The arrival of the Silver Tank made life in Cobar easier. In the vast, red-dirt hinterland of Australia, there is no rain. After European settlers discovered copper and gold in the area in the 1870s, enough water was needed to sustain a booming mining town. There were holes dug. The water was trained in from out of the way. The nickname for the steel water tank painted silver was erected a mile outside of town in 1901. The Cobar, a freckle at the edge of the Outback, became something of a desert oasis when the threat of a dry spell remained.
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The entrance to the sound chapel has a bench that visitors can use to listen to Lentz's "String Quartet(s)", a 24 hour-long composition inspired by the Outback's dramatic skies.
The water from the Burrendong Dam is piped into Cobar, and the tank that used to be silver is empty. It has been filled with new music. It will be reborn as the Cobar Sound Chapel on April 2, after two decades of work by Glenn Murcutt and Georges Lentz, two of Australia's leading contemporary composers. The cube that Murcutt installed within the cylindrical space was made out of 16 feet of wood. One can look out through the gold-rimmed oculus from the bench that seats up to four. The sonic stream from the concrete booth will travel throughout the day and into the sky at night. The artists hope that their work will prompt visitors to meditate on their place in the universe. Lentz says there is a mysterious element to our existence that we ignore. We realize we are just a tiny thing in this huge scheme by turning to something higher than ourselves.
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The concrete cube was placed inside the tank. One can look up at the sky through the gold-rimmed oculus on the concrete bench inside.
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Lentz collaborated with the noise on a string quartet called the "String Quartet(s)", which will play on a quadraphonic sound system.
Josh Robenstone got credit.
Since he was a child, Lentz has been interested in questions of spirituality and cosmology. He was born in Echternach, a small town in Luxembourg that formed around a seventh-century abbey. He studied music in Germany. In the fall of 1988 he read a story in the German science magazine about the creation of the universe. He fell into a depression after it threw the tininess of humanity into sharp relief. He says it felt like an ant hole.
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A view from just outside the concrete chamber, which was built inside of a roofless water tank.
Lentz has devoted his entire body of work to exploring the questions of the cosmos, transforming his initial fear into a quest for contemplation, one that only intensified following his 1990 move to Australia. The culmination of his work, "String Quartet(s)" began as an attempt to translate the sky into a score. He collaborated with the Noise, an experimental string quartet based in Australia. The musicians used a range of techniques, including plucking their bows at the top of their instruments, to create sound. Oliver Miller, the Noise's cellist and a technical and creative adviser to the chapel, says that if you repeat that, it will converge into a cluster of the Milky Way.
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Music can be heard from outside the sound chapel thanks to its oculus, which is marked by two concrete slabs.
They ended up with about six hours of music, which Lentz expanded into a 24 hour sound of terror, wonder and reverence. He recorded sounds as if they were in a palimpsest. In one track, a curtain of strings gave the impression of a dust storm. In one instance, I was in a state of reverie as the strings came back into a shiny, ethereal pattern. It would be different to hear the music inside the chapel than it would be to listen from the top of a hill.
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The interior walls of the concrete chamber were cast in corrugated iron. The men decided to keep the graffiti that had accumulated on the tank.
Lentz had a dream of a music box in a copper landscape, where his music could live with its muse. He considered the town as a potential site after he played a concert there. The hilltop was proposed as the location for the tank by the Cobar shli Council. Absolutely not! Lentz said something. He called Murcutt, who is celebrated for his hand-drawn, landscape-specific designs inspired by Australian vernacular architecture. Murcutt remembers thinking that he would have to be mad to do something like this. It is also extraordinary.
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The entrance to the Cobar Sound Chapel will open in April, and the morning sun creates a small amount of light on the inside.
Murcutt has always been drawn to the desert because of its sparseness and its resemblance to the Aboriginal slogan, touch the earth lightly. He set out to design a simple, solar-powered chapel that would unify sound, site and atmosphere thanks to governmental funding. There are two large slabs of concrete outside. The desert is just like the space inside is slanted to maximize acoustics. The local artist Sharron Ohlsen paints Russian blue glass in the four corners of the ceiling, and she uses pointillism in her work. An ellipse of light traverses the floor and concrete walls, which were cast in corrugated iron, and act as sound absorbers. Miller says that music booms from a speaker in each wall, as if they were moving within a school of deep-sea jellyfish.
Over a century after arriving in town, the Silver Tank is once again providing something essential as the chapel will play host to an annual string quartet festival. It's a great place to contemplate questions that haunt us in the age of the Pandemic. Even though the piece doesn't provide answers, it is still comforting to know that there is still music.
