Artist: Henning Christiansen & Lorenzo Mammi. Label: The Henning Christiansen Archive. HC10. LP. Release Date: 9.11.2026.
The definitive vinyl edition of Henning Christiansen’s 1985 sound installation at the Rome Zoo.
In 1985, Danish composer and Fluxus artist Henning Christiansen created Symphony Natura at the Zoological Garden of Rome: an ambitious site-specific work in which the conventional boundaries between composition, environment, performer and listener were deliberately dissolved.
Working with the young composer and technician Lorenzo Mammi, Christiansen recorded the animals of the zoo before opening hours, capturing their voices as they emerged into the morning. Wolves, monkeys, birds and other inhabitants provided the primary sonic material. These recordings were subsequently transformed through tape collage, electronic processes and pre-recorded instrumental sounds, before being returned to the zoo itself.
Eight loudspeakers were distributed around the central lake, turning the grounds into an open, spatial composition. There was no fixed listening position. Instead, visitors encountered different combinations of sounds as they moved through the site, while the animals remained within the work’s original environment — at times responding to the sounds, at times simply gathering to listen.
For Christiansen, Symphony Natura represented a decisive departure from the architecture and conventions of the concert hall. His interest lay not in imitating nature through traditional musical forms, but in allowing natural sound, physical space and chance encounters to become compositional forces. The zoo became both instrument and exhibition space; the animal voice became musical material; movement became a form of listening.
The resulting work occupies a distinctive position within Christiansen’s practice and the wider history of post-war experimental music. It brings together Fluxus, musique concrète, field recording, spatial composition and an emerging ecological consciousness, while retaining the eccentricity, humour and openness that characterize Christiansen’s work.https://henningchristiansen.bandcamp.com/album/symphony-natura-2
