(gentle orchestral music)
- [Tim] An ice instrument has the purity
and the clarity of the heavenly realm.
It's not of the earth in the way
that a wooden instrument would be.
There's so much potential in ice as an acoustic material.
(classical piano music)
My name is Tim Linhart, and I am the founder of ice music.
Ice music is the music that we make on this orchestra
of ice instruments.
The idea first came to me about 21 years ago.
I was an ice sculptor for many years.
Decided one of my sculptures I'd like
to build a giant violin.
And I had a friend who was building guitars
and he just asked the question:
Gee, I wonder how that one's gonna sound?
And that question has swallowed much of the rest of my life.
The instruments are made of white ice,
which is a mixture of snow and water.
It's filled with snowflakes and air bubbles
and all kind of different things going on.
To make a single instrument a violin, or viola here,
the ice part takes about five or six days.
I can probably build the whole orchestra, here,
in about seven or eight weeks.
We have violins, violas, cellos, bass, guitars,
mandolins, banjos, drums, and xylophone.
- [Photographer] Hold, hold, grazie.
- Ice music is not just classical music
or experimental music,
it's a wide variety of different things.
This winter we'll put on about 45 concerts.
The concert hall has a specific design,
it's one giant ice cave.
The igloo, right now, is 10 degrees fahrenheit.
It's definitely an issue in ice music
that people's fingers get cold.
People play with a variety of different kinds of gloves.
Some people play barehanded, but for me the temperature is,
you know, the thing that I really need
to make ice music work.
(audience clapping and cheering)
So many people just cannot wrap their brain
around a piece of ice making a sound, or a beautiful sound.
When they come in to the ice concert hall,
they're just very, very pleasantly surprised
and that releases a real, kind of, a high for people.
And then, wow, it's amazing.