Strumming Music by 9 Horses

Pay what you want, or download free. Then go to https://9horses.bandcamp.com/album/strum and get STRUM.

In 1973 Palestine was commissioned to write a piece for the founders of the French label Shandar. Shandar had released music by the likes of Glass, Reich, Riley and La Monte Young, but also by Stockhausen and avant garde jazz artists. The perfect place, then, for Palestine’s eccentric brand of contemporary composition. The recording was released as an album the following year – the same year that La Monte Young premièred The Well-Tuned Piano, another classic work of minimalist piano composition. Instead of using a repetitive playing style, however, Young’s piece uses a piano tuned in just intonation – a kind of tuning that uses whole number ratios to determine the intervals between the notes – to achieve a similarly strange, overtone-rich effect.

Strumming Music opens with a plaintive pentatonic chord progression, before an insistent two-note motif of E and B sets up a rhythm that will persist throughout the piece’s duration. Slowly, gently, more notes enter the fray, as singing overtones flicker over the sounds of the struck piano strings. Very quickly, it becomes difficult to discern which notes are being played by the pianist and which are merely resonances being made within the body of the Bösendorfer Imperial piano that Palestine insisted on using for the piece. Regarded by some as the “Rolls Royce” of pianos, the Bösendorfer’s combination of thick strings and a relatively lightweight body makes the sound project outwards toward the listener and the concert hall rather than back toward the player. It is also one of the loudest grand pianos in the world, and Palestine has been known to cut short performances (2 hours into a 4-hour performance, on one occasion) because the resonant potential of the Steinways he was furnished with just didn’t match up to his beloved Bösendorfer.

As the piece progresses, Palestine introduces increasingly dense chords, which only adds to the heady effect of the swirling harmonics, amounting to something not unlike a phaser effect that one hears in popular music. Minute flickers of tones seem to bounce off each other – are they really sounded notes or just aural hallucinations? If you give this piece your full attention, you will see why Palestine loathes the minimalist tag, preferring instead to think of himself as a “maximalist." He explodes the potential of the piano using the most basic of techniques, maximizing the instrument’s capabilities without resorting to modified “prepared piano” techniques.

Following the release of Strumming Music as an album in 1974, Palestine fell relatively silent as a composer, instead choosing to focus on visual art and filmmaking. In the intervening years, Strumming Music was adapted by both Betsy Freeman, who performed the piece on harpsichord in 1977, and the composer John Adams, who adapted the piece for string quartet (also in 1977).

from 'Piano Maximalism: Charlemagne Palestine’s Strumming Music' by Danny Riley

9 Horses is Joe Brent on acoustic and electric mandolin, Sara Caswell on violin and Hardanger d'amore, and Andrew Ryan on bass.

josephbrent.com
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