How to Prepare a Piano with Stephen Drury
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 22 ธ.ค. 2011
- Stephen Drury of New England Conservatory's Piano faculty demonstrates the process of piano preparation for John Cage's "Sonatas & Interludes".
NEC will be celebrating Cage's centennial in 2012 with a series of concerts. Find out more at necmusic.edu/cage - เพลง
I personally think it's genius. They've expanded the potential of the instrument. If someone doesn't like the way prepared piano sounds, that's fine, but a lot of folks appreciate and use this experimental sound.
Absolutely. And if you don’t want to do this to your piano, you can just get one for free off Craigslist
Stephen! I had fun playing these pieces when I was in your class! You are still awesome! Missing PZ...
Stephen Drury was a pupil of Claudio Arrau, whic was a pupil of Martin Krause which was a pupil of Franz Liszt which was a pupil of Carl Czerny which was a pupil of Ludwig Van Beethoven which was a pupil of Joseph Haydn
Cool
Just an English tip... when you're talking about people, you use "who" instead of "which".
apple don't fall far from the tree . . . ?
@@bennemann I was about to make the same comment!! Thanks!!!
Hi Steve....fan from my Boston days 1990s...heard you last in Santa Cruz, CA some years back.
This guy's great!
How I love Mr Cage and his prepared piano - definitely a genius!
very interesting presentation, not just the process but also what Cage's instructions look like and specify - thanks for posting!
Maybe I'm wrong, because I'm certainly no expert, but doesn't the idea of tirelessly recreating Cage's preparations in such detail kind of negate the experimental nature of prepared piano?
I see where you're coming from, but these kind of prepared piano works by Cage weren't necessarily just an experiment in indeterminacy. He's actually trying to harness a specific sound with his preparations (which he describes in detail), either the sound of indonesian gamelan or european carillon, depending on which piece. But good question!
re: the comments wondering whether the over-analysis of the piano preparation contradicts the experimental nature of Cage's music.
I don't think that experimentation and specificity are mutually exclusive. Lots of free improvisers (e.g. Sun Ra, John Zorn, Ikue Mori) have still cared a lot about the specific sounds that they were making, even if some of the organization of those sounds was less determined at times. Since Cage bothered to give musical notation at all --for specific rhythms and timbres-- in this piece, it means that he did have certain sounds, techniques, and durations in mind. This can be contrasted with other works of his, where pieces have been centered around primarily text instructions describing what to do:
- Cage's piece Indeterminacy, which had Tutor improvise while Cage read stories
- Cage's Music Walk, which is a mix of musically notated and choreographic instructions
- Stockhausen's Aus Den Sieben Tagen, which is a collection of poems that describes sonic goals
Interesting question to think about~
You sir and John Cage are lunatics!
thanks for caring
I guess cage was the pre digital age. what could he have done with General MIDI. Thanks for the detail. love cage. ps i heard he set an organ to play endlessly on a fractal algorythym. do you know about this
thanks stephen! can we find a notation diagram of where to put the screws and rubber?
Cage's chart is included in the score!
Does preparing the piano change the pitch? I'm curious as I am currently composing a piece for prepared piano. I would like to change the sound of the piano but not the pitch of the music I've composed. Is there a way to do this?
Objects inserted into the strings will tend to change the pitch but objects placed atop the strings will not, in my experiencce, but will bring out other pitches in overtones
I wonder if this could potentially damage the strings.
4:55
There's a thin line between genius and insanity.
these guys use that line like a jump rope.
Do you mind if I steal that amazing quote?
far out
wat r u doing to tht piano!!!??!!1
lol, he goes "the last thing you want to do is This!" and then he does it ... hmm ?! indeed it's weird to learn from another youtuber, another video, the clear instruction, lift the damper and use a wedge before you do the insert, otherwise you damage the piano. looks like this teacher doesn't care all that much about the damage.. ?
To atonal composers can I please ask a serious question? I'm not going to attack you i'm being serious... why did composers abandon the western classical tradition and start writing strange music, and place such great importance on originality and not think about pleasing the audience any more?
My second question, is that I compose music of the Austrian Classical tradition, therefore alluding to Haydn and Mozart. Other composers and teachers attack me and say that my music is 'pastiche'. Is it wrong to write classical music? Can you please tell me what you think and why? Thanks!
Wan Ker I'm by no means an expert, but maybe I can help.
The writing of "strange" music peaks at a time in which all arts are in serious rupture with all tradition. They are the avant garde. The thing about pleasing the audience is a bit tricky. See, the audience generally likes works they can recognize, or at least recognize its "style". So the avant garde throws it all in the trash, searching for new grounds on which music can be enjoyed. It may be a "painful" process, but it certainly changed how we see the world forever.
The second question: it's not wrong to write classical musica at all! It's just that it's part of very well established aesthetics and therefore it doesn't challenge much. It's beautifulm but it's already been done and redone
+Wan Ker "serious question" "....start writing strange music, and place such great importance on originality and not think about pleasing the audience any more..."
It's not your thing. People get bored and like variety. I'm not a fan of dubstep, but I get that it has pretty broad appeal. I can assure you many people, myself included, like weird textural music. It sounds unfamiliar, and especially without visuals, it creates an instant mystery and curiosity. That's not to say that I like _ALL_ weird and non chromatic music or sounds, but I definitely like connecting with an artist's taste in them, in such a way that I know I can rely on them to curate only the things that we would mutually like. As someone who creates music this way, I also like to focus as much or more on sound design than song writing. I've done both, but sound design is not something that was really available to the degree it exists today, until maybe 30 years ago.
+Wan Ker Despite what you may hear, it is possible to have originality without being arbitrary or unpleasant. That, in my opinion, is the future of music. Art, like life, is fundamentally about being true to yourself. Imitation can be just a way of escaping the challenges of identifying who you are and making your own way. Then again, going mad with an obsession with randomness and the abandonment of all structure, control, choice, and judgment, can be just another way of doing the same thing. It is in exercising judgment, your own judgment, that you can make good art. Don't pay too much attention to what other people think, as most people have one of those two wrong ideas about art, or no idea at all.
Classical music continued to evolve, bit by bit, after Mozart and Haydn. In fact their music was considered an evolution after the Baroque composers. Especially with regard to harmony and harmonic progressions. By the time of Wagner and Liszt it had become almost chromatic and dissonant; the composers after them (Debussy and Stravinsky) took this even farther. From there, European composers (especially the so-called "Second Viennese School; Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern) felt the need to further explore that evolution to create completely atonal music. Then, during World War II, these forms were banned by most fascist and Nazi governments as "degenerate". So when the war was over composers exuberantly adopted atonal forms in order to free themselves of the governmental shackles of the war period. Hence, Stockhausen, Boulez, Xenakis, Carter, Cage, et al.
The problem with writing in the style of the 17th or 18th centuries is that there is no need for it. There is plenty of great music in that style written during that time. Writing in older styles is strictly a compositional exercise nowadays; it only provides a springboard for writing comtemporary music.
As for the audience; they need to keep up. The sounds and rhythms of older music evoke the sounds of those eras; galloping horses and what-not. We now live in the era of airplanes, radios, TV. computers, and such, and it is necessary that listeners are up to date. This is not to say that the earlier music is outdated; we can still enjoy it, but we cannot take it very seriously in regard to the current era we live in. Composers of the Classical era always scoffed at Baroque music (even Bach!), calling it old-fashioned.
I think there have been a lot of excellent responses to this question, but I'd just like to add one thing: not all atonal music is 'ugly.' Many pieces by Schoenberg, Webern, and Hauer, as well as later composers such as George Crumb and John Cage, created some of the most ethereally beautiful of the 20th century even while engaged in some of their most radical experimentation. Check out Webern's Passacaglia; it won't exactly 'prepare' you for the atonal music that he almost exclusively composed following that piece, but it will at least illustrate some of his methods. His Passacaglia is more like a late Romantic piece, but definitely points the way to the complete atonality of his subsequent music. Give it a listen!
haha Huib dit ga ik echt nie kijken #interfaculteit
Three hours (at least) to (literally) screw up a piano? Ow!
What an utter waste of time!
what a waste of time