Live orchestra brings new score to Hunchback of Notre Dame

A show next weekend is pairing a classic silent film with a 60-piece orchestra and choir. Local composer Philip Shorey has been working on the score for the Hunchback of Notre Dame for years and is finally putting it on stage. There will be three shows at the Luminary Arts Center in the North Loop neighborhood. And in that 60-piece orchestra, some unexpected and rare instruments. Two, three, four. It's just a full score. I mean, there's so many voices, so many instruments. Yeah, it's a lot to organize. We have some very interesting instrumentation, like a rubber chicken for one. I went to Axeman and I actually had to find a barrel of chickens where I would try different chickens to see which pitch would work. So we settled on this chicken. The thing about it is that Quasimodo, he's kind of a fool. He's in the festival of fools. a quirky guy and so we thought like what's what better instrument to kind of throw out these like quirky funny kind of circus bizarre festival of fool kind of sounds the chicken we got a hurdy-gurdy player and we have a hammer dulcimer player we have a bouzouki Irish bouzouki player and we have an accordion player we have the oboe we have the Romani violin this is a traditional Renaissance instrument these are all very traditional Renaissance instruments basically instead of a bow I have this wheel that I'm rubbing the strings with and then instead of putting my fingers on the neck like I would with a violin I'm using keys that press up on the strings directly like that so it's a very antiquated instrument their heyday was about 500 years ago but uh yeah for this kind of music it really suits itself well how does one learn to play this instrument oh i taught myself i mean i'm a musician so this is not the first instrument i played but you kind of just have to just hit the ground running with it just pick one up and teach yourself really so this is a hammered dulcimer and you play it with two hammers if you opened up the piano you'd see that every time you hit a key, a hammer hits the strings. So if you pulled out two hammers, don't actually do that. And started banging around in there, this is what it would sound like. You play the piano too? I play the hammered dulcimer a lot better than I play the piano.