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Guest post by Rolf Dragstra

The name that can be named

Is not the right name

The way that can be told

Is not the right way.

Laozi

My older son must have been about five years old, when we were riding on a 43 double-decker bus from Highgate Station down the Archway Road. Its sides appeared to be rigidly converging towards the bridge still far below, whose high arch, once having given the road its name, now looked like a tiny loophole hovering over it in the distance. “That’s where we’re going, through there”, I pointed out. “But the bus can’t through there”, he exclaimed, “it’s too small!” Luckily, another red double-decker, the 134, was just overtaking us at the bus stop, and I said: “Watch that one, Adam, it may well go through down there before we do!” And his eyes followed the bus now quickly diminishing in size while descending – eventually slipping way below through the arch, to complete the experiment…

Our bus, taking in lots of passengers, had just about stopped long enough to make this observation possible. By that time, at least subconsciously, my son must have already started to register the shrinking size of a person or a ball or a car moving away from him. But I had alerted his consciousness by pointing towards the tiny arch below, made him aware of a peculiar situation. He was about to become more aware of something he had learnt already. And it wasn’t me explaining it all to him that raised his awareness – it was Adam looking again: his eyes following the dramatically shrinking size of the bus ahead of us, guided by the converging size of the road, the “bridle and rudder” (1) of this experiment in perspective diminution. Looking afresh enabled my son to create a better balance between what he had seen and was seeing now: that apparent sizes continuously shrink and expand very much when things, including ourselves, are on the move.

For all animals, including ourselves, learning is a subconscious process. It starts long before we become aware of it, before we learn to speak, let alone explain things. And becoming aware of ourselves, learning to think things through, does not put an end to it. It’s a lifelong process. Even the eureka moments of our conscious discoveries, often inspired by a gulf of common sense emerging from our memories, have to sink in, as we say. This process of embedding takes time – especially if academically acquired knowledge appears to contradict common sense and past experience…

At any point in our lifetime, the part of our knowledge, which we are, have been, and will become aware of, only forms the tip of an iceberg, or better: a huge mountain forest… First of all, we should become aware of, and respect, that giant mountain on whose shoulders we are standing. And the roots of all its trees are out there. The information is out there. Information is a natural phenomenon. Both the natural and the fabricated world pervade us through perception, through the use of all our limbs and senses. As the pioneer of perceptive psychology J.J. Gibson put it: “Ask not what’s inside your head, ask what’s your head inside of” (2) : the natural world.

Learning is always based on creating a balance between what we do or observe, and what we make of it. A balance between all forces involved: inside out, and outside in. It’s physical, not just about thinking straight, but finding out whether it works, doing it. Il faut le faire, as the French say.

Nature isn’t just the “environment”, as our eyes would have it, and as everyone seems to call it these days. We’re part of it: grew up in it. And our brain is part of it: a muscular organ, physically rooted in all corners of our body, like the crown of a tree. Thus we would appear to be walking trees, whose limbs and organs, like branches and leaves, are reaching out to as much as taking in what’s happening.

I am aware that the tree is only a metaphor. But I’m suggesting it might be a more appropriate one than that of a machine, or a computer.

There always was, and is, one way or another, a lot of computation going on inside the brain. Each time we cross a busy road, we have to estimate the acceleration of an approaching car; the better we get at it, the better we’ve learnt it – and the more casual we go on about it… But we’re not aware of these processes; and do not yet know how we perform all these computations: many ways lead to Rome…(3)

And let’s not talk about virtual worlds either; let’s stick to the real world, for once – not talk about artificial intelligence, but stick to natural intelligence, natural learning:

How do we learn to walk? How the cat, to pounce? How do we learn to swim, or a bird to fly? How does the child’s mouth learn to speak? How does the hand find the right measure of force? How did that girl learn to always put her fingers in the right place while bowing her violin with the other hand? How did I learn to tune pianos?

I had two parallel educations, as an academic, and as a craftsman. I studied philosophy and physics, history of science and the arts – while practicing the skill of tuning and maintaining pianos which my father had passed on to me. Trying to find a balance of touch and tone on those instruments, while trying to maintain a balance of the two strands of my education, wasn’t always easy, but personally rewarding.

At the time of the Archway Road bus ride with my son, when my third education into becoming a father was already in full swing, I was doing research on Renaissance perspective, and was therefore intrigued by Adam’s initial rejection of what linear perspective was all about. Shortly after I got involved with this subject, pondering over Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, I had realised that there was an analogy between scaling and creating the geometry of a visual space, as surveyors and painters were doing, and scaling an acoustic space, as I was doing every time I tuned a piano.

My academic qualification hasn’t made much of an impact on my professional career: bringing up my sons, and, much more so, curing all those ill-maintained pianos in this country, hasn’t left much time for research, writing or publishing. But more recently, a customer of mine whose old Schiedmayer upright piano is in my care, gave me an article published in the Journal of Neuroscience, 29/8/2012.

Julija herself is working in the field, and she told me it contained the first piece of pioneering neuroscientific research on piano tuners.(4)

The research, based on acoustic experiments comparing the performance of piano tuners – differing in years of experience – “with controls matched for age and musical ability” demonstrates that particular parts of the brain are activated, moulded and enlarged during and in relation to years of tuning practice: The “psychophysical task” of piano tuning results in the creation of “precise sound templates”, “encoded and consolidated into memory over time in an experience-dependent manner.” (5) This process of learning is compared to that of taxi-drivers, who, while obtaining and consolidating their spatial knowledge in years of driving, create templates of maps shaping regions of the brain very close by. (6)

Acoustic navigation of tuners within an octave, memorising and comparing the speed of harmonic vibratos created by different musical intervals, is compared to spatial navigation in a jungle of roads. In both cases, the memory bank built up over the years appears to be located in the hippocampus. This comparison of spatial and acoustic navigation took me back to my realization of the analogy between perspective and tuning: scaling the visual, and scaling the acoustic reality. (7)

The result of this research confirms the physical and largely subconscious nature of learning. Although piano tuning seems to be a rather quaint and highly specialised activity, it is, like any other art, definitely embedded in the roots of natural learning. Experience remains the ultimate judge of your work, the routine completion of which does not ask for conscious intervention, unless a problem arises. Empty that head: let ears, hands and memory do the talking. Most communication is still non-verbal…

But the article in the Journal of Neuroscience only looks at what’s inside the head, not what the head’s inside of. There is no mentioning of the cooperation, the creation of a balance: between the ears; the hand of the tuner turning that crank firmly, but very slightly; and the located parts of the brain involved in the process. Only practice makes perfect – but the practice is not investigated here. It’s not about the process, but about its results. But, as Bertolt Brecht’s reading working man asks:

“Caesar beat the gauls…

  Did he not at least have a cook with him?” (8)

The limitation to evidence that can be located in the brain may come with the territory. Yet for the sake of future research and our underlying understanding of reality, it may be wise to look for, and question its philosophical premises – especially if they turn out to be not part of the solution, but part of the problems and traps that are being created. What if Descartes’ dictum: “I think therefore I am” will neither allow us to understand the nature of our existence, nor the process of learning? What if the true nature of the beast cannot be merely understood as a cognitive process?

What if the balance of all agents involved was at the root of natural selection itself?

The agents here not understood – as in Peter Kropotkin’s somewhat romantic theory of “mutual aid” (9) – as creatures or persons working together; but as perceptive organs, or even tiny integral parts of these, cooperating with their natural surroundings: obtaining, processing and exchanging information. It’s out there: it’s not all happening inside heads… Nature produced an ecological niche filled by the brain. And nobody, no brain, nothing became what it is on its own, not even a “selfish” gene.(10) As everyone else, as George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, Charles Darwin was a child of his age. He was well aware of the difference between his concept of “natural selection” – in the context of aeons of evolutionary change; and its ideological misunderstanding – in the context of socialisation and economic competition. “Survival of the fittest” became the metaphor for individual and social success, a principle of education, a philosophical principle: “the way of the world”… Darwin himself did not escape the influence of this abuse of his concept – nor do we, still tied up in the same rat race, long after the decline of the British Empire. (11)

To sum it up: at some point “competition” was identified as the engine of natural selection. Yet any working engine is based on a well-balanced interplay of all its vital parts. Competition itself is, on a deeper level, always based on cooperation…

Metaphor and formula: no scientist, let alone the rest of us, can do without either of them. And when there are not many estimates, rules, equations, there will be all the more metaphors… We need them both, balanced; and apply them both in the right way…(12)

The clockwork was once what the computer is today: they tried to apply it to everything. It was the pinnacle of mechanical engineering in the Middle Ages, and was soon to be used to simulate all sorts of physical activities and operations: by breaking them up into little segments of linear and circular movements. The piano action, for example, is a set of 88 clockworks in a row, simulating the action of hitting the strings of a harp with hand-held little mallets.

Classical mechanics with its mathematical framework laid foundation to physics as a science. The planetary movements were to be described as those of a clockwork wound up by its creator, and eventually, even human perception and thought processes were described in a mechanical fashion. (13) When we get too good at something, we keep using the same recipe, the same metaphors: it’s like a progress trap…(14)

But our brain isn’t a calculating machine – it’s a living organ. And nature isn’t a factory, nor is a hospital a business, or a university a chicken farm, producing degrees like eggs: all these understandings, or misunderstandings, of reality are based on ridiculously false premises. But beware: the ridiculous will become the dangerous, once we stop laughing, and the money is allocated to put the wheels in motion…(15)

“Cogito, ergo sum”? I can feel my heart beat; I sing, I dance, I tune a piano: that’s also how I know I’m around. And all the while, Nature still makes a lot of common sense – probably most of it; and animals and children, from a very early age, are partaking in it…

As a piano tuner, I am inclined to use the term of resonance to describe the balance created in the learning process: all agents involved acting in resonance – not necessarily an acoustic resonance, for that matter.

Something comparable to the power of resonance could strengthen, shape and mould particular parts of our body, when learning a skill: muscles, organs, nerves, the “medial temporal lobe” or the hippocampus.(16) Or even much smaller vital parts…

I am a biased layman, of course – but I will throw my hat into the ring, anyway.

And it wouldn’t make me wonder if this did not just apply to the navigational skill of taxi-drivers and piano tuners – but to all skills we, like all other creatures, pursue with a vengeance. They have been, are and will be shaping our mind and body.

Like the tune played on a fiddle, or a temperament put on the scale of a piano:

We are making ourselves up as we go along, always have been, and always will be.

And what the scientists investigating my skill have impressively demonstrated is that we have to give ourselves time, allow for the information we process – including all we learn academically, I would add – to sink in: take root in the backhand of our memories; memories also of all the mistakes we made, without whom we would not learn anything. It all happens over time, “in an experience-dependent manner”. “Experience is the mother of wisdom”, says Leonardo. (17)

With so much useless or misleading information bombarding us these days, whether “science, non-science or nonsense” (18), we can’t be mindful enough. My father’s soft-spoken warning is still ringing in my ears: “Some never learn, others later still”…

Notes:

1) Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting:

“Perspective is the bridle and rudder of painting.”

2) James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, Boston 1966, p. 21; and W.M. Mace, James J. Gibson’s strategy for perceiving: Ask not what’s inside your head, but what your head’s inside of, in: R. E. Shaw & J. Bransford (Eds.), Perceiving, acting, and knowing, Hillsdale, New Jersey, 1977.

3) And Neuroscience has taken the lead in exploring them: Stephen Pinkers How the Mind Works, 1997, was and still is a revelation.

4) Sundeep Teki et al., Navigating the Auditory Scene: An Expert Role for the Hippocampus, in: Journal of Neuroscience, 29/8/1912, pp. 12251-12257.

5) Ibidem, p.12251

6) Maguire et al., Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi-drivers, Proclamations of the National Academy of Science, vol. 97, USA 2000, pp. 4398-4403.

7) It was the late Prof. E.H. Gombrich who pointed out the limits of this analogy to me: “There are no octaves in optics”…

8) Bertolt Brecht, Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters, Moscow 1936. Brecht is in exile in Denmark at the time.

9) Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, London 1902

10) Again, a metaphor introduced in 1976 by the young Richard Dawkins, which may not have been the best choice for what he was trying to say. Or, as Andrew Brown, The Science of Selfishness, 22/12/98 (Salon, book review) puts it: “Selfish”, when applied to genes, doesn’t mean “selfish” at all. It means, instead, an extremely important quality for which there is no good word in the English language: “the quality of being copied by a Darwinian selection process.” This is a complicated mouthful. There ought to be a better, shorter word—but “selfish” isn’t it.”

11) Less than the first two, Darwin also shows a certain affinity to the ideas of eugenics, which were quite popular in Britain and other parts of Europe and the United States at the time…

12) Around 1800, when the triumphs of experimental physics are popularizing the scientific endeavour around Europe, the German writer, playwright and publicist Heinrich von Kleist put it this way:

“Metaphor and formula: those who understand both of them are small in number – they don’t make up a class.” In a distich, musing about gravity, he observes the stability of a stone arch standing the test of time: “because all stones want to fall together”… Poetry – of the romantic period! – isn’t always “romantic”: the metaphors of poets observing nature are often much more precise than those chosen by scientists themselves…

13) The mathematical framework of Classical Mechanics is Analysis, as devised by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz; the eminent French mathematician, physicist and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace imagines God as the great clockwork custodian, and the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of pure Reason, analyses the cognitive processing of perceptions in metaphors borrowed from his thorough understanding of Newtonian mechanics and its mathematical foundation: the result almost reads like the action of a film camera at work – long before the actual existence of such a device…

14) Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress, Edinburgh 2006.

15 E.H. Gombrich, On General Knowledge, in: Ideas and Idols, Oxford 1979.

16) Sundeep Teki et al., p. 12256

17) Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting

18) Martin Kemp, Science, Non-Science and Nonsense: the Interpretation of Brunelleschi’s Perspective, in: Art History 1, 1978, pp. 134-61

Rolf Dragstra was born in 1952 in Germany. His father was a piano master builder, with a workshop in which he overhauled and restored pianos and other keyboard instruments. That is how and where Rolf picked up his first tools and tricks of the trade, alongside academic studies in physics, philosophy, history of science and the arts. During the 1980s he worked in Berlin as a piano tuner and technician, and author of radio dialogues. In the 1990s he undertook post-graduate studies on Leonardo da Vinci at the Warburg Institute, University of London. From 2000 to 2010 he worked as head piano technician in London’s oldest music shop (Yamaha Music, formerly Chappell of Bond Street). Now self-employed as a busy piano tuner and technician, he has also started writing again.

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Originally Composed was an exposé about the use of beta-blockers by classical musicians. A heart medication drug that helps stop your body’s fight or flight response when faced with stage fright. For years musicians, surgeons, actors, dancers, and lawyers have used beta-blockers as an unspoken solution to the problems of stage fright. Some would call them performance enhancing and others performance enabling. We’re going to ask those questions of course, but it’s more about all of the ways musicians have overcome performance anxiety. You might feel it too when you’re giving a presentation or when you’re put on the spot in a meeting, but understanding whats happening internally and having a strategy to overcome that fear is what musicians have been practicing for years. Painting a broader picture of what the real problems might be we’ll hear about how some amazing and dedicated musicians have found answers in a world where a few minutes on stage can close or open the gates of success.

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From the press release

John Beder, director and producer of Composed, has spent the past 9 months traveling the US and UK interviewing classical musicians and health care professionals, building a comprehensive story about the ways musicians have overcome performance anxiety.Initially, Beder was interested in the debate surrounding a prescription drug called propranolol, a heart and blood pressure medication that some musicians use to calm the physical symptoms of stage fright. After many months of interviews and conversations, Beder has learned of a plethora of additional remedies which musicians have explored and embraced in their quest for the highest quality performances.

In exploring these anxieties and remedies, Composed explores themes that are relevant to everyone, not just musicians: on how people deal with fear and pressure; how to understand and address moments of fear and doubt; how to move past these obstacles and achieve high-­‐pressure, high-­‐performance goals.

In the research phase of Composed’s pre-­production, Beder focused on a key question about what methods of addressing performance anxiety are most popular amongst classical musicians. A 1987 study with the International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians (ICSOM) has stood for the past 28 years as the closest indicator of what’s happening within American orchestras; it is long overdue for an update. The original survey was also the first publication made about the percentage of musicians who used propranolol, or beta-­blockers, and is often quoted when mentioning the drug.

With the support of ICSOM Beder sought out health professionals from the US, UK, and Australia, and has worked with them to develop a new survey to learn what has changed among musicians over almost 30 years, where performance fears come from, and what can be done to address them.

As a guest presenter of the 53rd annual ICSOM conference in Philadelphia, Beder encouraged the delegates of all 52 orchestras represented to participate in this new survey. ICSOM is the only organization of its kind in the US, representing 52 orchestras and over 4,000 classical musicians.

About the film-maker

John Beder is a percussionist, classical musician, and filmmaker based out of his hometown of Boston, MA. Composed is a forthcoming documentary about overcoming performance anxiety, and the lengths to which professional classical musicians are willing to go to deal with the stress of performance. Beder is anticipating a Spring/Summer 2016 release of the final feature. Learn more at www.composeddocumentary.com.

Contact:

John Beder, Bed Productions LLC
617 383 4407; johnbeder@me.com

facebook.com/composedkickstarter

twitter @JanBoder

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(Photo: Jana Jocif)

Who or what inspired you to take up conducting and pursue a career in music?

I like to take the broad view of works: their historical and philosophical context, their structure, the issues surrounding them. As an artist, I like that music expresses itself using the body. Conductors are not far removed from dancers.

Who or what have been the most important influences on your musical life and career?

My time as a student in Vienna was unforgettable: the language, the repertoire, those life-changing sessions with Abbado and Harnoncourt. Those Nordic and English musical influences set me on my musical path.

What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far?

There have been several! Creating a professional chamber choir in France, then developing a structure which brought together artistic discoveries, new technology… transmission… and now the creation of Insula Orchestra, playing on historical instruments.

Which performance/recordings are you most proud of? 

I’m very proud of our recording of Richard Strauss’s monumental choral works, and, more recently, of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice with Franco Fagioli.

Which particular works do you think you play best?

I feel an affinity for many composers, starting with Bach. As a conductor, I particularly enjoy performing Beethoven, Weber, Schumann…

How do you make your repertoire choices from season to season?

It’s a very delicate operation: you must find a balance between your own wishes regarding the repertoire you want to create for yourself and your orchestra, soloists you’d like to work with, rare and unjustly neglected pieces, pieces by women composers, what the programme creators want…

Do you have a favourite concert venue to perform in and why?

There are several halls which really inspire me with their beauty and their acoustic… In France, the Philharmonie de Paris, soon to be the  Cité musicale de l’Ile Seguin, Theater an der Wien, the Barbican in London, and the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires. There are also lovely halls in Tokyo and in the US.

Favourite pieces to perform? Listen to?

I would like to come back to the final Schumann Ballades, they’re nothing less than little operas. I also enjoy conducting Mendelssohn’s ‘[Die erste] Walpurgisnacht’, Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’… But also Bach’s St. John Passion. As a listener, I like listening to the big Romantic symphonies; Bruckner, Mahler, Shostakovich. At home, chamber music or Lieder.

What is your most memorable concert experience?

With the Brussels Philharmonic, I performed Schumann’s “Das Paradies und die Peri” semi-staged. It’s a spiritual tale from which no-one escapes unscathed, and the music is sublime from start to finish.

What do you consider to be the most important ideas and concepts to impart to aspiring musicians?

It’s important to make your vision of the work, its artistic issues, clear to the musicians, and to speak to them about your view of it. On the other hand, the most important thing is to let the musicians communicate their musicality and feelings themselves. As a conductor, you are there just as much to understand their emotions and the colours they bring, and to relish them. You shouldn’t lead, you must be followed.

Could you tell us a bit about the Insula orchestra?

Insula is a period-instrument orchestra that focuses mostly on music from the Age of Enlightenment, the Classical style, and the pre-Romantics. We play symphonies and oratorios and also operas. There are 50 musicians, with the string section enlarged to fill today’s halls. We try to find a balance between a very cultivated, historically-informed style and one compatible with the size of concert halls.

Insula are making their UK debut on 21 September, how did you choose the programme for this? 

I proposed a programme to the Barbican that typifies our current artistic goals: Zelenka’s Miserere, a real forgotten masterpiece. Then, the Solemn Vespers, a famous work by Mozart, a composer central to our project, and whose Requiem we recorded earlier this year. Finally, a piece to which I feel particularly attached, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s rarely-performed Magnificat.

What are Insula’s plans for the 2015-16 season? 

Insula’s highlights for this season include the release of Orfeo in September on Archiv, then the Magnificat programme at the Barbican and, on tour, an all-Beethoven programme, with the 3rd piano concerto and Nicholas Angelich, as well as the Eroica symphony. After that, Mozart’s Lucio Silla with Franco Fagioli, in a semi-staged performance which will go on tour to Paris, Aix-en-Provence, and Vienna.

Where would you like to be in 10 years’ time?

I would like to have been involved in some exciting, innovative projects which bring in a big audience, and to have played in the greatest halls.

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

I am always searching for it.

What do you enjoy doing most?

Giving concerts, and connecting with the public, an “être merveilleux”, as Novalis said.

What is your present state of mind?

Impatient!
Insula make their UK debut on Monday 21 September at London’s Barbican Hall

Magnificat

Zelenka Miserere

Mozart Solemn Vespers K.339

C.P.E. Bach Magnificat in D Major H.772

Insula orchestra, accentus choir, Laurence Equilbey conductor

Judith Van Wanroij soprano, Wiebke Lehmkuhl alto, Reinoud Van Mechelen tenor, Andreas Wolf bass

21 September 2015, Barbican Hall, London, 7.30pm

Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice 

CD release: 11 September 2015 

Archiv Produktion

Insula orchestra | accentus Choir

Franco Fagioli | Malin Hartelius | Emmanuelle de Negri

Conductor and musical director of Insula orchestra and accentus, Laurence Equilbey is acknowledged for her demanding, yet open-minded approach to her art. Her exploration of the symphonic repertory has seen her conducting the orchestras of Lyon, Bucharest, Liège, Leipzig, Brussels Philharmonic, Café Zimmermann, Akademie für alte Musik Berlin, Concerto Köln, Camerata Salzburg, Mozarteumorchester Salzburg, etc. In 2015, she performs Beethoven’s König Stephan with the Frankfurt Symphony Orchestra.

She has recently conducted Britten’s Albert Herring (at the Opéra de Rouen Normandie and the Opéra Comique), Weber’s Der Freischütz (Opéra de Toulon), Sous apparence (Opéra de Paris) and Reynaldo Hahn’s Ciboulette (Opéra comique).

She regularly conducts the Orchestra of the Opéra de Rouen. Since 2009, she has been working with accentus as an associate artist of the Paris Chamber Orchestra and will be joining up with them again for a Gounod/Liszt programme. She is also an associate artist of the Grand Théâtre de Provence in Aix-en-Provence and a companion of the Philharmonie de Paris.

In 2012, with support from the Conseil départemental des Hauts-de-Seine, she founded Insula orchestra, an ensemble devoted to the classical and pre-Romantic repertory, using period instruments. In 2014, she recorded with her musicians Mozart’s Requiem on the Naïve label and she continues to honour the Austrian composer in 2015-2016, with Vesperae solennes de confessore, and also Lucio Silla, including at the Theater an der Wien. Their second album – Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice with Franco Fagioli – will be released in September 2015 on the Deutsche Grammophon label (Archiv Produktion).

With accentus, Laurence Equilbey continues to interpret the great vocal music repertoire. She conducts a Bruckner program in the spring with the Orchestra of the Opéra de Rouen Normandie. The extensive recorded work of accentus (on the Naïve label) has received wide critical acclaim. Laurence Equilbey supports contemporary creation and she’s also Artistic Director and Director of Education at the Department for Young Singers at the Paris Conservatory.

Laurence Equilbey has studied music in Paris, Vienna and London, and conducting, notably with Eric Ericson, Denise Ham, Colin Metters and Jorma Panula.

Laurenceequilbey.com

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How many sounds is the piano capable of? I know the possibilities are infinite and I tell my students it can be any instrument they wish – a trumpet, a guitar, a flute, the human voice. With just a bit of imagination and wit we have the potential to create any sound we like on that magic box of wood and wires.

Occupy the Pianos, a festival of modern and contemporary piano music conceived and curated by pianist and composer Rolf Hind, gives performers and audience a unique opportunity to explore the myriad soundworld of the piano, and its seemingly endless possibilities, as evidenced by its vast repertoire which is constantly being added to by today’s composers.

The American composer John Cage (1912-1992) appreciated the range of possibilities afforded by the modern piano and he took this a step further – much further – with his “prepared” piano, creating what he described as “the equivalent of an entire percussion orchestra……….an exploded keyboad” by placing nuts, bolts, nails and other objects inside the piano.

John Cage’s instructions for preparing a piano

But Cage did not simply casually empty a bag of nuts and bolts into the guts of a piano. His instructions for preparation are obsessively precise – yet the resulting soundworld is of a piano set free.

Not many concert venues, and even fewer piano technicians, are prepared to allow a concert instrument to be prepared in this way and so Cage’s ‘Sonatas and Interludes’ (1946-8), his most famous work for prepared piano, is rarely performed. But at Occupy the Pianos, listeners were given a rare chance to hear this work, performed by Rolf Hind, a musician with a special affinity for this kind of repertoire.

The sound of the prepared piano is unexpected at first – akin to hearing Schubert for the first time on fortepiano – but the ear quickly adjusts, so much so that the “unprepared” notes are more unexpected than the prepared ones. In fact, the range of sounds, timbres and textures is greater than a percussion orchestra: there are gamelans and gongs, the deep “bong” of a long-case clock, the high tinkling of a northern European church carillon; there are “dead” notes and notes which resonate deeply, slowly decaying in the big airy acoustic of the venue (St John’s Smith Square). The music itself is generally tranquil and meditative, reflected by the pianist’s small gestures. The result is absorbing and other-wordly: this is music which takes you out of yourself – and out of time and place.

Contrast this with the second concert of the second day of Occupy the Pianos: a performance by the Françoise-Green piano duo which included contemporary works by Rebecca Saunders and David Thomas Duncan (receiving its premiere) as well as music by Ligeti at his most obsessive – a perpetuum mobile of sound, like a fly trapped in a window – and Kurtag. Here the sounds were created more conventionally (though ‘Choler’ by Rebecca Saunders called for elbows on the keys and strumming the strings with plectrums) while ideas about timbre, resonance, musical colour, dynamics, acoustics, sound decay, the sounds “between” sounds, the sounds of silence, and the sounds we imagine or continue to hear internally after the instrument itself has stopped sounding were explored through the contrasting repertoire. The concert closed with both pianists at one piano playing a selection of intimate, witty and playful miniatures from Kurtag’s ‘Jatekok’.

Morton Feldman and John Cage

The “silence between the sounds” (real and imagined) is examined even further in the music of Morton Feldman, who exploited the instrument’s limitations to produce austere and haunting works. His music has been described as “minimalist”, yet it owes almost nothing to the repetitive, spooling sequences found in the music of Philip Glass, for example. It is certainly “minimal“, with strikingly spare motifs and simple  harmonies unfolding slowly over time. It is also almost entirely contained within a very soft dynamic range, and, just as the person who speaks quietly often commands the most attention, so Feldman’s music forces us to listen intently.

‘Palais de Mari’ was performed by American pianist Adam Tendler, whose stillness at the keyboard contributed to the concentrated listening experience. He also played the entire work from memory, no mean feat since this music is not conventionally constructed in harmonic sequences. The resulting performance was meditative, intense and beautifully poised.

In complete contrast, John Adams’ ‘Phrygian Gates’ is an almost continuous stream of musical consciousness and although minimalist in style, it represents the composer’s desire to move away from the traditional conventions of minimalism. Over the work’s duration (approx 24 minutes) the music takes a tour of the classic Circle of Fifths, but via the Phrygian or Lydian mode. In doing so, the music moves through 14 sections each with a special character: fluctuations of pulse, different figurations and textures, a change of amplitude. The continuous motion of the piece creates extraordinary layers of sound which suggest other instruments – horns, gongs, cellos – or noises: electronics, machinery. Eliza McCarthy, who has performed this work for the composer himself, played with great sensitivity and nuance, creating a rich palette of colours and emotions and an impressive command of both instrument and the overall architecture of the work.

More about the Occupy the Pianos festival here