Being Green in 2013: Week 10

Music Meets Recycling

What to do with your old instruments and how to make new ones out of trash

We all made our own instruments in preschool, putting beans in tin cans and rubber bands around shoe boxes, but recycled instruments are for big kids too! Making instruments out of recycled parts can be a fun DIY project and a great way to salvage perfectly good, quality materials or old, broken instruments.

Tons of musical instruments end up in landfills each year. Last year, Hunter College High School of New York's upper east side sparked controversy when around 20 cellos and violins were left on the curbside to be picked up with the school's trash. According to DNAinfo New York, passers-by were disgusted by the sight of the discarded instruments, calling the careless act a "disgrace of our public funding" and walking home with cellos stashed in strollers. A representative from the school claimed that instruments with broken soundboards were thrown out because they were beyond repair, but one woman who took three violins from the pile with the intention to have them refurbished and donated pointed out that hundreds of children at schools nearby without music programs and instruments would appreciate those ones.

In another case of careless instrument disposal, last January a man in Texas found a violin in a neighbor's curbside garbage bin and had it appraised on the PBS television show "Antiques Roadshow." Turns out this man found an instrument that, with a simple cleaning procedure, would be worth as much as $50,000!

Fixing, donating, or selling old instruments is always a better option than throwing them in the trash. Here in Ann Arbor, old instruments can be donated to Kiwanis Thrift Shop, Salvation Army, and many of the other second-hand stores listed in the Mrecycle Blog's "Being Green in 2013: Week 8" post. Music Go Round, a used musical instrument dealer in Ann Arbor, also buys, sells, and trades used instruments.

Homemade musical instruments from recycled parts are another way to combine your passions for music and recycling. Cigar box guitars, for example, have become a phenomenon in recent years, with online forums, plans, and how-to guides for making the instruments. Innovative guitar makers also make guitars from old and broken skateboards. Buzzfeed and Earth911 have both published articles featuring various DIY musical instrument projects. 

A documentary titled Landfill Harmonic, scheduled for release in January 2014, tells the story of a Paraguayan slum built on top of a landfill where local musician Favio Chavez started a music school in which students play instruments made entirely out of recycled materials found in their trash dump. The youth orchestra calls themselves the "Recycled Orchestra." The movie's webpage says, "Landfill Harmonic is a beautiful story about the transformative power of music, which also highlights two vital issues of our times: poverty and waste pollution." Click here to view the documentary trailer.

Do recycled instruments have a place at U-M? With over 1200 student groups at U-M, it might surprise you that we don't already have our own "recycled orchestra." U-M School of Music student Annick Odom gave her input on the topic of instruments from recycled materials. Spoken like a true musician, Annick says:

I think learning to be more open about what makes a violin a violin or a clarinet a clarinet would lead to so many more opportunities for the love of music to be more accessible to the masses. It would be really interesting to have a course at U-M that lets you create an instrument. We do have a wonderful creative arts orchestra and an improvisational forms course which have opened my eyes to the possibilities of music as well as the current boundaries of the classical music world.

A U-M course on creating your own instrument would be a fantastic way to incorporate the musical and visual arts into the triple R (Reduce Reuse Recycle) cycle. Do I sense a collaboration between the U-M School of Music and the U-M School of Art and Design coming on???