Subtitles section Play video
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(gentle orchestral music)
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An ice instrument has the purity and the clarity of the heavenly realm.
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It's not of the earth in the way that a wooden instrument would be.
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There's so much potential in ice as an acoustic material.
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(classical piano music)
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My name is Tim Linhart, and I am the founder of ice music.
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Ice music is the music that we make on this orchestra of ice instruments.
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The idea first came to me about 21 years ago.
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I was an ice sculptor for many years.
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Decided one of my sculptures I'd like to build a giant violin.
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And I had a friend who was building guitars and he just asked the question:
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Gee, I wonder how that one's gonna sound?
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And that question has swallowed much of the rest of my life.
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The instruments are made of white ice, which is a mixture of snow and water.
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It's filled with snowflakes and air bubbles and all kind of different things going on.
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To make a single instrument a violin, or viola here, the ice part takes about five or six days.
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I can probably build the whole orchestra, here, in about seven or eight weeks.
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We have violins, violas, cellos, bass, guitars, mandolins, banjos, drums, and xylophone.
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Hold, hold, grazie.
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Ice music is not just classical music or experimental music, it's a wide variety of different things.
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This winter we'll put on about 45 concerts.
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The concert hall has a specific design.
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It's one giant ice cave.
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The igloo, right now, is 10 degrees Fahrenheit.
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It's definitely an issue in ice music that people's fingers get cold.
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People play with a variety of different kinds of gloves.
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Some people play barehanded, but for me the temperature is, you know, the thing that I really need to make ice music work.
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(audience clapping and cheering)
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So many people just cannot wrap their brain around a piece of ice making a sound, or a beautiful sound.
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When they come in to the ice concert hall, they're just very, very pleasantly surprised and that releases a real, kind of, a high for people.
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And then, wow, it's amazing!