Sona Jobarteh hails from a long West African tradition of Griots and kora players; her grandfather was the master Griot Amadu Bansang Jobarteh. Creating her own history, she has broken from the male-dominated kora tradition to become the family's first female virtuoso of the instrument. Here Sona Jobarteh performs the traditional Malian song, Jarabi, accompanied by Femi Temowo on guitar and percussionist Robert Fordjour.
Like Bertoia and Eastley, Fullman started out as a sculptor, gradually got interested in constructing sound-making objects, and finally graduated to instrument invention. She has dedicated much of her artistic life to the Long String Instrument, a physically imposing device with 53-foot-long strings that takes several days to set up in a performance space. Later incarnations of the Long String Instrument expanded to 100 foot strings. Unlike Mr and Mrs Lasry with the Cristal Baschet, Fulman doesn’t use water to keep her fingers slippery but coats both her hands and the strings with rosin. Waxed up, she strokes the strings between her fingertips, coaxing out gorgeous hovering tones as extended as the filaments themselves. The timbre sometimes recalls the viola or the church organ but the notes are so stretched out it feels almost like a synthesizer sound. In one interview, Fullman described playing the Long String Instrument as “an ecstatic feeling, a floating sensation. Music is bigger than me: there are pitch relationships, shapes of notes beautiful beyond the level of human expression. I like that feeling of being a conduit.” This enjoyably amateurish local news item from an Austin, Texas TV station also showcases another of Fullman’s inventions, a water-drip drum.
- Simon Reynolds
Listen to the beautiful sounds of Vietnam's only ensemble that performs its repertoire purely with bamboo music instruments.
1st song: Diễm Xưa | Trịnh Công Sơn
2nd song: Turkish March | Mozart
Suc Song Moi (The New Vitality) is the only bamboo ensemble in Vietnam that performs its symphonically orchestrated repertoire purely with bamboo music instruments. It was established in 2013 by the young conductor Dong Quang Vinh – the principle conductor of the Vietnam National Opera & Ballet & Hanoi Voices Choir, who had been trained for 9 years in Shanghai Conservatory of Music – China. The Ensemble’s music instruments were all made from bamboo by Artist Dong Van Minh (father of Dong Quang Vinh) – a prominent bamboo music maestro and its reperoire, includes Vietnamese folk music and world’s academic classical masterpieces by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Debussy, Ravel, Saint-Saens, Offenbach, Elgar etc., were all orchestrated by Dong Quang Vinh himself. Inherited the passion for academic music from his father, combined with the unfettered mind of a young professional, Vinh set up the Bamboo Ensemble with an ambition to bring academic music closer to the young generation in his unique and original style.
Harry Partch has been dubbed the “hobo composer” on account of his youthful wanderings during the Great Depression when he rode the railroads with other jobless Americans and found precarious work harvesting fruit. In this short 1958 documentary, though, Partch guides us through his Chicago home full of self-built musical inventions. Perhaps nodding to his itinerant past, a Japanese calligraphic inscription on the studio wall declares “though homeless, you make a shrine wherever you are”. Partch says that his version of shrines are his instruments, “unusual in size, shape and philosophic purpose,” adding “I am a philosophic music man, long ago seduced into musical carpentry.”
Along with esoteric spiritual impulses, it was a quest for different scales and micro-tonal intervals that led Partch to create such outlandish machines as the Diamond Marimba and The Gourd Tree. Sonically these metal and glass contraptions recall the tuned percussion and metallophonic instruments of Indonesian gamelan. But Partch’s actual inspiration came from the Ancient Greeks. His Chromolodeon works with the Greek enharmonic scale, while the 72-stringed Kithara is a drastic expansion upon a lyre used in Antiquity for dances and recitations of epic verse.
For the actual material out of which he fashioned his creations, though, Partch ransacked the modern world. He turned cloud-chamber bowls from the scientific laboratory into bells and repurposed brass artillery casings for an instrument he named The Spoils of Wars. Building these striking-looking and sui generis sound-machines was just the start of the artistic process for Partch, though. His compositions typically were one element in performances involving dance, costume, and mime-like theatre (see Delusion of the Fury, a 72 min film ). Like so many modernists, Partch’s true goal was to go back: to reinvent the holistic audio-visual art forms of the Ancient world, in which “sight and sound unite for a single dramatic purpose”.
Dean Shostak is one of last true masters capable of playing the glass armonica – an enchanting instrument lost to time. First devised in 1761 by Benjamin Franklin, the art of “playing glass” began to fade in popularity as musical fashions changed. Today, there are only eight glass armonica players left in the world. Along with the revival of the armonica, Shostak is also reintroducing an entire family of glass instruments, including the glass violin, the crystal hand bells and the French Cristal baschet.
Raw Footage |13 min | 1957
Starting in the early 1950s, the sculptor François Baschet and his engineer brother Bernard built a range of “structures sonores” – a term variously translated as sound structures or sonorous sculptures. Among their creations was the poetically named Voice Leaf, a glossy metallic shield that transformed the performer’s voice into an unearthly keening wail. Most famously there was the Cristal Baschet, a glittering array of glass rods that produced piercing drone-tones when rubbed by the performer. Teaming up with the composer-musician Jacques Lasry and his organ-playing wife Yvonne as the ensemble Lasry-Baschet, they performed concerts and made records like Chronophagie. This TV program appears to date from the late Fifties and unless you understand French, your best bet is to skip to about six minutes in, when Monsieur Lasry appears looking a bit like a Gallic Keith Moon. Duetting with his wife, Lasry showcases the shimmering sight-and-sound of the Cristal in operation, his fingers periodically dipping into a bowl of water to keep his tips lubricated. If you are of a puerile, Viz-reading mentality, you might well find all this stroking of perpendicular rods suggestive and snigger-worthy, despite the angelic purity of the tones generated by the frotting fingers of the Frenchman. Among the many Baschet-related videos on YouTube, look out for a recent, full-colour clip of the Hope Ensemble performing Erik Satie’s Gnossienne no. 1.
- Simon Reynolds
An angklung is a Sundanese bamboo instrument which is rattled to produce a fixed note. Originally tuned to the pentatonic scale, it was used in traditional music. However, today it is usually tuned to the diatonic scale and Western style music is performed. In this program the Bandung Conservatoire Orchestra demonstrates the complexity of the instrument and plays a well-known waltz.
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