Saint Paul Pioneer Press

Published: Monday, July 9, 2001

Philip Blackburn is the creator of the marimba benches that will be installed at the Phalen Poetry Park in St. Paul. The benches can be played with mallets, like a xylophone.

NEIGHBORS: SPOTLIGHT ON ST. PAUL'S PHALEN POETRY PARK

Benches made for playing music

Marimbas-as-benches planned for poetry park

BY KARL J. KARLSON

Soon, visitors to St. Paul's Phalen Poetry Park will be able to enjoy a relaxing view of Lake Phalen from two new benches and then get up and play music on them. "St. Paul will have the first in the world. ... Not just one, but two marimba benches. There are none other,'' says Philip Blackburn, who has created the musical benches in the den of his Battle Creek area home. Blackburn is program director for the American Composers Forum, a St. Paul-based service organization for musicians, but he is also a singer and musician interested in improvisational instruments. And the benches qualify on that score.

The benches, which can be played like a xylophone by striking them with mallets, "are not tuned like your piano," Blackburn says. "You can't play "Mary Had a Little Lamb' on them. The keys on a piano are evenly spaced (for tone), but the bench is not. You have to play it to know its sounds.'' The benches are made of redwood 2-by-4s of varied lengths fitted with 3-inch-diameter PVC pipes that act as resonators. The pipes sit in a concave groove in bricks. They are held together with bungee cords and strapping. "If you nail or bolt them together, they won't sound, and the metal would rust,'' Blackburn says.

Constructing the benches took several months and many trips to Home Depot and the Ax Man Surplus store, he says. One bench is carved with the motto "Beat me with gentle prayers,'' a phrase from a Japanese temple where visitors can play gongs. The other is carved with a Latin word game in which five-letter words are arranged to read the same left to right, right to left, vertically and horizontally. Blackburn says the cube is a mind game that may mean, "What goes around, comes around.'' The marimba benches, too, he adds, are a mind game. "They are not tuned traditionally. You play them, and your brain and ear work to find what is good. It is a game of discovery.'' Blackburn says he is now working on installing the benches, which will be pegged into the ground and a concrete slab. He hopes to have them in place before an Aug. 25 joint performance of musicians and poets at the poetry park.

The benches, Blackburn says, may be the forerunners of a sonic playground that he wants to create. He also wants to construct an underground "loudspeaker" pipe system so that a poet could read poetry at the park's poetry bulletin board and be heard about 100 yards away. The words would come out of the mouth of a landscape dragon, another feature of the park.

Karl J. Karlson can be reached at kkarlson@pioneerpress.com or (651) 228-5260.

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