Can sound heal? Inside Overtones, the Israel Museum exhibition turning sound into an art form

And as we muddle our way through the morass of auditory overflow – consciously or subconsciously taking parts on board in betwixt attempting to weed out the predominantly irrelevant stuff – whether we like it or not, we take on some emotional fatigue. That can lead to shrinking attention spans and a diminishing ability to discern the proverbial wheat from the chaff.

The explorative scene is set with the introductory wall text, which opens with an insightful quote from John Cage, the innovative 20th-century composer, artist, and music theorist: “Not one sound fears the silence that extinguishes it. And no silence exists that is not pregnant with sound.”

That yin-yang reciprocity dynamic was palpable as I took a walk through the recently refashioned Billy Rose Art Garden, speckled with its beguiling variegated array of sculptures and other aesthetic items. It wasn’t just a matter of deciding to take a stroll around the pebbled expanse with its motley crafted figures and forms. This was a premeditated, crafted tour of a sector of the museum’s outdoor domain, indeed a guided tour, courtesy of currently US-based Jerusalemite interdisciplinary artist Meital Covo.

And it wasn’t just any old information-laden lap around an eminently attractive location created 60 years ago by Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi. “This is an audio walk,” Covo enlightens me before we step out of the air-conditioned museum, into the sun-drenched late morning. “This is a work that you go out, to perform it. More than anything I have created until now, it very much depends on the individual who is experiencing it at the moment,” she posits.

“That’s why it is important to me that as many people as possible, of different ages, with different degrees of patience, coming from varying contexts, come and experience this. For me, the work does not exist by its own right. It needs to encounter a person.”

That is surely true, but isn’t that the case with every work of art? Once the artist puts something out in the public domain, he or she subjects the fruit of their labors to third-party scrutiny and response thereof. The difference here, Covo explains, lies also in the intent behind the creative process.

“A lot of artists have no interest in that, and that’s fine too. They want to engage in their art, and they don’t care what happens afterward. I can’t operate like that.”

The 40 or so minutes I spent with Covo’s velvety-voiced narration, as I took the audio walk around the garden, was a delightful, calming, and immersive timeout.

For starters, I suddenly paid close attention to the creations that dot the sequestered al fresco spot, which for the majority of museum patrons is a little off their beaten track. Most of us head straight for some exhibition or other set inside the labyrinthine building without giving the outdoor offerings too much thought. After taking the audio walk, I can appreciate how much I have been missing all these years by circumnavigating the Billy Rose Art Garden.

Then there is the crux of Covo’s endeavor, her Hebrew commentary built around snippets of her Archive of the Soul. The latter references a project she began in 2024, on the first anniversary of the murderous Hamas attack in the South, when she turned to members of the public and offered them an opportunity to offload some of their pent-up angst accrued since that fateful day, by vocally recording their thoughts and feelings.

Early in the audio proceedings, we hear a young child from Shlomi who was about to return home, up North, with his family, after spending 18 months in a Jerusalem hotel as an evacuee. The innocent goodwill that exudes from the youngster’s dulcet tones, as he expresses an insouciant wish for better things to come, points us in a suitably introspective and amenable direction.

“You can take a breath now,” Covo advises us via our headphones before we move away from Anish Kapoor’s iconic Turning the World Upside Down reflective stainless steel sculpture, where we capture our own distorted fun image and some of the landscape around us. The audio walk – the original Hebrew name translates directly, and delectably, as Sonorous Odyssey – now begins in earnest as we get into the thick of the artistic and soulful mix. Hearing water trickling from the Water Source mound is a wonderful balm to an already overheated body and spirit.

The narration continues betwixt palpable inhaling and exhaling, which helps keep us on the right psychological track. Breathing is key to the participatory exercise, and as we not only get a closer look at Noguchi’s deftly arranged maze of artistic creation, we begin to take in – with Covo’s guidance – the panoramic view of Jerusalem that is unique to the eerie hilltop where our foremost cultural institution sits.

Like the rest of us, Covo is all too aware of our country’s blood-soaked past and what the future may hold for us. She says her quotidian multitasking conversely helps to keep her grounded. “I live in the world of today. I am a mother, and also an artist and a teacher, and I try to function in those roles in a manner that benefits myself and people who meet me.”

That is a highly commendable and society-friendly line to take, although it comes at a price. “I try to do all those things while staying in the moment. We are always thinking back and forward. I’m not good at that, and I don’t like it.”

Cue the audio walk. “That’s why I was drawn to the garden, because it invites us to roam and lose ourselves in it. And that’s why I was drawn to work with the voice, because it is a medium that demands total dedication, to be in the moment.”

“And breathing,” I interject. The basic physiological fact of the matter is you can’t talk if you don’t breathe.

The audio walk is not – pardon the pun – merely a blissful palliative bed of roses. There are some visceral slots in there that come straight out of Covo’s peripatetic Archive of the Soul recording venture. The artist set up shop at myriad spots up and down the country, including at Mount Herzl. There, an initially hesitant woman eventually entered the tent-like apparatus that Covo had set up to allow participants some privacy as they discharged their innermost anguish.

“Suddenly, there was a deafening shriek,” Covo recalls. “The guard from the cemetery ran over to see what was going on. But the woman just came out, gave me the recording and told me to do whatever I want with it. She rejected my offer to send her the result.” Duly relieved, the woman just wanted to go on her way. That astringent outburst is audibly and emotively present in the audio walk guide.

There are all sorts of philosophical, artistic, and emotional insight to be had as you follow Covo’s directions around the expanse, drawing you physically and cerebrally into the creative progression, and also enhancing your bond with the one-of-a-kind locale. I can honestly say that, after hundreds of visits to the Israel Museum over the years, the next time I make my way up to the museum buildings will be a different, more personal experience. I may even breathe a little more easily.

Meanwhile, inside the museum, curator Amar has laid out an expansive and diverse range of items for our visual and aural appreciation and enjoyment. “The reference point for all the artists in the exhibition is the point of view of listening, breathing, the human voice and the non-human voice. There are a variety of works that engage in different aspects of sound, noise, and so on,” Amar explains.

The eclectic selection of offerings is also a result of the source disciplines. “Not all the artists work in the plastic sphere,” Amar continues. “Some are musicians.”

The latter is pretty clear from some of the exhibits. That includes Peter Coffin’s Free Jazz Mobile, which comprises a bunch of instruments tantalizingly suspended from the ceiling, just waiting for someone to pluck, bash, blow into or pass a bow across them.

The “incomplete” ethos also pops up strikingly in Samson Young’s Muted Situation 22: Muted Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, created in 2018. As the numeral suggests, Young has made a whole series of videos of ensembles playing classical works without emitting a sound from their instruments, which have been mechanically muted.

You are left with the corporeal dynamics of the players and conductor, their breathing and any other peripheral sound that would normally be smothered by the music. That naturally puts one in mind of Cage’s seminal avant-garde composition 4’33”, which addresses silence not as a sonic vacuum but as a domain that is full of sonic textures that are usually ignored.

Sixties vibes filter through in the form of a Moog synthesizer that somehow found its way over here, in 1969, and ended up in the Electronic Music Laboratory opened by Josef Tal, a pioneer in the electronic music field. We get a good look at the workings of the instrument, with cables distended every which way out of something that looks like a back-to-the-future telephone operator switchboard.

Before Robert Moog came up with his baby, electronic music had been the sole domain of classical music innovators. The new synthesizer was swiftly embraced by the psychedelic and other rock and pop crowd, such as The Doors and The Grateful Dead, particularly after the introduction of the portable mini-Moog.

That revolutionary passage of Western culture is also represented in the exhibition by a cluster of posters advertising rock concerts of the day, with acts the likes of Jefferson Airplane, Cream, and Jimi Hendrix.

We head back to this part of the world with Dor Zlekha Levy’s Manana Manana projection and sound installation, inspired by the heady mix of church organ music and the acoustics of a mosque he encountered in Cordoba. The city was established as the regional capital by the Muslim rulers of the Al-Andalus part of southern Spain in the eighth century. Five centuries later, King Ferdinand III wrested control of the area back to the Christians and had the Cordoba mosque reconsecrated as a Catholic church. Hence, Levy’s fusion of sonic elements of both religions becomes a natural musical synergy.

The 71-year-old American artist has been bridging various musical domains for some years now. He was a pioneer of record scratching back in the day, relating to discs as physical-sculptural entities in addition to their musical content. He has also produced a hefty body of work in the areas of performance, collage, sculpture, video, and photography.

Reprising the theme championed by Young and Cage, Marclay’s impossibly long – all seven meters of it – snaking accordion winds its way from end to end as a clearly unplayable instrument. The intentionally impractical manifestation harks back to the idea of paying attention to silence and, thus, prompting us to use our own powers of imagination to complete the sonic picture.