I. Deciso
When it comes to resolutions, I am a slow learner. Every January for more than a decade now, I have committed to something I am apparently congenitally incapable of completing — organizing my photographs from my previous year's travels. I had thought going digital would somehow make it easier to account for my photographs, but now instead of my linen closet it is my hard drive that is cluttered with old and frequently unremarkable pictures.
I had recently begun to wonder why I even bother to take so many photos on my journeys because, except for the ones I sell to magazines and newspapers, I seldom look at them again and tend not to share them with anyone unless I'm badgered into it. My father-in-law, a semi-professional photographer who can click off 753,000 shots before the sun has even come up on the first day of his vacation, spends many happy hours and days sorting and revising his handiwork. What was my problem with this part of the photographic process?
It was, ironically, in a bad photograph that I found my answer. It was a blurred picture that I took last spring in India: I was on the Ganges in a cockroach-infested boat with a small group of friends, trying to capture the exuberant commotion on the ghats of the holy city of Varanasi as Hindu pilgrims prepared to celebrate their sunset prayer ritual. As I studied the murky image on my laptop screen, my finger hovering over the delete key, I could make out a smudge of saffron-coloured robes, ribbon-swirls of distorted light from hanging lanterns — and in the foreground, the outline of a hand holding a small electronic device high in the air: a tape recorder.
Later, I asked the friend, an electro-acoustic composer who owned the tape recorder, if I could have a copy of the cacophony of bells and competing chants he recorded that night. I have finally come to realize that my most vivid travel memories are cemented not by sight, but by sound.
II. Appassionato
If, as the Bard reminds us, all the world's a stage, then I propose we photo-obsessed wayfarers might do well to lay aside our cameras and pay closer attention to the incidental music that punctuates the scenes and acts of our travelling days.
I am not talking here about the blue-chip performances that require advance tickets, balcony seating and fancy dress. I am speaking rather of those unplanned and unexpected gifts of music that tell us as surely as the food we are eating and the language we are speaking where we have landed on this planet.
When we come back from our travels, we are prepared for the usual questions: "Where did you go? What did you see? What did you do?"
And even before you have boarded your return flight, you have likely prepared your stock responses. But how would you begin to answer if someone were to ask: "Tell me — what did you hear?"
III. Dolce
I collected my first sound postcard when I was 14 years old and trapped in what seemed an interminable family vacation in the suburban barrens of Winnipeg. It was a hot July afternoon, and my younger brother and I, tired of running through my grandmother's sprinkler, sat on the scorching concrete steps leading to the never-used front door, stunned silent by the oppressive humidity.
Inside, my mother and her older sister, my Aunt Donna, had claimed the below-ground basement, the only cool place in the little brick-and-stucco tract house. Both accomplished violinists, they enjoyed playing duets whenever they got together. The screen door was open, and my brother and I could hear them tuning up as we meticulously picked the bits of grass off our feet that so annoyed my granny when we tracked them into her obsessively tidy kitchen.
