Colin Siyuan Chinnery on Peter Cusack
‘Over the radio, he asked listeners a simple question: what is your favourite sound of Beijing?’
‘Over the radio, he asked listeners a simple question: what is your favourite sound of Beijing?’
In 2004, I invited Peter Cusack to make a work for ‘Sound and the City’, an experimental music/sound art project for the British Council in Beijing. This was my first real curatorial project and a rebellion against the ‘output’-driven programmes beloved of British Council management at the time. I decided to attempt a non-glamorous, out-there project that mainstream media would run a mile from. Artists and musicians would love it, I thought. Instead, the exact opposite came true. Artists thought it was music and musicians thought it was art. Both largely ignored it. The mainstream media, however, went nuts. They loved it. Mostly, it turned out, because of Peter Cusack. Over Beijing radio, he asked listeners a simple question: what is your favourite sound of Beijing? The answers people gave opened onto all kinds of issues, from the mundane beauty of everyday life to remembered histories and shared experience. Many years later, I started a long-term project, Sound Museum, making a history of Beijing using only sound. The project started almost by accident but grew in direct response to the amount of public interest it attracted. In a way, Sound Museum is simply continuing a conversation Cusack started 15 years ago.
