When Tim Linhart started making instruments from ice, they were more likely to explode with a bang than produce music, but things have come a long way since then.
Today, the US-born artist is in charge of an ice orchestra of local musicians playing a series of concerts at sub-zero temperatures in a vast, custom-built igloo high in the Italian Alps.
“I made snow and ice sculptures in the ski resort where I’m from in New Mexico [or 16 years] ... and then I decided it would be cool to make a sculpture of a violin,” said Linhart, 59.
Photo: AFP
“I heard the sound coming from inside and thought: ‘Wow this is super exciting. If I just tighten up the strings a little bit more it would be louder,’” he said.
However, overtightening the strings caused the instrument to shatter into little pieces, he said.
“But I had heard enough; it was the beginning,” Linhart said, his large frame treading nimbly among the delicate instruments on stage in the igloo.
In the Passo Paradiso winter sports station at an altitude of 2,600m, instruments still at times spontaneously implode due to the brittleness of the ice, but less frequently, and when they do, it is not altogether a lost cause.
“Then you know you’re as close to the edge of ice music as you can get,” Linhart said.
Here, the artist has built a violin, viola, timpani drum set, xylophone, double bass, mandolin, cello and even his own invention, the giant Rolandophone, a huge percussion pipe instrument, all from ice.
After molding front and back plates, Linhart uses a white-ice mix of water and snow to build the instrument’s walls, around a metal backbone, over which the strings are stretched and tightened.
A mandolin takes five or six days to make; bigger instruments can take months.
“It’s a great material because you can both grow it and cut it away, and it’s free,” Linhart said. “The only setback is that it melts above freezing.”
Due to their weight, some of the instruments are played while suspended from mountaineering carabiners attached to steel cables drilled into the ceiling of the 200-seater igloo.
For storage, many are kept in niches carved out of the igloo walls.
Cellist Nicola Segatta, who helped build his own instrument out of ice, said their sound is “more crystalline” than the classic wooden instruments.
“They’re incredibly fragile. When you’re building them, there’s the constant risk that they’ll disintegrate into a thousand pieces,” said Segatta, who was part of the orchestra that day.
However, the intensity of the music produced by the ice instruments brings out a strong emotional reaction in the audience, in counterpoint to their fragility, he added.
The ice instruments require amplification and technicians battle constantly to keep the sound coming in the adverse conditions.
As the audience enters the igloo, where temperatures average minus-12°C, it begins to warm up, and so do the instruments, forcing the musicians constantly to retune.
However, the ice’s flexibility is also a blessing, as it adapts to being played.
“The instruments when they’re first newly built, they sound kind of tinny, a weird-sounding little thing, and the more you play them, the bigger the sound gets,” Linhart said.
“Within the first couple of hours, the sound will be twice as big as it was just before and much nicer, sweeter sounding, because the ice is responding to this vibration passing through it and getting warmed up like it’s getting a massage,” he said.
Linhart spends the summer with his Swedish wife and their young son in northern Sweden, gardening and creating non-ice art, while some of the better instruments are kept in a freezer for the next winter.
“If they’re old and worn we’ll just hit them with a hammer or leave them out in the sun and let them die,” he said.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
CONFIDENCE BOOSTER: ’After parkour ... you dare to do a lot of things that you think only young people can do,’ a 67-year-old parkour enthusiast said In a corner of suburban Singapore, Betty Boon vaults a guardrail, crawls underneath a slide, executes forward shoulder rolls and scales a steep slope, finishing the course to applause. “Good job,” the 69-year-old’s coach cheers. This is “geriatric parkour,” where about 20 retirees learned to tackle a series of relatively demanding exercises, building their agility and enjoying a sense of camaraderie. Boon, an upbeat grandmother, said learning parkour has aided her confidence and independence as she ages. “When you’re weak, you will be dependent on someone,” she said after sweating it out with her parkour classmates in suburban Toa Payoh,
HIGH HOPES: The power source is expected to have a future, as it is not dependent on the weather or light, and could be useful for places with large desalination facilities A Japanese water plant is harnessing the natural process of osmosis to generate renewable energy that could one day become a common power source. The possibility of generating power from osmosis — when water molecules pass from a less salty solution to a more salty one — has long been known. However, actually generating energy from that has proved more complicated, in part due the difficulty of designing the membrane through which the molecules pass. Engineers in Fukuoka, Japan, and their private partners think they might have cracked it, and have opened what is only the world’s second osmotic power plant. It generates
Chinese dissident artist Gao Zhen (高兟), famous for making provocative satirical sculptures of former Chinese leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東), was tried on Monday over accusations of “defaming national heroes and martyrs,” his wife and a rights group said. Gao, 69, who was detained in 2024 during a visit from the US, faces a maximum three-year prison sentence, said his wife, Zhao Yaliang (趙雅良), and Shane Yi, a researcher at the Chinese Human Rights Defenders group which operates outside the nation. The closed-door, one-day trial took place at Sanhe City People’s Court in Hebei Province neighboring the capital, Beijing, and ended without a
RSS