'Piano music has come to an end and something quite different is coming. I sense it clearly: with the claviers made up to this time, there is nothing new to discover any more', declared Karlheinz Stockhausen on 24 October 1992, at the auditorium of the Pädagogische Hochschule in Weingarten.1 It is difficult not to agree with the German composer who, nevertheless,continued to compose for piano after 1992. Though, it is true that contemporary composers engage themselves less and less with the piano – particularly as a solo instrument. From the second half of the 20th century onwards, the new epoch has radically re-evaluated the concept of musical sound; this has resulted in incorporation of all kinds of sounds and noises in music on one hand, and an active employment of technologies in music production and composition on the other. As a result, to paraphrase Stockhausen, timbre and timbre-oriented pieces gain in importance, whereas monochrome pieces are almost ignored.2 The restrictions of equal temperament make the piano even less attractive for contemporary composers. However, some composers of the 20th and 21st centuries have enriched the sound production abilities of the piano by altering the mechanism of the instrument as well as extending performance techniques. It is difficult to imagine what further innovations the acoustic piano could present to listeners, even with the addition of electronic technologies. So, has piano music really come to an end? One of the best ways to answer this question is to conduct an artistic research.
The question could have been answered through the musicological research too. Though, rather creative methods of the artistic research that, as a rule, results into an artwork, seem much more appropriate for this task. 'The arts, design and architecture are not involved in an exact logical understanding of our world (as are the exact sciences), but they complement this with a knowledge field which builds on human experience and behavior and is interwoven with cultural and societal development', states the architect and artistic researcher Johan Verbeke.3 So is the artistic research. 'As with any other discipline, the arts, design and architecture build on their own specific positions in relation to reality', concludes Verbeke.4
Building on our own specific position in relation to reality, and being provoked by Stockhausen's lecture mentioned above, we - the Georgian composer Eka Chabashvili and pianists Nino Jvania and Tamar Zhvania have decided to find out whether piano music has truly come to an end, conducting the research together.
Our artistic research consists of the historical analysis of evolution of piano music in the context of development of academic music, as well as experiments that aim at finding methods of modifying piano or adding some new ways of employment of the instrument. The research resulted into a large-scale piano piece/performance composed by Eka Chabashvili in cooperation with pianists Nino Jvania and Tamar Zhvania. Music history remembers a few quite successful cases of famous composers working in tandem with interpreters.5
The piece reflects on one hand the evolution of piano music through the centuries, and on the other hand the experiments conducted by the artistic researchers. The performance engages two pianos, one modified piano developed within the research project by Eka Chabashvili, the virtual and chamber piano orchestras that will be realized with the help of two video-installations and live video broadcasts. Interestingly, from the very beginning we intended to engage only with acoustic pianos, avoiding any employment of technologies (except of amplification) to modify the piano sound.
Our Artistic Research and Publicity
No artistic research about music and a musical instrument could be conducted without making the research and its results public. Publicity is an inherent part of music which has to be performed and perceived in order to fully fulfill its purpose. Although, the final result of our research – the piece - could be considered as an artistic publishing theorising in practice, it is intended not only for professional musicians, but for music lovers (comprising the major part of public) who do not need to be experts of the field in order to perceive it. The piece could also be regarded as an alternative way of presenting research, as we mainly present research results employing various artistic types of writing (music, video-installations, literary texts, etc.) instead of academic writing. The new instrument – the modified piano – on one hand, is a part of the piece/performance, on another hand, it could stimulate interest of professional composers for the modified piano, thus inspiring them to further compose for piano, generating novelty at the same time.
In this exposition we present some results of our experiments with the piano and its sound conducted within the artistic research Has Piano Music Come to an End?
They led to the reconsideration of the piano and inspired us to offer to music lovers some new options of its employment and modification, as mentioned above.
A musical instrument is a kind of a musical chronicler with its own structure, tuning system, performance techniques, and etc. It tells us a lot about the musical aesthetics of the age it belongs to. The main principles of music representative of a new epoch lead to the transformation of the instrument, its renewal, refinement, even simplification, enrichment of performance techniques. Each epoch adapts the instrument to the principles of the corresponding musical thinking in order to make it capable of producing contemporary sound.
The main hero of our exposition is the Piano, the instrument considered as a brainchild of its era that has gradually been alienated by our epoch.