Reinhold Friedl - Inside piano

You've been making music for many years, but it's quite rare to see you play solo... What does a solo album mean to you?

I've made several solo albums, and they're all different from one another. There was "Inside-piano," a double CD and vinyl with extra material, dedicated both to the orchestral side of my acoustic piano playing and to the technique of playing literally "inside" the piano, on the strings. Another solo album, released on Warsaw's Bocian Records, is called "Mutanza," and is devoted to classic pieces for "inside-piano"; the most recent release was "Golden Quinces Earthed," which features a spatialized Neo-Bechstein, the first amplified piano ever built. What these solo releases have in common is that they reject the idea that the piano has to be something intimate and romantic. This instrument can step outside its traditional history and become a true instrument of sound and noise, orchestral and even spatialized, as in the case of "Golden Quinces Earthed."

"Golden Quinces Earthed" is very different from many of your previous releases... What did you have in mind before it took its final shape? And what role does it play in your artistic path?

I worked on this project for many years; I wanted to find music suited to this incredible instrument. As you know, it has no soundboard and only one string per note, but it has 19 humbuckers for amplification. This amplification system completely changed the way I play: you only hear the sounds of the strings - the acoustic sound of the objects used to play them isn't amplified, so it ends up almost inaudible. This let me really focus on this incredible string sound, which you never get with a normal grand piano. Another aspect is that the nature of the instrument invited me to spatialize its sound output: there are 18 humbuckers! So it felt natural to differentiate them through a sophisticated, automated spatialization. I took on that challenge and devised all those simultaneous movements in space, realized across eight speakers surrounding the audience.

And what about the title? What might it suggest about the "characteristics" of the album?

There's a famous track that uses "silver apples" in the title; I've heard this music is a response from the earth. Do you know golden quinces? I have a Turkish market around the corner where you can find fantastic quinces – and I could tell you about some great Persian recipes that use them. But I also have a dear old friend who makes one of the best spirits in Germany, made with quinces…

"The medium is the message". What's the message in playing an old electric piano and turning it into an unconscious message?

I don't see any special meaning in doing that, but I think it's clear we should have great respect for everyone who, almost a hundred years ago, started exploring these new technical and sonic possibilities to spread music. Maybe I discovered something inherent to their invention that, at the time, they themselves didn't see.

What does Golden Quinces Earthed mean, and what does it represent in your career?

Practically speaking, it was a huge success in two ways: it was commissioned by Berlin's MaerzMusik Festival for Contemporary Music and by ZKM in Karlsruhe, one of the leading electronic music studios, as well as by the San Francisco Media Lab. So I really got to work seriously on every single issue: amplification, spatialization, and so on. The second thing was that I had the opportunity to become friends with David Balzer, a piano builder from Berlin and owner of probably the only Neo-Bechstein in the world that isn't kept in a museum. That gave us the chance to bring the project to many different places in Europe and, for the first time in my life, to travel with "my piano". I also had the chance to produce Golden Quinces… at the Studio for Electronic Music at the Technische Universität Berlin, with all the necessary facilities. So, in my career, this project was something truly special: it started with a small idea, following the intrinsic idea of an old instrument, to make new music with it, and I managed to find all this support! Including Sukandar Karthadinata, the great programmer.

Is your "inside piano" technique connected to an artistic aesthetic? And which one?

Yes. The inside piano means trying to make a piano sing! The cliché in every piano lesson up until the 19th century was: "make the piano sing" – but it actually doesn't. So I tried to tackle this problem physically, and I managed to draw those singing sounds out of this old piece of furniture, turning it into a real orchestra.

Following on from that, what's your relationship with the piano? Do you think it's an instrument capable of many different kinds of expressive power?

Yes. It's an incredible instrument: the strings exert a tension of over 20 tons on the internal metal frame – that's the same power a jet needs to take off! You can play so many kinds of great music on this instrument, and it even sounds incredibly good if you set it on fire.

I think you've always placed a lot of importance on this, for instance when you play piano with Zeitkratzer… But to me, you do it in a very different way there. Do you agree?

No. People simply don't realize that Zeitkratzer can also be seen as an extension of my inside piano. The problem is that most listeners can't recognize, in a Zeitkratzer recording, which sounds come from the piano, since it normally doesn't sound at all like a piano being played on the keys in the usual way. And it's really hard to hear. I remember working with Lou Reed on the mix of our version of "Metal Machine Music", and he joked that we didn't need the piano, since it wasn't there. But the next day, he asked to bring some sounds up louder in the mix and realized those sounds were the inside-piano sounds. So it's hard to hear… And you get this effect on many of Zeitkratzer's releases.

And what about the idea behind Piano Inside-Out, using this instrument?

Piano Inside-Out was a trio: three grand pianos! The idea came from a wonderful composition by Italian composer Mario Bertoncini – he was, together with Franco Evangelisti and Ennio Morricone, a founding member of the Italian improvisation group Nuova Consonanza in the 1960s. Bertoncini was a dear friend of mine when he lived in Berlin, and he wrote this piece called "Cifre", introducing many new inside-piano techniques he had invented! It's the bible of the inside piano! Imagine playing three grand pianos on a stage with all those rich sounds – it was exhilarating, I loved that trio. We played in various places, at an airport in Italy with six pianos, at a piano manufacturer in southern Germany, at a festival in Berlin, but you can probably imagine how hard it is to find venues where you can play with three or more grand pianos.

Zeitkratzer is, however, one of your main projects. How did you come up with the idea of a noise ensemble organized in a classical chamber-music style?

Zeitkratzer was founded in the late 1990s. I'd had some experiences at an electronic music studio in Marseille and had just come back from a long residency in Rome. Berlin at that time was becoming really interesting, there was a new, curious generation that was crossing the boundaries between improvisation, composition, interpretation, and so on. So I asked a trumpet player I was playing with to found a group of this kind together and invite all the open-minded, interesting musicians who were also developing extended techniques, working on sound, and so on. The trumpet player was Axel Dörner. We were already playing noise music at the time, and I wrote a piece for Axel where he uses nothing but amplified breathing sounds. A real theme of Zeitkratzer was working with and on the amplification of acoustic instruments – and I think Zeitkratzer is still the only group today working in such a defined and sophisticated way with the possibilities of microphones. Not just to make things louder, but to microscopize instrumental sounds.

Back then contemporary classical music was starting to feel a bit exhausted, academic, mannered. Since I'd come across Japanese noise music and lots of other interesting music that didn't come out of an academic context, I thought: let's work with these people too (at the time there were hardly any women involved, which thankfully has changed now), we know how to fix scores, etc., and that's how the idea came about. I called Merzbow and told him: use us like a mixer, and Carsten Nicolai did the same, and everyone ended up composing for Zeitkratzer. The idea was: let's look for interesting music, regardless of where it comes from. We have to put an end to the abuse of music as a marker of social distinction: why not work with great noise musicians the same way we work with young composers or avant-garde electronic musicians?

And what's the internal dynamic of the ensemble like? How do you and the other musicians involved manage such a shared artistic dialogue?

I'm the director of the group. Democratic aesthetic decisions tend to favour the mainstream – more or less by definition. If you want to do radical work you need someone who, in case of failure, takes responsibility for it, and that's me. This allows the other musicians to really contribute, to propose projects and even to criticize anything. On the other hand, it's really important that Zeitkratzer was never conceived as a full-time ensemble. The group benefits so much from the diverse musical and artistic lives of its members!

I've often read the Zeitkratzer experiment as a strong demonstration of the equation between noise and music. There, you play real, classical instruments, and you create noise music (the opposite of music in its classical sense, in a way) using only these instruments, with no electronic aid whatsoever. Do you have a similar idea? What does music represent for you? And what is noise?

First of all: Zeitkratzer plays mostly amplified, and that means: WITH electronic aid. We don't use electronic treatments beyond that, but amplification is clearly a treatment. For example, the incredible sounds that Hild Sofie Tafjord or Hilary Jeffery get out of their wind instruments can only be achieved by covering the microphone with the bell of the instrument. So noise should be seen as a perfectly normal musical material. There's a great tradition of this, starting perhaps with Varèse. Pierre Schaeffer of the French group GRM wrote a 600-page book on how to categorize sound objects; then there were Iannis Xenakis and also the school of Polish composers, including Witold Szalonek, who taught in Berlin. I had the pleasure of working and touring with him. So noise was nothing new. What was new was that some people in contemporary music tried to re-establish a distinct material: notes! "Beans", as some Korean friends of mine called them… A clear statement Zeitkratzer has always made is: don't abuse music for social distinction! It's fine to play different kinds of music, it's fine to think about the social forms of concerts, seated, standing, smoking, drinking, dreaming… we've done late-night concerts, but also acoustic listening concerts. And noise is always present, and always takes very different forms.

As opposed to this "conceptual" side, I think you've always placed great importance – with Zeitkratzer, but also in your solo work and other collaborative projects – on the "instinctive" side of your music. Most of your work doesn't sound "calculated" or "studied" at all: instead, it really sounds spontaneous… Would you agree?

Sometimes I've wished it were so! Unfortunately, I have to work very hard to develop the concepts, the methods to realize them and the instructions, etc… But I'm glad to know our music can evoke those impressions.

How much of what you play is written and how much is improvised?

Music is an allographic art, as Nelson Goodman pointed out. And that means there's no music unless it's played. It's not like being a painter: I can make a painting on my own, with no help from anyone else, and hang it on the wall. Music needs to be transmitted. So the question of authorship is never really clear-cut, and that's one of music's greatest qualities. I once summed up this idea in a story, to boil it down to its materialistic aspect: imagine you play one of your compositions at a concert. Imagine that after the concert you tell me I played the piece so badly it was no longer your piece. Will I still get paid the royalties? But to answer more concretely: Zeitkratzer has never played what we'd call free improvisation, but we've used almost every other kind of fixing you can think of. Most of the time we play scores based on timelines, and we use synchronized clocks, built specially for us, to realize them.

By the way, do you have any concerts planned for the coming months this year? Any chance of seeing you play in Italy?

I think there are some plans for Milan and also Bologna, Rome and Sicily, but nothing's confirmed yet. We'd love to do a tribute to Giacinto Scelsi and we're working on that.

What other projects are you preparing at the moment?

Right now there are two main projects we're preparing and working on. The first is called Kriegslieder / war songs: we're going to rework, in a very Zeitkratzer way – like a "Neue Volksmusik", for instance – war songs from the First World War, including Serbian war songs. And we'll be collaborating with the incredible singer from Belgrade Svetlana Spajic and a friend of hers, an old folk singer, who still sings a song written by his father about the assassination in Sarajevo. Pretty brutal, raw, shocking music and lyrics… The other project is a collaboration with the performance group She She Pop, and it focuses on all the questions you normally don't ask in a concert situation: about you on stage, about the audience, about the relationship between us, discussions with people… This will include a broader inquiry into the role of musicians, into Zeitkratzer's structure, and we'll take all of that as inspiration for the musical performances. I can't wait for this dangerous project, where we don't know where it will take us, but we hope to pull it off in 2016.

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