Trimpin: Phffft
Henry Art Gallery
15th Ave NE and NE 41st St, 543-2280
Through Oct 2.
When asked why he never composed any music for the organ, Igor Stravinsky replied, “The monster does not breathe.” In the latter half of the 20th century, composers struggled to make the King of the Instruments—so deemed for its imposing mass, loudness, vast palette of sounds, and royally removed organist triggering tones from a loft perched on high—breathe. And better yet, denude the beast of its religious robes.
A few succeeded. Mauricio Kagel’s Improvisation ajoutée (1961–62) miscegenates traditional keyboard and pedal technique with the rowdy shenanigans of two assistants who not only manipulate the organ’s stops, but yell, clap, cackle, and stomp. György Ligeti’s Volumina (also 1961–62) and Charlemagne Palestine’s epic Schlingen-Blängen (1988) reaffirm that the organ was the first synthesizer and capable of much more than symphony-sized liturgical music. Long hypnotic tones slowly accumulate and coalesce into complex, shimmering harmonies; terrifyingly loud clusters scream every chord ever played simultaneously; and through it all, the ears marvel that such strange, abstract elektronische sounds were created acoustically—with just air—on the organ.
Trimpin’s Phffft (1992) succeeds too, not only by dispensing with the keyboard but also by exploding the organ’s constituent parts altogether.
Like the organs of old, Phffft bristles with ranks of pipes. On each side of the room, gray plastic tubes terminated by whistles hang vertically from a giant marionette’s X. Sharp eyes can read the type on the sides of the PVC pipe and catch each X as it slowly rotates, dispersing flute-like hoots and toots around the room. A pair of eight-foot-long gaudy orange pipes hover near the entrance, as if someone fattened up a bundle of stretched, skinny trombones for sentinel duty.
Against three of the four walls stands a six-foot-long cylinder that belongs in someone’s trunk subwoofing booty-shaking bass lines. Inside these resonators, air-driven accordion reeds huff, thud, and yes, burp a phffft here and there. At the center stands a sturdy control box that reminded me of Trimpin’s installation at Suyama Space, conloninpurple (1997). “It’s the same box,” Trimpin confided, pointing to the sturdy twin dials. In front of the control box squats a wagon wheel ringed with squawking duck calls and chirping square wood whistles. Look closely at PVC pipe joints and you’ll spot price tags from Eagle Hardware, 29 cents.
Trimpin’s resourcefulness extends to Phffft‘s colors, a slapdash riot of oranges, yellows, blues, and purples. “Whatever I had on the shelf,” came Trimpin’s genial reply to my pretentious supposition regarding the work’s color scheme.
What does Phffft need? People to take the time to play it as an instrument, and a better room. Upon entry, a sensor triggers one of Trimpin’s compositions. Some are sparse atmospheres of tinkles and chimes while others offer good jaunty fun, like a rambunctious player piano plunking out tunes at the Olde Soda Shoppe. Visitors can also start a Trimpin piece by pressing the square button in the middle of the control box. Alas, the noise of the room—surging air conditioners and people talking—can make it hard to listen.
I paid closer attention while playing Phffft. Although the control box does not grant complete control over all the instruments, the two dials, when turned slowly either singly or in tandem, trigger enough of the whistles, flutes, and reeds to make even a novice confident. Emboldened by the ability to create something so pleasant so quickly, I began to spin the dials gently to different degrees and at radically disjunct rates. The result sounded organically electronic, as if Olivier Messiaen had made musique concrète by gently processing and spatializing his beloved bird songs throughout a small cavern.
Phffft is the first installment in a 25-year retrospective of Trimpin’s oeuvre, which resolutely uses mechanical means to make organic music—entirely without electric amplification or digital sound processing. Over the next two years, more pieces will appear at ConWorks, Tacoma’s Museum of Glass, Suyama Space, the Frye, and other venues. And though the Henry’s decision to exhibit Phffft continues a welcome trend among galleries and museums to present and preserve the sonic arts, the room’s mediocre acoustics remind me that someone, somewhere needs to build a museum better suited to looking and listening.
