The Bottlephonist

Wandering around St. Petersburg, you might catch a glimpse of street musician Fedor Grigorev at a metro station exit or park, playing his bottlephone – a homemade instrument consisting primarily of glass bottles.

St. Petersburg musician Fyodor Grigoryev began his studies at 13, specializing in percussion instruments at a music academy. There, in addition to the piano, he learned to play the xylophone, vibraphone, and drums.
He later graduated from the city’s Rimsky-Korsakov College of Music.

In 1989, Grigoryev got his first taste of street performance when the famous Russian clown Vyacheslav “Slava” Polunin organized the MIR Caravan or Caravan of Peace – an international clown, circus, and theater festival that launched in Moscow. More than 200 performers and support personnel took to the capital’s streets and squares in hopes of reviving street art. From Moscow, they took the show to St. Petersburg before touring other countries.

Circus Perillos (Spain), the international Footsbarn Traveling Theater, Shusaku & Dormu Dance Theater (the Netherlands), Teatro Nucleo (Italy), and other foreign ensembles came to Russia at Polunin’s invitation. Grigoryev and his family participated in the festival as an amateur ensemble. He has four brothers and two sisters, but only one brother has continued to perform as a musician.

In the 1990s, Grigoryev got a job at Pulteks, which manufactured and rented out filmmaking equipment. He serviced equipment and even helped shoot several films. He hadn’t given up his music but was only playing for his personal enjoyment.

In the early 2000s he returned to music full time, earning his living as a street musician. At first, he played the accordion and a homemade vibraphone, until he had saved enough to buy a marimba. He then followed a friend’s advice and crafted a bottlephone, which has been his instrument of choice since 2013.

The Instrument

Grigoryev doesn’t know where his friend first heard about the bottlephone. “He probably saw it somewhere on the internet,” Grigoryev shrugs, saying he only knows of two European musicians that play the bottlephone: one from Croatia and the other from Vienna.

Judging by the number of videos on the internet, very few Russians have taken up the instrument. And despite not having anyone local to guide him, Grigoryev was able to figure out how to build a working bottlephone.

He decided to use rubber mallets, like those used to play the marimba. “If you used wooden ones, it would be hard to play in the cold, since your joints could get really sore,” he explains.

Finding the proper bottles was more difficult. “At first, I collected glass bottles at home, and when I had accumulated quite a few, I tested how they sounded and kept about 20. Then I added more. I would pick up a bottle in a store, hold it up to my ear, tap it, and listen to the sound, to what note it was,” he recalls.

An ideal bottle, he says, has an even thickness and is cylindrical – otherwise the sound will bifurcate or treble. It was incredibly challenging to find bottles that produced really high or low notes, he adds. For instance, a champagne bottle has a nice low tone, but its glass is too thick, so the notes come out muddy.

Every bottle contains a measure of water, and that also impacts the sound.

“As an example,” Grigoryev explains, “if a bottle is full, it might produce a C note. Adding salt to the water increases the water’s density, and so you can get a B or B-flat. So you’re lowering the note.”

Adding salt has another advantage: it prevents the water from freezing in winter, so that the bottle will not crack in the cold.

Today, Grigoryev’s bottlephone consists of 28 glass bottles – covering a 2.5 octave range – suspended on a bamboo frame.

Not only did Grigoryev have to build his instrument, he had to teach himself how to play it. His mastery of the marimba helped a little, but his playing technique had to be seriously altered. Not only are the bottles arranged vertically (a marimba’s bars are horizontal), but the distance between the bottles is different, and each is larger than a marimba bar. At first, Grigoryev says, he found it difficult to keep at least ten “keys” (or bottles) in his line of sight.

The bottlephone weighs about 90 pounds before the addition of water. Grigoryev packs his instrument in polyethylene and piles it into a large ski bag, box, and backpack, which all fit in the trunk of a car. Setup takes about 30 to 40 minutes and teardown between 15 and 20 minutes. He’s made another bottlephone that he can pack up for travel by plane – even the mallets disassemble. It fits into two suitcases, but takes even longer to assemble and disassemble.

As a precaution, Grigoryev tries to keep a few backup bottles at home, since every now and then bottles break. And he’s constantly making a mental note of where he can buy bottles if necessary.

“It gets ridiculous,” Grigoryev laughs. “I once walked into a store and tapped on a bottle of pomegranate juice. I was listening to the sound. The security guard must have noticed this strange customer, so he approached me and asked what I was doing. I complained that the bottle sounded different from yesterday. It didn’t suit me today. I left feeling that the guard was looking at me as if I was crazy.”

Takin’ it to the streets

Grigoryev’s current repertoire includes about five or six hours of music. Some melodies are original works, but Grigoryev generally prefers ready-made compositions, like the first part of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40, which he has arranged for the bottlephone. He plays music from twentieth-century French films and the Soviet films of Leonid Gaidai and Eldar Ryazanov. His repertoire also includes works by Russian composers Andrei Petrov, Aleksei Rybnikov, and Gennady Gladkov.

Children’s songs are extremely popular in Grigoryev’s set. “It’s interesting,” he says. “A grown-up guy is sitting there playing ‘Goluboi Vagon’ [Blue Wagon] from the children’s film Cheburashka. When they hear their favorite song, children often stop, and so do their parents.”

Even familiar tunes require a lot of work, however, since finding versions on the internet of pieces with a simple accompaniment is not easy, so he uses a synthesizer to create his own (in his performances, Grigoryev plays along with a recorded accompaniment). He mostly reworks orchestral scores.

“I recently found the score for the Italian film Amarcord, directed by Federico Fellini,” he says. “I printed out the sheet music, hooked a synthesizer up to my computer, and wrote an accompaniment for the bottle solo. It took about two weeks to create a seven-minute piece.”

In the early 2000s, Grigoryev began performing in Helsinki, Finland, about 250 miles from St. Petersburg. “At that time, there were around 20 or 30 Russian street musicians that regularly played there,” he recalls. “Between 2012 and 2015, they began performing less often in Helsinki, but I kept going out of habit. I only played in St. Petersburg on occasion.”

In 2020, when the borders closed due to the pandemic, Grigoryev set up shop in St. Petersburg. Street musician colleagues told him about a page on the Russian social network site VKontakte where you could reserve your spot, allowing performers to coordinate, so as to avoid clashes. It also helps prevent conflicts over the more lucrative spots.

When asked about the legality of working as a street musician, Grigoryev replies that busking is not against the law, though police do occasionally conduct raids, dispersing musicians. The issue is that not all street musicians, of which there are about 20 or 30 in St. Petersburg, pay taxes. Grigoryev operates as a registered sole proprietorship.

He says that in late spring and summer he typically plays in parks, because they tend to be crowded with tourists and passersby that time of year. In fall, winter, and early spring, you’ll usually find him near metro stations on weekdays and in parks on weekends. His normal set lasts between two and four hours. On rainy or extremely windy days, he takes the day off.

Before leaving for work, Grigoryev says he puts on a warm sweater or two, a coat, gloves, a fur hat, and warm boots in winter. “A street musician should look no worse than an artist on stage at the philharmonic,” Grigoryev says. “You should never play the sympathy card, since people give less money out of pity than they do for talent.”

Sometimes Grigoryev is invited to play at private events. He’s performed at private tastings, banyas, museums, and festivals. Yet he says he prefers the street, because he finds that the public is more appreciative. “If they like the music, they stop and listen, whereas at events my music often serves as background, so capturing someone’s interest is harder. Plus, there are often problems with the sound or microphone at these events.” Nevertheless, he’s not one to refuse invitations for events in Moscow or elsewhere.

Future Plans

St. Petersburg’s bottlephonist loves his work, although much like anyone in any line of work, there are days he is simply exhausted.

He says he doesn’t necessarily consider his work any less “stable” than other jobs, even though his daily earnings vary widely: from R1,000 to 10,000 ($13-130), depending on the weather and people’s moods. But it does have one clear advantage: no one can fire him.

Most importantly, however, it’s fun. “I worked as a teacher in a music school for a while,” he says, “but it was difficult and boring. Working as a street musician gives me freedom.”

Grigoryev has many plans. Once the pandemic ends, he wants to return to Finland, but he’s sure that he won’t perform in Helsinki as often as before. Driving for five or six hours each way to only perform for three hours is a headache. Plus, he has realized that he can find an appreciative audience at home in St. Petersburg.

He does hope to be able to travel to Dubai soon, for an international music festival he has performed at in the past. It was planned before the pandemic and subsequently postponed. Some 20 musicians from all over the world were scheduled to perform.

Grigoryev also admits he would love to tour the US with his bottlephone. For now, though, as with many things affected by the pandemic, that is just a pipe dream. So to speak.