Music Reviews : Trimpin Unveils a Contraption

Mechanical instruments have a long and fabled history. One remembers the musical clocks for which Mozart composed, the “Panharmonicon” of Beethoven’s “Wellington’s Victory” and the elaborate musical boxes--disguised as hat racks and umbrella stands, performing tunes from “William Tell” and “Fra Diavolo”--of Thomas Beecham’s youth.

Trimpin--he goes by the single name--has invented a complex device, controlled by computer, which fits onto, and plays, the grand piano. He calls it Contraption IPP 71512. The Seattle-based composer-inventor unveiled it for Los Angeles at the Pacific Design Center Wednesday night, as part of the CalArts Spring Music Festival.

From a framework placed above the strings of the piano, Trimpin can lower and manipulate a series of bows and hammers, plucking and dampening devices, all applied minutely to the instrument through computer command. Another mechanism, also computer-controlled, sits atop the keyboard itself and strikes the keys with a rapidity, exactness and simultaneous range no mere human could ever hope to achieve.

All the sounds created, however, are acoustic, the computer only regulating the application of the machine, not enhancing the results.

In the 27-minute composition of the same name, Contraption IPP 71512 produced a huge and fascinating array of timbres and effects: from a symphony of buzz saws to polyrhythmic ragtime, from prepared-piano clicks, thuds and clinks to delicate autoharp strumming, from whirring scales three octaves in unison to harpsichord doodles.

Whether the piece itself has much musical value is difficult to say after a single hearing, but it amply demonstrated the potential of Trimpin’s invention, and it fascinated.

The composer, who sat calmly at a computer to the side, also showed how his software-driven keyboard can perform the player-piano works of Conlon Nancarrow--in the witty, polyrhythmic Studies Nos. 21 and 48--and James Tenney, in his brief, kinetic “Spectral CANON for CONLON Nancarrow.”

The rest of the program was given over to the music of Tod Machover. His “Born Again, Again . . .” is a kind of concerto without orchestra in which the soloist generates, influences and interacts with the computerized accompaniment through an intricate wire/sensory system--attached to bowing hand, bow, bridge and fingerboard.

The result is an accompaniment nuanced by and unique to the particular performance. Machover’s 26-minute work emerged a typically eclectic, driven, rhapsodic, theatrical barrage of sound, as aggressively and capably dispatched by Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick and computer technicians.