For the last 27 years, the Vegetable Orchestra in Vienna, Austria, has been playing with their food.
The 11 musicians that make up this unorthodox band prepare for their concerts by hollowing out carrots and celery, peeling onion skins and cutting aubergines (eggplants), and piling up fresh produce onstage to create their distinctive sounds. Throughout their decade-spanning history cooking up fresh new hits, the band has performed 344 concerts on their veggies, officially becoming the uncontested record holders for most concerts by a vegetable orchestra.
"We believe that we can produce sound that cannot be (easily) produced by other instruments. You can hear the difference. It sometimes sounds like animals, sometimes just like abstract sounds," says the Orchestra.
"You can say that the vegetables' 'hidden' inside sound life is brought to the surface and made visual during the performance."
But the group, who describe their music as "vegetable-style", says that the real point of their tunes (besides just having fun) is to demonstrate that music can come from all kinds of places – even the supermarket.
"You can make music out of nearly everything, each thing contains a very specific acoustic quality and represents an intricate universe of sound," they said. "Each thing could be a tool to open up that point of view."
Although nobody in the band remembers who exactly came up with this innovative idea in February 1998, all members came from musical backgrounds spanning multiple genres like electronic, rock, punk, and classical. Inspired by artists like Aphex Twin and John Cage (who composed the famously-silent song 4'33"), the band is constantly finding new sounds and developing new instruments.
Some of their classics include the carrot recorder, a cucumberphone, percussive pieces of aubergine or even a leek violin. The performers purchase all of the vegetables fresh the day of their performance, and the audience can see in live-time how the sounds of the instruments change as they break and dry out in the stage lights.
"In some cases, the changes of the sound while using the vegetable is characteristic for the piece," they say. "On the other hand, a melody instrument like the carrot recorder or the radirimba [radish marimba] should be constant, at least as long as the song lasts."
Naturally, these instruments are pretty single-use, so the band has a chef that turns all the unused vegetables into a soup for the concert-goers to enjoy after the performance. They then distribute the rest of the veg out to potential future radirimba players, or sort it into the organic waste.
Despite the fact that it's hard to come up with musical notations for a carrot, the Vegetable Orchestra does take their work seriously, and they have created their own system for composing and recording their pieces.
"The appearance varies from classical rhythm patterns, to graphical notations or comix, and some of them are rather abstract," they said. "As there was no knowledge in the beginning of how to write the music down on paper, we experimented and found our own way."
They encourage viewers to approach their concerts with an open-mind, and to consider all the fantastic ways music is present in our daily lives.
"We like to play in places with an open-minded audience, a concentrated atmosphere, and a good PA system," they said. "There are many possibilities and our music works in many different places" – which is true, considering they've toured across Europe and in hundreds of different venues.
The only thing that remains off-limits at their shows? Asking if the band is vegetarian or vegan.
"No we are not. Don't ask again," they said. "We've heard this question 3 million times."
Source: Guinness World Records