Prepared Piano: Bertelmann’s ‘Room to Expand’ / Improvisatory Politics

It’s admittedly an acquired taste. To say that you enjoy ‘prepared piano’ resembles saying that you genuinely like Campari or grappa straight. In this respect it is neither more and nor less so than saying you like any form of electroacoustic music or ‘found sound’—you enjoy being stimulated, and you do not insist on conventional narrative structure or conventional tonality or conventional rhythm. But ‘prepared piano’ does ‘grow’ on you, if you let it.


Volker Bertelmann’s performance at the Goethe-Institut tonight in Boston shows just how far such music will go to ‘meet you half-way’. It was warm, accessible, inviting. Bertelmann’s ‘prepared piano’ was the vehicle for an evening’s discoveries and improvisations among about 100 delighted attendees. For this occasion, an otherwise fine Steinway was ‘tricked out’ with some of its hammers covered with aluminum and some of its strings encumbered with various bits of paper, cellophane, bottle-caps, clips, keys, saxophone reeds, foam wedges, chopsticks, loose guitar strings and metal chunks inserted into and between the piano’s strings. And lots, lots of duct-tape. Ach, der Horror! Nichts da! Alle Sünden in eine münden!


For Bertelmann, the rate at which various obligations of phrasing need to be met doesn’t always distinguish improvisation from other modes of playing. Yes, some distinctions have to do with challenges of coordination in expressions—the uncertainties involved in achieving something coordinated and cohesive; similar to the problems involved in an improvisational ensemble with each player adjusting his/her text and tune to one another. The players cannot know ahead of time how they themselves, let alone listeners, wil respond to the conjunction of musical ideas. Bertelmann cannot know with certainty how his instrument will respond. It is a process of ongoing discovery and re-discovery. Objects in the overhead bin tend to shift during flight, as they say. From time to time during each piece, Bertelmann reaches into the Steinway to move or re-apply one or more objects inside.

This ‘Prepared Piano’ is essentially ‘Improvisation Under Extreme Conditions’. Isn’t it a bit like Messaien composing in a prison camp? Or think of Haydn and Bach and others of their era: until the late eighteenth century, musicians were generally all good at improvising. They were taught even to invent whole compositions extemporaneously. It was only in the Romantic period and 20th Century that improvisation became a lost art. Have a look at the books by Harrison and Schulenberg and Nettl. The interplay between constraint and freedom is framed by the context and by how your improvisatory technique is used! In order to be able to improvise well, you still need to master the language and techniques of the music you want to produce. Bertelmann just takes it a step further by inserting this randomness into his instrument, so that the techniques required and discovering and mastering the language that the prepared piano will support is an evolutionary process that unfolds during the performance itself. Evolution! Genomics in action!

Of course, improvisation arises in different steps of the creative process and can influence the production of music in several ways. It could be, for example, the technique used to compose a score, or it could be the method used during a performance. Improvisation in jazz performance is nothing but composition on the fly, in real-time. Musical form in improvisatory jazz materials is, in most cases, more diffuse and less structured than the form of compositional works. In addition, it takes longer to develop transitions and variations of the material. Usually, elements and ideas are much more spread out in time. The main reason for this is the difficulty of comprehending the material without a score, and the difficulty of synchronizing events in the case of gestural improvisations by ensemble members.

Ultimately, isn’t Bertelmann’s music all to do with the limits of Gestural Improvisation and the concept of gesture itself? With Wittgenstein’s famous assertion 50 years ago that the most fundamental communication is shown, not said?

And isn’t there a difference between Gestural Improvisation versus Free Improvisation? The term Gestural Improvisation is associated with visual events or motion. On the other hand, Free Improvisation is a term that generally has an instrument or orchestration specified or implied—a way of producing sound. Contrary to this, Gestural Improvisation defines a visual and acoustical result—a collective performance. Attention must be given not only to the sounds that each member of the ensemble is producing but also to the final result received by the audience. Isn’t this configuration with Prepared Piano a sort of collective performance where one of the participants is the inanimate instrument. The piano warrants the ‘participant’ label insofar as it is an unknown quantity, an element that is to a substantial degree beyond the player’s control, in a manner not unlike other ensemble members—whose performance is also beyond a given player’s control.

M  usic is not about sound. It’s about people.”
  —  John Zorn.

What we see, then, in Bertelmann’s playing is how far the concept of improvisation has become normalized and regularized, and hence no longer disrupts anything? The prepared piano breaks those norms and expectations. The idea that jazz performance is post-modern or deconstructive (where what’s outside the contextual framework impinges on your frame of reference) is no longer valid if jazz improvisation is no longer ‘outside’ and no longer ‘disrupts’. What happens if improvisation itself is the frame, as it is for Bertelmann? Michael Jarrett writes that much jazz writing ‘wants’ to be jazz: it aspires to the condition of improvisation. In contrast, Julian Cowley likens post-modern avant-garde fiction writers’ practices to jazz improvisation. The work of writers like Sukenick, Sorrentino, and Barthelme is, he claims, “predicated upon acceptance of contingency and uncertainty”. Bertelmann just moves the frame of reference for what improvisation is.

So what do we have here? In Bertelmann’s playing we have (1) Temporality. The music takes place in real-time, ad libitum, and is not to be reiterated verbatim. It questions, even ‘hacks’ tradition.


We have (2) Elasticity. This music exists within a frame but also stretches the limits of frames: improvisation sometimes uses harmonic and rhythmic structures as a scaffold, but sometimes the ‘frame’ is barely there.

We have (3) Sociability. Bertelmann’s music occurs within a myriad of shifting social relationships, just as good jazz improvisation is sociable and interactive, like a conversation.

We have (4) Expressivity. Improvisation is not aimless, abstract ‘noodling’: it must ‘say something’—it must express a musician’s or an ensemble’s emotional and intellectual ideas, in a way that can be grasped by the rest of us. If the piece is named, the name must make sense. Bertelmann’s pieces and names make sense.

We have (5) Risk. Improvisation carries risks of failure—both minimal (‘clams’ or wrong notes) and maximal (discord; incoherence). In regard to the latter, improvisation involves risk because one can't know in advance what to play. Corbett (p. 224) says “Improvisation involves the permanent play of threshold and transgression… The improviser develop[s] and employ[s] a repertoire of possibilities in order to risk the unknown” . Bertelmann: check!

We have (6) Contingency. It resides in the shifting space between planning and acting. Guitarist Joe Beck once asserted that “the essence of playing any instrument [is] not being surprised by what you play. It should be no more surprising than something you would sing.” Playing becomes a constant dialogue between expectation and surprise, control and loss of control. Hebdige says improvisation embodies mastery “through the paradoxical act . . . of letting go,” a paradox of ‘deliberate spontaneity’ that is a model for inspiration itself. “To think that ‘not to think ahead’ might operate as a performance-practice virtue . . . flies directly in the face of most of the theoretical proscriptions currently in place in arts-related discourse”.

And we have (7) Novelty. No two improvisations can be alike. And yet when one considers the others, it is possible that novelty is not a cause but an effect. In this regard, I like the definition of jazz offered by Pat Metheny: “It’s not a noun but a verb”. It seems Volker Bertelmann would agree.

Around mid-20th century, jazz experienced a radical evolution. Traditionally, jazz improvisation was based on songs that provide a melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, formal framework for improvisation, as well as an emotional mood or feeling based on the text of the chart. A solid understanding of functional harmony is prerequisite to developing or extending the melodic ideas, as those ideas have to work within the harmonic scheme. The radical expressions of jazz developing over the last five decades, though, shifted away from a strong harmonic/melodic orientation toward timbre—toward sound itself. These developments paralleled similar trends in classical music. And, just as neoromantic and other trends have supervened in classical new music, so too we recently have increasingly narrative and lyrical forms in improvised jazz. Bertelmann’s playing is a case in point.

Some new music of the past 50 years has embraced improvisation, along with indeterminacy and chance, as an important part of performance, calling on classically trained performers to make creative decisions in their realizations of the music. Composers like Stockhausen, Berio, Cage, Feldman, Ligeti, Boulez, Kagel, Lutoslawski, Erickson, Pousseur, and Schafer have used improvisation and indirection in their work—far beyond the strict, deterministic approach of serialism of Schoenberg and others. But the composer’s relinquishing control presents an aesthetic dilemma. What is the work? Is it the score or the performance? Derek Bailey draws a distinction between improvisation and experimental music, stating that few improvisers consider their activities experimental and, unlike composers, “the desire to stay ahead of the field is not common among improvisers.” (p. 83)

Today there’s a growing tendency to acknowledge a new kind of modernity—globalized and multi-faceted and no longer in line with a Western hegemonic center—which acknowledges indeterminacy and chance. The idea of ‘alternative modernities’ holds that development always unfolds within specific cultures or civilizations and that a different starting point of the transition to modernity will lead to different outcomes. This alternative perspective can help generate more adequate descriptions and analyses of different cultures and music.

The communicative aspect (to oneself) and the dialogic aspect (to others) that are central to all improvisation—can be seen as parallel to communication and dialogue that are prerequisites for a “well-functioning democracy.” In all kinds of dialogues there are elements of uncertainty—one cannot know the result until the participation in the dialogue has come to an end. Individuals and societies both face problems of planning that exceed our ability or will to foresee the future or acknowledge current reality. To cope with this mismatch, the function of leadership is to get better and more effective organization and more effective planning and action. But organization based on a hierarchical form of thinking and conventional politics seldom yields the expected, satisfying, hoped-for results. Bertelmann’s compositions and performances serve as timely, evocative and optimistic reminders that the human species may yet solve its problems—if only we will improvise and put ourselves out for each other. The basis for this interaction and interplay is trust and generosity and freedom—each so indispensable for securing societies and each in short supply today. Bertelmann’s inspiring, expansionist example can be a lesson for us all. Go listen to him! See what you hear!

Room to Expand Track List

• Dilettante
  
• Paddington
  
• One Wish
  
• Chicago Morning
  
• Kleine Dinge (Little Things)
  
• Belgrade
  
• Sweet Spring, Come
  
• Femmeassise (Woman, Seated)
  
• Watercolour Milk
  
• Zahnluecke (Tooth Space)
  
• Fjorde
  
• Old Man Playing Boules

P repared Piano’: A playfully disruptive intervention into the preconceived idea of the piano as a pure-toned, perfected instrument waiting for a gifted virtuoso to play on it.”
  —  FATcat Records liner notes.

R oom To Expand’ largely resembles the masterful piano vignettes of Aphex Twin’s ‘Drukgs’ album, or a condensed version of John Cage’s ‘Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano’. Yet Hauschka’s effort will take many, many listens before it becomes tired or predictable. Through close listening over time, the album unravels—it’s possible to discover a new sound in each song with every listen. This already has to be a contender for the most outstanding, even unique, album of 2007.”
  —  P. Ansell, www.diskant.net

F or Bertelmann, this means covering hammers with aluminum, weaving guitar strings amongst the ones provided, and my own personal favorite, placing crown corks on the strings... ‘Chicago Morning’ is the antithesis of ‘Habits’, much as ‘Room to Expand’ is quite the opposite of ‘Plant, Watered’. A simple piano line tinkles along in the background to its unending satisfaction as an art-damaged horn section woozily provides backup.”
  —  P. Masterson, www.audiversity.com

R oom to Expand eschews purism throughout: although on tracks like Paddington the piano works on its own as a driving rhythm section, elsewhere he is not afraid to throw in synths, drums and electric bass. He does upbeat, contemplative, and even minimalist, as on ‘Sweet Spring, Come’. It’s an album that flows beautifully, and unlike many in its field stands up to close listening as well as holding its own as more than mere background. Hauschka has produced an excellent addition to a burgeoning genre.”
  —  B. Bollig, www.noripcord.com

I try to find a way of writing which comes from ideas, which is not about them, but which produces them.”
  —  John Cage, Silence, 1961.

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