SYMPHONY IN VEGAN MINOR
Broccoli flutes, squash trumpets and ‘carronets’ make compostable music,
LONG ISLAND, N.Y.— 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.
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 32 C 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.
Stuckenbruck’s daughter, Erin, the fourth player, was trained on traditional instruments. In compari-
“You’re shaving holes down, making holes bigger, shoving stuff in to make the pitch different.” ERIN STUCKENBRUCK VEGETABLE ORCHESTRA MEMBER
son, she said, playing vegetables was “very unpredictable.”
“You have to think while you’re playing,” said Stuckenbruck, 23. “You troubleshoot with a knife. You’re shaving holes down, making holes bigger, shoving stuff in to make the pitch different.”
Stuckenbruck was born in Stuttgart, Germany, the son of a saw player. He attended a Waldorf school — which favours 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 initially failing to capture their interest, 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, pan pipes 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.
“It’s a way to access music,” said Stuckenbruck who still teaches at the Waldorf School. “You are learning how things work and don’t work. It’s common-sense 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.”
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.”