The Great Animal Orchestra: Bernie Krause and United Visual Artists
Exhibition
The Great Animal Orchestra
The Peabody Essex Museum
161 Essex Street
Salem, US 01970
November 20, 2021 - May 22, 2022
This November, the Peabody Essex Museum and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain are presenting the North American premiere of The Great Animal Orchestra, an immersive audio-visual experience celebrating our planet’s rich biodiversity.
Over the course of a nearly fifty year career, Bernie Krause collected more than 5,000 hours of recordings of natural environments, including more than 15,000 terrestrial and marine species from around the world.
Trained as a musician, Krause found animal vocalizations in the natural world to be akin to musical harmony and orchestral organization. Krause’s soundscapes reveal that each species has its own acoustic niche and that human activities are silencing these great animal orchestras. United Visual Artists (UVA) worked with Krause to visualize these recordings, immersing the audience in the heart of these wild soundscapes.
The Great Animal Orchestra, a collaboration between Bernie Krause and United Visual Artists, was commissioned in 2016 by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain and is part of its permanent collection. The exhibition is organized by the Peabody Essex Museum and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain.
The exhibition is presented as part of PEM’s Climate + Environment Initiative.
