Stacking wood on Norwegian TV was the topic of last week’s post from my fine writing colleague Paul Asay. Maestro of the blog that he is, he managed, somehow, to make a Plugged In sort of point out of a controversy over whether wood dried better with its bark up or down.
Well, not be outplayed (or outstacked), I’ve managed to scoop up another captivating Norwegian tale, this one about playing music with instruments made entirely out of ice. Surely I can come up with a lesson about entertainment with that kind of connection!
According to National Public Radio here in the U.S., Terje Isungset has figured out a way to literally put his songs on ice, playing “chimes, drums, a marimba and a ‘tube-ice’ (like a tuba) … carved out of shimmering ice, harvested from … frozen lakes.” That last bit is important, by the way. The lakes bit. Isungset says:
Artificial ice doesn’t have any sound at all, nearly. So we have to try to find lake ice. But when you come to lake ice, there is only some lakes that have sound, and even if you find the lake there might be just a few pieces that will have a good sound.
He’s been playing his cold melodies for 13 years now, and, to our knowledge, has never intentionally smashed any of his instruments onstage. Oh, he’s broken things before, but only in the service of striving for icy excellence. When performing at the Kennedy Center recently, NPR reports, “he hit an ice block to create a bass sound and shattered the instrument. It didn’t worry Isungset; he just used his foot to grind the shards into the floor to create a crunching sound.”
Which brings me naturally to my Plugged In point. Several simultaneous things would happen to the music world, I believe, if all musicians had to craft their instruments out of ice. Female performers would wear a lot more clothing, for one. And maybe, just maybe, everybody involved would suddenly become a lot more conscious about what they’re doing with their 15 minutes of fame … you know, before their wind instruments stuck to their tongues. Maybe they’d freeze out some of the hot innuendo and let all the bad words drip off into that bucket sitting under the trap set. Maybe they’d be forced to concentrate on the real art of working hard to make something beautiful and lasting out of something so fleeting.
I haven’t even gotten back around to the part about Isungset saying the best sounds come only from the best, purest, most natural ice. The relationship between that and pop music is absolutely crystal clear. It makes me shiver just thinking about it.
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