The Great Animal Orchestra with Bernie Krause at Berkeley Public Library
Contact: Michele McKenzie
Art & Music Librarian
Berkeley Public Library
510-981-6241
The Great Animal Orchestra with Bernie Krause at Berkeley Public Library
Berkeley, February 18, 2014—The Art & Music Department of the Berkeley Public Library presents a multimedia author talk with Bay Area musician and naturalist Bernie Krause at the Central Library in the 3rd floor Community Meeting Room on Saturday, March 8, 2014, at 2:00 pm.
Dr. Bernie Krause has spent the past forty years recording and preserving wild soundscapes from around the world. His hugely popular 2012 book, The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in The World’s Wild Places, exposed a new audience to the significance of the endangered sounds of our natural environment. For questions regarding this program, call 510-981-6241
Dr. Krause’s vast bioacoustic archive, Wild Sanctuary, includes recordings of more than fifteen thousand species and four thousand hours of wild landscapes, over half of which no longer exist in nature due to encroaching noise and human activity. Selections from his catalog of recordings of rare and threatened habitats are included in the Berkeley Public Library’s circulating CD collection of sound effects.
In his most recent book, The Great Animal Orchestra: finding the origins of music in the world’s wild places, Krause reflects on his lifelong pursuit to record natural music in its purest form and focuses on the multiple ways in which animals have taught us to dance and sing. While emphasizing the importance of the aural habitat to the animal kingdom, Krause also provides insight into its role as the origin of language and music.
During the 1950s and ‘60s, Krause devoted himself to music and had the honor of occupying the Pete Seeger slot in the folk group, The Weavers. A pioneer of electronic music, his seminal album In a Wild Sanctuary, recorded in 1968 and 1969 was the first to incorporate natural soundscapes as an integral part of the orchestration. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Krause and his musical partner Paul Beaver were credited with helping to promote the use of the Moog synthesizer in popular music and film compositions and has performed on recordings with Mick Jagger, Van Morrison, The Doors, George Harrison, and many other artists. Films include Apocalypse Now, Rosemary’s Baby, Castaway, Shipping News, and 130 other major features.
As one of world’s leading experts in natural sound, Krause has been a featured speaker at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco and TED Global in Edinburgh Scotland. His other books include Notes from the Wild: The Nature Recording Expeditions of Bernie Krause, Into a Wild Sanctuary: A Life in Music & Natural Sound and Wild Soundscapes: Discovering the Voice of the Natural World.
This free program is sponsored by the Friends of the Berkeley Public Library (www.berkeleylibraryfriends.org).
Wheelchair accessible. For questions, to request a sign language interpreter or other accommodations for this event, please call (510) 981-6195 (voice) or (510) 548-1240 (TTY); at least five working days will help ensure availability. Please refrain from wearing scented products to public programs. www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org
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