Notes by Philip Carlsen
Conrad Tao has put together an astonishing, provocative program that dances back and forth across the hazy boundary between notated music and improvisation. It encourages us to think about composing and improvising as a never-ending, wide-ranging conversation that musicians engage in with their instruments and their creative ancestors. When Tao improvises on the song “Auf einer Burg,” originally written by Robert Schumann in 1840 for voice and piano, he enters into an emotional and spiritual space with the composer and the poet Joseph von Eichendorff. When he plays the transcription of Art Tatum’s virtuosic cover of “Over the Rainbow,” Harold Arlen and his lyricist Yip Harburg are also in the room—maybe Judy Garland, as well.
The conversation in Debussy’s first étude, “For the Five Fingers,” is addressed to Carl Czerny, the early nineteenth-century pedagogue whose repetitive piano exercises, even if effective at developing technique, are often boring to listen to. Debussy invites us to hear the profound possibilities in such drudgery, in the process crafting an object lesson in improvisation. We begin with a simple scale on the white keys, the left hand parked in place, one note per finger, up and down. The temptation to disrupt is impossible to resist. Cross the right hand over and strike a dissonant black key. Ah, so satisfying. Do it again. Nice. Go faster. Turn it into a jig. Oops, teacher scowls. Back to boredom. But freedom quickly wins. Scales and arpeggios fly around the keyboard. All notes are fair game. Key signatures change unexpectedly. There’s always a sense of spontaneous searching, settling into a new rhythm or pattern for a few bars, then hesitating briefly, as if deciding where to go next. The music sounds improvised, even though fully written out.
In similar fashion in the other études, Debussy transforms the genre of workaday practice-room exercise into endlessly fascinating concert showpiece. Yet these pieces still nod to the Czerny model in the way they focus on developing a particular aspect of technique or expression. Debussy’s titles announce his intentions. Étude No. 2, “For thirds,” aims to help the pianist develop their fluency with playing rapid scales of paired notes in one hand, the notes always a third apart. The next three études follow a logical progression—fourths, sixths, octaves. In No. 6, “For the eight fingers,” the final étude with a number in its title, the player is instructed to avoid using their thumbs. Debussy teases out the inherent personalities of his materials from étude to étude, exploring the evanescence of fourths, the lassitude of sixths, the bold aggressiveness of octaves.
After playing Book 1 of the Debussy, Tao jolts the piano recital into unfamiliar territory with his move to the Lumatone, an electronic instrument first introduced not much more than five years ago. By juxtaposing it with the venerable grand piano, Tao prompts us to contemplate how the physical interactions of fingers with keys and the tuning of an instrument can profoundly influence the music that is produced. The Lumatone has 280 keys, hexagonal in shape, all the same size on the same plane, fitted together like cells of a honeycomb, laid out in a 9 by 31 grid. How does a pianist cope with that? Where is C? On a traditional keyboard, you can know where you are even without looking at the keyboard, orienting yourself to the feel of the repeating patterns of raised black keys. The Lumatone instead differentiates the keys by color. Their bright glow under the player’s fingers is one of beauties of the instrument. But its true glory lies in its resources for a seemingly unlimited exploration of microtones. Each of its many keys can be tuned separately. The octave can be divided, for example, into 53 equal parts instead of just twelve, an arrangement that Tao is fond of, and the honeycomb layout means all those notes are within easy reach of the fingers.
The combinations of microtonal notes into chords may sound at first simply out of tune, but over time they can take on a strangely seductive more-in-tune quality. The player gets drawn in, improvising new music and reimagining existing pieces. Besides his own compositions for Lumatone, Tao has turned to Schumann’s “Auf der Burg,” a song that already dwells in a dreamy realm. It is part of the set of twelve songs called “Liederkreis,” or “song cycle.” No other song in the set is so spare, none with such simple rhythm, as if suspended in time. Eichendorff’s text describes an old caretaker in an empty castle above the Rhine, beard and hair matted, slowly turning to stone as the years pass, a wedding party going by on the river, the bride weeping. What does it all mean? Perhaps the microtones of the Lumatone in Conrad Tao’s hands provide the ideal medium to plumb those depths.
Tao steps back to the piano for his composition “Keyed In,” described in the notes for a previous performance as “an exploration of … the full range of sound the piano is capable of, including its nuanced harmonics and resonances between notes.” In the same spirit of adventure, he performs his own transcription of one of Art Tatum’s formidable solos. As you listen, you might recall a famous story retold many times, such as in this version by a writer named Gregg Baker: “Fats Waller [no slouch of a pianist himself] was playing a club one night, when Art Tatum walked into the club. Fats stepped away from the piano to make room for Art, saying ‘Folks, I’m only a pianist, but tonight God is in the room.’”
Whereas Book 1 of Debussy’s Études, as the great pianist Paul Jacobs succinctly puts it, “is concerned with traditional technical problems, … Book 2 is concerned with pianistic problems associated with musical figurations.” These are identified in the titles as chromatic figures, ornaments, rapid repeated notes, opposed sonorities, arpeggios, and chords. But perhaps the most important thing to be alert to (and to relish) is the way the études in both books surprise us constantly with their quick shifts from one thing to another. For instance, there is a passage in Étude No. 11 where the key signature changes nine times in the span of only 15 measures. The underlying beat may repeatedly speed up and slow down. The serenity of a quiet passage may suddenly be interrupted. To quote Jacobs again, “The materials, as well as the moods and expressions, juxtapose kaleidoscopically to produce forms that are continually self-renewing and mercurial … allusions to the most unexpected and variegated styles may coexist and change in a matter of seconds.”
Conrad Tao performs Sunday, March 9 at 2 PM at Hannaford Hall on the USM Campus in Portland.
