The Glass Singer

What it looks like, and what it does

A woman on a stage in a grey gown, mouth open on a note. No sound. Behind her the stage has grown deeper, with extra rows of seats receding into the dark. The audience listening with hands to their faces.

Performs with eyes closed. Stands at the centre of the stage. Opens her mouth, and the room does the rest.

What is known

Lena Vasquez lost the ability to produce sound in 2003 and kept performing. The silence in the hall grew larger. Reviewers wrote of an enormous acoustic.

Surveyed, the hall is bigger on her nights. After a performance the rooms she has sung in keep a little of the extra space. A chapel in which she rehearsed now has a nave.

What it can do

• Makes a space larger with song
• Leaves the room changed after she sings

Where it stops

• Cannot sing in a space whose ceiling she cannot see
• Her voice cannot be recorded

An encounter

Eng measured the stalls before the recital and again after. Eleven rows had become seventeen. He did not know where the extra seats had been stored. The fire marshal, asked about capacity, said that the hall had always seated that many. The audience applauded quietly, as they do, and left by a door at the back that had not been there at the start.

Marcus Eng, hall manager, The Meridian concert hall, A Friday recital

What is established, and what is only said

• established: Laser surveys before and after seven recitals record a total additional volume of 2,100 cubic metres.
• incomplete: The view from the chapel window was photographed. The place pictured has not been found.
• interpretation: She may not be making space. She may be opening a door that was already there, one note at a time.

Still unresolved

The rooms she has enlarged remain larger. The nave has a window with a view of a coastline nobody has identified.

Where it has been recorded

• The Meridian Hall (confirmed) — Recorded by Marcus Eng, hall manager.

Stories about it

• The Glass Singer's Room at Hallam (Grotesque encounter, 3 min) — A library assistant at the Hallam Reading Room is asked to shelve a box of old gramophone records, and when she drops the first disc a soprano voice rises from the broken shellac, and the glass in the high windows begins to hum a note that is not a window's own.

Connected entities

• The Man Who Is Also a Door — Both open a place that the building does not account for. One uses a voice, the other a hinge.