The Almanac of Collapsing Records
The Great Music Hall in Fishamble Street, Dublin, packed for the first performance of Handel's Messiah
April 13, 1742 — a new oratorio given for charity in a hall so crowded the ladies were asked to leave hoops at home and the gentlemen their swords, the choristers of two cathedrals gathered for the first singing of a work never heard before
A sound heard for the first time by everyone in the room at once. This breach reads the CHORISTER IN THE RANKS at the first Messiah: a charity concert in a jammed Dublin hall, the choir of two cathedrals drawn up small before a crowd, the printed part trembling in your hand as a music no ear has met before is lifted into being. The witness is read only from the ranks and the singing — the composer a figure at the harpsichord far off, never approached, never named in speech. What is held in the background is the crush of the hall and the charity it served; what is held in front is your own voice joining a wall of voices in the Hallelujah. The fragment is the subject's own: the first time your single voice was swallowed into something vast and you were glad of it — and the memory beneath it of a time you stood in a crowd and sang or spoke as one and felt yourself dissolve into the whole.
From the record
The era door
a narrow oak stage door, iron-studded and scarred, a brass ring handle worn bright by many hands, candle-smoke dark along the top
DUBLIN — APRIL 13, 1742
A guided walk with Wallace — you are placed inside the record as a witness, and you carry a memory of your own back out. Free, ~20 minutes.
MEMORY IS RESISTANCE · IN SERVICE OF VELOCITY · YEAR 3037