I’ve created a new page for my trilogy of piano recordings, made between 2006 and sometime in the mid-2010s, which made use of the Yamaha Clavinova’s capacity for altering the piano’s tuning system away from the “equal temperament” westerners (and now the world) have gotten used to, and toward some more interesting sonic terrain. As I write there,
While a piano always remains a piano — its keys are struck to resound in their fixed tonalities, unlike strings (bowed) or wind instruments (blown) which can be bent, pulled, elongated, and woven into tensile braids — the possibility of modifying the tonal relationships of a pianistic keyboard opens up a vast new world. Its harmonies become movable strata, with new rhythms and relationships introduced in their overtone structures. With its timbres become more adjustable as well, a piano can come to resemble something more like a tuneable gamelan orchestra.
The trilogy begins pensively, moves on to some avant-jazzy territory, and progresses to full-on La Monte Young style “distemperament.” The back story to Distempered Landscapes, the third in the trilogy, goes like this:
When I performed with and composed music for the Avant-Garde Ukrainian Theatre (AUT) in the mid 1980s, we were invited to a party at a large, suburban house following a performance in Philadelphia. The family owned a piano, but the piano was completely out of tune — to the extent that it made harmonies I had never heard before. It was, to my ears, miraculously out of tune. I found a few note combinations that I was especially enchanted with, but the owner of the house, hearing my percussive, minimalist-style repetition of these “discordant” note clusters, came up to me and asked, “Do you like what you’re playing?” Then, a little cautiously, he added, “because I don’t.” So I stopped. “Distempered Landscapes” is my (long awaited) revenge.
More can be found at https://adrianivakhiv.bandcamp.com (and on how it relates to ecophilosophy, here).
