 |
Volume
I Issue 4
16 August 1999 |
|||
|
|
Musical Sculpting: The Emergence of a New Art Form by Larry Bloome
It's 4 PM in Los Angeles and the sound engineer at David Abell Recording Studios is gearing up for the final recording session of the day. He whispers into the intercom: "Art of the Fugue, Fugue No. 1," and the majestic sounds of Bach's masterpiece fill the control room. There is nothing unusual about the scene except that in the recording booth the shiny Yamaha concert grand seems to be playing by itself. There is no one at the piano bench. Just a few moments ago, three thousand miles away, concert pianist Peter Taussig, at a matching grand piano in a New York City office building, has just finalized the painstakingly delicate process of entering the Bach fugue into a computer. Within minutes of emailing the results to the Los Angeles studio, his computer file has triggered the LA piano's keys and pedals to move up and down reproducing the slightest nuances of his interpretation just as if Taussig were physically present. For Taussig this is a realization of a dream he nurtured for fifteen years following a lively conversation with the late Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. Taussig and Gould shared not only a devotion to the music of Bach but also a futuristic fascination with the possibilities inherent in computer technology and electronic recording. Taussig admits, "I hated practicing. The whole athletic aspect of piano playing just got in the way of my musical concepts. The computer allowed me to skip the drudgery of practicing." For years, on a series of different computers and synthesizers, Taussig had been refining the classical interpretations he heard inside his head. However he was continually exasperated with the synthetic sounds of digital keyboards. A phenomenal shift happened when Yamaha produced a new type of piano, the Disklavier concert grand, the only acoustic instrument in the world which can be "played" by a computer. At long last Taussig could actualize his entirely new approach to recording piano music. He calls it "Musical Sculpting." He explains the detailed process: "[In musical sculpting] the actual playing into the computer is just the initial step. It is like getting the block of marble onto the sculptor's floor. The real work happens later when I use the computer mouse as my chisel. It's not easy. I had to examine everything I used to do instinctively and then recreate it step by step on the computer. However the payoff is an expressive freedom I could have never even imagined! Musical sculpting allows me to create interpretations that are humanly impossible." In the Art of the Fugue project, for instance, four-part fugues emerge with such clear voice separation as could only have been imagined in Bach's mind. Taussig crafts his interpretations from tiny building blocks, sometimes a single note at a time. He records the fragments separately and then endlessly shapes and reshapes them. These musical "scenes" are then assembled into the final work. "It's similar to the way films and videos are made. It's not like a regular recording where you prepare for weeks and then you have a few run-throughs to actually create the recording. I create my computer interpretations over a very long period. Then when I send the file to LA they record it in an hour. No need for retakes." For the past few years Taussig has been working in his high-tech studio in rural Massachusetts on new ways to create, record and transmit classical music and combine music with imagery. His eclectic background - combining music, film, multimedia, performance, and computers - has brought him to this point. Peter Taussig was born in Czechoslovakia, grew up in Israel and lived in Canada before moving to Massachusetts in 1991 with his wife and daughter. In addition to his music degrees he also holds a degree in Islamic studies. After graduating from the University of Toronto in the early 70's Taussig became one of Canada's best known concert pianists, recording for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 200 radio programs that spanned the entire chamber music of Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, and Mendelssohn, and dozens of other works. In 1983, to fulfill a childhood ambition to make films, Taussig joined two artists' cooperatives and began producing experimental art videos which were soon presented in galleries and at festivals. His soundtrack compositions for his own and other artists' video work led him to the fledgling field of synthesizers and computer music. By the late 80's he was a professor at the Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto teaching video production and sound synthesis. His video opera Catatonics (1990) was featured at the Montreal International Film Festival, the Australian Film Festival, and elsewhere. Along the way Elyakim Taussig (he used his Hebrew name for a few years) also founded and directed a major music festival at Stratford, Canada, home of the famous Shakespearean festival, and was musical director at the Shaw festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake. In the late 80's he also experimented with presenting his video and computer compositions in live settings, collaborating with performance artists Vera Frenkel and Peter Chin. His best known multimedia performance was My Memorial Service, a provocative funeral service at the Music Gallery of Toronto which drew headlines in the Canadian press ("...Imagine a noted concert pianist lying in state on top of a piano, only to resurrect and play some Schubert for his own memorial service," wrote the Toronto Star). Along the way he also created several music comedy one-man shows, notably Taussig and Enemies, which ran for six years on the Canadian stage. In 1991 Taussig turned his back on his performance and university teaching career and retreated to a yoga center in Massachusetts, where for the next four years he concentrated on his spiritual practices and creative work. By the time he left in 1995 he had found a way to combine all his seemingly unrelated interests into one powerful artistic direction. The newly emerging Internet and digital video technologies, combined with a new generation of music software, sophisticated enough to handle the subtleties of classical piano music, offered the tools. The ramifications of musical sculpting are far-reaching. Armed with computer skills, musical sculptors who may have limited playing ability but exquisite imagination may one day redefine our musical recording conventions. In the process they may perhaps challenge some strongly held beliefs. "It knocks virtuoso performers off of their pedestal," chuckles Taussig, "when thundering octaves and breakneck speed are just a few mouse clicks away." In the meantime, if you are one of the millions of music lovers who can't play Chopsticks despite years of piano lessons, perhaps your computer skills, coupled with a Disklavier, may allow you to sound just like Horowitz. Or maybe even better. About the artist: Peter Taussig can be reached in care of Crystal Music Records P.O.Box 2394 Lenox. MA 01240 Phone: 413 / 637 1545; Fax: 413 / 637 1716 http://www.crystalmusic.com About the author: Larry Bloome, a Denver-based journalist and amateur pianist, travels wherever the next story may take him. |
|||
|
|
|
