Transom Shows: Song of Marconi

Song of Marconi
by Dennis Downey

The towers a Wellfleet
(1903) The towers and buildings at the South Wellfleet station in Cape Cod.
Listen in Real Audio or MP3

Intro by Jay Allison

One hundred years ago this week, Guglielmo Marconi made his historic transatlantic broadcast from Cape Cod. Imagine: on that day, there was only one message traveling in waves in the air. How many swirl around us today? Our neighbor Dennis Downey has written an homage to that moment and to this one. He borrowed a cassette machine from us and recorded himself here on Cape Cod.

Marconi, 1924
Marconi, c.1924

Notes From Dennis Downey

I was thinking at the time about the mysterious nature of radio...the way you turn the dial and what you are listening to is re-placed with other speakers...other sounds....other meanings...the way you drive along and stuff comes in your car...the way you drive further and you can't hear it anymore...you've passed beyond its circle....

I tried to visualize what it means after having read (and not fully understanding) the science stuff: like modulation and frequency and interference and waves....

It is like we are in a Huge Heraclitus Stream
....invisible...imperceptible...layered and overlapping....and full of sounds rushing by...But we can't hear any of them because our ears aren't radio receivers...

It all happens above....or below....or faster than we can hear...

And when I went to Marconi Beach...as you know....the 4 towers are not there...just the bases...and the bluff is high up....so you have this sense of vista...and I imagined the men who built the towers with lumber 100 years ago...and how well (far) they could see from the top....and how there was nothing in the air running by them...like there is today....if they turned on a radio....they wouldn't get anything.

I also stood there and couldn't understand the idea: how the wave thing worked...and how anyone thought to find it...

Tech Notes

As far as the recording:

I have a work room in town.

It is a book work room.

I built it with lots of shelf, desk and bench space.

It has 8 large windows overhead and is very good for pacing and thinking.

I recorded the pieces on a Sunday morning with two windows open when the downtown is generally quiet.

I put the recorder and its buttons right in front of me on the tall work bench.

I hung the text from 4 clipboards at eye level.

I put the mike on a book shelf in the middle of the clipboards and anchored it with books.

I talked standing up and more or less toward the mike.

Dennis Downey

About Dennis Downey

Writer...lives with his family on Cape Cod.
Born in New Bedford...1956.
One of 10...Irish Catholic.

Dennis Downey moves and talks with his whole body in order to explain things. His work explores an implosion of history, language, culture and technology as we increasingly converge towards a world-wide tribe. Since 1983, Mr. Downey has evolved the unique form and content of his action-talks in solo performances in nightclubs, art museums and small theaters throughout the Northeast. At once confounding, profound and exhilarating, Downey's performances describe a Large World just underneath our everyday lives.

"I began as a standup performer in comedy clubs in 1983. Whenever I perform, though I prepare extensively with pen and paper, I always talk off-the-top-of-my-head and in-the-moment - in the way that people wrote before there was reading and writing. After a year in the nightclubs, I re-configured the work as action-talk performances in art. Since finishing Harvard in June of 1996, I have concentrated on developing high-level HTML designs for the Web while pursuing the prototype for a new, edu-tainment Web content that I call TextTelevision."