The album, subtle and sensitive as it is, thrives on changes of pace and texture, yet works as a unified, flowing entity – originally forty-eight minutes, pared down by de Wardener to an essential thirty-four.
The challenging detunings were carried out with great skill, often attended to between takes, by Laurence Fischer.
Pianos were variously detuned to take in unconventional tuning systems used by La Monte Young, Harry Partch and Tenney, and the final recordings involved overdubbings and subtle insinuations of synthesiser and tape delays to create additional spatial dimensions.
#DETUNE MUSIC SERIES#
The premise was to work with detuned pianos, with retunings based on harmonic series tuned to naturally occurring overtones, inspired by James Tenney’s intensely textured pianola work dedicated to Conlon Nancarrow, and to complement these with live, acoustic, one-take pieces with ‘normally tuned pianos’ (known as Equal Temperament). The project took up four years with the recording spanning two years in a range of studio locations. This is their first collaboration and de Wardener, in our conversation about the album, described Downes as having ‘super open ears’ and ‘the sense of pulse that jazz musicians have … with a brilliant sense of time and touch and the ability to make not sound like notated music.’ Downes, an organ scholar, had worked with detuned organ so was no stranger to de Wardener’s ideas. For this piano-focussed project with a difference, he identified Kit Downes as the keyboard played with the corresponding breadth of vision to interpret and perform the ten pieces that make up the album. Max de Wardener is an established composer and musician with a broad palette spanning contemporary classical through to jazz and electronica.
#DETUNE MUSIC WINDOWS#
This thoughtful, meditative, reflective and introspective collection of compositions is rooted in some of contemporary music’s most complex and sophisticated structural systems, yet these are windows to atmospheres and statements which make it a record to soak up, to bathe in a balm, but a balm with a cutting edge. Music for Detuned Pianos is deceptively simple. (Village Green: vinyl VGLP063, CD VGCD063. Max de Wardener, Music for Detuned Pianos, performed by Kit Downes
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