Town casts a sonic spell
At a spiritualist retreat, musician Jill Tracy lets herself be the instrument
Years ago, San Francisco-based musician Jill Tracy read about the New York state hamlet of Lily Dale, becoming intrigued by the small, private community of mediums and spiritualists and hoping that one day she might be able to visit the place.
Eventually connecting with a librarian in town, Tracy was invited to Lily Dale for a residency, where she would be able to make music on the piano inside the community’s auditorium.
“I was just blown away by the graciousness and the interest that they had in this project,” Tracy says by phone. She made several trips to Lily Dale between 2017 and 2019, the results of which make up her new album and book, “The Secret Music of Lily Dale.”
The 17-track album focuses on piano music Tracy spontaneously composed while playing in Lily Dale’s 19th-century auditorium; the music was later augmented by field recordings she made during her stay. Tracy’s accompanying book documents her visit and includes her own photography from the trip. The hardback edition comes as a book and CD combo that’s designed to evoke the children’s storybooks that once came with 45 rpm records.
“I just wanted people to know about this magical place that exists. I decided that it had to be part of the product,” says Tracy. “It couldn’t just be that I post some things on Instagram about it.”
Fueled by shows like “The Twilight Zone,” Tracy has long been intrigued by curious histories and unexplained phenomena. As a child, she played the upright piano in a neighbor’s basement and came to understand how certain notes would evoke specific emotions, as well as how much of a role music played in the entertainment she enjoyed. She also noticed that music itself had a spectral quality.
“I would create these little melodies on the piano as a kid in the neighbor’s house and I didn’t know what I was playing. I would find a passage and it made me feel something, but then I wouldn’t remember what I had played,” she recalls. “It was at that point that I realized that music itself is a ghost because once the music is played, it disappears into thin air. It vanishes.”
As an adult, Tracy has used music to tap into the histories of unusual spaces and document specific moments in time. She received a grant to compose at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia and was commissioned to make music at The Presidio in San Francisco. For Tracy, this work explores, “what happens when I immerse myself into the location and tap into that energy and just record spontaneous music with no preparation so that I’m just in tune to that moment in time.” The results are what she calls a “sonic souvenir” of the location.
She’s also become known for her “sonic séance” events, where Tracy creates a piece of music with the audience that exists for one night only in venues that have ranged from old mansions to outdoors among redwoods. In 2020, Tracy played piano and recorded at home, which led to “A Medicine for Madness: The 2020 Isolation Piano Recordings,” a sort of aural diary of that very strange year.
Lily Dale, as Tracy points out in the book, is only 167 acres and has about 275 full-time residents. It’s open to the public only during its summer season of events. Tracy was able to visit during the offseason and was instructed to travel solo, so she packed her laptop and three microphones to make the recordings.
While in Lily Dale, Tracy would head to the auditorium at dusk, set up her recording equipment and play for as long as she wanted, sometimes until the early morning hours. She would also explore the town with her field recording equipment, gathering the sounds of local nature.
Tracy recalls one particular day when she saw that a storm was heading toward Lily Dale and set up her gear in the auditorium to prepare for it. “I started to hear the first drop of the rain on the roof of the auditorium,” she says. “It made that beautiful sound, but then I had to be quiet. I got a little blanket, had all the mics on, and was just lying on my back on this blanket, listening to the rain, letting it record.”
With her music, Tracy guides listeners into places and stories that they might not otherwise get to experience. Her Lily Dale residency was an opportunity to do that as a writer and photographer as well. “It gave me a chance to go beyond music,” she says.
In a way, Tracy is encouraging listeners to be curious and observant as well. “It’s so important to have that element of marvel and wonder in our lives,” she says.