Art & Ecology:
Photoessays: Art and the Earth
Earthly Matters
Recycling and the Aesthetics of Sound
by Suzanne Seriff, Ph.D.
"Pan (steel drum bands) was born in the junkyard."
- Lawrence Mayers, Steel drum tuner, Trinidad
All around the globe, including the United States, artisans who recycle select their raw materials because of the way they look, feel, or even sound. Considerations of resonance, rhythm, and timbre are especially important to makers of musical instruments.
If "heavy metal" describes some of the popular music of our era, it is also a telling description of the industrial materal with which many scrap-fabricated instruments are made in the twentieth century. What once was shaped from natural shells or pottery shards is now commonly improvised from machine-made buttons, tin scraps, metal pipes, bottles, and bottle-caps. These modern-day resonators fit the bill for such varied instruments as ham can fiddles in Alaska, and bottle cap ankle rattles in Kenya.
One of the oldest and most common of musical instruments made from found materials is the plucked or bowed string box. While stringed instruments have existed for over 5,000 years in some parts of the world, they have a relatively recent history in the Americas, where they were first introduced by European settlers only several hundred years ago.Culture contact not only influenced the material and sound of the instruments, but the resulting music, dance, and social traditions which surrounded them. For example, when Irish and Scottish trappers settled in the Athabaskan interior of Alaska in the 1700s, they brought with them their fiddle repertoires, dances, and fiddling contests--all of which were adapted by the Native American conmmunities who maintain them to this day.
In the Caribbean island country of Trinidad and Tobago, another ingenious example of a thriving musical tradition emerged from the scrap heap of the oil industry during the Second World War. It was around this time that a grassroots movement of poor young islanders began to transform discarded 55-gallon oil barrels into "tuneable" percussive instruments with a revolutionary new sound. Today, a whole new genre of tuned percussive sound has emerged from the use of discarded fifty-five gallon oil drums--an instrument which lends itself to everything from calypso to European classics and which has helped define a new national identity for its Carribean homeland.
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