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 RADOSŁAW NOWAKOWSKI prepared piano recorded on December 8 and 9, 2024 at home on Tascam DR-07X imagined, produced, designed, printed, bound by R.N.  (here you can listen)  (here you can purchase wav files) Not a long time ago I listened to a concerto for prepared piano. Surprisingly, it was more nostalgic than avant-garde. It took me to the room in the old tenement house where uncountable number of years ago I myself prepared my piano. In spite of teenager’s recklessness, which sometimes could be brutal, I neither tried to cut the instrument with a hand saw, nor set fire in its dark interior, nor threw stones in the strings, nor fixed metal objects to the felt hammers. I only put pieces of old newspapers under the dampers. Once. Maybe twice. I have never repeated this experiment. Nevertheless, it was enough to get those rasp, harsh, blurred sounds to hover above the abyss of oblivion. I wanted to describe this event, as well as what happened before and after it. I made an attempt, but the text told about something else, because it was telling not like it should be telling. So I again put scraps of paper in between felt dampers and strings. In the same huge, black upright piano, which has been with me always. Since I remember. My memory – my eternity. This time I didn’t take old newspapers, but the strips of plain paper, the edges of pages from my books which I had had to cut off as redundant, thus depriving them of possibility to narrate. Now they can splutter, groan, buzz, hum, tingle, drone, clatter, rustle full force. Whereof one cannot write, thereof one must play. |