Stella Artois Chalice Symphony

Eek! - long time no blog. They say all work and no play makes Matt a dull boy...

So, what links Belgium's best selling beer "Stella Artois", American indie rock band "Cold War Kids", musical robot sculptor from the MIT Media Lab, Andy Cavatorta, and me, Matt Nolan, a cymbal maker from England?

Well, this is something I've had to keep under my hat for almost a year: The Stella Artois Chalice Symphony. What's that you say? Last March I had an email and then a phone call from Mother Industries, an ad agency in New York. They'd seen my work for Bjork on the Gameleste and wondered if Bjorgvin Tomasson and I could get together again to make some musical instruments based around the Stella Artois beer glass - what they call their Chalice. I called Bjorgvin but he was in the middle of a bespoke pipe organ build that was going to keep him busy until September. Shame. Though it had me thinking about other folks who might make a good collaborator.

Then I got an email from Andy Cavatorta which asked, without giving too much away, if I'd been approached about this as he had too. Pretty quickly we were both making plans about how we could work on this potential project together. Andy had also made an instrument for Bjork's Biophilia project. So, I ran out and trawled a few bars in town, trying to buy a couple of Stella Chalices. Surprisingly difficult but, in the end, I got a pair of the pint sized ones. I did some experiments on these and made a couple of ideas videos to send to Andy and Mother. This thing was all about glass. Here I am, a metal percussion craftsman who mostly makes things using large hammers, dealing with glass ;-)

First I had to get Frankfurt Musikmesse out of the way but, straight afterwards, I was off to Brooklyn to Andy's studio on Flatbush Avenue. This is a very cool place. It is an open plan shared space including many small creative companies. There is lots of cross-pollination of ideas there. We were sharing the floor with a Genetics Lab, a Broadway Costume and Set Designer, an expert Researcher into Big Data and a Greek lady with a French accent who makes artistic sculptures which are inflatable. That's just the half of it...

Separately, and without conferring, Andy and I had both suggested to Mother that what they really needed was a glass Pyrophone - or Flame Organ. They liked this idea. You could say that they warmed to it immediately. Thinking in terms of "Symphony", I was also imagining things like giant chalices fashioned into Timpani and some kind of glass Bell Tree. Also there was the prospect of bowed glass. Using a violin or bass bow on gongs and cymbals is something I do a lot and it works well on glass too. The timps idea died pretty quickly, we were going to be working with the pre-existing chalices only. Andy was thinking struck and bowed tuned chalices also and the Hive and Violina ideas were already crystalising inside his head.

Andy worked mostly as the overall architect and project manager, also writing the upper levels of real-time software - all the instruments would be robotic and MIDI controlled. We had Karl Biewald for mechanical design smarts and, thankfully, also his giant CNC machine. Marina Litvinskaya was also key to the whole thing, doing lots of fabrication with a great artistic eye - initially paper and cardboard maquettes, later on a lot of the actual build. My main job was to be the physics of sound guy - to investigate and plan note ranges, figure out how to tune the glass, etc. I also ended up helping with the mechanical build, writing actuator code for Arduinos and soldering mosfet driver boards. All hands to the pump! Throughout the project, there was a revolving door of other cast members too, helping out with various things.

We had 3 sizes of Chalice to play with - and lots and lots of boxes full of them (at the beginning at least!) 33, 40 and 50cl Chalices - in nice thin, musical, untempered glass. The pint chalices I had got in the UK were thick, heavy, clunky sounding and very easily shattered tempered glass. There was no way we could have cut down and tuned those. In the basement at Flatbush, with a small diamond blade tile cutter, I figured out the extremeties of the tuning ranges that still sounded good for each of the 3 Chalices. I found that when you bow a chalice it sounds a few cents flat than when you strike it with a beater. I then went ahead and tuned up 18+ Chalices for the Violina and 24+ Chalices for the Hive - all of this with help and skills from Leo Tecosky and the facilites in his own workshop and the workshop and Brooklyn Glass.

I will continue this blog a little later - and add some photos and video to make it properly interesting. But first, more of that work that makes Matt a dull boy...