Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France, Dimensions: 10 x 15 x 4 meters
Extant: May 6 – June 12, 1983
Image: Max Neuhaus, Sound Installation Invite
Collection: The Estate of Max Neuhaus
It's a big sterile exhibition room on the top floor of the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris. It had this window in the back wall, but it was blocked up. I found out about it and opened it up - I don't think anyone had ever seen this window open before - it brought the room back into the real world, back into reality in a beautiful way because it's high and you could see the whole city. The work was made from a very smooth sound texture.
We have a sense of sound, of what I call sound character, that we are born with perhaps, that is inherent in our language although unconscious, that we use in communication as another language on top of the verbal language - it tells the listener how to interpret the verbal meaning. We do it by shaping the contours of tone and emphasis in our speech and also by adjusting the sound of different parts of the words - the rise and fall of pitch and loudness, and the timbre of our phonemes.
In music it is called sound color. It was introduced with the idea of orchestration, the idea that there is musical meaning inherent in the nature of the sound itself, not just the melody and harmony, that you don't have the same work if you just play the melody and harmony on the piano. But in orchestral music it is only part of the meaning; we can still recognize the piece without the orchestra if we play it on the piano.
What I have been interested in since the beginning is going further, distilling this essence, this unconscious language, having it be the sole carrier of meaning in a sound work. That's what I do when I build a sound texture in a work.
This work had such a very fine texture, really fine. I've always been fascinated by a particular sound - it's an unrecordable sound in nature - the sound of a certain kind of pine tree with wind moving through it. It's a pine found in the Bahamas. The thing that's always fascinated me is that this sound is made solely from the rubbing of pine needles against one another - this is an absolutely inaudible sound - you can rub two pine needles together as hard as you want and you will never hear anything. But the fact that there are five hundred thousand of them rubbing together, the accumulation - you get this incredible rustle. It's so rich because no two pine needles are the same; each one is adding this inaudible difference. That's where this work came from.
Max Neuhaus