Music To Suit Your Taste

Forget marinated sound ideas and canned listening habits -- there's a new music waiting to be discovered. The Viennese Vegetable Orchestra has set out to prove that vegetables are good for you in more ways than one. Featuring a line-up of nine different instruments carved and peeled from ordinary garden varieties, the Austrian ensemble shows just how tubers can toot, radishes rattle and salad shakes.

Since 1998 the three men and six women making up the world's first (and only?) vegetable orchestra have been touring the world, demonstrating that there's more to music than the sounds traditional instruments produce. Using simple kitchen utensils, they turn cucumbers into cuke-o-phones, eggplants into cymbals and carrots into flutes. Each instrument has its own unique sound, and when blown, banged and rubbed together they create an interesting, entirely new blend.

In the ensemble's own words, their self-composed melodies present a "transfer of electronic music pieces and structures to the instruments of the vegetable garden."

Sounds like dinner time

For audiences, there's more to the group's performance than a night at the symphony. At a Hamburg concert over the weekend, several listeners expressed amazement at the sound one can produce from a cucumber, others commented on the raw vegetable aroma accompanying the tunes.

That's not surprising, considering the orchestra uses 40 kilos of vegetables for every concert. Each one is freshly sliced and peeled no sooner than an hour before each performance. Size, texture and water content are vital to achieving the correct sound, says Matthias Meinharter, who plays a violin fashioned from leeks.

To keep the veggies from drying out during the performance, the musicians drape damp cloths around them. But because the instruments are organic, nothing is predictable and occasionally one of them fails to create the right sound. As a result, each performance is different. It's really a constantly evolving type of experimental sound.

And for those listeners who grow hungry listening to leeks, potatoes and peppers, at the end of the performance all the instruments are diced up and turned into a vegetable stew.

Now that's a recipe for success.