Old Chatham, NY, 1997 Behran's Farm Installation

Carousels is an installation of wind powered musical sculptures on a 500 acre farm in the Taconic Hills of of upstate New York. Six sculptures, small music boxes, are scattered across the farm just within earshot of each other. Each sculpture is in the form of an old Carousel windmill, a device used on farms before the advent of electricity to provide power for grinding and pumping water. These sculptures turn with the wind, striking windchimes that hang from the top frame, and produce simple repeating musical patterns. Any two adjacent sculptures in the installation work together to create a chord when the notes of each are heard together. The chord arrangement of the piece is experienced by the listener's movement through the space of the installation, the sound zones of each sculpture. As the listener moves from one sound zone to the next he or she experiences the chord changes as subtle changes in the background pattern of chimes as the patterns go in and out of sync with each other.

The sculptures are designed for public spaces, city parks, bike paths, wooded trail areas, rivers or streams. They are meant to be a combination of environmental art, deriving their tempo and power from nature; and a piece of environmental music, a musical experience that the listener enters and explores experiencing the piece by their own movement through space. This piece has appeared as well in the 1997 Convergence Festival in Providence Rhode Island through a grant from the Providence Parks department.

Score of Installation /Plans / Performance History

Tiverton 4 Corners Installation

RPI Thesis on Carousels