Instrumentarium Hopkinis
$12.50
Add to Cart

Get both CDs of Bart's instruments: Instrumentarium and 21 Ways
$22 Item #421
Add to Cart

View Shopping Cart  /  Checkout

Back to Main Catalog

To review our online ordering procedures (they're pretty simple) click here.

For information on ordering offline by mail, fax, phone or email, click here.

Audio CD with enclosed 16-page booklet.
Published by Experimental Musical Instruments.

In this CD, Bart Hopkin (the founder and still the main guy here at Experimental Musical Instruments) plays his own instruments. The 22 selections range in mood from decorous to raunchy and from crazy-happy to contemplative. A huge number of instruments appear -- way 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 open siren, the wobbly bentwood chalumeau, the silver-limned 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, membranophones, idiophones and uncategorizables.

$12.50 Item #415
Add to Cart

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 barbeque grill or throw a piano off a building.

-- Tom Waits

Also available: 21 Ways of Looking at Things, audio CD by Bart Hopkin
Get Both: Instrumentarium Hopkinis and 21 Ways, $22 Item #421
Add to Cart



Sounds from Instrumentarium Hopkinis

Excerpt from Branching

Excerpt from Embert

Excerpt from Ridges

Notes from the musician, Bart Hopkin

This CD comes out of my 20-plus years as director of Experimental Musical Instruments. In that position it's been my job, and also my great joy and priveledge, to learn about an incredible diversity of instruments from the most innovative and creative instrument makers worldwide. All along, I've also been designing and making instruments myself. With the CD Instrumentarium Hopkinis I've turned the focus, for the first time, to my own instruments and the music they make.

In the pieces on the CD I tried to bring out the individual character of each instrument. At the same time I tried to make the musical whole of each piece compositionally coherent and satisfying.

Photos: Jan Watson, Point Reyes Station, California