Marc Berghaus When confronted with a grand piano in the gallery, what is a sculptor to do? Upon first inspection of this gallery, it seemed a definite interruption in the flow of the space, to say the least; an interference with the presentation of the sculptures I had intended to bring. I knew there had to be a solution to this problem, and it didn’t take me long to reach it. I decided to build a portion of a specific show that I have been wanting to present for a long time, but always thought that it would be years from now before I would be able to do so. Nearly all of my work in both sculpture and photography is concerned with one goal- investigating the interactions between chance, nature, and spirituality, as well as humanity’s relationships to all three. I have recently been wanting to extend these investigations and relate these ideas into the medium of music, and sound in general. This show is a small first step. I was told that the piano is available to gallery visitors, and students and faculty frequently come in and play it to relax. The intention behind this show is to allow people so inclined to use this piano to try to interpret the pieces in the show as well as viewing them as visual objects. They are, after all, musical scores, and their purpose is to be performed. (The one exception is Randomized Red Piano, a sound sculpture in which the mechanism playing the toy piano’s keys makes it nearly impossible to predict which little note will be played next, or when it will come.) The show is titled Variable Scores because, in keeping with my interest in complexity and unpredictability, it is very difficult to get the same results twice when playing these pieces. I have used several different means to achieve this. The first is to simply use either mechanical or organic means to disrupt the notes that the musician must read. Blue Note and Kinetic Solo #3 for Piano both do this: Blue Note contains a live fish swimming behind staff lines, the “note” in constant motion, while in Kinetic Solo #3, fields of notes shift in front of music paper, their motors all timed so that the groups of notes rarely line up in the same way twice. In both of these pieces, most of the products of these motions, if played, will be random, pointless noise, but after a long enough time in constant motion, there are bound to eventually be brief moments of interesting combinations, even beauty. If you put enough monkeys in front of enough typewriters for a long enough period of time... as the saying goes. The question is, will anybody be in the room, at the piano, with knowledge enough to capture it before it disappears again? The other means I am interested in exploring involves the use of three dimensions in musical notation. These sculptures are, really, more experiments in musical notation than in the nature of music itself. The basic idea behind these pieces is to introduce the third dimension, depth, as an additional quality to those two used in conventional notation: left-right for time, and verticality for pitch. Depth can be used to indicate volume, for example, by placing the notes toward the front of the piece for increased volume, to the rear for quieter notes. Or, depth can delineate the boundaries of a musical space-- as one travels through it left to right, for instance, the depth can indicate stereoscopic space as if we were in the piece itself. This is what happens in Quartet for Piano and 3 Cellos and Spherical Solo #1. The brass rods represent constant yet changing sounds moving through the space, the copper or onyx beads individual notes suspended there. By giving only general performance instructions that allow the musicians to interpret these pieces in many ways, I have injected uncertainty into them as well- it is unlikely that any performances would sound at all identical, although they would all have certain similarities. Spherical Solo #3 takes a different approach to using a third dimension. It simply uses certain properties of the sphere, namely that all points on its surface are equidistant from the center, and are of equal value if there are no axes, equators, or lines of longitude and latitude, and contrasts these qualities to those of a normal sheet of music paper, with a definite beginning, middle and end. The piece can begin anywhere on the sphere, and end anywhere, and can be of any duration. Playing around and through the hexagons that divide its surface (all being of equal value), there are nearly, but not quite, infinite ways of playing this piece. It is precisely notated, but the performer makes decisions at every note, and there are so many possibilities that the chances of it being repeated exactly are slim. I do have ideas for future projects that use actual sounds, either recorded or site-installed, to further look into these areas that interest me, but as I said, I think these pieces are a nice place to begin. There will be more, and my eventual goal is to have some of them performed. I have always viewed music and visual art to be very closely linked, hence a sculptural approach to composing music! I hope you enjoy the show. |
