Music: The National Jukebox

The Library of Congress' National Jukebox makes historical sound recordings available to the public free of charge. As it began operations, the "jukebox" already listed more than 10,000 78rpm disc sides issued by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1900 and 1925. The playlist includes popular recorded selections of the beginning of the 20th century years—band music, novelty tunes, humorous monologues, hits from the season's new musical theater productions, the latest dance rhythms, and opera arias. As of this posting, upcoming releases include early Victor discs from National Jukebox partners David Giovannoni and Mark Lynch, many more selections from the 1919 edition of the Victor Book of the Opera, and thousands more Victrola 78s from the collections of the University of California Santa Barbara. Later this year, the library will begin digitizing recordings from additional record labels, including Columbia and Okeh, along with selected master recordings from the Library of Congress Universal Music Group Collection. -- adapted from the website.

Pencil Sharpening: Music from Unexpected Objects

The comedian Rick Overton has said that art was invented when the first man realized that if he banged a stick on the ground, women would dance. With that inspiration, it's understandable that early music making evolved to include handy everyday objects, including natural materials still used today like rocks, animal bones, and hunks of wood. The creation of instruments has gotten much more complex since then, of course, and professional music along with it, but a folk tradition of homemade instruments has continued, as anyone who has ever visited the boardwalk on California's Venice Beach can testify, with instruments ranging from the jug through the spoons to various stringed contraptions. In the 20th century, composers and musicians have readopted the idea that worthy music can be made with found objects. Some of these tools you will never be able to look at again as simply utilitarian:

Bash the Trash: Plays for kids and teaches them how to make musical instruments out of recycled materials.
Car Music Project: Bill Milbrodt, with the help of various musical and mechanical experts, turned a 1982 Honda into a set of unique musical instruments, including a bass made from the gas tank, 55 percussion instruments, flutes made from tubes, a huge drum out of the trunk, and an “air guitar” using the car’s air filter.
Scrap Arts Music: A Vancouver-based group that makes music with instruments fashioned from scrap metal.
Blue Man Group: A performance art group whose creation of instruments out of PVC pipes and boat antennae carried them to Broadway, Vegas and across the world.
Stomp: Another Broadway and Vegas favorite, the members of the troop perform intricate coordinated rhythms using objects from garbage cans and lids to matchboxes.
How to build a rubber balloon bass guitar: About which, seeing is believing.
And don't forget Playing with Your Food, an earlier posting on Library of Links about the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra, an Austrian musical aggregation that plays on instruments made from, well, veggies.

The Avant Garde: Playing with Your Food (YouTube)

Currently, the most popular video on YouTube is of a shirtless, inebriated David Hasselhoff trying to eat a hamburger. Instead, LOL offers you this: a video from the Vegetable Orchestra, an Austrian musical group that plays with instruments made from, well, vegetables. Amazon.com describes the band's fragile handmade devices thusly: "Their unique instruments include the carrot recorder, the cucumberophone, and the leek violin among many others. Musically falling somewhere between avant-garde classical and electronic music without actually sounding like either one, the performers have created what they consider to be a new genre: vegetable music." Frank Zappa would've loved it. <http://youtube.com/watch?v=hpfYt7vRHuY>

Music: Memorial performance of 4'33" dedicated to the memory of John Cage (YouTube)

The top link on the YouTube page below is to a video from a concert in memory of John Cage, a live performance of his 4'33". A work that consists of three movements of ambient noise, it must lose some of the impact intended by the composer when it is announced in advance; instead of generating surprise, shock and outrage, it tends to inspire the audience to four and half minutes of whispered pretention. Still, it makes you think.

Other links on the page take you to additional performances, including adaptations for other instruments (it was written for piano), such as guitar and recorder. It's probably the only music that you'd really like to hear Kenny G* do.
http://youtube.com/results?search_query=4'33"&search=Search

* Gratuitous aside: The masterful guitarist and songwriter Richard Thompson once wrote a song, "I Agree With Pat Metheny, Kenny's Talents Are Too Teeny," that went in part:

A meeting of great minds, how nice
Like Einstein and Sporty Spice
Digitally fused in an abortion
Oh, Kenny fans will doubtless rave
While Satchmo turns inside his grave
Soprano man's bit off more than his portion.