Tag Archives: Claviocentrism

999 Words

Unprepared Piano

I haven’t contributed much to human history.

I don’t have children and may never do, if my perpetual singledom, unemployment, and financial poverty continue on their current trajectory. I’m not good at business, nor keen on new technology, nor fond of predatory capitalistic practices — generally the characteristics that ensure upward social mobility in today’s society.

I write words by hand, which is something that my AI assistant continually tells me I should improve, by breaking my paragraphs into smaller chunks, and adding subheadings in order to lead my readers. Ostensibly, Artificial Intelligence doesn’t think much of us. Surely within a decade, AI will render my profession unnecessary, if there is any necessity to it now.

However, before artful writing fell out of favour, I elicited a minor stir at the offices of The Quietus, in January 2013, when one of the site’s editors noted that a word I had used in an article celebrating the 30th anniversary of MIDI came up a Googlewhack. That term was “claviocentrism” — referring to the centrality of the twelve-tone, clavier-style keyboard to Western musical traditions. My MIDI article constituted its first use. I knew this because I indeed invented the word, as none was previously sufficient.

This week, I had the good fortune to attend two very different concerts that returned the piano to my center of attention. No Hay Banda, the excellent Montreal-based concert series, which exists somewhere between a concept and a band, organized the first one, aptly titled “The Last Act of the Piano.”

The troupe’s three members — percussionist Noam Bierstone, keyboardist Daniel Áñez, and violinist Geneviève Liboiron — come from diverse backgrounds. But they somehow blend seamlessly in ethos, a veritable power trio of in sounds from way out.

No Hay Banda is renowned for staging exceptionally dramatic performances that push the boundaries of Montreal’s live music scenes. For better or worse, there is nothing else quite like what they do. It is impossible to overstate how challenging — even alienating — their concerts can be. No Hay Banda is truly art for art’s sake, audiences be damned. Easy listening, it isn’t.

Although, “The Last Act of the Piano” happily was both sonically and visually appealing, perhaps because No Hay Banda chose to focus upon Western music’s most familiar instrument, albeit in a profoundly experimental way.

The trio performed two pieces of 21st century post-classical piano music that were at once delightful and rare to experience in a live setting: Jennifer Walshe’s 2008 composition, entitled “Becher;” and “101% mind uploading,” the 2015 piece by Elena Rykova.

Rykova’s score calls for the instrument to be prepared with magnets, Scotch tape, and an optional sticker of X-ray radiation. No Hay Banda photographed for NicheMTL.

“Becher” is the contemporary equivalent of Mauricio Kagel’s post-modern 1970 album, Ludwig Van, reconstructing snippets of Beethoven’s compositions, running them through amplitude modulation and other forms of effects, intending to mimic the way that the composer might have heard his own compositions as his natural hearing deteriorated.

Jennifer Walshe, “Becher’s” author, stitches together borrowed scraps of popular piano compositions — from Beethoven to Coldplay and beyond — in a technique that emulates digital sampling, and which tests the virtuosity of any pianist performing the piece. But No Hay Banda’s Daniel Áñez tackled the task with incredible skill, doing justice to Walshe’s ambitious work, and doing so with the group’s signature David-Lynchian laconicism.

Without saying a word, all three members then donned medical scrubs and surgical gloves to perform “101% mind uploading,” which had the threesome operating upon the piano’s insides as if it were a patient undergoing an emergency appendectomy.

Rykova’s score calls for the instrument to be prepared with magnets, Scotch tape, and an optional sticker of X-ray radiation. No other band in Montreal would have the guts to rip out a piano’s guts in such theatrical fashion, and few other Canadian cities could muster enough of an congregation to support such an endeavour — a testament to both.

The week’s second claviocentric concert could not have been more different; comparatively speaking, more palatable to a wider patronage — the Russo-German pianist Igor Levit interpreting the works of Brahms, Mahler, and Beethoven at Bourgie Hall, on the venue’s recently acquired Hamburg Steinway grand.

Just being in the presence of this instrument was itself worth the price of admission, as evidenced by the sold-out crowd, who were enraptured with Levit’s shoeless performance. Apparently, he injured his foot days prior to the recital. But this lack of footwear in no way hampered his dexterity.

As I sat there recalling No Hay Banda’s wild concert, listening now to one of the world’s most celebrated pianists caressing this perfect instrument, it occurred to me that keyboards are devices that require human intelligence to bring out their best qualities.

The electronic musician Richard D. James, aka Aphex Twin, famously experimented with programming mechanical machines to trigger an analogue piano’s keys. A generation prior, the avant-garde composer Conlon Nancarrow produced player-piano reels that spat out extreme, impossible compositions. And MIDI, the computer protocol that digitally controls any imaginable instrument, has given rise to the niche genre known as Black MIDI, which attempts to pack the largest number of notes into the smallest time span.

The question, though, is why? Just because it is technically possible to exceed human skill doesn’t mean it should be done. And once it is, there is no reason to try and surpass it, as if in some robotic pissing contest. Less is more — in this sense, less machine means more human.

What I initially meant with the term “claviocentrism” was not what the word has come to mean to me recently. I coined it as a shorthand for a cultural logic that prefers pianos over, say, guitars, or drums.

But what claviocentrism means today is the ability of this wonderful instrument to gather people around it in something approaching harmony, something approximating peace, with an unmistakable timbre that is unquestionably beautiful, whether it is played with fingers, mallets, or magnets.

Maybe AI can parse information faster than we can. But can it invent useful words and innovate new musical forms? Is there still another act for pianists and writers?◼︎

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999 Words

Minor Fall, Major Lift: notes on notes

The multiple meanings of the word “note” are themselves noteworthy, especially given that NicheMTL habitually subtitles these articles, “notes on” this or “notes on” that — not least including this latest note, which is self-reflexively subtitled: “notes on notes.”

First, there are literal notes, to which the subtitle refers. The written word is defined as a note. Notes scribbled in class. Notes stuck to the fridge, or the calendar. Notes in passing. The subtext of using “notes” as opposed to, say, an essay or a report, is its fleet-footedness and improvisatory character, like notes jotted during a lecture, or in a police interrogation. Quickly, efficiently.

Then, there are musical notes. These notes are also written forms — that is, notational — which are audible and understood to us as discrete sounds, the note of middle C, or G#, for instance. We conventionally speak of these notes as sitting on a chromatic scale of twelve distinct units, the notes on a piano, the notes upon which the vast majority of Western music is composed.

Notes describe smell and taste, too. Coffee, for example, is often thought to exhibit a “note” of chocolate, or vice versa. Certain flavourful notes, just like certain audible notes, complement each other, and others seem dissonant. We never know, however, which notes are going to taste or smell pleasant, or harmonize, until we put them together in resonance with one another.

This presupposes the singularity of notes. We think of notes — whether olfactory, flavourful, audible, or legible — as individual units of dimension, infinitely divisible, but irreducible, beyond being constituent of more notes.

A note scrawled on a blackboard has a definite quantity of information, just as a piano note corresponds to a definite musical frequency. Yet, as isolated as notes appear, we only define them in relation to other notes, one note in opposition, or conjunction, or relation to another. Therefore, no one note ever exists alone, a reassuring thought in a world comprised of seemingly solitary, remote parts.

I started thinking again about notes this past week, during the first of two sold-out Alexandra Stréliski concerts at Place des arts, a flawless performance at which there seemed to be no false notes. But what is that anyway — one false note? How can any note be considered wrong?

There are eighty-eight notes on a traditional piano keyboard. That is, eighty-eight keyboard keys which trigger one of twelve notes across a little more than seven octaves.

Obviously, there are no wrong notes on a piano. It depends upon the song. Although some notes are far more frequently used than others. The extreme notes, resting at the ends of the spectrum, are played only seldom and very deliberately. We have modified standard pitches over the years as well, tuning slightly upwards over time.

The scientific measurement of a note is one hertz, equal to its wavelength per second. In other words, a note depends upon its place in space and time, like a pyramid of cards, supporting and warping itself simultaneously.

In fact, infinite notes must exist, because there is always another note between notes. This is not the case, however, with linguistic notes. There is a finite number of letters in the alphabet. An exact number of words in a language. And yet, the combinations are endless.

Pleasant combinations of musical notes are what we call chords. So, it was apt that Stréliski invoked a “crack in everything”, the famous quote by Leonard Cohen, another noteworthy Montreal artist who filled the same auditorium with pleasant notes. In his most well-known song, “Hallelujah,” Cohen sings of a “secret chord that David played, that pleased the Lord.”

What does this mean?

David was the harpist introduced in the Book of Samuel, who banished King Saul’s supposedly evil spirits during spells that we might today consider on a sliding scale in severity, from panic attacks, to epileptic seizures, to paranoiac fits.

Something about the melody of David’s harp managed to calm the king’s disturbed mind. Just as something about the combination of Cohen’s words has struck a profound chord in millions of people, comforting troubled souls in troubled times. Just as Stréliski’s notes struck a chord last Wednesday night for thousands of fortunate Montrealers who were in the same place, on the same wavelength, at the same time.

The Book of Revelation is the ultimate of the Bible’s “notes,” so to speak, which describes in allegorical language the world’s destruction and redemption. It, too, is a combination of notes that inspires and terrifies its readers.

In Chapter 14, the text tells of a “new song” that redeemed people sing, which precedes the end of God’s wrath on Earth. I could not help but hear this new song in every note of Stréliski’s performance, in each chord that cleansed the air and saturated it with such pleasant sounds that for one moment it seemed as if peace on the planet was possible, within reach, that all it would take was the right combination of notes, of words, hammered out from a keyboard, revealing the secret chord that might deliver us from evil forever.

I wrote about the centrality of the keyboard to Western music in my book, Mad Skills, coining the term “Claviocentrism” to define the phenomenon. Why we have chosen the piano and its particular frequencies to gather ‘round is arbitrary, mysterious, but nonetheless real. For reasons unknown, or unexplainable, we resound most with the piano, an instrument with a remarkably limited number of notes that it can reproduce. But their combinations are familiar and novel all at once. We recognize them, and yet they delight us every time.

There is no such thing as a dishonest note. And nothing false about any individual frequency. We merely have to strike the correct chords.

There is no such thing as a wicked word. And nothing false about any literary unit. We merely have to find the right combination of them, the precise notes, the hidden hallelujah chorus.◼︎

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Gather ‘round the piano

Francesco Fusaro, Clavicentrico (Self-Released)


It is not every day that someone names their album after something you invented.

To clarify, I did not invent ‘claviocentrism;’ but I did coin the term. It was in late 2012 — exactly ten years ago, come to think of it — as I was writing an article for the good folks at The Quietus, on the 30th anniversary of MIDI. I was struggling to find a word to describe how central, both culturally as well as physically, the piano had become to western music since the inception of the standard, black-and-white, ebony-and-ivory, together-in-perfect-harmony, clavier-style keyboard to which we are all so accustomed today. But there wasn’t one. Ergo, claviocentrism.

I received an email from one of tQ’s editors saying that he had Googled claviocentrism and it came back a Googlewhack — there were no prior instances of that word indexed in the search engine. I was embarrassed. I replied sheepishly admitting that I had indeed invented the term, and asked if they would like it changed. But the editor said absolutely not to change a single thing, that they were “chuffed” to publish a neologism, and that it was in fact a “cracking piece.” I still remember those words. A cracking piece!

When I perused the press release for Francesco Fusaro’s Clavicentrico, I had to do a double-take. Clavicentrico? It’s not a word I come across often, never, and I thought it might just be a mighty coincidence. But I scrolled down and noted a hefty quote pulled from my 2018 book, Mad Skills, and realized that my concept of claviocentrism had inspired Fusaro not only to compose a touching cycle of “non-virtuosic” piano music, but also to give Claviocentrism an Italian twist.

When you do things, especially when you do things out of desperation, you can never be sure what kind of impact those things will have. When you write a book, or make an album, or paint a picture, or dance a jig, you can never possibly imagine how that book or album or picture or jig will change the world. Probably it won’t. But maybe it will, and probably is not a reason to not try.

Black Ox Orkestar, Museum of Jewish Montreal, 14 December 2022

It is wonderful to have a piano in the kitchen. The kitchen is usually the room in the house where people spend most of their time, and tend to have the best times, over food and family, fellowship and fun. At every party, I always end up in the kitchen.

Pianos, though, are most often relegated far away to the music room or the study, or worse, they become just another piece of furniture in the living room, covered in framed family photos and all manner of other kitschy trinkets.

But the piano, if you are fortunate enough to possess one of these magical instruments in working order, should be kept, I believe, in the home’s most central location. So that anyone, at any time, can start to play it and immediately turn the moment musical.

Pale Ribbons Tossed into the Dark, Fable Guide, Pale Ribbons Tossed into the Dark (Self-released)

The social position of the flâneur was desirable in the 19th century, a person to emulate, the free-floating subject nonetheless un-subjected to the city’s confines of work and family, not institutionalized by institutions, nor hospitals, universities, corporations, prisons, or other such operational enclosures.

Today, the flâneur that is truly untethered from those enclosures is a terrible zombie wandering dazed and spreading capital virally through the confines of hyper-capitalism, a superstructural biodome surrounding the other operational structures that more traditionally enclosed and still enclose, separate, and subjugate subjects.

Even in domestic spaces and other private, seemingly “free” zones, more often the internet nowadays encloses us, and various platforms and subnetworks divide and subdivide that virtual enclosure into smaller and smaller virtual rooms that ultimately reveal our abject isolation in a post-industrial meatspace. Any collective being, even industrial, is no longer necessary.

The contemporary flâneur is either crazy or an exploitative object vis-à-vis subjectivity; that is, capital liberates their subjecthood, thus they subject others using capital in commercial and service environments to their flâneuristic whims. We are all always either working or making others work. There is no leisure today without exploitation. And the guilt, “onboarded” — to use a terrible bro-culture buzzword — from a Christian social order that no longer exists or applies or is even suitable to our quotidian realities still subliminally dictates that leisure is wasteful, sinful, even to a Godless economic society that only idolizes productivity.

La fête du clavecin Kirckman, Chapelle historique du Bon-Pasteur, 15 December 2022

One of the things I love about Montreal is that events like this take place: a concert of a 250-year-old harpsichord in an historic chapel, and it’s free. Were the proceedings entirely in French? Oui. And was I the youngest, Anglo-est person there? Oui encore. But did that matter? Mais non.

Halfway through the performance, however, I started imagining that, to audiences 250 years ago, a harpsichord might have seemed like cheating, like a facile way to emulate the virtuosity of a real harp. Harpsichords, although they utilize the same form of 12-tone keyboard as their piano cousins, are different instruments.

For instance, pianos strike their strings with hammers, meaning that the harder a player hits the key, the harder the hammer strikes the string, and the louder the note sounds. Harpsichords conversely pluck their strings with plectra, a piece of stiff leather similar to a guitar pick. So, when a note is played, the plectrum plucks the string with equal intensity regardless of how hard the player hits the key. This gives the instrument an unsettling on-off sound that we 21st century listeners are not accustomed to hearing. It is more like a music box absentmindedly clanging out a tune. The note is either sounding or silent. It is actually very binary, not unlike early MIDI.

MIDI, or the musical instrument digital interface, is a standard computer “language” that makes it possible for digital instruments of different manufacturers to communicate with one another. MIDI is what allows, say, one central sequencer to control an array of peripheral equipment like synthesizers, samplers, effects processors, mixing boards — even lights and smoke machines. In the digital music studio, it is impossible to overstate the importance of using one common language.

Sarah Pagé, Méduses, Voda (Backward Music)

What is the ultimate experience? What experience could you experience that would put an end to the longing for more experiences? How would you know it was the ultimate it?◼︎

@nichemtl

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