A Room Somewhere Behind the Room

You are sitting in the City Recital Hall when the room begins to acquire another room behind it.

Nothing has changed. The stage is still there, the audience sits quietly, Sydney continues beyond the walls. Thomas Dunford holds the lute almost lightly, as though it might disappear if held too firmly, while Nicolas Altstaedt draws the bow across the cello and a darker resonance gathers beneath it, warm and bodily, something that seems to come from further inside the room.

Then the lute speaks.

A string is touched and released. The sound barely arrives before it begins to recede, leaving a fine disturbance in the silence. You find yourself listening for what has gone rather than what remains, the way you sometimes remember a dream through one small detail that refuses to disappear: a doorway, a colour, someone’s hand resting on a table.

Marais. Forqueray. Bach.

The names pass through the room without quite belonging to it. You might imagine other rooms, other centuries, candlelight falling across wood, hands moving over strings. But the past does not appear. It is stranger than that. It seems to be somewhere nearby, just beyond the edge of recognition.

The cello holds the sound longer. The lute lets it fall.

Between them there is a peculiar tension, as though one instrument belongs to the world of things that remain and the other to the world of things that have already begun to vanish. At times the distinction disappears altogether, and you are left with the sensation of listening through a wall whose other side you cannot see.

Perhaps you have been here before.

There is a room like this in dreams. Not a particular room, but the kind of room that seems to have been waiting somewhere beneath the visible one. You enter and immediately know that something has happened there, although there is no evidence of it. A bed has been moved. A door is open. The harbour is visible where a wall should be. You don’t ask for an explanation. The place has its own knowledge.

The music seems to know this.

Pärt arrives almost unnoticed, and suddenly there is more silence than sound. A few notes hover, reflected in themselves, and the room becomes strangely deep. You become aware of the smallest things: the movement of a bow, the hand at the strings, the faint decay of a note after you thought it had ended.

One sound catches you.

You could not say why.

It is not the music as a whole but something smaller — a note falling away, a pause that seems to open rather than close, an instant in which you feel that you have remembered something without remembering what it is.

Then it is gone.

The hall slowly returns. Applause, movement, coats, footsteps. The ordinary world gathers itself around you again, almost too quickly. Outside, Sydney is waiting with its lights and traffic and weather, perfectly indifferent to the room you have just left.

You walk out into it.

For a while you carry the sensation that there was another room behind the room, and that you had been allowed inside only long enough to notice it.

Notitia – Some places are entered only by leaving them.