There is a crisis surrounding the piano. The instrument is, and will continue to be, a central fixture of the contemporary ensembles that give life to new music. And yet for many living composers, pianists and non-pianists alike, writing a solo piano work is a daunting task. The richness of the solo piano repertoire—along with two centuries’ worth of performance practice and cultural significance—have set the genre apart as a forbidding proving ground, wherein the composer temporarily exits the conversation with his or her peers to engage with the giants of the instrument: Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy. Moreover, some of the most exciting developments in the musical languages of recent decades have rendered the piano, for lack of a better term, anachronistic. The shifting timbres and kaleidoscopic microtones that today’s composers have inherited from electronic and spectral music are simply impossible to produce on an instrument so thoroughly designed for a past century of melodies, counterpoint, and chords.
The piano thus presents a paradox, an inherent confusion: it is indisputably the instrument of modern concert music, the inheritor of the classical tradition, but it is also stuck in the past, an impediment to progress. At the very least, there is no clear sense of what constitutes, or ought to constitute, a twenty-first century piano idiom.
One way to overcome the weight of the piano’s history and the limitations of its physical design is to “reinvent” the instrument, to dissociate the piano from its inherited cultural context and reimagine it anew. Since the mid-twentieth century, composers have called for performers to play inside the piano, to prepare the strings with screws and bolts, to bow the piano, to retune to unfamiliar temperaments, to augment the piano with electronics, to combine two, three, four, or hundreds of pianos. Rebecca Saunders’s crimson and Helmut Lachenmann’s Serynade use the ingenious, detailed control of pedaling and sustain to enable sonorities that are quite unfamiliar without altering the physical instrument or the mode of playing. Dan Trueman’s groundbreaking work with bitKlavier allows for the alteration of the piano’s tuning and attack envelopes, creating an exhilarating sense of freedom as the digital piano escapes from the stifling constraints of its acoustical counterpart.
An impossible hairpin, from Beethoven’s op. 81a, “
Another way to overcome the weight of the piano’s history and the limitations of its physical design is to simply deal with them head-on. The piano embodies the full complexity of Western classical literature and performance practice. One could imagine the “traditional” pianistic tropes—tangles of overt polyphony, performer-centric interpretive flexibility, subtly voiced harmonies, dangerous speed (as in Chopin’s exhilarating prelude op. 28, no. 16)—not as a heavy burden, but as a deep pool of resources. Even the instrument’s physical limitations can partly be overcome, if not through an actual alteration of the instrument, through the imagination. For many pianist-composers, the piano has always been something more than a piano. Under the fingers of Mozart and Beethoven, for example, the piano is a horizonless environment, a hybrid space in which a complex meta-music flourishes. In his sonata K. 576, Mozart is clearly thinking not just of the piano, but of the many shades of orchestral timbre: a powerful unison string section is followed by a soft, light, solitary flute. Beethoven’s sudden shifts from pianissimo to fortissimo—as in the famous op. 57 “Appassionata” sonata, for example—represent not just a change in instrumental dynamics, but a movement from the most intimate whisper to the most extraordinary fervor, a dramatic expansion in scale from the palace chamber to the orchestra hall. In his op. 81a sonata, “Les Adieux,” Beethoven calls for dynamic inflections that are, quite simply, impossible to play. These gestures—crescendos on a decaying note, swells on a sustained chord—infuse the music with a spirit of metaphor, of impossible overreach: this is music that can be only partially executed on the piano, with the rest coming to life, unsounded, in the composer’s and pianist’s heads.
I wish to cultivate a loving, holistic view of this massively complex instrument. There is much to explore even while staying strictly within the limits of the traditional instrument (the eighty-eight identical keys that can only be played loudly or softly, not “more beautifully or less beautifully,” as Charles Rosen observes in Piano Notes). Through detailed control of voicing, chord spacing, pedaling, and resonance, one can find fresh sonorities in this familiar instrument. There is no need to deny the piano its memories. From its invention (imagine the joy of Bartolomeo Cristofori when the first hammer bounced back from the string!), through the vast stretches of repertoire and performance practice it accumulated over centuries, to its amalgamation with various genres and mechanical transformations, the piano’s journey is storied and fascinating. From this one composer-pianist’s point of view, the piano is starting to look much less like a symbol of obsolescence, and much more like an instrument with limitless potential.