OUGD505 - SB01 - Piano Research

OUGD505

SB01

Research

The Development of the Piano (Yale University Lecture)

Mozart was the first composer to switch from the harpsichord over to the piano.

Harpsichord

The harpsichord was the primary instrument of the Baroque period, 1600 to 1750. Baroque music is often described as tingling or jangling. 

Mozart (between 1770 - 1780) preferred the piano because the harpsichord lacked dynamics. It only had one dynamic level. (dynamic levels refers to relative loudness) At this time people started to switch across to an instrument that was known at that time as the Pianoforte. In musical dynamic terms terms piano means soft and forte means loud. This instrument allowed for gradations of sound. 
The Pianoforte was invented in Florence around 1700 by a man called  Bartolomeo Cristofori. It took around 50 years for this instrument to catch on and replace the Harpsichord. 

Mozart came from Salzburg, Austria. He was an employee of the Archbishop of Salzburg. He was a composer who worked at the piano, and so was his friend and contemporary Joseph Haydn. It was said that Mozart would do most of his composing in bed, he didnt need a piano as he heard the music in his head.

In 1781 he establishes himself as a freelance musician in the city of Vienna. He made a living by giving piano lessons to the aristocracy and play the piano to the public. By doing this he contributed greatly to both Piano Sonata and the Piano Concerto (he wrote 23 original Piano Concertos.) 

Mozarts piano only had one string per key (usually there would be 3) and was tuned down by half a step. At this time tuning changed a lot until the 20th century when it was fixed that A should be 440 vibration per second. His piano sounded shallow, there was not a great resonance and the sound dissipates very quickly.

Mozart dies in 1791.

Beethoven had been originally sent to Vienna to study with Mozart, but there were family problems. Beethoven was also a pianist, but unfortunately his teacher was his father. He told people that Beethoven was actually two years younger than he actually was, because he wanted him to be the next 'wunderkind',  the next child prodigy in order to make money. Eventually Beethoven moved to Vienna around 1797. In Vienna he impressed the aristocracy with the power of his play, the aggressive nature of it and the physicality of it. It was much more technical than Mozart had ever created.

Beethoven piano had two strings per key. His work often sounded out if tune because of this as it is very difficult to have two strings exactly in tune. Beethoven wrote 32 Piano Sonatas and five Piano concertos, the most famous of these is the Emperor Concerto. When performing, Beethoven struggled and his contemporaries described him as messy. This was because he was going deaf. 

Later Instruments:

The Graf Piano 

Conrad Graf

This piano is bigger than its predecessors. As it gets bigger, a bigger soundboard is needed. This is the main resonator. More tension is needed in the strings so they are not broken or come loose. An iron support is needed. Eventually the sound board rested in cast iron. A pin block is needed, this is where the pins that anchor the strings are. All of these things allow for a bigger, more powerful instrument. 

Franz Schubert played a Graf Piano

Franz Liszt played an Erard piano


Musical Impressionism

A period in the history of music running from1880 to 1920 (Mostly a French phenomenon) 
Clair de Lune
Style: Unexpected chords, new chords, often uses augmented triads. Chromatic approach to melody, doesn't have much structure.
'Mood paintings' Debussy's description of The Afternoon of a Faun (Inspired by Mallarme's poem)
Mallarmw's response to Debussy's piece: 'The music prolongs the emotion of my poem and paints its scenery more passionately than colour could.' Music as painting 

The Frog Pond by Monet, the brush work is made up of individual gestures. Same in music, a chord could be played very rapidly, you wouldn't hear the individual notes but get a wash of sound. 

La Cathedrale Engloutie (The sunken Cathedral), Monet pained the Cathedral over and over again. Debussy constructed a musical equivelent.

Traditional western musicians always tie line to colour. 


Triads

A chord is any combination of three or more pitch classes that sound simultaneously. A three note chord whose pitch classes can be arranged as thirds id called a triad. To determine whether a three not chord is a triad, arrange the three notes on the 'circle of thirds'. The pitch classes of a triad will always sit next to each other. There are 4 triads: Major, Minor, Diminished and Augmented.

Modernism

New approach to rhythm, highly irregular rhythms. New approach to orchestration. The moment the constitutes the begining of modernism: Stravinsky's Ballet Score for The Rite of Spring. 


The Structure of the Piano

Structure

Sound Producing Mechanism

Schematic Rendering of a Grand Piano

When a key is pressed, a hammer inside the piano strikes the strings from below. However, this only produces a soft sound.
One end of the strings is supported on bridges, which are attached to the soundboard. The vibrations of the strings are transmitted to the soundboard through the bridges, and a loud sound resonates as a result of the soundboard vibrating the air. The entire piano, notably the soundboard, vibrates to produce sound.

The mechanism of the piano that causes hammers to strike the strings when a key is pressed is called the "action." his mechanism allows the pianist to quickly repeat a note without having to fully release the key. Up until the introduction of this mechanism, when a key was depressed, the hammer usually rose and struck the string and was not ready for the next keystroke, until it had fallen back to its at-rest position.

The damper mechanism is another important part of the action. This mechanism quiets the sound instantly as soon as the finger is lifted from the key.

A piano keyboard has 88 keys. The number of strings depends on the model, but is usually around 230. For the tenor and treble notes, three strings are strung for each key, and for bass notes, the number of strings per note decreases from three, to two, and then to one as you approach the lowest bass notes.
In addition, the strings become shorter in length going from low-pitched notes to high. The thickness of the string changes in steps, and the higher the pitch of the note, the thinner the string. Strings for bass notes are wound with copper wire, while strings for tenor and treble notes use bare wire and are not wound.

Colour and Music
here are many theories about the relationship and translation from colour to sound. The most widely accepted theory seems to be from Newton's Colour Circle from his book from Opticks of 1704, showing the colours correlated with musical notes. 
Around 1665, when Isaac Newton first passed white light through a prism and watched it fan out into a rainbow, he identified seven constituent colours—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet—not necessarily because that’s how many hues he saw, but because he thought that the colours of the rainbow were analogous to the notes of the musical scale. Naming seven colours to correspond to seven notes. 

Newtons colour circle

Musical Notes - Colour Correspondence 

Synesthesia

The word synesthesia comes from the Greek words syn meaning together, and aesthesis meaning perception. Synesthesia literally means cross-sensing, one of the senses being triggered by another sense. A synesthete might hear colours, taste sounds, see smells or any combination of the senses. Females and left-handed people are typically synthetic. Ratios of women to men synesthetes have been reported at 3/1 and even as high as 8/1. A typical feature of synesthesia is that the particular sensations, the colour blue associated the pitch C, are consistently experienced. 

Synesthesia has been known to medicine for 300 years. Traditional ideas about the experience have consisted of a ‘crossed-wire’ explanation. Somehow the sensory information is switching to a new channel and showing up in a different sense. Many studies are underway today and much information has been gathered about synesthesia. Richard Cytowic diagnoses five characteristics of synesthesia on his article Synesthesia: Phenomenology and Neuropsychology. The five characteristics are 1) involuntary experience 2) projection of sensations 3) sensations are durable and generic 4) sensations are memorable 5) sensations are emotional and poetic.

Hearing colours is quite a common experience among synesthetes. The perceptions of colours associated with particular sounds has been found to be consistent among individuals but not between individuals but no common set of colour and sound associations exist between individual synesthetes. Synesthesia is a personal experience and the details of the perceptions are completely subjective. 



Crit Feedback
Idea to create an instillation based on the relationship between colour and music by giving each not a specific colour.

Response
Relises on things that already exist
Develop own system
Consider the qualities of music, memories and emotive
Look at the work of Kandinsky 



Kandinsky 
The idea of music appears everywhere in Kandinsky's paintings. He believed shades resonated with each other to produce visual 'chords' and had an influence on the soul. Music - and the idea of music - appears everywhere in Kandinsky's work. Take his generic titles: Compositions, Improvisations, and Impressions. His mighty 10 compositions were created over more than three decades from Composition l in 1907 to Composition X in 1939. 
To support his colour theories, Kandinsky appealed in his manifesto to the evidence of synaesthesia, the scientific name for the condition in which the senses are confused with one another 

"Our hearing of colours is so precise ... Colour is a means of exerting a direct influence upon the soul. Colour is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many strings. The artist is the hand that purposely sets the soul vibrating by means of this or that key. Thus it is clear that the harmony of colours can only be based upon the principle of purposefully touching the human soul."

Both Kandinsky and Schoenberg were seeking to create music dramas in which colour would be perceived on the same level as sound and action. And this before the invention of modern lighting.

Scriabin's Primetheus: Poem of Fire
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3B7uQ5K0IU

Description of music in the Great Gatsby

“The moon had risen a little higher, and floating in the Sound was a triangle of silver scales, trembling a little to the stiff, tinny drip of the banjoes on the lawn.”

“The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music…”