Sarah Kenchington, The Urchin, 2016, by The Glad Foundation
A workshop allowing people to not only create their own instrument but play it too.
The Glad Foundation, a Scottish charitable incorporated organisation based in Glasgow, welcomed the musician Sarah Kenchington to hold a series of four workshops in its premises.
Workshops are open to everyone over 5 years old – both children and parents have the chance to take part.
The first workshop was held on Saturday 20 February and the next ones will be on the three following Saturdays (27 February, 5 March and 12 March).
The Urchin, Sarah Kenchington`s latest creation. Photo credit: the Glad Foundation
By combining contemporary thinking with expertise in music, Sarah Kenchington explores an uncommon way of making music with hand-crafted experimental instruments made of all kinds of materials.
In these workshops, Sarah teaches instrument making to children.
This week, Sarah explained how to create a saxophone with any kind of material (plastic tubes, balloons, multi-coloured adhesive tape and cardboard paper among others).
Both children and adults were really excited by the concept. After having built and manipulated various everyday objects for about an hour, everybody had made their own saxophones.
During the second hour, Sarah presented her latest creation- The Urchin. This instrument is unusual because as Sarah says: “It doesn’t make any noise but it tells you what notes to make”.
This experimental instrument generates a six part, musical score thanks to a colour code – you just rotate its wheel and its system will show you which note to play and when. Participants could also learn the principles of colour rotation thanks to The Urchin.
The Urchin is a series of wheels which have little sticks in different places. Whenever sticks on the bigger wheel encounter those on the smaller ones, they will make them move and the colour shown corresponds to the note that should be played.
For the third -and last- part of this workshop, Sarah assigned a colour to each of the 12 participants to allow them to play along with The Urchin. As there are six colours, one is assigned to two people. Each time a stick of a certain colour from the top moved, the two children who had that colour had to make their instrument ring.
Participants were able to play their own instruments while composing a melody with them using The Urchin.
At the end of the workshop, children and parents could take their creations home before next week’s activities.
Video by Lucie Jung
During the next workshops, participants will have the chance to build a xylophone and learn how to play with it, to write music for the Urchin, to create a water-tined table guitar as well as to construct a reverb cone and to explore its vocal effects while playing with the Urchin.
You can find out more information on how to get involved with the Glad Foundation by visiting their website.
Sarah Kenchington said: “I started by studying Sculpture where you have to make aesthetics decisions. When you move into making a practical object, it’s like the function of the thing determines what it looks like and what material you use. I usually use every day, cheap material.”
Sarah has created many instruments, her biggest creation being the Wind Pipes, an unusual Pipe Organ. This project was presented at the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2013 and was made of 100 decommissioned organ pipes.
Sarah added:“The pipe organ was about 20 foot long. […] That was set up in a church, it took all of the church. That was for the public to come and play.”
Sarah Kenchington, Wind Pipes for Edinburgh, 2013, photograph by Kat Gollock
Published in Maze mag: http://maze-mag.com/creating-and-playing-experimental-instruments-in-glasgow-with-sarah-kenchington
