More about Bash the Trash

Including

How Bash the Trash makes connections to other subjects

Why Make Instruments from Trash?

Reading and Writing connections

ABOUT BASH THE TRASH

I founded BTT about in 1987 ago to fulfill a need in elementary school education concerning recycling and the musical arts. At that time recycling seemed to be about to take off again, and I wanted to catch that wave with my programs. Back then it was almost purely a way to make some money off of my music. Little did I know that it would turn into an obsession and a philosophy.

Currently Bash the Trash performs regularly all over the NY-NJ-CT area and sporadically in other places. Although most of our shows take place in the schools, we have also performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Smithsonian Museum's Folklife Festival in Washington DC, the American Museum of Natural History and Liberty Science Center among many, many others.

WHY MAKE INSTRUMENTS FROM TRASH?

There are so many reasons to build instruments from trash.

First, from the instrument builder's point of view. Throughout the world, whenever somebody wanted a musical instrument, they would build one from whatever was lying around. If you lived near a rain forest, there was almost always some kind of bamboo to build flutes, xylophones, etc. If you lived in a desert there was clay to build drums or flutes. In the industrialized countries of the world one of the greatest resources is our own trash. And we have lots of it. So it just makes sense to build instruments from this great resource.

And the instruments sound great! As Alex Ross of the New York Times said: "...Bewitchingly beautiful and complex sounds." Jason Gross of the Village Voice said: "....The show was at once laughable, educational, ridiculous, and inspirational. Kids, try this at home."

From an educator's point of view, the reasons are even more compelling. Musical instruments are seductive for children. All kids like to bang on instruments, no exceptions. What makes it cool for educators is the wealth of connections to other subjects that can be shown to kids as related to instruments.

Science

For example, building musical instruments is pure science. When you talk about vibration, you're talking energy transfer and wave theory. When you talk about sound waves, you're talking about a part of the electromagnetic spectrum, the system by which most energy travels.

All this can be brought to a simple, demonstrable level by the use of musical instruments as examples of phenomena that students have probably already observed, but were not able to figure out why they happened.

For example, a simple xylophone has longer and shorter bars of wood. When the wood is struck, the bars vibrate. The longer the bar of wood, the longer the sound wave produced, and the lower the tone. The shorter the bar of wood, the higher the pitch.

Most kids have heard the change of pitch when a nail is hammered into a piece of wood. This takes place because the length of the nail that is able to vibrate gets shorter as it gets hammered in.

Another example is pouring water into a container with a narrow top. As the water is poured into the container, the air in the top of the container is vibrating. As the water level gets higher and higher, the amount of air gets smaller and smaller, and the pitch of the vibrating air gets higher in consequence.

Math

Music and math have an intimate relationship. Einstein himself was a competent violinist, and Richard Feynman, the Nobel prize winner was a drummer (the inspiration for his prize-winning work came from juggling plates). For the youngest kids, music is a wonderful counting game. Later on, when talking about quarter notes and sixteenth notes, kids are actually learning a useful application of fractions. A melody can be shown to have two components - pitch (high and low) and duration (long and short) and therefore is a great candidate to be shown as a bar graph.

Furthermore, music is a great thing for demonstrating organizational systems. Kids are always interesting in organizing and catagorizing what they see around them, and music is a good example. Music systems even show calculations in other bases than base 10 (y'know, we start all over again from 10 with 10+1, 10+2, etc. Music systems are often in base 4 or even 12, a great demonstration of the practical uses of base mathematics. [The US system of measurement is another example, i.e. that 12 inches equals a foot, and so on. This is base 12.]

Cultural Studies

This one is a natural, since, after all, all musical instruments used even in the most sophisticated classical settings originated from simple musical instruments built from whatever was was in the back yard. But in education, it's great to try to immerse the students in whatever culture they may be studying. So, if they are looking at Chinese culture it is a good idea to have the kids listen to some Chinese music, classical as well as post-revolutionary; also they should see some Chinese opera. Not only is it great fun, but it presents a vital side of the vast Chinese culture.

Folk music also shows a lot about the culture that created it. After all, nomadic cultures tend to create instruments that fit into the camel pack, or beltpack or whatever (Toyota pickup truck?). Agricultural societies tend to build instruments that are bigger than what can be carried by one person, or llama, or whatever.

Reading and Writing

Music and Text have been partners ever since people could grunt in time to a log beating. Students can find a different route into literature by discovering the connections between these two subjects. Some obvious avenues are by combining sounds of homemade instruments into stories that the children write themselves. It's just another way to insinuate reading and writing into their lives.

Other ways are to use song and rap along with homemade instruments to encourage kids to work with the concepts of rhyme and rhythm. Believe it or not, trying to put together raps teaches quite sophisticated concepts of linguistics, such as phonemes, syntax and rhythmic foots.

Of course, the real draw of trash instruments is that they are really on a kid's level. They are simple to build, fun to play, and they really work. The real worth of these instruments comes along in the way that they can entice even the most reticent child to have fun while learning.

Recycling

Making instruments from trash has clear connections to two of the three "R's" of recycling: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.

Reduce is the art of actually slimming down the flow of trash per household. For example, buying food with a minimum of packaging is reducing. Building instruments doesn't really apply to this.

Reuse is really where we come in. We reuse just about everything to build our instruments except perishable items. While we do use styrofoam and plastic bottles and fishing line and cardboard boxes, we have yet to create a child-friendly instrument from a banana peel, or apple core. Oh well.

Recycle. Let's face it. While our instruments are cool, they probably will not last forever. So, after the kids bash 'em and beat 'em to death, they will then recycle them. What a concept.

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