What Becomes

As a composer, I had wanted for a long time to get away from the piano’s natural sound. This was in part due to the fact that I’d had this sound in my ears every day since my earliest childhood with all the intensity that marks a musician’s relationship to his instrument. Over time, I associated this sound more and more directly with a sense of something worn out, obsolete, at a dead-end. The instrument, for me, was dead, relegated to a position outside the stream of music’s development. Rachmaninov’s Third and Bartók’s Second Piano Concertos represent for me the last authentic high points in which statement, form, and virtuosity are still coherent, in which traditional pianistic methods are still used to say something truly new.

The possibilities electronic music offers and the invention of the synthesizer assumed the role previously played by other instruments in the search for new sounds and in catalyzing new developments. And the piano became a sacrosanct historical instrument still built today exactly as it had been at the end of the 19th century. I wanted to interrupt this trend and elicit from the piano new sounds and means of expression that would turn it into a «different instrument», able once again to speak for our time. That is why all the works I composed then that include the piano require a prepared instrument and are played directly on the strings.

«Smart Dust» concludes this long development. For this piece, the piano must be completely prepared with rubber wedges and gaffer tape. It was my attempt to return to the piano a sound with a sense of urgency, of desperation, a sound that evokes one’s sense of inner imprisonment, of suffocation from which there is no release, something that cannot be easily expressed but only forced out, something to hammer against the piano’s sound and the entire range of conventions bound to it. The image I had in mind while composing was inspired by an article on the internet that said, «Picture being able to scatter hundreds of tiny sensors around a building to monitor temperature or humidity. Or deploying, like pixie dust, a network of minuscule, remote sensor chips to track enemy movements in a military operation. Smart dust devices are tiny wireless microelectromechanical sensors that can detect everything from light to vibrations …» The term smart dust is very well suited to the atmosphere of this piece which has something wild, threatening, as well as hermetic to it.

The «Poems» were, in a certain sense, a surprising gift for me. I had reached an endpoint with Smart Dust and continuing in this direction was not possible. After some time, I was able to go back to the piano and rediscover its natural sound. I had also begun to experiment with very short forms. I wanted to make music in a minimal space that would not cross certain technical limits. This had to be music that was purified, reduced, clear, and therefore all the more intense. And I returned to a very clear tonality.

The twelve «Poems» teem with associations and are rife with connections to other works. Whenever I write for the piano, I am automatically immersed in all the piano music I know and have played myself. In part, the «Poems» refer directly to other composers, for example to Bartók («MUI 1»), but also to a piece that I composed when I was twelve years old («Twelve years old»). Yet they also consist in part, of elements taken from what I call my «notebox». The enigmatic titles that hearken back to personal experiences, images, and memories also reflect this source. Parts of longer compositions, of «Madhares», for example, or «My Illness Is the Medicine I Need», can also be heard—reduced and made even quieter through the piano.

Leif Ove Andsnes, who had initially inspired me to write «What Becomes», set conditions for me in composing it. His requirement was that the piece must fit into a recital program that pianists would consider «normal» (although, in truth, such «piano recitals» are anything but «normal»; most are little more than geriatric museum tours by candlelight). The instrument, therefore, could not be prepared; perhaps this would also keep it (and the audience) from going out of tune.