As part of the London Design Biennale, Andrew Scott and Hangrui Zhang have created the London Orchestra From Waste Materials, a project that creates instruments from discarded materials and plays new music composed for them.
The project provides a way of using the huge amounts of waste created in a city as big as London to create joy through music and a sense of community during the city’s lockdown.
The first step was to create the instruments. Designer and artist Andrew Scott used plastic bags to make bellows for bagpipes and organs; PVC tubing, broken brooms and crutches combined with clothes hangers and latex gloves to make flutes and other woodwinds; and discarded cooking-oil drums collected from the street which were broken down and welded together again to create steel string-instruments.
Composer and musician Hangrui Zhang then created musical compositions to be played by the instruments in three movements over 60 pages of sheet music, that takes around 30 minutes to perform.
In winter 2020/2021, Scott and Zhang took some of the instruments made from waste materials with a few friends out into the street and had an impromptu ‘concert.’ “Strangers and passersby were much more intrigued than we had anticipated and several were enthusiastic about joining in this event. The joy that this event brought about was palpable.”
The London Orchestra From Waste Materials proposes more ‘concerts’ and collaborations with musicians, as well as workshops to create new instruments. Working with new composers, they hope to play different types of music from classical to jazz to reggae.
The project statement reads: “Musical instruments are usually expensive and only a privileged few have access to them. In creating our instruments we are able to empower people both young and old to be able to access the benefits inherent in making music, exposing them to these otherwise inaccessible
tools of musical creation (perhaps sparking an interest which may last a lifetime) while simultaneously highlighting the error in deeming much of
what we discard to be ‘trash’.”
Andrew Scott is a designer and an artist and graduate of the Royal College of Art (2020), while Hangrui Zhang is a composer and graduate of the Royal College of Music (2021).
More on the London Orchestra of Waste Materials
More on the London Design Biennale
