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Multidimensional Music Explodes in Other Minds
by Tony Reveaux
Composers Jaffe and Trimpin with a Brant/Trimpin xylophone. photo: David JaffeIt’s the second evening of the Other Minds 16 concert series last March and the hall at the Jewish Community Center is exploding with sound from every direction. Musicians are playing from different positions in the aisles amidst the audience. Overhead, clanging metal chime tubes hang from the ceiling like gleaming stalagmites. On stage, a musician in a nest of electronics, his hands a blur, plays with mallets on a “radio drum” touch keyboard. Behind him a Yamaha Disklavier computer-controlled piano responds, and you can see its keys rippling to his remote commands. Spooky!
The cylinders on the side of each chime are electro-magnets that pull a “beater” to strike the chime when directed by the percussionist. photo: David JaffeSpace is the score for Jaffe and Trimpin
3D in cinema is becoming so widespread and established that it is beginning to expand from the theater into the living room TV. Filmmakers are testing, experimenting and learning how best to shape and form depth to their best expressive advantages. Stereophony and multiple speaker placements gives perceptive depth to the audio. Live music generally radiates from stage center like a virtual speaker cone.
“The Space Between Us” (2011) for 3-D sensor, Trimpin instruments and strings by David A. Jaffe with the collaboration of German sound sculptor Trimpin expands all of that so that musical generators colonize and inhabit the audience realm as well as the stage. The performance is purely acoustic, with no amplified or speaker-driven sound whatsoever.
“This piece,” said Jaffe, “explores what can be communicated and what must remain unsaid as eight isolated string players embedded in the audience, and one percussionist alone on stage, reach out to one another. While the violinists, violists and cellists move air through intimate coupling of bows, strings and bodies, the percussionist silently induces electromagnetic waves that elicit reaction in remote robotic xylophones, bells, pianos and chimes.”
Composer Jaffe likes to meld acoustic analogue instruments and electronics. photo: David JaffeHenry Brant’s Fourth Dimension
The piece is a memorial tribute to spatial music pioneer Henry Brant, who referred to space as the Fourth Dimension of Music, after pitch, time and timbre. It draws upon pre-WWII percussion instruments that Brant collected over the years and bequeathed to David A. Jaffe, Brant’s protégé and close friend.
These instruments have been transformed by sound artist Trimpin especially for this piece, turning them into 21st century robotic sound contraptions that evoke Brant's nuts- and-bolts spirit of adventure and experimentation, combined with a hand-crafted one-of- a-kind aesthetic that harks back to earlier days.
Trimpin on the Near Event Horizon
Stanford Lively Arts presents the world premiere of “The Gurs Zyklus,” a stirring and indefinable reflection on memory and remembrance, exploration and wonder, created by composer/sound sculptor/inventor Trimpin—in collaboration with director Rinde Eckert—on Saturday, May 14 at 8:00 p.m. in Memorial Auditorium.
Part multimedia performance and part installation, the event will be the culmination of a yearlong Stanford residency by Trimpin, who has designed and built of the work’s sound sculptures in partnership with students at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). Trimpin’s wildly imaginative inventions will inhabit the entire Memorial Auditorium stage as the work plays out on multiple layers at once: theater, musical performance and kinetic objects—such as a Fire Organ and rolling loudspeakers mounted on a 40-foot teeter-totter—all blurring the line between sculpture and musical instrument development.
The project will also draw audiences through the history and landscape of Gurs, an internment camp that during the Nazi era housed the Jews deported from Efringen-Kirchen, the German town where Trimpin grew up in the 1950s, see.
Tony Reveaux is a writer, film critic and tech specialist now living in Marin County.
Posted on May 05, 2011 - 09:05 PM
Multidimensional Music Explodes in Other Minds
by Tony Reveaux
Composers Jaffe and Trimpin with a Brant/Trimpin xylophone. photo: David JaffeIt’s the second evening of the Other Minds 16 concert series last March and the hall at the Jewish Community Center is exploding with sound from every direction. Musicians are playing from different positions in the aisles amidst the audience. Overhead, clanging metal chime tubes hang from the ceiling like gleaming stalagmites. On stage, a musician in a nest of electronics, his hands a blur, plays with mallets on a “radio drum” touch keyboard. Behind him a Yamaha Disklavier computer-controlled piano responds, and you can see its keys rippling to his remote commands. Spooky!
The cylinders on the side of each chime are electro-magnets that pull a “beater” to strike the chime when directed by the percussionist. photo: David JaffeSpace is the score for Jaffe and Trimpin
3D in cinema is becoming so widespread and established that it is beginning to expand from the theater into the living room TV. Filmmakers are testing, experimenting and learning how best to shape and form depth to their best expressive advantages. Stereophony and multiple speaker placements gives perceptive depth to the audio. Live music generally radiates from stage center like a virtual speaker cone.
“The Space Between Us” (2011) for 3-D sensor, Trimpin instruments and strings by David A. Jaffe with the collaboration of German sound sculptor Trimpin expands all of that so that musical generators colonize and inhabit the audience realm as well as the stage. The performance is purely acoustic, with no amplified or speaker-driven sound whatsoever.
“This piece,” said Jaffe, “explores what can be communicated and what must remain unsaid as eight isolated string players embedded in the audience, and one percussionist alone on stage, reach out to one another. While the violinists, violists and cellists move air through intimate coupling of bows, strings and bodies, the percussionist silently induces electromagnetic waves that elicit reaction in remote robotic xylophones, bells, pianos and chimes.”
Composer Jaffe likes to meld acoustic analogue instruments and electronics. photo: David JaffeHenry Brant’s Fourth Dimension
The piece is a memorial tribute to spatial music pioneer Henry Brant, who referred to space as the Fourth Dimension of Music, after pitch, time and timbre. It draws upon pre-WWII percussion instruments that Brant collected over the years and bequeathed to David A. Jaffe, Brant’s protégé and close friend.
These instruments have been transformed by sound artist Trimpin especially for this piece, turning them into 21st century robotic sound contraptions that evoke Brant's nuts- and-bolts spirit of adventure and experimentation, combined with a hand-crafted one-of- a-kind aesthetic that harks back to earlier days.
Trimpin on the Near Event Horizon
Stanford Lively Arts presents the world premiere of “The Gurs Zyklus,” a stirring and indefinable reflection on memory and remembrance, exploration and wonder, created by composer/sound sculptor/inventor Trimpin—in collaboration with director Rinde Eckert—on Saturday, May 14 at 8:00 p.m. in Memorial Auditorium.
Part multimedia performance and part installation, the event will be the culmination of a yearlong Stanford residency by Trimpin, who has designed and built of the work’s sound sculptures in partnership with students at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). Trimpin’s wildly imaginative inventions will inhabit the entire Memorial Auditorium stage as the work plays out on multiple layers at once: theater, musical performance and kinetic objects—such as a Fire Organ and rolling loudspeakers mounted on a 40-foot teeter-totter—all blurring the line between sculpture and musical instrument development.
The project will also draw audiences through the history and landscape of Gurs, an internment camp that during the Nazi era housed the Jews deported from Efringen-Kirchen, the German town where Trimpin grew up in the 1950s, see.
Tony Reveaux is a writer, film critic and tech specialist now living in Marin County.
Posted on May 16, 2011 - 10:16 PM
by Tony Reveaux
Composers Jaffe and Trimpin with a Brant/Trimpin xylophone. photo: David JaffeThe cylinders on the side of each chime are electro-magnets that pull a “beater” to strike the chime when directed by the percussionist. photo: David Jaffe3D in cinema is becoming so widespread and established that it is beginning to expand from the theater into the living room TV. Filmmakers are testing, experimenting and learning how best to shape and form depth to their best expressive advantages. Stereophony and multiple speaker placements gives perceptive depth to the audio. Live music generally radiates from stage center like a virtual speaker cone.
“The Space Between Us” (2011) for 3-D sensor, Trimpin instruments and strings by David A. Jaffe with the collaboration of German sound sculptor Trimpin expands all of that so that musical generators colonize and inhabit the audience realm as well as the stage. The performance is purely acoustic, with no amplified or speaker-driven sound whatsoever.
“This piece,” said Jaffe, “explores what can be communicated and what must remain unsaid as eight isolated string players embedded in the audience, and one percussionist alone on stage, reach out to one another. While the violinists, violists and cellists move air through intimate coupling of bows, strings and bodies, the percussionist silently induces electromagnetic waves that elicit reaction in remote robotic xylophones, bells, pianos and chimes.”
Composer Jaffe likes to meld acoustic analogue instruments and electronics. photo: David JaffeThe piece is a memorial tribute to spatial music pioneer Henry Brant, who referred to space as the Fourth Dimension of Music, after pitch, time and timbre. It draws upon pre-WWII percussion instruments that Brant collected over the years and bequeathed to David A. Jaffe, Brant’s protégé and close friend.
These instruments have been transformed by sound artist Trimpin especially for this piece, turning them into 21st century robotic sound contraptions that evoke Brant's nuts- and-bolts spirit of adventure and experimentation, combined with a hand-crafted one-of- a-kind aesthetic that harks back to earlier days.
Trimpin on the Near Event Horizon
Stanford Lively Arts presents the world premiere of “The Gurs Zyklus,” a stirring and indefinable reflection on memory and remembrance, exploration and wonder, created by composer/sound sculptor/inventor Trimpin—in collaboration with director Rinde Eckert—on Saturday, May 14 at 8:00 p.m. in Memorial Auditorium.
Part multimedia performance and part installation, the event will be the culmination of a yearlong Stanford residency by Trimpin, who has designed and built of the work’s sound sculptures in partnership with students at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). Trimpin’s wildly imaginative inventions will inhabit the entire Memorial Auditorium stage as the work plays out on multiple layers at once: theater, musical performance and kinetic objects—such as a Fire Organ and rolling loudspeakers mounted on a 40-foot teeter-totter—all blurring the line between sculpture and musical instrument development.
The project will also draw audiences through the history and landscape of Gurs, an internment camp that during the Nazi era housed the Jews deported from Efringen-Kirchen, the German town where Trimpin grew up in the 1950s, see.
Tony Reveaux is a writer, film critic and tech specialist now living in Marin County.
Posted on May 05, 2011 - 09:05 PM
Multidimensional Music Explodes in Other Minds
by Tony Reveaux
Composers Jaffe and Trimpin with a Brant/Trimpin xylophone. photo: David JaffeThe cylinders on the side of each chime are electro-magnets that pull a “beater” to strike the chime when directed by the percussionist. photo: David Jaffe3D in cinema is becoming so widespread and established that it is beginning to expand from the theater into the living room TV. Filmmakers are testing, experimenting and learning how best to shape and form depth to their best expressive advantages. Stereophony and multiple speaker placements gives perceptive depth to the audio. Live music generally radiates from stage center like a virtual speaker cone.
“The Space Between Us” (2011) for 3-D sensor, Trimpin instruments and strings by David A. Jaffe with the collaboration of German sound sculptor Trimpin expands all of that so that musical generators colonize and inhabit the audience realm as well as the stage. The performance is purely acoustic, with no amplified or speaker-driven sound whatsoever.
“This piece,” said Jaffe, “explores what can be communicated and what must remain unsaid as eight isolated string players embedded in the audience, and one percussionist alone on stage, reach out to one another. While the violinists, violists and cellists move air through intimate coupling of bows, strings and bodies, the percussionist silently induces electromagnetic waves that elicit reaction in remote robotic xylophones, bells, pianos and chimes.”
Composer Jaffe likes to meld acoustic analogue instruments and electronics. photo: David JaffeThe piece is a memorial tribute to spatial music pioneer Henry Brant, who referred to space as the Fourth Dimension of Music, after pitch, time and timbre. It draws upon pre-WWII percussion instruments that Brant collected over the years and bequeathed to David A. Jaffe, Brant’s protégé and close friend.
These instruments have been transformed by sound artist Trimpin especially for this piece, turning them into 21st century robotic sound contraptions that evoke Brant's nuts- and-bolts spirit of adventure and experimentation, combined with a hand-crafted one-of- a-kind aesthetic that harks back to earlier days.
Trimpin on the Near Event Horizon
Stanford Lively Arts presents the world premiere of “The Gurs Zyklus,” a stirring and indefinable reflection on memory and remembrance, exploration and wonder, created by composer/sound sculptor/inventor Trimpin—in collaboration with director Rinde Eckert—on Saturday, May 14 at 8:00 p.m. in Memorial Auditorium.
Part multimedia performance and part installation, the event will be the culmination of a yearlong Stanford residency by Trimpin, who has designed and built of the work’s sound sculptures in partnership with students at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). Trimpin’s wildly imaginative inventions will inhabit the entire Memorial Auditorium stage as the work plays out on multiple layers at once: theater, musical performance and kinetic objects—such as a Fire Organ and rolling loudspeakers mounted on a 40-foot teeter-totter—all blurring the line between sculpture and musical instrument development.
The project will also draw audiences through the history and landscape of Gurs, an internment camp that during the Nazi era housed the Jews deported from Efringen-Kirchen, the German town where Trimpin grew up in the 1950s, see.
Tony Reveaux is a writer, film critic and tech specialist now living in Marin County.
Posted on May 16, 2011 - 10:16 PM
