Christiansen, Henning (DK)
Carlsberg Tap E
Henning Christiansen
Born 1932 in Copenhagen, Denmark
Lives on Mřn
Symphony Natura was made in 1985 in the zoo of Rome. It is a symphony of animal voices and sounds that have been combined electronically and turned into a piece of music in which the sounds of the individual animals are used as instruments. The symphony unfolds by being played from several different loudspeakers positioned across a larger area. This means that you have to move around in order to be able to hear the whole symphony - there is no position from which you can hear everything at once. Originally, Christiansen had recorded the animal sounds at dusk, at night and at dawn in the zoo, and in its first performance, also in the zoo of Rome, the symphony was played from loudspeakers placed around the lake in the middle of the zoo.
In a text published on the occasion of Ars Electronica 1988, Christiansen points out that violin strings are made from animal gut while referring to the phrase "My bowels are screaming" as an expression of hunger. This line of thought may seem strange and incoherent, but it is actually a fairly adequate description of Christiansen's ambition with Symphony Natura. In this association he insists on the relation of music to the animal body, the human body, language and bodily sensation; here, hunger. To Christiansen, that is, music is not abstract, lofty, unchanging and classic. It is rather alive and embodied, temporal, spatial and contextual.
Henning Christiansen is a classically trained clarinettist and composer. He has
composed more than 200 opuses including relatively traditional music as well as
music with sheep, hens, cocks and other animals. His work has unfolded across
many different media and practices, notably performance and installation. He has contributed to the development of new, groundbreaking ways of making art within the field of what is known as Fluxus. Fluxus is not a particular artistic style, but rather anti-art. It is a tool or a way of thinking that transgresses all frameworks and thus also the idea of art as a delimited entity apart from reality. Henning Christiansen radicalises this transgression to the point of understanding the world as a piece of music in itself - as one big coherent, dynamic, heterogeneous, infinite, chaotic flow of language, sensations, smells, sounds, images and emotions.
-NH
Lives on Mřn
Symphony Natura was made in 1985 in the zoo of Rome. It is a symphony of animal voices and sounds that have been combined electronically and turned into a piece of music in which the sounds of the individual animals are used as instruments. The symphony unfolds by being played from several different loudspeakers positioned across a larger area. This means that you have to move around in order to be able to hear the whole symphony - there is no position from which you can hear everything at once. Originally, Christiansen had recorded the animal sounds at dusk, at night and at dawn in the zoo, and in its first performance, also in the zoo of Rome, the symphony was played from loudspeakers placed around the lake in the middle of the zoo.
In a text published on the occasion of Ars Electronica 1988, Christiansen points out that violin strings are made from animal gut while referring to the phrase "My bowels are screaming" as an expression of hunger. This line of thought may seem strange and incoherent, but it is actually a fairly adequate description of Christiansen's ambition with Symphony Natura. In this association he insists on the relation of music to the animal body, the human body, language and bodily sensation; here, hunger. To Christiansen, that is, music is not abstract, lofty, unchanging and classic. It is rather alive and embodied, temporal, spatial and contextual.
Henning Christiansen is a classically trained clarinettist and composer. He has
composed more than 200 opuses including relatively traditional music as well as
music with sheep, hens, cocks and other animals. His work has unfolded across
many different media and practices, notably performance and installation. He has contributed to the development of new, groundbreaking ways of making art within the field of what is known as Fluxus. Fluxus is not a particular artistic style, but rather anti-art. It is a tool or a way of thinking that transgresses all frameworks and thus also the idea of art as a delimited entity apart from reality. Henning Christiansen radicalises this transgression to the point of understanding the world as a piece of music in itself - as one big coherent, dynamic, heterogeneous, infinite, chaotic flow of language, sensations, smells, sounds, images and emotions.
-NH