Count-down

I forever love the quote from a book I read about the Guarneri String Quartet. They (jokingly) make light of the fact that there is rarely any money in chamber music, and when there is any money, it certainly isn’t much. I am determined to solve this problem. 

The arts don’t sustain themselves financially. In the days when Bach would have been alive, he was essentially writing “pop music,” much in the vein of how a praise band would write a chart for a contemporary worship service. Back in those days, we didn’t have “early musicians,” rock musicians,” “pop musicians,” or “classical musicians.” 

We had musicians.

And we need to go back to that. There is just as much to learn from Jimi Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner” improvisation and Billy Joel’s amazing piano lick in “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” (the one in G Major, right before the “Oh-oh’s,” and before the great re-transition to F Major) as we can from studying the cadenza to … basically any instrumental concerto in the canon.

I have long worked on the precision and cleanliness in my playing, and it has come along way. Any musician who plays classical music needs to then swing the pendulum in the other direction, as to call upon the spirit and presence of the original. As if to say, “Bach is in the room. Let’s groove it.”  

 

 

PHOTO: Lukens Trio and Friends, from “Bach by Candlelight 2014"

Or another way to think of it is to “transcend” the instrument. Beethoven, in speaking to Schuppanzigh, said, 

“Do you think I worry about your lousy fiddle when the spirit speaks to me?” 

(this was after Schuppanzigh complained about the difficulties that he encountered when playing one of the quartets).

My goal in playing the d minor Bach concerto coming up will be to (of course) play accurately … 

but even much more than that ...

to make the listeners feel like we have taken a time machine back to Leipzig, and we are listening to some of the greatest music ever written and enjoying the thrill of the idea that it “could” have been created on the spot.

If you would like to attend our concert on 12/19/15, please consider reserving your space in advance. You might even consider a CD! You can click here (Lukens Trio Kickstarter) to learn more about that. Thank you! 

Preparation

I have thought so long that a piano should be, simultaneously, the substition and simulation of an entire orchestra. Organists might trump this in some ways, but pianists have a wide dynamic range through physical interaction with the keyboard. 

Twentieth-century composers became curious about color possibilities when a performer was asked to treat the strings with various things, therefore altering the sounds. John Cage asked performers to put nails, forks, tacks, felt, and various other objects in or on the strings. It would create colors closer to a gamelan, Indian drums, or an entire percussion section rather than a keyboard. 

Three of the pieces which I played recently in Germany called for "prepared piano." The composer will put some sort of key or legend in the music before the actual music begins. He or she will lay out a "map" of which notes to treat with which materials. One of the pieces called for some keys to be taped to the fallboard. Another piece asked for notes to be muted (and-or producing overtones) with some sort of putty. The putty in particular was easy because it was able to be removed quickly and re-used. 

I had not done a lot of music like this before initiating the "Albuquerque meets Darmstadt" project. Now, all of the sudden, I was immersed in the possibilities of color which the composers required. 

PHOTO: The inside of the piano while I was practicing "Pulstastung," a multi-movement work by my friend, UNM colleague, and amazing Darmstadt host, Dr. Karola Obermüller. 

Here is a further explanation from the "Prepared Piano" article on Wikipedia. Here is the link if you are interested - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prepared_piano

Although theoretically any object could be used to prepare a piano, in practical application preparation objects are usually expected to have certain characteristics:

• They are applied directly to the piano strings.
• They must fit in the desired location inside the piano.
• They (usually) should not move from their location during playing.
• They must be reversible (that is, when a properly prepared piano has been "unprepared", it should be impossible for anyone to tell that it had been ever been prepared; no permanent damage is done to the piano).

Additionally, most preparations will change the timbre of the string in such a way that the original pitch of the string will no longer be perceptible, though there are occasional exceptions to this.^[1]

Semi-simple summer

Greetings everyone! 

I was intentionally absent from the blog-o-sphere when Zheng and I took a much-needed vacation to the San Francisco Bay Area. Photos forthcoming. We had an amazing time exploring that time. I had not returned since my summer at Merola (2007!) so it was amazing to be back there. 

I’m now hard at work on a project involving the musical history of Darmstadt, Germany along with my current position and relationships at UNM. The project is to present solo piano works of current UNM composers and their pieces, alongside pair-able German works in the common repertoire (occasional Bach or Brahms) or with a composer who was at Darmstadt during the initial years of the summer course (Berio, Babbitt, Messiaen). 

 

 

I have my first “outing” of some of the pieces this coming Thursday and Saturday, for a house concert (visit this post if you haven’t seen it before).

I have downtime this summer as well - so the summer is some playing and some resting. 

Semi-simple.

PHOTO: The opening to Milton Babbitt’s “Semi-Simple Variations.”