Video: New Jerseyites find music in a flower pot

On Jan. 17, Montrealer Jacques Lacombe will preside over the American premiere of Tan Dun’s Earth Concerto with the New Jersey Symphony. To prepare, guest percussion soloist David Cossin and his colleagues went out to find a gong-type tone to accompany the sounds of our Earth.

So they went to a garden centre.

I have a great-aunt (alive and well and living on her own nine weeks shy of her 102nd birthday) who was a ceramic artist and teacher, and remember a childhood lesson on how the best-fired clay produces the clearest tone.

But I don’t think she would have allowed me to walk through her studio with mallets:

John Terauds