RECYCLED MUSIC
Alex Shapiro
2024

RECYCLED MUSIC expands musicians' and audiences' thinking about what music can be: not necessarily melody and rhythm, but sound and texture. Possibly the very first trash—electroacoustic minimalist wind band work, it merges the realms of performance and environmental art.

A piece of music also has the power to have a meaningful impact on how listeners perceive the world around them. If a message is attached, audience members go home thinking—and maybe talking with others— about something that might not have been on their minds two hours earlier. 

Here, the topic of human pollution versus the health of our planet is addressed by juxtaposing the organic presence of rocks throughout the audio track with the sound of man-made objects that litter the world, as played by the musicians. It's a message wrapped in a musical experiment: how can we encourage people to hear, to care about hearing, and to focus on something that's rather still and nearly uneventful, lacking rhythmic grooves and an obvious melody? It took the planet’s glaciers tens of thousands of years to form the rocky landscape we know. It’s taken humans merely 100 years to do harm to this beautiful place and its creatures. This piece only takes four minutes.

My hope is that everyone on both sides of the stage will realize how much power they have to make a very positive difference.

Alex Shapiro
San Juan Island, WA
November 2024