The Horse - Matthew Herbert & London Contemporary Orchestra (2023)

This is a very interesting project.

Herbert (o_O), never one to do things in a standard way, acquired the biggest horse skeleton he could find, because… horse skeleton, I guess.

But what emerged is fascinating in a number of different dimensions. He had a wide array of instruments made from the skeleton: bone flutes, a harp sort of thing from the pelvic bone, bowed instruments of horse hair (it doesn’t say, but skeletons don’t have hair, as such, so i assume the non-osseous parts came from a different horse).

Then he assembled a large array of musicians, playing both these horse bone instruments as well as more traditional ones, and put together an interesting examination of some of the earliest forms of music we know of. Man has been making music for millennia, and crafting animals into instruments nearly for nearly as long.

This is heavy on atmophere and texture, and is quite enthralling.