Showing posts with label nettl. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nettl. Show all posts

Monday, September 8, 2008

We Are Genetically Wired for Music, But Not Just Six Songs

Astronauts
T  he strength of any piece of music is how well it can simultaneously invoke memory schemas but still surprise us with clever twists and turns that foil our expectations.”
  —  Daniel Levitin, Chatauqua Institution interview, 16-AUG-2007.
I  think that is a mistake. There are more ways in which we reflectively meta-surprise ourselves than the number of ways that music directly surprises us. In fact, many of the pieces that are most-loved are ones that intrigue us by causing us to (re-)experience and rehearse emotions that we treasure. Have a look at David Huron’s new book (link below) for detailed empirical data and discussion of surprise and meta-surprise in music. The key is the prosodic stimuli that we experience with the music, and how the particular prosody of a piece satisfies a listener’s hunger or unmet need. Our need—and consequently our interpretation of the music—differs from time to time, from place to place, from culture to culture. What the pieces in Well-Tempered Clavier mean to me evolves with each passing decade of my life, and with each performance. The same is true of how I perceive the song ‘I Love the Mountains’.”
  —  DSM.
One World or None? The astonishment at Daniel Levitin’s simplistic, reductionistic “Six Songs” meme! So it was that I began reading Levitin’s new book with this chip on my shoulder: ‘How like an ex-rock-producer-turned-academic to reduce everything to neat marketing and packaging!’

Daniel Levitin, The World in Six Songs
S  cience should make everything [out to be] as simple as possible but not simpler [than is possible or factual].”
  —  Albert Einstein.
But the book stayed; it stayed in my hands until I had finished the last page. So I now put up this CMT blog post to enthusiastically recommend that you read it, too.

Daniel Levitin argues in ‘The World in Six Songs’ that all music can be classified into one of six thematic categories:
  • friendship,
  • joy,
  • comfort,
  • knowledge,
  • ritual, and
  • love.
The motives for composing and performing may be more diverse than these categories, but, according to Levitin, all music is socially ‘normative’ (prescriptive, or reinforcing of social norms) and the reception of each piece by individual listeners and by society as a whole is associated with one of these categories.

T  he right question, after due consideration of music’s diversity, is whether there is a set of functions music performs in human relations. And how might these different functions have influenced the evolution of human emotion, reason, and spirit across distinct intellectual and cultural histories? What role did the musical brain have in shaping human nature?”
  —  Daniel Levitin, The World in Six Songs, p. 7.
Q  uoting the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, [Stanford professor James Ferguson] persuaded me that the right question to ask, in trying to understand music’s universality, is not what all musics have in common, but how they differ... It is in the particulars—the nuances, the overwhelming variety of ways we express ourselves—that one can come to understand best what it means to be a musical human.”
  —  Daniel Levitin, The World in Six Songs, p. 7.
Twenty years ago Alexander Ringer (Professor Emeritus, Univ Illinois Urbana-Champaign) examined the question of whether there is one music ‘world’ or many. And Francois Fetis and Alexander Ellis had ‘classified the human races according to their musical systems’ 100 years before that. Levitin’s new book knowingly caters to current social ‘political correctness’ fixations, but, in my view, scholarship is not advanced by uncritical illustration.

Astronauts
I  don’t like the idea of this at all. How can you tell the story of the world in six songs? Who does this guy think he is telling me what these six songs should be? [A few hours later: ] Hmmm... this is interesting. I think I could come up with six songs to tell the story of the world.”
  —  Willie Nelson.
Levitin’s new book is not scholarly ethnomusicology—it is a humanistic tract written for a popular audience. What I mean to say is that, insofar as comparative musicology tends to reveal in musical terms relatively synoptic and superficial features of human evolution, Levitin’s reduction of music to “six songs” should be considered a kind of ‘historiography’ at best and as a kind of "Voyager spacecraft Golden Record" at worst. The record placed on-board Voyager, which was launched in 1977 and departed the solar system into deep space in 2004, contained material selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University.

Golden Record on Voyager spacecraft, 1977
W  hy is music so important to us as human beings? What is it about us that seeks music? For many people, music is a way of expressing, sharing, or experiencing emotions that we use as an alternative to language. Music does things that language can’t. As an art form, it allows us to express emotions and ideas over time, as opposed to painting, which does this over space. Why do songs evoke many emotions, that can make us laugh and cry? Because that is the job of music! It is made to do that. Music captures the dynamics of human emotion, their changing nature, the complexity of feeling happy and sad at the same time. When it’s composed well, it can do this better than language, and that’s probably the reason why we, as a species, still have both.”
  —  Daniel Levitin, interview on Voice of America, 20-AUG-2008.
Prof. Sagan and colleagues assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind, and thunder, and animal sounds, including the songs of birds and whales. To this were added several dozen musical selections from different cultures and timeperiods, plus spoken greetings in fifty-five languages. The first movement of Bach’s Brandenburg concerto No. 2, the Prelude and Fugue in C No. 1 from WTC Book 2, and the gavotte from Partita No. 3 in E for violin were on the disc. Louis Armstrong’s ‘Melancholy Blues’ and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and String Quartet No. 13 Op. 130 were on it. Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny B. Goode’ and the Bulgarian ‘Izlel je Delyo Hajdutin’ were on it. In all, an eclectic 90-min housemix of the past 500 years of music.

Parazynski in space
The diversity of human feeling and musical expression was not about to be adequately captured on one Golden Record, any more than the tremendous diversity of round musical “pegs” will fit into Levitin’s six square “holes”.

A sign is something which stands for something to somebody. It addresses one or more somebodies. It carries an association with a particular meaning and generally with one or more other signs. It can even create other signs. The sign stands for something: its object. In Peirce’s notion of semiotics, the sign creates in the perceiver’s mind a more developed sign (called an ‘interpretant’). Each of these in turn generates its own chain of interpretants. ‘I Love the Mountains’ (ILTM) generates a litany of its own interpretants. So does Bach’s BWV 862.

In music, pitch, timbre, intensity, or chord progressions may act as signs. Popular music especially trades on these. But all music since time immemorial has also done so. In fact, after reading Levitin’s book (and its mention on p. 108 of how prevalent ‘I-vi-ii-V7’ progressions are) I went looking for examples in Baroque music. They’re not difficult to find. Open up Bach’s ‘Well-Tempered Clavier’, for example. Have a look in Book 1 at BWV 862. The chord progression ‘I-vi-ii-V7’ is nominally the second most common chord progression in music, ever.

Here we have the little-known duet by J.S. and son C.P.E. Bach, in 1722:
J.S. & C.P.E. Bach, ‘Ich liebe die ganze Welt’, WTC Buch 1, No. 17, BWV 862, Fugue in A-flat

Pieces with I-vi-ii-V7 progression:
  • I Love the Mountains
  • Blue Moon
  • Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man
  • Savin’ All My Love
  • Try To Remember
  • Chopin’s Nocturne in E-flat
  • Bach’s Fugue in A-flat
  • Millions more…
A  hit song is actually somewhat formulaic—the repetitiveness, the rousing section that leads us to that ever-so-hooky thing that we call a chorus—those things seem to happen over and over in hit songs, whether we like to admit it or not. It’s not necessarily a good song from a musical standpoint, one that uses ‘The Chord That Stops The Planet From Rotating On Its Axis’. I think one of the most difficult things to give students a grasp of is an idea of the dire simplicity of most of the music in a song.”
  —  Jon Aldrich, Berklee College of Music.


[Video was first aired on 15-APR-2008 during the Discovery Channel’s season premiere of “Deadliest Catch” program; went ‘viral’ after that. Arrangment by composer Brian Chapman (Beacon Street Studios, Los Angeles); Creative Director: Glenn Cole; CD/Designer: Bryan Rowles; CD/Copywriter: Jason Norcross; Agency: 72andSunny; Agency Executive Producer: Sam Baerwald; Agency Producer: Angelo Ferrugia; Production Company: Outsider; Director: James Rouse; Director of Photography: Max Goldman; Producer: Jeremy Barrett; Editorial Company: Mad River Post; Editor: Lucas Eskin; Producer (Editorial): Ann Kirk; VFX Artist: Alex Kolansinski; VFX Producer: Helena Lee; Producer (Music): Adrea Lavezzoli]

It never gets old, huh?
Nope.
Kinda makes you wanna... break into song?
Yup.

I love the moun-tains, I love the clear blue skies;
I love big bridg-es, I love when great whites fly--
I love the whole world, and all its sights and sounds.
Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah, Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah, Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah, Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah.

I love the o-cean, I love real dir-ty things;
I love to go fast, I love e-gyp-tian kings--
I love the whole world, and all its cra-zi-ness.
Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah, Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah, Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah, Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah.

I love tor-na-does, I love a-rach-a-nids;
I love hot mag-ma, I love the gi-ant squids--
I love the whole world, it’s such a brill-iant place.
Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah, Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah, Boom-Dee-Aht-Tah, Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah.

    [50-sec clip, Brian Chapman et al., DiscoveryChannel ad, ILTWW, 0.8MB MP3]

Notice the circle of 5ths movement in this series of chords. The ‘Circle of 5ths’ describes chord movement downward by 5ths (or upward by 4ths). The strong resolution of the dominant V7 chord to the tonic I chord is known, oddly enough, as ‘dominant resolution’.

Circle of 5ths
In chamber musc and other classical music genres, ‘dominant resolution’ is called an ‘authentic cadence’. Every time we change chords:
  • The root moves down a fifth, or one string.
  • The seventh always slides down one fret, to become the third of the next chord.
  • The third of the previous chord stays where it is, but becomes the seventh of the next chord.
ILTM in 3-3-2, 1MB pdf

    [50-sec clip, CrewsNelson, ILTM, 0.9MB MP3]

In the right hand of a guitar, each note moves to the pitchwise-closest note in the next chord. That’s basic ‘voice-leading’, and the ‘I-vi-ii-V7’ progression voice-leads well—it is physiologically convenient to sing and play, reliably and with minimal risk of mistakes, and, consequently, is likely to sound good—which is why this pattern has been so prevalent in western music over the centuries. MIDI sequencers can execute horribly complex patterns that might sound good, and MIDI sequencers can execute them with no performance risk. But our ears and minds have evolved over the millennia to prefer singability/playability. We love dire simplicity, as Jon Aldrich calls it.

Somehow ‘major scale’ = ‘happy expressivity’ / ‘minor scale’ = ‘melancholic expressivity’ became a social norm—at least in western music. That led to a bias toward the ‘harmonic minor’ harmonizations. Listen to just about any piece of music in a minor key and you will hear progressions like I-iv-V7-I / I-vi-ii-V7 / I-vi-IV-V7. Success breeds success. But the sound of the harmonic minor scale played in a melodic context was unpopular. So the Dorian and Aeloian came together with the addition of a raised 7th (leading-tone), and this union begat the melodic minor scale. The raised 6th and 7th on the way up sounded ‘right’ in a melodic context and didn’t impair the harmonization.


    [50-sec clip, DSM, midi euphonium (Garitan), ILTM, 0.7MB MP3]

    [50-sec clip, Orange Sherbet, ILTM, 2.2MB MP3]

    [50-sec clip, Cedarmont Kids, ILTM, 2.1MB MP3]

As Frank Zappa put it in ‘The Real Frank Zappa Book’, this progression is the ultimate in formulaic ‘bad caucasian music’. While it may have originally been interesting 500 years ago or more, it has by now been so overused by every composer and songwriter that it’s become a musical cliché. ‘I-vi-ii-V’ progressions—the only way these can be used effectively to create new music is to subvert the cliché. Which you can see that Bach did in BWV 862 if you carefully analyze it, measure by measure.

In the end, Levitin’s new book is highly enjoyable, well worth the read. If you’re looking for penetrating comparative musicological scholarship, this is not your book; but, if you’ve read other of Levitin’s writings, you would never have thought that it would be anything other than what it is: an expansive, highly-readable, inspirational book-length essay. Successful record-producer and marketer that he is, Levitin concludes abruptly with a surprising ‘Love is the fulfillment of the Law’ passage that is patterned along the lines of Romans 13:8-10 or Galatians 5:14. What the!?

I  t is the love of our existence that is the highest love of all—the love of humanity with all our flaws; all our destructiveness; all our petty fears, gossip, and rivalries. A love of the goodness that we sometimes show under the most difficult stresses—of the heroism of doing the right thing even when no one can see us doing it; of being honest when there is nothing to gain by it; of loving those whom others might find unlovable. It is all this, and our capacity to write about it—to celebrate it in music—that makes us [sentient creatures with moral standing].”
  —  Daniel Levitin, The World in Six Songs, p. 289.
I won’t hazard to guess how comparative anthropologists will receive this book. But Levitin’s writing succeeds as brilliant, popularistic music commentary in much the same way as, say, Rob Kapilow or Bruce Adolphe succeeds. It’s fine. It’s fun. And it propels ordinary readers to think about why music works—about why they respond to it as they do.

Just the same, what about ILTM? Isn’t this song simultaneously a member of all six of Levitin’s categories? And why exactly is it that I like Brian Chapman’s Discovery Channel ad so, so much? The reason has nothing do with any of Levitin’s six categories. Boom-de-yada.

Nettl-Bohlman book

XKCD #442


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Monday, November 5, 2007

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

Volker Bertelmann
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.

Hauschka Prepared Piano
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!

Volker Bertelmann
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.

Düllo - Cultural Hacking
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.

Volker Bertelmann's Favorite Tool 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 CD
    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.

Hauschka Prepared Piano

Hauschka Prepared Piano


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