Relatively speaking, I’m new to the city of Chicago – been here a little over one year. All of my adult life I have lived and worked in the east coast: Boston, New York, Washington DC. If you’re a rookie in a city as sprawling as Chicago, it can be a challenge to find the type of music you want to hear – particularly so if it’s a bit more obscure. Sometimes, you just get lucky as I did last Saturday night (January 8).

I’m a big fan of experimentalism in any of the artistic disciplines (media arts, music, film). I knew a kid at MIT who would show up to concerts with his hand all bandaged from some construction error or another on whatever new electronic instrument he was building next. It’s like cultural thrill seeking. Imagine, then, the endorphins pulsing through my brain when I walked into the PianoForte Foundation’s recital room to see wires, stereo systems, instruments I didn’t recognize, soundboards and laptops in addition to a traditional piano. On top of everything else another surprise: three of my conservatory classmates I haven’t seen in a few years, and one of them was performing! Sometimes you get extra lucky.

Curated by Chris Preissing and Dan Godston, the Experimental Piano Series is in its third season. I stopped to talk briefly with Mr. Preissing after the concert and he explained the series as a culmination of immersion in a variety of disciplines between himself and Mr. Godston including classical, jazz, and poetry. In fact, their final concert of the season is entitled “Piano | Poetry.” 

The crowd was small, but those dozen or so of us who were there experienced something very special, and I could tell from the banter back and forth between the stage and the seats that everyone there truly loved experimental music. So, even though I really hope in the future more people will go out and attend the impeccable show Preissing and Godston put on, I cherished the kind of club meeting atmosphere of the evening.

Two composers were featured, each performing their own works (all piano/keyboard as the series name denotes) and talking about them casually with us throughout their performances. Eric Glick Reiman presented four compositions. Keith Kirchoff presented three.

“So how do we interpret that? What is the composer’s role?" These questions were posed to us by Mr. Rieman who continued, “How can I get an animal’s perspective?” His answer? “Have the snails interact with paper.” In his Helix Aspersa Series (2008) Rieman placed snails on both blank pieces of paper and some of his previously composed graphic notation scores. They were left to wander as they pleased. Their trails were brought to life by dusting the pages with charcoal and set with fixative. Voilà – graphic scores by common garden snails (or, in the Latin, Helix Aspersa). What do you imagine snail music sounds like? Yes, it’s slow. But moreover Rieman’s interpretation was intensely introspective and atmospheric. At times using extended techniques, playing inside the piano directly on the strings, it was the sound of movement outside of time. Suspended and elegant.

Preceding the music of snails was the music of feline (yes, feline) deconstructionism: Felis Catus I and II for prepared piano. Remember those beatnik poetry techniques of writing words on pieces of paper, allowing them to drop, and then assembling a poem (however nonsensical) from the random chance arrangement of the words as they lay? Same principal at work here. Rieman produced a graphic score and gave it to his wife’s cat to “edit” (apparently she had done a lot of editing without invitation in the past, so Rieman decided to join if he couldn’t beat). The result was a short playful piece intermittently sprinkled with bursts of sound, just as a cat’s paw in smooth staccato motions.

Rieman ended his set with Ghost House, a more benign and moody piece, and an unlisted work for a kind of extended Rhodes he constructed himself. Involving a soundboard to his left and part of a Rhodes keyboard built onto a series of metal pieces resembling tuning forks with three Theremin-like antennas it produced an incredible hybrid sound. I also found it a fascinating meta commentary on Rieman’s dual preoccupations, one with the animal kingdom and one with the electronic and synthesized. Something pertinent to us all as “The Jetsons” continues to morph from fantasy into reality all the while we tuck in to organic greens from our local farmers market, or perhaps our own gardens.

Keith Kirchoff has made a name for himself by not only executing tremendously exciting performances on the piano, but also for broadening the scope of appeal for the toy piano with his resolve to “challenge what we think of when we hear ‘toy piano.’” He is accomplishing his mission with flying colors. His composition Overdrive for toy piano, live electronics (responsive and contingent) and fixed media (preset and static) was a virtuosic tour de force of the familiar juxtaposed with the exotic floating past in bold clouds – some dense, some gossamer, others disturbed and green with violence. The fixed media included the sound of an old radio dial being continually turned in impatience and electronic beats occasionally interjecting a popular modern language; perhaps the sonic equivalent to seeing a McDonald’s in a foreign land. At times Mr. Kirchoff’s entire forearm forcefully depressed the keys resulting in billowing reverberations plummeting weightlessly into the live electronics; an exploding star turned black hole.

He then presented the only work that evening penned by a composer not present in the room, Nostalgic Visions (2009) by Elainie Lillios for piano and live electronics. As can happen during technologically dependent shows, the hook-up wasn’t filtering correctly meaning the live electronics were, for all intents and purposes, dead, forcing a pause in the performance. After fixing the problem – all while handling the situation with candor and humor – Kirchoff offered us a piece fraught with a kind of airy neuroticism portrayed through the ghostly reverberations of tapping the strings inside paired with the attack of single notes in ever increasing speeds. Punctuating plucking sections cocooned by the electronics were offset with brash demanding fits. I hope Lillios’ work has plenty more outings.

Wrapping up the evening was another work written and performed by Kirchoff, which was inspired by his love for Isaac Asimov. Norby is his tribute to the fictional robot hero of The Norby Chronicles by Janet and Isaac Asimov, and as such it had a programmatic sensibility. Including a wide variety of extended techniques such as closing the piano lid and percussively tapping on the body and at times even implemented drumming on the floor or other objects with drumsticks accompanied by the fixed electronics through the stereo system. An insanely difficult cadenza showed again Kirchoff’s prowess as his arms and fingers commanded the piano to keep up.

Tremendous new music and brilliant performances – yes, sometimes you get very, very, lucky, indeed.

Saturday’s concert was the second in a series of three for the 2010-2011 season. The next concert (“Piano | Poetry") will be presented on April 16th.