The 'Great Animal Orchestra' brings the wild rumpus of nature to art museums
Your imagination does the work at The Great Animal Orchestra – you just sit in a dark room and listen.
Currently at the Peabody Essex museum in Salem, Mass., through May 22, the exhibition immerses visitors into soundscapes from remote parts of the planet: seven of them, from the tropics to the tundra. No wildlife footage accompanies this symphony of wild animals. It's audio first, in a visually overstimulating world.
"The basic message is that the soundscapes of the natural world are the voices that we need to hear in order to moderate our behavior," says the show's creator, Bernie Krause. He's spent decades traversing the globe and collecting thousands of hours of animal habitat recordings as a soundscape ecologist.
His 2012 book, The Great Animal Orchestra, helped germinate this traveling museum show. Before this iteration of his career, Krause was a pioneering musician in multiple genres. Born in Detroit in 1938, he started playing the violin at age five. By the time he was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, he had already performed professionally with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.
"I worked my way through school playing guitar as a backup musician at Motown," Krause tells NPR. "After I graduated, I came out to Boston and The Weavers were performing and giving concerts around the Boston area."
The seminal folk group was looking for a replacement for the seat of Pete Seeger; Krause auditioned and got the job. He sang and played banjo and guitar with The Weavers until the group disbanded in 1964. Then, enchanted by new frontiers of musical possibility, he headed west.
At Mills College in Oakland, Calif., Krause studied with the acclaimed avant-garde composers Pauline Oliveros and Karlheinz Stockhausen and became a force in the burgeoning field of electronic music. With musician Paul Beaver, he helped introduce Moog synthesizers to popular music and film.
"We did a lot of work with major groups — with The Doors, the Byrds, The Monkees. We did work with George Harrison, Frank Zappa," Krause recalls. Krause's film work includes classics such as Rosemary's Baby and Apocalypse Now. He programmed much of the latter's score and worked on its memorable "Ride of the Valkyries" scene. "Shirley Walker actually played the keyboard. I'm not a great keyboardist," he says.
Before Paul Beaver died in 1975 of a brain hemorrhages while giving a concert in Los Angeles, he worked with Krause on a pioneering album called In A Wild Sanctuary, an early example of ambient music.
"Paul refused to go outside to record, which left that task to me," Krause says. "And I was terrified of animals. I grew up in a home in the Midwest that didn't allow dogs or cats or a goldfish. That was dangerous to my mom. Germs and all of that. I wanted to get over that fear."
So one autumn afternoon, Krause toted a still-new portable analog recorders to a heavily wooded public park north of San Francisco. His life was forever altered when he slipped on his headphones, took a breath and focused on the sounds of nature. "It wasn't noise," he explains. "It was a collection of sounds that felt so good that I just relaxed immediately."
Krause felt affirmed, soothed, awakened. In the late 1970s, he earned a Ph.D. in marine bioacoustics at the experimental Union Institute and University in Cincinnati, Ohio and started recording what he calls biophonies – the collective sounds of living organisms in their biomes - in such far flung locales ranging from the boreal forests of Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada to the savannas and shrublands of Zimbabwe's Gonarezhou National Park.
"This is really cool because you're gonna hear the baboons barking at a granite wall that creates an echo," whispers Jane Winchell, in the shadowed room of The Great Animal Orchestra at the Peabody Essex. Winchell, who directs the museum's Art & Nature Center, brought the show here after seeing it in 2017 at the Fondation Cartier in Paris where, she says, it transfixed audiences.
"It's just this miraculous composition. It really is like a piece of music with different movements," she enthuses.
Bernie Krause calls these soundscapes "yoga for the ears." Listening to animals he says, connects us to something ancient and vital about being human.
"These sounds are part of our DNA," he explains. "What we are hearing resonates with that atavistic moment in our lives when our ancestors heard these sounds and lived by them. In that way, it reconnects us to the natural, to the living world around us. But let me tell you, the further we draw away from that source of our lives, the more pathological we become as a culture. You don't believe that? Watch the news."
Or listen to it, he says. Never before have we been more connected to constant sound – in our cars, our earbuds, our phones. "And disconnected at the same time," Krause says. "Basically, we have to learn to be quiet."
So, if you cannot go to Salem, Mass., and experience The Great Animal Orchestra yourself, try something right now. Take off your headset. Turn off your radio or streaming device. Go outside, and listen.
Even if you're in the middle of a city, you can hear it. It may be far away, but the Great Animal Orchestra is there.
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Transcript
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And I'm Steve Inskeep with sounds of "The Great Animal Orchestra."
(SOUNDBITE OF BERNIE KRAUSE'S "THE GREAT ANIMAL ORCHESTRA")
INSKEEP: Hm, could keep that going for a while. Those are soundscapes of nature, from the flute sounds of birds to the harmonies of arctic wolves. "The Great Animal Orchestra" is an audio art exhibit that has traveled the world and is now at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., where NPR's Neda Ulaby paid a visit.
NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: Your imagination does the work at "The Great Animal Orchestra." You sit in a dark room surrounded by strangers and listen.
(SOUNDBITE OF BERNIE KRAUSE'S "THE GREAT ANIMAL ORCHESTRA")
ULABY: You don't watch movies of animals; you tune into the harmony of soundscapes, from the tundra to the tropics. In this Amazonian habitat, you only see artistic renderings of sound meters projected on the walls and the names of the critters you're hearing - tree frogs, blue-headed parrots, crested owls and jaguars.
(SOUNDBITE OF BERNIE KRAUSE'S "THE GREAT ANIMAL ORCHESTRA")
ULABY: Creator Bernie Krause says all human music was first inspired by wild choruses like these. He's got a pretty wild musical background himself. It started soon after he graduated from college in 1960 and joined the seminal folk music group The Weavers.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GUANTANAMERA")
THE WEAVERS: (Singing) Yo soy un hombre sincero.
ULABY: Krause took over Pete Seeger's spot in 1963. But then he moved to the West Coast and became enamored with electronic music. He partnered up with a keyboardist named Paul Beaver, and the two of them brought the Moog synthesizer into recordings by The Doors, The Byrds, George Harrison and The Monkees.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "STAR COLLECTOR")
THE MONKEES: (Vocalizing).
ULABY: What you're hearing is early electronica, which Beaver and Krause also added to some of the defining movie soundtracks of the era...
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "APOCALYPSE NOW")
ROBERT DUVALL: (As Bill Kilgore) Romeo Foxtrot, shall we dance?
ULABY: ...Like "Apocalypse Now." Krause did much of the sound in one of the movie's most memorable sequences.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "APOCALYPSE NOW")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character, laughter).
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
ULABY: But while he was working in Hollywood, Bernie Krause was also experimenting with recording sound outdoors. He made an album called "In A Wild Sanctuary," now considered a pioneering piece of ambient music. When Krause directed his microphone on forests, fields and birds, he felt affirmed, woken up, spiritually soothed. Nothing in his 1950's boyhood, he says, prepared him to take in the natural world.
BERNIE KRAUSE: I was terrified of animals. I grew up in a home in the Midwest that didn't allow dogs or cats or - a goldfish was dangerous.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
ULABY: So when he started to record whale music in the 1970s, it changed Krause profoundly. He started traveling the globe, gathering thousands of hours of what he calls biophonies (ph) at, for example, a wild game reserve in Zimbabwe.
JANE WINCHELL: This is really cool because you're going to hear the baboons barking at a granite wall that creates an echo.
(SOUNDBITE OF BERNIE KRAUSE'S "THE GREAT ANIMAL ORCHESTRA")
ULABY: Jane Winchell is a curator here at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. Her passion is exploring how museums can respond to the environmental crisis. She first saw "The Great Animal Orchestra" in Paris at a contemporary art museum where audiences sat transfixed for hours. Sometimes, she says, they'd even cry.
WINCHELL: That feeling - it's just this miraculous composition. It really is like a piece of music with different movements.
KRAUSE: These sounds are part of our DNA.
ULABY: Bernie Krause calls these natural soundscapes yoga for the ears. Listening to animals, he says, connects us to what's ancient and vital about being human.
KRAUSE: What we're hearing resonates with that atavistic moment in our lives when our ancestors heard these sounds. But let me tell you; the further we draw away from that source of our lives, the more pathological we become as a culture. You don't believe that? Watch the news.
ULABY: Or listen to it, he says, like now. Never have we been more connected to sound - in our cars, our earbuds, our phones.
KRAUSE: And disconnected at the same time. Basically, we just have to learn to be quiet.
ULABY: So if you cannot go to Salem, Mass., and experience "The Great Animal Orchestra" yourself, let's do something right now. Take off your headset. Turn off your radio or streaming device. Go outside. I'm doing it right now.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOOR OPENING)
ULABY: Listen.
(SOUNDBITE OF BIRDS CHIRPING)
ULABY: Even in spite of the cars, I can hear it - the great animal orchestra.
Neda Ulaby NPR, News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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