NEW YORK - The NASDAQ closed yesterday with a microtonal dip, and as a sea of blue wool-clad financiers exited the World Financial Center at 7 p.m. they were serenaded by the unusual sounds of a piano undergoing surgery, an organ made from car horns, and a theremin that sounded like a chorus of wailing alien babies.
Five builders of unique musical instruments were there to launch the Reinventions Performance Series. Most instruments were culled from the book/CD Gravikords, Whirlies & Pyrophones by Bart Hopkin, itself inspired by his quarterly journal Experimental Musical Instruments.
With electronic musicians turning everyday noises into digital instruments, the time seems ripe for tuned trash cans, and short-circuiting radios to find some popularity. Last April, the virtuoso of ordinary objects, Harry Partch, achieved posthumous respectability with a retrospective at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Also, a documentary on the theremin, an electronic box that responds to motion in the air around it, was an indie film hit in 1997. As Tom Waits wrote in his foreword to Gravikords: "With the digital revolution wound up and rattling, the deconstructionists are combing the wreckage of our age."
So, in the marbled excess of the WFC Winter Garden, a surreal atrium containing New York's largest grove of palm trees, the artist known simply as Trimpin pecked apart the insides of a piano like a biologist's lab frog. Prepared piano technique was made familiar in the 1940s by composer John Cage, but Trimpin controlled his Rube Goldberg-style machinations via PowerBook, creating a diabolical automaton.
Accompanied by flute, Robert Grawi plucked a Gravikord, an African-inspired string instrument of his own invention that lent itself to a rambling, folksy set of songs. Equally soothing and new agey, Richard Cook of Utah explained the democratic impetus for his "Freenotes Gamelan": to teach people to improvise like jazz musicians, without memorizing scales and developing skill. "All the patterns are simple, but the music is complex and glorious," he said.
In practice, modifying instruments is something that all musicians do. Some, searching for the unpredictable, take innovation and personalization to an extreme. One of the event's performers, David Simons trained with avant-garde composer Morton Subotnik, then turned to world music to create something new "using the instruments of one culture to play the music of another." He bought a mail order theremin, and configured it using a MIDI controller to trigger samples based on volume.
"It was hard tonight," he said. "The radio towers and nexus of microwave emissions on the World Trade Center made the theremin very sensitive. I had the samples stacked so the soft signals played a tambura, then flutes, then a drum machine beat, then the loudest sound brought on strings from a film noir and The Man with the Golden Arm. With the sampler, I can play all these instruments at one time, but even just plucking a jaw harp, you can make a hundred different sounds."
Just because these did not look like conventional instruments did not mean the devices on display weren't musical, but one can't take ear kindness for granted. When Wendy Mae Chambers sat cheerfully and with pride at her Car Horn Organ, she summoned images of a whimsical indoor traffic jam that drove a lot of people away, clutching their umbrellas. Undeterred, a very young couple cavorted gleefully, the music seeming to transport them to a fantasy land.
Also on stage were a bass built from a chair and a walking cane, and some kind of guitar constructed of old film reels and a tennis racket; evocative junk to inspire those bold enough to venture outside of the Oxford Dictionary of Music and play with music instead of merely playing it.
The Winter Garden again serves as sanctuary for unusual musical visions on 14 January, at 12:15 p.m. and 7 p.m., when attractions will include a 10-foot pair of singing pants, and a musical flying machine. The eclectic wonders will continue at the Knitting Factory on 15 January, when Simons will appear along with Ken Butler, William Eaton, Arthur Frick, and Reed Gazala. The staff of Ellipsis Arts, who demonstrated the simplicity of Cook's Gamelan by serving as his impromptu orchestra, hope to take some of the contraptions on national tour later this year.
