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KNOWING FROM THE INSIDE

                                                                                                 

The Music Inn is one of the oldest music stores in New York City. It preserves, sells and restores traditional instruments from around the world. This film takes us on a journey through sound as it emerges from the encounter between musical instruments and humans. Along the way, we get to know the characters who keep this space alive as a haven for playfulness, community-making and repair.

^{Hilary Brady Morris, organologist and ethnomusicologist, playing the Damian in her workshop at the Music Inn, where she is charge of repairs.}


A small business devoted to traditional music, music performances and community making, The Music Inn is a survivor in the increasingly gentrified urban landscape of the West Village. Moreover, it’s the only place in New York City, to Hilary’s knowledge, in which the general public has direct access to a collection of world instruments. “The MET instruments are behind a glass. Here you can touch them, and you can also see their back.” This is why Hilary suggested that the Music Inn, in this film could be represented as “a vehicle to listen to sounds of the world”.

John Cage famously went into an anechoic chamber to discover that silence was not accessible to humans, since in the absolute silence of the room his own bloodstream and cerebral activities produces two distinct, continuous sounds. The Music Inn could be considered like a schizophonic chamber, in which the way we make sense and acquire knowledge through sound can be explored along infinite material and affective trajectories. This film aims at extending the capacity of a place to bring people in relation to musical instruments and the worlds that resonate through them, allowing for a relational understanding of what it means, for humans, to be social and sonic beings.

^{Jeff Slatnick, longtime owner of the Music Inn}

“Life is one long conversation. More precisely, it is a tangled web of concurrent conversations, all going on at once, that weave into and around one another. They flow, spinning here and there into topics like eddies in a stream. And they have three distinguishing properties. First, conversations are processes: they carry on. Secondly, conversations are open-ended: they do not aim towards a fixed destination or a final conclusion, for everything that might be said invites a follow-on. Thirdly, conversations are dialogical. They are not solitary but go on between and among people. It is from these dialogical engagements that knowledge continually emerges. To join a conversation is to be ever-present at the cusp where ideas are on the point of making their appearance, of taking shape.” (Tim Ingold, Correspondances)