In a world full of war, famine, oppression, deceit, monotony, what -- apart from the eternal innocence of animals-- offers an image of hope? A mother with a newborn in her arms? The child may end up as a murderer, or a murder victim, so that the hopeful image is a prefiguration of pieta: a mother with her newly dead child on her lap. No, the image of hope is something passing with a musical instrument in a case. It is not contributing to oppression, or to liberation either, but to something that continues below the surface: the boy on his bike, with a guitar in a faded mock-leather cover on his back; a girl with a dented violin case waiting for the tram. The hallowed halls beneath concert platforms where orchestral musicians open their cases everywhere on tables and chairs and on the floor and take out their shining and glittering instruments, after which imprints of those instruments remain: negative clarinets, flutes, bassoons with their mouthpieces and connection, hollowed out of soft reinforced velvet; and while the space gradually fills with the muted cacophony of all the instruments thronging around the A like sparrows and seagulls and starlings and thrushes around a hunk of bread, the lids of the cases of double basses, as tall as a man, are opened like the doors to another world...