Little music

Little Music, a collaboration between Jorge Macchi and Edgardo Rudnitzky, was produced in the occasion of the Biennial Prospect 1 New Orleans. The piece is located near the City Park, in the Bayou Saint John, a channel that used to connect Mississipi river with Pontchatrian lake. Together the artists have created five paddle boats that the public can ride, drawing from the tradition of paddle boats in City Park before Hurricane Katrina. While they acknowledge that “the tragedy of Katrina is an obvious and unavoidable background to the event,” their inspiration began with “the importance of music in New Orleans and the strong relation between African and American culture in this part of United States.”
Each one of the boats has the six paddle wheel associated to a giant kalimba installed on the back of the seat. The paddles have teeth that activate the metal keys of the instrument like in a musical box. In this way the people produce music when pedaling. The sounds coming from the boats mix at random but harmonically, due to the use of a pentatonic scale
The kalimba is an instrument in the percussion family. It is a modernized version of the African mbira. It is a sound box with metal keys attached to the top to give the different notes. It is also known as the African Thumb Piano. Several reeds or tines are plucked with the thumb or fingers, and the reed vibrations are amplified by a hollow box resonator or a sounding board. The name kalimba is a Bantu word which means ‘little music’.