Page 59 - PDF Flip TR Program Demo

Pianos are woods in miniature. Forests unwind out of them. Their soundboards are histories of storms, drought, heat, blizzards, wound into wood. Their cases provide the discipline, the rigor, which focus- es history. Small details like the iron bell below the plate or the way they are strung give them specific sounds: the fin-de-siècle languors of 1900, the fuzzy Sehnsucht (nostalgia) of the uneven string lengths of Brahms around 1880, the iron strength of the locomotive and its ringing train tracks in the plate, specially shaped in the Steinway factory in the early years. Out of these onomatopoetic con- trivances Messiaen birds sing, Lisztian waves surge, Poulenc cars honk, Moog synthesizers quaver.
The sounds of pianos imitate the sounds of life: of leisure, of industry, of love. The Industrial Revolu- tion introduced roaring engines, belching smoke- stacks, clanging trolleys, honking horns. Before it, there was only wind in the leaves, water flowing in
the river, mountain distances descended to ruffle the grass in the late afternoon.
In between the sonic events that shape our mod- ern anxieties come the restful nights of Belmont in The Merchant of Venice, the moonlit lagoons of L’Elisir d’Amore, the enchanted forest of Arden in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The storms of Beethoven, the fairies of Mendelssohn are replaced by the musique d’ameublement of Erik Satie, the airplane propellers of Georges Antheil, the city noises of Bangkok or New York in Darius Milhaud, the fast car rides and gamelans of John Adams, the world music of Paul Simon. The role of sound in our lives is well catalogued in The Sonic Boom, by Beckerman and Gray.
Later the monastic sanctuaries of Arvo Pärt,
the musica celestis of Aaron Jay Kernis, and the snow-covered tundra of John Luther Adams return the world to its primal stillness.
2018 Summer Season 59