Where is the Music? artist book installation

In Philip Gross’ poem ‘The Musical Cottage’, a child explores the mechanics of a toy cottage, ‘the whirr and tick of cogs, precise machineries circling on themselves’, and wonders ‘Where is the music?’ The poem answers him, ‘Elsewhere’. In the same mood of equivocation it ends: ‘The final note hangs frozen at the lip of being. Thirty years. It will not drop.’ This project addresses the haunting evoked by the ‘elsewhere’ and the arrested note of Gross’ poem, and traces a new path across the same terrain. Our ‘musical cottage’ is a modded musical box; our music is a combination of short experimental pieces and captured street sounds, installed via iPod; and our new poems will explore the ideas of music, precise machineries and lost objects and abstractions