Playing with David Byrne

August 1, 2008 by william alberque  Send to a Friend

Music is about play – playing, enjoying yourself, losing yourself in a silly game that happens to make noise. David Byrne has embodied this concept aptly for decades, making music which evokes a joyful “pop” sensibility. Amazingly, he has captured that feeling of play through his latest project, “Playing the Building” – a wonderful art installation in the Battery Marine Building at the very tip of Manhattan Island.

The exhibit is simple: a large room in an otherwise abandoned building; an old-fashioned pipe organ in the center of that room; a series of colored tubes tracing out the back of the organ to the pillars and walls; a bench; and two words painted on the floor in front of the bench reading, “please play.” Anyone signing the waiver downstairs is allowed up into the room to wait on line for their turn to “play the building.”

Intriguingly, the notes of the organ, rather than corresponding to traditional scales, actually play different parts of the building itself. Each key corresponds to a different action – this one thumps that pillar, these here make the building emit a low, growling roar – combining the feelings of committing some sort of transgression and making art at the very same moment, without in any way taking any of it seriously.

The line itself moves relatively swiftly – only a few of the other patrons I observed behaved self-indulgently by taking advantage of the lack of time limits for each player. The room is quite breathtaking, with the palpable industrial decay and the foghorn-like moans, metallic pings and random clanging combining to invoke the atmospherics of a daytime concert by seminal West German noise-band Einstürzende Neubauten – sans the atonal screaming that makes those shows so memorable.

The sound is more intriguing while roaming through the room and the building than it is on the keyboard. I couldn’t help but shake the feeling that I was inadequate to the task of making anything interesting out of my turn. Still, the delirious joy of holding the bottom notes and hearing the cavernous structure creak and moan took me quite off guard, and while I was unsure half the time whether any of the noises were directly corresponding to my own moves (this may be why I don’t play any instruments), I was intoxicated by the feeling of play. A wonderful experience.

In “researching” this piece, I came across Byrne’s blog, charmingly called a “journal,” (as though an anachronistic attitude toward language can improve ugly, modern “blog” discourse). Reading this, I came across a striking passage contrasting expectations of modern classical music as atonal rubbish on the one hand, and film music as occasionally brilliant atmospherics with a direct purpose, in language that strikingly sums up the “Playing the Building” experience:

We’ve become habituated to the use of atonal chords, weird, high suspended notes, and creepy plunks and plinks. In every apocalyptic sci-fi, horror and suspense movie for instance, this music warns us that something incredibly bad is about to happen — so, say your prayers now, ‘cause da creepy music has started.

In other words, Byrne has created a popular mechanism for randomly generating the music he disdains – atonal chords, creepy plunks and pinks – effortlessly and without the pretentious twaddle that usually saddles such creations in muck. He is, in his own way, obviating the need for these artists through a People’s medium. But I do him a disservice by summarizing. Please, read on, and judge for yourself:

There are lots of books exploring what the fuck happened with 20th century classical music, when many composers willfully sought to alienate the general public and create purposefully difficult, inaccessible music. Why would they do anything that perverse? Why would they not only make music that was hard to listen to, but also demand, as in the case of Zimmerman, that the piece be performed on twelve separate stages simultaneously, with the addition of giant projection screens and other multimedia aspects? Were these composers competing to see whose works could be heard and performed the least? Why would anyone do that?

Having closely observed the behavior of New York’s downtown, avant-garde music scene for a few decades, I can say that this impulse is not limited to academic classical composers. There are many musicians and composers of experimental works who seemingly compete for the title of most obscure and most difficult for the listener, and even record collectors like to play along. In this world, any trace of popularity, however slight, is distasteful and to be avoided at all costs. Should a work become unexpectedly accessible, the artist must then follow the piece with something completely perverse and disgusting, encouraging members of the new, undesired audience to walk away shaking their heads, leaving behind the core of pure and hardy aficionados. This is elitism of a different sort. If one can’t be fêted by the handful of patrons at the Met, then one can be just as elite by cultivating an audience equally rarified in the completely opposite direction. Extreme ugliness and unpleasantness becomes the mirror image of extreme luxury and beauty.

[…]

As classical music followed this bizarre, perverted road for some half of the 20th century, the audiences left in droves. I hope the composers were pleased, because it seems they got what they wanted in that respect. Their compositional ideas live, and even thrive in movies; but as a form of music and music-theater, they simply died — rumbling and roaring all the way.

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