Wednesday, February 26, 2003

With a piano, and really only a handful of notes, and a handful of highly predictable, mapped out notes that don't play well together, you have a pretty darn good chance, just statistically, of putting something together than sounds pretty good, whether  single chord, or speaking over a limit that approaches infinity, an entire symphony. I imagine what a perfectly played chord even of notes that stretched over eons, not just octaves, would sound like, what must be a perfecty syzygy of so many different factors at work that our math can't even begin to comprehend such a phenomenon, let alone a sonatina even. I noticed on the piano tonight how there is even an option in hitting a key that makes it possible to strike with much speed and precision but, at the last moment, eliminate that particular note, or dampen it such that it brings the other notes in the chord into a harmony beyond. Or just do cool things by precisely controlling the volume of each note struck in a chord, what I imagine might be like bending a note on the harmonica. Imagine what it might sound like if an eighty-eight fingered pianist sat down and played a PIANO chord. The whole thing. I wonder if the ultra-multi-numerary artist could make the whole chord disappear simply by controlling the volume of each note. Or make it vibrate the planets. Imagine what that might be like with a million note piano. Or otherworldly equivalent. Wow. Makes me vibrate just thinking about it. The piano also teaches that sometimes the chords that sound so awful together, work sandwiched between. You can't really determine the beauty of a single measure until you've played the next measure. Maybe beyond. But that's a tricky measure. There is some absolute aesthetic, I think, that allows us, at least, to decide the difference between the pleasing and noxious for ourselves, without waiting it out, chasing the fractal to its never-end. Maybe you're richer and enlightened and probably turned into energy of the next chord if you can follow out a single or an infinity of notes to the very end which is the beginning, but as my friend Caitlin says, Jesus didn't have any friends. I think it's okay to say enough. To say your "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?" In life and love as well as art. Even Jesus did in the end. And the piano also teaches that something of our aesthetic depends on what we agree to, our own ears consensualized that this is a pleasing color, this is a pleasing sound, in what is not the case, not the colors, almost literally, for everyone. What if the music we listen to really is just in gray, except for those among us tuned to that particular hue and/or value of sound? You could figure out so many ways to make keys, even with the limited palette of a piano's eighty-eight notes. Especially if you could bend notes by controlling the strike of each note in  chord, as discussed earlier. Like doing extensions and adaptations of logarithms. It's all ratios. I can't even remember what anymore. Makes a key in piano. I generally play in B when I'm improvising though. I remember that. And could extrapolate, knowing what is in each key that makes it sound like the key I've accepted as key. Whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half. I guess that's why we have minor and major keys, but it's all within that eight note schema. Statistically, there is probably at least one person in the world who would have fallen in ecstasy with the piano as it sounded when it first arrived. That that piano would be like the singing of angels to. Maybe so attuned to that particular "out of tune" that that was the only music he or she ever hears. I so love having a piano back in my life. Especially one I can actually watch strike strings while  I play. I wonder if someone designed a piano so that the force of the key striking the lever that hits the hammer that hits the string. Why she hit that string, I'll never know why. I guess she'll die. was so elevated, and fed into a piano cabinet using Bose acoustic principles, you could get some really good sound happening. I have a good piano, a playable piano, at a decent price, but I'm already anxious, right now, to get it restored, or save up enough money for some crazy expensive Steinway, smoooofff like buttah. Playing on the Church of the Nativity's piano has spoiled me, even the full upright I grew up playing. But then again, I couldn't watch the action, literally, with the upright.      1:08:31 AM