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Bruce Brubaker on all things piano

Flatline

February 16, 2009 by Bruce Brubaker

flatline.jpgFor about ten hours in Bob Katz’s studio in Florida, I listened with him. We were adjusting the final mastering of my new CD. I like the sound on our previous discs, but I hope that this is going to be better. A piano sound not as edgy as pop, and not as distant as some classical piano recordings.

Apparently, during part of one of the recording sessions, there was a taxi radio or some other kind of transmitter outside. Traces of those signals became part of the recording. I noticed scratches or crackles, and it turned out Bob’s twentysomething intern could hear these high-frequency noises better. There was a symphony goin’ on up there!

Some teenagers have high-pitched cell phone ringtones that their older-eared teachers cannot hear. Such sounds were previously used in a security device, developed in the U.K., intended to drive youngsters out of shops where the high-pitched sounds were broadcast — a rodent-control noisemaker for kids!

Certainly, recordings are heard specifically and differently by every listener. And it’s not only a matter of physical differences in the receptiveness of our auricles. Hearing is interpretation. Psychoacoustics is not acoustics. Still, I now imagine a piece of music that could be designed to be heard differently by hearers of different ages — or again and again by an aging listener. A kind of sound hologram through time.

In If on a Winter Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino writes: “I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read, but at every reading I seem to be reading a new book for the first time. Is it I who keep changing and seeing new things of which I was not previously aware?”

The noises in our project can be removed through spectral editing. On a computer screen, the sound material appears renovatorAJ2.jpgin bright colors, top to bottom through the frequency range. Individual bits of the picture can be modified or removed. It’s finicky work. The “normal” musical sounds show up as organic-looking overlapping curved shapes. In one very brief section of the music where I still heard some of the taxi, Bob displayed the spectral image and we saw the telltale, regular vertical lines — each one making the speakers emit a tiny crackle. The absolutely straight lines are like the cliché of every emergency room TV drama — flatline. Not the jaunty, nuanced vital signals of a living human, but the totally flat signal on a monitor hooked up to someone who is dead.

With a few clicks of Bob’s mouse, our bright red sonic flatlines were removed…

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Bruce Brubaker

Recordings such as the new American piano music albums I make for ECM, InFiné, and Arabesque reach many listeners, and seem to break through some old divisions of high culture/pop, or art/entertainment. My fans are listening to Frank Ocean, Skrillex, Nicki Minaj — even the occasional Mozart track! Spotify, iTunes, Twitter, YouTube allow music lovers to discover music they could not have encountered so easily in the past. Live performances begin to reflect what’s happening online: this year I play at the International Piano Festival at La Roque d’Anthéron, traditional concert venues in Los Angeles, and Boston — as well as nightclubs in Berlin, Hamburg, Paris, Lyon, Geneva, and New York’s (le) Poisson Rouge. Read More…

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Music is changing. Society's changing. Pianists, and piano music, and piano playing are changing too. That's PianoMorphosis. But we're not only reacting... From the piano -- at the piano, around the piano -- we are agents of change. We affect … [Read More...]

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BB on the web

“Glass Etude” on YouTube

demi-cadratin review of Brubaker solo concert at La Roque d’Anthéron

“Classical music dead? Nico Muhly proves it isn’t” — The Telegraph‘s Lucy Jones on my Drones & Piano EP

Bachtrack review of Brubaker all-Glass concert

“Brubaker recital proves eclectic, hypnotic, and timeless” — Harlow Robinson’s Boston Globe review of my Jordan Hall recital

“Simulcast” with Francesco Tristano on Arte

Bruce Brubaker hosts 4 weeks of “Hammered!” on WQXR — “Something Borrowed,” “Drone,” “Portal,” “The Raw and the Cooked”

“Onstage, a grand piano and an iPod” — David Weininger’s story with video by Dina Rudick

“Bruce Brubaker on Breaking Down Boundaries” — extensive audio interview at PittsburghNewMusicNet.com

“Heavy on the Ivories” — Andrea Shea’s story for WBUR about Bruce Brubaker’s performances and recording of “The Time Curve Preludes” by William Duckworth

“Feeding Those Young and Curious Listeners” — Anthony Tommasini in The New York Times on the first anniversary of the Poisson Rouge

“The Jewel in the Fish” — Harry Rolnick on Bruce Brubaker at the Poisson Rouge

“The Post-Postmodern Pianist” — Damian Da Costa profiles Bruce Brubaker in The New York Observer

Bruce Brubaker questioned at NewYorkPianist.net

“Finding the keys to the heart of Jordan Hall” — Joan Anderman in the Boston Globe on the search for a new concert grand piano

“Hearing and Seeing” — Philip Glass speaks with Bruce Brubaker and Jon Magnussen, Princeton, Institute for Advanced Study

Bruce Brubaker about Messiaen’s bird music, NPR, “Here and Now”

“I Hear America: Gunther Schuller at 80” — notes and programs for concert series, New England Conservatory, Harvard University, Boston Symphony Orchestra

“A Conversation That Never Occurred About the Irene Diamond Concert,” Juilliard Journal

Bruce Brubaker plays music by Alvin Curran at (le) Poisson Rouge

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