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	Sound Forms For Piano John Cage, Henry Cowell, ... New World Records, 1995 average customer review:based on 6 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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Although there is a logical connection between the works that imaginative juxtaposition on the disc enhances, Cowell, Cage, Johnston, and Nancarrow arrive at their musical conclusions from completely different directions. This disc is a tribute to the nonuniformity of American experimental music.

Listeners should spend some time at their local music libraries familiarizing themselves with the scores, just to see how the composers get these startling results.

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Not enough

I fail to see how Messiaen had anything to do with this music, the American innovators/composers had their own language,a world apart from Europe,in gesture, in content, in source, in development/ Messiaen developed his own sense of rhythm from the East and the seriality of it. With impressive pieces as his "Chronochromie for orchestra" and his piano music was innovative with another content to pursue/ and here the only disappointment is that it is all excerpts except for the Johnston "Suite" a self-contained piece.
The prepared piano,is/was/ where you place nuts, bolts, wood-screws, erasers and pencils inbetween on the internal strings of a piano. It for the record was invented.suggested by Cowell, Cage merely perfected the instrument, and curious how there really is no literature for the instrument after Cage. The Sonatas and Interludes of Cage was a kind of summit for expression,an un-romanticized way, Cage was also interested in proportions,structure that had no dramatic telos somewhat anti-serial,third person, how durations come to inhabit spaces in a live situation. This music is traditionally very gorgeous,spacious and focused and the most beautiful music Cage ever wrote. Much of the prepared piano music had a dramatic purpose and was written for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company largely ignored in the early years of their existence by the "savy?" New York critics.(They also found painter Cy Twombly to be uninteresting) It was not until the Company and Cage was recognized elsewhere(Europe) is when the New York illiterate critics finely saw something innovative.
The Cowell pieces herein, as well are two small examples embark of the utilization of the extended piano, playing with the flesh of the hand on the inner strings of the piano,sometimes the pianist depresses the tones on the keyboard silently then harp like running fingers or plucking the strings, Clusters and percussive like gestures as well were utilized by Cowell. He played all this music also in Europe in the Twenties. I wish there was more that Johnston wrote for the piano, microtonal or otherwise, for the language of just intonation of different tuning systems ,utilizations of different scales all had incredible potential. Johnston also saw the creative paradigm of finding usable musical forms as "containers" for the timbres of just intonation unlike some other practicioners who merely "pour" it into well-known moribund forms as Harry Partch.It still reamins a problem for just intonation music to find equally innovative forms to equal the transfomration of timbre,and how we come to listen. Nancarrow is/was another neglected creator,only in his last years was his music known at all, and here you get small excerpts from the larger "Studies",the first to use musical automata the innovativeness is in rhythm only for tone manipulations and pitches are at a minimum,I really don't know if he could have gone atonal with this rhythmic discoveries.

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Of Abiding Interest

"Experimental" though they may be, the pieces on this CD meet one of the criteria for great music: they not only hold up on repeated listening, but can inspire additional insights. Cowell's work was almost an end in itself - there wasn't anywhere else to go in that direction, but it now seems inevitable that someone would play the piano in that way. The Cage pieces are delightful, enjoyable on the superficial level yet containing enough substance to maintain interest. The Johnston piece suffers in that the composer may have attempted to do too much at once - not only is it written in a highly complex microtonal scale, it dispenses with conventional sonata form. Either of these by themselves would have been enough. The Nancarrow pieces, representing a fraction of his writing for player piano, are astonishing and must be heard to be believed.

The liner notes are unusually extensive, although given the subject matter, a lesser treatment would not have sufficed - the novice is given a complete introduction to these works. Included is an essay on the history of the piano in America, outlines of each composer's life and work, and discussions of the individual pieces (with an additional one by Johnston himself).

The works presented here are not simply ideosyncratic exercises in oddity - they are profoundly approachable on many levels, and served as an inspiration to later composers. For example, the prepared piano is an indispensable component of Arvo Pärt's "Tabula Rasa."

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Personal response is not always judgment

I have my reservations concerning pure sonority, or intellectual game, or a combination of both as a basis for composition. But I also have reservations about what so many composers have done "on the keys" with sonority and intellectual game - or is it just plain "thinking" or "intuition" or "composition lessions"? Most of it, in any era, is either dismissed or lost, or never comes to light at all (never more true than now).

If one does not share Messiaen's religious viewpoint, his wonderful music can get (let's be gentle) tedious; it certainly borders on the pretentious at times (I know he wasn't that way personally); some might say blasphemous. But what is really his most accessible music besides the romantic and programmatic Quartet for the End.... (with those intellectualized rhythms based on a very personal reading of Indian tala)? All those bird (and bird as the spirit) pieces! Talk about (wonderful) gimmicks!

I guess the reviewer above shares Messiaen's heart/soul and therefore responds fully to the "Vingt Regards." (I like it, too.) But I assume that "new music" for him has to have a postromantic sensibility or surface attraction; has he read criticism/reviews, back to the 18th century, and not seen the pattern of nonacceptance of the new, whether it be sonic, intellectual or both? (Beethoven was "a madman," Berlioz a ringmaster at a noisy circus, et al.)

It's okay if the above reviewer doesn't like the music. The Cowell pieces are novelties, to be sure, but pretty darn important ones - and fun. Cage is in a non-Western place, so take it or leave it (or leave it and listen). Nancarrow's studies are a case of doing one thing, but doing it very well and for most of a lifetime. Those pieces are rhythmically shattering, defying all dance-rhythm expectations - not bad for a player piano. And, finally, my friend Ben Johnston's Sonata; about as radical a microtonal piece as he ever wrote (what is it, 77 nonidentical pitches?) with its interchangeable movements. In its original ordering, I wonder if an openminded ear can hear this without experiencing an expressionistic personal crisis unfolding. Just plain postwar beautiful!
There's room for all of it in this great big CD world....

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Interesting program through somewhat frustrating snippets, disappointingly short timing, outstanding liner notes

This disc is almost more interesting for its liner notes than for its musical content. It features 20th Century American compositions for piano in which the instrument's traditional, time hallowed mode of sound production (felt-covered hammers, actionned by human fingers depressing keys and beating on strings tuned to "equal temperament", e.g. acoustically imperfect subdivisions of the acoustically perfect octave) is altered some way or another. Cowell was in many ways the inventor of these new ways to produce sounds from a piano. True, Schoenberg made a timid essay at silently depressing a chord in opus 11/1 to produce a sympathetic resonance when striking other keys; sporadic uses of tone clusters are encountered throughout the history of Western music, usually to descriptive ends (battle music, evocation of bells) and at the beginning of the 20th Century both Ives and Ornstein were very liberal in their use of them (but Ives' works were unpublished, unplayed and unknown). Percy Grainger also composed pieces with clusters and some in which the strings are directly played upon. But I am not aware that anyone before Cowell so systematically and so radically searched for new ways to elicit sounds from the piano strings. In "The Banshee" and "Aeolian Harp", two of his most evocative pieces, Cowell has the pianist play directly on the strings, varying color through different modes of sweeping or plucking. Piano Piece is a compendium of Cowell's techniques, using both tone clusters and piano strings. Miller plays it with snap and power. Unfortunately, in the two others, he is not nearly as precise nor as varied in his colors as the composer himself (Henry Cowell plays his own Piano Music).

In many ways Cage took his lead from Cowell, who introduced him not only to the idea of altering the tonal qualities of the piano, but also to non-Western music traditions. The selection of five of his famous Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano sound like far-Eastern ritual music. Though being formally quite elaborate, they are easy and enjoyable listening, to whet one's appetite for more (there are too many complete recordings to be mentioned, but as the pieces' dedicatee and first performer of some, Maro Ajemian's has a special authority in them: Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano or John Cage: Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano [IMPORT]).

The story of Conlon Nancarrow is now well known. Although he too seized the suggestion from Cowell's book "New Musical Resources" to explore the possibilities of the Player Piano, in some respect his point of departure is where Ives arrived, at rhythms so complex as to be inhuman, e.g. impossible to play by human fingers. Living in near seclusion in Mexico, Nancarrow spent years painstakingly punching holes in cardboard rolls to feed in an Ampico Player Piano, elaborating music of awesome rhythmic complexity and heart-warming, jazzy exuberance. The threee studies featured here were recorded in March 1973, in Nancarrow's studio and on his equipment. Beyond their incredible rhythmic complexity, the particular, brittle sound of the piano links them to Cage's sound world. It was fairly rare stuff back then. The first "complete" recording didn't come out until 1977 to 1981 on four legendary 1750 Arch Records LPs, and the only exposure the studies had had was through a selection of twelve of them (and none of the three featured here) on a 1969 CBS LP. Now of course we have the essential Wergo undertaking, an even more complete recording made in 1988, again on the composer's equipment and under his supervision (Nancarrow: Studies for Player Piano), and a new one by MDG, for which the Ampico Piano Player has been adapted on a modern Bösendorfer (Player Piano 1: Nancarrow Vol. 1, Player Piano 3: Conlon Nancarrow Vol. 2 - Studies 13-32).

Finally Ben Johnston, in his Sonata for Microtonal Piano, has sought to "reopen doors closed by the acceptance of the twelve-tone equal-tempered scale as the norm of pitch usage", by exploring tuning modes based on the exact acoustical properties of pitch, e.g. the mathematical relations between pitches. The Sonata's movements roughly follow the traditional pattern of "sonata-allegro", "scherzo", "slow movement" and "finale (meditative adagio)", but if I understand the liner notes right, they can be played in an alternative order: 4-1-3-2, creating a composition which the composer calls "Grindlemusic". Although the notes insist that the music is very different from the quarter-tone compositions of Haba and the likes, it does sound like that. Still, the microtonal sonorities and sometimes demented flurry of notes of the first two movements are evocative of Nanacarrow's studies, while the use of altered piano sounds and harped strings in the last two is evocative of Cage and Cowell.

This CD is a reissue from an LP published in 1976, but at 47:43, what was acceptable for an LP is disappointingly too short for a CD. This drawback is compounded by the fact that all these compositions can be found on CDs in more complete collections (for Johnston's Sonata, see Johnston: Microtonal Piano ). What still makes it highly valuable are Charles Hamm's magnificent liner notes, apparently written or at least updated for the CD reissue. The 24-page essay in small script they contain takes longer to read than the disc to listen. It outlines the history of piano manufacturing in America and of the various essays to alter its mode of sound production, gives lengthy bios of the composers, depicts their respective approach to the instrument and provides detailed analyses of the compositions. The analysis of Jonhston's Sonata is even introduced by an elaborate presentation of remarkable pedagogical clarity of the acoustical properties of pitches and of equal temperament - for the first time, I got the feeling that I understood what it is all about. To that are added a selected bibliography and discography and even a historical chart of a century of American invention between 1852 and 1962. The notes owe an additional star to this disc, which otherwise I would have rated only 3-stars.

But I still haven't understood how the disc's title relates to its content. It should have been something like "American Altered Piano", or "Alternative Alterations for Piano".

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reviews: page 1, 2



Tracks
The Banshee | Aeolian Harp | Piano Piece (Paris 1924) | Sonatas And Interludes: Sonata I | Sonatas And Interludes: Sonata V | Sonatas And Interludes: Second Interlude | Sonatas And Interludes: Sonata X | Sonatas And Interludes: Sonata XII | Sonata For Microtonal Piano: Movement I | Sonata For Microtonal Piano: Movement II | Sonata For Microtonal Piano: Movement III | Sonata For Microtonal Piano: Movement IV | Studies For Player Piano: Study No.1 | Studies For Player Piano: Study No.27 | Studies For Player Piano: Study No.36

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