Christian Wolff - For Piano I @pelodelperro

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For Piano I (1952)

Frederick Rzewski, piano

For Piano I was written for David Tudor with a view to his virtuosity, and first performed by him in February, 1952 in New York. The structure is made of sixteen segments of varying lengths and densities (number of notes in a given length), whose sequence, superposition and recurrence are determined by chance. The choice of notes (out of a total of nine), durations (total 13) and amplitudes (9), and their disposition within a segment were made by the composer. Only segments of zero density, i.e. silence, left no choice.

These limitations allowed a special freedom to the composing: the restrictions once made, the range of choices, though still immense, became particularly clear. The question of what to do next for how long, depending so much on idiosyncratic feeling, was settled in advance. The larger continuity of the piece formed itself, and its expressive content fell in with it. --Christian Wolff

Art by Jannis Kounellis

$Paul Hindemith - Slow Piece & Rondo Slow Piece & Rondo, for trautonium (Lost. Preserved in a reconstruction by Oskar Sala) (1935) I. Slow piece II. Rondo (2:39) Oskar Sala, trautonium The trautonium is a monophonic electronic musical instrument invented about 1929 by Friedrich Trautwein in Berlin at the Musikhochschules music and radio lab, the Rundfunkversuchstelle. Soon Oskar Sala joined him, continuing development until Salas death in 2002. Instead of a keyboard, its manual is made of a resistor wire over a metal plate, which is pressed to create a sound. Expressive playing was possible with this wire by gliding on it, creating vibrato with small movements. Volume was controlled by the pressure of the finger on the wire and board. The first Trautoniums were marketed by Telefunken from 1933-35 (200 were made). The sounds were at first produced by neon-tube relaxation oscillators (later, thyratrons, then transistors), which produced sawtooth-like waveforms. The pitch was determined by the amount of resistive wire chosen by the performer (allowing vibrato, quarter-tones, and portamento). The oscillator output was fed into two parallel resonant filter circuits. A footpedal controlled the volume ratio of the output of the two filters, which was sent to an amplifier. On 20 June 1930 Oskar Sala and Paul Hindemith gave a public performance at the Berliner Musikhochschule Hall called “Neue Musik Berlin 1930″ to introduce the Trautonium. Later, Oskar Sala toured Germany with the Trautonium; in 1931 he was the soloist in a performance of Hindemiths Concert for Trautonium with String Quartet. He also soloed in the debut of Hindemiths student Harald Genzmers “Concert for Trautonium and Orchestra”. Paul Hindemith wrote several short trios for three Trautoniums with three different tunings: bass, middle, and high voice. His student, Harald Genzmer, wrote two concertos with orchestra, one for the monophonic Trautonium and, later, one for Oskar Salas Mixtur-Trautonium. One of the first additions of Sala was to add a switch for changing the static tuning. Later he added a noise generator and an envelope generator (so called Schlagwerk), formant filter (several bandpass filters) and the subharmonic oscillators. These oscillators generate a main pitch and several harmonics, which are not multiples of the fundamental tone, but fractions of it. For any of the now two manuals, four of these waves can be mixed and the player can switch through these predefined settings. Thus, it was called the Mixtur-Trautonium. Oskar Sala composed music for industrial films, but the most famous was the bird noises for Alfred Hitchcocks The Birds. The Trautonium was also used in the Dresden première of Richard Strausss Japanese Festival Music in 1942 for emulating the gongs- and bells-parts and in the 1950s in Bayreuth for the Monsalvat bells in Wagners Parsifal. [wikipedia.org] Art by Aristarkh Lentulov$

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