interval of silence, everyone clapped. The musicians walked back, smiling, to pack away the drums.
The festival that put on the performance says on its website that “Crossing Open Ground” “has been described as ‘an opportunity to rediscover and reconsecrate a place—an invitation to listen to the older, deeper resonances beneath our feet.’” I still can’t figure out who described it that way—probably a previous press release—but it’s apt enough, at least for this performance. After all, the column we had gathered around was built atop a crypt, which houses twenty-two boxes full of bone fragments, the remains of men and women who died on prison ships during the British occupation of New York. They were buried hastily on the shore, then reburied nearby, before being brought—whatever was left—to this park. The Prison Ship Martyrs Monument was dedicated in 1908, and would fall in and out of repair for the next hundred years. You used to be able to ride an elevator to the top, before they filled it in.
After the performance, I felt invigorated, almost ennobled. The piece did remake the place, if only for an hour. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was belated somehow, despite its recency. Perhaps it was the setting of the war monument, or the drums and horns and locomotive sounds, but I couldn’t help but hear an attenuated idealism in the music, traces of that Coplandesque tradition of trying to conjure a symbolic country that might be traversed less savagely than the real one.
As with all rituals, the piece contained a level of moral instruction. Here is how music can be summoned from noise. Here is how space can be cleared without unsettling a landscape. Here is how people can be brought together and, having been changed, disperse. And yet it was not the music that seemed most instructive to me but the interruption by that drone, the intrusion of the very forces we had been trying to shut out, our machines that move without touching open ground at all.
The musicians had crossed the ground in a slow and deliberate way, giving the music time to take on an aspect of space, which could then be shared by everyone. The drone had crossed it swiftly, automatically, all at once. The performance took many people and much effort. The drone was a winged prosthesis of a single person’s phone. Despite the lofty tone of the festival’s press release, consecration is hard work and does not last for long. It has never been easier to use up common ground, to exhaust its surfaces with some passing need. We will need more music—and more than music—to reconsecrate it.
ben tapeworm