Exploring Affordances

The piano as we know it today looks a lot like the pianos used more than a hundred years ago. Its design has barely changed since then. But the musical cultures in which the piano was used changed immensely. Consecutively, the piano was also used in different ways.

 

The piano was used within genres that each appropriated it differently and musicians explored its affordances extensively. Jazz musician Thelonious Monk, for instance, developed a percussion-like style of playing, in which he “struck the keys forcefully, jabbing dissonant chords and clusters and releasing them abruptly” (Parakilas 1999, p.305). Instead of pressing the keys, avant-gardist Henry Cowell played the piano by plucking its strings. Rock musicians like Jerry Lee Lewis used the piano symbolically to shape their identity – some more aggressively than others. He used the piano as object of physical assault to establish his identity as a rocker. As a consequence, classical pianists “needed to shun aggressiveness in order to distinguish themselves from rockers like Lewis, just as Lewis needed to pounce on the piano to show that he was a real rocker, even if he did play the piano” (p.364).


For some composer-pianists the affordances that the piano offered them were not sufficient. A variety of Charles Ives’ compositions, for instance, were to be performed on multiple pianos and required one of them to be tuned differently - a laborious adaptation. In later years, John Cage tinkered with his pianos. Tinkering is understood as a “rather informal process of experimentation and adjustment in pursuit of results that were sometimes not clearly defined until they were achieved” (Waksman, p.675). By placing screws and bolts between the strings, Cage modified the sound of his piano to fit his particular style of playing (Cage 2012). These experiments were nevertheless a search for some specific… 


…even if we explain it as the desire to get away from old sounds. (…) Schoenberg would not have wanted to use the new sounds discovered by Cage - who was briefly his student - and cage would not have wanted to find Schoenberg’s. To serve any musical purpose, a new sound has to provide the composer with some feeling of recognition. (Parakilas 1999, p.366)


In his aesthetic practices Nils Frahm has appropriated elements of such earlier searches for affordances. He uses for instance toilet brushes as drum sticks in the performance of Toilet brushes – More, for which the piano serves as drum-kit. While the toilet brushes are taken out of their conventional context of use to be deployed as drum-sticks, the piano has turned into an object on which one can rhythmically slam toilet brushes. But Frahm also modifies pianos. Reluctant to infringe upon the sonic privacy of his neighbors, he dampened his piano at home by preparing it with the felt patches, while plugging a pair of headphones to a pick-up placed at the bottom. When turning up the volume, the ‘unintended’ sounds of the piano became audible. Frahm then perceived aesthetic value in these ‘accidental’ sounds, which he then decided to include on the recording of his album Felt (Keenan 2011). This album, which was released in 2011, forms a prelude to the formation of an aesthetic approach that shows concern for the environment within which music is made.

 

References


 
  • Keenan, S. (2011). Interview: Nils Frahm. Trebuchet. Retrieved from: http://www.trebuchet-magazine.com/interview-nils-frahm/

  • Parakilas, J. (1999). Piano roles: three hundred years of life with the piano. Yale University Press.

  • Waksman, S. (2004). California Noise Tinkering with Hardcore and Heavy Metal in Southern California. Social Studies of Science, 34(5), 675–702.