Gordon Monahan

1998 release ** "This Piano Thing is, in some ways, an answer to questions and problems raised by my composition Piano Mechanics . These problems deal both with an evolution of piano technique and a redefinition of the piano as a machine for the ‘synthesis’ of ‘new’ sounds. When Piano Mechanics is performed live in concert, the unusual acoustical effects emerging from a solo unamplified and unaltered piano form an impression to the audience that some trickery is taking place. In almost every performance of this piece, I have had audience members approach me after the concert to see what processing equipment I was using, or to look for the preparations inside the piano. Of course, no such equipment or preparations existed for this piece. This gave me the idea to compose a piece for the antithesis of this perceptual innuendo: a piece for amplified prepared piano, This Piano Thing. In This Piano Thing, seventy-three notes of the piano are prepared using materials of the traditional preparation repertoire: bolts, screws, broken chopsticks, rubber, weather-stripping, and vibrating nuts and washers. In some instances, medium-size (0.5 cm x 6.0 cm) eyebolts are placed in the strings of adjacent whole tones so that their ‘eyes’ are barely touching. When either of these whole-tone notes are sounded, a sustained jingling takes place, creating a kind of multi-level mechanical reverb-feedback system, in that a string attack induces further attacks between the eyebolts with the resulting sustained sounds feeding back through the strings to the soundboard. "