This is my epiphany story for 2025, January 6th.
Tip: For an enhanced experience, listen to the sound while reading the story slowly.
Epiphany Story 2025
It was hot.
Maybe the hottest day in July.
Far above 30 degrees Celsius.
I have my recording equipment with me and hold the stereo microphone in my right hand.
A drop of sweat occasionally leaves the lowest part of my hand, fortunately, without making any sound. Or it did make a sound but very, very gentle.
We are in Italy, Venice, in the Arsenale area, in the Italian Pavilion of the Art Biennale.
There is a soft sound, an everlasting melody of simple notes, playing together in an eternal loop of soft organ-like sounds,
It is an enormous installation built with scaffolding pipes covering the whole pavilion.
The entire structure is designed like a baroque garden, with pathways inviting you to stroll.
You can walk around it, but some entrances lead you to the central part. A circular sculpture or fountain is pumping a white fluid – a meeting place that serves as a bench, where you can sit and listen in all directions – an ambisonic live experience where you can listen to various sounds from different distances.
The inside mixes with the outside; the two melodic lines, played in a loop, intersect and complete each other with mechanical components standing in for the human player of a traditional organ. The music is inscribed on two motorized rolls, like giant music boxes that play in unison on the big wooden organ pipes, diffused in four places in the installation.
Although the acoustic space has been conceived with a true centre, the sound of this musical apparatus can nonetheless be heard in many different ways while walking through it.
It is the movement, the pace, and the direction of the microphones that “compose” a constantly changing piece of music.
Sounds from the outside, like the omnipresent cicadas that hide outside in the trees, the sound of church bells in the distance and the people talking, are dynamically remixed depending on the listener’s position (in my case, also the microphone).
You walk, you listen, and you think.
What is this sound?
Is it composed or from the environment?
Have I heard this before?
Is it what I think it is?
What is noise?
What is sound?
What is music?
What is art?
What do I like?
Why is it so hot here?
Your mind is wandering alongside your steps in the sculpture.
Your inner voice is singing in unison with your multisensory experiences – you see, you listen, you smell, you feel the temperature, you taste the water from your bottle – you calm down, stop asking questions and observe with all your senses.
Or like Pauline Oliveros said: “You just have to listen long enough to make meaning of all this”.
Let’s listen a bit louder and longer, as we usually do – today, tomorrow and the whole year! – to experience many positive multisensory epiphanies in meaningful harmony!
Happy Epiphany!
Christof Zürn
What is Epiphany?
A collection of different meanings of Epiphany – what does Epiphany mean?
“Western churches generally celebrate the Visit of the Magi as the revelation of the Incarnation of the infant Christ, and commemorate the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6″. (wikipedia)
But there are more meanings of epiphany; here a selection” :
- EPIPHANY is the sudden realisation or comprehension of the (larger) essence or meaning of something.
- PHILOSOPHICAL meaning: having found the last piece of the puzzle and suddenly seeing the whole picture.
- ARCHIMEDES Eureka! I found it!
- EINSTEIN was struck as a young child by being given a compass, and realising that some unseen force in space was making it move.
- DARWIN An example of a flash of holistic understanding in a prepared mind was Charles Darwin’s “hunch” (about natural selection) during The Voyage of the Beagle.
- JAMES JOYCE Referring to those times in his life when something became manifest, a deep realisation, he would then attempt to write this epiphanic realisation in a fragment. Joyce also used epiphany as a literary device within each short story of his collection Dubliners (1914) as his protagonists came to sudden recognitions that changed their view of themselves or their social condition and often sparking a reversal or change of heart.
- In RELIGION it is used when a person realises their faith or when they are convinced that an event or happening was really caused by a deity or being of their faith.
- WESTERN CHRISTIAN Religion: The adoration of the magi, represented as kings, having found Jesus by following a star 12 days after christmas.
- HINDUISM epiphany might refer to the realisation of Arjuna that Krishna (a God serving as his charioteer in the “Bhagavad Gita”) is indeed representing the universe.
- In ZEN kensho describes the moment, referring to the feeling attendant on realising the answer to a koan.
- BUDDHISM Buddha finally realising the nature of the universe, and thus attaining nirvana.
- WILLIAM BURROUGHS is talking about a drug-influenced state, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is at the end of the fork (naked lunch).
- EPIPHANIES is the thirteenth episode of the second season of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica television series.
- EPIPHANY is a web browser for the GNOME graphical computing desktop.
- HIERONYMUS BOSCH painted the adoration of the magi around 1495.
- HOMER SIMPSON has an epiphany, after visiting a strange Inuit shaman, and realises he has to save the town from Russ Cargill’s plans to destroy Springfield.
- The last page of THE WIRE magazine with surprising sonic stories about music is called EPIPHANIES.
- Interesting: if you search for Epiphanies or Epiphany on TWITTER many people talk about that they (just) had an epiphany, but don’t exactly say what it was.
Since 2011, CREATIVE COMPANION has been sending out epiphany greetings on the 6th of January.
More like this
If you like the sounds and the story, you might also like The Power of Music Thinking podcast episode about the Sound Walk through Venice.
A lively recording of beautiful sounds of the magic city while walking through the Art Biennale in 2024, with many sounds of the city and the art installations.
As an extra, there is also a sound-only version of the podcast without the talking 🙂 on SoundCloud (see the show notes, which also have info about the Italian Pavilion mentioned above).