[Sca-cooks] OOP funny article

[Sue Clemenger]

This came off another list I'm on, but since it involved playing with
food, I thought y'> MOLTO LENTO, WITH MIXED VEGETABLES
> By Sarah Lyell
>
> HAMBURG, GERMANY
>
> Performing music with fresh vegetables brings certain occupational
> challenges, like the tendency of the instruments to fall apart suddenly.
>
> "We have to be flexible," said Matthias Meinharter, a member of the
> First Viennese Vegetable Orchestra, who awkwardly lost the mouthpiece
> for his hollowed-out carrot during a recent concert here and had to
> improvise by nibbling at the carrot even as he blew into it.
>
> Carrots, which make fine wind instruments as well as having impressive
> percussional uses, are the least of it. The orchestra, made up of nine
> black-clad avant-garde artists
> from Vienna, uses everything from tiny kidney beans to hefty pumpkins
> in its work - beating, shaking, blowing, peeling, spitting, snapping,
> grating. poking, rubbing and mushing them in startlingly ingenious ways.
>
> The sensitive microphones on stage pick up even the softest hint of
> vegetable noise, and somehow the result suggests that the musicians are
> more than just people publicly
> playing with their food.
>
> "They're very enthusiastic, talented and artistically minded," said
> Franz Hautzinger, a trumpet player and abstract composer in Vienna,
> whose compositions for the
> vegetable orchestra include "Five Improvisations for Mixed Vegetables."
> Speaking of one of his favorite vegetable instruments, he added, "You
> can really write for the
> cucumber-o-phone -- it's an instrument with many, many possibilities."
>
> In Hamburg, the orchestra played in a bohemian-minded arts center and
> then served post-performance bowls of vegetable soup. The audience
> seemed to take the whole thing in stride, even when Meinharter grated
> carrots so zealously in one piece that the shavings sprayed across the
> front row (the orchestra  also uses kitchen utensils, including knives
> and blenders).
>
> "I expected it to be just fun and games, but it's really interesting
> experimental music," said Hartwig Spitzer, a 64-year-old physicist who
> nonetheless said he would be loath to try it at home. "I play with my
> compost," he said. "That's enough vegetable life for me."
>
> As he spoke, members of the orchestra were dismantling their
> instruments -- which generally take about 90 minutes to construct --
> and offering those still in good condition, as well as unused backups,
> for people to take home for dinner.
>
> "We are showing that you can make music not only with common
> instruments, and also that it's important to work in a multisensual way
> - -- this is not just for your ears but for
> your nose and your taste as well," said Barbara Kaiser, 30.
> "Do you need some leeks?"
>
> The orchestra's pieces include traditional Austrian tunes; versions of
> work  by bands like Kraftwerk; and original compositions that evoke
> house music, techno-pop, electronic music, and genres that defy
> characterization.
>
> "It's become more about the music than the vegetables," Meinharter
> said.  His colleague Nikolaus Gansterer said: "It's about the whole
> procedure of buying and playing and
> destroying and eating and vanquishing your fears. Nothing lasts
> forever."
>
> The orchestra was formed about five years ago and has since played
> around Europe at the rate of about  a concert a month. None of the
> musicians can quite remember how the idea evolved; Kaiser, an animator,
> recalls cooking dinner one evening when she suddenly "thought about the
> fantasy of people sitting in a concert hall, playing tomatoes."
>
> In fact, the finale of the Hamburg show was meant to be a piece
> performed entirely on tomatoes, but the theater asked the musicians to
> leave it out.  "It was too dangerous for
> their beautiful new curtains," Kaiser said.