Putting Objects In The Strings Of A Piano Is Actually Highbrow Art

Putting foreign objects such as cloth, cutlery and ping pong balls in the strings of a piano to alter the sound is something you might imagine happening at the tail-end of an orchestra's particularly drunken Christmas party, but it's actually a quite highbrow artistic pursuit known as prepared piano. Dating back over a century, the practice was made famous by sonic explorer John Cage in the '40s and even utilised by John Cale on The Velvet Underground's All Tomorrow's Parties (he favoured a chain of paper clips).

Probably the best known practitioner today is German musician Volker Bertelmann, who in the last decade has released roughly a dozen albums under the moniker Hauschka (most incorporating prepared piano). Despite classical training Bertelmann began his career in the electronic world, and stumbled upon prepared piano trying to fuse these two disparate worlds together.

"All noise can be music: there are rhythms and noises and we're very influenced by nature, by birds and trees."

"Around the beginning of 2000 I was fascinated by the soundscape of electronic music," he explains. "Especially at that time there was a lot of clicks and cuts and music that was very noisy and I really loved that — these abstract sounds. I was fascinated so I thought, 'I want to have that in my music as well, but I want to play my own instruments.' In the beginning it was a little bit weird to work with a computer on stage to the point where I started wondering whether I can do that with an acoustic instrument, so I started to use material on the strings and that created in a way this kind of element that I'd been missing on the piano.

"When I started the prepared piano I was very happy that I didn't know about the other composers, because if I had known I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing. Now I think the musical theory of John Cage is awesome, about how music is sound and noise and everything else also. All noise can be music: there are rhythms and noises and we're very influenced by nature, by birds and trees, and it's a very interesting syncopation. That point of view is very influential to me."

Bertelmann explains that he favours informed guesswork when choosing objects to place into his piano.

"I have a fair idea about things that I'm using now or have used, so I use them as a basic element of my preparations — but there's always stuff that's pretty random that moves me. Sometimes I'm completely wrong with my selections — one time I used these metal scouring pads and I thought that they'd sound really great and I put them in the piano and played something and nothing happened, the sound was still the same and the pads were just lying there like a piece of crap on the strings," he chuckles. "I'd thought they'd create a metal sound but they weren't heavy enough to influence the sound at all. Then other things that I'd thought would bring nothing to the sound reacted really nicely — for instance the ping pong balls, I never expected them to sound so beautiful as a preparation."