Musical Sculpting
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Musical Sculpting is a technique of recording classical piano music on the Yamaha Disklavier piano. It was originally intended to help handicapped pianists to record classical works on the piano without using their fingers. The method was pioneered by Peter Elyakim Taussig, a handicapped concert pianist, who recorded several works of J.S.Bach using the technique. Musical Sculpting is fundamentally different from the way music has been performed and recorded in the pre-computer age. In Musical Sculpting notes are entered into a MIDI sequencer connected to an acoustic Disklavier concert grand piano one note or one musical line at a time, and then shaped into phrases in an editing process. The recording artist listens to a real-time feedback of each manipulation as the sequencer triggers the piano keys. This in itself is a common computer music process, with the crucial difference that it is performed on an acoustic instrument.
The real innovation of Musical Sculpting is not technological but musical. The method reduces the art of musical interpretation to just a handful of parameters that can be easily manipulated, thus offering a first step towards quantifying artistic interpretation of musical works. The interpretation parameters are:
- Pitch (which key is struck)
- Velocity (the speed with which the hammer strikes the string)
- Note duration
- Tempo fluctuations
- Note attack position relative to an imaginary pulse (or timeline)
- A sixth parameter, pedal, is also included, although not used much in the Bach recordings.
Although originally intended to mimic live recordings, the method quickly evolved an aesthetic of its own, allowing a clarity of texture and performance effects that are physically impossible to achieve in real-time playing.
