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Maestro Gives New Meaning to Traffic Jam
Daniel J. Wakin and
HIGHLAND, N.Y.
A SKINNY laborer with a flaming skull tattooed on his upper arm shimmied up an I-beam 135 feet over the Hudson River. He taped two tiny microphones to a cable holding up the bridge deck and took a rubber mallet out of his knapsack.
With his arm outlined by the blue sky, he whacked away at the cable as a sound engineer recorded the dull thuds. “You’ll want to give your full might when you hit it,” yelled Joseph Bertolozzi, a composer leading this expedition one day late last month. The cable swayed slightly with each stroke.
The purpose of the test was to check not the bridge’s soundness but its sound. The rather bizarre scene on the Franklin D. Roosevelt Mid-Hudson Bridge near Poughkeepsie was part of Mr. Bertolozzi’s audacious plan to transform the span into an orchestra, compose a piece for it, then actually perform the work live with a small army of percussionists. It is a musical undertaking on a vast scale and one that has brought oddly harmonious marriages among the worlds of art and government, music and engineering.
Mr. Bertolozzi, 48, has been meticulously harvesting a multitude of sounds from the structure: not just the cables, which on playback create woo-wooing effects or sounds like a bass guitar, but the spindles below guardrails, the rails themselves, the interior and flanges of innumerable I-beams, connecting metal plates and the grates between walkways.
He sent mounds of steel pellets down the interior of a 315-foot steel tower to create a rain-stick effect. He collected clanks from the “Hudson River Estuary” sign, with its blue sturgeon emblem. An organist as well as a composer, Mr. Bertolozzi even hopes to turn large upright conduits for power lines into rough organ pipes.
“I only play big instruments,” he said.
Each sound is sampled by a computer program and labeled. From the samples Mr. Bertolozzi is isolating pitches and percussive effects and will use them to compose and record a 45- to 60-minute suite called “Bridge Music.”
If all goes according to plan, the project will culminate in public performances piggybacked on celebrations in 2009 commemorating the 400th anniversaries of Henry Hudson’s trip up the river and Samuel de Champlain’s journey to the lake named after him. Twenty-two percussionists stationed along the bridge and a singer at the top of one of the towers will perform the work, to be transmitted over loudspeakers to audiences on the riverbanks.
The New York State Bridge Authority has given its approval, lending Mr. Bertolozzi workers during his handful of visits so far and accepting his presence with amused benevolence. He awaits word from the Hudson-Fulton-Champlain Quadricentennial Commission on whether it will endorse the project or provide funds.
An endorsement, at least, would help Mr. Bertolozzi raise money from other sources. He estimates he needs $1.8 million, an outlandish sum for an obscure composer without a major institutional connection.
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UP on the bridge, while huge freighters slowly sailed down the Hudson as if they were whales, Mr. Bertolozzi’s persistence — bordering on obsession — had the whiff of Ahab.
“I’m not trying to prove anything,” said Mr. Bertolozzi, who has amassed an impressive amount of information about bridge engineering along the way. “I just want to play the bridge. Whoever thought anybody would get to this point doing something like this?”
While his quest may seem quixotic, elements of Mr. Bertolozzi’s idea have precedents in music history. Found instruments from tire rims to metal sheets have often been used in percussion pieces. Big art is often found in natural settings, as with Mount Rushmore or a Christo installation. Composers like Ives and Copland celebrated the American outdoors too.
Such points are made by Andrew Tomasello, an associate professor of music at Baruch College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, in a testimonial that Mr. Bertolozzi includes in a packet of information laying out his vision and credentials. “The proposal is an exciting and original one,” Mr. Tomasello writes.
Bridges have inspired other composers. Tobias Picker’s “Keys to the City,” a concerto for piano and orchestra, evokes the Brooklyn Bridge and was performed on it during a celebration of its centenary in 1983. Last year Bill Fontana attached eight vibration sensors to the Millennium Bridge in London and transmitted the sounds to a room in the Tate Modern.
Mr. Bertolozzi has done something different.
“I’m actually using the bridge as an instrument,” he said. “It’s not aleatory. There’s no guesswork. I have an army of percussionists playing a percussion instrument.”
And then there is the setting. “Look at the theater I have,” Mr. Bertolozzi said, spreading his arms wide toward the Hudson. “Not only is the bridge magnificent, the venue is exalted.”
Early in the day Mr. Bertolozzi, wearing a black T-shirt under an unbuttoned burgundy shirt and black pants, collected sounds under the bridge road. He worked on a traveler, a motorized platform that gives bridge workers access to the underside of the deck.
Rick Warr, the worker who would later shimmy up to bang the cables, and another laborer, Deven Fisher, were there to help, wearing neon yellow-green shirts and handing up mallets, cleaning surfaces with alcohol and attaching the contact microphones. Ron Kuhnke, the sound engineer, sat at a laptop on the walkway above. The traveler vibrated with the passing of vehicles.
Mr. Bertolozzi used an array of striking instruments at each spot, in a set order, starting with two rubber mallets with the names of his wife, Sheila, and daughter, Sarah, inscribed on the handles. He used ball-peen, Lucite and rubber-coated hammers and a pair of dowels, warning a visitor about the potentially infection-bearing effects of the copious pigeon droppings.
Mr. Warr and Mr. Fisher helped willingly and took Mr. Bertolozzi’s unusual idea in stride. “He’s a good guy,” Mr. Fisher said. Mr. Warr added, “Easy day for us.” With their lunch break approaching at 11:45 a.m., Mr. Bertolozzi worked quickly, snatching up mallets and yelling to Mr. Kuhnke that he was moving to the next set of hammers. A train rumbled along the shore. “The sounds are unremarkable themselves,” Mr. Bertolozzi said. “It’s when you put them together that you make music.”
Mr. Bertolozzi, who lives in nearby Beacon, said he became interested in composing when he was 10. He studied organ, graduated from Vassar College and now earns his living as an organist at Vassar Temple in Poughkeepsie and the Lutheran Church of the Resurrection in Mount Kisco. He collects gongs and has created a battery of them for composition and performance. His catalog of more than 75 works includes pieces for orchestra, band, small chamber ensembles and organ.
He has long been a student of instrumental physics. Organs are a study in columns of air and resonance. His gongs taught him about how sound waves propagate across metal and how the kind of metal and its thickness alter the tone.
So when he looks at the bridge, he said, he sees something in its spindles and handrails and trusses and ropes that means more than suspension, support and transport. “It’s a whole percussion ensemble,” he said.
Mr. Bertolozzi said he had thought long and hard about the physics behind the sounds that elements of the bridge might produce. For the most part the solid steel structural elements of the bridge produced the thuds and clangs he expected, he said. But the suspension ropes, which are actually made of steel, were a surprise. “I was thinking that because they were so dense and so rigid they might act like a chime,” he said, or perhaps a bell.
“I was wrong,” he added, immensely pleased by a fruitful mistake.
The ropes, it turned out, were not so taut as to be immobile. When struck, they sway back and forth like a plucked guitar string. “When we finally played it,” he recalled, “the very short ones sounded like a bass guitar or marimba.”
Air is not a good conductor of sound, so he and his technicians have added microphones to the metal structure, just as an electric guitar has pickups on its body to capture and amplify the strings’ vibrations.
He handed over headphones so the sounds could be heard. The result was an otherworldly “Puh-THEW!-Whew!-Whew! ...”
But why go to the trouble to try a live performance when all the sounds are on his hard drive? “I could sample a cat in Bulgaria and sample someone drinking a glass of water and put it together,” he said, but living performers make the difference. “I wanted to put a human fingerprint on this project.”
SEVERAL strands of Mr. Bertolozzi’s career led to this place high above the Hudson. In 2004 he composed a piece for Poughkeepsie’s 150th anniversary that included using the band of the United States Military Academy at West Point, the stationing of trumpeters in two civic buildings and the ringing of the town’s church bells. “It was like playing the city,” he said. The gong music was another avenue.
The bridge idea was born, Mr. Bertolozzi said, in September 2004, when he and his wife returned home after a gong performance. Passing a poster of the Eiffel Tower (where they met and first kissed) in their home, Sheila Bertolozzi whimsically made a gong-striking gesture toward it. “And I said, ‘Of course!’ ” Mr. Bertolozzi recounted.
Perhaps there was music in the banging of the Eiffel Tower, he speculated. But Paris was impractical. “I thought, ‘What can we do here?’ ” Mr. Bertolozzi said. The bridge came to mind. Through a mutual friend he approached the bridge authority’s communications director, who was intrigued, and approached the agency’s executive director, George C. Sinnott.
Mr. Sinnott was skeptical. “Quite frankly people were wondering if Mr. Bertolozzi had his head screwed on straight,” he said. “Everybody wondered if this guy was a kook.” He had Mr. Bertolozzi checked out and found that he was a serious composer. Why not give him a chance? he thought. After all, the authority’s charter says it should act for the “economic and social benefit” of the community, and the bridges often play a role in charity events.
With the approval of the authority’s chief engineer, William J. Moreau, Mr. Bertolozzi was given permission in July 2006 to collect his first samples. He created “Bridge Funk,” a 2 minute 16 second calling card for the commissioners, who had to sign off on the project. (Available through josephbertolozzi.com, the piece will serve as a movement in the suite.) In November Mr. Bertolozzi was given 10 minutes at a board meeting to make his pitch. The commissioners heard “Bridge Funk” and gave approval.
The authority has stood behind the project, even urging the quadricentennial commission to approve it, despite scattered complaints that it is a waste of money, officials said.
“It’s a kick,” Mr. Sinnott said of the piece.
The bridge, its main span 1,500 feet long, is already a cultural symbol to its community. Built between 1925 and 1930, the soaring Gothic towers and suspension cables show up on logos of local businesses and organizations.
Mr. Moreau, the bridge’s longtime engineer, said he has always seen the bridge as a machine: a device that gets people from one place to another with the structural integrity to carry 35,000 vehicles each day but flexible enough to accommodate 40 inches of expansion and contraction along its length.
It also makes a lot of noise. “We’re very familiar with the screeches and groans that it makes,” Mr. Moreau said. But until Mr. Bertolozzi’s project, he added, “we never thought of it as a musical noise.”
So Mr. Bertolozzi’s proposal struck him as “pretty bizarre,” he said. “I had to conceptualize how the noise would be played without damaging the bridge.” During test runs, he said, the hammers and mallets make the paint on the ropes shake away like silver dandruff. “We’ll be dealing with that,” he said.
Since he has been watching Mr. Bertolozzi, Mr. Moreau has come to see a new dimension to his bridge, he said. “Bridge Funk” opened his eyes and ears. “The physics of it didn’t make a lot of sense to me at first,” he added, “but he’s teaching me something here.”
During one of the many lulls between setups and whamming Mr. Bertolozzi picked up two of the heavy wooden dowels from his bucket and faced the railing. With no microphones attached, he began to play the railing, striking the top in a rapid, jazzy beat and punctuating phrases with a rattling rake across the skinny balusters.
The metal pinged and rang with the heavy blows, and Mr. Bertolozzi increased the tempo, rocking on his heels, his shoulders rolling. The scarred wood began breaking in his hands. Splinters flew as he sweated in the midday sun.
For a moment it was the opposite of the careful sound-by-sound sampling. This was performance. Music. A boy playing on a bridge.
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