KoNoSo is what the original inhabitants of Knossos, Crete, called their city, the first known city in Europe. Already well-known from Greek legends and stories, the ruins of KoNoSo, and the clay tablets which represent the oldest preserved European writing, were uncovered in the late 1800s and have been fascinating archaeologists, linguists, artists, and just about everyone else ever since. Soon after the initial excavations, around 1890, Erik Satie wrote the first of his seven Gnossiennes, a series of experimental piano pieces which have always been among my favourite works of his. Satie’s title was likely derived from the Cretan city’s name.
KoNoSo can be heard as a landscape, a view of a city almost four thousand years in the past, a city which is at the roots of European civilisation, but also at the western edge of what even then was a kind of silk road. The instruments, the filters through which this soundscape is heard, are themselves different degrees of ancient, deriving from both mediaeval Japan and neo-classical Europe. Each instrument gives their own idiomatic flavour to the scene, which is largely still, quiet, and empty.
