From Jagger to Jaguar
The Great Animal Orchestra at PEM
By Paul Erickson, COSMOS Science Contributor
“Natural soundscapes, or biophonies, are narratives of both place and time. The messages from nature we record are not contrived. They come to us as unvarnished truths.”
—Bernie Krause
One picture may be worth a thousand words. But musician, sound artist, and wilderness explorer, Bernie Kraus says, “A soundscape is worth a thousand pictures.” Kraus, in collaboration with United Visual Artists, has created a sonic masterpiece The Great Animal Orchestra at the Peabody Essex Museum, in Salem, Massachusetts.
What you will experience here within a dimly lit sonic theater with impeccable sound reproduction began more than a half-century ago when Kraus ventured out of a Los Angeles recording studio where he contributed synthesizer tracks to the likes of Mick Jagger and the Doors.
Into the Wilds with Heavy Eqipment
Bernie’s introduction to things potentially wilder than rock and roll happened when he and the late Paul Beaver were producing the Warner Brothers album In a Wild Sanctuary from 1968 to 1970. It would be the first music album to incorporate natural soundscapes with orchestration. That meant Bernie had to haul his recording gear into the woods.
“The moment I switched on the recorder and heard the awesome beauty of the natural world in my headphones, the trajectory of my life changed,” he says. He made a beeline into the world of nature and never looked back. Along the way, Kraus earned a PhD in Creative Arts and Bioacoustics at Ohio’s Union Institute and University.
On one of his more remote adventures, Bernie climbed Rwanda’s Virunga Mountains to record gorillas. “What made it difficult was not so much the terrain,” he says, “it was lugging heavy, battery-dependent analog tape equipment.” And not all the residents were welcoming. “Elephants and Cape buffalo could attack us at any moment,” he says. “I was terrified of wild places but wanted to get over my fear.”
Then, one night, across the world and alone in a remote South American jungle, intrepid Bernie kept remarkably cool in the tropical heat when a jaguar sauntered up to him. The big cat nuzzled and sniffed the microphones he had set up several feet from where he was sitting. Fortunately, the tape was rolling. Listen carefully for the inquisitive, sniffing jaguar in The Great Animal Orchestra.
The Great Animal Orchestra is full of many other surprises: A bearded seal sounds exactly like a flying saucer in a 1950s sci-fi movie. The mating call of a sea raven fish resembles the whistle on an ocean-going freighter. A bull elephant call suggests Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page bowing his Les Paul electric guitar. Rest assured, rock and roll is still alive and well, even in the jungle.
The High Tech Audio and Visual Installation at PEM
