Heavy metal usually means a lot of racket . But on his farm in southwestern Tuscany, the German sculptor and musician Paul Fuchs, 74, cultivates the Giardino dei Suoni, his Garden of Sounds.
Weighing tons, his spindly abstractions of steel and bronze - “The Long I,” “Cut Out,” “0 + 1” - inscribe the landscape like quick strokes and squiggles of some titan’s pen. Rising as high as 30 meters they catch movement in the air and give forth the gentlest of music. “What I want is to make heavy things light,” Mr. Fuchs said . “That in turn makes my life difficult.”
Apart from the principal dwelling, a stable for the horses and a workshop that sometimes doubles as a gallery, his compound has a barn packed with an astonishment of instruments: a thunder sheet ; a suspended assemblage of hollowed-out wooden block s; assorted bells, whisks and sticks. There are motorized sound generators too, one outfitted with heavy-duty rubber boots.
Trained as a blacksmith, then as an artist, Mr. Fuchs has evolved into a musician without any formal training.
“The rhythm of the hammer on iron, the sheer physical work, was always music to me,” he said.
He plays every few days for his own enjoyment. Private tours of the grounds, conducted for groups of eight or more (by reservation only, at paul.fuchs@ tiscalinet.it), feature performances too.
“As a little boy,” Mr. Fuchs said, “I wanted to learn the violin, but my hands weren’t built for that. Working with metal, I could never mold them to conventional instruments. I made trumpets for other musicians and also horns of copper, wood and bronze that I could blow myself: simple sculptural tubes and cones that made amazing sounds. I still play them.”
He added: “I never copied things that already existed. The instruments were never Indian or Turkish or European. I never cared about playing the overture of some opera. I wanted my breath to open out into sound.”
Originally developed at the request of a music therapist, the spooky ballastsaiten (weighted strings) quickly became an integral part of the Fuchs paraphernalia. It consists of strings, attached weights and a drum head that resonates when the strings are brushed or plucked. Mr. Fuchs has also developed a sort of caveman’s xylophone of carefully selected granite plates.
Mr. Fuchs has collaborated with classical musicians as well as with more folkloric performers, like the American Indian flutist R. Carlos Nakai. “Paul intrigued me,” Mr. Nakai said. “I listened to the sounds he made and thought: ‘This is really special. ‘ ” Mr. Fuchs invited him on a tour of West Germany in 1988.
Pamela Hyde-Nakai, Mr. Nakai’s wife, remembers their tour.
“We traveled with a flatbed truck, with all this stuff on the back, and every time we had to perform, Paul had to lug it all off,” she said. “It was big and heavy. It was the most cumbersome way to put on a show I’d ever seen. It was quite the adventure . ”
For Mr. Fuchs, a collaborator’s musical pedigree is on one level completely unimportant.
“The only people who can be partners for me are people who think beyond music,” he said. “These days I work a lot with Hariolf Schlichtig, the violist of the Cherubini String Quartet and a professor at the Hochschule fur Musik und Theater in Munich. ”
When recently asked by a concert pianist if he considered himself a musician, Mr. Fuchs said he replied: “Not the way you are. I don’t have 24 keys in my pocket and all the harmonies that go with them. But I make music, and you make music too.” He added: “Am I a musician or a sound artist? Really, I don’t care.”
By MATTHEW GUREWITSCH
