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Join Philip Blackburn of the American Composers Forum and Bill McGlaughlin from Minnesota Public Radio at the MPR booth on Sunday, Sept. 2, at 1 p.m., for a musical spectacle. Musicians from around the country will perform original compositions with instruments made out of everyday items from the garden, kitchen, and farm!
The event will not be broadcast live, so be sure to catch it at the fair.
Participants *
- Douglas Ewart and two friends — bamboo flutes, didjeridu, and rainsticks
- Mark Miller — grass blade demo
- Philip Blackburn — introduction to the cornstalk fiddle
- Anne Kilstofte with four to six players — world premiere of new composition for organic foods and implements: watermelon drums, cornstalk fiddles, flutes, rattles, kitchen items, sampler, bamboo buzzers
- Patti Cudd — "Temezcal" by Javier Alvares, maracas and tape solo
From the composer: "The title is taken from the ancient Aztec word meaning 'water that burns.' The maraca material is drawn from traditional rhythmic patterns found in most Latin American musics. This is a piece where the performer is asked to master these rhythmic patterns and make complex rhythmic patterns which would be set against similar passages on tape. Many of the sound sources for the tape include the harp, folk guitar, bamboo rods, and maracas."
- Steve Heitzeg with three players — "Crow Cadenza for Four Crow Calls and Corn Sheaves"
From the composer: "This movement from Earthworks is a kind of apologia or zoomorphic elegy: an apology to all animal lives that are taken each day. I have attempted to write in the language of crow, with my score notation looking as non-human as possible as well as sonically human-free. I have the performers play crow calls here to honor crows, not to kill them, the original intent for which crow calls are designed.
"The crow is also the sacred bird of many indigenous nations of North America. Ravens and crows are medicine (an Algonquin word meaning 'sacred power') birds, shamanic birds, mysterious messengers between living and spirit worlds, comical corvids, tricksters, the wise winged ones."
- David Revill — "Child of Tree" by John Cage, on amplified Cacti
John Cage saw his work in sound as a way to encourage us to pay attention, to discover how marvellous the noises around us are if we only stop having opinions about them and simply listen. He was also a man who loved the natural world—his Manhattan apartment was filled with plants so varied he had to draw maps and watering plans for the people who'd watch his place while he was away—and he was an expert mycologist. He also had the social idealist's concern for what we're doing to the natural world. I think "Child of Tree" snowballs all these concerns together—you take 10 instruments, including pod rattles and cactus, and use his score to make a form within which you improvise with them: It helps us realize that even fascinating sound is part of the secret life of plants. All we need do is take the time to listen.
- Philip Blackburn — Review of standard literature: Philip Blackburn surveys some shining examples of the genre from around the world and close to home.
- Fulani of Niger pounding millet: practical polyrhythmic amusement play
with a pestle
- Hmong leaf call from Vietnam: wooing and impressing your date with a
tune on a leaf
- The First Viennese Vegetable Orchestra plays the Radetzky March before making a soup of their instruments and feeding the audience
- Zhang Ying Kitchen Symphony: local Chinese composer (who works in a well known local kitchen) wrote this for the Minnesota Chinese Music Ensemble, conducted by Carleton Macy with a fondue fork
- Philip Blackburn and players — "Pop Music" for junk food ensemble (world premiere)
No celebration of wholesome, organic, nutritious music would be complete—especially at the State Fair—without the dark side: the high-calorie, insulin-spiking, fat-inducing, heart-stopping, cholesterol-laden junk we so enjoy. Even the list of ingredients is a poetry of chemical jargon. (How many of us learned to read from the backs of cereal packets and shampoo bottles?) "Pop Music" delves into the sonic aspects of these poisons, bringing together an orchestra of soda bottle flutes, friction-drum slurpies, bubble gum, fizzy candy, and potato chip percussion.
* Program description provided by the American Composers Forum
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