Elistrau. The bell you're hearing is called Mukai Gane, which means welcoming bell
in Japanese. Every year, on August seventh, hundreds of pilgrims line up
to ring it at the Rokudo chino Ji Temple in Kyoto. This ritual marks
the beginning of the Oban Festival, the Japanese version of All Souls Day.
The bell is hungover a well, and legend says that its sound can be
heard in the great beyond. That way, the spirits of the dead know
that it's time to reunite with their relatives. This is Seema, a Turkish
Sufi ceremony. You've probably seen dervishes before, those dancers that whirl around with
their white skirts billowing like bells. They spin faster and faster like orbiting planets,
using dance and music to go into a trance. Their right hands rise
towards the sky and their left hands point toward the earth. In that state
of mystic ecstasy, they become a symbol of the connection between the human and
the divine. Dervish is a Persian word that literally means seeker of doors.
The idea that sound and music can connect the world of the living with a
higher dimension is not unique to any specific culture, and can be found in
myths and religions around the world. For instance, in the twelfth century German
Saint Hildegard vom Bingen wrote in a letter, the soul is symphonic and the
song of the human soul is an echo of the celestial harmony. To understand
what Hildegard is talking about when she says celestial harmony, we have to go
back a further fifteen hundred years to Pythagoras and his theory of the music of
the spheres. Broadly speaking, the theory puts forward the idea that the mathematics
that govern the laws of the universe can be translated into music, just as
all music can be translated into numbers. If the motion of each celestial body
produces a sound, then together they can create a grand celestial harmony. But
if the universe produces sound, why can't we hear its music? Pythagoraeans say
is because we are born and immersed in it. It's like a background noise
that our brain blocks out because it's always been there. This theory survived from
many centuries all the way through to the Renaissance. The ominous music here now
was written in sixteen nineteen by astronomer Johann Kepler in his work Harmonices Mundi.
According to his calculations, this is what Mars would sound like. Over time,
different philosophers added their own ideas to the theory to adapt it to their
religious beliefs. At some point it expanded beyond just celestial bodies to include the
entire cosmos, from the tiniest to the largest elements. Let's go back to
Abbess Hildegard von Bingen. Apart from being a saint, she was also a
writer, philosophers, scientist, and composer. Hildegard said heavenly music can be
found in all things, but humans lost the ability to hear it when they
were cast out of Eden. The way to recover for that ability is through
song, since, according to the saint, singing is a form of remembering.
It allows us to reconnect with a divine and to add our voice to
the celestial harmony. In her mystical act Disease, Hildegard her music, which
she then transcribed. Although she had no classical training, she composed seventy eight
songs that she compiled under the title Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations.
This music was composed by a Swiss woman born seventh centuries later, in eighteen
seventy seven, less than two hundred miles from where the abbess once lived.
Here's something she wrote. This ancient land has a heart made of mountains,
rivers and lakes, and we have our cities on top of them and filled
them with our noise. We are deaf, But when light hits the water,
and when birds fly across the sky to greet me, these times stand
still and I can hear something. I can hear music, I can hear
the Earth's heart beat. Ursula Bloom wrote those words at the dawn of the
twentieth century. She was a painter and composer, and like Hildegarde, she
may also have thought that she wasn't composing music, she was simply hearing it.
But here I am talking away and I haven't even introduced myself or told
you what this is all about. My name is Emma Clark. I'm a
journalist, and for the last few months I've been obsessing over Ursula Bloom and
the few facts I've been able to find out about her life. But Before
we move on to Arsla's life, let me tell you about how I discovered
her, because that's a whole other obsession. Hi David, UM, I'm
so sorry for springing this on you, but um, I'm not coming back.
I know it sucks, but I've paid my part of the rent and
I'm sure you'll find someone to move in next month. Right, you can
get rid of the stuff that I've left behind in my room. I mean,
whatever you want to do with it, it's fine. I don't care.
I hope you don't take this personality, but please don't text me or
call me again. I'm going to DISCONNECTU number. Well bye. I that's
that's no way to start. Let's put the voice recorded here here. That's
David, my boyfriend. He's going to be editing the sound for this podcast.
We've been living together for a couple of years, and we're actually in
our living room right now. I want David to walk us through a few
things. When did you receive the voice mess which we just heard. Is
that your journalist voice? You did say you're going to help me? Right?
Okay, Okay, I forgot sorry. Clara sent the message on April
fourth, twenty eighteen, and who's Clara? Well, I used to share
this house with Clara and another guy called Alex. Your office used to be
her room. I think she lived here for about two years. Yeah,
that sounds about right. Whose house is this then? Tell us a little
bit about that. Well, the house is mine now because I inherited it.
Back then, it was my grandma's who rented it out to me.
I lived here when I was at university and shared it with other students.
Clara, Alex and I shared the place for about two years. Paul moved
in when Clara left. I met you around that time, and then my
grand died and left me the house. Alex and Paul moved out. I
renovated it and we live here now. That's about it, Okay, So
what happened after Clara messaged you? I called her the minute I heard her
message, but her phone was already switched off. Alex also called her over
and over again that month. Her phone was always off until one day a
voice message informed us that the phone had been disconnected. She lived with you,
guys for two years, and you never heard from her again after that,
not a word ever. She didn't even come back for a thing.
She just vanished into thinny. What about her friends? Did they know what
was going on? Well, Alex only knew one of Clara's friends, a
classmate from UNI. He managed to contact her, but she didn't have a
clue either. We never met any of her relatives in those two years.
We just knew that she was from Madrid and that she was studying in London.
Were you worried? Sure? I mean, it was strange, even
why Clara's standards. It was weird of her to disappear like that. We
even thought about going to the police, but what could we say. In
her message, she made it clear that she was leaving the house. You
said it was strange, even by Clara standards. What do you mean?
Well, come on, I'm not being mean, you know me? Yeah,
I like strange, Yeah, yeah, I get it. Well,
Clara was beyond weird. She always kept to herself, and she'd been acting
even stranger for the last couple of months before she left. What do you
mean? She was working on her PhD. She'd finished her history degree and
was research and a Swiss painter Bloom exactly, Yeasa Bloom. Two or three
weeks before she called, she'd gone to Switzerland. We think that's where she
called us from, but there's no way to know for sure. What do
you mean she was acting weird or weirder than usual those months? It was
her music. We were all losing our minds because of her fucking music.
Sparkling water for me, Please, I already knew all this stuff you just
heard about Clara. David ended up telling me about her, just not when
we first met. Back then he was living with Paul and Alex and they
never mentioned Clara. I only happened to find out about her recently by accident.
Actually, this is the first time I've asked Alex about her. Well,
I get why David didn't tell you about Clara. We're all in shock
at first, and when that wore off, well, you know, we're
pretty annoyed, especially David. Later on, when Paul moved in, we
just kind of forgot about the whole situation. I mean, there wasn't that
much to say about it anyway. David says you were closer to Car than
he was. Definitely, I wouldn't say they didn't get along. They just
didn't click. They won't completely different wavelengths just co exist in the same space
and that's not my thing, as you will know. Yeah, I certainly
do. I sometimes cook a meal and we'd get together for dinner. I
like doing that every so often. Too great a sense of camera. Ye,
and David's grandma hard a cleaner, so we didn't need to handle the
daily chores and all that. Yeah, I definitely can't pickture you just sharing
a space with someone and nothing else. Well, I mean to tell you
the truth. She didn't pay much attention to me and we weren't exactly friends.
She always kept herself hidden away in her room when she did need to
talk to someone, but she would come to me, and that's why I
was upset when she sent the message to David and not to me, although
I suppose it would have been even worse if she sent me that message out
of the blue, like it was our landlady's grandson. After it is the
sparkling water for you, Yeah, thanks the beards for me. Alex is
one of the nicest and most sociable people. I know. It's not hard
to be friends with him. So if Clara avoided him, I guess David
isn't exaggerating. She must have been a super private person. But I asked
Alex about the music. Well, she'd been with us for a little over
a year and I've never heard music coming from her room before. She might
have had the radio on occasionally, or maybe she wore headphones. Nomise isn't
really an issue for me. She starts working on her PhD, and all
of a sudden, she's blasting this classical music and I'm like, have you
heard of headphones? And she goes, well, I have to listen to
it like this, And on top of that, it's the same music over
and over again. And get this. About a month later, she went
out and bought herself a keyboard and started playing the melody herself. But it
just didn't sound right. What do you mean it didn't sound right, like
well, it sounded like she was playing it in a different key. You
know, I don't really have a clue about music. But did you say
something to her? Of course we did. We asked her to turn it
down several times. We've got her to agree to that at least, which
made it slightly more bearable. It wasn't so much the volume as the fact
that she was playing the same music obsessively. And do you remember the music?
Do I ever, like I swear, I hear that music and my
dreams sometime I can see do you right now if you want to dun dun
dun d d dun dun dun dun dunn d Clara Taurus, I wonder if
you'll I will listen to this podcast. I know you haven't published your PhD
on our sol Bloom yet because I've searched for it and nothing comes up.
There's almost no information about you online, and that's quite an achievement in this
day and age. I hope what I'm about to tell you doesn't bother you
too much. I've seen your old Instagram account, although it's private, and
your last post appears just before you disappeared. Alex let me have a look
at it, and I took screenshots of the few photos you posted when you
were in Switzerland. I also have all of your things full disclosure. That's
how I found out about you. David never got round to throwing them out.
He didn't. No, I didn't see that one coming. I was
so pissed off at Clara for having left us in the lurch like that,
I said we should keep them just in case she came back. But we
wanted to chuck them out. A year or so after she left, we
sold and got rid of the bigger items like the bookcases and the keyboard,
But the clothes she didn't pack for the trip and the rest of her stuff
it all fit in a big old suitcase that we left lying around the house.
I mean, she didn't have much. It was really beer like like
a nun's room. She did have a set of books that she was using
for her research, but that's pretty much it. I can't believe the suitcase
survived the renovation. I know, right when I was getting the house ready,
I thought this has to go. I mean, I got rid of
so many things and some stuff that used to belong to my grant, But
I couldn't bring myself to get rid of that suitcase. How come I don't
know, I mean, I guess I thought it was like the only evidence
that Alex and I have that Clara existed. Otherwise, it feels like,
you know, David's right. If I hadn't found that suitcase when I was
going through the closet in the hall, I would never have found out about
Klara. And even if David and Alex had told me about her, she
would have been nothing but a distant blure of a person, a memory of
a memory. But being able to go through her things makes Clara feel like
a real person. She really didn't have much stuff, especially compared to what
I would have accumulated if I'd lived in that room for two years, just
some summer clothes, a pair of sandals, some necklaces on a couple of
books. If I didn't know she was doing her PhD on an avant garde
female painter, I'd say she's in a Greek and Roman art. There's a
Greek and a Latin dictionary, and it looks like she only wore neutral colors.
There's not a single print in sight. The things Klara left behind say
a lot about her, but I'm not interested in her style or even her
personality. I want to know about her obsessions. It's not uncommon to gather
hundreds of papers and photo copies on a certain subject when you're working on your
PhD. But the notes in the margins and the underlining are compulsive. There
are four Latin words that appear several times. I've looked them up. Mortua
means dead, VIXI means lived, TAKUI means I'm silent or I've got a
secret, and dulcekano, which I think is actually two words, and that
means to sing sweetly. But those aren't the only words that appear frequently.
This one, for instance, is a printed document about women and medieval music
that mentions Hildegarde vom Bingen. Clara used a red pen to write voss day
on it, which means the voices of God in Latin, but she didn't
write it just once. It's written in the margin nine times in a row.
There are a lot of notes on the history of music and the sear
of the harmony of the spheres. Did Rsala Bloom think that was the music
she heard? I'm not sure. There's barely any information about her online,
just a handful of art blogs, but they all seemed to repeat the same
facts about her. Maybe Clara discovered a ton of other things, but if
so, that information must have been on the computer she took with her to
Switzerland. She left behind photocopies of her art books and a short summary of
Ursula Bloom's life. This is all I've been able to find out about her
so far. Bloom was born in eighteen seventy seven. In Saint Gallen,
a small city in Switzerland. She was the only daughter of a wealthy family
who owned a textile company. She went to a Catholic boarding school that was
run by nuns, and from a very young age she showed a flair for
music and painting. In eighteen ninety eight, she moved to Munich to study
art. That's where she supposedly met another Swiss painter who was also studying there
at the time and became friends with him. His name was Paul Clay.
In nineteen eleven, Clay introduced her to a group of painters from Munich that
called themselves the Blue Rider, led by vasili Kandinsky. Bloom style matches the
groups. Her paintings depict Swiss landscapes using violent brushstrokes and intense colors. They
could also be classed as fauvest given the bold use of color. When World
War One broke out in nineteen fourteen, Ursula Bloom was in Switzerland, and
even though her country was neutral, she enlisted as a nurse to help soldiers
from both sides who crossed the border. Here's something weird about that period.
Several biographic notes mentioned that Ersla used a sort of music therapy with the soldiers
to help treat their PTSD. Let's take a break here music therapy in a
field hospital during World War One. It's hard to imagine from here on.
There's a gap in her story. We have no information on Hersla blooms slide
from the end of World War One until nineteen twenty. That year, Ursula
had a severe of his breakdown and was committed to a psychiatric hospital in Geneva,
and she never left. In nineteen twenty three, she threw herself out
of the window of her room and died. She was only forty six.
Maybe I should have warned you that Ursula Bloom's story was tragic, not only
because of her demise, but because of how little we know about her.
Like so many female artists from the early twentieth century, she did not go
down in history. Her art has been neglected, overshadowed by the renowned male
artist of the time. It's just so unfair, considering how special her paintings
are. And what about her music, you might ask. The biographical notes
say she was a composer, but I can't find any recordings online. The
music you hear in this podcast is David's rendition of a score written by Ursula,
which Clara left behind when she disappeared. He'd asked me to play this
song when Clara was living, yet I would have literally cut my hands off.
Come on, it's a nice melody. It might be the first hundred
times you hear right. Yeah. We haven't been able to find the recording
the Clara listen to our repeat. David says it was on a vinyl.
They did find a small record player in her room, which they sold along
with the keyboard, but there were no records. I think she only bought
it to play that record. But I'm sure i'd remember if we found it.
I mean, we probably would have thrown it out the window. Oh
maybe not the best choice of words. Uh oh right, yeah, sorry,
you know what I mean. Though, We'll have to cut David some
slack because he's going to have to listen to this song a lot while he
edits the podcast. He didn't play it by heart, although he says he
could have. Several of Clara's papers have little thumbtack holes in them. David
says she had a corkboard above her desk. Among the papers she's pinned up,
there are some scanned and printed images of an old score handwritten by Ursula.
It's the melody that Clara listened to over and over again. Another of
the papers with tach marks is a printed photo of an old notebook. That's
where I got the quote in German that I read earlier. It's not signed,
but I'm sure it's hers because the notes on the score are written in
the same handwriting. Where did Clara get those two things? Is there an
entire notebook that could provide us with more information on hersel's life in her own
words? The hospital in Geneva where she spent the last years of her life
is now a state owned building that hosts cultural events. I checked the website
and there's a small permanent exhibition dedicated to her. I wonder if that's where
Clara found the score in the notebook. Did she take those photos when she
visited, or did someone send them to her. I've called an email the
center, but I haven't her back, and the only alternative I can think
of is to go there myself, because I want no I need to know
who's Ursula Bloom, What other music did she compose? Why did she disappear
after she used music? Therapy on the soldiers. And what made Clara,
the woman who lived in the room where I'm according these words, become so
obsessed with her. I don't know if I'll find an answer to all these
questions, but if you've made it this far, I hope you'll come along
for the ride.