Thingamajigs' Fundraiser Concert August 19, 2011

To help support artists traveling from overseas and other parts of the country to join Thingamajigs for its Annual Music for People & Thingamajig Festival, a special fundraising concert will be held at Meridian Gallery in San Francisco. Local Bay Area artists will volunteer their time to perform music and demonstrate their special instruments to audience members and bring awareness to Thingamajigs’ arts and education programming.

The Thingamajigs Fundraiser Concert features the music and original homemade instruments of Bart Hopkin and Tom Nunn, and will also feature Persian-Tuned Piano performed by Iranian artists Ramin Zoufonoun.

The Music For People & Thingamajigs Festival is an annual event dedicated to promoting experimental music that incorporates made/found instruments and alternate tuning systems. Each year, MFP&T invites artists who design their own musical instruments to join in a festival of workshops, music making, and performances with the goal of reaching a large, diverse audience of all ages. It is also a festival where the public can participate in instrument building and tuning educational workshops, as well as hear unique sounds and compositions from up and coming artists. Now in its 14th year, Thingamajigs’ genre-crossing MFP&T Festival is the only annual event completely dedicated to music created with made/found materials and alternate tuning systems. Past participants include Carla Kihlstedt, Walter Kitundu, Pauline Oliveros, Brenda Hutchinson, William Winant, and Laetitia Sonami.

Artists involved:

Bart Hopkin is a designer and builder of acoustic musical instruments, and a student of musical instruments worldwide. Since 1985 he has been publisher and editor of the quarterly journal Experimental Musical Instruments, and he has written several books on musical instruments and their construction.

A lot of Bart's recent work has involved big, semi-self-playing sound-devices that, once set in motion, will carry on for a while (with occasional interventions). This leaves him free then to fill in with other instruments from his diverse instrumentarium. At the August 19 concert, he'll be debuting the latest and grandest of these semi-self-playing instruments. It would take too long to describe it here, except to say that it involves lots of things flopping around in a most choreographically musical fashion.

Tom Nunn has designed, built and performed with original musical instruments since 1976, and has built over 200 instruments. His instruments typically utilize commonly available materials, are sculptural in appearance, utilize contact microphones for amplification, and are designed specifically for improvisation with elements of ambiguity, unpredictability and nonlinearity. Tom has performed extensively throughout the San Francisco Bay Area for over 30 years, as well as in other parts of the U.S., Canada, Europe, and New Zealand, both as soloist and with other musicians.

His most recent work has involved two different, and very opposite, types of instrument. Skatchboxes (invented in November 2008) are cardboard boxes with objects such as washers, combs, toothpicks, bronze rod, dowel, etc. taped or glued to the exterior that are played with various modified plastic combs. There are many different skatching techniques that produce a wide variety of highly articulate, noise-like sounds. Lukie Tubes are simply cardboard tubes (in this case, 1” diameter, thick-walled) that are cut at a slight angle at one end. The tubes are held like a pencil and pushed across the surface of a stainless steel “resonance plate” that has been sanded with a high-speed disc sander. The plate is supported on inflated balloons in cardboard paint buckets. Each tube produces a very pure tone, the pitch of which depends on the mass (not length) of the tube. By grabbing the tube at different points using 2 hands, a range of pitches from a minor 3rd to a minor 6th in some tubes can be produced. Varying the angle and pressure of the tube will vary the pitch microtonally and/or create chordal harmonies and/or very high harmonics.

Born in Iran, and based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Ramin Zoufonoun is an established Persian-tuned pianist and a third generation in a line of musicians. He studied the Iranian radif system with his father and mentor, Mahmoud Zoufonoun
Inspired by the works of Morteza Mahjoobi (1900-1965), Ramin became deeply interested in Persian-tuned piano and started using existing recordings of Mahjoobi’s as the model for tuning and playing technique on the piano. Meanwhile, he collaborated with his father and brothers in the Zoufonoun Ensemble Ramin’s collaborations with jazz musicians such as John-Carlos Perea Hafez Modirzadeh, Ken Filiano, Tim Volpicella, and Royal Hartigan resulted in various live performances and recordings including Mystery of Sama, an Afro-Persian suite inspired by the story of Rumi and Shams. In 2007 Ramin’s collaborations with Amirabbas Etemadzadeh (percussion) and Jamshid Zarringhalam (vocals) resulted in the release of the Getting in Tune album containing improvisations and renditions of some older standards.

In 2006, Ramin founded the non-profit organization Z Venue in Santa Clara, California, with the mission to inspire and educate through artistic expressions and community involvement. The organization continues to organize events in the Bay Area.
Ramin continues to collaborate with Bay Area musicians in various venues including Thingamajigs.

History and Mission Statement:

Thingamajigs is a genre-crossing arts organization that promotes, presents and performs music and other art forms created with made and found materials or alternate tuning systems.

Our mission is to develop and nurture the exploration of alternate materials and methods of creating sound, as well as promote collaborative efforts within other artistic disciplines. With open workshops, performances, artists exchanges and an educational program, we welcome audiences/participants of all ages and backgrounds to join in a wonderful tradition started in the Bay Area by such composers as Harry Partch, Lou Harrison, and John Cage.

Thingamajigs was founded as an art project in 1997 at Mills College, Oakland California. Created by Edward Schocker and Dylan Bolles, the project was originally conceived as a forum for composers/performers who develop new and unique ways of producing sound. The project soon broke out of the college environment and into an annual music festival called Music for People & Thingamajigs (now in its 13th year). In 2004 a permanent group of unpaid volunteer organizers and advisors was created. Together they expanded the yearly festival as well as created a season of international artist exchange programs (The Pacific Exchange) and an education program (Thingamakids!).

Official Website: http://www.thingamajigs.org