Jean-Luc Plouvier x John Cage
The Prepared Piano and Luminous Sound
The story of the invention of the prepared piano is in a way legendary. The tale is fairly well-known: in 1938, Syvilla Fort, an African-American choreographer and colleague of John Cage at an art school in Seattle, urgently asked him to compose music for a ballet titled ‘Bacchanale,’ which had to be ready by the end of the week! The performance space was very small, with only room for a piano. John, who had recently completed his studies with Arnold Schönberg, set to work and first sought "a twelve-tone series that sounds African" (sic). Predictably, this was in vain. Then he had the sudden idea to transform the piano into the equivalent of a percussion orchestra by placing various small objects—nuts, bolts, wooden pegs, or pieces of balatum—between the strings of the instrument. The prepared piano was born.
John Cage later described the feeling of exhilaration that seized him and those around him during the first improvisations on this tinkling keyboard. The instrument had such an evident charm, it was so 'found', so rich in resources... Composer Lou Harrison, who tested the invention during one of his daily visits to John, was blue with admiration and envy: "Oh, damnit! I wish I'd thought of that!"
John Cage
Concerto for Prepared Piano (1951)
CONDUCTOR Ilan Volkov
PIANO Jean-Luc Plouvier
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Pierre Boulez Initiale (1987)
Pierre Boulez Messagesquisse (1976)
John Cage Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1951)
John Cage The Seasons (1947)
John Cage Seventy-Four (1992)
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14.11.2024 FLAGEY
15.11.2024 DE BIJLOKE GENT
In a way, the idea was already launched: Henry Cowell (1897-1965), who had also been Cage's teacher, had already elicited various new sounds from the grand piano by manipulating its strings: pizzicati, muted strings, strikes with the palm on the bass strings that sounded like thunder, and especially magnificent ‘Aeolian harp’ effects achieved by brushing the strings. As for Cage, he had long been interested in the percussion potential of all possible objects: "I have become convinced that everything has a spirit and that everything sounds. I became so curious about the world in which I lived, from the sonic point of view, that I began hitting and rubbing everything I came near—whether I was in the kitchen or outdoors, and I gradually assembled a large collection of unconventional instruments. "
Due to their ambiguous pitch, percussion instruments express a fluid identity: "String instruments only want to be what they are, percussions can become something other than what they are," he wrote. Percussion was early on the ideal ally in John Cage's artistic quest: ‘composing sound’ rather than manipulating notes. The shift from ‘pitch’ to ‘timbre’ as the primary element in composition had already begun with Berlioz, strengthened with Wagner, and further developed with Debussy. But it found a new life in Cage, and his aesthetics of fragility and ‘found objects’. "I meant that Time, Life, and Coca-Cola were also hideous, that anything that is big in this world is hideous. Logically I thought that anything that is small and intimate, and has some love in it, is beautiful."
Therefore, any notion of provocation or scandal regarding the prepared piano should be abandoned. One should not imagine a Steinway subjected to torture, or an aggressive piano bristling with nails and covered in greasy papers! The prepared piano is in no way an affront to the instrument. Rather, it is the emblem of John Cage's meticulous aesthetic refinement, requiring his pianists to reconfigure the instrument until it becomes "a mix of harpsichord and percussion orchestra." He recommended preparing the piano as one would walk along a beach, collecting shells. When a journalist asked him about his favourite mushroom (knowing he was fond of mushrooms), Cage replied: " I like the ones I have. If you like the ones you don’t have, then you’re not happy."
The preparation of the piano, different for each of his works, is always carefully explained by Cage at the beginning of the score, on large tables filled with his wonderful calligraphy. Each preparation generally consists of a mix of three types of timbres: fully prepared notes, half-prepared notes, and unprepared notes. Since many piano notes have three strings, a ‘half-preparation’ is achieved by placing a small object between strings 1 and 2, while leaving string 3 free (which then provides the classic pitch of the instrument). These half-preparations are the most beautiful ones. The pitch of the note remains more or less identifiable, but it is adorned with an additional aura, made up of irrational harmonics reminiscent of bells, gamelan, or balafon. The overall effect of the preparations irresistibly evokes a polyphonic and polyrhythmic play, as if many musicians were playing simultaneously.
Cage's instructions are always precise regarding the materials to be used (screws, wood, rubber, balatum) and the location of the preparations, down to the millimeter. But in reality, these instructions should be taken with some flexibility: each piano model is unique, with significantly different string lengths, so it is better for the musician to rely on their intuition and sense of discovery and place the preparation at a ‘harmonic node’, one of the points where the string produces an interesting harmonic. The legitimacy of this ‘loving creativity’, seeking to transfigure the instrument beyond strict adherence to the score, was personally confirmed to me by a composer who was one of John Cage's most faithful assistants, Stephen Montague.
It takes two or three hours to prepare a piano coherently. Then the miracle happens: in its softness, the complexity of its harmonics and their interferences, the strange familiarity of its timbres, the prepared piano becomes the purest and most luminous instrument in the world. I recommend, to those who are in doubt, listening to the ‘Sonatas and Interludes’ from 1948, my favorite of all Cage's scores. From beginning to end, the work breathes a sense of wonder. Its calm, flat phrases, strangely looped in on themselves, shine with a soft fluorescence that only Mozart had previously shown, in some of his andantes.
And speaking of luminous sound, one final remark... The ‘Concerto for Prepared Piano’ from 1951 has two stylistic roots: the percussion-oriented music I described earlier, inherited from Cowell and Varèse, and a certain serial pointillism, inherited from Anton Webern, whose taste Cage shared with his friends (or enemies) in the European avant-garde—Stockhausen and Boulez, among others. Just as it would be a mistake to see the use of the prepared piano as a profane gesture, it would also be wrong to see the ‘pointillist moment’ of the post-war period as merely a scientific and rationalist gesture, a dry formalism. John Cage, a reader of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Emerson, was far removed from this type of modernism. Pointillist musical works, when closely examined, are often marked by great tact. What ultimately matters in these networks of ‘points’ cherished by the post-war serial taste is not the attacks, but the resonances. It is a matter of aura. Pointillism in music, as it was in painting, is above all the art of making small halos of light flicker. In this sense, it is a perfect ally of the prepared piano.
Jean-Luc Plouvier
All quotes from John Cage are from the fascinating book by Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, a compilation of 150 interviews with the composer and various interlocutors (Routledge, 2003).