BROKEN ORCHESTRA: HOW OLD, BEATEN SCHOOL INSTRUMENTS HELP REINVENT TRADITION
In the USA, it is often education and the arts that suffer first when it comes to budget cuts. Funding for public schools is constantly cut, especially for arts programmes. One consequence of this is that there aren't enough functioning musical instruments.
Students often have to make do with damaged and broken instruments, using duct tape and other makeshift solutions to keep them playable. Sometimes they even have to play with missing strings, valves or keys. Over the years, numerous initiatives have addressed this problem, such as We Are Instrumental, a New York initiative that provides children with functioning instruments.
But the most famous is probably the Broken Orchestra project, which started in Philadelphia and evolved into something much bigger and weirder than just a charity providing instruments, although it has stuck to its original mission throughout the years.
“The first time I came across broken instruments was in a closed school — meaning that that was a school that had been closed by the school district in 2013,” says Robert Blackson, the project’s creator, in a documentary about the Broken Orchestra. “They had been stockpiling instruments in the gymnasium. And that, in many respects, became the tip of an iceberg that just got bigger and bigger. And that’s when I kind of felt like there’s something here that we need to do something about.”
https://youtu.be/SBKGtBcawqI?si=yqhR2RGV7HnLLrNt
Philadelphia has a rich musical history — music has always been an integral part of the city, as evidenced by its famous jazz scene. However, it is also one of the poorest large cities in the USA. Robert Blackson and the Broken Orchestra stumbled upon a treasure trove of discarded broken instruments. They decided to give them a second life.
The first step for them was to create Symphony for a Broken Orchestra. They commissioned David Lang, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, to write a new piece for an orchestra of 400 musicians playing broken instruments. Mr Lang's symphony explored the idea that, while the instruments were damaged in the Western classical music sense, they could still be used to make music.
https://youtu.be/EzmZgQWM_ZQ?si=wzPm5a9zoXdKWNtZ
“That is a beautiful and subjective way to approach and appreciate music,” says Robert Blackson. “And that's what had to be asked of each of the 400 musicians that performed in Symphony for a Broken Orchestra, to take this thing and make something beautiful with it.”
Symphony for a Broken Orchestra was performed in 2017 to raise money to repair instruments and return them to schools. However, the project's history didn't end there.
Before David Lang began working on his piece, in autumn 2016, the Broken Orchestra project had recorded a substantial sample library. Musicians were gathered in Philadelphia and invited to improvise with hundreds of broken and battered school instruments, including rusted horns, splintered double basses, damaged saxophones and broken snares.
They also launched a global open call with that sample library, inviting artists to use their curated sample pack of damaged instrument audio. Over 120 submissions came in from musicians around the world, from Kazakhstan to Indonesia, all reimagining what music could sound like when made using only the recorded samples of broken instruments. The resulting album, Suites for a Broken Orchestra, features many renowned musicians, including Julia Holter, Ian Chang and Daedelus.
https://fsnrecords.bandcamp.com/track/broken-orchestra
In keeping with the spirit of experimentation and free access to music and creative resources, the Broken Orchestra has made its sample pack fully accessible and free of charge. Even today, you can download the samples from the project's website: hundreds of sounds from broken instruments.
Rather than using "normal" sounding instruments, Broken Orchestra inspires people to take tradition and create something new and weird with it, experimenting with the broken sounds of familiar instruments and stretching the idea of what we think of as music and acceptable sounding instruments.
This approach has certainly worked — there are musicians all over the world who are still working with these instruments. Berlin-based musician Mustelide recorded her 2019 album Ginseng Woman using only sounds from the Broken Orchestra sample pack.
“I wanted to find a new language to surprise myself with,” Mustelide told the Beats and Chords podcast. “I found this pack of broken orchestral instruments. The whole album is made up of these samples, the drums, the synths, everything. I wanted to restrict myself and force myself into difficult conditions.”
Ultimately, Broken Orchestra proved to be so much more than just a charity project to provide schools with new and repaired musical instruments (which would already be more than enough to make it noteworthy); it is a project that helps musicians around the world broaden their understanding of traditional instruments, musical possibilities, and the range of sounds available to us.
