When we categorize sound recordings as “music” we may make a misrepresentation. Isn’t this sound, these patterns of sounds, the cause, the inducement, left incomplete without listener response? So for all these decades, we have been recording only part of the story. And of course those sounds are completed into “music” as they are heard each time. This music continues to change. As each listener hears the recordings we have, different music is rendered every time.

In order to record, or preserve, a complete musical transaction we will need to record not only the sounds that are made but the responses they cause. An image of brain activity in the listener perhaps? We may not quite be ready to do it.

But we can have a better sense of old music as it becomes old, if we can record cause and effect. We might have better comprehended Lisztomania described by Heinrich Heine or the fervor induced by Elvis (or now Bieber). Let’s record not just sounds that are made but the complete circuit of music.

A student asked my opinion of a performance he described. In the performance, a pianist used the pedal to sustain long notes while taking his fingers off the keyboard. After thinking, I wrote:

“I think the use of the pedal for sustaining notes or helping with legato depends very much on what music is being played. For me, in music by Brahms or Mozart, the central Germanic repertory, long notes must be held with fingers — no matter what the pedal is doing.

“In later Russian or French music it may be different. You might make the sound by removing your hand and sustaining only with pedal.

“The ‘proof’ would be that Beethoven, for example, notates short bass notes (‘Waldstein’ sonata, last movement), that are indicated to be elongated with the pedal. (He’s notating what the player does with the hand.) While Debussy (in something like ‘Hommage à Rameau’) writes long-value notes that can only be sustained with pedal. Even though he makes no mention of the pedal at all. Debussy’s notation is not showing how to use your hands or feet — it’s more of a sonic picture.”

Beethoven: Opus 53, movement 3

Debussy: “Hommage à Rameau”

This is much more than a matter of how to use the pedal in piano music. What is written music? A how-to guide? A blueprint? And what kind of a blueprint? If I’m giving indications to builders who are making a structure of familiar type and in well-known conditions, I may need to convey less, or convey it differently. If my plan is for something unprecedented, the recipe takes on different significance.

Does musical notation show effect or cause?

“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”

– Walter Benjamin (1936)

Our current practice (2013) regarding sound recordings, movies, novels, poems, or images is rooted in old norms of analog reproduction. New art technologies will allow varying surface iteration of an underlying art product.

For example, the new process of making a “recording” of music will involve capturing or conceiving several plausible performance alternatives and allowing algorithms to be made that can render a new “performance” each time the listener chooses to listen. All this art will include VSI (variable surface iteration).

Eve Sussman has already made a “film” with multiple pathways through it (though all the visual and sound material has been produced in advance). Rupert Nesbitt makes digital animations which actually do render differently each time they are viewed.

Even the HDR setting on your phone is allowing multiple images to be captured and purposed to more layered, nuanced experience in reception. (Images of differing focus are overlaid.)

The great possibilities of realizing multiple varying surfaces in image, text, or music (sound) remain for us to develop.

The changing surface of a text doesn’t have to be randomized. Imagine the poet allowing for a varying subject in his phrase: in 93% of versions the word will be “creature,” in 7% of reads, the word that appears will be “rabbit.”

This art is no longer a fixity, but a range. And the details can be generated through ongoing interaction with other (new) data streams — the news, or the reader’s pulse or neural firings. Today’s “phone” becomes “ceiver” in the future. No more dated brand names in short stories — or brand names dated by a considered degree. The restive reader may get a shorter or punchier book.

For those who never find recordings quite to be music, the application of VSI will mark a real change. Perhaps music avoids disappearing into the “perfection of its materiality” — Baudrillard’s concern. This will be a new music not a recording of sound.

In the new studio, I might evaluate a number of alternative performance possibilities, putting my opinions into a software program. Or the program, adopting one of many, tweakable “producer” personas can take the information contained in my playing and synthesize a functioning VSI music product. (My involvement with or control of specific nuances can vary as I choose.)

Our ongoing conversation about live performances versus recording changes considerably if “recordings” are no longer fixities. This new art will not require live artists to carry it out in the moment, but it will not be recording, or it will be recording that is performative. No longer copying — this art will give new meaning to “reproduction.”

I said “piano auditions” and it’s true we hear people play piano. You might think we’re evaluating the piano-playing these kids do — and we are. Or you might think the piano is an instrument used for making music; so we’re evaluating the music making these prospective students do — and we are.

If aliens appear on earth (!) and vaporize all of our pianos, all electronic keyboards, all the harpsichords, and organs — I’d like to think our pianists could carry on as musicians without their current instrument.

But in my thought-experiment laboratory, I dare to have my aliens go farther. These new spacepeople will not just vaporize pianos, musical instruments — these new aliens will remove music itself. The sounds, compositions, the idea, the practice of music, all gone! It’s my hope that the most fearless of our applicants might carry on communicating, without music, communicating in some other way, by other means.

Difference may make us uncomfortable, yet it’s the basis of communication. Can I go so far as to say that if someone tells me something completely expected or already known by me, no communication occurs?

Some of us admit that not all music is communication. Music can occupy space, or induce a condition. And the other functions of music might be undertaken differently in no-more-music circumstances.

Musicians have been playing keyboard instruments for hundreds of years, not thousands. The first documented use of the term “classical music” occurs only in 1829. With too great specificity — obsolescence can come to us quickly.

(In very soft tapering at the end of a melodic line, frequently I have the sense that pianists lose contact with the music, or with the process of music making, perhaps in the service of sonic detail. The prettiest moments may mark gaps of coherence.)

Achieving long continuity in solo piano pieces is especially challenging. No other musicians to help the pianist along. No conductor…

The player’s own continuing, (unwavering?) attention to the music really matters. And the achievement of that continuity may be rooted in physical behaviors.

What do we look at while playing? In a memory-performance, there’s no score to read. We may look at our hands and the keyboard. Or perhaps stare provocatively upward…at the heavens? To me it seems, a fairly limited range of vision will help us. If the head and eyes move very widely or very suddenly, continuity of sound and line are more difficult to achieve. (I’m not a fan of closed-eye playing either. Too much loss of contact with the real physical sound in the room, I believe.)

Some players, often of great intelligence, get into a condition of insufficiently-focussed hyperawareness. Their attention/consciousness is taking in so much, or too rapidly switching from awareness of one dimension, task, or idea to others. Physical vision may slightly blur, eyes not quite focussing.

Easily followed limits on the player’s field of vision can be a good technique for exploring this issue. “Look mostly at this spot on the wall in front of you.” Or, “Move your head and eyes only within these bounds.”

Stephen Hough described a series of caricatures of the pianist Benno Moisevitch. No matter the music, tempo, or mood, Moisevitch has unchanging posture and facial expression in the images. Without discussing how the music sounded, I can say that I expect he was able to hear very, very well.

“Ever wonder what it would be like to get shot in the head, or have your face smash into a car’s windshield? Well, you can stop wondering, because you’ll never know — even if it does happen to you…

“It takes as long as 150 to 300 milliseconds (ms) to be aware of a collision after it happens…

“Now this might not sound like a lot of time, but think of what happens during a car accident. At the 1 ms mark, the car’s pressure sensor detects a collision, and at 8.5 ms the airbag system fires. At the 15 ms mark, the car starts to absorb the impact to a significant degree. It’s not until the 17 ms mark that the occupant starts to make contact with the airbag, with the maximum force of the collision reaching its apex at the 30 ms point. At the 50 ms mark, the safety cell begins to rebound, and after 70 ms the passenger moves back towards the middle of car — the point at which crash-test engineers declare the event as ‘complete.’

“And then, around the 150 to 300 ms mark, the occupant finally becomes aware of the collision.”

I wasn’t comforted, because I play Alvin Curran’s Hope Street Tunnel Blues III. For more than ten years, I’ve been training. I’ve been practicing and performing this piano piece/position paper/performance artwork/conceptual hurdle/extreme sport. At times, HSTB III is a physically painful task.

The main feature of the piano writing is very rapidly alternating chords that go on for about 14 minutes without stopping (there is a single measure of rest). Rapid alternating chord passages occur in music by Tchaikovsky, where they go on for a phrase or two, or in music by John Adams, where they continue for a couple of minutes. Hope Street Tunnel Blues is a kind of piano equivalent of running a marathon…

Alvin Curran: Hope Street Tunnel Blues III, mm. 11-14

When I first told Alvin I was going to play Hope Street Tunnel Blues in a concert, his reaction: “You’re going to play that piece?”

In learning to perform the music, I’ve also gotten better at hearing it. Now, I hear each chord and notice that one is a bit early, or late, that the constant alternation of left-right-left-right is slightly accelerating or dragging, that a changed bass note takes a tiny bit of extra time. It’s as though my hearing, my perception has sped up. Playing music may “rewire” our brains.

I calculate that each of these chords lasts about 85 milliseconds, 85 thousandths-of-a-second. And that’s what makes me nervous. It may be that I’m perceiving the events of this piece after they happen — as with latency in a cellphone call. But I’m aware of increments of time around 85 ms in length (though most listeners will not be). And that’s getting a bit close to the numbers in the article.

I mentioned my concerns to Judy Gordon. Maybe I’ve inadvertently taught myself to experience, made myself vulnerable to perceiving some future quick catastrophe? She said, my speeded-up perception of time probably only functions while I’m playing Hope Street TB. So then, if I’m suddenly killed at any time other than when this piece is underway, I probably won’t notice.

“I repeat all the great experiments of the 19th Century. My results are much better, more consistent, and more subtly nuanced.”

What will I think of the scientist who makes such a pronouncement? I might think that person’s not a scientist. A craftsman perhaps. An artisan or hobbyist? But this guy’s goal in the laboratory would seem to be something other than discovery, something other than science.

And doesn’t this apply to art as well?

Yes, there’s Pierre Menard, in Borges story, writing (anew) passages of Don Quixote, word-for-word:

“To compose the Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth century was a reasonable undertaking, necessary and perhaps even unavoidable; at the beginning of the twentieth, it is almost impossible. It is not in vain that three hundred years have gone by, filled with exceedingly complex events…”

So to play music by Beethoven today may be to recontextualize it. It’s not to say that there can’t be art in that — in that rereading. But it’s quite specialized. To approach an array of music, including music written now, the useful occupation of making, playing, and hearing music that has not been heard before — that’s the work of the professional musician, the “expert” practitioner.

Some in classical music, consider musicians who play new music to be specialists. In pop, musicians who only repeat the past (cover bands) are usually peripheral.

Someone who does not work with an aspect of present research or practice can’t be considered “professional.” For me, it is not those classical musicians who play new music that are the specialists — it is those who access only music by Beethoven and Brahms.

How about the various people on an airplane headed from New York to Amsterdam? Or Boston to Cancun?

Or the musicians gathered in and by a conservatory? At Juilliard, we had at one time (students and teachers): Dorothy Delay, Felix Galimir, Milton Babbitt, Doug McLennan, Gerard Schwarz, Russell Sherman, Julius Baker, Nadia Salerno-Sonnenberg, Stephen Hough, Nigel Kennedy, and me.

In Boston today, at New England Conservatory, there are: Paula Robison, Eliot Fisk, Russell Sherman, Kim Kashkashian, Jason Moran, Miriam Fried, Richard Stoltzman, Anthony Coleman, and me. I have to stop — oh, except that Wayne Koestenbaum was once the piano student of NEC faculty member Wha Kyung Byun. This is a community whose members seldom “meet.”

In the choice of students (and faculty) to bring into a school, we are having long-range effect on the community within our walls (social engineering), and eventually on the world.

For a long time, I wanted to acquire an old photograph of Ignaz Jan Paderewski. (Is it because I know Horowitz kept a Paderewski photo near his piano?) Paderewski’s playing is documented in sound recordings, piano rolls, and even film. My sense of his powerful impact as a musician comes more from the reception of it — accounts of his playing, and the intense reaction to Paderewski’s music-making that all this memorabilia constitutes. All this stuff is a recording of Paderewski!

“Away with all cynics! To perdition with the scoffers! Throw criticism to the dogs! Let us praise, applaud, and be merry, for tomorrow some other piano manufacturer will import a pianist who cannot play thus. Let us sound the loud timbrel of praise o’er Egypt’s dark sea of analysis. Great is Paderewski, and thank heaven for it!”

“When Paderewski comes this way, I’m so delighted, if I’m invited / To hear that long haired genius play.”

The movie remains to be made. Famous teacher tells aspiring youngster he will never be a pianist. Youngster practices a lot. Plays 19 public concerts in New York in 1891-92. (His Carnegie Hall debut featured a performance of a then 17-year-old concerto by Saint-Saëns. Equivalent to playing John Adams’s Century Rolls today?) Earns fortune from American tours. Travels in private railroad car. Becomes prime minister of Poland! Knows Queen Victoria, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt. Initially buried at Arlington Cemetery.

Not Quentin Tarantino perhaps… Steven Spielberg?

Generation 1: Beethoven

Gen 2: Czerny

Gen 3: Liszt

Gen 4: Leschetizky

Gen 5: Yesipova [Есипова]

Gen 6: Vengerova

Gen 7: Lateiner

Gen 8: me