Chaotic Menagerie
Created by Kyle Bartlett
Inside the Greenhouse, composer Kyle Bartlett’s compelling sound installation, titled Chaotic Menagerie, is a musical collage combining melodies from the French Revolutionary era, sounds from nature, and her own contemporary, electro-acoustic compositions. Based on the five sections of the exhibition, her music includes everything from the trumpeting of elephants and the rustling of leaves to the imagined secret thoughts of giraffes and the love songs of robotic birds. Bartlett arranged many of these individual elements into 17 “micro-compositions”. Inside the Greenhouse, they play in varying combinations from four different speakers. Sounds overlap as visitors walk through the space, creating a unique auditory experience for each listener.
Here are two micro-compositions from the sound installation:
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Bartlett created a short work titled Single Path that represents what its like to walk through the Greenhouse as micro-compositions shift and overlap:
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To hear more of Bartlett’s compositions for Chaotic Menagerie, click here.
Kyle Bartlett is a resident composer for the new-music ensemble “counter)induction” and new works administrator for the Opera Company of Philadelphia.
Selected audio recordings provided by the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Musical selections performed by the members of counter)induction, counterinduction.com.