Intern Edition Summer 2008

Last month, Carina Giamerese wrote a note about Playing the Building, an installation by David Byrne in New York City’s Battery Maritime Building. Recently I was lucky enough to visit Byrne’s installation, with Carina and some other friends and fellow interns, to play the building myself.

There were a fair number of people around, but the building wasn’t packed. Those wandering through the concrete cathedral mostly looked detachedly amused, walking slowly, heads back staring at the rafters or down, lazily searching for noisy radiators and pipes. There was a general sense of wonder visible on the faces of all present, from small children there with families to middle-aged men who could only be befuddled musicians.

I wandered a bit before getting in line, taking in all the sights and sounds of the place. Vast concrete floors stretched through every hall, with large horizontal windows looking out toward the Staten Island Ferry terminal. A few floors up from the entrance, I found the installment’s center: a room that looks like an entire abandoned warehouse, blue wires flying out the back of a lone organ to connect to steel support beams fifty feet overhead. After a few minute’s wait, I finally got a chance to lay my hands on the old pipe organ’s keys. I poked around and pushed some buttons, but my orchestra was less than sonorously extraordinary, producing some banging, clanging, and lots of unidentifiable dissonant rumbles.

But, according to Byrne, the installation was created with an aim toward democratizing the playing of an instrument: the sounds that happen when you press a key don’t actually correspond to the notes of a piano or any other instrument, so it’s just as strange and difficult to play for a gifted musician as for an amateur. And if you look at it that way, my discordant symphony on the architectural organ was a total success, if only for the nature of its happening, and the fun of being part of the process.

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