Episode 9: Weird Instruments

David Walliams' Marvellous Musical Podcast

Global

Music, Kids & Family, Education

4.7 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2019

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

From a helicopter quartet to a vegetable orchestra, prepare to have your idea of what an ‘instrument’ can be blown wide open. David Walliams explores some of the most fantastical, needlessly complex and sometimes tasty musical instruments that human beings have ever created. Each episode is also accompanied by a playlist in Apple Music – you can find those here: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/curator/classic-fm/1211395150 Viola Organista performed by S?awomir Zubrzycki The Vegetable Orchestra John Cage: Variations I – Langham Research Centre Leroy Anderson: The Typewriter – Richard Hayman Orchestra/Richard Hayman Verdi: ‘Anvil Chorus’ from Il trovatore – Orchestra e coro del teatro alla scala/Riccardo Muti Mahler: Symphony No.6 – Minnestora Orchestra/Osmo Vänskä (BIS) Tchaikovsky: 1812 Overture – Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra/Vasily Petrenko (Classic FM) Ligeti: Poème Symphonique for 100 Metronomes – Françoise Terrioux (Sony) Leopold Mozart: Cassation in G ‘Toy Symphony’ Rautavaara: Cantus Arcticus – Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra/Leif Segerstam Tchaikovsky: Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy on glass harmonica – William Zeitler

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a global original podcast from Classic FM.
0:04.4	What instrument is this?
0:21.5	If you guess violin or viola, then you're wrong.
0:26.0	You've brought shame to us all.
0:27.9	Have you learned nothing from these podcasts?
0:29.9	The correct answer is the instrument is a viola organista, an incredibly rare and obscure
0:36.1	instrument.
0:37.4	The viola organista was designed by the inventor
0:40.7	Leonardo da Vinci, who was a famous painter and decorator, but the instrument was never actually built.
0:48.2	That is, until 2012, when a Polish musician built the only one that's ever existed in history. While it looks like
0:56.3	a piano, you can hear that it sounds like a string instrument. So what you say? I may not know
1:02.8	that instrument, but I know plenty of other instruments. Trumpet, triangle, did we do? Get off my back!
1:09.7	Well, firstly, what's your attitude?
1:12.4	Secondly, there are actually loads of wonderful obscure musical instruments out there,
1:17.8	and countless pieces of music which make use of their weird sounds,
1:22.2	like birds, cannons, helicopters.
1:33.5	Yeah. cannons, helicopters, and even silence.
1:41.9	Join me as we delve into some of the weirdest instruments in music.
1:45.0	What does this sound like to you? A ghost?
1:46.0	A whining grandmother?
1:48.0	No, this is the Theramen.
1:50.0	It's maybe the only instrument in the world that you can play without touching.
	...

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