When I was composing Die Klavierübung (with digital piano samples, no live performance initially) in my Vienna days, the notion of a Klavier Selbstmord accompanied me everywhere and plagued me to no end. Now, I’m not being cavalier about the very serious notion of mental illness in this regard. The idea is a personal one of course, but as I told a good friend once, you can do things in art…such as self-obliteration…that you cannot do in life. Truth is, it was as if the piano, exhausted with its repertoire and its long and illustrious history, was asking me most emphatically, “Why are you writing another piano piece?! Requiescat in pace. Let me rest in peace already!” I must confess, this idea came to me here in Stuttgart, at the Academy Schloss Solitude. The palace proper was undergoing major renovations and to educate the public, the rotting wood and crumbling plaster of the internal structure were put on display, as well as the exorbitant costs of the renovations, which had not been procured at the time. This served as advertisement for financial support no doubt. No one lived in the castle proper, but on sunny days in summer, it served as the backdrop for staging wedding photos: it was as if the castle also had to smile for the camera, and I felt sorry for it…this old castle that had witnessed so much history and was frankly, tired…naturally exhausted, rotting from the inside out, but was being forced to stand up straight and say “cheese” at the photographer. And analogous to this, there was something in the selfish idea of keeping the piano alive, that the instrument…now so infected and infused with its newly digitalized underpinning…a digitalized fabricated grin, so to speak…that it didn’t recognize itself as piano, as human anymore.

Steven Kazuo Takasugi

Revised extract from a lecture entitled “JNH: Just-noticeably Human: Lecture on Musical Humanness in the Age of Digital Automation” for the Cultural Foundation Schloss Wiepersdorf, October 18, 2021.

Layering, juxtaposition, audio-visual free association, and most importantly, listening & response became the focal points of this piece for Pony Says and Jessie Marino. Jessie and Pony were strangers, familiar only in the way that the internet and a few after concert drinks can foster. At the onset of their collaboration, Jessie asked Pony to come together and listen to the 33 minute record ‘Pieces for Kohn’ by the experimental composer and sound engineer Tom Hamilton (1976 on Sonmath Records). These pieces are electronic compositions “generated conceptually from graphic paintings by Bill Kohn.” The tapes were performed at the opening of Kohn’s exhibition at the Terry Moore Gallery in St. Louis, one of which is featured on the album cover for Pieces for Kohn. The intention of beginning with a listening session was to build a small world – one simply based in the experience of listening to the same record. From this mutual exposure to Tom Hamilton’s fantastic pieces, came sonic associations which paved a mutual ground for us to lay our ears. We shared our impressions of the sounds themselves, and these insights provided us a tiny keyhole into the ears and minds of one another. How do we listen? What do we notice about the music when we listen together? What do we notice about ourselves when we share and compare our experience with one another? From our mutual listening space, we began to play – beginning with an approximation of the sounds, rhythmic patterns, timbers, scenes, and characters which we were drawn to in Pieces for Kohn, but then moving quickly and purposefully beyond the simulacrum and into a space that is a confluence of played experiences both on and off our respective sound making tools. The playground of Tom Hamilton provided us a foundation and a meeting point – the musical relationship we built through listening, gave us a playground all our own.
Jessie Marino