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 Philip Venables gets set for a grand performance of a toy masterpiece |
Honey, I shrunk the piano
PREVIEW: MUSIC FOR AMPLIFIED TOY PIANOS
Kings place
SIX toy pianos gathered from around the world are to be played by professional pianists for three mornings in succession at Kings Place in York Way, King’s Cross, as part of the centre’s three-day festival next month.
The free concerts, starting at 9.30am each day, will involve performances of John Cage’s extraordinary Music for Amplified Toy Pianos composed in 1962.
Although the piece is highly placed in the Cage cannon, it is rarely performed due to the difficulty of assembling six quality toy pianos.
The toy pianos for the Kings Place performances have been brought together by Philip Venables, artistic director of Endymion Ensemble.
“Good toy pianos are hard to come by, particularly those of the quality Cage envisaged,” he says.
“One, made in the 1920s, is being flown over for us from the United States. We’re getting another, made in East Germany after the war, and we’re in the last stages of arranging to get two made in China, one in the 1960s, the other in the 1970s.
“The toy pianos were made for children and they’re very small, some no bigger than an A4 page. Unlike ordinary pianos, they don’t have strings. Rather, they have metal rods of different sizes to produce the different notes, some having only one and a half octaves, others three octaves.
“Cage’s music is for six pianos.
“The music is on a set of seven pieces of transparent paper with different dots and symbols on a grid of lines on each piece of paper, the idea being you can ‘mix and match’ the pieces of paper to produce completely different sounds.
“In this way, every performance is totally different.
“The sounds produced by hammers tapping the metal rods is very different from the sound of an ordinary piano.
“Instead, the toy piano sounds more like the Asian gamelan instruments played in Japan or Thailand. There’s an oriental feel to them. We’re going to perform the piece in Kings Place atrium so we’ll have the opportunity to enhance the effects through amplification.”
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