‘This is what broken sounds like’: 800 Philly school instruments awaiting repair to be used for symphony

by Samantha Melamed on February 1, 2017
Philadelphia Inquirer

As a small corps of musicians arrived on a recent morning, Jeremy Thal gathered them into a loose huddle and laid out the day’s mission.

“We know what one broken tuba sounds like,” he said. “Now, we’re kind of curious what four broken tubas sound like. So, everyone grab a horn that has a leak — a sizable leak like this one, that’s missing a valve.”

A half-hour later, a quartet was assembled: a French horn, approximately one-and-a-half trombones, and a French horn-meets- trumpet Frankenstein they were calling a French hornet. “We’ll do two normal notes, and two notes of weirds,” Thal suggested. Then they played — a sound that was a little bit Billie Holiday, a little bit pack of feral cats.