Low Culture Essay: Robert Barry on the The Sea Organ at Zadar

For this month’s subscriber essay, Robert Barry travels to the Croatian coast, where the Adriatic Sea plays the pipes of an installation that gives lie to the idea that sound art is “difficult”

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If you walk north up the Nova Riva on Zadar’s Adriatic waterside, you will start to hear a hum. It is not attributable to any passing traffic or any of the idling cruise ships up at the headland. The tone is deeper than that, warmer and rounder, less fuzzy. Come a little further along, following the line of trees which separate the promenade off from the road, past a copse of broad white umbrellas marking the territory of a seaside cafe spilling out onto a wide terrace, and you’ll notice a low whistle, something like the pitch of an alto flute. Reaching the crest of the peninsula, the mounting flux of moans and sighs resolves into a pair of unsteady chords beating against each other, like the crashing waves that power them beneath the paving slabs.

The Zadar Sea Organ (or Morske orgulje) provides a constant bed of mellow, ululating music. The sound is ambient, but not quite new age. The harmonies are too indefinite for that, too vacillating and unsettled. Yet it is oddly calming. It is constantly changing, but it remains broadly the same, subject to the movement of tides and any outside forces which might agitate the lapping waves. You watch the breaks approaching and then hear the surge in intensity from the pipes embedded in the stone steps, leading gently down to the water. The wake of a passing ship or a strong gust of wind will provoke a crescendo. 

One morning, as we sat in the sun, listening, four small jet planes, their fuselages painted in red and white, flew by in formation, adding a white noise rush to the lulling sound of the Organ, like the amped up swoosh of an EDM track. Otherwise, the music of the Organ is without climax or resolution. Different notes poke through at different times, teasing out different implications of the chords, changing the harmonic emphasis. The sound rises and relaxes, ebbs and flows. 

Opened to the public in 2005, the Sea Organ was built by Croatian architect Nikola Bašić as part of the reconstruction of the quayside in Zadar’s historic centre. Some seventy metres long, with 35 organ pipes set into the concrete promenade, it is a permanent installation in the very heart of the city, an autonomous musical instrument ‘played’ by the push and pull of the water lapping against the land.