Found Objects
Over coffee, Stewart picks up the white ceramic salt and pepper shakers on the table. Tapping the two bulbous bases against each other, he produces a dull clacking. “This does resemble the sound of two little rounded stones being struck together,” Stewart says, almost surprised, as if he had wanted to mimic that very sound. Tapping the shakers together again, he moves them to his lips, formed into an O shape. With his mouth as resonator, like the hollow body of a guitar, the clacks amplify, wowing in vibration.
“When performing,” Stewart explains, “I want to generate interest through a nice balance between the repetition of the beat and the variations between timbre and pitch.” And so, while drumming on plate glass, if he finds that its dull resonance makes for dull listening, he’ll drag or rub his homemade mallets, capped with toy bouncy balls, across the surface. A sustained otherworldly note ensues.
Stewart wants to “explore non-musical sounds and make them musical, elicit some kind of secret, coax new sounds from them.” Every day he listens; every day he wonders. Stewart is nothing if not inquisitive, sharing his curiosity with others who show any interest. Ordinary objects. What else can they be? What else could they be?
He has used steel bowls, electrical conduits, canoe paddles and a sheet of paper. He has played a reconfigured, almost unrecognizable drum set. And he plays with water. One evening this past summer, he played next to John Ceprano’s Balanced Rock sculpture on the Ottawa River. Listening to the sounds of the water, he made a soft answer with his hand drum. As the river replied, Stewart playfully thrummed back. When no sound came back, that silence was heard as never before. As a bird uttered a cry, he grabbed the waterfowl call he had picked up at a hunting store. Bird and man made unfamiliar music together.
MC HAMMER Jesse Stewart down the way from campus at the corner of Bronson and Gladstone avenues. Found objects produce found sound. If Stewart doesn’t get the sound he likes from an object, he’ll experiment and adapt. In this case, he added bouncy balls to homemade mallets
Up the Tree House
BRANCHING OUT Jesse Stewart created this tree house for his children. Having spent considerable time and money on the project, he felt a tinge of sadness. What of all the children who have no home? He assuaged his concerns by hosting concerts inside the tree house. Admission is a donation to a children’s charity of their choosing
In Stewart’s backyard is a tree house he built for his two children. It’s solid, nothing rickety. The stairs are steep, ladder-like—and once up, you see the splayed trunk of the silver maple emerging through sawn holes.
Two windows have shutters with gingerbread cut-outs. Two skylights let in daylight, and battery-operated lights serve in the evening. Inside are a desk, benches and a bed, hideaway furniture made of simple boards. There’s a shallow cupboard for storing the weatherproof cushions.
Stewart intends to give concerts up here. It wouldn’t take many for a full house. There’s no room for a whole drum set, but Stewart’s simple frame drum fits just fine. So would other small instruments: pebbles, shells, a salad bowl. Voice might get into the picture. Here, “the space itself becomes the improv partner.”
Back in the ’90s, Stewart played jazz and rock in bar bands. A few years later, as his visual work went on display, he left the dark dinginess of a club for the clean light of an art gallery. Attentive audiences were a nice change too.
Since then, Stewart has been drawn to different acoustic environments. He’s played at a second-hand store in St. John’s, surrounded by playable blocks of ice at Toronto’s WinterCity in Nathan Phillips Square, at Vancouver’s International Jazz Festival and at the National Gallery of Canada in front of Barnett Newman’s immense, minimal Voice of Fire.
So far, the tree house accommodates only three people, with perhaps a fourth perched on the tiny balcony. Up here, Stewart is reminded that many children don’t have a tree house in which to play, quietly or madly. Some don’t even have a real home. He proposes audience members pay by donation to their favourite children’s charity.
The article states the following,
“Cosmologists reckon that nine billion years before the birth of the earth, the Big Bang happened and somehow all 118 chemical elements were produced.”
which is even more prominently displayed in the print edition.
That is quite untrue. The Big Bang (counting the minutes that followed) only produced 3 elements: Hydrogen, Helium, and Lithium.
All heavier elements were produced inside of stars, billions of years later.