Trapezoidal monochords made by Gunnar Schonbeck, with help from his students.
Photo by Jason Reinhold.
Over fifty years, Gunnar Schonbeck built a collection of unlikely musical instruments: a 9-foot banjo, a “Western Gamelan”1 made from automobile leaf springs, a chamber orchestra of trapezoidal monochords, and a myriad of steel pan drums, zithers, pan pipes, plumbing pipe chimes, ukuleles made from coconuts, and countless others. Schonbeck, who taught composition and ethnomusicology at nearby Bennington College, believed that everyone was a musician, and created compositions and instruments that reflected that belief— as posters for his concerts often said, “no experience required.”
Schonbeck’s inventiveness stemmed from a comparatively simple concept: “People have a notion that musical instruments must be made of certain things,” said Schonbeck. “In fact, they usually have grown out of what’s been readily available in an environment.”2 To this end, he collected materials—from rebar and steel tanks to car parts, airplane fuselages, and plumbing—with interesting sonic properties from acquaintances in the Bennington community, from fellow staff and faculty at the college, as well as from the local dump. Schonbeck worked with his students to use this library of objects to fabricate instruments. Former students fondly recall making and tuning trapezoidal monochords—single-stringed instruments made from wood and metal wire—with Schonbeck giving lessons in applied physics and music theory as they worked.
Schonbeck’s openness towards incorporating unusual materials in his instruments was shared by a number of visual artists active in America and Europe in the 20th century—an affinity that Schonbeck hinted at by titling many of his musical compositions “Collages.” Objects from everyday life can be seen in paintings, collages, and sculptures by Louise Bourgeois, Marcel Duchamp, Louise Nevelson, Robert Rauschenberg, Betye Saar, and many others. These artists combined traditional media, such
as paint, canvas, stone, and wood, with tin cans, tires, and spools, creating works that asked viewers to consider the potential of familiar objects when used within new contexts.
This experimentation with nontraditional materials extended to contemporary music as well, with composers such as John Cage creating compositions to be played on pianos whose strings had been prepared with screws, bolts, nuts, or weather stripping. Each material produced a different sound, depending on its placement within the instrument. As Schonbeck was fond of saying, “Everything has its sound. You just have to bring it out.”3
The instruments made by Schonbeck and his students took this defiance of tradition even one step further. Some instruments take familiar shapes, but are fabricated at a scale so large that they must be played in new and unfamiliar ways, such as the enormous octo-bass banjo and the 10-foot-tall congas made of aircraft parts. Others bear little resemblance to instruments usually found in modern orchestras and bands, such as a series of plywood boxes each with a single bar resonator called Sound Towers or Bass Metalophones (best played with a large, soft mallet) or a sculptural rack of metal chimes, reminiscent of a mobile by Alexander Calder. Schonbeck’s instruments were often painted
in friendly, playful “Rust-Oleum” colors— red, green, orange, yellow, and blue—and labeled with his signature stencil design saying simply “SCHONBECK,” a marked difference from the dark wood and gleaming metal that characterize many traditional musical instruments.
The unfamiliarity of these instruments, and their sheer joyfulness, was born in part from Schonbeck’s own belief in universal musicality: if no one knew how to play them, then everyone was equally a novice—or equally an expert. By the peak of his career, Schonbeck had assembled more than 1,000 handmade instruments, which were played by as many as 300 volunteer musicians at a time during his wildly inclusive community events—part concerts, part parades, part block parties. Whether held in Bennington’s Commons Building or farmers’ meadows, advertised in local newspapers, these multimedia
extravaganzas became highly anticipated social gatherings for Bennington College students, faculty, staff, and local residents.
Schonbeck’s numerous musical “Collages” incorporated marching band songs, Japanese-influenced “sound paintings,” and Greek choruses with idiosyncratic instrumentation that he often taught to attendees at his events. First-timers sang, shouted, strummed, and clapped alongside professional musicians from around the globe. The Collages were semi-improvisational, with Schonbeck composing and arranging some of the music in advance and then, while conducting, deciding how long a section would be, and whether it should be included at all. Gunnar Schonbeck’s daughter, Katy Schonbeck, recalls that “his on-the-spot compositional choices were intended to create the feeling of a cultural moment in time” such as “the
Left to right: leaf spring air tank metalophone, steel pan drums, leaf spring gamelan metalophone and chime rack (metal), marked with the signature “SCHONBECK” stencil. Photo by Jason Reinhold.feeling of being in a Persian market” or a Ming Dynasty court. Titles of Schonbeck’s Collages included “The Vikings,” “The Egyptians,” “The Great Kiva,” and “Ode to Confucius.”4 Schonbeck's compositions were played not only within the context of communal concerts but also by professional musicians, who admired his ardently held belief in universal human musicality.
Over the course of his life, Schonbeck’s unusual “instrumentarium” gradually accumulated in his garage and the top floor of the Commons Building at Bennington College, where famed modern dancer and choreographer Martha Graham once had her studio. In 2011, Nicholas Brooke—a composer and professor at Bennington— offered to show the collection to Bang on a Can All-Star Mark Stewart, who was captivated by the instruments. Bennington was, at that time, preparing to renovate the Commons, and Stewart and Brooke worked with Sue Killam, MASS MoCA’s Managing Director of Performing Arts, and Joseph Thompson, MASS MoCA’s Founding Director, to relocate most of the surviving instruments to the museum’s campus.
Visitors during the museum’s Solid Sound Festival that summer were delighted by a temporary installation of Schonbeck’s instruments, and musicians performing at MASS MoCA immediately found them irresistible: members of Wilco played the instruments alongside the museum’s Sol LeWitt wall drawings, and Bang on a Can experimented with them throughout their month-long residency. In the years since, musicians, led by Stewart and Wilco’s Glenn Kotche, have explored Schonbeck’s instruments during residencies at MASS MoCA.
The performance and practice spaces in MASS MoCA’s Building 6 were conceived through Stewart’s curatorial and musical guidance, with the enthusiastic cooperation of Schonbeck’s family and Bennington
College. In preparation for the opening of the Gunnar Schonbeck installation, Stewart worked with local luthiers and students to conserve and restore Schonbeck’s instruments, which visitors are welcome to handle and play. The installation also includes facsimiles of rhythms that originally hung in his classroom and posters advertising Schonbeck’s Collages, providing an insight into his teaching process. These spaces provide a laboratory for visitors and resident performers to experiment using some of the world’s most extraordinary instruments (and provide rehearsal spaces for the many musicians who create work and perform at MASS MoCA throughout the year). Enjoy playing your own musical creations…we only ask that you treat the instruments with the same care and respect that Schonbeck himself put into them.
—Mark Stewart and Alexandra Foradas
Gunnar Schonbeck with a Grecian-style lyre, which he made. Courtesy of the Schonbeck family.
1 A traditional gamelan is an Indonesian orchestra of metal instruments.
2 Toby Kahn, “Gunnar Schonbeck Proves the Sound of Music Can Come from Some Pretty Strange Places,” People, volume 17, no. 9.
3 Toby Kahn, “Gunnar Schonbeck Proves the Sound of Music Can Come from Some Pretty Strange Places.”
4 From an email to the authors on April 5, 2017.
Gunnar Schonbeck (1917–2005) was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He became a clarinetist, teaching at Smith College at the age of 16 and playing in the Works Progress Administration orchestras, the Boston Symphony, and the Military Band at West Point. Following his service in the U.S. Army in World War II, he traveled to Bennington, Vermont. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he started building his unique collection of handmade instruments. He was invited to visit Bennington College in 1945 as a chamber music teacher, and ultimately taught there from 1946 to 1999. Schonbeck also taught at The Putney School, Wellesley College, the Longy School of Music of Bard College, MIT, Harvard, and Middlebury College.
Gunnar Schonbeck: No Experience Required
On view beginning May 28, 2017