Vegetables are setting the tone! When the vegetable garden becomes a source of inspiration for musicians, roots are flutes and cucurbits drums. Throughout the world, music loving gardeners transform fruits and vegetables into instruments.
Several training throughout the world
The most well-known remains The Vegetable Orchestra. Based in Vienna (Austria), this 11-artist collective has been playing for 20 years, having fun with creating instruments before each concert depending on the market, playing all music styles (free jazz, fusion, classical…). No waste: everything ends up in a soup enjoyed by the whole group.
In France, the Belgian sculptor-musician Eric Van Osselaer created Orgabits in 2006 and introduced the bass drum watermelon to France, Belgium and Germany as well as the castanets aubergine. In what he nicely named the “sound vegetable garden”, he succeeds in making leeks’ leaves swing! Finally, the Japanese Junji Koyama has become a YouTube star in the last twelve years (30 000 subscribers, over 18 million cumulated views), with videos in which he shows how to make an ocarina with an aubergine or play Christmas carols with a broccoli… or video game music with white radish.
What vegetables for which instrument?
Zucchini, parsnip and carrots can be carved (with a drill bit to avoid breaking them) and transform into wind instruments, reed pipes, pan flute. Leaves, leek or chicory, can be rolled to become whistles. The larger specimens, type squash, are more for percussions, even if it means using other vegetables (carrots for instance) for drumsticks. Celery’s taut strings transform into string instruments such as guitar and peppers offer many possibilities from maracas to ocarina. As for squash, they were always used in a traditional way: colocynth (small bitter crooked squash not suitable for human consumption) become genuine maracas when they dry; and the percussion instrument African calabash is manufactured from a dried cucurbit.
However, tomato is rather useless because too soft… and it is not very proper to through it on these talented and imaginative musicians: its place thus remains in your plate rather than on a stage!