Circles of wind and light

Oct 06, 2022, 01:29 PM

"The recording I worked with from Burkina Faso captured me immediately. Its liveliness and feeling of sparking joy moved me greatly. As well as the feeling I had of music being part of life. Music is not separate from our daily lives but is another facet of our community and of what binds us together as people. Cities have that unique potential of connecting and providing space if balanced properly. And this is an essence that drove the music I create for this project. One in which the field recording from Burkina Faso and my music interconnected to create a joined whole.

"This is something I feel that can be one of the most crucial aspects of the well being of cities. That there is space for everyone, that everyone is a part of the communities that make up the city, that each have a a place for their unique voice, together with the understanding and respect for others perspective. My music in this piece attempted to address this by joining together elements in order to create not only a whole made up of the parts but also a new whole that transcends the sum of the parts that form them."

Burkina Faso street band reimagined by Emmanuel Witzthum. 

IMAGE: Wendkouni, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Part of the Well-Being Cities project, a unique collaboration between Cities and Memory and C40, a global network of mayors of nearly 100 world-leading cities collaborating to deliver the urgent action needed right now to confront the climate crisis. The project was originally presented at the C40 Cities conference in Buenos Aires in 2022. Explore Well-Being Cities in full at https://citiesandmemory.com/wellbeing-cities/