Image: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is highlighting Oliver Beer’s 'Vessel Orchestra', the artist’s 2019 sound-based installation in which 32 hollow objects from The Met collection were selected, fitted with microphones and connected to a keyboard so they could be “played.” According to the museum’s Perspectives Magazine newsletter, the project culminated in an exhibition that the institution identifies as the first sound-based installation in The Met’s history.
The newsletter frames Beer’s work within a broader Met focus on music as a form of human expression, connection and experience. That context includes the museum’s own collection of musical instruments, which it notes spans six continents plus the Pacific Islands and dates from around 300 BCE to the present. Within that wide-ranging collection, the museum uses Beer’s installation as a contemporary intervention that draws attention to the sonic possibilities of objects not usually regarded as instruments.
Beer’s project also sits alongside The Met’s longer engagement with music-related histories and artifacts. The newsletter points readers to objects such as a 19th-century bala associated with Mandinka people, a 19th-century śankh from Kerala State in India, and a French musette baroque from around 1700, presenting them as part of a collection that ranges from ceremonial shells to stringed and wind instruments. In that setting, 'Vessel Orchestra' offers a different kind of collection encounter: not display alone, but activation through sound.
The museum describes Beer’s approach as imaginative and cheeky, emphasizing his redefinition of what an instrument can be. Rather than building a new instrument from scratch, he worked with existing museum objects whose hollow interiors could resonate once microphones and keyboard controls were introduced. The result, as presented by The Met, was an installation that translated collection objects into playable sources of tone and vibration.
The inclusion of 'Vessel Orchestra' in a music-themed newsletter also places it in conversation with other Met programming around instruments, performance and interpretation. The same issue references 'Musical Bodies', described by the museum as currently on view at The Met Fifth Avenue and the first major exhibition to explore the relationship between musical instruments and the body. It also points to digital features on topics such as hidden bagpipes, the history of the piano and music in the Harlem Renaissance, reinforcing the institution’s interest in music as an art-historical subject as well as a living practice.
For 'Vessel Orchestra', the museum supplies one concrete installation detail that has become central to its identity: in July 2019, it was installed on Floor 5 of The Met Breuer. The current newsletter presentation revisits that project as part of a wider survey of music across The Met’s collection and exhibitions, with Beer’s installation standing out for turning museum objects into an audible orchestra.
