Homemade music - musical instruments from recycled objects

E: The Environmental Magazine, Feb, 1994 by Iris Brooks

For musician Skip La Plante, heaps of garbage are nothing more than great opportunities to make music. "Garbage is actually a resource; if more people looked at it that way there would be less of a garbage problem," says La Plante. Peanut butter jars, crushed aluminum soda cans, broiler pans, "no parking" signs, styrofoam boxes, cole slaw containers, traffic cones, forks, keys, and even the kitchen sink are a small sampling of the recycled objects he uses to make musical instruments.

"It's guerilla recycling," says La Plante, who has designed and constructed almost 200 such instruments. "I used to live in a farmhouse on 100 acres of land. People came and went, leaving behind what they no longer wanted and three buildings filled up with weird stuff. Those became the materials for my first instruments."

A Princeton University-trained composer who writes music for dance and theater, La Plante is also an avid backpacker who has hiked the Appalachian Trail. "I am inspired by the sounds of rain hitting a tin roof, bird songs and the music of other cultures," he says.

Using found objects to make music is a world-wide art. In some parts of the world it means playing gourds, coconuts and bamboo; in others, washboards, jugs, spoons and bones. In Kenya, the ridges of Fanta orange soda bottles are played with metal rods as percussive scrapers. In Indonesia, scraps of iron are recycled into gongs.

La plante's neighborhood - the Bowery in New York City - is a motherload of found objects, with easy access to garbage heaps and demolition sites. La Plante estimates he has recycled two tons of junk for his instruments - junk which would have otherwise been landfilled or incinerated. In his loft, LaPlante presents concerts by Music for Home-made Instruments, the composers' collective he which since 1975 has been inventing, building, composing for and performing on recycled musical instruments. No effort is made to disguise some of the humble-looking instruments. Yet, La Plante's work has been exhibited at the Smithsonian Institute's Renwick Gallery, the American Museum of contemporary Crafts in New York and the Capital Children's Museum in Washington, DC. For concert information (they're performing in New York City his January), or to order their cassette, A Decade of Debris, contact: Music for Homemade Instruments, 262 Bowery, New York, NY 10012/(212)226-1558.