Year composed: 2014
Duration: 4’30”
Instrumentation: keyboard sampler
Premiere “Mallets” at the Leo Brouwer Festival of Music, Havana, Cuba
Notes:
Several years ago I began working with a database of piano recordings of the beautiful grand in UC Berkeley’s Hertz Hall. Four tones (C, E-flat, F-sharp, and A) in every octave were carefully sampled using multiple playing modes, such as playing with mallets inside the piano, plucking the piano strings (pizzicato), playing harmonics (including wonderful samples of harmonics from the second to the twelfth partials on a couple of the lower octaves) and playing with various prepared piano devices, such as caulk, magnets, tape, and even a super ball on the strings. The sessions resulted in more than twenty hours of recordings featuring these unusual playing techniques and are available as open source materials to the general public.
I took portions of these recordings and cut them into short audio segments (usually about one to five seconds in length), mapping them onto a sampler keyboard so that the unusual sounds and timbres could be easily played. In a live performance situation playing with mallets or plucking inside a piano is usually a tricky and limited maneuver; assigning the sounds to a keyboard allows a level of ease and virtuosity not technically possible otherwise.
Credit is due to Daniel Cullen, Edmund Campion, and Myra Melford for their contributions to the database recordings, as well as to CNMAT (the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies) for their support of this project. In particular, I would like to credit Ilya Rostovtsev for the Max/MSP software development in both of this etude.