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.
