some background on myself and the piano(s)
March 4, 2010
a short bio can be found here (along with all the sound files linked to from this blog).
i have played the piano since the fourth grade in tacoma washington, first taking beginning piano lessons, then studying jazz, and then improvised music and 20th century composed music.
around 2001 i began to experiment with playing the inside of the piano. i was playing and performing regularly with a group of improvisers in seattle who were working with what we then called “extended techniques.” my explorations into the inside of the piano at this time were part of a search for sounds i could use, as a pianist, that could better engage the sounds my musical partners were using in the context of improvisation.
in other words, in an ensemble sonic world comprised of mostly unrecognizable (at least to the non-connoisseur) instrumental and electronic sounds, the traditionally played piano almost always sticks out as a piano. depending on the music, this is not always desirable.
these early explorations involved all the usual and obvious inside piano experiments – rubbing the strings with various objects mostly, and putting chopsticks in between the strings and letting them vibrate back and forth. while playing with a musical saw player i began to excite the piano strings by rubbing upwards on the swizzle sticks i had placed between them. this produced a very beautiful, overtone-rich drone.
also around this time, my seattle partners and i developed a healthy musical and personal exchange with a group of musicians in portland. the music in portland seemed more detached from free-jazz and european free improv than the music a lot of us were playing in seattle. it seemed to me that the portlanders were dealing more with duration and sound, whereas we were really dealing with tones and rythm, albeit in an extremely fragmented and abstracted way. at the time, this was pivotal for me, and i continued to experiment with the inside of the piano, searching for techniques that would allow me to engage with this music more directly.
over the years i switched from the swizzle sticks to wooden dowels with rosin, and the placement of the dowels has moved from suspended-in-between-the-strings to directly on the soundboard. i have identified a focused area of sounds that i continue to develop through small changes in technique, exploration of the physical instrument(s), and the application of amplification and electronics.
i can compare the sound(s) to the wind. it’s like the wind. there are many different types of wind, many different qualities.
all that being said, i also continue to play the piano as a piano. for several years, these two practices have been totally self-contained and separate. however, i feel like they may start to inter-penetrate in the near future. we will see. in the meantime, the recordings on this blog, all from my residency at open space, march 1-6, 2010, stem from different points in the process of taking apart a piano and making a new instrument out of it. the end goal being an instrument that allows me to further investigate the sonic area i’ve been working with or the past few years.
