Greg Stepanich

Cue the celesta; it's time to dance

Make a joyful noise, the psalmist said, which considered one way could mean an injunction to sing, shout, or bang on anything at hand to get the job done. Wandering in the semi-sleepless landscape of late-night TV recently, I've seen two performances by pop bands that offered some unusual takes on the traditional chamber ensemble of guitar, bass, singer and drums.

The basic rock band ensemble, which often includes a keyboard of some kind, has been more or less the same for most of the past 50 years, and as a basic unit of music-making, it's something like the string quartet in that the bare-bones instrumentation hasn't changed, but the sounds that can be drawn from it are limited only by a composer's imagination.

But on one of the late-night shows the other night was a performance by Eels, featuring a string quartet, a string bass, a drummer hammering something more like a big can, and that immortal rock instrument, the celesta.

A celesta!

This bell-piano instrument is best known for its starring role in Tchaikovsky's score for The Nutcracker, when the Sugar Plum Fairy comes out to do her delicate thing.

I've never seen it used in a pop piece that I can think of, but it worked here very well. It was a nice tune, compelling and catchy, and while you couldn't say the sound of this band had a lot of rock edge, it nevertheless had energy and novelty.

And then on a rerun of Conan, there was the Canadian band Feist, led by guitar-playing singer Leslie Feist, fronting a band consisting of an organ (a Hammond B3, it sounded like), drums and — a trombone. The trombone playing wasn't too good, and the basic ensemble was markedly out of tune, but it somehow fit the Anthropologie-garage-sale vibe of this quirky singer and her band.

There are any number of great sounds you can get from all sorts of different instruments, and if you know how to use them, you can come up with some refreshingly different aural textures for your music. Anybody who's spent any quality time playing an instrument knows there are a wide variety of colors available on almost anything you're trying to play.

The important thing is to open your ears and allow all those sounds to be part of your universe, even if you're not a performer or writer. People naturally get tired of hearing the same kinds of sounds over and over again, and it's stimulating to hear somebody with a sense of daring trying something new.

The Eels and Feist songs, moreover, were further evidence to me of the spirit of invention and boundary-toppling that's currently abroad in the land of music, particularly in pop and classical. This should be celebrated, not least because it brings us as music lovers back to the spirit of music, which the Hungarian composer and pedagogue Zoltan Kodaly once proposed as the only thing that would keep humanity from the abyss.

It's that elemental joy of creation that he was talking about, I think; it's that sense of a human being interacting one on one with an inanimate object, or just the muscles in his or her throat, and bringing forth sounds that transcend the circumstances of their production and carry listeners somewhere else entirely.

A celesta and a trombone might not rock, exactly, but they tickle the ears of auditors who are expecting something else, and show us that everything old really can be new again, in the hands of confident, unrestricted imaginations.