What is the Avant-Garde Park Portrait?
Sound Tunnel: Avant-Garde Park Portrait Thanks to the composer John Morton, six high-end speakers, a computer and a generous helping of musical avant-garde, a tunnel in Central Park has found a voice. Sources: http://www.stsnews.
The elegantly arched pedestrian tunnel just north of the Central Park Zoo is never a tranquil place. Every half-hour it is filled with “Georgie Porgie” and “Old King Cole” and other nursery-school war horses ringing out from the George Delacorte clock chimes nearby. Convoys of summer campers passing through on their way to the Tisch Children’s Zoo shriek and shout and send the word “echo” echoing off the 140-year-old sandstone brickwork. “I see adults who get in there and let loose,” said John Morton, a composer who has been spending a lot of time around the tunnel lately. “Tunnels are weird kinds of public places that way. You lose your inhibitions inside them. Here’s this place in the middle of Manhattan where you feel like you can scream.” For the last month — thanks to Mr. Morton, six high-end speakers, a computer and a generous helping of musical avant-garde smuggled into the city’s populist playground — the tunnel itself has found a voice: a strange, urgent one that screams, whis
