KENNETH
KIRSCHNER:
TOKAFI
by
Tobias Fischner
Interview in it's original form on Tokafi (click here)
It's
been almost exactly a year since we last spoke to Ken, his inspirations
as a composer and his aspirations of writing pieces in Duran
Duran style. Strangely enough, we not even once touched upon
the issue of the piano in his oeuvre, which would have been
an obvious choice. Quite a lot has happened since that first
interview. A narrow staircase prevented his very own piano from
joining him in his new apartment and thus temporarily robbed
him of the chance of using the instrument he is probably most
associated with on a daily basis. All of which should suffice
to explain why we chose the piano as the theme of this round
of debate. A recent release further intensified the need for
clarification: Kirschner's "May 3, 1997" (one of "Three
Compositions" on Sirr ecords) is built around the awe-inspiring
title track, a thirty-minute long tour de force of piano-clusters,
-chords, congruencies and -contortions and an enveloping mass
of electronic metaphors. It thus once again focusses on the
search for new forms and modes of expression for the instrument
amidst a tradition spanning centuries. The album also follows
the second volume of "Post_Piano" as well as a couple
of live sessions with close friend Taylor Deupree, in which
Deupree uses his laptop to engage in a dialogue with Kirschner's
live piano performance. The piano is everywhere in Kenneth's
oeuvre and yet, he keeps insisting that he is not a pianist.
How can this be? The question looks like a good starting point
to catch up with his personal history as well as his thoughts
on Cage, Feldman and - Elton John.
Hi! How are you? Where are you?
Nowadays I spend my summers shuttling back and forth between
two points along a terminal moraine from the last ice age: Brooklyn,
in New York City, and Block Island, off the coast of Rhode Island.
This interview will have been written at both locations, as
well as points in between.
What’s on your schedule at the moment?
Well, it’s been a difficult year for me: I’ve been
dealing with some significant health problems, among other disasters,
all of which has limited my ability to take on projects and
collaborations. So I’ve just been focusing what energy
I can on writing. Thus the best place to hear what I’ve
been up to is, as usual, my website, where I hope to post some
new recordings in the next month or two.
You started playing the piano at the age of five. Was
that a choice you made yourself or were you “gently coaxed”
into picking up an instrument?
Yeah, I was certainly coaxed by my parents into taking piano
lessons, all in your typical middle-class-suburban-let’s-see-if-junior-has-any-musical-talent
type of way. Interestingly, although my parents were these brilliant
literary, intellectual people, they were almost completely non-musical.
My mother only knew how to play Beethoven’s Für Elise
on piano, which she played over and over again throughout my
entire childhood very, very badly. My father was aware, I think,
that there was this thing called music, which was some sort
of modulated sound that had emotional effects on people, but
it wasn’t entirely clear that he’d ever actually
heard any. Again, this is quite odd, since my parents were incredibly
cultured and creative – it’s just that music wasn’t
a big part of their lives. And perhaps that became part of the
attraction for me, that music offered a different direction,
something new and unexplored.
I suppose (correct me if I’m wrong) that you started
playing the piano with the Classical repertoire. When did you
have the feeling that you wanted to switch to something different
and – your own music?
Yes, I started with classical music, which I thought was just
incredibly boring. But I was a very obedient child, and I stuck
with it because my parents wanted me to. It wasn’t until
I was 12, in 1982, that things changed. I was on a school field
trip, and I met this kid David Giuffre, today still my best
friend, and now of Brainclaw, who had brought with him a little
Casiotone MT-60 synthesizer. It was the coolest thing I’d
ever seen. I got my own little Casio and started writing my
own music immediately.
How would you describe your relationship with the piano
in the year 2007? Is it an addiction, do you need to play every
day? Do you still “practice”?
Now this is one of those things I say over and over again, but
which no one ever seems to believe: I’m not a pianist!
Yes, I can press down keys on the instrument, and sometimes
I have some vague theoretical sense of what I’m playing,
but none of this makes me a pianist. And I have enough respect
for the artistry of real pianists to insist that I’m not
one. Consider my friend Dan Tepfer, who’s a phenomenal
young jazz musician. Dan is a pianist; I’m a guy who likes
to play with synthesizers, and who just can’t stop using
piano sounds. This is not to say that one or the other is better
or worse – I’d like to think that the world needs
synthesizer geeks just as much as it needs jazz pianists, or
techno DJs, or Indian classical percussionists. But if you’re
Zakir Hussein, and everyone just seems to assume that you’re
this awesome techno DJ, then I think you do have some responsibility
to say, no, actually, I play tabla. All of which to say, yes,
I’m addicted to piano, and no, I never practice.
You mentioned that you found the academic atmosphere
to be “conservative and stifling”. Did that, in
any way, change your perception of the piano and of the repertoire
you were interested in?
I think my frustrations with academia actually drove me away
from piano for some time – and it’s only been through
a long path that I’ve found my way back to it. Because
for me, the possibility of creating new music has always been
tied to the potential of electronic music. This brings me tangentially
to a key story in my whole relationship with the piano, which
took place long before my encounter with academia, but which
seemed to anticipate it in a way. One day, when I was maybe
5 or 6 years old, I was sitting at the piano with my mother
next to me, and she turned to me and said, “Write something.”
And I remember thinking very clearly: it’s impossible.
I remember looking at those 88 keys, keys which had been fixed
in those exact patterns for hundreds of years, and I believed,
naively, that every possible combination of notes must have,
at some point in time, already been written. Of course, I realize
now that this isn’t literally true – and yet in
a sense I was onto something. Because there was this sense that
the piano was exhausted, that its possibilities were exhausted,
and that the only way to move forward, to do something new,
was to find another path, a way out of that history. And it
was not until years later, when I first encountered that little
synthesizer, that I came to believe that new music was really
possible. Or at least that it was something that I myself could
aspire to create.
Your music is electronically processed to a large extent.
Why then, are you still interested in the piano as a basis?
I think piano is often for me the clearest and most direct way
to get across a harmonic or emotional idea – which to
me is almost the same thing, as I really see harmony as being
the principle carrier or medium of emotion in music. And so
when I want to say something very directly, or very clearly,
I often end up falling back on piano – because I know
what I can do with it. So there’s a clarity of expression
there, and a confidence I feel in knowing how to find the result
I’m looking for. And there’s also a simplicity,
which can be a nice break from the technical side of electronic
music, much as I enjoy that. And I often find myself turning
to that simplicity when I’m asking very basic questions
about music, questions of form, of narrative, of what a composition
is, or can be. And I often end up writing pieces that ask those
questions first on piano, then later adapting what I’ve
learned to other more technical tools.
Were Ligeti’s and Cage’s prepared piano
studies in any way an issue for you (possibly during your academic
years)? Have you ever considered changing the instrument in
this physical way, instead of the digital method of editing?
Cage’s prepared piano music has certainly been a big influence
on me, and that’s a direction I’d love to explore
one day. But right now I don’t have a real piano! This
is the sad truth. When I moved to my current apartment in 2006,
I failed to take into account the geometry of the building’s
staircase, and my piano couldn’t make it, it just couldn’t
be done. So it’s living down the street with my friends
Anne Guthrie and Billy Gomberg, and my studio is all electronic
these days. But what for me has been very helpful is the wonderful
PianoTeq, a piano physical model which is actually quite impressive.
With the right processing, the sound can be quite compelling,
plus you have control over a large number of parameters that
you obviously can’t tweak on a physical instrument. Thus
the little mean-tone piano piece 3/20/07 up on my site is all
PianoTeq, and I’ve got another piece, 6/21/07, this one
actually equal tempered, coming soon as well. But until they
start to put stray nuts and bolts into their model, or I get
a new apartment, prepared piano per se will have to wait.
Do you keep up with the contemporary piano repertoire? Is there
any composer out there who inspires you for your work on the
piano?
My brother Ted does a nice impersonation of me that goes, “Morton
Feldman! Morton Feldman! Morton Feldman!” in a sort of
nasal, annoying voice. Which about sums it up. I’m really
not up to speed on everything that’s going on in the world
of piano music, and it’s the legacy of Feldman that I
tend to focus on, almost monomaniacally. Certainly a piece like
Triadic Memories is hugely important to me, but to really understanding
where it is I’m coming from, you need to look at the Piano
and String Quartet. I first heard the P&SQ in the final
days of 1993, and, sad as it is to say, I really don’t
believe that I’ll ever have an epiphany like that again
in my life.
Especially with the ten-year old “May 3, 1997”
from your latest release on SIRR, I had the feeling that you
were looking for new, spontaneous and organic ways for the piano
and electronics to interact. Is that a direction you still consider
to be fruitful today?
Continuing on from what I was just saying, I think you could
look at all of my work with the intersection of piano and electronics
as a sort of pathetic attempt to rewrite Feldman’s Piano
and String Quartet as Piano and Synthesizer. Because that piece
is always what I’m trying to get to, what I’m reaching
for – and I never quite make it. I’m not sure I
even come close. I listened to the entire P&SQ again earlier
this year, and I was really struck by how it represents a sort
of limit for me, a limit in the mathematical sense, something
one’s always approaching but never quite reaches. The
intricacy and genius of that piece, that one piece – it
will always be beyond my grasp. But the hope is that in my endless,
bumbling attempts to mimic it, I might occasionally stumble
onto something interesting or new.
Having asked all that: Have you ever thought about recording
an album with unprocessed solo piano works?
I love the idea, and I probably would never do it – because
I just don’t think it would be good enough. If there is
anything interesting in what I’m doing, it comes from
this tension between the piano and the electronics, and not
from my skills or abilities as a pianist or a composer of piano
music. So I think I’d just feel way too self-conscious
about publishing an entire album of nothing but my piano noodlings,
fun as it might be for me.
In our previous conversation, you also mentioned that you found
many electronic live performances to be “a dangerous art”,
because of its restricted performance aspect. I was wondering
why you haven’t chosen to integrate the piano into your
concerts, to counterweight the laptop stasis.
Actually, my friend Taylor Deupree and I have been doing a series
of concerts over the last few years taking exactly this approach.
We walk on stage with nothing, no plan, no sounds, nothing.
I sit down at a piano and start playing, and Taylor samples
my playing into his laptop and starts slicing it up and sending
processed fragments back at me. And I in turn respond to those,
and we go back and forth, and build up a piece from it, all
on the spot, all improvised. It’s totally terrifying,
and occasionally successful. As with a lot of fully improvised
music, you get some great moments, and you get some train wrecks.
But Taylor and I have been working together for nearly 20 years
now, and we know each other really well, so we usually manage
to keep it from going entirely off the rails.
I had the slight impression that the piano used to be the main
starting point for your pieces until a few years ago, but that
in more recent work you have made a discreet switch to different
source material. Is that a correct perception?
If you look at just about any period in my work, you’ll
find pieces that are totally focused on piano, or that are all
about piano-type thinking, and then you’ll find pieces
right next to them that have nothing to do with piano at all,
that are all about escape from the piano, escaping from that
mode of thought, into a world of insects, or particles, or strange
forces or other planets. This is one of those long-term themes
that runs through my work, this constant push and pull, back
and forth, to and from the piano. And it’s certainly true
of my recent work as well. So while I wouldn’t say that
I’m moving away from using piano as a source, I would
certainly agree that this tension is one of those key dynamics
that animates what I’m doing.
You mentioned you really wanted to turn towards pop,
but didn’t have the hair to be Duran Duran. Do you think
you could have the pianistic technique to be Elton John?
I have neither the pianistic technique nor the fashion sensibility
to be Elton John. Needless to say. But this does remind me of
a great line I heard about my playing. I had contributed some
material for vidnaObmana’s Opera for Four Fusion Works
– basically just my usual Feldman impersonations, i.e.,
simple, repetitive piano patterns. And he then took them and
looped them further, making them even more repetitive. And one
of the reviews came in, and it said the piano playing was so
repetitive it “makes Harold Budd sound like Liberace.”
And I thought that was just the greatest line I’d ever
heard! I really love it, and I quote it all the time.
