Customer Reviews

New Music For Bowed Piano

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It's been about three weeks - time for the CD to be delivered - and now I can't even remember what led me to the name and music of Stephen Scott. I'm a great admirer of the piano music of Henry Cowell and George Crumb, two great explorers of new ways of producing fascinating and hitherto unheard sounds from the piano, but I had never heard of Scott. Serendipity. However it was that I chanced here, I listened to the 30 second-previews, and that seemed engaging and intriguing enough for me to give the CD a try - the happy price demanded for it on the marketplace was no disincentive, either.

Lucky draw.

Scott may not have invented the techniques used in his "New Music for bowed piano" - he himself recognizes in the liner notes that he "first became aware that one could bow the strings of a piano in 1976, when [he] heard David Burge play a composition by Curtis Curtis-Smith" - but he certainly developped them to the point of obsession, and turned them into something entirely personal, and really unique. He was so fascinated that, even before the concert was over, he was "imagining the sound of several players, bowing a piano's strings simutaneously, thus producing sustained chords". His first composition, "Music One for Bowed Strings" (track 4) was completed in 1977. In the ensuing years he developped not only special bows to enable him to obtain the desired sounds from the inside of the piano (using even a kind of "virtual" bow made of electromagnets in "Resonant Resources", track 5, to enable him to bow several strings simultaneously; but his main sound is obtained simply by bowing a single rosined fishing line back and forth under the piano string, a little like dental floss along your gum - I'd love it if my gums made that kind of sounds), but also many specialized performance techniques. You can go to the performing ensemble's website, The Bowed Piano Ensemble, and view some videos of them performing: it is a fascinating ballet, like a throng of ritual-funeral spinsters (they are all donned in black) weaving strings into the entrails of the piano-beast.

So much for the "what and how" - kitchen matters that ultimately are of no interest to the eater. What matters is the music, independant of how it is produced.

And this is music of enchanting, mesmerizing beauty, slow moving, with some whiffs of repetitive minimalism (in those years Scott was "much influenced by the music of Steve Reich, whom [he] had met in Africa in 1970 while [they] were both stydying the music of Ghana"), atmospheric like a meditative state of mind lost in the contemplation of the infinite vistas of the Grand Mesa or Siberian steppes or the Antarctic, the piano sounding absolutely not like a piano but like some gigantic organ, or musical saw, sometimes an accordion (try the opening of track 1), built not by human hands led by the design of human intelligence, but by the forces of nature, and put in vibration by the winds of the earth, or maybe the winds of space. Scott calls his compositions "Rainbows", "Resonant Resources", "Arcs": yes, exactly. This, really, should have been the music composed by Terry Riley for his "Harp of New Albion" (The Harp of New Albion).

TT 51:08. The recording was first published in 1984 on LP and this CD reissue dates from 1999. In a short additional note, looking back on them, Scott calls his early compositions, by comparison to his "much more complex and large scale recent works", "early essays in an untried medium", while expressing the hope that the reissue will convey "the sense of excitement and discovery we all felt on our first voyages into an uncharted sound world". Yes, perhaps this is the sense of wonderment that the first water-creature felt when setting caudal fin on hard soil, or Gagarin on April 12, 1961.

Now I need to spread the word, like radio waves sent at random through the vast expanses of outer space. Stephen Scott, Stephen Scott, Stephen Scott...