Oliver Beer
1
DEPT.OFRUMMAGING
IFYOULISTEN
O
liver Beer, a thirty-three-year-old
Brit who is a member of the semi-
conceptual, site-specific, confessional-
reminiscent school of contemporary Brit-
ish art, has created, at the Met Breuer,
what may be the most eccentric and
original keyboard instrument in the his-
tory of Western music. Called the Ves-
sel Orchestra, it consists of thirty-two
vessels from the Met’s vast collection of
statuary and objets. When carefully
“Nothing actually touches the objects;
the mike is suspended in each one’s empty
space,” Beer explained, pointing to the
black cords that emerge from each ves-
sel. “When you turn on the microphone,
it amplifies the ambient sound inside the
vessel.” The microphones are connected
to a mixer, which is connected to a key-
board. “When I press the D on the key-
board, it turns on the mike inside the
Iranian jar,” he said. “You can control the
decay by choosing how fast or slowly the
microphone turns on and off.” He demon-
strated the range of attack on the instru-
ment by playing a little Bach. (You can,
a reporter discovered, even play a version
of “Hey Jude” that spans millennia.)
The vessels, placed on pedestals of
different heights, are configured out of
musical order, to emphasize their range
and varied provenances. Beer walked
among them. “This boat sings a G,” he
said, pointing at a Chinese dragon-boat
vase. “This earthenware temple by Wil-
liam Wyman, from 1977, that’s a beau-
tiful F, and this very early portrait bust
by Gaston Lachaise is our A-flat.”
The Met has so many things in stor-
age (cooking pots, for instance) that
many of the objects in the orchestra had
never been displayed. The negotiating
required to turn them into musical in-
struments was nonetheless tricky. “We
worked with five departments,” Beer
said. “But it was amazing how well the
curators came around. It took only four
years!” (To persuade them, Beer had to
demonstrate that the microphones could
be placed inside the treasures with max-
imum discretion; the actual insertions
were done by art handlers.)
Beer, aware of the complexities of
creating a Western-sounding instru-
ment when many of its components
come from non-Western cultures, en-
couraged a Lebanese band to write a
piece for the orchestra using scales un-
familiar to Western ears. “The chro-
matic scale is the lingua franca,” he said.
“We’re all biologically programmed to
recognize what’s in tune and not in
tune. That Iranian jar has been singing
a D-natural for several thousand years.
That’s the humbling thing about this.
These objects are going to outlive the
Met. They’re going to outlive the En-
glish language. And they’ll still be sing-
ing the same notes they’re singing now.”
—Adam Gopnik
away the best.” He also called Alex Jones
“one of the world’s great entertainers.”
They finished lunch and walked
through the mall looking for a Star-
bucks. A thirteen-year-old boy named
Brandon stared at Saladino, slack-jawed.
“Holy shit!” Brandon said. “I watch that
guy’s Fortnite videos!”
Saladino shook Brandon’s hand. “I’m
running for Congress,” he said.
“What?” Brandon said. “Why?”
“Tell your friends who are eighteen
to vote for me,” Saladino said.
“They won’t remember to vote,” Bran-
don said. “They smoke too much weed.”
Saladino returned to the Tesla and
set the G.P.S. to Jack Demsey’s, a bar in
Manhattan, where he was being hon-
ored by the New York Young Republi-
can Club. When he got there, Vish Burra,
his campaign manager, was outside smok-
ing. “You have a speech prepared?” Burra
said. “Bullet points? Anything?”
“I’ll wing it,” Saladino said. “I know
how to talk in front of people.”
“How do you want to be introduced?”
Burra said. “Joey Salads, or Saladino?”
“It’s gotta be Saladino if they wanna
vote for me, right?”
A hundred and fifty people had gath-
ered. Burra stepped up to a microphone.
“We’ve got a one-of-a-kind candidate
coming to speak to you guys tonight,”
he said. “He’s younger than A.O.C., he’s
smarter than A.O.C., and he’s better-
looking than A.O.C. If there’s anyone
out there that’s gonna get our message
to the youth, I think he’s the one.”
—Andrew Marantz
THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019 15
miked and connected to a keyboard, the
vessels, each with its own resonance, can
be induced to play a two-and-a-half-
octave scale, flats and sharps included.
Stretched across the fifth-floor gallery
of the Breuer, the Vessel Orchestra com-
prises a hallucinatory intersection of ob-
jects—from Persian religious figurines
to contemporary ceramics and Deco
portrait busts—and offers a set of pure
tones that, pealing out from thousands
of years of vessel silence, have enticed
many composers, including Nico Muhly,
to write music for it.
Caught alongside his creation the
other day, interrupted by its strange sing-
ing tones, like the moans of inanimate
whales, Beer explained the instrument’s
origins. “Every empty space has its own
resonance, one that’s entirely based on
its geometry,” he said. “If I built a room,
that might give me an A-flat and the
harmonic series that goes with it. Every
empty space sings, if you listen.
“For this piece, I listened to hundreds
and hundreds of objects,” he continued.
“There are very few objects that sing in
the Western scale. There was a Bran-
cusi—the ‘Sleeping Muse,’ which I
would have included,” he said. “But it
sang sharp.” He added, “The hardest
part was finding a pure D.” Several notes
kept recurring. “I had twenty objects
that, when you placed your ear to them,
sang an E-flat.” (E-flat was one of Mo-
zart’s favorite keys, and is a frequent key
in pop music.) In the end, he found his
D-natural in a seven-thousand-year-old
ceramic jar from what is now Iran—the
oldest vessel in the orchestra.
