The Art of Ear Trumpet is an exhibition celebrating a decade-long live performance work, a multi-site piece, which has travelled both nationally and internationally. The work is inspired by the Dorset National Landscape, the Wessex Landscape and the Red-House Museum itself.
In the exhibition you will see props and artefacts from the show, as well as costumes, music, geologically-inspired art-work used in the show's 'field tent', and our extraordinary listening devices: the Ear Trumpets themselves.
We aim to share the universe we have created and the weird, wonderful things we have encountered in ten years of ‘listening to the earth’.
Ear Trumpet
Ear Trumpet is a piece about listening. It’s about the sound under the ground. The noises that you would miss if you didn’t listen for them.
Made for people of all ages, the playful installation invites audiences to listen to enchanting contemporary classical music composed by Robert Lee (National Theatre, BBC, Cambridge University Press). In order to listen to the music, audiences choose from a series of elaborate Ear Trumpets created from converted euphoniums and brass instruments; listening devices which - as if by magic - make the barely audible sound loud and clear. Ear Trumpet draws upon notions of attentive listening pioneered by composer and revered sound ecologist Hildegard Westerkamp.
By rendering the familiar act of listening strange, we invite audiences to delight in the discovery of the secret music under their feet.
EAR TRUMPET | gobbledegooktheatre
Images: Rik Irons-Maclean and Dominic Old
