One of Norway's most innovative and distinctive percussionists, Terje Isungset collects material from nature and creates new instruments. For Icemusic, he carves instruments out of pure ice, including from the 600-year-old Jostedal glacier.
Terrace Gallery - Sat., Feb. 23, 2013 7:30 PM and 9:30 PM
Ticket Price: $25.00
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One of Norway's most innovative and distinctive percussionists, Terje Isungset collects material from nature--wood, stone, metal, litter, ice--and creates new instruments out of it. He has even composed a musical work based on sounds from the world's largest oil platform. For his Icemusic, Isungset carves instruments out of pure ice, including some from the 600-year-old Jostedal glacier. The quality and temperature of the ice determine the sound of the instruments.
Terje Isungset has been making music on unusual instruments for a long time. Since the late 1980s, he has incorporated natural materials such as pieces of wood, stone and metal in their original form into his music, but it took him several years before he discovered and started playing on ice.
In 1999, Isungset was commissioned to perform a concert at the Winter Festival in Lillehammer, the city that hosted the 1994 Winter Olympics. As usual, Isungset incorporated found natural objects into his music-making, and because the concert was to be performed inside a frozen waterfall, he decided to incorporate instruments constructed from ice as well.
This was the first time Isungset experimented musically with this element, and the sounds he created with the ice made such a strong impression on him that he decided to focus solely on ice from then on. And so Icemusic was created, and just a couple of months into the new millennium, Isungset was asked to make more ice music for the Ice Hotel in Sweden, music that later became a part of a New Year’s Eve 2000 television show that was broadcast worldwide.
Ice instruments don’t last. In fact, they melt during each performance. So for every Icemusic concert, Isungset builds new ice instruments. He prefers to use ice obtained from local lakes or rivers. As a percussionist, Isungset mainly builds and plays on ice percussion instruments, but the variety of instruments that can theoretically be made from ice is almost endless. Isungset has built guitars, harps and even iceeridoos (an ice didgeridoo). Creating ice instruments, however, is very time-consuming and the quality of the ice is crucial. To perform a successful concert, Isungset needs ice that can sing, meaning ice that is able to carry tones for a long time. Finding quality pieces of ice is a big challenge even for an expert such as Isungset.
“You can have 100 pieces of ice looking exactly the same, but only two of them might sound great. Why that is, I don’t know,” he says.
Once he does find the right ice, Isungset often brings out a chainsaw — a very useful tool when dealing with large blocks of ice — to create the rough shape. He then does most of the detailed sculpting with a knife. The thickness, width and length of the pieces determine the sound, but temperature also plays a major role. The lower the temperature, the more frequencies can be heard; as the temperature of the ice rises and approaches the freezing point, the less sound the ice emits.
Playing on ice means playing on nature’s terms and is demanding in more than one way, Isungset explains. “First off, I can never practice like most other musicians, since new instruments are created for every new gig. I never get to know my instrument.” Unlike other musicians, who know what sort of tones they can expect to get from their instruments, Isungset has to listen to his instrument and play with the sounds it makes available to him. As the tuning and timbre of the instruments may change between the sound check and the concert, and even during a concert, improvisation is important.
Although the majority of ice used at each concert is local, Isungset often brings his own pieces in large freezers. This ice is usually very old — with some pieces dating back 2,500 years — and comes from parts of the world where the ice is melting rapidly. Isungset includes these pieces in his concerts to raise awareness to global warming through his music.
Despite all the time spent building, tuning and getting to know his instruments, Isungset does not get sentimental when seeing them melt away. He says that they are merely borrowed, and as they melt, nature reclaims its water to put back into circulation.
In the last decade, Isungset has played concerts all over the world, helped start the world’s first IceMusicFestival in Geilo and founded All Ice Records, an independent record company specialized in recording ice instruments. Isungset is scheduled to perform at the Kennedy Center’s “Nordic Cool” festival in Washington, D.C. in 2013. His website, icemusic.no, features interviews, video and sound clips of his performances.