Prepared Piano: Subtle Effects by Hacking DIY Nocks with Sugru® Silicone Rubber

S ometimes ‘less’ is ‘more’. For ‘prepared piano’, you don't necessarily need to throw all sorts of heavy hardware, and car keys, bolts, screws, weatherstripping, and other violent junk into your piano and treat your piano like a percussionist’s rubbish bin.

F or one thing, the piano suffers. For another thing, the sonic consequences are just too extreme, and draw the audience’s attention to the performer and to the outrageous thing the performer has done to the piano, and detract from the audience’s actually listening to the music that the prepared instrument makes. Sometimes, instead of a visual ‘spectacle’ or sonically ‘provocative stunt’, the comparatively subtle acoustic effect you want can be gotten just by inserting some tiny objects that are gentle to the piano and that can be as easy to apply and remove as, say, a mute on a violin or other stringed instrument is easy to apply and remove.

T he do-it-yourself widgets below don’t ‘mute’ anything though. They dramatically change the pitch of each string they are applied to—from a few tens of ‘cents’, up to as much as a major sixth.

A nd you can’t create this sort of note-by-note harmonic effect with Pianoteq® or other synths; those establish harmonic attributes globally, applying them across the entire keyboard, not note-by-note.

F irst get yourself some Sugru®. It comes in a wide variety of colors, not just the orange that appears in the pictures here.

N ext, get yourself some 5 mm OD brass tubing and 5 mm OD brass archery nocking points (see links below). Also get yourself some 22 AWG copper wire, or whatever convenient gauge is slightly smaller than the diameters of the various piano wires where you intend to place the nocks.

T hen with your Dremel® handtool fitted with an abrasive saw (circle disc), cut your brass tubing to the lengths you want.

I  have used tubing lengths from 30 mm to 70 mm to create weights ranging from 3 gm to 7 gm. For strings in the bass register, obviously you can use larger-diameter brass tubing.

E ach Allen Co (Broomfield CO) nocking point (Part No. 540) weighs about 400 mg when its lumen is filled with Sugru® silicone rubber.

N ext, cut one lengthwise slit in the side of each segment of brass tube with the Dremel® handtool.

C ut pieces of copper wire with a wire cutter or snips, about 2 cm longer than the length of each brass tube or nock. Use a needlenose pliers to put a crook or loop in one end of each wire, so you will be able to easily grasp the wire between your thumb and index finger, and so you will also have a loop by which to hang each piece up in a safe place while the Sugru® cures. Alternatively, you can get a piece of florists’ foam or styro at a hobby shop and stick the straight end of the copper wire into it after the nocks have been penetrated by the wire.

L ay all of the brass bits and archery nocking points and copper wires out on your worktable on a piece of plastic or a plastic kitchen cutting board. This will faciliate clean-up and prevent the Sugru® from smudging any surface you care about.

O pen a 5 gm sachet of Sugru®. Roll it around in your fingers for a few seconds. It has the consistency of soft modeling clay at this point.

Y ou can press the Sugru® into the lumen of a brass bit with your fingers and trowel it nice and even with an artists’ spatula.

T hen take a copper wire of the length appropriate to that brass bit and gently push the straight end of the wire lengthwise through the Sugru® in the center of the lumen. The copper wire adheres to the fresh Sugru® a little, but you can easily poke the wire through, so that a centimeter or so of bare wire sticks out beyond the end of the nock/tube. Hang the wire with the Sugru® nock/tube (or insert the straight into florists’ foam) in a safe place where it can remain undisturbed for at least 24 hours.

C ontinue, filling each of the brass bits and penetrating their centers with the copper wires. Set your collection of Sugru® piano nocks aside in a cupboard—someplace at about 20°C (68°F) and away from sunlight.

F or your convenience, make a 5 mm ball of Sugru® and set it aside in the same location with the rest. Wait at least 24 hours for the Sugru® to cure. Pick up the 5 mm Sugru® ball and squeeze it. If it is firm, then you know that the curing process is complete and it is okay to proceed with the next step.

T ake a razor blade or X-acto® knife and cut radially, directly down to the copper wire. Mount each in turn in a PanaVise® or other suitable holder and slice the silicone in the lumen lengthwise, to enable the nock/tube to slide onto a piano string. Then gently rotate the copper wire loop clockwise and anticlockwise 45 degrees or so, to release the wire’s surface from its attachment to the Sugru® silicone. Pull lengthwise to extract the copper wire out of the silicone rubber hole it’s been embedded in. Use your X-Acto® knife to trim any excess Sugru® from the slit or the ends of each nock/tube.


H ere is how the Sugru®-filled brass tubes and bow-hunting archery nocking points look:



A nd the picture at the top of this post is how they look when you push the nocks and tubes on, their slits going over the piano wires so that each piano wire is seated in the center, in the cylindrical ‘cast’ made by the copper wire.

O n notes that have 2 or three strings, if you apply a tube or nock to one of the strings, you will create a sound where the weighted string is significantly lower in pitch than its companion string(s). In the upper register, my 3 gm to 7 gm tubes make the notes sound like Chinese bronze bells with the nipple-like bosses.


Y ou can slide the weight close to the middle of the string and it will mainly lower the fundamental and second harmonic of the string. If you move it nearer to the end of the string, it will lower the third and higher harmonics much more strongly.

I ’ve created a little Excel spreadsheet (link below), which helps you to calculate how much detuning you can expect as a function of changing the average mass of a string by adding weight to it. Obviously, this simple spreadsheet does not tell you anything about how the higher-order harmonics change, given that the weight is localized in a particular position on the string, not spread over its entire length.

P lease add comments below or email me to comment on your experiences with these Sugru® prepared-piano kluges.

• Sugru® moldable silicone rubber [methyltris(methylethylketoxime)-silane; gamma-aminopropyl triethoxysilane] (FormFormForm Ltd, 13 Hague St, London E2 6HN, U.K.)
  
• Allen #540 brass archery string nocking points
  
• Brass C260 seamless round tubing at SmallParts.com [3/16-in OD ~ 4.8 mm OD]
  
• Dremel.com
  
• Excel sheet, pitch as function of average string density
  
• Piano Technicians' Guild (PTG) website
  
• Pianoteq virtual piano synth
  
• DSM. Pianoteq: Virtual instrument with many uses. CMT blog, 03-DEC-2008.
  
• Bunger R (John Cage). The Well-Prepared Piano. Colorado Coll, 1973.
  
• Gann K. No Such Thing as Silence. Yale Univ, 2010.
  
• Nattiez J-J, Samuels R, eds. The Boulez-Cage Correspondence. Cambridge Univ, 1995.
  
• Surhone L, Tennoe M, Henssonow S, eds. Works for Prepared Piano by John Cage. BetaScript, 2010.

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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