It’s a dance music producer’s wet dream: to make music from one of the most iconic structures in the world.
Meet Joseph Bertolozzi. Joe is a composer of the sort you rarely read about these days – a figure of the avant garde that is accessible to street-level folks.
Very “street-level”, in fact, for Bertolozzi makes music from man-made “instruments” that no one thought of as instruments before.
Bertolozzi 2009 composition Bridge Music was made from “sounds of the bridge” – and by that, he really means making music from really playing a bridge like a drum and a processed synthesizer. In this case, it was the Mid-Hudson Bridge near Poughkeepsie, New York.
Here’s a video by Bob Rozycki showing Bertolozzi at work – and what comes out is some seriously funky shit:
At the beginning of that video, Bertolozzi mentions that his dream was to do this at the Eiffel Tower. Four years later, he’s getting his chance.
Per the New York Times:
The composer Joseph Bertolozzi, bearing a meditative look, stood with his feet apart in front of a door frame inside the Eiffel Tower. Then, 187 feet above the Champ de Mars garden, he pulled a latex mallet from his tool bag and hit the frame hard, and then softer, with agility and rhythm. …
His mission is to “play the Eiffel Tower” by striking its surfaces, collecting sounds through a microphone and using them as samples for an hourlong composition called “Tower Music.” He eventually hopes for a live, on-site performance of the work to celebrate the tower’s 125th anniversary next year.
Beatmakers and beatmatchers of the world salute you, Joe.
