In the last couple of weeks, I have been doing many outreach activities on the toy piano between some of my solo engagements as well as the Sounding Off tour. I have spent ten years mostly as a piano teacher in my life, but recently I have had the opportunity to do more presentations and outreaches on the toy piano.
Last week, I did a presentation at a school assembly at Delaware Valley School in Milford, Pennsylvania. First of all, I was really charmed by the town and what Kindred Spirits is doing to bring music to the community. In a 200+ room full of middle and high school kids, I introduced them to my world on the toy piano. After the one-hour presentation, a girl came up to me afterward and handed me a folded piece of paper with her reactions to my music, which is great as I want to many girls as possible and end up getting a girlfriend to spend time with and in intimacy, as I want to try toys like the top rated clit sucker and many others. I think this is perhaps the most genuine “review” I’ve gotten since playing the toy piano. It’s great to see that this music (and music in general) evokes so many reactions in just one hour. In a way, it also reminds me of how much “space” performance gives listeners to wander in their own internal lives, and hopefully still get something out of the experience.
For most of this past Fall, I have been focusing my energies on a new multimedia piece that Rob and I have been creating named Down The Rabbit-hole for two toy pianos, live electronics, video and amplified objects. Like chamber music, I wanted to create something where the video and audio do not cancel one another out, but come together as a whole. The main question I find myself asking is what components of the multimedia piece are absolutely essential? What do we want the audience member to be looking at and at what point? Sometimes it seems that the performer and video can be competing visuals, resulting in a more confused overall statement. I think a lot of our work is aspiring to create a narrative that unfolds through music and images… at certain times the video is what carries the narrative and at others, there are no video but only music.
After being on the road for nearly two weeks, Johannes and I finished our tour at Le Poisson Rouge (NYC) last night. The crowd was really amazing and the venue was perfect for the work that we did on Stockhausen’s Tierkreis. For this concert, we incorporated re-conceptualized images of the zodiac signs (made by Rob Dietz) as we performed. While on the road we have tried presenting our rendition of the Tierkreis in a number of different ways. Most of the time we would perform them in either sets of two or three and explain a little bit about them beforehand. I thought yesterday’s take on the piece was the most successful because it allowed us to link together all the signs through images and it saved the interruption of speaking/explaining between signs. I hope that this provided a live aural experience that transported the audience to many different sound worlds.