"Please take a seat. You will be surrounded by twenty-one automated music boxes and a web of cables will enclose you. The music boxes, originally produced to repeat a singular melody endlessly, form an orchestra that pays tribute to yesterday (the day all troubles seemed so far away)."

The musicboxes are divided in six groups playing different play - stop patterns, in this way recycling the initial melody into a new composition. Four different themes were programmed on an Arduino board: Staccato, Single Groups against Tutti, Accellerando and Legato Layering. Duration: 11', played as a loop. Preferred size of audience: one at a time. The walls and floor are the resonance box, that produce the sound softly but tenaciously.

Yesterday is commissioned by November Music for the Imprisoned exhibition at the November Music festival 2010. The theme of the exhibition was imprisonment and isolation. Initially the exhibition was planned the empty cells of the 'Huis van Bewaring' (prison) in 's Hertogenbosch, but had to be moved to the CBK building.

In april 2011 the installation was exhibited during the Notations festival in Amsterdam. In september 2011 it was exhibited at the Gaudeamus Muziekweek in Utrecht and october 2011 at the Dutch Classical Music Meeting in Amsterdam.


An installation by Dyane Donck & Evelien van den Broek, technical support: Michael Dotolo, commissioned by: November Music