Last night I went to this Soundscapes thing at Migdal David
(The Tower of David). It sounds maybe a little hokey, but boy oh boy was it cool. I didn’t bring a camera, so we’ll have to make do with the pics I found online. You can see more at the designers’ website.

Really, it was a lot like fairyland, the colors and sound against the old white stone.

It was beautiful. Basically, the artist-folks created these gigantic sculptures that were like robotic/mechanical musical instruments that played themselves–that is to say, the mechanical part did the plucking or drumming, but the instruments were real drums and strings and such.

There was a harp (above–you can’t tell but it was 3 meters high), and all different kinds of drums, and the things that look like flowers on the top pic were cymbals and tambourines and cowbells, and, if you look on the right on the top photo, you can see the ginormous bass guitars (OK, they were really just speakers, but neat nonetheless) and you can see the blue and green wind instrument pipes sticking up from the ground, and the blue bells in a big pretty tree dangling from the arch–the frame on which the bells were hanging twisted this way and that, ringing the bells as they moved. There were also big “peacock feathers” with bells dangling from them that moved up and down.

The music was sometimes instrumental solos, sometimes all the instruments at once, and maybe a distant cousin of Peter Gabriel’s Passion, or like walking inside a symphony.

I love this kind of magic. If you’re in Jerusalem, you should go, I think it’s open another month.