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PianoMorphosis

Bruce Brubaker on all things piano

Eno Piano

October 30, 2023 by Bruce Brubaker

The album Eno Piano will be released by InFiné on November 10, 2023. Additional tracks will be released in 2024. 

photo: Devin Doyle

My  new album got started with a question: Is it possible to play Music for Airports on the piano? Brian Eno’s original studio recording contains a lot of piano sounds, but they are manipulated, redistributed, dehumanized, or rehumanized. And then there are long, long sustained tones. The gorgeous defining long notes! (Some of them are vocals.) How to do that with a piano? Acoustic piano sounds decay, immediately, unstoppably. The piano is a big decrescendo machine.

In my recording of William Duckworth’s The Time Curve Preludes, I used the prescribed metal weights to hold down some keys on the piano keyboard. That allows continuing resonance and vibration for the selected pitches. But that’s a rather subtle change, a prolongation of the inevitable fade-out that’s part of a note played on the piano. The piano does have its great secret weapon, the right pedal, the pedal that raises the dampers on each string. Most of the time, we just call it “the pedal.” Called by Ferruccio Busoni, “a photograph of the sky,” it can be overused, certainly. Yet, the nuances of pedal use remain under-explored. The virtuosic pedalist can lighten the resonance of an already sounding midrange tone while preserving a bass line, or modify the sound of a single note after it is played…

I heard the fine jazz pianist Evan Allen (who was my student for a time) using an eBow inside the piano. (The eBow is a device used on the electric guitar to vibrate a string, producing a long, sustained tone.) Evan managed to fit an eBow to a piano string and make a drone. Around the same time, I mentioned all of this to Alexandre Cazac, the far-sighted director of InFiné, the French record label with which I make albums. Alexandre told me about an inventor in France who was making electro-magnetic “bows” designed to make piano strings vibrate. In some online meetings, during the global pandemic, Florent Colautti demonstrated and described his bows. They seemed perfect for making the long sounds in Music for Airports.

Suspended over the piano strings, the electro-magnetic bows can be turned on directly. They can make a piano string produce its fundamental pitch, or overtones, or more complex and colorful vibrations. In recording Eno Piano, sometimes the bows were responding to a piano track played back through the bows — that is, somewhat ambiguous electronic signals were turning the bows on and off… 

The composer Simon Hanes helped me tremendously by transcribing Music for Airports into notation on paper! (Eno’s music existed as sounds made in the studio but not written.) Later, I added further details to the scores and specified more time elements in the notation. I also transcribed four additional short pieces that were eventually recorded along with Airports.

Eno Piano is not just the title of an album. It represents an aspiration: the use of new technology and new techniques to make an instrument, a transformed piano, an “Eno-piano”! With the collaboration of Alexandre Cazac, Florent Colautti with his electro-magnetic bows, the highly expert engineer Martin Antiphon, and me, we produced the recording only using sounds made by an acoustic piano — and yet including some sounds never heard before. 

It concerns me that today’s extremely high level of classical piano virtuosity has little impact on the world. Already in the 1970s Roland Barthes wrote: “For today’s virtuoso, much esteem but no fervor.” It becomes more true every year. The resource of musical virtuosity that exists in the world today is used narrowly, focused on a very small amount of music by a tiny number of dead composers. 

Eno Piano is a piano album; at the same time, it is a blending of old and new — and a blending of two musical worlds, two societies, the “classical” and the “electronic.” In post-production, engineer Martin Antiphon used Ircam SPAT to spatialize sounds and add movement. Some slight detuning was introduced, and some simulation of the texture of sound recordings made on magnetic tape.

Brian Eno famously said, “The studio is a musical instrument,” I am now saying that a musical instrument (the piano), can be a studio! I’m using acoustic sounds made with a piano to recreate or reinhabit the music Eno made using the resources of the studio. 

Artists who rework, repurpose, and otherwise reuse older art fascinate me. Sherrie Levine photographing photographs by Walker Evans, the band Mostly Other People Do The Killing making the sounds of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music played live by Zeitkratzer. 

As I think about Brian Eno’s use of piano sounds in his studio-made recordings, it crosses my mind: Am I imitating something that was an imitation to begin with?

During work on Eno Piano, a deck of cards printed with Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s “Oblique Strategies” was in the studio. Sometimes, these answers to artistic questions guided the creative process. Most significantly: “Repetition is a form of change.” 

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Alexandre Cazac, ambient, ambient music, Antiphon, Brian, Brian Eno, eBow, electro-magnetic bow, Eno, Florent Colautti, InFiné, looping, loops, Martin, Martin Antiphon, minimal music, minimalism, Music for Airports, musical performance, Philharmonie de Paris, piano, piano music, recording, recording studio, repetitive music, studio, tape loop, virtuosity

Bruce Brubaker

Recordings like the new American piano music albums I make for ECM, InFiné, Bedroom Community, and Arabesque reach millions of listeners, and break through some old divisions of high culture/pop, or art/entertainment. My fans are listening to Billie Eilish, The Weeknd — even the occasional Mozart track! Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube are allowing music lovers to discover music they could not have found so easily before. Live performances begin to reflect what’s happening online. My performances occur in classical venues like the Philharmonie in Paris, the Barbican in London, at La Roque d’Anthéron, at festivals such as Barcelona’s Sónar and Nuits Sonores in Brussels, and such nightclubs as 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

“Glassforms” with Max Cooper at Sónar

“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

Bruce Brubaker

Recordings such 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 Cardi B, Childish Gambino, Ariana Grande — even the occasional Mozart track! Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube are allowing 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.

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