A Mirrored Beekeeper Bows One Steel Corner in Gdansk at 18:00
A paper notice went up at 17:00. By 18:00 forty people were standing on a cold quay to hear a woman bow a scrap-metal sculpture, and one corner of it sang a flat D.
The paper on the lamppost said 18:00 and had been taped up at 17:00. Eleven people read it. By five to six there were forty, breath showing, the first real cold of the year coming off the Baltic in flat sheets.
Vesna Kowalczyk-Dread walked out in a beekeeper suit lined with small mirrors. Every light on the quay ended up on somebody's coat. The sculpture was two and a half metres of riveted scrap steel with corners folded like paper.
She starts with the hammer. Seventy-two strikes a minute, a resting heart. Each hit leaves a grey smear around 90 Hz, the sound of a dustbin lid thinking it over.
Then the cello bow. The rosin is laid on so thick you hear it grab before the note arrives. She drew it down the upper left corner, the one with the folded flap, and the corner spoke. About 1,150 Hz, a hair flat of D. No wobble. No wash of inharmonic junk, which is what sheet steel usually gives you. One clean partial, hanging in the air like a pin through a map.
I stopped writing. My pen kept moving, I think.
I recorded forty seconds on a handheld recorder with the gain far too high. It clipped, and it should have. Afterwards I asked how she tuned that corner. She said she hadn't. She found it that way. She bowed it again to show me and it sang the same flat D, and the mirrors in her sleeve caught the lamppost.
The next concert will be announced an hour ahead. I have started standing under that lamppost at 16:00.
