ABSTRACT
Freely suspended flexible metal sheets are wonderfully efficient resonators. Strike them, shake them, flex them; they readily produce a remarkable array of sounds. For musical purposes, though, they are hard to discipline. The sheet by itself lacks mechanisms for controlling the exuberant sound it produces. Robert Rutman’s best known instrument is the steel cello. It employs a metal stand to support an eight foot by two-and-a-half foot sheet of stainless steel. His bow chime uses five metal rods as initial vibrators. The rods are mounted upright on a horizontal bar set on a stand, attached to the bar by a mechanism which allows their length above the bar to be adjusted for tuning. Rutman creates music for the steel cello and bow chimes not by conceiving a musical idea and applying it to them, but by doing his best to allow the instruments to suggest the content of the composition.
