Concert in the Catacombs, Atlas Obscura New York
“Did someone die?” my Uber driver asked with a mixture of sympathy and curiosity as we sped away from Brooklyn’s Green-Wood cemetery late on a Sunday night, long past visiting hours.
“No,” I reassured him. “I was... at a concert.”
I wondered what he thought as we drove silently under the city lights. I knew some people who were uncomfortable going to a concert where the dead are supposed to rest in peace. I myself had always been told to avoid cemeteries, particularly at night, but for different reasons.
According to Asian folklore, hungry ghosts wander the earth at night to feed. Some feed off lost objects, while others seek to possess a human spirit. Some unlucky ghosts have no mouths and are cursed with starvation. If any hungry ghosts were wandering the Green-Wood Cemetery of Brooklyn on a late hot summer night filled with fireflies and shadows, they would hopefully have at least been satiated by the sound of Bach and Purcell arias at a concert in the catacombs organized by Atlas Obscura.
Founded in 1838, Green-Wood Cemetery and its 478 acres once attracted half a million visitors a year in the 1860s, but has since become far less frequented, even by longtime locals. The site may be more familiar to birdwatchers because the colony of green monk parakeets nesting in the turrets of the cemetery entrance (they were indeed there, flying back and forth with long strands of dried grass in their beaks). Art enthusiasts may seek Jean-Michel Basquiat’s grave.
The catacombs are located in the center of the cemetery. They are very rarely open to the public, typically only once a year during Open House New York. Unlike the deep underground catacombs of Paris and Rome, the catacombs of Brooklyn were the unintentional result of active gravel mining into the hillside. The central chamber of the catacomb is long, narrow, and spare, with dense walls and a marked absence of air flow— expected, but unnerving nonetheless. Thirty vaults with the inscription of family names line both sides of the central chamber.
The night’s performances and respectful decor of candles and flowers tastefully conveyed the theme of the night— memento mori, remembrance of the dead. Soloists included Jillian Blythe on cello and singer Abigail Fischer, along with an orchestra— all of whom bravely navigated and performed in this unconventional space. The acoustics in the chamber created less reverb than one might expect. It was as if all the sound was absorbed by the walls or sank into the side vaults. Or perhaps the hungry ghosts feasted on music that night.
An equally, if not more, haunting experience is leaving the catacombs in the pitch darkness to find the cemetery entrance (or exit, thankfully, in this case). There are no city lights above— only the moon and stars— and the silence is as impenetrable as in the catacombs. The paths wind past mausoleums and clusters of tombstones, their outlines traced only by moonlight.
The uncanniness of a concert in the catacombs is paradoxically the experience of the negation of sound— the voices of those alive being swallowed by a more enormous silence. As I try to remember the sound of the music that night, the imprint of silence hangs opaquely over the memory like a thick coverlet, like a sheet draped over the dead.
Atlas Obscura is holding another concert in the Brooklyn Green-Wood Cemetery catacombs with the theme of Soul Night on September 9, 2017.