Former longtime Tampa Resident and Musician Joe Popp is spending time in Paris.
He's working on a project to make music out of the sounds of the Eiffel Tower - sounds generated when composer Joseph Bertolozzi strikes parts of the famed tower with a mallet or other assorted things.
According to The New York Times:
His mission is to “play the Eiffel Tower” by striking its surfaces, collecting sounds through a microphone and using them as samples for an hourlong composition called “Tower Music.” He eventually hopes for a live, on-site performance of the work to celebrate the tower’s 125th anniversary next year. “I’m exhilarated to be here,” Mr. Bertolozzi said, just before striking a wall with a sheepskin-padded log hanging from a leather strap. “I’ve been planning this for so long.”
This isn't the first time Bertolozzi has made music on a structure made for a lot of traffic. An earlier project used the Mid Hudson Bridge to generate musical sounds.
Popp himself is known for heavier metal. He and his band played the witches in a 1997 American Stage Shakespeare in the Park production of Macbeth, for which Popp wrote the score. More recently, after moving to New York in 2000, he penned the score for Pericles, Prince of Tires, which was performed by The Jobsite Theater in Tampa in 2009 and 2010 and later played in New York.
