Do you play an instrument? Maybe the carrot? The cucumber? The pepper? The celeriac? Leek? Or parsley? What sounds like a vegetarian shopping list are, for some people, indeed tools to make music. How can music be fresher and healthier than that?<\/p>\n
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The Vienna Vegetable Orchestra was founded in 1998 and consists of twelve members who use different vegetables to produce a quite experimental kind of music that fuses a variety of music styles such as contemporary music, beat-oriented house, jazz, noise, dub, and clicks\u2019n\u2019cuts.<\/p>\n
All instruments are self-made of fresh vegetables and dried plant material. Very popular veggies are carrots, peppers, cucumbers, dried pumpkins, leek, artichokes, celeriac, and onionskin. This results in instruments like: pumpkin drum, celery guitar, cucumber phone<\/a>, carrot recorder<\/a>, eggplant clap<\/a>, celeriac bongo<\/a>, leek violin<\/a>, radish bass flute, leek zucchini vibrator, pumpkin triangle, and carrot marimba<\/a>. In order to build the instruments the musicians use drilling machines, sharp knives, and other kitchen tools. How long it takes to prepare a vegetable instrument depends very much on the instrument. For example, a tomato takes no time at all, and other instruments like a cucumber phone or carrot recorder take between ten to thirty minutes.<\/p>\n The members of the Vegetable Orchestra don\u2019t see their music as a fun project but take it serious and they give concerts all over the world. This can make it sometimes difficult to get the right vegetables. Since vegetables go off soon the musicians have to build their instruments immediately before a concert. Further, they cannot carry the vegetables with them on the plane. Therefore, they need to buy all the vegetables in the country where they appear on stage. One problem is that the quality of the vegetables differs from country to country. For example, in order to build a carrot recorder it is necessary that the carrot has a certain size. Since the instruments do only last for one concert, the Vegetable Orchestra gives some parts of the vegetables in a soup and distributes it to the audience after the concert.<\/p>\n The members see themselves as \u201cGem\u00fcsiker\u201d and \u201cGem\u00fcsikerinnen\u201d, which is a blend of the German words Gem\u00fcse<\/em><\/strong> (vegetables) and Musiker<\/em><\/strong> (m) \/ Musikerinnen<\/em><\/strong> (f) (musicians). So, that you can talk of \u201cvegeticians\u201d in English.<\/p>\n Until now the orchestra has released three albums. The latest one is called \u201cOnionoise\u201d. If you want to know how the instruments are built and how they sound watch the clip below. Enjoy.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n