Ascension - UnPrepared Piano by Steve O'Keefe

Soundcloud won't let me post the full story about this strange recording, so I bring it to Cardboard Rhino for your consideration. Feedback welcome!

 Ascension - UnPrepared Paino by Steve O'Keefe

On Tuesday, I heard this amazing symphony on the morning show on WKCR public radio from Columbia University. You can get it online or on Echo or Google Home or Tune In. Just get it! And listen to the morning (usually) piano set from 10 a.m. to 12 noon weekdays and you will hear a lot of good music and improve your work productivity.

So I heard this music, and it just keeps swelling and swelling, lots and lots of strings piling up on each other and horns blaring and timpani rumbling. I'd never heard anything like it. The announcer said it was the 9th Symphony by Anton Bruckner, and Austrian composer who was active at the end of the 19th Century.

I told my wife, collage artist Deborah O'Keeffe, about the Bruckner and she said, "Oh, yes. Bruckner. I have several of his things." Sure enough, she had symphonies 3 through 9 on CD. She brought them as we headed out the door for a six day road trip.

I did all the driving -- a couple thousand miles -- and we listened to two symphonies a day. They're all different flavors of the same thing: really, really big sound! Fanfares. Swelling. Endless building and building, with big waves of chords crashing down like thunder. Yum!

We got home and my hands and arms were vibrating from two straight days of controlling the wheel and every time I closed my eyes I saw objects whizzing by. Jacked on coffee to get me through the West Virginia mountains, I needed a release.

Down in the basement in the poured concrete cellar in the back room is a piano. A really big piano. A Schiller Grand Upright pre-war piano with a rebuilt action that I purchased at Goodwill Industries a few months ago for $65. I paid $150 more to intern it in the basement.

Down in the basement I have a set of tools I purchased from Werlein's Music in New Orleans that used to belong to a piano doctor of some reputation who had passed away. I asked to look at the tuning hammer -- which is really a wrench -- and they said sure but they are not breaking up the set. So I purchased the whole kit.

The first time I tried to tune a piano, I snapped a couple strings. I decided to leave tuning to the professionals. But I hung onto this kit all these years in case I ever needed to fix a piano. Then I had a dream about six months ago that I was playing a solo piano concert using a crowbar and a chainsaw. I just can't get the piano to make the sounds I want it to make.

I have always wanted to attach a bass drum pedal to an upright piano so I can bang the box whenever I want. I also lust for a high-hat or sock cymbal by my right foot. Lately, I have taken to playing with a tambourine under my left foot. Some of those recordings might surface someday. Now I have a piano I can break any way I want and who cares? And I can record the whole thing.

It's not that I want to break a piano (I do), it's that I want different sounds to come out of it, sounds that match a real world that's very messed up right now. "All the sounds a piano makes is too pretty!" (Sun Ra) So I did actually put a crowbar across the strings, ok, but I also wove wire between the strings and used clothespins to dampen notes and even went at some of the string with a Ryobi cordless power drill.

Nothing really worked. The best sound I came up with was to attach metalic cup hooks to the strings on the bass octave of the piano. It makes a ghostly rumble heard at the beginning of this track, like old Jacob Marley rattling his chains or Davy Jones banging around in his locker. The sound contains sustaining harmonics thanks to the metal, as well as the rustle of the cuphooks rattling. I like it very much!

So I come home from this long road trip, hands shaking from the wheel, mind rattled from the road, and I go down to the poured concrete cellar and hit that bad note. Next thing you know, I was rolling five bad notes in the bass, with the sustain pedal wide open so those weird harmonics won't ever die!

Then I started rolling the right hand, too, and before I knew it the piano was bouncing and the walls were shaking and the vibrations travelled down this big rock I live on in the Appalachian Mountains and all across the Shenandoah Valley -- from Winchester to Blacksburg -- began to rumble from the thunder of the Schiller playing Bruckner!

The hammers were flying and the chords were stacking up like only a church organist can do (Bruckner was an organist). Every time I thought I was getting too loud, I doubled down and laughed and roared and played some more! I felt in control, not of the notes, but of the sound. I felt free.

I didn't record.

But I had learned a style -- Bruckner -- that I wanted to try again. And so I have.

I've made several recordings; "Ascension" is the best so far. Because the piano is so badly out of tune, if I leave my thunder chord in the left hand, it all falls apart. So I have to stay down there and play by modulating the volume and the pace and forget about the pitch. In the right hand, I'm trying to be brave and looking for anything that works.

My wife heard this and she said it sounds like I'm reaching for something I haven't grasped yet. That might be a polite way of saying it sounds like crap. But I'm okay with that. The world is crap right now and I want to make a sound that is authentic to the experience. And I think the sound of reaching is the very best sound of all -- don't you?

And so I give you Ascension, the first of the Bruckner recordings from the broken Schiller piano played by Steve O'Keefe. Enjoy?

Image of Anton Bruchner by Ferry Bératon [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.