“Less classical, but above all very entertaining was the play of the Norwegian pianist Mathias Halvorsen earlier that day. With his ‘Well Prepared Piano’ (a contraction of Well-Tempered, and John Cages Prepared Piano), he cleverly saws the legs of the eternal question ‘can you play Bach on a modern concert grand piano?’ Like a chemistry teacher who shows experiments in a class, he mixed his bottle of Bach with skewers, masking tape, rubber bands, tassels and even vibrators. The result is a grand piano that sounds a lot like a loud clavichord. When a first spectator unabashedly comes to take a picture of dozens of ping-pong balls dancing up and down on the strings, the fence is off the dam. While Halvorsen concentratedly played the last parts of his selection from “Das Wohltemperierte Clavier”, his audience was already rushing forward in bushes to take a good look at the grand piano.”
The Well - Prepared Piano is a new project where I play Bach on altered versions of the piano. These new instruments are developed together with other musicians, composers and artists and each explore different concepts and some new and often quite quirky ideas. A selection of instruments is featured on my first solo album «The Well- Prepared Piano, vol. 1», released on Backlash, September 2018.
Part 1: Rubber and Inequality
The first altered piano is an instrument where the sound changes depending on harmony. The idea was to represent in sound quality the unequal tuning systems of Bachs time, where intervals would change depending on which key you were playing in. This would for instance mean that when you play a piece in A major, you would also tune your instrument for A major. So if you would perform an A major piece on a keyboard tuned for E - flat minor, it would sound very “out of tune”.
On this altered piano however, the intervals do not change, but instead the sound morphes. So when Bach travels harmonically, the sound will keep changing slightly from note to note. In a way this brings back a concept present in earlier music which is normally lost when performed on the piano. It also introduces whole new array of funky sounds to play with - which of course is never a bad thing.
To get the sound I wanted, I tied the piano strings together with rubber band using this special knot I invented especially for this purpose. The knot sounds great on all areas of the strings, is great for flageolets and sounds almost like somebody is touching the strings with their finger.
Part 2: The Wooden Sticks
Next I met composer Ingibjorg Fridirksdottir in my apartment in Iceland. We started early in the morning, only after having crafted two cups of nourishing coffee. Following the preliminary sharing of ideas, it soon became apparent that our main goal would be to try and bring the mechanical inner nature of the piano out and into the open. After some intense artistic pondering with two heads firmly stuck inside the piano, a few options presented themselves. However a quick review showed most required extensive building and a quite unsurmountable amount of contruction work. This meant a trip back to the kitchen for another cup of deliriously delicious coffee.
It was at this point Ingibjorg opened a drawer at random and kicked of a comprehensive phase two: everything from pots and pans to knives and lemon squeezers were tried, but while producing some awesome sounds ultimately failed to bring us further on our mission. Until she found the wooden food skewers. This led straight into phase three, which consisted of frantic building, probing and looking for the one, true stick - driven link between the intestinal piano and the outside world. After hours of sticks flying everywhere, the solution presented itself and the Second Altered Piano was born.
In the end the result was a visually active preparation where one can see moving wood hard at work when the instrument is being played. The sound of sticks bumping together is beautifully reminiscent of old harpsichords and organs which do produce a not insignificant amount of extra musical noise. The sticks also alter the pitch of the initial attack of the sound and it takes a second for the final note to make its graceful appearance. This really makes this instrument come alive, with a voice quite unlike anything I have heard before.
Part 3: Ping Pong
When I asked Michael Rauter if he would like to participate in the project, he at once had the idea to tune all keys on the intire instrument to the same tone. Fortunatly, before we could move on this rather effortful thought, Android did the exact same thing for a comercial (see here). So something new had to be concocted.
And soon Michael had another plan - to fill the entire piano with ping pong balls. After picking him up at the airport for our working session, we visited three different sports shops buying all available ping pong balls. Later, after some great spinach pasta, coffee and a cookie and a first try at the piano, it quickly became apparent that the sound of a ping pong on the clean sound of piano was not nearly rich enough. The next few hours were spend developing a new, underlying preparation based on an intricate non - linear system of harmonics.
The result is a bright, tender instrument which adds beautiful ornaments in the way of freely moving ping pongs. They chatter and sing when played with care, but add a little temperament to the touch and the balls go everywhere.
To get the harmonics sounding right, we resorted to the newly named Halvorsen knot, invented for the first preparation I did.
Part 4: The Vibrator Piano
Already before meeting Peaches in Berlin, I had presented her with the idea of building a piano preparation using vibrators. To gather a large assortment of various items, we enlisted the help of set designer Angela Rivera. She put together a collection containing vibrators of all colours, shapes, sizes and made from wide range of materials.
Once gathered at the piano, Peaches and I started trying each vibrator to see how they worked in the piano. The variety of sounds they produced was great, with some sounding like machine guns and others making absolutely no sound at all.
Early on we fell in love with a vibrator called “the whale”. It produces a subtle, rich and beautiful sound, while moving up and down the strings as if it were alive. The Whale makes great music on its own, and does not really require the piano to be played while its working.
Our next vibrator manifested a new idea, more accommodating for a pianist performing Bach. It was a small, silver coloured vibrator that jumped around on the strings vigorously, producing a kind of constant white noise through hitting many different strings almost a the same time. This turned out to be a very exciting start, as one could then produce sound not only by hammers striking the strings, but also by silently lifting the dampers from the strings - letting the strings ring freely when played by the vibrator. The way to play this instrument turned out to be more like one would play an organ - where the player allows for the production of the note, rather then actually actively producing the sound.
We distributed several of these vibrators around inside the piano, were they would jump and move around freely. The vibrators also had a great look to them, reminiscent of bacterias under the microscope.
Part 5: The Brushes
The next preparation was inspired by a technique from Bara Gisladottir’s beautiful piece Prussian Blue. In the piece, sounds are produced mainly by working the piano harp directly with various objects, many of which are normally used when making visual art. Several types of paint brushes were among the required tools, used in a way where one would “paint” the strings from the side with one hand while silently playing piano keys with the other. The dampened (not played on the keyboard) strings would create a kind of hushed non- pitch background sound, while the strings played on the keyboard (no longer damped) would subtly resonate.
When turning this technique into a preparation covering the entire keyboard, I enlisted the help of several voluntaries. We divided the entire set of piano strings into sections where a “brusher” - armed with one brush in each hand - would steadfastly stroke the strings back and forth.
Performing on an instrument like this requires playing the keys on the keyboard with so little speed that the hammers never strike the strings, and the only sound is produced by the brushes. It was a surprising challenge to maintain this playing style without any single “normal” note ever to surface. However, the few times those accidental outbursts occurred, turned out rather charming, and they became an integral part in the sound of the preparation.
Of all the piano preparations developed for the project, this feels like a special one. The sound is extremely soft and intimate, with rhythmic, breath- like sounds of brushes on strings, over which resonances of Bach appear like morning mist on a lake. Then there is the changed relationship between the instrument (including the brushers) and the performer. In this case the performer is more of a facilitator (just letting certain strings resonate) while the instrument itself controls timber, volume and majority of the timing.