Skip LaPlante

SuniSkip La Plante invents, builds, composes for, performs on and teaches with musical instruments built from trash. He co-founded the composer’s collective MUSIC FOR HOMEMADE INSTRUMENTS in 1975. He has had about 200 compositions performed professionally, many for MFHI and most of the rest composed for theater and modern dance companies in NYC. He has created somewhere between 200 and 300 instruments for his own projects, and tens of thousands more in workshops in schools, museums, etc around the US. These instruments run the gamut from simple, such as collections of tin cans used as percussion instruments, to the complex, such as replicas of instruments by microtonal pioneers Harry Partch and Julian Carillo in 43 pitch per octave just intonation and 96 pitch per octave equal temperament respectively. He lived in Indonesia for two years, studying both musical performance and gamelan building, and has performed extensively with Gamelan Kusuma Laras and Gamelan Son of Lion in the US. Working with Bash The Trash over the last 20 years, he’s done about 1500 performances in schools thruout the northeast, as well as many instrument building workshops. He is also a teaching artist at NYC’s Materials for the Arts, which receives donations of unwanted items from corporations and makes the items available to teachers and artists. He is an incorrigible backpacker, whose favorite food is wild raspberries.