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I just posted a pic of hamburger from 70+ years ago in the family album thread.

He thinks globally, plays locally
Eclectic is word for Ben Grossman One of specialties

is the hurdy-gurdy

ROBERT CREW
ARTS WRITER

Ben Grossman is a renaissance man. He's also a medieval man and a modern man and almost everything else in between.

One of his interests is percussion. Another is the hurdy-gurdy, also known as the vielle à roue. Using both skills, Grossman earns his living with groups as diverse as the Toronto Consort, the Aradia Ensemble and the Ensemble Polaris, to name but a few

The next chance to catch him in action is this Friday and Saturday, when he appears with the Toronto Consort in a program named The Flute's Pleasure Garden, featuring recorder virtuoso Alison Melville in a program of early music by people such as John Dowland, Diego Ortiz and others.

What is a hurdy-gurdy? What it is not is a barrel organ. Both are cranked by hand but there the similarity ends. The barrel organ only plays pre-programmed music. The monkey is optional.

The hurdy-gurdy is a stringed instrument and the strings are rubbed by a wheel, cranked by the player's right hand. The left hand plays on a couple of strings while several others ?- drone strings ?- sound the same note all the time.

The effect is somewhere between that of a violin and the bagpipes. Found throughout Europe from the 12th to the 19th centuries, hurdy-gurdies were played by everyone from beggars to kings. They weren't necessarily played very well, however.

"The hurdy-gurdy has developed rather a bad reputation because people don't set them up properly or make sure they stay in tune," Grossman says. "Interestingly enough, they are the people who tend to have the loudest instruments."

And he quotes a joke that apparently originated with the oud (a Middle Eastern lute, which he also plays): "We spend half our time tuning, the other half playing out of tune!"

The hurdy-gurdy player has to be a tinkerer, he says. "There are a lot of moving parts and they all have to be lined up just so to make a good sound and to play reliably.

"In some way, that's the instrument's curse. I have personally heard lots and lots of people who have hurdy-gurdies and are very enthusiastic about them but aren't able, willing or knowledgeable enough about them to keep them running properly. But they play them anyway."

Grossman, who now lives in Elora, grew up in North York, playing electric guitar and double bass and listening to the Sex Pistols, T Rex and Eno in his parents' basement.

"I was surrounded by Chinese and East Indian culture, pop music, experimental pop, the Weavers, Beatles, Beethoven, all the stuff that was on the stereo at home.

"That is my musical culture but what does it mean? How do I sort that out?"

He built synthesizers and experimented with tape loops and percussion instruments, studying tuning systems from around the world. He played frame drums from the Arabic world and the oud, studying Turkish music in Turkey and percussion in both Turkey and Toronto.

It all made him realize that he would never be a great master of Turkish classical music, "nor did I want to be. Devoting myself to it was not where my heart was. It is not an authentic voice for me. So, ironically, the process of getting into this very rich and complex musical tradition actually led me away from it."

And it led him back to his parents' basement and to experimentation. "The creation of new sound is really all that I am interested in and for me, that incorporates all of the other things I have done," says Grossman, who also designs soundscapes and composes music for theatre and film

He was intrigued by the hurdy-gurdy when he first heard one on a recording and some years later, began to play himself when he came across some hurdy-gurdy players who specialized in French folk music,

How does playing with the Toronto Consort fit in with all this? "When I first heard renaissance music, it was like a great kick to the head," Grossman says. "Here is this wonderful music and there is so much that seems to relate to eastern musical practices in terms of mode and rhythm and singing styles."

Medieval and renaissance music therefore became another kind of ethnic music, to absorb and integrate into everything else that he does. "It's fun and I love the music and working with those people is a treat beyond measure. They are amazing musicians and great people and I always learn so much preparing a concert with those guys."

Despite the eclecticism, there's one instrument missing. "I would love to play bagpipes. In some ways I think I play the hurdy-gurdy because I would love to play the pipes but my brain doesn't work that way."