Pick of the Issue this week is Adam Gopnik’s wonderful Talk story, “If You Listen,” about “what may be the most eccentric and original keyboard instrument in the history of Western music.” Gopnik beautifully describes it:
Called the Vessel Orchestra, it consists of thirty-two vessels from the Met’s vast collection of statuary and objets. When carefully 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 comprises a hallucinatory intersection of objects—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.
Here’s another superb passage:
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 William Wyman, from 1977, that’s a beautiful F, and this very early portrait bust by Gaston Lachaise is our A-flat.”
That “ ‘This boat sings a G,’ he said, pointing at a Chinese dragon-boat vase” is delightful.
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