The piano

[Mandryka]

The only passage I can think of is in the second movement of the Fête des Belles Eaux suite for four ondes martenot, of 1937. Very neat writing, inversions and all, could almost have been composed by Roussel!

According to Joanna MacGregor's notes No. 6 of the 20 Regards is an "enormous fugue"

https://soundcircus.com/vingt-regards-sur-lenfant-jesus/

[kea]

Stupid question here, but: is anyone aware of any genuinely innovative/new/original piano music after say 1970, that uses only the 88 keys and 3 pedals? I.e., no electronics, no inside the piano stuff, no prepared piano, no disklavier, no retuning the instrument, no turning the piano on its side etc. I genuinely can't think of any innovations in piano music that don't rely on in some way defeating the whole concept of "playing the piano" since Stockhausen Klavierstücke/Berio Sequenza IV/Cage Etudes Australes etc, with everything else since then just being variations on the same. Is the piano essentially a dead instrument now, one that has to rely on artificial life extensions to remain relevant?

I mean I'm sure I'm asking the wrong question here, and should be interrogating my attachment to 88 equally tempered notes instead etc, but I was thinking about this mostly because of how much the traditional piano repertoire written for that particular apparatus was at the cutting edge of music... up until Stockhausen/Berio/Cage, after which all piano music seems epigonic and derivative, even if I do like some of it for various reasons. Music needs to evolve and innovate, to break new ground, in order to survive. And it seems like it has now evolved past the need for the piano.

[Bryn]

Stupid question here, but: is anyone aware of any genuinely innovative/new/original piano music after say 1970, that uses only the 88 keys and 3 pedals? I.e., no electronics, no inside the piano stuff, no prepared piano, no disklavier, no retuning the instrument, no turning the piano on its side etc. I genuinely can't think of any innovations in piano music that don't rely on in some way defeating the whole concept of "playing the piano" since Stockhausen Klavierstücke/Berio Sequenza IV/Cage Etudes Australes etc, with everything else since then just being variations on the same. Is the piano essentially a dead instrument now, one that has to rely on artificial life extensions to remain relevant?

I mean I'm sure I'm asking the wrong question here, and should be interrogating my attachment to 88 equally tempered notes instead etc, but I was thinking about this mostly because of how much the traditional piano repertoire written for that particular apparatus was at the cutting edge of music... up until Stockhausen/Berio/Cage, after which all piano music seems epigonic and derivative, even if I do like some of it for various reasons. Music needs to evolve and innovate, to break new ground, in order to survive. And it seems like it has now evolved past the need for the piano.

Why restrict this to 88 keys when 97 are available on demand? As to equal temperament, http://www.precisionstrobe.com/apps/...mp/temper.html

As to post-1970 new music addressed from the piano keyboard, all four late, extended piano works, plus a few other of his late period works involving the piano, by Morton Feldman, date from a good few years after 1970. Sure, his approach to piano technique had mainly been developed in advance of that final period but was further developed through those late works.

As an aside, I am reminded of a text I used as the basis for a piece I wrote back in the early 1970s. That text was about committee work, rather than keyboard technique but here it is:

Learn to "play the piano". In playing the piano, all ten fingers are in motion; it will not do to move some fingers only and not others. However, if all ten fingers press down at once, there is no melody. To produce good music, the ten fingers should move rhythmically and in co-ordination.

[atribution reserved]

[cloughie]

Yet to my ears there is nothing better, in almost any musical genre, than the simplicity of a solo piano or piano accompanying a good voice.

[silvestrione]

Stupid question here, but: is anyone aware of any genuinely innovative/new/original piano music after say 1970, that uses only the 88 keys and 3 pedals? I.e., no electronics, no inside the piano stuff, no prepared piano, no disklavier, no retuning the instrument, no turning the piano on its side etc. I genuinely can't think of any innovations in piano music that don't rely on in some way defeating the whole concept of "playing the piano" since Stockhausen Klavierstücke/Berio Sequenza IV/Cage Etudes Australes etc, with everything else since then just being variations on the same. Is the piano essentially a dead instrument now, one that has to rely on artificial life extensions to remain relevant?

I mean I'm sure I'm asking the wrong question here, and should be interrogating my attachment to 88 equally tempered notes instead etc, but I was thinking about this mostly because of how much the traditional piano repertoire written for that particular apparatus was at the cutting edge of music... up until Stockhausen/Berio/Cage, after which all piano music seems epigonic and derivative, even if I do like some of it for various reasons. Music needs to evolve and innovate, to break new ground, in order to survive. And it seems like it has now evolved past the need for the piano.

I would offer Birtwistle's suite of toccatas that he calls 'Harrison's Clocks', where, as elsewhere, he is making music out of our fascination with mechanism and machine.

[Mandryka]

Stupid question here, but: is anyone aware of any genuinely innovative/new/original piano music after say 1970, that uses only the 88 keys and 3 pedals? I.e., no electronics, no inside the piano stuff, no prepared piano, no disklavier, no retuning the instrument, no turning the piano on its side etc. I genuinely can't think of any innovations in piano music that don't rely on in some way defeating the whole concept of "playing the piano" since Stockhausen Klavierstücke/Berio Sequenza IV/Cage Etudes Australes etc, with everything else since then just being variations on the same. Is the piano essentially a dead instrument now, one that has to rely on artificial life extensions to remain relevant?

I mean I'm sure I'm asking the wrong question here, and should be interrogating my attachment to 88 equally tempered notes instead etc, but I was thinking about this mostly because of how much the traditional piano repertoire written for that particular apparatus was at the cutting edge of music... up until Stockhausen/Berio/Cage, after which all piano music seems epigonic and derivative, even if I do like some of it for various reasons. Music needs to evolve and innovate, to break new ground, in order to survive. And it seems like it has now evolved past the need for the piano.

Do you know Scelsi's piano music, and Cage's number pieces played on piano (like Two2)?

For a taste of what was going on with Brit piano music in the last decades of the last century, there's a nice CD called British! by Steffen Schleiermacher

Apart from that this is 10 minute brain dump of pieces which have caught my attention over the past few months, some of them may fit the bill. It made me see that I hardly know anything about what composers are up to in France for example, less so Italy, Germany . . . The list is just too anglo-centric!

Galina Ustvolskaya's 6th piano sonata
Gennady Banshchikov, Piano Sonata no.3 (1974)
Rytis Mazulis The Clavier of Pure Reason
Tim Parkinson Piano Piece (2006 and 2007)
Peter Ablinger - Ohne Titel / 3 Klaviere (rain pieces) (untitled for three pianos) (1993)
Alvin Curran’s Inner Cities cycle
James Tenney’s Bridge for two pianos (1984)
George Flynn's Trinity
Jay Alan Yim's Tendril (get it on soundcloud)
Michael Finnisy's English Country Tunes and Verdi Transcriptions
The Wergo CD of Mark Andre's piano music
All the piano music which Roger Reynolds ever wrote
Walter Zimmermann's Beginner's Mind
Sciarrino’s Perdute in un cità d’acque as played by Stafano Malferrari
John Tilbury Barcelona
John Tilbury's recording of Michael Parson's piano music
Christopher Fox's The Red Room
Michael Levinas Concerto pour un piano espace No. 2.
Laurence Crane, Ethiopian Distance Runners
Jurg Frey's Klavierstucke

[Mandryka]

Yet to my ears there is nothing better, in almost any musical genre, than the simplicity of a solo piano or piano accompanying a good voice.

That's a genre which it's hard to make a mark in without sounding derivative IMO, unless they use extended techniques. Rihm, for example, does it pretty well, but basically it always sounds a bit like Hugo Wolff to me! Ades's Eliot Landscapes is quite a nice little cycle though, as is Thomas Larcher’s A Padmore Cycle, just nice well made music.

[kea]

Why restrict this to 88 keys when 97 are available on demand? As to equal temperament, http://www.precisionstrobe.com/apps/...mp/temper.html

Point taken! I suppose I'm thinking of pieces that could fit on a concert programme alongside Chopin, Bartók and Boulez, and be practiced easily at home on a rented Yamaha upright.

As to post-1970 new music addressed from the piano keyboard, all four late, extended piano works, plus a few other of his late period works involving the piano, by Morton Feldman, date from a good few years after 1970. Sure, his approach to piano technique had mainly been developed in advance of that final period but was further developed through those late works.

I do enjoy some of those late Feldman works, but truth be told I don't see them as particularly original: the musical language is comparable to the work Cage was doing in the 1940s, and for Feldman himself they represented a stylistic retreat from his graphic scores and aleatoric works, into something more conventional. One can make the argument that they represent a novel combination of preexisting stylistic ideas, but one can of course make that argument about any piece of music.

I suppose what I'm looking for is something from the last fifty years that bears the same approximate relationship to Klavierstück X as it in turn bore to, say, Schoenberg's Drei Klavierstücke op. 11.

For a taste of what was going on with Brit piano music in the last decades of the last century, there's a nice CD called British! by Steffen Schleiermacher

Apart from that this is 10 minute brain dump of pieces which have caught my attention over the past few months, some of them may fit the bill. It made me see that I hardly know anything about what composers are up to in France for example, less so Italy, Germany . . . The list is just too anglo-centric!

Galina Ustvolskaya's 6th piano sonata
Gennady Banshchikov, Piano Sonata no.3 (1974)
Rytis Mazulis The Clavier of Pure Reason
Tim Parkinson Piano Piece (2006 and 2007)
Peter Ablinger - Ohne Titel / 3 Klaviere (rain pieces) (untitled for three pianos) (1993)
Alvin Curran’s Inner Cities cycle
James Tenney’s Bridge for two pianos (1984)
George Flynn's Trinity
Jay Alan Yim's Tendril (get it on soundcloud)
Michael Finnisy's English Country Tunes and Verdi Transcriptions
The Wergo CD of Mark Andre's piano music
All the piano music which Roger Reynolds ever wrote
Walter Zimmermann's Beginner's Mind
Sciarrino’s Perdute in un cità d’acque as played by Stafano Malferrari
John Tilbury Barcelona
John Tilbury's recording of Michael Parson's piano music
Christopher Fox's The Red Room
Michael Levinas Concerto pour un piano espace No. 2.
Laurence Crane, Ethiopian Distance Runners
Jurg Frey's Klavierstucke

I don't know some of these pieces, so thanks. I will say that I may be putting too high a threshold on originality: for example English Country Tunes is a piece I value extremely highly, but fundamentally, it's just Stockhausen with some algorithmically altered bits of older music mixed in. Inner Cities likewise, but it's Cage + Feldman with again a bit more music history added. Ustvolskaya 6 is a true original, but there's also only one possible piece that can be written in that style, and it's Ustvolskaya 6. But I will certainly keep looking.

[Bryn]

Point taken! I suppose I'm thinking of pieces that could fit on a concert programme alongside Chopin, Bartók and Boulez, and be practiced easily at home on a rented Yamaha upright.


I do enjoy some of those late Feldman works, but truth be told I don't see them as particularly original: the musical language is comparable to the work Cage was doing in the 1940s, and for Feldman himself they represented a stylistic retreat from his graphic scores and aleatoric works, into something more conventional. One can make the argument that they represent a novel combination of preexisting stylistic ideas, but one can of course make that argument about any piece of music.

I suppose what I'm looking for is something from the last fifty years that bears the same approximate relationship to Klavierstück X as it in turn bore to, say, Schoenberg's Drei Klavierstücke op. 11.

It's more to do with the way the pianist addressed the keys.

[Mandryka]

Point taken! I suppose I'm thinking of pieces that could fit on a concert programme alongside Chopin, Bartók and Boulez, and be practiced easily at home on a rented Yamaha upright.


I do enjoy some of those late Feldman works, but truth be told I don't see them as particularly original: the musical language is comparable to the work Cage was doing in the 1940s, and for Feldman himself they represented a stylistic retreat from his graphic scores and aleatoric works, into something more conventional. One can make the argument that they represent a novel combination of preexisting stylistic ideas, but one can of course make that argument about any piece of music.

I suppose what I'm looking for is something from the last fifty years that bears the same approximate relationship to Klavierstück X as it in turn bore to, say, Schoenberg's Drei Klavierstücke op. 11.


I don't know some of these pieces, so thanks. I will say that I may be putting too high a threshold on originality: for example English Country Tunes is a piece I value extremely highly, but fundamentally, it's just Stockhausen with some algorithmically altered bits of older music mixed in. Inner Cities likewise, but it's Cage + Feldman with again a bit more music history added. Ustvolskaya 6 is a true original, but there's also only one possible piece that can be written in that style, and it's Ustvolskaya 6. But I will certainly keep looking.

Ablinger's your man! I mean, he makes piano transcriptions of the rain, for fks sake! How cool is that!

[Mandryka]

Or maybe James Whittle

[Mandryka]

. Ustvolskaya 6 is a true original, but there's also only one possible piece that can be written in that style, and it's Ustvolskaya 6. But I will certainly keep looking.

Sciarrino 4

[matthewfox]

From the latest composers, I have a special affection for Philip Glass, Arvo Pärt and Max Richter piano works :)

Pärt's «Credo» for piano, orchestra and choir is absolutely an astonishing and unique work!

I am a piano player myself. Btw currently looking for a cozy cushion on https://www.perfectlygrand.com/:)

[Mandryka]

21st century piano music... that's an interesting thought. I agree about Stockhausen of course, and about Finnissy too although I'm not very well up on the latter's post-2000 piano music and what I do know doesn't excite me as much as his spikier and less allusive piano music from earlier on. I would mention also Sciarrino, although he's written hardly anything for piano since 2000. Mark R Taylor (b 1961), who has a recent CD out on Another Timbre, is IMO writing some of the most original and powerful piano music of the present time.

When you first mentioned Mark R Taylor someone played me a low bitrate mp3 of the CD and I thought “OK, but no cigar.” And then about two weeks ago I decided to take a punt and downloaded the flacs. It is like night and day, suddenly the richness of those harmonies - like the boldest harmonies of late lugubrious chromatic Liszt - have come to life and I love that CD, and play it often. Thanks for mentioning.

Have you seen the new release (of old recordings) of Mark Taylor’s duos for violin and piano on bandcamp? Darragh Morgan and a pianist who I hadn’t come across before called Mary Dullea.(Edit, yes I had, she’s on a rather good Finnissy CD with Morgan.)

[Bryn]

Mary is Darragh's life partner. With Tim Gill they comprise the Fidelio Trio. It was Mary who put together John While's 70th birthday event at Wiltons Music Hall: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-e...n-6103748.html

Oh, and Mark Taylor's Nocturns are due to be played by John TIlvury at the official launch concert for Iklectik's recently acquired Broadwood 200 piano. No date fixed, as yet, but some time in the new year.