21C-Orch-Instrs Resume (3)

Resume of Instrument Researches No 3

In Rio de Janeiro my lecture on new instruments was recieved very
warmly, as was a piano work of mine I gave in a concert there.
Subsequently, I was invited to repeat the events in Belo Horizonte - but
as it turned out, my time in Belo Horizonte was spent visiting the home
of the well-known Brasilian Group UAKTI. Some of you may know their
recordings, or about their instruments from Bart Hopkin's recent book -
'Orbitones, Spoonharps and Bellowphones'.

UAKTI don't specialise in alternative tunings, but they DO perform
almost exclusively on instruments built by one of their members - Marco
Antonio Guimaraes. If I have the figures correct, Marco has been
building instruments for over 30 years, and has built over 300 new
instrunents. A significant portion of these really are NEW, or at least
have highly original features - which was to me was really astonishing.

I was picked up at the airport by Artur Andres Ribeiro who is the only
member of the group who 'normally' plays a conventional instrument (the
flute) within the ensemble, but even this has been modified. Artur's
flute has a specially cut, large extra hole in the headjoint which is
covered with fine polythene held relatively taut over the hole (closing
it). This gives the flute a slightly buzzy Indian timbre (similar in
principle to some Eastern woodwinds, such as the 'Taegum').

(A Swiss flautist, Matthias Zeigler, who unfortunately I did not manage
to meet on the trip, also plays a conventional flute which is modified
in a similar way. In Zeigler's case, I understand he has a key which
opens and closes a cap over the polythene (or fish-skin, in the case of
the Taegum), so that the buzz effect can be turned on and off. I
understand that Zeigler may also have tried to patent this idea).

I cannot possibly describe all of Marco's instruments here. Amongst them
were:

- the 'Pius-Pi' - a set of bird-calls set together in a wooden holder,
with adjacent rubber-bicycle-horn-bulbs which can be pressed as if they
were a typewriter keyboard...;

- the 'Taquara', an extremely simple but beautifully effective kind of
bamboo mouth-organ;

- various percussion instruments using plastic tubing of varying length
mounted in stands - 'Trilobita', 'Grande Pan', 'Pan Inclinado' - some
with open tubes, others with skins stretched accross the open ends of
the tubes. The non-struck end of the tubes have small plastic inserts
which can be used to slightly vary (perhaps from one peice to another)
the pitch that each tube sounds;

- a 'Chori' - a cello in which the body of the instrument is a gourd;

- a glass marimba;

- a special 'berimbau' with three strings and a special key for pitch
changes;

- a 'guitar' played using a piano-type keyboard arrangment;

- a multi-movement percussion intrument, in which each movemnenbt in
different direction effects an individual sound;

and many, many others...

These instruments were not 'central' to my research into developments of
the orchestral mainstream, but throughout the trip, more and more I
found myself fascinated and moved by alternative instruments - as well
as always being aware of how one 'technology' may lead to another - and
how one design may 'interact' with another...

What is also extraordinary about UAKTI - aside from the sheer prolific
invention of Marco's instrument making - is that each of the four
members of the group has a virtuosic skill on many of these new
instruments...

See:

http://culturabrasil.art.br/uakti/index.html

and practice your Portuguese...
--
Patrick Ozzard-Low,
http://www.c21-orch-instrs.demon.co.uk
mailto: pol@c21-orch-instrs.demon.co.uk