FALL

If we were to consider Western musical instruments visually, few would equal the piano in their ability to physically convey information about the music they were designed to produce. One glance at the keyboard is enough to tell us that it is designed for diatonic music. The asymmetrical layout, with alternating groups of two and three black keys rising above a sea of white, eloquently indicates that, as Orwell might have put it, while all notes are equal, some are more equal than others. And to the even slightly more informed, it clearly confirms that pitch played an especially important role in Western music throughout the period when organs, harpsichords, fortepianos and modern pianofortes held sway.

With the arrival of the XXth century, pitch found itself increasingly obliged to share the limelight with timbre, and the electrification of Western society stimulated the invention of innumerable new instruments whose timbres seemed truly exotic at that time. Of these, many were played, at least partially, with keyboards not especially different that those of their innumerable acoustic predecessors. The Ondes Martenot, the Novachord and even Thaddeus Cahill's gigantic Telharmonium—it weighed no less than 200 tons—were operated primarily with piano-like keyboards. Later in that same century an offshoot of the piano would provide the solution for controlling the first synthesizer to actually be called by that name. The Pianola or player piano was activated by a long roll of thick paper punched with holes—a form of "programming" adopted for controlling the 4-channel Olsen-Belar electronic music synthesizer more popularly known as the RCA Mk. II, which provided the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center with its unique sounds in the late 1950s and '60s.

Fully a decade earlier, John Cage was involved in a more direct approach to timbral exploration. Rather than incorporating parts of the piano into the design of an electronic instrument, he began experimenting with the sonic possibilities of placing objects on or among the strings of a grand piano itself. The result was what came to be known as "prepared piano", for which Cage composed numerous pieces culminating in his Sonatas and Interludes (1946 and 1948). Not surprisingly, his initial exploration of electroacoustic media dates from the same period. While his first composition for prepared piano, Bacchanale, dates from 1940, his Imaginary Landscape no. 1, which includes gramophone records of constant and variable frequency, was premiered in March, 1939. Although the inventor of the prepared piano never composed a work that paired it with electronic media, the narrow time frame in which he began exploring both is indicative of a shared set of underlying timbral and discursive concerns.

For me, as a musician thoroughly grounded in the techniques and practices of contemporary electroacoustic composition but active primarily as an electronic free improviser, the chance to create music spontaneously with someone equally familiar with the canons of contemporary composition is a luxury. In such a dialogue, harmonic and rhythmic elements present and explored in Western compositions since at least the mid 20th century need only be alluded to in order to be recognized by the other party. Carmen and I share a wealth of musical resources and to my delight she uses them very creatively. It's not enough to know a language; you also need to have something to say. She does. Of course, there is also the fact that she plays prepared piano, that she has deeply studied and written about prepared piano—not just its iconic compositions, but also its techniques of preparation—and that she is a fluid, imaginative, personal and intelligent improviser.

The five pieces on this recording, all freely improvised, reflect a shared sense of timbre, pitch and time/rhythm that extends beyond the music we make together to constitute the basis for our choice of instruments. Preparing a piano and programming a digital synthesizer are not dissimilar tasks in that both directly affect how they behave, respond and sound and both are done beforehand with considerable knowledge of the foreseeable results. There is, however an inevitable amount of surprise involved as well. One is preparing one's instrument but, for what? How does one prepare for a free improvisation? In that context, preparation also means preparing oneself for the surprises that will inevitably emerge when the playing begins. For us, more than for many free improvisers, dialogue with the instrument itself is a valuable and generally quite fecund part of the process of making music together.

The five pieces presented here were recorded over the course of two days in the deconsecrated basilica of a former monastery perched above the valley on the edge of Ronda in southern Spain. Beneath the impassive gaze of Saints Justa and Rufina, who look down from a fresco above, the grand piano, electroacoustics and recording equipment found their place among banks of oak casks filled with aging wine whose gurgling fermentation is audible in the background of some tracks. The first and last pieces, Aspen and Hawthorn, were improvised with no previous planning at all. We started the recorder, looked each other in the eye, and began playing. The central piece, Plunge and Tumble is equally spontaneous but, as it wound up being five variations, I took the liberty of slightly expanding the silences between each in order to make the form easier to grasp. That is the only post-recording intervention on the entire disc. The remaining two pieces, Abscission I and II, reflect a single, one sentence proposal: "let's do something outside of time." They work with a minimum of material, about which nothing was said beforehand, and are quite different in their interpretation of a single proposition.

Like the music, the titles reflect the autumnal idea. Aspens and hawthorns are trees whose leaves are particularly striking at that time of year. The word abscission describes the act of leaves falling and somehow captures the sense of cycles far beyond human scale that I proposed as being "outside of time". Plunge and Tumble, clearly the most active of the pieces, plays with the other reading of the word "fall", not as a season but rather as a verb. Also, for me, as someone who spent a considerable part of his childhood living in the North, it recalls late fall and the erratic scurrying of practically weightless, brittle and curled leaves blown haphazardly along the pavement by the first winds of impending winter. Of course, none of this was planned and the music was certainly not intended to be evocative. The titles of both the album and its pieces came far later than the music itself, just as the names of Liszt's symphonic poems were entirely posterior to their composition. As Charlie Parker replied to a music critic when asked the meaning of his title, Klactoveedsedstene: "It's a sound, Man. It's a sound."

Wade Matthews