From October 5 – November 30, Bret Schneider’s just-intoned player piano will be located at Comfort Station. The programming ranges from generative compositions running on afternoons, string ensemble concerts, and discussions on music experience in the 21st century.

Bret Schneider is a composer, essayist, & poet. For the first quarter of the 21st century, Schneider has attempted to synthesize the outer limits of third ear music with modern beauty. Via novel formal experiments, his music cultivates dreamspace & reverie. Recent works include live-composing to a just-intoned player piano. Schneider is also a co-founder of Caesura Magazine.

ABOUT:

A lone piano has been retrofit with player piano capability for the composer to spontaneously &/or algorithmically transmit live musical expressions from a custom composition system. This arrangement allows for an uncannily precise integration of pitch & rhythm — rhythms are timed at exact subharmonics of pitch, creating a resonance across distinct listening modes never before experienced in acoustical realtime. This “MetaPiano” can also be played at volumes & velocities not possible with the human body, manifesting dormant capacities of the piano & extending the instrument for 21st century composition. Like all of Schneider’s music, the goal is to integrate the last half-century of acoustic experimentalism with modern beauty — in this instance, just-intoned third-ear music with impressionist French piano music. On the surface an odd pairing … yet overlapping in the new, modern discovery of harmonic experience. To be clear, there are no effects involved — all sound comes solely from the hammers hitting the strings on the piano.

Modern French pianists had embraced the player piano. Gabriel Faure was keen to have his work transcribed to piano rolls, & Erik Satie always embraced the ‘mechanical’. Even Chopin had looked in wonder at the new singing androids of his day, hoping that electronic means might one day replace the manifold difficulties of musicians. Perhaps the most famous example of work for player piano is Conlon Nancarrow, who wrote music specifically for player piano. Even so, modern composers might never have imagined that pianos would one day be live-composed from a personal computer, offering the composer high-level compositional freedoms. Schneider’s personalized, almost psychoanalytic composition system is modeled after Laurie Spiegel’s (defunct) Music Mouse program, which explicitly advanced this higher-level composition ideal, relieving the artist of non-musical superfluities surrounding musical experience, & opening up new creative freedoms by emphasizing essential musical decisions. The craft, sport, & acting surrounding music is suspended, its imaginative art & acoustic resplendence emphasized.

The piano is tuned to a custom just-intonation scale inspired by La Monte Young’s Well-Tuned Piano … here tuned in C, & built on septimal minor thirds and perfect fifths. It values clarity & simplicity as elsewhere in the music. This tuning inflects the music with a dreamy, unresolving character conducive to the perennial openness of the generative composition. The scale is an evocative tonality full of difference tones in the theta frequency range, in which the listener can free-associate tonal shapes in aural clouds laconically suspended in space & unfurling in lyrical time. The bass provides an ostinato background for the higher voices to freely improvise elongated chords over, radiating a prismatic drone.

The radiant dispersion of the tones is determined by the composer’s playing “drunk walks” — a finitary iterative movement that rises & falls in evocatively writhing patterns. The sinuousness of the rhythm is a macrocosm of the individual waveforms of the pitches. (For deeper discussion, see the artist’s conversation with Omair Hussain published on Caesura Magazine). This dynamic cyclical movement — striving to permute through as many chordal & melodic combinations as possible — pairs well with the just-intonation, which cultivates strange difference tones & other sensuous third-ear phenomena. This extreme permutational movement — this nearly libidinal drive to exhaust all known possibilities so as to evoke unknown possibilities — expresses a desperate striving for something like a transcendent beauty, a type of tormented, but free-floating beauty characteristic of much art in our era.

Due to this wandering chromaticism, these works often fall in the Fantasia genre. As Schoenberg says of the form …

J. S. Bach in many “Introductions” for example, and especially such pieces or parts labelled “Fantasia” prefers a disposition of the harmonic structure which neither in its entirety nor even in its detail can be easily referred to a key. It is not uninteresting that in just such instances these old masters use the name “Fantasia” and unconsciously tell us that fantasy, in contradistinction to logic, which everyone should be able to follow, favors a lack of restraint and a freedom in the manner of expression, permissible in our day only perhaps in dreams; in dreams of future fulfillment; in dreams of a possibility of expression which has no regard for the perceptive faculties of a contemporary audience; where one may speak with kindred spirits in the language of intuition and know that one is understood if one use the speech of the imagination — of fantasy.

Inscribed on the score is the phrase Quasi Una Sogno — “almost like a dream” — referring to Beethoven’s inscription for the Moonlight Sonata score, “Quasi Una Fantasia”, implying that the sonata be played in the style of a fantasia. Here I instruct the presentation of this fantasia — the modern form par excellence — to be played in the style of a dream. More importantly, to be listened to as one might listen to — or in — a dream.

The piano is an instrument of illusion. What we know as ‘piano music’ is not at all natural. The piano is a non-continuous instrument, each percussive note quickly decays & is incapable of being sustained in the way a violin string can, for example. Each note lives a very brief life. And yet we hear the flourishing of continuous tone. Tonal piano compositions must work against the inherent percussive staccato of the piano by connecting many notes seamlessly, creating the illusion of continuous tonality. Piano composers like Chopin ingeniously emphasized a legato style, with the sustain pedal also more often held than not. Traditionally, the only practical reason (notwithstanding artistic ones) to lift the sustain is to prevent dissonances when harmonies change — but with a well-conceived just-intonation scale, all tones are rationally related to each other & generally don’t clash as in many equal-tempered key combinations; so the sustain can simply be held down (here with books that have sustained me over the years). This also allows for more euphonic chromaticism. Besides, we like dissonance now. It’s adventuring from the comforts of consonant home is pleasurable to moderns who are in constant flux & self-reinvention; it’s overtonal restlessness beautiful. And the far-off overtones in this tuning is nothing short of the grasping of distant stars brought down to earth.

Compositionally, one of the innovations of this piece (& all my other recent work) is the unique integration of tone & rhythm — rhythms are paced at exact subharmonics of pitches. The rhythms become an additional tonal voice, albeit in the subharmonic, rhythmic domain. Mostly ranging between 3-7Hz, they fall in the ‘Theta’ frequency range, which neuroscience research suggests is the brainwave frequency associated with daydream & reverie. Such rhythmic pacing echoes the theta range difference tones of the tuning. Their independent sinuous movements evoke a kind of subcutaneous melodic line, an extension of the melodic chord in the rhythmic domain. When voices overlap, they create rhythmic chordal forms, polyrhythms that are actually tuned. The formal integration of rhythm & tonality creates a hypnagogic new musical experience conducive to reverie & reflection. And the ‘drunk walk’ motive — which doesn’t just progress, but also regresses — brings a kind lulling languor to this fantasia.

The emphasis on dream, reverie, reflection, corresponds to a de-emphasis on performative gesture, the latter often associated with a value of music as craft or entertainment. This is not entertainment. This is the Art of Music. As Glenn Gould said, “One doesn’t play the piano with one’s fingers, one plays the piano with one’s mind.” I contend that the art of music in our era is much more about imaginative free-association, the apperception of various musical characters & sonic figures, & the type of conceptual play we find in dream. The paradox is that in pursuing such abstract dreams, the sensuousness of music becomes strangely palpable.

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Tags: Bret Schneider, Chicago, Comfort Station Logan Square, Logan Square, PPP — THE PREPARATOR'S PET PIANO: Third Ear Nocturne #7