What is the old tiny piano called full#
What is the old tiny piano called series#

Before 1948, the history of musical resources looks like a more or less uninterrupted crescendo:ДЇrom the diatonic scale to the chromatic to the quarter-tone scale to the 43-tone scale of Harry Partch ДЇrom simple consonances to seventh and ninth chords to unresolved dissonances to thick tone clusters to noises.ДЇrom the unaccompanied choir to the classical orchestra to the romantic orchestra with a large brass section to the modern orchestra with its array of percussion to the expansion of these means via recorded sounds. One of the most electric performances I've ever seen was a 1988 piece called Click by Mary Ellen Childs which consisted of three performers using only two wood blocks each, tapping them against each other's in intricate patterns with the inventive logic and lightning speed of a Warner Brothers cartoon.ДЇrom one viewpoint, this interest in self-limitation seems like a historical aberration. John Luther Adams has written many pieces using only the C major scale, up to his 75-minute, 1998 orchestra piece In the White Silence. Carl Stone made his 15-minute electronic piece Shing Kee from a few seconds sampled from a Schubert recording. This environmentalism continues to have many adherents. Theodor Adorno once referred to the attitude of Richard Strauss in his tone poems as that of 'the grand industrialist who knows that his resources are endless.' The 1960s, though, gave birth to a musical environmentalism that rejected the industrialist attitude in favor of a more cautious husbanding of resources.

What is the old tiny piano called series#

Jonathan Kramer, a reformed 12-tone composer who would later teach at Columbia, wrote a series of works limited in pitch, using only five pitches in his Moving Music for 13 clarinets, six pitches in Music for Piano Number 5, and an uninflected E-minor scale for his orchestra piece Moments in and Out of Time. In 1975, still in college, I, like Cage, wrote a piece using only the 'white' notes, no sharps or flats. Three years later, Philip Glass produced Music in Fifths using only seven pitches, five in each hand with three overlaps. Those may have been isolated experiments, but in 1960 La Monte Young wrote a piece using two pitches: B and F#, 'to be held for a long time.' In 1966 Steve Reich wrote Piano Phase using five pitches. European works on one pitch were written by Witold Lutoslawski and Giacinto Scelsi. Soon afterward, however, the idea of pitch limitation was in the air: In 1950, Elliott Carter employed extreme pitch limitations in his Eight Etudes and a Fantasy, using only a D Major triad in the Third Etude and only the pitch G in the Seventh. Clearly, not many at that moment shared Cage's dubious view of the big things of society. The same year in which the Suite for Toy Piano was written saw the composition of one of the largest symphonies ever, Olivier Messiaen's Turangalila, written in ten movements for orchestra expanded by a large percussion section, solo piano and Ondes martenot.

What is the old tiny piano called full#

In a survey of the symphony I once prepared, I found more symphonies written by well-known composers in 1946, the year after the war ended, than any other year since the 18th century, most of them big, noisy works using the orchestra's full potential for brass and percussion. At that time he was writing mostly quiet works, because, as he later explained, 'I didn't think there was any good in anything big in society.'Д¬age's willingness to limit himself to white keys was strikingly dissident in a noisy, patriotic decade which produced perhaps more symphonies than any other decade before or since. His instrument was only two octaves wide and contained only white keys. In 1948 John Cage wrote a Suite for Toy Piano. Keynote Address for The Extensible Toy PianoДelivered at Clark University in Worcester, Massachussetts, November 5.