What remains of everything we hear? Words and sounds come back to us, voluntarily or against our will. The baritone Gérard Théruel remembers a sentence, a fragment of an opera that he has sung so often.
Memorized excerpt from this episode: “Pelléas et Mélisande”, opera in five acts by Claude Debussy, libretto by Maurice Maeterlinck with the Lille Opera Orchestra, conductor: Jean Claude Casadesus.
series“BY ROTE” aims to stimulate thought and create creations around the world’s sonic memories and oral cultures. What words, poems, lullabies, slogans, songs… do we remember by heart? What sounds did we notice? Can we imitate them orally? Seemingly unimportant, these fragments that we keep deep within ourselves and that we know how to recite with our own voices represent living archives of what we remember, voluntarily or involuntarily, from our world and, above all, from the world of others.
All episodes of the series
By heart – The lost language – Listen to the world (rfi.fr)
By heart – The dark room – Listen to the world (rfi.fr)
By heart – The unforgettable sentence – Listen to the world (rfi.fr)
By heart – The absurd – Listen to the world (rfi.fr)
By heart – Mémoire Palace – Listen to the world (rfi.fr)
By heart – The poem in Greek – Listen to the world (rfi.fr)
By heart – The secret – Listen to the world (rfi.fr)
The sound that remains – Mosaics of languages – Listen to the world (rfi.fr)
WHAT DON’T FORGET?
What remains of everything we hear and what don’t we forget? Monica Fantini wants to multiply our perception and listening to the world and touch everyone. She collects and records texts, sounds and songs memorized by people of different languages, backgrounds and ages, evoking the context and memories they evoke… Put together and intertwined, these fragments become Sound mosaics of memories from around the world also form five continents as part of sound installations in Europe and Africa.
And you, what don’t you forget? If you would like to participate and meet Monica Fantini you can write to the following address: [email protected]
LISTEN TO EVERYONE, EVERYONE
Listen to the World is both a radio show, broadcast every Sunday on the RFI news bulletin, and a participatory platform that allows you to experience the world’s cultures, languages and ideas through sounds from Africa, America, Asia, Europe or Oceania can hear. Hundreds of shows can be heard on the participatory and evolving platform www.ecouterlemonde.net offers audio postcards and audio recordings. To date, 245 audio recordings are freely available.
