Berklee and Boston Conservatory Musicians to Play Fenway's Green Monster

On the night of October 10, nine percussionists will play the Green Monster as a musical instrument, using the monster’s natural drums to perform original compositions.

October 2, 2015

Nine hitters will take on Fenway Park’s Green Monster to bring it to life during HUBweek, a celebration of Boston’s artistic and technological creativity and innovation. But these hitters won’t be wielding baseball bats at home plate, they’ll be swinging mallets and drumsticks inside the famed structure.

On the night of October 10, nine percussionists will play the Green Monster—the nickname for the left field wall—as a musical instrument, using the Monster’s support structures as drums to perform original compositions. Meanwhile, sensors embedded in it will send information back to a projection map that will light up the structure in time with the music.

“We put all of our energy together, and that combined is turning this three-story metal Monster—one of our most iconic pieces of architecture in the city—into a living, breathing, moving, sounding entity that I think well captures that idea of monster creativity,” said Ryan Edwards ‘11, a coproducer of the Waking the Monster event.

Watch a video of percussionists exploring the Green Monster:

Edwards, a drummer and composer who was a performance major at Berklee, and Marie Finkelmeier, a drummer from New England Conservatory, are leading the Waking the Monster team of some two dozen artists, including several percussionists and composers from Berklee and Boston Conservatory.

Waking the Monster is the capstone piece in Illuminus Boston, a free music and projection art festival along Lansdowne Street that will feature about 30 artists and installations. Last year, Illuminus Boston held its first projection art event, called a “nuit blanche,” in the South End. This year, it's part of HUBweek, a festival sponsored by MIT, Harvard University, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Boston Globe. Illuminus Boston is directed by Jeff Grantz, who owns Materials and Methods and is the creative director of HUBweek.

To create the Waking the Monster piece, Edwards said, percussionists strapped on harnesses and “actually climbed on the Monster and sampled all these sounds, identified the areas that we liked, and then gave that map and a specific notation key and those samples to the composers and said, ‘Here’s the instrument, here’s what it sounds like, here are the physical parameters that you are writing for. Write us a piece.’”

The challenge was to figure out how to make the work musical and interesting. “You can bang on anything, but can it hold people’s attention? Can it be compositionally captivating?” he said.

Watch a clip from the rehearsal for Waking the Monster:

In addition to helping the musical end of the piece come together, Edwards and Finkelmeier brought in projection artist SAMO (Sam Okerstrom-Lang) from MassArt to design a motion graphic light display mapped to the Monster and synchronized with the music.

Waking the Monster will run as a dialogue between the Monster and artists at street level in which the Monster is activated or woken up for 10 or 15 minutes and then a musician on a smaller stage performs. The program will start at dusk and run continually throughout the night, on the part of the structure facing Lansdowne Street. The event date was moved from October 3 and 4 to October 10 due to rain.