"Saturday, April 11, 2020," from *Call and Response* by Christian Marclay & Steve Beresford, Siglio, 2022.

When a global pandemic swept across the world in the spring of 2020, the world retreated to isolation, abandoning the city streets and skyscrapers, the country roads and town squares, the schools and public transportation stops, the cafes and bookshops, the restaurants and bars. Silence and stillness crept across the globe. It swallowed the car horns and chatter, the laughter and everyday bustle, the sirens and construction. It didn’t, however, swallow the music.

Artist Christian Marclay, known for discovering music in the most unexpected places, found music amidst the silence when photographing the empty London streets when the world shut down. In the silence, he felt the eeriness, haunting and peaceful, settle into his bones. Sound as he knew it had retreated with the life that once walked along the streets that he wandered with his camera. But like the people, it had not disappeared entirely. Instead, it took another shape. Music found shape in the abandoned landscape, while humanity found friendships and connections through virtual and socially distanced creativity in Zoom trivia nights and picnics in the trunks of their car. Photographing an iron gate adorned with decorative white balls, Marclay witnessed a musical score. He found music amidst the silence.

*Call and Response* by Christian Marclay & Steve Beresford, Siglio, 2022.

In enclosures, gates, fences, windows, closed stores, doors, reflections, and buildings, Marclay saw musical compositions written into the architecture of human design. He sent his images to his friend and composer Steve Beresford and asked: “How would this sound on the piano?” Beresford responded with a recording that soon turned into a series of correspondences between the two where Marclay captured the landscape’s musical score, and Beresford gave it sound.

At a time when isolation often felt crushing and constraining, Marclay and Beresford found a musical silver lining. Through images of confinement, Marclay expanded space by locating the hidden musical notation within it, and, with Beresford, they reconfigured the visual correspondences between image and sound. In a playful experiment, the malleability of music can be analogously seen in the resilience of human beings to adapt in the hardest and loneliest times.

"Tuesday, May 12, 2020," from Call and Response by Christian Marclay & Steve Beresford, Siglio, 2022.

"Monday, June 15, 2020," from Call and Response by Christian Marclay & Steve Beresford, Siglio, 2022.

Call and Response is a collection of twenty of Marclay’s photographs taken during the height of the pandemic in the abandoned streets of London alongside twenty of Beresford’s musical scores. Organized chronologically, the pairs of images and scores create an elegant music notation book, playful in its composition, mournful in its reflection on the state of the world, and hopeful in its creativity. In its entirety, Call and Response reveals how the world can be reflected in images and translated into music even in the worst of times.

Visual artist and composer Christian Marclay is renowned internationally for his experiments with the fusion of sound, video, collage, performance, and sculpture. British multi-instrumentalist and composer Steve Beresford is known for his extensive discography. Their book, Call and Response, is published by Artbooks publishers and can be found at artbook.com for purchase.