Page 60 - PDF Flip TR Program Demo

60
About Tippet Rise
THE HISTORY OF THE PIANOS AT TIPPET RISE
Throughout it all, the piano has taken on the elements of its surrounding landscape. John Cage developed the prepared piano to respond to the deadening of sound, the untuning of the sky. Keyboards and sampling libraries have add- ed every known sound to the composer's palette. But the challenge remains to imitate the orchestra of the world with the relatively limited toolkit of the old-fashioned piano, still the most human, the most sonorous of devices made for translating the soul of the world into sonic metaphors.
In my poem "Piano Maker," I evoke the attributes and mechanisms of the piano which we weave into synonyms for the human spirit.
Soundboard, key bed, chord and cord, ebony
dies, key ivories, maple sounding-board crowns, and glue mix with human limbs, fingers, bed and board, growth and sound to deepen the collusion of tree body and human body, piano wood and forest wood, body shape and piano shape, piano maker and poem maker, so that both human and celestial hands are heard together on the tree bark of the keyboard.
Since the advent of the “well-tempered” tuning system, harmony has been an organized trellis, using logarithmic surds to structure notes. "Piano Maker" is an ordered sonnet, but more modern, conversational mid-rhymes and meters dominate its more formal form, as a person or a pianist tries to rise beyond even the most complex structures in nature or in music:
PIANO MAKER
Gnarls and boles, whatever woodwork words Can turn or blur to use, to glue, to growth
Of board or bed, I know: I use their surds
And darkened boughs like fingers, so that both
Our hands are heard together on the keyboard Bark; no sounds but branches rise
To leaf through breezes in the scattered cord Of sheaves and limbs, inking in the dyes,
The ivories of silence on the evening's rose And shade; twisting up the wires of a day's Old sun and funneling the body's splay
Of music into crowns of maple and god knows,
I wind up nature's miniature keys To play out, on a bed of vines, The tune of my own trees.
—Peter Halstead
A 9-foot concert Steinway has more than 12,000 parts. Its strings are under 20 tons of pressure. So it has an effect immeasurably beyond its size, as big as it is. It is a church organ in disguise. Although each piano is made in exactly the same way by the same people, each one is completely different. Each piano has its own DNA.
On the morning of John Paulson’s purchase of Steinway & Sons in September of 2013, we were very lucky to be offered by the company a choice of thirteen of their best pianos at the factory. Each one was better than the next. I have never