Sound Sculptor : Brian Ransom’s ‘whistling pods,’ ‘hooters’ and ‘spiral horns’ double as ceramic art and instruments.

Asoft, throbbing four-note chord, something like a steamship whistle, greets you as you walk into the Conejo Valley Art Museum these days. The largest ceramic piece on display there, the “Nest of Hooters,” looks, for all the world, like a whiskey still built by some character in a Dr. Seuss book.

Welcome to ceramic sculptor/instrument maker Brian Ransom’s world, one filled with “whistling pods,” “hooters,” “spiral horns” and “nutating vessels.” The current exhibition of Ransom’s pieces, on display through this weekend, elicits a strange, disarming variety of reference points, from primitive pre-Columbian artifacts to cheeky post-modernist tactics.

They are somehow rustic, elegant and wacky at the same time. And, critical to Ransom’s interdisciplinary aesthetics, they are also functional as sound sculptures. Two weeks ago, another side of Ransom was revealed when he brought the members of his Ceramics Ensemble and several of his kiln-baked instrumental creations to the gallery for a concert.

One question springs to mind: Was he a musician or a sculptor first? Ransom, the head of the ceramics department at Scripps College in Claremont, laughed. “This is always a pertinent question, with a complicated answer. It’s hard to say. Did I first pick up some blocks as a kid or sing a melody? I started doing both early.”

Music played a role in his early life as he studied “legit” trumpet and played in orchestras while taking art classes. “The music and art classes were the bastions of goof-offers in high school,” Ransom said. “So we had the whole scene wrapped up.”

The music versus art dilemma dogged Ransom at the University of Puget Sound, where ceramics piqued his interest. And while at the Rhode Island School of Design, he began playing in jazz clubs.

“It worked out to be a really nice marriage, because at that point I was really thinking about exploring scales and microtones that were different from what were available to me on regular western instruments.”

Making ceramic instruments requires scientific calculations to attain desired musical pitches from a material as fragile as clay.

“I’d spent a whole life avoiding math,” he said, “and now I’d come into an area where I have to think about physics, percentages and shrinkage in terms of tone.”

By the time he finished his undergraduate degree at the College of Ceramics at Alfred University in New York, he had already made a set of ceramic instruments and his sights were turning global. Wanting to study in a country where ceramic instruments had a long tradition, he wound up in Peru in 1976 on a Fulbright fellowship.

Of special interest to him then was the curious pre-Columbian artifact known as the “whistling water jar.” It produces an eerie moaning sound from the internal motion of swishing water, which then pushes air through whistles.

According to Ransom, the whistling water jar was an obscure phenomenon. Archeologists, anthropologists and ethnomusicologists have puzzled over which field was best equipped to study it. “So it took an artist coming down there” to unlock some secrets, Ransom said.

He even turned museum officials’ heads while rummaging through ceramic holdings in Peru.

“I looked at a few vessels, filled them with water and for the first time probably since they’ve been taken out of the grave, a sound would just cut across time. This moaning sound would come out.” The museum director was amazed. “He had no idea the things would make sound,” Ransom said.

Ransom adopted the whistling jar concept for his series of “nutating vessels.” When rocked in various directions, a spooky sound almost like a calf’s gentle cry is released.

“As with most of the instruments I deal with,” Ransom said, “it starts with a sound in my head. But to get that sound in my head, I’ll turn to something that’s been done--be it string sound or a horn. I started out with the whistling jar, and it changed into something of my own.”

The Ceramic Ensemble features Ransom, Norma Tanega, Ernesto Salcedo and Hartt Stearns on instruments--and often tunings--devised by Ransom. They played at the Winnipeg Folk Festival this summer and at an opening for the new wing of the San Jose Art Museum.

“There’s improvisation in everything we do, but all the cues and all the ins and outs of the piece--the heads, tails and transitions--are all worked out with a lot of care,” Ransom said. “There will always be open sections. We’ll know we have to get from here to there.”

For the last several years, Ransom has been working up a sizable collection, happily caught between the worlds of sculpture and instruments.

“In the case of a lot of these pieces (at the Conejo Museum), you’re not seeing many instruments, you’re seeing sound sculptures,” he said. “But even the instruments themselves are very sculptural. When I make them, they please me. I work on them until they do.

“Objects are important to me. I don’t pretend to be anybody except who I am, living in the time I do, being the ethnic variety that I am. So it’s just a chance to realize that more life can be given to these things just by making sounds.”

* WHERE AND WHEN

Brian Ransom’s sound sculptures and ceramic instruments will be at the Conejo Valley Art Museum, 193-A N. Moorpark Road, (in the Janss Mall) in Thousand Oaks, through Sunday. For information, call 373-0054.

UP CLOSE / BRIAN RANSOM

On the shelf life of an idea: “A lot of the instruments I work on are themselves under continual development. I’ve been working on each idea for at least 10 years, continually upgrading how it looks and how it sounds. That’s the only way to do it: to keep working on the same idea for a long time and keep making it better.”

On his connection to pre-Columbian instruments: “It’s funny: people see the instruments and they’ve heard stories, like that I had a Fulbright to South America. They think ‘Well, it’s all just derivative of South America.’ But that’s entirely untrue. Each instrument is inspired by a study of instruments from all around the world.”

What makes Ceramic Ensemble tick: “As close to the mainstream as we get is World Beat music, music from around the world. The most intense we get is with conceptual pieces of mine, with music which may have movement involved. The audience might be treated in a variety of ways, and the music may require a lot more listening.”