A Musical Village Takes Root in New Orleans
Tags: Music, New Orleans, Architecture, Arts

A Musical Village Takes Root in New Orleans

After four years of semi-permanent and roving installations, the arts organization New Orleans Airlift is ready to build a permanent town of musical architecture.

This article was originally published in 2016. New Orleans Airlift is back on Kickstarter with a new project to take a new Music Box Village installation on a cross-country tour of the United States. See it here.

Five years ago, Jay Pennington faced the weathered remains of a collapsed eighteenth-century Creole cottage. Sitting on a plot of land in the Bywater section of New Orleans’ Ninth Ward and battered by the winds of Katrina, the cottage was a fragile remnant of the city’s history he wanted fiercely to preserve. From that urgency an extraordinary idea emerged.

“We asked [New York-based street and installation artist] Swoon to come down and look at the property,” says Delaney Martin, with whom Pennington co-founded the arts organization New Orleans Airlift in 2008. “Jay knew he wanted to do something with performance and installation. In talking about music and performance and houses, and performers playing in the house, we had the eureka moment: they’re not playing in the house, they’re playing the house.”

Photo: Melissa Stryker

Along with Pennington, Martin, and mechanical sculptor Taylor Lee Shepherd, Swoon (a.k.a. Callie Curry) conceived the idea for Dithyrambalina, a “sonic playground, performance venue, and laboratory for musical architecture” made of salvaged materials from the cottage. Step on a floorboard here, and tuned creaks and groans might reverberate through an amplifier. Pull a rope there, and a whirring fan might force air through corrugated tubes, creating otherworldly tones.

This wouldn’t just be a novel art installation paying tribute to New Orleans’ distinctive architecture and musical heritage. To the creators, it was more: a symbol of resurrection and rebirth, and of the value of pleasure and play in a community still struggling to rebuild.

The creators decided to prototype the musical house concept before building the more imposing Dithyrambalina. The first Music Box was their proof of concept: a “shantytown sound laboratory” comprised of several musical houses. New Orleans Airlift invited twenty-five visual and kinetic sound artists, architects, and inventors to build the sonic structures. “Sometimes five people were working on a single house, working to make a musical village that harmonized, that felt of one piece,” Martin says. “That became a guiding principle — everybody knows they’re part of a bigger vision.”

The first Music Box installation opened to the public in 2011. By day, people from the community were invited to pass through and experiment, creating cacophonous and harmonious sounds. A visitor might create a slide guitar-like wail out of a set of sliding doors, or run a hand along clapboard siding for a percussion-like rat-a-tat. One could pick up a telephone and send their voice sailing over loudspeakers, or call another phone in another house to set off an orchestral chorus of rings. A stethoscope broadcast the heartbeat of passers-by through a spinning speaker. A singing wall sampled the voices of those who walked past, then filled the empty space with their echoes.