Photo above (Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times): composer Joseph Bertolozzi bangs away on a bridge in New York with mallets and dowels to test out sounds for his suite titled "Bridge Music." Snip from a feature by John Schwartz — I can't wait to hear the resulting work!
The purpose of the test was to check not the bridge's soundness but its sound. The rather bizarre scene on the Franklin D. Roosevelt Mid-Hudson Bridge near Poughkeepsie was part of Mr. Bertolozzi's audacious plan to transform the span into an orchestra, compose a piece for it, then actually perform the work live with a small army of percussionists. It is a musical undertaking on a vast scale and one that has brought oddly harmonious marriages among the worlds of art and government, music and engineering.
Mr. Bertolozzi, 48, has been meticulously harvesting a multitude of sounds from the structure: not just the cables, which on playback create woo-wooing effects or sounds like a bass guitar, but the spindles below guardrails, the rails themselves, the interior and flanges of innumerable I-beams, connecting metal plates and the grates between walkways.
He sent mounds of steel pellets down the interior of a 315-foot steel tower to create a rain-stick effect. He collected clanks from the "Hudson River Estuary" sign, with its blue sturgeon emblem. An organist as well as a composer, Mr. Bertolozzi even hopes to turn large upright conduits for power lines into rough organ pipes.
"I only play big instruments," he said.
Link (Thanks, John Schwartz!)
Reader comment: Hal Bergman says,
I read your post about Joseph Bertoluzzi playing a bridge in New
York… very cool. I just thought I'd share that this reminds me of
an art installation that David Byrne (of Talking Heads fame) did two
years ago, entitled "Playing the Building", where he installed
percussion, vibration, and wind machines to different structural
components of a warehouse and hooked them all into a keyboard. Here's a link.
UTM says
The brilliant drummer David Van Tiegham did something similar. I think the YouTube video here was made back in the 80s.
Stuart Sands says,
Incidentally van Tieghem played with Byrne, Eno, Talking Heads, Fripp, etc., so perhaps Byrne was influenced by David. Here a link to his bio
David Sanborn says,
While Bertoluzzi playing a bridge is truly fascinating, German provocateurs and eardrum shatterers Einsturzende Neubauten beat him to the punch line by over two decades with "Stahlversion" from their LP Strategies Against Architecture. Here is a link to the song, but Amazon Britain might have a higher quality version. I have enjoyed E.N. through my formative years, gaining a new outlook on what music can express or convey. Also it's nice to have music in my library that will clear most any venue of riff raff.
