Christopher Cerrone — Wind Phone, Goleta, CA [Score-Follow]

Text by Stephanie Fleischmann (2022)

Performed by Conspirare and Miro Quartet
conducted by Craig Hella Johnson

More information about the piece: https://christophercerrone.com/music/wind-phone/
Purchase the score: https://www.eamdc.com/psny/composers/christopher-cerrone/works/wind-phone/

A wind phone is a phone booth, containing a disconnected rotary phone, set in a garden or in nature, in a windy place overlooking the sea, where people go to converse with the dead. The first wind phone was created by Sasaki Itaru, in a garden outside Ōtsuchi, Japan, one of the cities hardest hit by the 2011 Tsunami. Now there are wind phones in various places around the world.

—Stephanie Fleischmann

Hello,
Are you there?
I hear this whoosh—
I can almost hear—
The rush,
the cadence,
of your—

I can almost see—
I can almost touch
the mist
clinging to the tips
of your lashes,
I can almost see,
I can almost feel
your eyes
shining
through the dusk.

Some nights
my dreams are awash
in your voice.
Some nights
your lips
brush
my ears,
so close…
Some nights
I can almost hear
the shape of your thoughts.

Though you’re not here,
I can almost hear you listening,
as my words echo against the glass,
and this booth shudders
in the wind,
and I settle in
the way we used to
on cloudless summer nights,
sitting beside the bluff,
words gently vanishing
into the phosphorescence
of the water below,
into the iridescence
of the sky above,
into the shadowing
of your memory,
the reticence
of the dark.