The Secret Sound Of The Vessel Orchestra

Any hollow container has a note, a resonant frequency, that you can hear if you put your ear to it and listen closely. For example, when you put a seashell to your ear, you don’t actually hear the ocean — you hear the resonant frequency of that shell. Oliver Beer, a British artist and composer who works in sculpture, video art, and music, put his ear to hundreds of objects from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection of ceramic jars, clay pots, bronze busts, Qing dynasty vases, and contemporary art pottery. From them, he chose 32 that each “sing” a specific note in the Western scale. 

The resulting "Vessel Orchestra" is a sound installation, a one-of-a-kind art exhibition, and a science project of sorts. Beer placed a hypersensitive microphone inside each object, which is amplified and fed into a keyboard. Press the low D key and you hear the sound of a 7000-year old jar from Central Iran whose resonant frequency is a now-audible D. Press a high E-flat and you’ll hear that note coming from inside a 1990 electroplated metal example of art pottery by June Schwarcz.(A light comes on next to each object so you know what’s being heard at any time.) 

The "Vessel Orchestra" juxtaposes objects that have almost nothing to do with each other and which would otherwise never be exhibited together. But in this context, they reveal a kind of hidden life, and come together to play a repeating composition by Oliver Beer on the top floor of the Met Breuer, the Met Museum’s annex on the site of the old Whitney Museum. The vessels will also be part of a series of larger live music performances by guest musicians each Friday night. 

Oliver Beer’s Vessel Orchestra runs through August 11, 2019 at Met Breuer.