Proving ground of OCD freaks and geeks, masochists, hermits and megalomaniacs for centuries, the grand piano is a bastion of convention. The instrument has also, of course, attracted iconoclasts of all stripes: Rebels and dreamers like Cecil Taylor or Conlon Nancarrow or John Cage, desperate to discover some way to get the clunky, rumbling music box to sing or wail.
Two performers who embody piano
extremes will visit Santa Fe this week. Peter Nero is a master of the traditional
keyboard, the "outside" of the instrument. Stephen Scott's Bowed Piano
***image1***
Ensemble, in which 10 performers, arrayed around the sound case of the instrument, masters the "inside" of the piano. Nero has behaved himself and stayed where he belongs, fingers on the keys. Sixty-seven albums, 55 years of staying power, two Grammy awards and performances for every US president since 1961 bespeak Nero's accessibility. Oscar Wilde may or may not have been either serious or correct when he said, "Everything popular is wrong," but Mr. Nero doesn't care.
Nero grew up with the piano, immersed in classical training. In a recent interview with SFR he said, "I was not encouraged to play my own notes, so to speak. Classical training was rigid and formal in those days. I was taught the typical stiff-wristed, high-fingered approach. At 17 I started studying with a husband and wife couple, Abram Chasins and Constance Keene, who were more open to improvisation. They encouraged complete relaxation at the keyboard." Nero's early recital in a contest with Valdimir Horowitz, Arthur Rubenstein and Rudolph Serkin as judges (Nero won) got him started on a round of television show appearances. By this time Nero had been "messing around on the side," as he puts it, playing fox trots and cha-cha's in dance bands and listening to George Shearing and Oscar Peterson. "When I heard Art Tatum, though, I finally got it. I wanted to create a synthesis of my classical background with this new jazz form." His technical virtuosity combined with his expanding improvisational vocabulary landed him a gig playing intermission piano at the Hickory House on 52nd Street in New York, opposite luminaries Billy Taylor and Marian McPartland.
In the intervening decades Nero has crafted a career melding his classical, pop and jazz backgrounds into music that has remained inventive, while steering clear of the upheavals in jazz. "At one time I loved Cecil Taylor because he crossed the idioms of classical and jazz. In response to Thelonious Monk I was very open-minded. I didn't want to play that way but I was fascinated by the freedom. But when jazz became angry it lost so much of its appeal. The music of protest is one-dimensional. A self-indulgent attitude crept in, musicians making music only for themselves." Nero explains his approach to performing: "We are up there to communicate with an audience. To stay inventive and keep our integrity, but to communicate." His sense of humor intact, Nero sits squarely in the mainstream, applying his prodigious skills to long-established musical tradition.
Stephen Scott is squarely in a tradition as well: the strange American tradition of artists who spend decades laboring in relative obscurity, creating something entirely unique. Like Harry Partch, Charles Ives or Terry Riley, Scott looked at convention (the piano) and saw opportunity (the harp inside). That was 1977. In the
***image2***
ensuing 29 years, Scott's Bowed Piano Ensemble has made music directly on the piano strings using nylon bows, a variety of mallets, guitar picks and rigid bows made of tongue depressors with horsehair. Scott says, "We rehearse for hours to make it work smoothly and look choreographed. The logistics of 10 performers playing the inside of a single piano is like a string quartet, with two of the members sitting in the laps of the other two players." The Bowed Piano Ensemble, with soprano Victoria Hansen, will perform Scott's composition,
The Deep Spaces
. "It's what you might call a 'polymodal' piece, although it has elements of traditional functional harmony. I've also used more and more chromaticism in my compositions over the years." Scott, who also had an early jazz background and teaches a Miles Davis course every year in his capacity of professor at Colorado College, continues to find inspiration in his unique medium. He says, "The resonance and the tonality is not replicable digitally or in any other way. It's intoxicating."
Whether you like your piano outside in or inside out, this is a banner week. As Scott said when he was told that Peter Nero was in Santa Fe the same week as his ensemble, "I love Peter Nero. That's great. If anyone is deeply offended by what we do they can go to his show a few days later to get over it."
