By Girija Madhavan
Before I left San Francisco last year to return to Mysuru, I went for a walk on a promontory in the bay of San Francisco to the jetty that protects the Small Boat harbour in the Marina District. It was a lovely day, pelicans and other water birds were on the wing against the skyscape. To my delight, as leek sea otter bobbed in the water, weaving among the trim craft moored in the boat harbour. It was sunny but crisply cold and windy too. The straggly path was weedy and the paving uneven but the views on either side of it were breathtaking. To the left, on the broad sweep of the sea, white capped waves rolled ashore. On the horizon loomed the grim and rocky former prison of Alcatraz, while to the right, the buildings of San Francisco rose in serried ranks on their escarpments.
I was going to see the “Wave Organ”, a wondrous, wave activated acoustical sculpture, a surprise for me. But when I reached there, it was enchantment rather than surprise; a realisation of the concept of listening to the Music of the Sea, communing with Nature itself.

The Wave Organ was constructed on the shore of San Francisco Bay in 1986 by Peter Richards, the artist-in-residence of the “Exploratorium,” a premier and popular science museum of the city. The sculpture is dedicated to the memory of Frank Oppenheimer, the Founding Director of Exploratorium.
Peter Richards was inspired to build the Wave Organ after hearing a recording of sounds emanating from a vent pipe atop a floating dock in Sydney, Australia. Those unique “aural resonances” made him decide to build a sculpture using the sea waves of the Bay to produce musical sounds, a maritime melody. George Gonzalez, mason and master sculptor collaborated with him in constructing the actual edifice, carving the funnels or “Listening Tubes.”

The jetty that leads to the monument was created from the remains of the Laurel Hill Cemetery which was demolished in 1939/40. This graveyard is said to have held the tombstones of a long line of the dead of San Francisco. Pieces of carved granite and marble, salvaged from the remains of the cemetery were used as decorations on the low retaining walls approaching the Wave monument where the seating units and the listening funnels are installed. The walls are decorated with Acanthus friezes [a leaf design of ancient Greek art] or Gothic crockets [a leaf or flower border] and other remnants. The carvings create an aesthetic, almost surreal touch to the pathway.
The Organ is an intricate structure of concrete funnels shaped like trumpets, strategically set up on the retaining walls of the jetty. They are connected to twenty-five PVC pipes that go down to different water levels. Each sound chamber holds a column of air. At high tide, the waves surge and crash into the pipes and then they ebb, bringing the Wave Organ into melodic life. The sound of the withdrawing waves combined with the play of water on the jetty, creates the Song of the Deep. Listeners become slowly attuned to this marine music. Some have found it eerie, others attribute its melancholy air to the fact that materials from the demolished cemetery were used in the building of the site.


In The New York Times magazine in 2002, Patricia Leigh Brown wrote a review about the Wave Organ. She described it poetically as a “Temple to Poseidon” and “a hypnotic Aeolian harp played upon by tidal forces and the monthly cycles of earth, sun and moon.”

Much goes on in our world that we are now beginning to understand. We are more aware of our own dependence on our environment and habitat as well as the harm we unwittingly do to it. So it seems both apposite and meaningful to listen to the very Voice of Nature…the magical Symphony of the Sea.
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