Tristan Clarke and Joe Buono met while studying at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, with Clarke learning the trumpet and Buono the bass trombone. Buono had also been playing his grandfather's melodica for about a year when he took it with him on a visit to see Clarke.
‘As soon as I played it, I was just floored,’ Clarke says. ‘It was so easy and so much fun. I bought one immediately and for a long time, before we were even living together, we would be on FaceTime for hours just playing random tunes.’
In summer 2016, Clarke and Buono went busking while on holiday in Seattle, eventually earning enough money to fund a round-trip from Seattle to Paris and Washington DC. ‘Our first world tour,’ as Clarke says.
The duo started posting videos on YouTube after their first busking sessions, with no other goal than having a little summer fun. By summer's end, they had gained around 500 followers – mostly friends and family.
Unexpected fame
One night that September, however, things were about to change. Armed with a few melodicas, Clarke and another friend visited Buono's apartment to celebrate his birthday when one of them played a phrase that sounded like Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. Two hours later, their latest video was complete, performing – for one time only – as a trio.
‘We posted it online the next day, not really thinking about it too much,’ Clarke says. ‘But then it just exploded and we had 1.5 million views in 24 hours.’
The video took the internet by storm and was shared by thousands worldwide, including a number of mainstream social media channels such as Classic FM.
There was little time to dwell on their success before the duo became embroiled in an unexpected legal battle with the Stravinsky estate.
‘It sucked,’ Clarke says. ‘We had a complaint filed against us saying we had used The Rite of Spring but didn't own the intellectual property rights, so it was taken down. We pushed really hard to get it back, but the Stravinsky estate is very diligent about Stravinsky's music not being performed in any other versions than he originally wrote. So unfortunately that was the end of the The Rite of Spring on Facebook.
‘It was just such a crazy week,’ Buono continues. ‘The video went viral, then it was taken down, I'm talking to one of my friends who's a music lawyer, researching copyright parity laws, and I'm just thinking, this is so ridiculous. All over an 89-second video of Stravinsky played on melodicas.’
The video may have been taken down, but its viral success changed everything for the duo. They amassed around 10,000 followers overnight and more people than ever were viewing their back catalogue of videos.
At this point, however, both still had no idea anything would come of their newfound fame. A few videos went by with little success, but then in December, their arrangement of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker went viral, with more than one million views.
Blowing in the wind: The Melodica Men wear costumes for their videos
That same month, the Melodica Men made their solo debut with the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra during their ‘Holiday Pops’ concert series, and have since featured as soloists with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, appeared on numerous news channels and on even on ABC's ‘The Gong Show’ – a popular US TV talent show known for its eccentric humour and peculiar line-up of acts.
The success of the Nutcracker video also prompted the next significant step in the project: the creation of the Melodica Men website. Partly as a response to requests, the duo began selling their arrangements online, along with songbooks of popular classical pieces arranged for complete beginners to advanced melodica enthusiasts. They also sell their own brand of melodicas and have uploaded a series of free video tutorials covering melodica basics such as articulation, dynamics and hand positioning. They are now looking to use their fame to promote the melodica as an educational instrument. With pilot programmes already running in elementary schools in North Carolina and Florida, they plan to develop a full curriculum this summer.
A superior educational instrument
Although most of the website content was already educational, it was not until midway through 2017 that Buono and Clarke started to make contacts in the education world and begin moving the project into the classroom.
After meeting a primary school teacher at a mutual friend's wedding, the two floated the idea of using the melodica to teach music in her school. Although initially she thought they were crazy, after some thought, she successfully applied for two grants from the local authority: a $1,500 (£1,133) arts education grant to buy a class set of melodicas, and a $1,000 (£755) travel grant to pay for the duo to travel to the school and teach the classes as guest artists.
In this first pilot programme, five different classes were taught music using the melodica in US school grades three to five (UK years four to six), with class sizes ranging from 16 to 28.
The pedagogy is based on call-and-response, including children singing patterns and intervals before playing them back on the melodica.
During the pilot, a local authority arts coordinator came to observe and film one of classes. Buono explains: ‘As someone who had previously taught piano and elementary music, she thought what we were doing was very cool because we're introducing ear-training, basic understanding of the piano keyboard, as well as rhythm and reading notation at the same time.’
The duo recently launched a second programme at an elementary school in Jacksonville, Florida and it is through both these pilots that they hope to ascertain the most effective ways to teach the fundamentals of music using the melodica. Over the coming months, they hope to draw this into a curriculum which teachers can then use in their own classrooms. Along with lesson plans and exercises, they aim to create online material and supplementary activities to keep students engaged outside the classroom, with translations for a global audience.
‘I think it's a matter of people thinking about it for themselves. The default tendency is to just say, “Oh, this is a fun toy”, but when you think about it, it's the perfect combination between a keyboard and a wind instrument,’ says Buono. ‘You obviously have the keyboard interface, but making a sound also requires breath control and articulation, just like a real wind instrument. We are both brass players and those skill sets match perfectly. So there is so much potential to develop transferable skills which can then be applied to other instruments.
‘With many instruments, it takes so long to make a characteristic sound that's in tune across registers. But melodica eliminates both those variables. You blow more air and you get pretty much the same sound as us – that's just the mechanics of the instrument. You can't control the intonation, you just blow air down and it is what it is, so you don't have to worry about those two things, which is a huge advantage over any other instrument, at least at the very beginning. You can focus on other things like phrasing, dynamics and ear training.’
Additionally, a melodica is portable, lightweight, and costs around £25 which, as Buono says, ‘makes it an ideal litmus test for parents to see if their child is interested in music’.
Busking in Seattle in July 2016
‘The dream is to replace the recorder,’ Clarke says. ‘That's already a reality in places like Japan and Korea, where children already learn the melodica instead of recorder. So if we can introduce the instrument to the educational community in our own unique way, hopefully it will really catch fire.’
When not playing melodica, Buono spends his time teaching and composing, while Clarke plays trumpet in the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra.
Early in the project, the pair created a Patreon crowdfunding page where people could support all aspects of the project through donations. They hope to use these funds to primarily finance their education mission, offering significant bulk discounts to schools, hiring someone to help develop a strong online component to the curriculum, and travelling to conferences to promote the melodica movement.
After all their unexpected success and good fortune over the past two years, what does the future hold for the Melodica Men?
‘It felt like the joke which went way way too far,’ Buono says. ‘We had no idea this would happen, but here we are.’
‘Our videos are more or less our brand now. That's how people know us. So hopefully we can continue to grow our social following and use that attention and recognition to seed the educational mission. If we can get more teachers interested in the melodica through our videos and they learn about our education work, hopefully we can get more of them on board and spread the melodica movement. We believe there is no limit to the impact we could have through music education at scale.’
