PIANO DIARIES OF A MUSICAL ALCHEMIST
"Life is a winding road," the old folk song says. In my career as a musician, my road has definitely taken some twists and turns. Whether performing my harp music, writing for voice and piano, or composing for an instrumental ensemble, I have carried my classical music background and training in one hand and a penchant for experimental techniques in the other.
Every single composition on this CD represents a time capsule from my life. Each piece I played and recorded on a different piano, in a different city, and in a different period of my life. In all of the pieces I applied the method I call "preparation in real time"—the personal performance practice I often use in my live performances. It implies using devices, easily movable objects, and different fingerings to temporarily shift the instrument's timbre from that of the piano to that of a harpsichord or clavichord. For instance, in Genesis (2009) and Kosmogonia (Cosmogony) (2005), following the proverb "necessity is mother of invention," I came up with a vibrating glove. When placed on the piano strings, the electromagnets stuffed into the glove's fingertips helped create the sostenuto-sounding strings, mockup flute sounds, and bass clarinet I needed.
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Every single composition on this CD represents a time capsule from my life. Each piece I played and recorded on a different piano, in a different city, and in a different period of my life. In all of the pieces I applied the method I call "preparation in real time"—the personal performance practice I often use in my live performances. It implies using devices, easily movable objects, and different fingerings to temporarily shift the instrument's timbre from that of the piano to that of a harpsichord or clavichord. For instance, in Genesis (2009) and Kosmogonia (Cosmogony) (2005), following the proverb "necessity is mother of invention," I came up with a vibrating glove. When placed on the piano strings, the electromagnets stuffed into the glove's fingertips helped create the sostenuto-sounding strings, mockup flute sounds, and bass clarinet I needed.
Click on the page to turn it
Mappa della Memoria, for acoustic baby grand piano, was recorded live during my recital at the Bogliasco Foundation in Genoa, Italy, where I held a composer's residency in 2004. Based on the eponymous work by the ingenious Italian visual artist Mario Fallini, the Memory Map is a fitting piece to start this album with. Like a traveler who retraces his own footsteps, Fallini draws his version of the iconic medieval allegory of memory, traditionally depicted as a portly matron in elaborate dress, by "stitching" the titles of his own works in each fold of her sumptuous attire. Sonatina No.1 was composed in 1996 and recorded in 1997 on an upright piano after I rescued it from the local bar and somehow fit it into the kitchen of my studio apartment in Manhattan. I dedicated this piece to Morpho, a large, mysterious South American butterfly with iridescent wings who lives for only a day before being sealed for eternity into a pendant by a jewelry maker. Sonatina No.2 and Sonatina No.3 were composed in 2004 and recorded on an amplified Chinese-made baby grand piano I purchased at a liquidation sale at the San Francisco Opera. In the already-mentioned Genesis, I wondered what it sounded like when God went about making the world. During my college years, while sitting in the symphony orchestra and counting numerous empty bars in my harp parts, I entertained the idea of getting a job in a planetarium.
I recalled that fantasy many years later in Kosmogonia, where I explore the ways to depict in sound the mindboggling theory of the ever-expanding universe.
Victoria Jordanova Los Angeles, May 2012
Victoria Jordanova Los Angeles, May 2012
Notes by Dean Suzuki
Victoria Jordanova, an American composer born in Kragujevac, Serbia, is probably best known for her magnificent Requiem for Bosnia for broken piano, harp and child's voice. The current CD is her first for piano since the release of the Requiem in 1994. Unlike the Requiem, which exists only as a recording and cannot be performed live (the namesake broken piano no longer exists), Kosmogonia is comprised of works that can be performed in concert.
Born in Serbia, a longtime San Francisco resident, and now living in Los Angeles, Jordanova's aesthetic forebears include West Coast American experimentalists and mavericks, Henry Cowell and John Cage. She is inspired by their innovative piano compositions, and especially by Cowell's "string piano" (when performers bypass the piano's keyboard and play directly on the strings, variously plucking, strumming, rubbing and otherwise manipulating them), as well as his generous use of tone clusters; and Cage's "prepared piano," inspired by and extrapolated from Cowell's string piano, in which items such as screws, bolts, bits of rubber and other materials are inserted and wedged between the strings, thus dramatically transforming the instrument's timbre.
Victoria Jordanova, an American composer born in Kragujevac, Serbia, is probably best known for her magnificent Requiem for Bosnia for broken piano, harp and child's voice. The current CD is her first for piano since the release of the Requiem in 1994. Unlike the Requiem, which exists only as a recording and cannot be performed live (the namesake broken piano no longer exists), Kosmogonia is comprised of works that can be performed in concert.
Born in Serbia, a longtime San Francisco resident, and now living in Los Angeles, Jordanova's aesthetic forebears include West Coast American experimentalists and mavericks, Henry Cowell and John Cage. She is inspired by their innovative piano compositions, and especially by Cowell's "string piano" (when performers bypass the piano's keyboard and play directly on the strings, variously plucking, strumming, rubbing and otherwise manipulating them), as well as his generous use of tone clusters; and Cage's "prepared piano," inspired by and extrapolated from Cowell's string piano, in which items such as screws, bolts, bits of rubber and other materials are inserted and wedged between the strings, thus dramatically transforming the instrument's timbre.
It should be no surprise that other important influences on Jodanova include Krzysztof Penderecki and György Ligeti, both composers who experimented with and explored sound masses, unorthodox timbres, and unconventional musical textures and techniques. In an undergraduate class taught by composition professor Dr. Jere Hutcheson, Jodanova encountered Penderecki's Kosmogonia (1970) (a work that inspired her own work of the same title found on this CD), Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1960) and Ligeti's Atmospheres (1961). The music left her awestruck.
Such inspiration is borne out when Jordanova states that she uses a computer and MIDI-instruments to compose, "But whenever I really want to test an idea, only the piano will do. I open it, knock on it, touch every part of it, play it inside and out, amplify it to hear its softest whispers, and present it with all kinds of toys and devices to coax every possible sound out of it. And it always gives back more than I expect, surprising me with new sounds and possibilities."
Jordanova's wide-open ears are on a never-ending quest for new sounds, timbres and sonorities. She says, "Some of the best times of my life were
Such inspiration is borne out when Jordanova states that she uses a computer and MIDI-instruments to compose, "But whenever I really want to test an idea, only the piano will do. I open it, knock on it, touch every part of it, play it inside and out, amplify it to hear its softest whispers, and present it with all kinds of toys and devices to coax every possible sound out of it. And it always gives back more than I expect, surprising me with new sounds and possibilities."
Jordanova's wide-open ears are on a never-ending quest for new sounds, timbres and sonorities. She says, "Some of the best times of my life were
spent with pianos. I have played many pianos in my life and I've never found one I didn't like. From the old upright, which never could be tuned properly, that I rescued from a local bar and worked on in my Manhattan apartment, to the one that fell down two flights of stairs in the French-American International School in San Francisco, which I used to record my Requiem—all gave me something unique. Sometimes I feel that there is more at play than a mere material object, as in the medieval concept of Anima mundi--a pure, ethereal spirit diffused throughout all nature that animates all matter in the same sense in which the soul was thought to animate the human." She concludes with a rather cunning and insightful proposal: "Maybe the piano participates in my compositions as much as I do."
In her Sonatina no. 1 for upright antique piano, Jordanova coaxes beautiful sounds from an instrument that would have horrified Chopin and would be considered beneath contempt by contemporary concert pianists (can one imagine Lang Lang performing on an upright piano, much less an antique one?). Instead of regarding the faults of the antique piano as shortcomings, she views them as opportunities for sonic exploration. Indeed, the Sonatina would be a completely different and much less successful work were it played on a pristine concert grand.
In her Sonatina no. 1 for upright antique piano, Jordanova coaxes beautiful sounds from an instrument that would have horrified Chopin and would be considered beneath contempt by contemporary concert pianists (can one imagine Lang Lang performing on an upright piano, much less an antique one?). Instead of regarding the faults of the antique piano as shortcomings, she views them as opportunities for sonic exploration. Indeed, the Sonatina would be a completely different and much less successful work were it played on a pristine concert grand.
Those familiar with the string piano and prepared piano, and with works by composers such as Stephen Scott who also use extended techniques on the instrument, including "bowing" the strings (for example, strands of rosined nylon fishing line are threaded under the strings then drawn back and forth to excite the strings), will recognized the instrument as a piano, but may be bewildered by the manner of sound generation in Genesis and Kosmogonia. These compositions require a vibrating glove, in which small electromagnets are placed in the fingertips. Jordanova does not insert her hand in the glove to stroke or massage the strings. Rather, she uses the glove as a holder for the electromagnets, which are placed directly on the strings. Further manipulation, including use of the keyboard, sustain pedal and touching the string with the fingers, changes the overtone structure for the purpose of discovering new timbres and advancing the music.
The amplification employed in several works on this CD is used only to precisely reveal the subtleties and nuances of the piano, rather than to increase power and volume. By running the sound from the microphone
The amplification employed in several works on this CD is used only to precisely reveal the subtleties and nuances of the piano, rather than to increase power and volume. By running the sound from the microphone
directly into the computer input, the normal recording studio problems of trying to accurately capture acoustic sound are circumvented. The amplification and recording techniques allow the listener to hear everything--harmonics, partials and other acoustic phenomena--in a way that would not be possible using traditional recording methods. As a result, one hears the music differently and in a way that enhances Jordanova's compositions and reveals her special gifts.
Dean Suzuki
Associate Professor of music history at San Francisco State University, and producer and host of "Discreet Music" on KPFA-FM in Berkeley, CA.
Dean Suzuki
Associate Professor of music history at San Francisco State University, and producer and host of "Discreet Music" on KPFA-FM in Berkeley, CA.
KOSMOGONIA
Victoria Jordanova, piano
ArpaViva CD 004, 2012
Produced by Victoria Jordanova
Executive producer: Relja Penezic
Audio recording of Jordanova's performance of Mappa della Memoria by Graham Parkes
Mastered by Hans DeKline at SOUND BITES DOG MASTERING, Culver City, California
Cover Art Photography and Design by Relja Penezic
Copy editing by Shannon Coughlin
Special thanks to the Bogliasco Foundation.
© ArpaViva Foundation Inc., Los Angeles, CA
Victoria Jordanova, piano
ArpaViva CD 004, 2012
Produced by Victoria Jordanova
Executive producer: Relja Penezic
Audio recording of Jordanova's performance of Mappa della Memoria by Graham Parkes
Mastered by Hans DeKline at SOUND BITES DOG MASTERING, Culver City, California
Cover Art Photography and Design by Relja Penezic
Copy editing by Shannon Coughlin
Special thanks to the Bogliasco Foundation.
© ArpaViva Foundation Inc., Los Angeles, CA