“Music is one part of theatre. ‘Focus’ represents the aspects that one is noticing. Theatre is all the various things going on at the same time. I have noticed that music is liveliest for me when listening doesn’t distract me from seeing.” (John Cage, Silence, 1961)
A grand piano awaits its performer. Everything is ready for the recital. The pianist enters, greets the audience, and approaches the instrument. But before playing, before sitting down at the keyboard, before striking the first chord, she must examine the piano, study the intricacies of its mechanics, follow the line from finger to string, the energy that one body imparts to another, and discover which other body — imaginary, sonorous before being musical — emerges from this performance that must be repeated night after night. He will have to open it up, plunge his hands inside, play it differently, forget the keys, pluck the strings directly, add accessories and devices, mutate it, stage and sound the monster behind the king. For, before being an instrument, the piano is a machine that reverberates and amplifies gesture, transmits and transforms, gallops and thunders as much as it whispers and chirps. A machine for training unruly bodies: spreading fingers, curving the arches, strengthening muscles, training postures. Less an instrument than a complex and shifting set of norms and expectations, orders and fantasies, constraints and desires.
This is the story told by Une oreille seule n’est pas un être (An Ear Alone Is Not a Being): that of the piano as a body and an imaginary construct, how it materialised a specific musical order (the temperament) and survived its collapse, how it was constantly demoted and reinvented, augmented to the point of becoming unrecognizable (electric, then electronic), but ever present and ever a shaping agent of a repertoire that continues to haunt our world.
On stage, at the piano, the pianist remembers: the intense emotion she felt when she first heard the Concerto on her parents’ small stereo system, the desire that gradually took shape to enter into this music, to be part of this unknown world, to produce these sounds, to hear the orchestra wash over her and stand up to it. Then she remembers what she had to learn, and not just learn, but incorporate—gestures, postures, fingerings—in order to achieve this, to earn the right to play and be listened to. She remembers this training. She wants to play, but something prevents her: sounds that seem to come from the piano, emanating from its very body, as if it were playing on its own from its secret depths. As if it were trying to remember that old concerto and could only manage to make its ghost heard. Less the music than its traces, oxidised by time and memory.
After the performer, it is the piano’s turn to tell its story, to be the topic of its own sonic discourse. But it is not alone. Through the piano, or behind it, we hear other voices: that of a composer introducing all kinds of objects into its body before writing a piece that will transform our ears as much as the instrument itself; that of an instrument maker who manages to alter the workings of its inner machinery to significantly increase its sound palette, but finding no appreciation; and that of a pianist in search of the right tone, who tunes it out of equal temperament to deliberately play an ill-tempered keyboard.
A piano can only be what it is – a musical instrument – within a complex and evolving ecosystem made up of performers and composers, tuners and manufacturers, record labels and concert halls, music lovers and critics with varying degrees of tolerance, festivals and publishers, agents and sound engineers, and so on. Without this whole world, whose boundaries are uncertain and which includes as many humans as it does objects, media, places, and technical inventions, there would be no piano as we have known it since the second half of the 18th century. If the piano had remained alone, it would have ended up in the museum of forgotten instruments, those that failed to capture the attention of composers, the desire of performers, the interest of manufacturers, and the taste of the public. This show (also) tells the story of this ecosystem.
Bastien Gallet
