Here is the whole process and technical information about artistic results of mine.
Electronics involved: details on the use of electronics and film are not specified here, as this is less related to my project.
(where I could write short essay or explanation of the word/names/works which were mentioned in the main tech/info)
Martin Rane Baucks piano quartet 'tostados en córdoba en medio de la noche' was premiered in 2019, and revised in 2022.
I will now tell a bit about how I practically solved and mapped the piano harmonics.
After me and Harada visited prof. Hondo in Sendai, Japan, in December 2019, all our communication had to happen through email and video calls due to a covid pandemic. Our planned concert premiere had to be postponed several times, so we ended up recording the album before performing it live. We met again in a hotel lobby in Tokyo in the summer of 2022, right after finishing my Harada recording with Lawo in Oslo only 2 weeks before.
Our working process was not ideal, as we couldnt meet, but this is what we did: Harada sent a quite amusing list of sounds she needed for her piece, some explaining certian specific preparations, but mostly she described her preferred sounds with self-made onomatepoeia, and adding if it should be a high or low sound, wet or dry etc.
I sound-recorded and video-recorded something close to it, and uploaded it to my website, so that she could have a listen, and comment on it. We did several rounds of this process, and struggled for a while with poor sound quality.
Just days before the recording, I uploaded the run-through, and made adjustments based on her final comments.
(The correspondance we had regarding sound quality will soon be added to this page.)
Bjørn Erik Haugen gathered video extracts of Helen Keller's speech, and also extracts from an old biographical movie about her (The Miracle Worker).
He analyzed and transcribed her speech and sounds into pitch and rhythm, to make a "silent fim with talking piano".
In the film, there are also other sound than just the voice, such as stomping, throwing things on the floor, closing doors, etc...
- Including Microtonality (Haugen)
He suggested that I should make use of all these "external" sounds by doing the same actions as in the film. Then I thought some of the sounds would be interesting to realize with microclusters.
By ear, we f.ex. tried to find the sound of throwing a silver spoon on the floor. The pitch was close to the highest G, but not completely, so I tuned down one of the strings in the course. It got more overtones and sounded much closer to the original clean sound.
As speech, also in the case of Helen Keller, often consist of lots of small glissandi, he asked me if it was possible to tune all the tones within the frame of an octave into a f.ex. the frame of a whole-tone. So we tried to tune a C4 into G3, and then make a micro-scale when moving upwards.
More details about the final tuning will come here.
More details about the final tuning will come here.
From Magalhaes, I received sketches and a video demonstrating several of the very original techniques (Magalhaes is a pianist herself). I practised with the preparation objects I had available, and asked her to come to Oslo in May 2021 to have a workshop with me. She brought some equipment, and showed me how her sounds could be solved, but the rest was up to me. She had very a clear image of the sounds and character she wanted, but still gave me a lot of freedome; I could even choose completely different sounds, if I thought it would work better within the given character.
The score was therefore more like a guide; if a very good sound would appear, I could stay with that sound longer, and the piano preparations did not belong to specific pitches, but to certain flexible ranges (as a solution to the various piano beam constructions etc.). This forced me to listen with own ears to each instrument and prepare the sound where I and the instrument "wanted to speak".
Ness told me that used some pentatonic scales from Ligeti's piano concerto (1st movement) and some of his etudes and, where different pentatonic scales in the low and high register together create something very dissonant, yet still has a feel of the pentatonic.
Ness was inspired by this, and created a pentaton scale including the 11th partial (a quartertone).
(where I could write short essay or explanation of the word/names/works which were mentioned in the main reflection)
- Gamelan
- Musetta
- Noh
- Okinawa
- Pitch and Timbre
- Tuning
- 12TET
- Albers, Anni
- Albers, Josef
- Keller, Hellen
- Banshee
- Vortex Temporum
................
The context of the "Microtonal Piano" project is basically the clear majority of piano repertoire that is NOT microtonal (i.e. with 12-TET tuning). The context is also what exists of microtonal piano, which has mainly been written for full equal temperament (quarter-tone piano), or various attempts at just intonation. In addition, there are also works from the last 100 years that use techniques (preparations etc.) that often do not aim to target a specific microtone, but rather have a timbral focus, but which nevertheless undeniably consist of clearly perceivable microtones.
