Playing With Food And Making Music

The Vienna Vegetable Orchestra makes unique organic music, using instruments made from vegetables. Pepper trumpets, leek violins, celery bongos, cucumberphones, pumpkin drums – these are just a handful of instruments used by the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra to entertain audiences everywhere, with their organic music. This one-of-a-kind music group was born when its current members were students. At first they started playing vegetable instruments, as a joke, but quickly realized they might be on to something, and took their work more seriously. The dozen members of the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra carve their instruments themselves, using whatever vegetables are available, at the location of their performance. After 12 years of making vegetable music, the group has learned what type of vegetables sound better in every country, judging by a range of factors, such as temperature and water content. The Vienna Vegetable Orchestra needs 70 kilograms of fresh vegetables for every concert, and three hours to carve the instruments they use. But their music wouldn’t exist without modern technological equipment, like amplifiers or sophisticated microphones. Combined with the squeaking of cucumbers, crackling of cabbage leaves and banging of aubergines, they create a hypnotic type of music, described as something between techno music and whale songs.