PianoMusicBox_1 is a piece for piano and electronics, written for the pianist Chiara Saccone, and premiered during the festival Collaborations are More Refreshing than New Socks, at the Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp, on December 4th, 2019. PianoMusicBox_1 presents a technical setup similar to Hidden Traces, which somehow has worked as a sort of preparatory study for the piano piece. As already explained in ch.3.3 the setup includes two piezos – one for producing sound and the other one to control some of the electronic processing –, and two transducers placed on the soundboard for the amplification. The combination of piezos and transducers allowed me to deal with a unique instrumental system, without the mediation of external loudspeakers: the mediation is in fact that of piezos and of the resonant body of the piano itself.
The composition of this work started around the idea of turning the piano into a sort of music box. I was interested in rendering the mechanical aspects of a music box and its characteristic way to playback well-known melodies. I, therefore, focused on putting into the foreground a few metallic and “mechanical” sounds produced by playing on the stringboard, together with a sort of transfiguration of the piano's idiomatic sound. I have chosen Dream, an early piano piece by John Cage of 1948, as the well-known melody that should have been played back from my “piano music box”. I have therefore made some recordings of this piece with the piezo, and I have also derived from Dream a few harmonies and fragments of melody that the pianist plays during the piece. In this context, the two piezos have been exploited for two different uses. The first piezo has been used to explore the inner part of the piano with sound gestures such as gentle scraping and glissandos produced along the strings, and on different sections of the stringboard, using the piezo again as a sort of stethoscope (see ch.2.1). The second piezo, the one fixed on the soundboard of the piano, has been used to record the instrumental sound. During the piece, this recording is played back through the transducers, therefore it appears extremely filtered, and with a very peculiar colour, primarily conferred by the strong sonic features of the piezo, but also by the fact that it is played back through the resonant body of the piano. Other materials that have been used for the composition of PianoMusicBox_1 are produced by playing in an ordinary way on the keyboard, where a section in the highest register has to be prepared with patafix, so that the sound result is a sort of stopped sound. In the first section of the piece, the pianist plays always with the piezo inside the stringboard, creating an almost pitchless environment of mechanical gestures. After b.12, the electronics start to record her gestures and play them back, often after processing them through filtering and granulations. This dialogue between the piano and the electronic part grows in intensity, to be then slowed down between bb.75-80. A new section starts at b.81 with the pianist alternating stopped sounds – with an ordinary playing on prepared notes – with glissandos made with the piezo along a single string. The movement of the stopped sounds increases in density between bb.94-105, to decrease again from b.106 on. At b.110 a new gesture appears: a ribattuto sound on a single string. This is the last sound played with the piezo, before the pianist approaches the keyboard to play in a very ordinary way. From b.123 on, a few melodic motifs start to emerge while the electronic still echoes previous piezo sounds. From b.136 to the end the electronic start instead to play back the recording of one section of Dream by Cage previously made with the piezo; so finally the playback of the recording through the transducers creates a last dialogue with the piano part. The appearance of this transfigured melody from the inside of the piano allows for understanding where the melodic fragments played by the pianist come from.
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