creative forces

Blog # 41…January 2015

It'll be about ten months now before we hear Frosty the Snowman again… so in the meantime, let’s sit back and enjoy ourselves.  Any of you lucky enough to catch The Polar Sea recently on TVO will have been amazed by the music in episode 2…played on instruments made of ICE.   At the moment here, ice isn’t our favourite element, bringing tree branches down on our power lines and sending us to the ER with broken wrists.  But Norwegian musician Terje Isungset shows us its magical side.

A talented percussionist, Terje got his big break in 2000 at the Winter Olympic Games in his native Lillehammer, composing and playing in a frozen waterfall on ice insruments…OMG how amazing is that!
                                                                                                                                                                           

In The Polar Sea, he and his fellow musicians perform on an Arctic ice flow, creating hauntingly beautiful sounds on a violin, trumpet and a series of chimes, all carved out of pure glacial ice 2,500 years old.   
Each instrument has its own unique tonal qualities that mellow over time as the ice eventually melts.


 

I’m sure you’re shivering both with excitement and cold now so let’s have a change in climate for some other interesting ways to make sound.  There’s a 21 mile stretch of highway in Thailand near the border of Laos called The Gong Road. It's lined with people who create huge instruments as well as a symphony of grinding, polishing and banging sounds in the production. The gongs were originally used for a ceremonial function to let two people approaching each other on the road know who should bow in front of the other -  now they supply alarm clocks for the monks in the country's 30,000 temples.

Today the process looks like something from the Bronze Age, clay is broken up to make molds for the shapes, metal collected and melted, poured and hammered  - all by hand - until exactly the right sound results.
We have our own Gong Road in Montreal  when  les Tam-tams du mont Royal, a long time tradition, come out to play every Sunday.

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Seems as if we’re driven to make music out of whatever comes to hand...if you missed The Polar Sea, it's available on TVO.org/thepolarsea.

A word about photos, I make every effort to credit photographers if I can track them down, the internet is a bit of a jungle of untitled work, but I do my best. The ice instrument pics are from Terje Isungset's site, the gongs from the New York Times.