An artist coaxes music out of stone and metal in Balbriggan, building lithophones and metallophones

Darren Rogers strolled up the footpath from Balbriggan Beach to the Martello Tower overlooking the sea on Sunday afternoon.

He approached what looks like a small table, made of Kilkenny limestone, on a grassy stretch of the King’s Strand.

The pale grey stone had been cut as if to resemble flowing water. Carved into its surface were abstract shapes resembling fish and seals.

The top of the table was hollowed out to fit 10 blue metal keys, tapering in length from left to right. “It’s a resonance chamber,” said Rogers, meaning it enhances the sound of this instrument, known as a metallophone.

It is similar to a xylophone. Rogers picked up small rubbery hammers and struck a few keys.

Rogers hit eight of the keys in a rising scale and the “doh re mi fah soh la ti doh”, rang out across the park, mixing with the whoosh of the wind and waves, squawks of seagulls and happy shouts of kids in a nearby playground.

Installed in late 2022, the metallophone took Rogers roughly a year to create from scratch, he says – and a lot of precision.

Each key is a different size, with two holes drilled on each end. Those holes have to be placed just right, he says. “The soundwaves come in at either side, at the node, which is roughly two-sevenths in on either end.”

He demonstrates how soundwaves flow through the keys using his hand. If he drills a hole in the wrong place, the key won’t sound, he says.

Rogers is a multi-disciplinary artist, whose work tends towards either music or sculpture. His instruments, metallophones and lithophones, are where these interests converge.

They can be found tucked in corners around Balbriggan.

Background music

Music was the first artform that Rogers fell in love with, he says, as he walks through Balbriggan, the town where he was born and grew up.

About 1986, when he was about 10 years old, his dad – a soldier – was stationed in Lebanon, he says. And, “he sent home some tapes”.

Cassettes with Rod Stewart, AC/DC, and Tom Waits, he says. As a teenager, he discovered classical music. “And I was playing guitar when I was 15,” he says.

Rogers shows a video on his phone, recorded with a friend. In it, they are making up a short tune on the spot, one reminiscent of the soundtracks of Ennio Morricone.

Morricone is one of his lifelong influences, he says.

How the Italian composer’s work was used in westerns like A Fistful of Dollars and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was partly what inspired Rogers’ decision to create instruments as public installations.

For some of those films, the music was written first and played on set as they filmed, says Rogers, so it was bound strongly into the environment where the shoots took place.

Local filmmaker Aidan Whelan says he thinks Rogers’ art grows, in some respects, out of wanting to directly connect with the people around him. “He speaks about art being a form of communication.”

Installations in public mean people of all ages interact with him, Whelan says. “You see children in awe of what it is, as the sound reverberates around, and they and their parents gather around it.”

People who use the metallophone don’t need to know who Rogers is, Whelan says. “But they’re certainly connecting in a way.”

A musical engineer

Rogers is an artist but he undersells himself, because his works are as much a feat of engineering, says Whelan. “He has an engineering mind, an architectural mind.”

Rogers first started to create instruments while studying in Whitehall College of Further Education, he says. “I made stone nodes first, because I made a music box as a college project.”

Part of that box can be found in The Warehouse, a performance and arts space on Vauxhall Street in Balbriggan.

The mechanical music box was made from mahogany gears, plywood, pine and Wavin pipes with lithostone keys, he says. It was programmed to play “Captain O’Kane” by the harpist Turlough O’Carolan.

The lithostone keys are stowed away in a corner of the warehouse, near a small stage and disassembled drum kit.

Another of his lithophones is in The Warehouse, too. It is also made of Kilkenny limestone, and decorated with a picture of a crab, and the outlines of fish in a Celtic knot motif.

Rogers doesn’t necessarily embark on a project like a lithophone with a clear-cut plan, he says. “Although I would like to put some order on it. That would be amazing.”

But a lot of his enjoyment comes from figuring out how it can function, he says. “That is part of it. It’s like analysing the music of Bach, or breaking down the music to its chord progressions.”

The process can involve going against your immediate instincts, he says. He lifts up a pair of lithostones, one short and thick, the other thinner and longer – and strikes them both.

The thinner one sounds lower.

Stony stoicism

Just up the road from The Warehouse, in the labyrinthine garden that sits behind the Lark Theatre and the Institute of Music and Song on Church Street, Rogers pays his fourth instrument a brief visit.

It is another metallophone with a stand also created from Kilkenny limestone, and decorated with sleeping ducks.

What the stone carvings will be is kind of improvised, he says. “The stone talks, and you have to listen to it.”

The seals and fishes along the sides of the metallophone were originally defined and less abstract, he says.

Carving is slow work, he says. “With a chisel and a hammer, and a nice bench, you’re chipping away and it’s very therapeutic.”

Kilkenny limestone is brittle, he says. “I made a bowl there, and it took 10 days, but when I was making a punch mark on its outside, it cracked.”

That happens all the time, he says, it’s constant. “But it’s kinda a journey, you don’t know how it will turn out.”