Location: San Anselmo, CA
Medium: Instrument design, music, sound art
Website: barthopkin.com
Bart Hopkin was born in 1952 and grew up in Berkeley, California. He earned a B.A. magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1974, studying folklore and mythology with a specialization in ethnomusicology. After several years teaching music in public and private schools and living in Kingston, Jamaica, where he worked as an arranger for the composer Father Richard Ho Lung, Hopkin returned to the Bay Area and earned a second B.A., in music education, along with a teaching credential, from San Francisco State University.
From 1985 to 1999 Hopkin published and edited Experimental Musical Instruments, a quarterly journal documenting inventors and builders of unconventional instruments worldwide, producing 70 issues first out of Nicasio and then Point Reyes Station in Marin County. He went on to write and publish more than a dozen books on instrument design and construction, including Musical Instrument Design (1996) and Gravikords, Whirlies & Pyrophones: Experimental Musical Instruments (1996), a survey of nineteen instrument inventors with a foreword by Tom Waits, along with volumes on wind chimes, marimbas, lamellaphones, and plosive aerophones.
Hopkin lives and works in San Anselmo, in Marin County. Since 2009 he has co-curated the Window Gallery at San Francisco’s Center for New Music with David Samas and Kirk Pearson, presenting exhibitions of newly invented instruments and sound art from makers near and far. He continues to build his own instrumentarium of experimental instruments and performs regularly as a classically trained guitarist.
Hopkin’s instruments are built largely from wood, metal, glass, and found or recycled materials, and range across winds, lamellaphones, free bars, bells and gongs, plucked and bowed strings, and drums — often idiosyncratically named (Gurgle Ock, Rattletine, Trillium Harp, Savart’s Wheel). His interest lies in the acoustic principles behind sound production rather than electronics, which he has written that he deliberately avoids in favor of exploring tuning systems, resonance, and unconventional playing techniques; he has described himself as “a very microtonal kid.” In recent years his practice has turned toward semi-self-playing instruments — constructions that, once set in motion, continue sounding with only occasional intervention, freeing the player to layer in other sound sources.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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