MUSIC NOTES: Playing the building
New York’s Battery Maritime Building (personally, I think the name I came up with, Le Cathedral Concrète, has much more pizzazz) has been virtually abandoned for the past fifty years.
Now, for three days a week, the South Street structure resonates with whistles, whirs, creaks, and clatters that harmonize into an unlikely choir of voices and rise to the heavens of the building’s vaulted ceiling. An old pump organ, connected to a canopy of blue wires that extend out the back, serves as an altar of sorts - it is here that the miracles happen. Strike one key and a mallet will hit a steel column with a loud clank. Strike another and an electric motor will vibrate a steel support beam, producing a menacing rumble. Venture further up the keyboard and pipes of varying sizes will toot in approximate octave intervals. Sounding a chord on this modified organ enables the industrial space to tell its structural story in every reverberating corner.
The process is more commonly known as “Playing the Building,” the name of this installation piece conceived by David Byrne. He constructed a structural instrument three years ago in Stockholm in an old that’s similar to the Battery Maritime Building. The installation was so compelling in Sweden that Creative Time, a public arts organization in New York, commissioned Byrne to recreate the sonic experience in the city that never sleeps…or shuts up.
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[...] month, Carina Giamerese wrote a note about Playing the Building, an installation by David Byrne in New York City’s Battery Maritime [...]