LONG before the legendary British prime minister Margaret Thatcher could be named Iron Lady, the Eiffel Tower was always affectionately referred to by the French as la Dame de Fer. So, inevitably, the musical event devoted to it and to be launched soon has already been baptised by the local media as ‘the song of the Iron Lady’.

The composer behind the project happens to be a New Yorker called Joseph Bertolozzi, who had made a name for himself in 2009 by creating a musical score dedicated to the Roosevelt Bridge on the Hudson River known as Bridge Music.

Bertolozzi’s technique, however, is slightly different from that of, say Beethoven. Instead of a melody that a classical composer hears in his head before transferring it to paper, Bertolozzi uses metallic batons, plastic hammers and rubber mallets to hit the object of his inspiration, as if it were a musical instrument, with various intensities and gathers the taps, echoes and reverberations on a tape recorder.

The next step is to rearrange the sounds thus accumulated on his computer in order to form his composition.

The dream of creating his Tower Music is actually even older than the Hudson River project. Following many requests from Bertolozzi for almost 10 years the French authorities finally gave him the green light in 2013 to work on the famous Parisian monument.

During the past three years Bertolozzi has been able to raise a fund of $40,000 that has allowed him to make several trips to Paris with his team of technicians and proceed with slow but steady progress.

Tapping on the bars of the Iron Lady at different heights Bertolozzi has so far recorded some 20 hours of sounds which he hopes to use to create his hour-long ‘symphony’.

Explaining his method to a newspaper reporter, he said: “The vertically narrowing shape of the tower gives you a great number of resources … high notes, middle notes and low notes. So far I have been able to record 2,000 of these and a primary part of the melody called A Thousand Feet of Sound has already been launched on the internet.”

Bertolozzi claims his technique is far from being pure invention and that he was much stimulated by the works of French composers such as Ravel, Poulenc and Debussy who had used everyday street sounds of the modern age in their works: “The Iron Lady is a profound inspiration to me in my effort to find newer and newer dimensions for my music. It’s a matter of constant reinvention for me.”

Freakish as it may sound, Bertolozzi’s idea is not really an invention. As far back as 1922, Russian musician Arseny Avraamov had used steamboat whistles, factory sirens as well as echoes of machine-gun blasts to create a composition that was played in the Azerbaijani capital Baku to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Soviet revolution.

Jean-Bernard Bros, a top city official, says he receives every month dozens of requests by painters, photographers and sculptors to be allowed to work on the Eiffel Tower, but this is for the first time somebody has asked to use the Iron Lady as a musical instrument: “It sounds too weird at the moment, but only the result will tell.”

However, as the Bridge Music episode seven years ago is a proof, Bertolozzi’s future venture has a solid background. In 2002 his composition A Contemplation of Bravery was played at the West Point Military Academy in the United States. Even in France he is not totally unknown following his musical score for the Samuel Beckett play Waiting for Godot in 1991.

Joseph Bertolozzi says he needs another two months of work to bring out the full composition of Tower Music to the public.

—The writer is a journalist based in Paris.

ZafMasud@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, February 21st, 2016