Music for Seven Ice Cream Vans

Mine's a Strawberry Mivvi, if you are buying, thanks. Suburban Counterpoint: Music for Seven Ice Cream Vans is a deliciously intriguing work by composer Dan Jones that does what it says on the tin. It will be performed as part of this year's Norfolk and Norwich Festival in May, before being reprised in London.

A set of seven ice-cream vans will, we are told, "weave a spellbinding counterpoint across an entire suburb at a time, weaving a carefully planned route as melodies  echo from one van to another, calling out across great distances through  the evening and sometimes into the night."

The instruments are the ice cream vans themselves and the concert hall is an entire suburb through which they wind their creamy counterpoint. As the organisers point out,  "The distant call of ice cream vans is a sound that instantly takes us back to childhood, to long hot summers and to something of the past - something out of reach. The tunes are reassuringly familiar, strangely British - and perhaps a little sad." Those with more specialist knowledge of ice-cream van music may remember a gamelan influenced piece written by Kevin Pawsley and artist Chris Yates. The more the merrier I say. It's clearly a trend. Below: an ice-cream van. Mystifyingly, nearly 50,000 people have watched this on YouTube.