When you get both hands busy on the keyboard — as anyone who comes to see the work will be allowed to do — the room roars and clatters to life, seeming to harbor an invisible band playing something written by Philip Glass in collaboration with the Stooges, a Japanese sho virtuoso and a kitchen full of 3-year-olds with pots and ladles.
Working on the project recently in his SoHo studio, Byrne said he had generally avoided music-related art projects because he did not want his reputation as a musician to become confused with such work.
But when he was invited several years ago to propose a piece for Fargfabriken, a gallery space in a former factory in Stockholm, Sweden, he began thinking about how to turn a building into an instrument. (One of his ideas for the Swedish project was to build a huge microwave oven inside the hall.) He had inherited the out-of-tune pump organ from a friend who was moving out of his print studio in the meatpacking district. And so Byrne used the organ to create the first version of Playing the Building in 2005.
Because he generally likes to distance his art from his music, Byrne has not composed pieces for the building-organ and does not plan to play it publicly. But he said he hoped the project would say something about the direction of popular music.
“I’m not suggesting people abandon musical instruments and start playing their cars and apartments, but I do think the reign of music as a commodity made only by professionals might be winding down,” he said. “The imminent demise of the large record companies as gatekeepers of the world’s popular music is a good thing, for the most part.”
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