Tom’s Song

A wooden container can be entered via a door. Old portable LP players and their speakers create a floor covering and music boxes with their pianola-like paper scores hang down from the ceiling. An elevated pathway allows the spectator to walk through the room. Each music box and LP player have their own part to play in the mechanical orchestra whose prime role is to accompany the one LP of Tom singing his song and accompanying himself on the ukulele.

Every LP player has it’s own specifically composed LP. Whistled harmonies, the strumming of banjos and tolling of bells create the multi-voiced LP accompaniment for Tom’s song. The hanging music box scores are paper cards punctured with holes and fed through the metal teeth of the music boxes, which hang from the ceiling above. As with the LP players, each music box plays it’s own composed score to create an accompanying orchestra for Tom’s song. Mechanically operated, each LP player and music box will start at the same time. Once each instrument has come to the end of it’s own score, they collectively re-start to play it over again.

In Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bete a garden shed holds the jewels, treasures and powers of the Beast. In the shed of Tom’s Song, we find a hanging mechanical sound garden of memories and song and is dedicated to all elderly men and their ukuleles.