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167 Theremin Players Perform Beethoven


UstadKhanAli

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Hmmm.

 

One-handed Theremins, huh? No dynamics, obviously. Makes for an amusing slide trombone thing at the beginning and ending of those long phrases. Obviously, the closer-to-native tempo section came off a lot better. I was intrigued by the apparently tight 'play space' imposed by the doll/theremin devices.

 

An impressive undertaking on some level. Maybe a few. ;)

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I resurrected a memory of an event that a former music partner of mine orchestrated. He had a soft spot in his heart for jug band music, and when he discovered the Mattel Bath House Brass in a toy store, he fell in love with it. It's a kazoo made out of pieces that look like plumbing parts. They had two or thre models, but the parts were all interchangeable so you could make big (long) ones out of little ones. He bought a few and assembled the parts into one that he could wrap around himself like a sousaphone.

 

He wrote to Mattel that they shouldn't sell it as a toy, bur rather as a musical instrument, and set out to prove it He had some friends in a local extended chamber music group, the Dupont Circle Consortium, and convinced them to play that same Beethoven piece on about 30 Bathhouse Brasses, a jug, and a washtub bass. Based on this proposal, he got Mattel to send him enough of the instruments to go around, and they indeed performed the piece at one of their holiday concerts. I don't know if anyone recorded it, but he never got a recording himself.

 

Not too long after that Mattel discontinued the Bathhouse Brass. I still have one.

 

BGMNYv6.jpg

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What I want to know is who woke up one morning and said "Hey!! You know what would be cool? To have 167 theremin players do variations on Beethoven's 9th! And then the piano player could do a sort of weird Jerry Lee Lewis thing toward the end!" But what I want to know even more is who said "Yeah, wow, that's a great idea! Let's do it!!"

 

Then how do you find 167 players? Facebook? Call people at random? And how to you find people who know how to play a Matryomin, let alone find 167 Matryomins? Is there a "Matryomins R Us" store in Tokyo?

 

Inquiring minds want to know the backstory!

 

 

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That's a fine looking instrument' date=' I think. I wonder what it sounds like?[/quote']

 

Having some experiences with kazoos, I would suggest it probably sounds pretty much like every other kazoo played by a given individual. I used to 'mod' my kazoos by swapping out the tissue paper element with other materials. The volume varied, timbre only a little. They pretty much all still ended up sounding pretty kazoo-like. ;)

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I have some antique kazoo reeds that are made of fish skin. Did you know that you could tuna kazoo?

 

I remember an hour long workshop at a Newport Folk Festival that Fritz Richmond (of Jim Kweskin's Jug Band) gave on jugs, kazoos, and comb-and-tissue paper. He favored hard rubber combs over plastic.

 

He used a balloon to measure his lung capacity, then looked a jug that was close to the same volume as a lung full of air. He said that gave him the most usable pitch range. He said that Sleepy John Estes used a tin ether jug. Maybe that's why they called hin "Sleepy."

 

Next day he talked an hour on washtub bass technology.

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Then how do you find 167 players? Facebook? Call people at random? And how to you find people who know how to play a Matryomin, let alone find 167 Matryomins? Is there a "Matryomins R Us" store in Tokyo?

 

 

Have you every seen some of those beautiful couch size "hand painted" paintings in Walmart for under $100 ? They are painted on an assembly line. No artists are required. One painter gets BLUE, another, RED, another YELLOW and so on. Each is instructed how to paint their little part on the painting (where to place their strokes) and they may paint the same way for a week to produce a few thousand almost identical paintings .

I believe that none of these (or very few) are real "theremin players". They were trained a few micro movements with their hands to play this one small part only. Some of them may get serious about the theremin and go on to buy the Moog or such, but this is how I believe they were trained. Some of them may never touch a theremin again.

 

Dan

 

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The bass player in this band made his own instrument out of a junk gas tank. A high octane washtub. The single string is from weedeater stock. At the time of this video, the guitar player/songwriter was dying of the same cancer that took our drummer. Around 2:30, a member of the audience is visibly crying.

 

Oh, and I forgot, there's a kazoo solo.

 

[video=youtube;yTIbQCxNhUw]

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