Body percussion

Last autumn my friend R. asked me if I wanted to play with his wind orchestra for the Christmas’ concerts: they needed somebody who could play the glockenspiel. The glockenspiel is a delicious instrument that can easily hurt your ears (to the uninitiated it looks like a xylophone, but it is made by metal). It’s a percussive instrument, but it needs a player that can read a musical staff. So my friend thought that a pianist might, after all, get by quite well. And indeed I was quite good, and I became curious about the world of percussions, so funny and varied. 
Having spent years practicing on the keyboard, every time I try to play a new instrument I look for information of all kinds: what is it, how it is used, who plays that instrument and what kind of music ... Browsing YouTube I was literally ecstatic looking at the performances of true masters. 
So today I’d like to inaugurate a series of post on percussion instruments, talking about a curious and interesting practice: the body percussion. Body percussion - as its name indicates- is a rhythmic type of music that uses the body of the musician as an instrument. It is used in schools to drive the children to the world of rhythm, but it has all the characteristics to be considered art. Just look at what Keith Terry does in this video. Enjoy!

Playing the vegetables

Do you know that vegetables can be musical instruments? I knew that pumpkins are good as percussion instruments. But I can't imagine you can also play carrots, tomatoes, aubergines, peppers, leeks, cucumbers and parsley. And someone takes it very seriously. Flavia Foradini has met the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra and talked about their meeting on the magazine Ventiquattro. Eleven musicians go to the market and chose their material, then build the instruments the'll use in their concerts, fragile instruments that become a soup after the performance. I visited their website (http://www.gemueseorchester.org/) because I wanted to know what kind of music you can make in this way and I was wrongfooted: the result reminded me some works of John Cage I studied at school, something similar to a particular kind of electronic music. That's incredible.
But creativity in this field has no limits. Give a look at this video and at the related posts: http://www.noantri.com/vienna-vegetable-orchestra-video.html
I like very much http://www.noantri.com/ford-unorchestra-suona-strumenti-interamente-ricavati-da-pezzi-di-un-auto-video.html: every time I listened to this music on the radio I asked myself: what is it? That's the answer!
Oh dear, the world is full of genius! I love it.
PS: well, it's not about experimental music, but I think that this video is wonderful. http://www.noantri.com/telemetry-orchestra-under-the-cherry-tree-video.html
Special thanks to noantri.com for collecting these videos.