Talk:Trimpin

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Contents

[edit] Fugues?

  • "…drops of water, timed in complex rhythmic fugues…": Is "fugues" really the intended word here? It has a rather precise meaning, and it seems unlikely. -- Jmabel | Talk June 28, 2005 06:01 (UTC)
Well, I know what a fugue is and so does Trimpin, and that's what he told me. Had the imitation been precise he would have said canons, and perhaps these start out as canons but depart from literal imitation. There are rhythmic fugues by Lou Harrison and Ernst Toch, among others. I'll ask Trimpin sometime to make sure. KG Kylegann 28 June 2005 11:37 (UTC)
If you have it from the horse's mouth, I'm less inclined to quibble. I'm just trying to imagine a fugue produced this way. Then again, much of Trimpin's music/sculpture defies imagination if one hasn't witnessed it firsthand. -- Jmabel | Talk June 29, 2005 06:26 (UTC)

[edit] Speaking of "from the horses mouth..."

The article say he settled in Seattle because he "hear[d] that Seattle was a nice place". I had the chance to ask him this evening why he settled here; he said that he settled in America because he had more access to certain technologies (as the article says), and in Seattle in particular because he was offered a studio in Wallingford for about a third of what it would have cost in any of the other cities he was thinking about. I don't have a proper citation from a "reliable source", but nothing seems to be cited for what the article now says, either. - Jmabel | Talk 06:50, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Given that it is anonymous and uncited, I'm changing to what he told me; it will still be uncited, but at least it will no longer be anonymous. - Jmabel | Talk 06:53, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

I see: the "nice place" remark is apparently citable from here (which I just found while searching for further citable material for the article). I already made my change and I'm not reverting it (because I believe it to be accurate), but won't object if someone else does. - Jmabel | Talk 09:08, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Ah, it's also citable from Gann's book. Some of this would have been much easier to sort out if Gann had bothered to cite himself explicitly. - Jmabel | Talk 00:38, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Nancarrow

Article says "In 1987 he met Conlon Nancarrow…" (presumably true, though uncited) but then suggests that his development of the MIDI-driven device to play pieces like Nancarrow's post-dates that. I suspect this is wrong: I heard him using that device to perform some music of that ilk in the very early 1980s, maybe 1982, at Seattle's Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) when it was located in a First Avenue South location that I believe it left around 1985. But perhaps at that time it was all Harry Partch rather than Nancarrow? I'll admit I'm on the edges of my musical knowledge here. But it was equipment specific to playing a piano in non-human ways, which seems to me far more like Nancarrow than Partch. Still, was there new technology specific to Nancarrow's work?

There is apparently, finally, a forthcoming book on Trimpin and his work that I hope will help us sort some of this out, and citably. - Jmabel | Talk 09:04, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

OK, I see from Gann's book, where he gives this in more detail: when I heard Trimpin in the early '80s he already had the technology, but hadn't applied it to Nancarrow's piano rolls. So I don't know whose music I heard him doing at that time. - Jmabel | Talk 00:41, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Additional source

According to [1] "His work was featured in the April 1999 issue of Smithsonian." Clearly would be worth tracking down. - Jmabel | Talk 08:26, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Sourcing (another horse's mouth)

(Not to call Kyle Gann/User:Kylegann a horse.) I ended up citing an article and a book by Kyle Gann for some material in the article. In fact, this material was apparently added here by him, almost verbatim to what I have now cited, but without citation here. There is no problem with him contributing the same content in both places: the copyright is his. And he certainly should be enough of an authority to cite (see our article about him). But since this is a bit unusual, I'm leaving a note here, in case anyone incorrectly suspects plagiarism. - Jmabel | Talk 18:56, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Cut because I couldn't cite

I've recently been going through trying to cite for all of this. Two things I myself have heard Trimpin say, but cannot cite for properly:

  1. Part of why he moved to Seattle was that he was offered a studio in the Wallingford neighborhood for about a third of what he would have had to pay in the other cities he was considering.
  2. The glass receptacles for one of the pieces with falling water were made by a number of glass artists, including Dale Chihuly.

If anyone has a citation for either of these, I'd welcome the return of this material to the article, with citation. - Jmabel | Talk 01:01, 7 October 2007 (UTC)