PUBLICITY MATERIALS
On this page you can find photos, blurbs and a short bio, all potentially useful for anyone who needs to get the word out about an upcoming event. The photos are available in high-resolution versions suitable for print media, and low-resolution versions suitable for the web. For audio samples, look here.
You are free to download and use these images, samples and blurbs. Be sure to include photo credits if needed in any public usage. (Photo credit will be included when you download. If no credit appears, then none is needed.) You can edit texts as needed for length, but please don’t alter in ways that distort or misrepresent.
For Solo Guitar Performances
Short blurb: Guitar music with taste, imagination, and depth
Longer blurb: Bart Hopkin plays guitar music from all over the place, including his own imagination. It’s classical guitar technique he’s employing, but not always classical sounds he’s making. He plays (mostly) guitars of his own design and construction, odd in appearance but splendid in sound.
For Duo with Clarinetist Dale Polissar, or Trio with Clarinet and Bass
Short blurb: Lamplit jazz — clarinet and guitar together create a luminous music with openness, warmth, and a dose of swing.
Longer blurb: The music they play has been called Lamplit Jazz, reflecting Dale’s habit of bringing a living-room-style standing lamp on stage to illuminate the music on his music stand. Dale and Bart play a variety of styles, all suffused with the freshness of Dale’s melodic imagination and the unmatched loveliness of his clarinet tone. Clarinet and guitar make a wonderful and natural pairing, the two instruments complementing and never crowding, creating a luminous music with openness, clarity, and lot of warmth. Plus, these guys can swing.
For Duo with Vocalist Sara Winge
Short blurb: Fine arrangements, imaginative and intelligently chosen repertoire, top-notch guitar work and voices rich and strong — a pairing worth hearing.
Longer blurb: Vocalist Sara Winge has a long history in folk and country music, but her work extends well beyond — for instance, you should hear her way with a boppy jazz number or a sophisticated ballad. Guitarist Bart Hopkin joins her in the vocal chores, and occasionally even sings a tune or two on his own. Together they explore a variety of styles informed by folk, jazz and not-so-contemporary popular music. Fine arrangements, imaginative and intelligently chosen repertoire, top-notch guitar work and voices rich and strong make this a pairing worth hearing.
For Performances with Invented Instruments
Short blurb: Strange and wonderful musical instruments take you to musical places you’re not likely to arrive at any other way.
Longer blurb: Original and unique musical instruments– not computers and synthesizers, but hand-made and human-played constructions of wood and air and strings and springs, levers and pulleys and skin — are the heart of Bart Hopkin’s instrumentarium of acoustic inventions. They’ll take you to musical places you’re not likely to arrive at any other way: some rhythmic and lively, some lyrical and lovely; some strange, and then some that may seem strangely familiar.
BIO
Bart Hopkin has worked as a guitarist and musical arranger for several decades, performing, recording, composing and teaching in many contexts and places. He’s also an inventor and maker of musical instruments. He is director of Experimental Musical Instruments, an organization devoted to unusual musical instruments. In addition to building, teaching and consulting, he has written many books on instruments and their construction, and produced books and CDs featuring the work of innovative instrument makers.
Bart received a B.A. magna cum laude in Folklore and Mythology specializing in ethnomusicology from Harvard University in 1974, and later picked up a B.A. in music education and a teaching credential at San Francisco State University. He has faithfully attended the School of the Autodidact ever since.
