Music Book Review: Sound Inventions edited by Bart Hopkin and Sudhu Tewari

Sound Inventions: Selected Articles From Experimental Musical Instruments

edited by Bart Hopkin and Sudhu Tewari (Music 784.19 Sou)

 

At first glance around an orchestra, you might think to yourself that there sure are a lot of different instruments, but considering the long history of civilization, it also seems like we don’t develop a lot of new instruments regularly. The main families of musical instruments are hundreds of years old in pretty much every culture, and although we gradually make updates to some of them, the common instruments have stayed stable for centuries. I guess you could say that we’ve continued to be more inventive in the area of electronic instruments and effects more recently, and maybe that area of focus is even part of the reason that there haven’t been as many innovations in acoustic instruments lately.

 

There are still folks who design new instruments, and sometimes these can make really exciting, new sounds. For a period in the 1980s and 90s, there was a quarterly journal that documented their collective efforts, called “Experimental Musical Instruments,” edited by Bart Hopkin. In retrospect, this was a very important publication. At the time of its arrival, the participants and their instruments often landed in an area somewhere between sound art, sound sculpture, and experimental music, and all of those fields have continued to grow over the last two decades. It seems like an especially good time to revisit some of the information first revealed in these journal pages, but the original journals are hard to come by.

 

Enter Sound Inventions: Selected Articles From Experimental Musical Instruments, edited by Bart Hopkin and Sudhu Tewari. As I’m sure you can guess from the title, this new book contains some of the most pivotal selections from the original journals. It also features two great introductory essays that explain the history and context of the original journal’s publication run, and discuss the context and relevance for this information and the need for new instruments today.

 

For me, one of the most interesting things about getting to dig into these articles from Experimental Musical Instruments is that I had some preconceived notions about the musical intentions behind a lot of new instrument design that were proven to be inaccurate. While it’s true that there was a tendency among these instrument makers toward experimental music — they’re already deep in the process of experimentation with their instrument building, after all — there were other motivations and influences afoot in this community, too. In some cases, designers were simply building on traditions. There are a couple of articles included in the book that discuss gamelan music, for example. There is a long Gamelan tradition in Indonesia, but interestingly the tradition doesn’t emphasize certain aspects of music that Western traditions gravitated towards, like having a widely shared tuning center and temperament system. There are some commonalities in terms of scales used, but each village could have some substantial variation, and gamelan builders might choose a particular tuning center for personal reasons. In “A Comparative Tunings Chart,” unique attributes of these scales are discussed, and in “Daniel Schmidt’s American Gamelan Instruments,” we get to see how composer Daniel Schmidt applied these general principles to building his own gamelan instruments. Traditional music can be played with his designs, but they also act as a sort of platform for him to use specific kinds of timbres and tunings for his own compositions.

 

In this broad sense, there is another point worth mentioning: when the word “experimental” is used to describe the instruments in this book, sometimes there are real experiments going on with an eye toward playfulness and discovery, but at other times, the builders know very much what they’re after, and perhaps the word “experimental” isn’t the perfect description of what’s happening. I find this to be the case in a lot of so-called “experimental” music, too: if something doesn’t sound like familiar music, that term is often used to describe it, although in truth there may not be experimentation happening in the literal sense. In many cases throughout the book, instruments are being created that improve upon previous instrument designs in some specific way, or solve a practical problem of some kind.

 

A great example of the latter is the article entitled “Augustus Stroh and the Famous Stroh Violin,” which details the history of a whole family of instruments that were heavily used from about 1901 to 1920, and then completely forgotten. But they solved an important technical problem of the era: early recording technology struggled to capture and reproduce frequencies above 3000 Hz. This was problematic for recording the violin, for which much of its sound happens above that range. The Stroh violin, which was a strange looking instrument using an aluminum body with a trumpet-like bell horn instead of a typical wooden violin body, helped to solve this problem. It was both louder than a conventional violin, and because of its horn, it was quite directional, so a performer could point the instrument’s horn directly toward the recording horn for better recording quality.

 

Where improving on instrument designs is concerned, I think the article entitled “A Musical Instrument Workshop in Hanoi” is a fascinating read. Here we learn about the studio and living space of instrument builder Ta Tham, located on the Hanoi Music Conservatory campus. Tham had studied both Western and traditional Vietnamese instruments, and realized that Western instruments such as the piano and violin came about through long periods of design refinement. Now he has set out to approach Vietnamese instruments with the same kind of attention to expanded functionality and musicality, expanding their ranges or timbral capabilities.

 

And then there are some incredible and very experimental kinds of instruments. An article on Ellen Fullman’s “Long String Instrument,” an installation that usually spans around 90 feet, describes an instrument and approach that has been influential in experimental music circles since she first started working with the concept in the early 1980s. Long time experimental instrument designers like Tom Nunn, circuit bender Reed Ghazala, and the original editor of “Experimental Musical Instruments” Bart Hopkins himself are represented. Some articles deal with the underlying physical nature of sound itself, which is important to all kinds of instrument design, such as the aforementioned “Comparative Tunings Chart” and a fine article entitled “Relating Timbre and Tuning.” And some, like “Mechanical Speech Synthesis,” relate to the early days of technologies that have applications beyond the musical world. And toward the end of the book, there is a great article called “Beyond the Shaker: Experimental Instruments and the New Educational Initiatives” by John Bertles, in which he describes a number of approaches that would incorporate the same core fundamentals of music used in instrument design as parts of education curriculum.

 

Overall, Sound Inventions is the kind of book that I think can be inspiring for all kinds of musicians. As these instrument designers address their personal musical questions through instrument building, we can all learn from their unique perspectives. And so many of their instruments are just plain fun, producing surprising results and often looking as interesting as they sound.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Musical Instrument Design: Practical Information for Instrument Making by Bart Hopkin, Making Poor Man’s Guitars: Cigar Box Guitars, the Frying Pan Banjo, and Other DIY Instruments by Shane Speal, or Circuit Bending: Build Your Own Alien Instruments by Reed Ghazala.)

 

( publisher’s official Sound Inventions web site ) | ( official Bart Hopkin web site ) | ( official Sudhu Tewari web site )

 

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

 

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