Musical Spin-Tops
instruments, ensemble work, performance-installation
2019–with Sono-Choreographic Collective
A family of new experimental instruments - musical, kinesthetic, visual and textual. The musical spin-tops and the works that play them are in development since 2019 by Bnaya Halperin-Kaddari with the Sono-Choreographic Collective. The tops are discs mounted with magnets: as they rotate they emit spinning magnetic fields, which copper coils pick up and turn into sound. The spin itself thus becomes audible, a tone that falls as the top loses speed, tuned by the ratios and formations of its magnets.
The family has two main kinds: Epoxy-tops are small discs cast in epoxy that sound a descending, almost sinusoidal tone. Cymbal-tops are percussion cymbals of fourteen inches and more, fitted with magnets and a central brass pole; they give a low bass rumble and a rich shriek, as friction passes from the brass tip into the body of the cymbal. Every spin follows the same arc, starting at its fastest, slowing as it loses energy, wobbling more and more on its axis, and finally giving in to gravity. Playing and listening to the tops becomes a practice of tuning in to this negotiation with gravity, heard and seen at once.
The tops have been played in the concert hall with a traditional ensemble, and on the floors of galleries as a performance and an installation.
Top-Game
gamified ritual for ensemble, spin-tops and live video · 2019
Top-Game brings the spin-tops into the concert hall. Three spin-top players sit on the floor and spin the tops in front of nine musicians on traditional instruments, standing in an arc in three groups of three. Each musician imitates, follows and responds to the top spinning before them, reading the contour and speed of its descent in real time, from a one-page part learned by heart. Live video projects the tops' base plates above the ensemble, so the audience can follow what happens on the floor.
The conductor, who leads by command, is replaced by three inductors, named after the electromagnetic induction that makes the tops sound: in-ducere, to lead by persuasion. The piece is set as a gamified ritual of nine spinning rounds, a game that could go on without end. Following the tops favours attention over achievement and attunement over accuracy, and relieves a virtuoso ensemble of the usual measures of success and failure, in what John Cage called "purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play".
- 2019 · WDR Funkhaus, Cologne · 3 November, premiere by Ensemble Musikfabrik
Playground N
installation-performance · 2020–
In Playground N the Sono-Choreographic Collective's family of electromagnetic and acoustic spin-tops is variously tuned and played to keep a continuous spin. Sonified gravity and narrated voice are spatialised, while a live-video feed closely observes the tactile and kinetic behaviour of the instruments and their players. The resulting audio-visual-textual polyphony is a hybrid of musical performance and lecture: a performance of the sono-choreographic process that often remains as an installation in its aftermath.
- 2021 · klingt gut! Symposium on Sound, HAW Hamburg · 15 May
- 2022 · Height, Pace, Consistency, Galerie der HBK Braunschweig · 1 February
- Commissioned by
- Ensemble Musikfabrik (Top-Game); klingt gut! 2020/21 Symposium on Sound, HAW Hamburg; Galerie der HBK Braunschweig (Playground N)
- Performers
- Ensemble Musikfabrik (Top-Game)
- Spin-tops
- Bnaya Halperin-Kaddari and Kerstin Ergenzinger, with the Sono-Choreographic Collective
- Top-Game, concept and composition
- Bnaya Halperin-Kaddari
- Top-Game, live video
- Kerstin Ergenzinger
- Playground N
- Sono-Choreographic Collective: Bnaya Halperin-Kaddari, Kerstin Ergenzinger, Kiran Kumar
- Support
- HBK Braunschweig; Niedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur (Playground N, Braunschweig)
- Photos
- Janet Sinica (Top-Game), Sono-Choreographic Collective (Playground N)
