THE CRYPTOPHONIC TOUR
2-7 p.m. Saturday. Tickets are $10 in advance and $15 at the gate for adults; children 3-12 are $5 and children under 3 are free. Advance tickets are available online only at www.ticketalternative.com. Oakland Cemetery, 248 Oakland Ave. S.E., Atlanta.
The magnolia’s big leaves clattered — light applause, perhaps, for the music at its roots.
There, in ivy growing around the old tree at Oakland Cemetery, rested two miniature speakers. They sat near the grave of Mary Whitney, who'd played music a century earlier.
Madeline Adams adjusted one, moved the other. From each emanated voices, high and low. Adams stepped across a brick walkway with a third speaker. She placed it behind an old marble marker. From it came bass notes, a steady thud.
Notes and voices echoed from one stone to the next, as if people were calling each other from one mountain to another. Adams, not quite satisfied, tilted her head and listened. She looked at the gray marker noting the remains of Whitney, dead since 1927.
“I don’t think she’d like the music,” said Adams, “but I don’t know.”
If not, the wife of Charles Hubner, a poet, author and journalist — another resident at the cemetery, Atlanta's oldest public park — might find something else to her liking on Saturday. The cemetery on the edge of downtown Atlanta opens its gates for the Cryptophonic Tour. It's billed as an interactive experience, where local artists blend music and art among marble and granite memorials to Atlanta's earlier citizens.
The tour takes place from 2-7 p.m. Sixteen artists will be on hand at sites across the cemetery. Scholars and cemetery volunteers also will give graveside chats throughout the day. The lineup includes Cole Alexander, a guitarist and co-founder of the Black Lips.
The event is a collaboration between Oakland and ROAMtransmissions, a group of Atlanta-based sound, multimedia and performance artists. The tour is the latest event to showcase Oakland, the final resting place of 70,000 people.
Devin Brown, the tour’s director, worked with Oakland officials to select different sites for Saturday’s performance. He wanted to match artists to people commemorated at the cemetery, Brown said.
Consider Julia Collier Harris, interred in a soaring mausoleum. Related to Joel Chandler Harris of “Uncle Remus” fame, she was an accomplished linguist. Harris, who was 91 when she died in 1967, translated the Hungarian fairy tale “The Pigeon” into English.
That was enough for Paige Adair, an Atlanta painter, performance artist and videographer who has an interest in fairy tales. She recently visited the mausoleum to see how well its echoing confines would accommodate a performance combining animation and music.
“I think this is a very interesting space,” said Adair, who brought with her an aluminum-foil creation that resembled a bird — an homage, she said, to the Hungarian fairy tale that Harris translated.
Not far away, S Bedford stood in the cool shadows of a mausoleum topped with a stone circle resembling a planet in orbit. It was erected decades ago for the family of Judge John Collier. The jurist, who died in 1892, filed the charter changing the name of his city from Marthasville to Atlanta.
Bedford, who really calls himself “S,” measured the mausoleum’s dimensions, then paused, thinking. Yes, it would work.
Bedford plans to create a device that creates aquatic sounds. Imagine a crank that turns a flywheel that spins a shaft. That shaft rotates other flywheels that raise and lower weights. Those weights land in containers of water. Plop! Splash! Call it a marriage of machinery and sound.
Bedford said he may add a few other devices to his creation to augment the plopping and splashing. Enhancing the coolness quotient: Visitors will be encouraged to spin the crank that turns the flywheel that — well, you get it.
Bedford credited his brainchild to “a small fascination with music and mechanics.”
Then he smiled. “Also, it’s an inability to play an instrument very well,” he said, “so I’ll make a machine to do it for me.”
