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A prepared piano is a
piano
The piano is a stringed keyboard instrument in which the strings are struck by wooden hammers that are coated with a softer material (modern hammers are covered with dense wool felt; some early pianos used leather). It is played using a keyboa ...
that has had its sounds temporarily altered by placing bolts, screws, mutes, rubber erasers, and/or other objects on or between the strings. Its invention is usually traced to
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading fi ...
's dance music for ''
Bacchanale
A bacchanale is an orgiastic musical composition, often depicting a drunken revel or ''bacchanal''.
Examples include the ''bacchanales'' in Camille Saint-Saëns's '' Samson and Delilah'', the Venusberg scene in Richard Wagner's ''Tannhäuser'', '' ...
'' (c. 1938), created without room for a percussion orchestra. Cage has cited
Henry Cowell
Henry Dixon Cowell (; March 11, 1897 – December 10, 1965) was an American composer, writer, pianist, publisher and teacher. Marchioni, Tonimarie (2012)"Henry Cowell: A Life Stranger Than Fiction" ''The Juilliard Journal''. Retrieved 19 June 202 ...
as an inspiration for developing piano
extended techniques
In music, extended technique is unconventional, unorthodox, or non-traditional methods of singing or of playing musical instruments employed to obtain unusual sounds or timbres.Burtner, Matthew (2005).Making Noise: Extended Techniques after Expe ...
, involving strings within a piano being manipulated instead of the keyboard. Typical of Cage's practice as summed up in the ''
Sonatas and Interludes
''Sonatas and Interludes'' is a cycle of twenty pieces for prepared piano by American avant-garde composer John Cage (1912–1992). It was composed in 1946–48, shortly after Cage's introduction to Indian philosophy and the teachings of art hist ...
'' (1946–48) is that each key of the piano has its own characteristic timbre, and that the original pitch of the string will not necessarily be recognizable. Further variety is available with use of the
una corda pedal.
Ferrante & Teicher
Ferrante & Teicher were a duo of American pianists, known for their light arrangements of familiar classical pieces, movie soundtracks, and show tunes as well as their signature style of florid, intricate, and fast-paced piano playing performances ...
between 1950 and 1980 used partially prepared pianos for some of their tunes in their albums. Other musicians, such as
Denman Maroney
Denman Maroney (born 1949) is a jazz musician who plays what he calls "hyperpiano". Hyperpiano "involves stopping, sliding, bowing, plucking, striking and strumming the strings with copper bars, aluminum bowls, rubber blocks, plastic boxes and ...
use prepared piano for performances, whereas
Cor Fuhler
Cornelis William Hendrik Fuhler (3 July 1964 – 19 July 2020) was a Dutch/Australian improvisor, composer, and instrument builder associated with free jazz, experimental music and acoustic ecology. He played piano by manipulating sound with elec ...
and
Roger Miller have developed their own ways of using prepared piano in their musical albums. Additionally, notable contributors to the subsequent repertoire include
Lou Harrison
Lou Silver Harrison (May 14, 1917 – February 2, 2003) was an American composer, music critic, music theorist, painter, and creator of unique musical instruments. Harrison initially wrote in a dissonant, ultramodernist style similar to his for ...
,
Pauline Oliveros
Pauline Oliveros (May 30, 1932 – November 24, 2016) was an American composer, accordionist and a central figure in the development of post-war experimental and electronic music.
She was a founding member of the San Francisco Tape Music Cente ...
,
James Tenney
James Tenney (August 10, 1934 – August 24, 2006) was an American composer and music theorist. He made significant early musical contributions to plunderphonics, sound synthesis, algorithmic composition, process music, spectral music, microtonal ...
, and
Christian Wolff.
When a properly prepared piano has been "unprepared", it should be impossible for anyone to tell that it had ever been prepared. Changes causing less easily reversible damage can be served by permanently dedicating an instrument, such as the
tack piano
A tack piano (also known as a harpsipiano, jangle piano, and junk piano) is an altered version of an ordinary piano, in which objects such as thumbtacks or nails are placed on the felt-padded hammers of the instrument at the point where the ha ...
. Other techniques related to prepared piano include the Acoustisizer.
Historical precedents
Cage frequently cited
Henry Cowell
Henry Dixon Cowell (; March 11, 1897 – December 10, 1965) was an American composer, writer, pianist, publisher and teacher. Marchioni, Tonimarie (2012)"Henry Cowell: A Life Stranger Than Fiction" ''The Juilliard Journal''. Retrieved 19 June 202 ...
(1897–1965) as the primary inspiration for the prepared piano. Cowell pioneered
piano extended techniques for what he dubbed "
string piano
String piano is a term coined by American composer-theorist Henry Cowell (1897–1965) to collectively describe those pianistic extended techniques in which sound is produced by direct manipulation of the strings, instead of or in addition to str ...
", involving reaching inside the piano and pluck, sweep, scrape, thump, and otherwise manipulate the strings directly, rather than using the keyboard. He developed these techniques in numerous pieces such as ''Aeolian Harp'' (1923) and ''The Banshee'' (1925).
Pieces of paper were called for in several early 20c works, the buzzing effect reminiscent of the parchment
'bassoon' pedal of early fortepianos. In his ''Ragamalika'' (1912–22), based on the classical music of India, French composer
Maurice Delage
Maurice Charles Delage (13 November 1879 – 19 or 21 September 1961) was a French composer and pianist.
Biography
Delage was born and died in Paris. He first worked as a clerk for a maritime agency in Paris, and later as a fishmonger in Boul ...
(1879–1961) calls for a piece of cardboard to be placed under the B in the second line of the bass clef to dampen the sound, imitating the sound of an Indian drum.
In his ''
Chôros No. 8'', a 1925 work for large orchestra,
Heitor Villa-Lobos
Heitor Villa-Lobos (March 5, 1887November 17, 1959) was a Brazilian composer, conductor, cellist, and classical guitarist described as "the single most significant creative figure in 20th-century Brazilian art music". Villa-Lobos has become the ...
instructs the 2nd pianist to insert pieces of paper between the strings
Maurice Ravel
Joseph Maurice Ravel (7 March 1875 – 28 December 1937) was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with Impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. In ...
's ''
L'enfant et les sortilèges
''L'enfant et les sortilèges: Fantaisie lyrique en deux parties'' (''The Child and the Spells: A Lyric Fantasy in Two Parts'') is an opera in one act, with music by Maurice Ravel to a libretto by Colette. It is Ravel's second opera, his first be ...
'' (1920-1925) calls for
Luthéal
The luthéal is a kind of hybrid piano which extended the "register" possibilities of a piano by producing cimbalom-like sounds in some registers, exploiting harmonics of the strings when pulling other register-stops, and also some registers makin ...
, but allows piano with paper to substitute.
John Cage
The invention of the "prepared piano", ''per se'', is usually traced to
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading fi ...
. Cage first prepared a piano when he was commissioned to write music for ''Bacchanale'', a
dance
Dance is a performing art form consisting of sequences of movement, either improvised or purposefully selected. This movement has aesthetic and often symbolic value. Dance can be categorized and described by its choreography, by its repertoir ...
by
Syvilla Fort
Syvilla Fort (July 3, 1917 – November 8, 1975) was an American dancer, choreographer, and dance teacher. Born in Seattle, she drew on her African-American heritage in her original dance works. American composer John Cage wrote his first piece fo ...
in 1938. For some time previously, Cage had been writing exclusively for a
percussion
A percussion instrument is a musical instrument that is sounded by being struck or scraped by a beater including attached or enclosed beaters or rattles struck, scraped or rubbed by hand or struck against another similar instrument. Exc ...
ensemble, but the hall where Fort’s dance was to be staged had no room for a percussion group. The only instrument available was a single grand piano. After some consideration, Cage said that he realized it was possible “to place in the hands of a single pianist the equivalent of an entire percussion orchestra ... With just one musician, you can really do an unlimited number of things on the inside of the piano if you have at your disposal an exploded keyboard”.
Other composers, arrangers, performers, and compositions
*
Ferrante & Teicher
Ferrante & Teicher were a duo of American pianists, known for their light arrangements of familiar classical pieces, movie soundtracks, and show tunes as well as their signature style of florid, intricate, and fast-paced piano playing performances ...
were an American piano duo who produced over a hundred albums of light classical and popular "easy listening" in their long careers (1947–1992). Between 1950 and 1980 they included partially prepared pianos on a number of their tunes to add percussive effects.
* On "
All Tomorrow's Parties
"All Tomorrow's Parties" is a song by the Velvet Underground and Nico, written by Lou Reed and released on the group's 1967 debut studio album, ''The Velvet Underground & Nico''.
Inspiration for the song came from Reed's observation of Andy Warh ...
" from ''
The Velvet Underground & Nico
''The Velvet Underground & Nico'' is the debut album by the American rock band the Velvet Underground and German singer Nico, released in March 1967 through Verve Records. It was recorded in 1966 while the band were featured on Andy Warhol's Ex ...
'' (1967),
John Cale
John Davies Cale (born 9 March 1942) is a Welsh musician, composer, singer, songwriter and record producer who was a founding member of the American rock band the Velvet Underground. Over his six-decade career, Cale has worked in various styl ...
prepared his piano with a chain of
paper clip
A paper clip (or paperclip) is a tool used to hold sheets of paper together, usually made of steel wire bent to a looped shape (though some are covered in plastic). Most paper clips are variations of the ''Gem'' type introduced in the 1890s or e ...
s.
* On his 1968 album ''Blues Roots'',
Dave Brubeck
David Warren Brubeck (; December 6, 1920 – December 5, 2012) was an American jazz pianist and composer. Often regarded as a foremost exponent of cool jazz, Brubeck's work is characterized by unusual time signatures and superimposing contrasti ...
prepared a piano by laying copper strips across the strings to give the song "Blues Roots" a honky-tonk sound.
*
Denman Maroney
Denman Maroney (born 1949) is a jazz musician who plays what he calls "hyperpiano". Hyperpiano "involves stopping, sliding, bowing, plucking, striking and strumming the strings with copper bars, aluminum bowls, rubber blocks, plastic boxes and ...
performs on what he has dubbed 'hyperpiano', which "involves stopping, sliding, bowing, plucking, striking and strumming the strings with copper bars, aluminum bowls, rubber blocks, plastic boxes and other household objects."
*
Cor Fuhler
Cornelis William Hendrik Fuhler (3 July 1964 – 19 July 2020) was a Dutch/Australian improvisor, composer, and instrument builder associated with free jazz, experimental music and acoustic ecology. He played piano by manipulating sound with elec ...
pioneered many inside piano techniques during the 1980s and recorded his first prepared piano solo album ''7CC IN IO'' on GeestGronden in 1995; recorded ''The Hands of Caravaggio'' with
John Tilbury
John Tilbury (born 1 February 1936) is a British pianist. He is considered one of the foremost interpreters of Morton Feldman's music, and since 1980 has been a member of the free improvisation group AMM.
Early life and education
Tilbury s ...
and
M.I.M.E.O. on the USA label
Erstwhile Records
Erstwhile Records is an independent record label devoted to free improvisation, particularly the electroacoustic variety, contemporary, experimental composed music, and combinations of both. Erstwhile was founded by Jon Abbey in 1999, whose perso ...
; and in 2007 he released ''Stengam'' on the French label Potlatch.
* Since 1982,
Roger Miller has developed his own take on prepared piano in his work, initially on Mission of Burma's single "Trem II". Miller has since released many albums (on labels including Ace of Hearts, SST, New Alliance, Atavistic and Matador) incorporating this technique. His concert hall compositions since 2009 have often utilized prepared piano.
* On his 1975 album ''
Another Green World
''Another Green World'' is the third studio album by English musician Brian Eno (credited simply as "Eno"), released by Island Records in November 1975. Produced by Eno and Rhett Davies, it features contributions from a small core of musicians, ...
'', composer
Brian Eno
Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno (; born Brian Peter George Eno, 15 May 1948) is a British musician, composer, record producer and visual artist best known for his contributions to ambient music and work in rock, pop an ...
employed prepared piano on the track "Little Fishes".
*
Hauschka
Volker Bertelmann (born 1966) is a German pianist and composer who mainly performs and records under the name Hauschka. He is best known for his compositions for prepared piano.
Early life
Volker Bertelmann was born in Kreuztal, Germany. He ...
, aka Volker Bertelmann, employed prepared piano techniques in his album ''The Prepared Piano'' in 2005.
* Several
Aphex Twin
Richard David James (born 18 August 1971), best known as Aphex Twin, is an Irish-born British musician, composer and DJ. He is known for his idiosyncratic work in electronic music, electronic styles such as techno, ambient music, ambient, and jun ...
compositions from the 2001 album
Drukqs
''Drukqs'' (stylised as ''drukQs'') is the fifth studio album by Aphex Twin, the alias of British electronic musician Richard D. James, released in 2001 on Warp. It is a double album alternating primarily between tracks of meticulously programme ...
make use of prepared piano.
Related techniques
Tack piano
Strictly speaking, a tack piano is not a prepared piano, since
* No objects are inserted into or onto the strings;
* The strings' original pitches remain perceptible; and
* The preparation is not fully reversible.
Although the tacks can be removed from the hammers, inserting them causes permanent damage to the felt; for this and other reasons, the use of tacks is generally discouraged by piano technicians.
Acoustisizer
''The Acoustisizer'' is an electroacoustic musical instrument built from a small grand piano with built-in speakers, magnetic guitar pickups,
PZMs, and ''prepared piano'' strings. It was built as part of a graduate thesis project at California State University Dominguez Hills by Bob Fenger (1983), a student of
Richard Bunger (author of the ''Well Prepared Piano''). Speakers are built into the bottom of the instrument, redirecting its own amplified sound back onto the sounding board, with strings and magnetic pickups creating an amplitude intensity loop, which in turn drives and vibrates suspended ''kinetic oscillators'' (assemblages of vibration sensitive materials). Secondary control parameters allow extraction of vibration and sound phenomena from the ''kinetic oscillators'' through a series of proximity microphones and ''PZMs'' (piezo-electric contact mics). An article by the inventor was published in ''Experimental Musical Instruments Magazine'' April 1991, Nicasio, California. It includes pictures of the ''kinetic oscillators'' and stages of the construction process, including an underbody view of the speaker system configuration.
[Fenger, Bob, "The Acoustisizer" Joshua Tree, California, April 1991]
See also
*
Fortepiano
A fortepiano , sometimes referred to as a pianoforte, is an early piano. In principle, the word "fortepiano" can designate any piano dating from the invention of the instrument by Bartolomeo Cristofori in 1698 up to the early 19th century. Mo ...
*
Luthéal
The luthéal is a kind of hybrid piano which extended the "register" possibilities of a piano by producing cimbalom-like sounds in some registers, exploiting harmonics of the strings when pulling other register-stops, and also some registers makin ...
*
Prepared guitar
A prepared guitar is a guitar that has had its timbre altered by placing various objects on or between the instrument's strings, including other extended techniques. This practice is sometimes called tabletop guitar, because many prepared guitar ...
*
Prepared harp
*
String piano
String piano is a term coined by American composer-theorist Henry Cowell (1897–1965) to collectively describe those pianistic extended techniques in which sound is produced by direct manipulation of the strings, instead of or in addition to str ...
References
Further reading
*
Bunger, Richard (1973)
''The Well-Prepared Piano'' Colorado Springs: Colorado College Music Press
* Fürst-Heidtmann, Monika (1979). ''Das präparierte Klavier des John Cage''. Gustav Bose Verlag Regensburg. .
* Dianova, Tzenka (2008). ''John Cage's Prepared Piano: The Nuts & Bolts''. Mutasis Books Victoria. .
External links
'Are You Prepared' 17-key Online Prepared Pianoby Andreas Busk. Site includes free downloadable prepared piano sampler for Ableton Live, NI's Kontakt and Logic's EXS Sampler
by Tim Ovens
PDF version.
essay by Kyle Gann, includes video performance of preparation by Margaret Leng Tan
here.
Prepared Piano Sample Set- By Tom Gersic. Some free, others cheap
Prepared Piano Max/MSP-Object- By Dr. Stefan Bilbao, ported to Max/MSP by Thomas Resch
Listening
Prepared piano demonstration and performance by Richard Bungerperformed by Margaret Leng Tan, featuring ''In the Name of the Holocaust''
{{Authority control
Extended techniques
Piano
Musical performance techniques