Electroacoustics, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Edgard Varèse…

A ferment of musical ideas swept Europe in the middle of the 20th century, inspiring young composers who rejected the conventions of earlier generations as well as what they viewed as rigid musical structures. These composers wished to explore harmonic potential and to shatter traditional means of relaying musical ideas. For them it was not enough to arrange notes on staff paper; for magnetic tape, non-traditional instruments, and electronics were enabling new forms of composition and performance that were less dependent upon the classic orchestra. Indeed, these composers sought a new definition of music itself, and in the process of challenging norms they helped to bring about a dramatically expanded era of musical creativity.

The book by Johannes Fux (1660-1741) that influenced composers from 1725 onward:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradus_ad_Parnassum

Examples of 20th century compositions that attempted to utilize new means and methods:

https://www.amazon.com/Boulez-Conducts-Zappa-Perfect-Stranger/dp/B0000009T9

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuDzS0EYixQ

 

 

Clockwork tunes give way to Musique concrète…

Eventually fascination with the player-piano gave way to more contemporary musical ideas and mechanisms.
The era of the parlor piano virtuoso was long since over, and although the masterpieces of “classical” and “romantic” composers dominated the repertoires of most major orchestras, as well as the majority of the recorded ‘symphonic’ music available in the latter half of the 20th century, new forms, new instruments, and radical ideas of composition had challenged norms and permanently altered the status quo.

In 1973 composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein initiated a lecture series at Harvard University. Although the context of his material was broad and encompassed much of almost three centuries of western musical canon , his primary focus was on the theme, “Whither Music?”. In order to guide his listeners on this pedagogic journey, Bernstein played the piano in addition to taped versions of musical works.  “Whither Music?” was an engaging six-part lecture series presented by a thoroughly knowledgeable professor, and yet it could hardly achieve more than prodding the listener to pursue the notion independently.  For while Bernstein taught and played, music was rapidly undergoing a transformation brought about as much by technology as by  generational rejections of staid forms and practices.

Not just an over-sized music box…

Punch paper coded rolls were interchangeable and thus provided a greater variety of music than, say, a music box which operated on a similar principle; however the player piano could also be played by a live performer. This allowed for greater variety still, and when the pianist was a young child, the results could be a startling and dramatic cacophony.

What a wonderful plaything for the nascent musician, who learned that the keys could be played not only with the fingers for which they were designed, but with teddy bears, toy vehicles,  fore-arms, elbows, noses and fore-heads.

Some background…

Bearded Crow grooving to his first exposure to keyboard under his aunt’s player piano.

The precision paper-punch style of music informed much of what later became “Jeff Jazz” and the music of Bearded Crow. For example:

https://www.beardedcrow.com/mp3s/Hot Foot.wav

Hot Foot , by Jeff Moylan, from Crow On The Keys (2015)
copyright 2015 moylanmedia.com

Back then it didn’t matter if the rolls contained music by Rachmaninoff, Wagner, Chopin or Joplin. Instead the attraction was the mechanism, something that could “read music” and play it back, as if it were some kind of musical-telegraph playing robot.  The composers were as far away in space as they were in time, and like the “player” of the player-piano, they were invisible.

Yet the ivory keys went down like dominoes- the ones on the left rolled like thunder while the ones on the right pealed like lightning. A window in the center of the piano gave access to the paper, a pale, passing perforated panel boldly scrolling a code known only to the ghost who plunged the foot pedals and depressed the keys.