Border Bond

Once while on a tour of the Tyrol I decided to visit a valley that I had only heard about. Though in Austria, it could only be reached by way of Italy, its Austrian end being blocked by a steep mountain ridge. I drove down south, through Italy, came up into the valley and kept driving up in the mountains, the roads getting smaller and smaller until finally the road ended at a farmhouse. I got out and started talking with an old man there. As things progressed I began to speak about sound and at one point he stopped me excitedly and said: 'Do you know that we have a very old legend around here? In fact this mountain barrier between us and the rest of Austria is not very wide; as the crow flies it's only three kilometers. Just on the other side of this ridge is another town about the size of ours. The story is that if you climb the mountain and stand on one particular point, you can actually hear the bells of both villages at once' – one point where you can, in a sense, be in both towns at the same time.

I found it fascinating that this was such an important idea to these people, for them it seemed a miracle. They felt that this formidable geological barrier could be bridged in some sense solely with sound. If this was so, then why not reverse the situation. If instead a sound were placed at that listening point, of course that sound would be heard by both villages simultaneously. It would no longer be just a myth. One could make a sound once a day and, at that moment daily, these two places would become united.

The concept is broader; one could go further. A periodic sound heard simultaneously on both sides of any border would unify cross-border communities. It could rejoin cultural groups which have been divided by a national border, or begin to build a bond between different groups who have traditionally been divided – a sound which would create moments in common between separated peoples.

m.n., 1994