Editorial Reviews
Instrumentarium Hopkinis
Music Review:
Music Review
Kopelent: Mon Amour / String Quartet No. 4 / Brass Quintet / Morning Eulogy
Franz Joseph Haydn: "Tost" String Quartets, Op. 64, Nos. 1-3 - The Salomon Quartet
Music: Antoine( 35 Grands Themes) [Import]
Happy Children 2005 [CD-single] [Enhanced] [Import]
Izitso [Original recording remastered]
June 17, 2002 St. Louis, MO: On the Road [Live]
Jongen: Symphonie Concertante/Saint-Saëns: Symphony No.3
Les Imazighen: Songs from the Middle-Atlas
Discografia Completa V.1 [Import]
Jackie Brown: Music From The Miramax Motion Picture (1997 Film)
From the Artist
This CD comes out of my 18 years as director of Experimental Musical Instruments, an organization devoted to new and unusual musical instruments from around the world. In this project I've turned the focus, for the first time, to my own instruments and the music they make. I tried hard, in the pieces on the CD, to show off the individual character of each instrument, and at the same time to make the musical whole of each piece compositionally coherent and satisfying. But, of course, all that matters is whether the music sounds good and feels right. So give it a listen; if you find that it works on a sounds-good feels-right level, I'll be happy.
About the Artist
Bart's book "Musical Instrument Design" is regarded as the leading how-to book on creative, non-traditonal instrument making. Exp Mus Inst has put out a number of other books and CDs as well, both independently and with other publishers, including more specialized how-to books, and CDs covering a great diversity of new instruments. Bart Hopkin plays conventional instruments as well, and has many years of music-making in the straight music world under his belt too. Conventional instruments... read more
Album Description
This CD is full of outrageously inventive new musical instruments. The music ranges from raunchy to decorous and from crazy-happy to contemplative. A huge number of instruments appear -- far too many to list here, but they're all described in 16 pages of liner notes. They include the infamous Savart's wheel, the bird-like branching corrugaphone, the worrisome scraper flutes, the magical Polly, the melancholical musical siren, the wobbly bentwood chalumeau, the glittering disorderly tumbling forth, and many, many more … all very different from one another, and representing every imaginable class of noise-maker. That includes winds, strings, idiophones and uncategorizables. Most of the pieces are ensemble pieces -- comings together of diverse instruments, with new sounds jumping in at every turn. Tom Waits says: "Bart Hopkin -- inventor, musicologist -- puts things in your ear that your mama told you not to. "Instrumentarium Hopkinis" is a record for the brave, challenging listener and should inspire you to strum your barbecue grill or throw a piano off a building.