Trimpin

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Trimpin receiving the 2007 University of Washington Libraries' Anne Gould Hauberg Artist Images Award.
Trimpin receiving the 2007 University of Washington Libraries' Anne Gould Hauberg Artist Images Award.
IF VI WAS IX: Roots and Branches, the Trimpin sculpture installed in the Experience Music Project, Seattle, is one of Trimpin's few pieces incorporating electronic instruments, as against electronically controlled acoustic instruments,
IF VI WAS IX: Roots and Branches, the Trimpin sculpture installed in the Experience Music Project, Seattle,[1] is one of Trimpin's few pieces incorporating electronic instruments, as against electronically controlled acoustic instruments,[2]

Trimpin (born Gerhard Trimpin[3] 1951 in Istein, Germany, now part of Efringen-Kirchen) is a Seattle, Washington-based[3] kinetic sculptor,[4] sound artist,[3] 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.[2] He uses only his last name, and has legally changed his name accordingly.[3])

He grew up near the French and Swiss borders,[5][6] a native speaker of Alemannisch.[6] The son of a brass and woodwind player,[7] 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.[8][9] 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.[6] He studied at the University of Berlin.[8]

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.[2] Prior to the availability of MIDI, Trimpin developed his own protocol for computer storage of music.[10]

In 1980 Trimpin moved to America because he needed access to old, used technological components, which were difficult to find in Europe;[3][7] he settled in Seattle because it "sounded like a nice place to live".[6] In the 1980s, he worked a month a year fishing in Alaska to support his work.[2]

One of his early installations was a six-story-high microtonal xylophone (that is, one with smaller intervals between achievable tones than in conventional Western musical scales) running through a spiral staircase in an Amsterdam theater, with computer-driven melodies ripping up and down it.[2][6] Another piece was a water fountain installation in which drops of water, timed in complex rhythmic fugues, dripped into glass receptacles.[2][6] Several of his pieces since that time have made similar use of falling water.[11] 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.[6]

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.[2][12] 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.[12] 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.[6]

Trimpin has invented machines to play every instrument of the orchestra via MIDI commands.[7][6] 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.[7][6] Indeed, his pieces do not generally try to imitate human playing.[2] "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."[12]

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.[6] His one work to use electronic sounds was commission-mandated, a tornado-shaped column of electric guitars called 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.

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 Museum at SAAM,[13] Henry Art Gallery of the University of Washington, Consolidated Works (which dissolved shortly after the Trimpin Exhibit[14]), 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.[15]

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-foot long glass case. Each "contraption" plays music in response to people passing by.[16]


Trimpin was the recipient of a 1997 MacArthur "Genius" Award.[8] 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.[17]

As of 2007, he is among a number artists establishing studio space in Tieton, Washington, on the edge of Washington's Yakima Valley.[18]

In the Spring of 2008 he will be Artist-in-residence at the University of Michigan (February) and the Bowdoin College Coastal Studies Center.

"A full-length documentary about Trimpin's life and work is presently in post-production."

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ “IF VI WAS IX: Roots and Branches on the official site of Experience Music Project. Accessed online 6 October 2007.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h Trimpin: Computers and Music, Audio Engineering Society - Pacific Northwest Section, Meeting report of meeting held February 12, 2002. Accessed online 6 October 2007.
  3. ^ a b c d e Sound Artist Trimpin Triumphs With Der Ring, FutureMusic.com, June 21, 2006. Accessed online 6 October 2007.
  4. ^ Stephen Wilson, "Chapter 5.3: Kinetic Instruments, Sound Sculpture, and Industrial Music", Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology, MIT Press (2002). ISBN 0262731584. p 416–417.
  5. ^ His native district of [[Lörrach (district)|]] is the extreme southeast corner of Germany.
  6. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Kyle Gann, "Trimpin's Machine Age: A Revolutionary Tinker Revives the Dream of Infinitely Fluid Music", originally published in the Village Voice April 20, 1993 (Vol. XXXVIII No. 16, p. 84, 87), reprinted in Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice, University of California Press, 2006. ISBN 0520229827. p. 32–38.
  7. ^ a b c d Kyle Gann If you build it, they will come!, American Public Media. Accessed online 6 October 2007.
  8. ^ a b c Program for 2007 Anne Gould Hauberg Artist Images award, October 5, 2007.
  9. ^ Ajay Kapur, "A History of Robotic Musical Instruments". Published in Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), Barcelona (Spain), 2005; PDF accessed online 6 October 2007 on the Music Intelligence and Sound Technology site, University of Victoria. p. 1.
  10. ^ Kapur, p. 2.
  11. ^ For example, Liquid Percussion at the "New York Hall of Science", mentioned by Dulcie Limbach in the New York Times "For Children" listing April 19, 1991, accessed online 6 October 2007; Hydraulis at the entrance to Seattle's KeyArena, mentioned by Young Chang, (Toy) piano man makes a big sound from tiny keys, Seattle Times, March 31, 2003, accessed online 6 October 2007.
  12. ^ a b c Trimpin Lectures At Form/Space Atelier, Artist | Trust (Seattle), 2007. Accessed online 6 October 2007.
  13. ^ Untitled piece in Vroom Journal (no date) cites for SAAM, also lists Suyama Space, the Henry, Con Works, Museum of Glass, Jack Straw, WSU Museum of Art, Vancouver International Jazz Festival, The Frye, Tacoma Art Museum, and Missoula Art Museum. Accessed online 28 November 2006.
  14. ^ Brendan Kiley, Almost Already Gone, The Stranger, Jul 6 - Jul 12, 2006. Accessed online 28 November 2006.
  15. ^ Jack Straw Productions' New Media Gallery page on Trimpin exhibit "Archival Investigations" lists all of these venues except Seattle Art Museum at SAAM. Accessed online 28 November 2006.
  16. ^ Sea-Tac Airport's Art at Sea-Tac, Concourse A, "Artwork All Along a Traveler's Journey"
  17. ^ The Seventh International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, official program. Accessed online 6 October 2007.
  18. ^ R.M. Campbell, Tieton: Artist's touch is rewriting community's story in a mighty way, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, June 14, 2007. Accessed online 6 October 2007.

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