Dedicated to Isabel Ettenauer
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Kalimba won a prize at the composition competition of the Extensible Toy Piano Project at Clark University (Worcester, MA).
The piece was released by Isabel Ettenauer on her CD the joy of toy - New Music for Toy Piano (edition eirelav 001, 2005) |
Isabel Ettenauer performing Kalimba
Essl Museum, Klosterneuburg/Vienna, 11 Mar 2009
Kalimba is a piece for toy piano and playback which was composed in April 2005 for the pianist and toy piano performer Isabel Ettenauer. The primary aim of this piece is an attempt to break up the restricted sound world of the toy piano - not by superficial means of additional sound processing, but by the sound of the instrument itself. This is achieved by a CD which is played back by a small loudspeakers which is hidden inside the toy piano; this creates a perfect blend between the sounds of the instrument and the sounds from the loudspeaker. Furthermore, as the listeners won't notice any electronic devices, they might assume that all the music comes from the toy piano itself.
The piece is entirely based on an eight-tone scale which alternates whole and halftone steps. It was recorded from the Schoenhut Concert Grand Piano that Isabel uses to play in her performances. This material was processed by a computer program which was written be Karlheinz Essl in Max/MSP using compositional algorithms from his Realtime Composition Library. It creates five layers of the same basic soundfile which are affected by very slow glissandos. The result of these operations is stunning: starting from the original scale (which is also played synchronously on the toy piano), the sound gradually transformes itself from a rich variety if sonic transformations into a "chaotic" distribution of the 8 tones which finally fall together into chord repetitions.
In the adjacent part of the piece, the glissandos are expanded to a much wider range and - by forming an ambitus of 4 octaves in the end - a proportional canon of the form:
is created. Continuously, all layers except the (s)lowest are fading out, so that in the end only a transposition of the original recording 2 octaves lower (and 2 times slower) can be heard.
This is the beginning of the "coda" of the piece, where over the "ground" of a slow toy piano melody the entire piece is compressed into a few seconds.
Kalimba was composed for a Schoenhut Concert Grand Toy Piano with 37 keys from f to f3. The score is written one octave lower than actually sounding.
As the sounds on the playback CD have been recorded from the toy piano model specified above, it must be played on such an instrument in order to achieve the perfect blending between the CD playback and the toy piano played live.
Altec Lansing iM207 Orbit speaker
When I asked Austrian composer Karlheinz Essl (b. 1960) to write a toy piano piece for me, he had the idea to use a playback CD to enrich the sound world of the toy piano. The interesting thing is that the sound on the CD, which is played back from a small loudspeaker hidden inside the toy piano, again comes from the toy piano itself.One sunny afternoon in April 2005 I visited Karlheinz at his studio and recorded my playing of a certain material (the whole piece is based on an eight-tone scale with alternating whole and halftone steps) which was later processed by one of his computer programs. The result is a very unexpectedly rich sound.
Kalimba was premiered at the Komponistenforum Mittersill on 15 September 2005.
from: booklet of the CD the joy of toy by Isabel Ettenauer (edition eirelav 001, 2005)
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Updated: 21 Aug 2010