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The glass-tubed Fire Organ created by inventor/composer Trimpin will be featured in Stanford University's staging of The Gurs Zyklus opera.

Kinetic sound sculptor Trimpin marshals a flame-powered keyboard, concentration-camp tree bark and Morse code–chattering castanets for his eerie opera The Gurs Zyklus.

Trimpin, who grew up in Germany and worked as a fisherman and Christmas-tree salesman before winning a 1997 MacArthur “genius” grant, invented the Fire Organ to address his memories of the Holocaust’s devastation.

“As a young kid, I learned that the Jewish community from my village no longer existed,” Trimpin told Wired.com. The Gurs Zyklus, which will be performed for the first time Saturday, “is basically about remembrance.”

To musicalize the story of Jews who were transported by train to a concentration camp near the town of Gurs in southwestern France, Trimpin’s unique keyboard will accompany four sopranos and the narrator as they perform onstage.

Trimpin explained how the Fire Organ works: A MIDI keyboard controls a Bunsen burner. Pressing a key moves a solenoid disc, adding oxygen to the propane gas. The warm air rises, and the cold air gets sucked into Pyrex tubes.

“It’s like a pipe organ, except that thermodynamics are used,” said the Seattle artist, who previously translated earthquake tremors into musical compositions with the marimba-like Seismofon.

Trimpin programs the Fire Organ by embedding red magnets in a rotating cylinder. “It’s not a computer-memory–based sequencer but mechanical-based,” he said. “You compose on this old-fashioned drum sequencer to trigger different flames. It rotates very slowly so that the red points are sensed by magnetic switches which will throw on the flames.”

To re-create the journey experienced by prisoners en route to the concentration camp in The Gurs Zyklus, or “Gurs Cycle”, Trimpin will dispatch rolling teeter-totters equipped with speakers that blast recordings of train sounds captured in Europe.

Additionally, Trimpin used the Max computer music program to reconfigure photos of bark patterns taken from trees in the Gurs region into a score performed by four player pianos.

“A mechanized camera plots the X and Y coordinates of a large photo print of the bark,” Trimpin said. “The trees were the only witnesses to what happened there.”

Drawing on text excerpted from family letters collected by concentration camp survivor Victor Rosenberg Gurs Zyklus is based on music by Conlon Nancarrow, who was interned at Gurs during the Spanish Civil War). The opera references Spanish poet-activist Federico García Lorca’s disappearance in 1936. To dramatize García Lorca’s presumed murder by a Falangist death squad during the Spanish Civil War, Trimpin transformed the Morse code used by fascist secret police into a percussion score.

“I’m using eight castanets at different locations in the theater to re-create the Morse code sent [to secret police] to kill Lorca, which was, ‘Give him coffee, plenty coffee,’” Trimpin said.

The Gurs Zyklus, presented by Stanford Lively Arts, will be staged at 8 p.m. Saturday at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

Images courtesy Stanford University except where noted.