专辑简介

Cor Fuhler专辑介绍：by Thom JurekThis solo recording of Corr Fuhler's prepared piano compositions is startling in its contrast to most everyone else's -- especially John Cage's. Where Cage sought sparkling tonalities that accented the metal and wood physicality of the piano's architecture, Fuhler seeks to augment its very "pianism" with the objects and playing methodologies -- plucked, hammered, and pulled strings laden with pieces of wood, metal, plastic, gum wrappers, power tools left on, and so on -- by treating it as one of the objects that "prepares" it. In other words, the poetic view is that, the piano, while being decorated and violated with sundry objects and assaulted from within by a foreign presence, remains essentially itself and speaks as itself linguistically if not "musically." The strange systems of amplification used on the title track, for instance, create the illusion of an organ for a moment, except that it is impossible for an organ to offer itself in harmonic and scalar counterpoint against its own structure. This is a highly experimental album, full of outrageous assertions regarding the presence and absence of "music," of surfaces and of things themselves. It is as if Fuhler were creating this gleefully beautiful sound from the innards of a destroyed building where the only thing that remained was a badly damaged piano and some primitive recording equipment. Indeed, if that were the case, then to play that piano, in whatever condition, would be an essential act of musical and humanitarian heroism because it flies in the face of a deafening silence. So too, Fuhler's prepared piano sonatas offer heroic voice in the silence of a classical vanguard that has only its vehement assertions that serialism is somehow still valid, somehow still necessary when it is as bankrupt a form as the skeleton in Schöenberg's rotting coffin. This voice of this physical, damaged instrument is a tender one and asserts, however fragile or broken, that the structure remains in some form, and must be played the way it is found, against theory and against history in some cases, if history, especially the history we call music, is to move forward.