Our Music Blog : 2017, Term 3, Week 2: Rubbish Music?

This week's tongue twister - how fast can you say it?

This week we continue to look at, and listen to, interesting instruments. This weeks instruments are rubbish . . .

Find Paraguay and find New Zealand.

Some vocabulary:
Paraguay - is a country in South America. It's capital city is called Asunción. It is land locked which means it has no coast and no sea. Its neighbours are Argentina, Brazil and Bolivia.
philharmonic - a full size orchestra may be called a symphony orchestra or a philharmonic orchestra, and includes strings, brass, woodwind and percussion instruments.
land fill - a dump or tip where rubbish is taken. After a while, it is often buried or covered over with soil.

Cateura is the biggest rubbish dump in Paraguay, a country in South America. The families nearby all work at the rubbish dump. They are very poor, and they live in very poor conditions. Over 40% of the children don't finish their schooling as their parents need them to help work in the land fill. Drugs and gangs are a problem. An environmental engineer called Favio Chávez was working on a recycling project at Cateura, and he wanted to do something to help stop the kids playing in the rubbish landfill and getting into trouble. Chávez had a musical background, so when a rubbish picker found an old violin, they recycled it to make a new instrument and then went on to make more instruments from the recycled rubbish, and organised a group of children to learn to play them. It was difficult finding a place to practise, and there were many obstacles, but the children were keen to learn and worked hard with Chávez to form an orchestra. News started to spread about this amazing group of children and their orchestra leader, and eventually the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura travelled all over the world to sold-out performances.

Here is a short documentary about the orchestra and some images of the instruments they play.

Here is some information about a film, called Landfillharmonic made about the group. There are lots of images of the orchestra and Cateura - showing the landfill, the instruments, and their community,

In this video, the orchestra are playing Beethoven's Ode to Joy at a concert in Holland.
Here are some videos - of varying quality recording and sound - of the Landfillharmonic orchestra.

The orchestra from last year will remember this piece of music called "Canon" by Pachabel.

And Eine kleine Nachtmusik (A little night music) by Mozart. You can compare it with a standard orchestral version here.