Strike up the squash!
The Long Island Vegetable Orchestra is ready to play
On a muggy day in July, in a Long Island backyard, a group of musicians had gathered for rehearsal. As their conductor gently raised both hands, they steadied their instruments and played the first notes of a Bach chorale, “Nun freut euch, Gottes Kinder all.”
The conductor stopped them. The snake gourd had not hit the D, and the butternut squash had come in a little sharp. Take it from the top, he told the players.
The group rehearsing, the Long Island Vegetable Orchestra, plays instruments made entirely from vegetables. On this day, in addition to the squash and the snake gourd, it included two carrot flutes.
The orchestra was created more than a decade ago by Dale Stuckenbruck, a classically trained musician from Germany who teaches music on Long Island. It is not the first of its kind. The Viennese Vegetable Orchestra has been around for years; there’s a London Vegetable Orchestra, too.
But it may be the only orchestra of its kind in New York. Over the years, it has performed at schools, galleries, libraries and at an environmental conference in Geneva. It even appeared in a film.
On this day, Stuckenbruck, 63, and his four players were rehearsing for their annual performance at the Oyster Bay Music Festival.
Because vegetable instruments don’t last, fresh ones have to be made every time they play, and they had spent the hour before rehearsal carefully drilling into carrots and hollowing out squashes with an ice cream scoop. The table before them was covered with pulp and broken carrots. The air smelled like carrot juice.
“I went through seven before getting one,” said one of the carrot flutists, David Elyaho, 20.
His identical twin, Solomon Elyaho,
had made the long green snake squash into the vegetable version of a reed instrument, something between a saxophone and a bassoon.
The instruments had been kept in ice water so they would stay crisp. “Feel it, it’s wet,” said Daniel Battaglia, 37, holding out his butternut squash French horn. But the temperature hovered around 90 and the day was windless, and as they played the Bach chorale, they were racing against time. In this weather, the instruments would soon grow soft and the mouthpieces gummy, or they might dry out.
Stuckenbruck’s daughter, Erin, the fourth player, was trained on traditional instruments. In comparison, she said, playing vegetables was “very unpredictable.”
“You have to think while you’re playing,” said the younger Stuckenbruck, 23. “You troubleshoot with a knife. You’re shaving holes down, making holes bigger, shoving stuff in to make the pitch different.”
Her father’s patience was perhaps the key to the continued existence of the Vegetable Orchestra.
“Let’s do it again,” he said, as they sat in the broiling sun. “We can do it better.”
A smear of orange vegetable matter had stuck to his sheet music.
Stuckenbruck was born in Stuttgart, Germany, the son of a saw player. He attended a Waldorf school — which favors hands-on learning — and moved to New York in his 20s to play violin and saw; he played the saw with the New York Philharmonic this spring.
He and his wife, a pianist, moved to Long Island in the 1980s, and he created the first Vegetable Orchestra at the Waldorf School of Garden City around 2005.
He had been asked to create a music program for students who were not musically inclined, he said. After failing to capture their interest with drumming or music theory, he stumbled across the Viennese Vegetable Orchestra on YouTube.
“Everything looks easy on YouTube,” he said.
Making playable vegetable instruments turned out not to be easy, but once he got the hang of it, the concept caught on. Carrots could be wind instruments — flutes, panpipes and clarinets, or, as Stuckenbruck called them, carronets. (The reed is often made from a slice of sweet potato.)
Depending on the depth of the cavity and the size of the mouth hole, butternut squashes could be trumpets, trombones or French horns.
Over the years, Stuckenbruck added more instruments. Broccoli and potatoes made melodious flutes. A daikon, a big white radish, made a deep, honking sound like an oboe. Peppers, with their seeds, were natural maracas.
Then there were the “squeakies” — cabbage leaves, artichoke leaves, eggplants and brussels sprouts, which, rubbed together, created a sound like a DJ scratching a record.
Even asparagus was musical. Remembering a student at the Waldorf School with exceptional vegetable-instrument-making skills, Stuckenbruck said, “She created the smallest whistle from an asparagus I had ever seen.”
At the school, where Stuckenbruck still teaches, he uses the power tools, like the drill, then students personalize the instruments, placing the finger holes to match the size of their hands, resizing them to discover the pitch.
“It’s a way to access music,” Stuckenbruck said, “You have it in you already to understand! You are learning how things work and don’t work. It’s commonsense things. ‘That’s not much of a pitch change. I need a bigger hole.’”
After they are done, “we compost it and the rabbits eat the carronets,” he said. “In Vienna they make soup, but in this country the rules are very strict. You can’t make soup after a concert.”
The group was invited to play at a UNESCO environmental conference in Geneva in 2009. “I had a student compose a piece for two carrots,” said Stuckenbruck.
He created a second iteration of the Vegetable Orchestra at Long Island University in 2011, where he is an adjunct professor. With trained music students in its ranks, the orchestra began playing more public concerts.
In 2014, the group appeared in “Fresh,” a 16-minute film made by Ben Hagari, an artist originally from Israel. “Fresh” features a Vegetable Man, played by the artist, who is covered in produce and subjected to various tests.
Asked about reactions to the orchestra, Stuckenbruck said, “There are people who don’t like the peppers. They say, ‘How can you call yourselves a vegetable orchestra when you also play fruit?’ We have people who criticize the waste — from an environmental point of view. I tell them we eat it. ‘You make it, you eat it.’ We compost.
“And some people think it’s too silly.”
On July 29, the players of the Long Island Vegetable Orchestra gathered in the yard beside the Raynham Hall Museum in Oyster Bay.
They stood under a tent around a table piled high with vegetables, some of them harvested that morning at a nearby farm. They all wore black. Stuckenbruck was working on a broccoli flute. His daughter was whittling down the plug for a carrot slide flute. The twins were fiddling with the pitches of two butternut squashes. Battaglia seemed stressed.
One thing was going right. The weather was gloomy, cooler.
By 1:30, a crowd had assembled inside. Two musicians finished a Franck sonata for piano and violin, and the audience of about 40 clapped heartily. Then it was time for the Vegetable Orchestra.
Nobody appeared.
“I’m sorry, there’s been a little problem,” said Pippa Borisy, the director of the festival.
As the minutes went by, the crowd began to fidget. Finally the group filed in, looking a bit flustered. The orchestra played the national anthem and “Amazing Grace.” The audience, which a moment before had looked serious and contemplative, began to giggle. One man covered his mouth. Several people took out their phones to shoot video.
Stuckenbruck invited two children in the audience onstage, Emily Levy, 8, and her cousin, Dana Kagan, 11, and handed them instruments.
“We are blessed with today’s weather,” Stuckenbruck said, introducing the final song. “It’s a perfect Vegetable Orchestra day. We like rain and cold. It makes our instruments sound better.”
Then the orchestra broke into “Ain’t No Sunshine.” The twins played a daikon and a squash. Stuckenbruck rubbed cabbage leaves to the beat. Battaglia grooved on his carrot flute. Emily knocked two coconuts together and Dana slapped a hollowed-out squash with a lemongrass switch.
The audience seemed pleased. Afterward, under a tent in the yard, Dana said, “It was a very interesting experience, definitely.”
The members of the orchestra stayed for a few hours, making instruments for children beneath the tent.
As he sliced into a long zucchini stem to make a violin, Stuckenbruck addressed the delay in coming onstage.
“We had a little bit of an incident,” he said, “It is an old building. They were a little bit concerned about us bringing food inside, but we explained that this is not food that is going to be eaten.” He paused, and smiled.
“It is food that is going to be played.”