Spotlight on the Prepared Piano | Introduction to the Prepared Piano
- Leah Froyd
- 6 days ago
- 2 min read
Hello again! Welcome to our preview series for our upcoming concert, The Prepared Piano with Tin Yi Chelsea Wong!
We wanted to do a bit of extra pre-insight for this cycle as the Prepared Piano is a very niche and cool pocket of the classical world! Everyone is familiar with a normal piano, but a Prepared Piano is an umbrella term for a piano which has added… “hardware” to it.
From the image above, you can see that the composer called for the addition of various screws and tapes onto the strings of the instrument. Listen to a demonstration of a prepared piano for John Cage’s piano Sonata below!
As you can hear in the example, there are a number of new sounds the prepared piano can make— Cage specifically asks for many percussive timbres to create a rhythmic groove to accompany the minimalist melodic line.
We often associate the prepared piano with contemporary music. However, composers have been experimenting with the mechanics of the piano since the beginning as a way to expand the musical timbres and colors at their disposal.
In Le Piège de Méduse, composer Erik Satie used a piece of paper to imitate the sound of winding a mechanical monkey— listen for the way the paper stifles and adds a percussive sound in the two movements below:
Even earlier during the classical era (1700s-early 1800s), the incorporation of “oriental” or Middle Eastern instruments were quite fashionable.
In the demonstration to the right you can hear a snare-like percussive sound on certain notes and in both videos you will hear a drum sound connected to a separate pedal named the “Janissary stop”. The additional pedal was meant to mimic the sound of the Turkish Ottoman Empire’s band of instruments.
Today, new techniques of the Prepared Piano are constantly being developed. In the improvisation below, you can hear how different tools help create a unique texture of sound.
The performer, Hauschka is clearly following in the footsteps of Cage by creating repeating, minimalistic patters but add his own voice to the discussion by including drones and expanding on his own palette of percussion sounds. In addition, the harmony of this particular improvisation sounds similar to the ones Max Richter uses!
Thanks for reading and we’ll see you back here next week to continue our deep dive into the world of Prepared Piano!
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