Listening Spaces Vol. VII

There's a question that sits at the heart of what we do at House of Shem: what is a cultural experience actually for?

Not what format it takes. Not what it costs or where it happens. But what is it genuinely trying to do to the person sitting in the room?

Listening Spaces was born from that question. Classical music concerts have existed for centuries — but somewhere along the way the format calcified. Formal venues, formal dress, formal silence. The experience became about demonstrating that you belonged there, rather than actually going somewhere. The music — which was always meant to transport you, to crack something open — got buried under the ritual of attending it.

We stripped that back. Small room. Comfortable chairs. A guided conversation before and after. Music played at the kind of volume that lets it breathe. No performance of appreciation required.

What we found, across six editions, is that people leave differently than they arrived. Not because we taught them anything. But because the music — heard properly, without distraction or pretension — did what it was always supposed to do.

For Vol VII we're listening to Richard Strauss's An Alpine Symphony.

Strauss completed it in 1915, and it remains one of the most audacious pieces of programme music ever written. Programme music is the practice of composing music that depicts something specific — a story, a place, a journey — rather than existing as pure abstract sound. Strauss didn't just evoke the Alps in a general, impressionistic way. He mapped a single day on the mountain across 22 distinct episodes: the darkness before dawn, the sunrise, the ascent through forests and meadows, the summit, the gathering storm, the descent, the night returning. He scored it for a huge orchestra and — with characteristic lack of subtlety — included a wind machine and a thunder machine.

The Alpine Symphony raises a genuinely interesting question about how music works: how does a composer make you hear a place you may never have seen? And why does it succeed even across that distance — even for someone sitting in a bookshop in Marshalltown, with no Alps anywhere in sight?

That distance is actually the point.

Johannesburg is flat, landlocked, and about as far from the European alpine tradition as it's possible to get — geographically and culturally. Listening to Strauss here, in this city, asks something of us. It invites us to discover our own capacity to travel without moving, to inhabit a landscape through sound, to find that the music connects to something in us that has nothing to do with mountains and everything to do with being human.

That's the self-discovery Listening Spaces is after. Not education. Not cultural enrichment as a performance. Just the genuine experience of finding out what you're capable of when you properly sit with something.

Come and find out what an Alpine Symphony sounds like when you're listening from Johannesburg.

Saturday 16 May. 14:00. Bridge Books, Marshalltown. R50.

Limited seating. Tickets via Quicket.