Trimpin
Encyclopedia
Trimpin is a Seattle, Washington
-based kinetic sculptor, sound art
ist, musician, and composer, most of whose pieces integrate both sculpture and music in some way, and many of which make use of computers to play these instruments. He uses only his last name, and has legally changed his name accordingly.)
. The son of a brass
and woodwind player, as a child he had access to old brass instruments to experiment with. He played brass instruments himself, but developed an allergy to metal that affected his lips and made him give up playing. Trimpin's father treated him to spatial musical experiences, playing at some distance in the German woods, and young Trimpin experimented with old radios and with cutting apart and recombining elements of musical instruments. He studied at the University of Berlin.
One early project in Berlin used a balancing clown figurine to play a wire recording
of speech. The wire was stretched across a room and tilted up and down while the figurine rode the wire and played it, backwards and forwards. The history his work recapitulates much of the history of data and sound storage technology. Prior to the availability of MIDI, Trimpin developed his own protocol for computer storage of music.
In 1980 Trimpin moved to America
because he needed access to old, used technological components, which were difficult to find in Europe; he settled in Seattle because it "sounded like a nice place to live". In the 1980s, he worked one month per year fishing in Alaska
to support his work.
(that is, one with smaller intervals between achievable tones than in conventional Western musical scale
s) running through a spiral staircase in an Amsterdam
theater, with computer-driven melodies ripping up and down it. Another piece was a water fountain installation in which drops of water, timed in complex rhythmic fugues, dripped into glass receptacles. Several of his pieces since that time have made similar use of falling water. A dance piece used the dancers' bodies to make music, with small bellows
in the dancers' shoes that played duck calls, air blowers triggered by sacs under their armpits, etc.
Trimpin has invented a gamelan
whose iron bells are suspended in air by electronic magnets; a photo sensor prevents them from rising past a certain point, and since they don't touch anything, once rung they will sound with a phenomenally long decay. Another invention is an extra-long bass clarinet
. Extra keys spiraled around the instrument allow a microtonal scale. A human blows through the mouthpiece; the dozens of extra keys are played via computer. In 1987 he met Conlon Nancarrow
, composer of experimental player piano music unplayable by a human pianist. Trimpin already had the technology to convert Nancarrow's player piano
rolls into MIDI information, thus saving their contents from potential deterioration and disaster.
Trimpin has invented machines to play every instrument of the orchestra via MIDI commands. His mechanical cello
can achieve virtually unnoticeable bow changes, and his MIDI timpani
can be rubbed quickly by the mallet, for a timpani drone unachievable by human hands. Indeed, his pieces do not generally try to imitate human playing. "What I'm trying to do," he as remarked, "is go beyond human physical limitations to play instruments in such a way that no matter how complex the composition of the timing, it can be pushed over the limits."
Although most of his music is computer-driven, Trimpin almost never uses electronic sounds—not because he objects to them on principle, but because he thinks that loudspeaker design, basically unchanged for 100 years, has lagged behind the rest of electronic music technology. His one work to use electronic sounds was commission-mandated, a tornado-shaped column of electric guitars called IF VI WAS IX: Roots and Branches, installed in Seattle's Experience Music Project
. Difficult to reach, the guitars tune themselves automatically, their tuning pegs turned via computer whenever pitch sensors register too flat or sharp.
at SAAM, Henry Art Gallery
of the University of Washington
, Consolidated Works
(which dissolved shortly after the Trimpin Exhibit), the Frye Art Museum
, Jack Straw New Media Gallery, and Suyama Space in Seattle; the Museum of Glass
and the Tacoma Art Museum
in Tacoma
; the Washington State University
Museum of Art (Pullman
); and, outside of Washington State, at the Missoula Museum of Art in Missoula, Montana
and the Vancouver International Jazz Festival in Vancouver
, Canada
.
The Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Concourse A artwalk includes Trimpin's Contraption installed next to the concourse's first moving sidewalk. Contraption is a motion activated work consisting of two moving "contraptions" made of assorted musical instruments and found objects, housed in an 80 feet (24.4 m) glass case. Each "contraption" plays music in response to people passing by.
Trimpin is a recipient of numerous honors. In 1994, he was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. Trimpin was also the recipient of a 1997 MacArthur "Genius" Award. More recently, he was an invited keynote speaker at the 7th International NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) conference in New York City, in June 2007. In May 2010, he will receive n honorary degree from the California Institute of the Arts
.
As of 2007, he is among a number of artists establishing studio space in Tieton, Washington
, on the edge of Washington's Yakima Valley
.
Trimpin's water-based sound sculpture "Sheng High" was exhibited during the 2009 Ojai Music Festival
, and one of his creations was featured in one of the pieces performed on the last evening. He was subsequently commissioned to create a permanent sound sculpture for the music amphitheatre at Ojai.
Trimpin's sculpture, Klompen, is a sound sculpture that includes 96 Dutch wooden clogs that connect to a computer by wires suspended from the ceiling. Placing a quarter in a token box electronically triggers mallets in the toes of the shoes. Klompen plays 20 different compositions. It is part of the permanent collection at Utah State University
's Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art
.
In 2010, Trimpin transformed into robotic form a set of percussion instruments that David A. Jaffe
inherited from Henry Brant
for use in Jaffe's composition The Space Between Us. The performance (at the 2011 Other Minds Festival) included an installation with 18 robotic tubular bells hung above the audience, two robotic xylophones, a robotic glockenspiel and a piano, all controlled by a percussionist using a 3-D sensor, augmented by two live string quartets surrounding the audience.
Since Fall 2010, Trimpin has been working with students and faculty at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) to create the multimedia installation "The Gurs Zyklus." Composer/director/performer Rinde Eckert will collaborate with Trimpin on the project.
about the artist/inventor/composer's life and work, TRIMPIN: The Sound of Invention, produced and directed by Peter Esmonde, premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival
in Austin, Texas
, in March 2009. The documentary subsequently screened at film festivals in New York, London, Toronto, Barcelona, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Vancouver, Dublin, Goteborg, Oslo, and New Zealand. DVD release is slated for Fall 2010.
, Charles Amirkhanian
and David Harrington of Kronos Quartet
. The book was funded by the private sale of a limited edition run of thirteen works titled BookBeatBox. Each unique sculpture is both a hand-made brushed aluminum encasement for the book, and also a musical instrument powered by a hand-crank.
Seattle, Washington
Seattle is the county seat of King County, Washington. With 608,660 residents as of the 2010 Census, Seattle is the largest city in the Northwestern United States. The Seattle metropolitan area of about 3.4 million inhabitants is the 15th largest metropolitan area in the country...
-based kinetic sculptor, sound art
Sound art
Sound art is a diverse group of art practices that considers wide notions of sound, listening and hearing as its predominant focus. There are often distinct relationships forged between the visual and aural domains of art and perception by sound artists....
ist, musician, and composer, most of whose pieces integrate both sculpture and music in some way, and many of which make use of computers to play these instruments. He uses only his last name, and has legally changed his name accordingly.)
Early life
Trimpin grew up near the French and Swiss borders, a native speaker of AlemannischAlemannic German
Alemannic is a group of dialects of the Upper German branch of the Germanic language family. It is spoken by approximately ten million people in six countries: Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, France and Italy...
. The son of a brass
Brass instrument
A brass instrument is a musical instrument whose sound is produced by sympathetic vibration of air in a tubular resonator in sympathy with the vibration of the player's lips...
and woodwind player, as a child he had access to old brass instruments to experiment with. He played brass instruments himself, but developed an allergy to metal that affected his lips and made him give up playing. Trimpin's father treated him to spatial musical experiences, playing at some distance in the German woods, and young Trimpin experimented with old radios and with cutting apart and recombining elements of musical instruments. He studied at the University of Berlin.
One early project in Berlin used a balancing clown figurine to play a wire recording
Wire recording
Wire recording is a type of analog audio storage in which a magnetic recording is made on thin steel or stainless steel wire.The wire is pulled rapidly across a recording head which magnetizes each point along the wire in accordance with the intensity and polarity of the electrical audio signal...
of speech. The wire was stretched across a room and tilted up and down while the figurine rode the wire and played it, backwards and forwards. The history his work recapitulates much of the history of data and sound storage technology. Prior to the availability of MIDI, Trimpin developed his own protocol for computer storage of music.
In 1980 Trimpin moved to America
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
because he needed access to old, used technological components, which were difficult to find in Europe; he settled in Seattle because it "sounded like a nice place to live". In the 1980s, he worked one month per year fishing in Alaska
Alaska
Alaska is the largest state in the United States by area. It is situated in the northwest extremity of the North American continent, with Canada to the east, the Arctic Ocean to the north, and the Pacific Ocean to the west and south, with Russia further west across the Bering Strait...
to support his work.
Inventions
One of his early installations was a six-story-high microtonal xylophoneXylophone
The xylophone is a musical instrument in the percussion family that consists of wooden bars struck by mallets...
(that is, one with smaller intervals between achievable tones than in conventional Western musical scale
Musical scale
In music, a scale is a sequence of musical notes in ascending and descending order. Most commonly, especially in the context of the common practice period, the notes of a scale will belong to a single key, thus providing material for or being used to conveniently represent part or all of a musical...
s) running through a spiral staircase in an Amsterdam
Amsterdam
Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...
theater, with computer-driven melodies ripping up and down it. Another piece was a water fountain installation in which drops of water, timed in complex rhythmic fugues, dripped into glass receptacles. Several of his pieces since that time have made similar use of falling water. A dance piece used the dancers' bodies to make music, with small bellows
Bellows
A bellows is a device for delivering pressurized air in a controlled quantity to a controlled location.Basically, a bellows is a deformable container which has an outlet nozzle. When the volume of the bellows is decreased, the air escapes through the outlet...
in the dancers' shoes that played duck calls, air blowers triggered by sacs under their armpits, etc.
Trimpin has invented a gamelan
Gamelan
A gamelan is a musical ensemble from Indonesia, typically from the islands of Bali or Java, featuring a variety of instruments such as metallophones, xylophones, drums and gongs; bamboo flutes, bowed and plucked strings. Vocalists may also be included....
whose iron bells are suspended in air by electronic magnets; a photo sensor prevents them from rising past a certain point, and since they don't touch anything, once rung they will sound with a phenomenally long decay. Another invention is an extra-long bass clarinet
Bass clarinet
The bass clarinet is a musical instrument of the clarinet family. Like the more common soprano B clarinet, it is usually pitched in B , but it plays notes an octave below the soprano B clarinet...
. Extra keys spiraled around the instrument allow a microtonal scale. A human blows through the mouthpiece; the dozens of extra keys are played via computer. In 1987 he met Conlon Nancarrow
Conlon Nancarrow
Conlon Nancarrow was a United States-born composer who lived and worked in Mexico for most of his life. He became a Mexican citizen in 1955.Nancarrow is best remembered for the pieces he wrote for the player piano...
, composer of experimental player piano music unplayable by a human pianist. Trimpin already had the technology to convert Nancarrow's player piano
Player piano
A player piano is a self-playing piano, containing a pneumatic or electro-mechanical mechanism that operates the piano action via pre-programmed music perforated paper, or in rare instances, metallic rolls. The rise of the player piano grew with the rise of the mass-produced piano for the home in...
rolls into MIDI information, thus saving their contents from potential deterioration and disaster.
Trimpin has invented machines to play every instrument of the orchestra via MIDI commands. His mechanical cello
Cello
The cello is a bowed string instrument with four strings tuned in perfect fifths. It is a member of the violin family of musical instruments, which also includes the violin, viola, and double bass. Old forms of the instrument in the Baroque era are baryton and viol .A person who plays a cello is...
can achieve virtually unnoticeable bow changes, and his MIDI timpani
Timpani
Timpani, or kettledrums, are musical instruments in the percussion family. A type of drum, they consist of a skin called a head stretched over a large bowl traditionally made of copper. They are played by striking the head with a specialized drum stick called a timpani stick or timpani mallet...
can be rubbed quickly by the mallet, for a timpani drone unachievable by human hands. Indeed, his pieces do not generally try to imitate human playing. "What I'm trying to do," he as remarked, "is go beyond human physical limitations to play instruments in such a way that no matter how complex the composition of the timing, it can be pushed over the limits."
Although most of his music is computer-driven, Trimpin almost never uses electronic sounds—not because he objects to them on principle, but because he thinks that loudspeaker design, basically unchanged for 100 years, has lagged behind the rest of electronic music technology. His one work to use electronic sounds was commission-mandated, a tornado-shaped column of electric guitars called IF VI WAS IX: Roots and Branches, installed in Seattle's Experience Music Project
Experience Music Project
The EMP Museum is a museum dedicated to the history and exploration of both popular music and science fiction located in Seattle, Washington...
. Difficult to reach, the guitars tune themselves automatically, their tuning pegs turned via computer whenever pitch sensors register too flat or sharp.
Exhibited work
Beginning in July 2005, several Washington museums engaged in a year-long survey of his work curated by Beth Sellars, with installations and/or performances occurring at the Seattle Art MuseumSeattle Art Museum
The Seattle Art Museum is an art museum located in Seattle, Washington, USA. It maintains three major facilities: its main museum in downtown Seattle; the Seattle Asian Art Museum in Volunteer Park on Capitol Hill, and the Olympic Sculpture Park on the central Seattle waterfront, which opened on...
at SAAM, Henry Art Gallery
Henry Art Gallery
The Henry Art Gallery is the art museum of the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, USA. Located on the west edge of the university's campus along 15th Avenue N.E. in the University District, it was founded in 1927 and was the first public art museum in the state of Washington. The...
of the University of Washington
University of Washington
University of Washington is a public research university, founded in 1861 in Seattle, Washington, United States. The UW is the largest university in the Northwest and the oldest public university on the West Coast. The university has three campuses, with its largest campus in the University...
, Consolidated Works
Consolidated Works
Consolidated Works was a "multi-disciplinary contemporary arts center" located successively in two former warehouses in the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, USA, just west of what would be considered the Cascade neighborhood within South Lake Union...
(which dissolved shortly after the Trimpin Exhibit), the Frye Art Museum
Frye Art Museum
The Frye Art Museum is an art museum located in the First Hill neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, USA . The museum emphasizes painting and sculpture from the nineteenth century to the present. Its holdings originate in the private collection of Charles and Emma Frye...
, Jack Straw New Media Gallery, and Suyama Space in Seattle; the Museum of Glass
Museum of Glass
The Museum of Glass is a museum dedicated to the medium of glass art located in Tacoma, Washington. It is not to be confused with the various other Museums of Glass, such as the one in Corning, New York, as the museum focuses on Contemporary and Pacific Northwest glass-art.The museum, the...
and the Tacoma Art Museum
Tacoma Art Museum
In May 2003, Tacoma Art Museum opened a new facility twice the size of its previous home, allowing the museum to expand on its vision and mission. American Institute of Architects AIA Gold Medal winner Antoine Predock designed the building located in the heart of Tacoma’s Cultural District...
in Tacoma
Tacoma, Washington
Tacoma is a mid-sized urban port city and the county seat of Pierce County, Washington, United States. The city is on Washington's Puget Sound, southwest of Seattle, northeast of the state capital, Olympia, and northwest of Mount Rainier National Park. The population was 198,397, according to...
; the Washington State University
Washington State University
Washington State University is a public research university based in Pullman, Washington, in the Palouse region of the Pacific Northwest. Founded in 1890, WSU is the state's original and largest land-grant university...
Museum of Art (Pullman
Pullman, Washington
Pullman is the largest city in Whitman County, Washington, United States. The population was 24,675 at the 2000 census and 29,799 according to the 2010 census...
); and, outside of Washington State, at the Missoula Museum of Art in Missoula, Montana
Missoula, Montana
Missoula is a city located in western Montana and is the county seat of Missoula County. The 2010 Census put the population of Missoula at 66,788 and the population of Missoula County at 109,299. Missoula is the principal city of the Missoula Metropolitan Area...
and the Vancouver International Jazz Festival in Vancouver
Vancouver
Vancouver is a coastal seaport city on the mainland of British Columbia, Canada. It is the hub of Greater Vancouver, which, with over 2.3 million residents, is the third most populous metropolitan area in the country,...
, Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
.
The Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Concourse A artwalk includes Trimpin's Contraption installed next to the concourse's first moving sidewalk. Contraption is a motion activated work consisting of two moving "contraptions" made of assorted musical instruments and found objects, housed in an 80 feet (24.4 m) glass case. Each "contraption" plays music in response to people passing by.
Trimpin is a recipient of numerous honors. In 1994, he was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. Trimpin was also the recipient of a 1997 MacArthur "Genius" Award. More recently, he was an invited keynote speaker at the 7th International NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) conference in New York City, in June 2007. In May 2010, he will receive n honorary degree from the California Institute of the Arts
California Institute of the Arts
The California Institute of the Arts, commonly referred to as CalArts, is located in Valencia, in Los Angeles County, California. It was incorporated in 1961 as the first degree-granting institution of higher learning in the United States created specifically for students of both the visual and the...
.
As of 2007, he is among a number of artists establishing studio space in Tieton, Washington
Tieton, Washington
Tieton is a town in Yakima County, Washington, United States. The population was 1,191 at the 2010 census.In recent years, Tieton has suffered economic depression, with the decline of its fruit warehouses...
, on the edge of Washington's Yakima Valley
Yakima Valley
Yakima Valley may refer to:*Yakima River Valley in southeastern Washington*Yakima Valley AVA...
.
Trimpin's water-based sound sculpture "Sheng High" was exhibited during the 2009 Ojai Music Festival
Ojai Music Festival
The Ojai Music Festival is an annual classical music festival in the United States. Held in Ojai, California for four days every June, the festival presents music, symposia, and educational programs emphasizing adventurous, eclectic, and challenging music, principally by contemporary composers...
, and one of his creations was featured in one of the pieces performed on the last evening. He was subsequently commissioned to create a permanent sound sculpture for the music amphitheatre at Ojai.
Trimpin's sculpture, Klompen, is a sound sculpture that includes 96 Dutch wooden clogs that connect to a computer by wires suspended from the ceiling. Placing a quarter in a token box electronically triggers mallets in the toes of the shoes. Klompen plays 20 different compositions. It is part of the permanent collection at Utah State University
Utah State University
Utah State University is a public university located in Logan, Utah. It is a land-grant and space-grant institution and is accredited by the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities....
's Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art
Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art
The Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art is a large museum on the campus of Utah State University in Logan, Utah, and a constituent of the Caine College of the Arts at USU. The museum, which holds one of the largest collections in the entire Intermountain West with over 4,800 pieces, focuses largely...
.
In 2010, Trimpin transformed into robotic form a set of percussion instruments that David A. Jaffe
David A. Jaffe
David Aaron Jaffe is an American composer who has written over ninety works for orchestra, chorus, chamber ensembles, and electronics. He is best known for his use of technology as an electronic-music or computer-music composer in works such as Silicon Valley Breakdown, though his non-electronic...
inherited from Henry Brant
Henry Brant
Henry Dreyfuss Brant was a Canadian-born American composer. An expert orchestrator with a flair for experimentation, many of Brant's works featured spatialization techniques.- Biography :...
for use in Jaffe's composition The Space Between Us. The performance (at the 2011 Other Minds Festival) included an installation with 18 robotic tubular bells hung above the audience, two robotic xylophones, a robotic glockenspiel and a piano, all controlled by a percussionist using a 3-D sensor, augmented by two live string quartets surrounding the audience.
Since Fall 2010, Trimpin has been working with students and faculty at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) to create the multimedia installation "The Gurs Zyklus." Composer/director/performer Rinde Eckert will collaborate with Trimpin on the project.
Documentary
A feature documentary filmDocumentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
about the artist/inventor/composer's life and work, TRIMPIN: The Sound of Invention, produced and directed by Peter Esmonde, premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival
South by Southwest
South by Southwest is an Austin, Texas based company dedicated to planning conferences, trade shows, festivals and other events. Their current roster of annual events include: SXSW Music, SXSW Film, SXSW Interactive, SXSWedu, and SXSWeco and take place every spring in Austin, Texas, United States...
in Austin, Texas
Austin, Texas
Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of :Texas and the seat of Travis County. Located in Central Texas on the eastern edge of the American Southwest, it is the fourth-largest city in Texas and the 14th most populous city in the United States. It was the third-fastest-growing large city in...
, in March 2009. The documentary subsequently screened at film festivals in New York, London, Toronto, Barcelona, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Vancouver, Dublin, Goteborg, Oslo, and New Zealand. DVD release is slated for Fall 2010.
Book
In May 2011 a biographical book entitled TRIMPIN / Contraptions for Art and Sound was published by Marquand Books. The book was compiled and edited by Anne Focke with contributions from many of Trimpin's friends and collaborators including Kyle GannKyle Gann
Kyle Eugene Gann is an American professor of music, critic and composer born in Dallas, Texas. As a critic for The Village Voice and other publications he has been a supporter of progressive music including such Downtown movements as postminimalism and totalism.- As composer :As a composer his...
, Charles Amirkhanian
Charles Amirkhanian
Charles Amirkhanian is an American composer. He is a percussionist, sound poet, and radio producer of Armenian extraction. He is mostly known for his electroacoustic and text-sound music...
and David Harrington of Kronos Quartet
Kronos Quartet
Kronos Quartet is a string quartet founded by violinist David Harrington in 1973 in Seattle, Washington. Since 1978, the quartet has been based in San Francisco, California. The longest-running combination of performers had Harrington and John Sherba on violin, Hank Dutt on viola, and Joan...
. The book was funded by the private sale of a limited edition run of thirteen works titled BookBeatBox. Each unique sculpture is both a hand-made brushed aluminum encasement for the book, and also a musical instrument powered by a hand-crank.
External links
- Charles Amirkhanian interviews Trimpin May 17, 1990 (on the Internet ArchiveInternet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
).