Scrapheap, for Piano

Duration: 12:00
Completed: 2004
Instrumentation: Solo Piano
Dedication: To Maria Cayetana of Alba, and Erin Bonski

Program Notes

The piano mastered me, while I tried to master it. I began to learn the piano early on, but little did I know that the piano had already begun its assault on me. Those teachers made Chopin and Mozart of a piece with their stolid country town, a stolid circus music of scales and how-clean-were-the-scales. Scales allow a piece to be stolidly judged, you place your hand in the scales and they weigh you and stolidly judge you. I was writing an orchestral piece and then I was asked to write a piano piece and thought how hard can it be, although in reality it would turn out to be impossible, how hard can it be when I began writing the piano piece, but the piano was by no means tacit in this process, it continued its assault, it continued to throw notes at me. I was trying to write a song, to provide a little human expression, and the piano provided notes and scales. More than any other so called musical instrument, the piano plays notes. You try to sing at the piano and it only throws up notes, and of course consequently nothing can be written at the piano other than terrible note music (which is not music at all), note music overwrites what you try to write at the piano. I try to sing at the piano, and the piano only throws up notes. You think how hard can it be, and you find at the end of your labors that you have written nothing but intolerable note music and stolid scales. Just to depress one key and set the huge machine of the piano in motion, to set the action in motion that would eventually, in the distance, cause a hammer to strike the strings, was torture, it is torture to cause the piano to strike the strings. To write an entire composition made up of this cruel string striking? Impossible, but how hard can it be I had thought, when actually even one note was torture, and I would have to depress the key many times in order to write this work when the key would depress me- I said that the piano is a so called musical instrument, but this is not true, the piano is not a so called musical instrument, but rather is only a coffin for music with each string laid out in state. You think that you are going to a concert and then you see a coffin for music and wince because you unexpectedly have found yourself at a funeral. How cruel and shocking that you thought you were attending a concert whereas actually you all along were going to a funeral, and not just any funeral, but a funeral in which you would witness the strings laid out in state and being struck. You mourn the music but you are constantly shocked by this grievous string striking, this torturing of music. What is this? Is this a composition? Should this be played? Impossible- to say that it is played is a joke. I thought I would play the piano, but the piano played me. To say that this is a composition is a lie. It should contain a little human expression, but in reality it is just notes.