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tags: Cage Music
A prepared piano is a piano that has had its sounds temporarily altered by placing bolts, screws, mutes, rubber erasers, and/or other objects on or between the strings.
Each key of the piano has its own characteristic timbre, and that the original pitch of the string will not necessarily be recognizable.
Cage said that he realized it was possible “to place in the hands of a single pianist the equivalent of an entire percussion orchestra … With just one musician, you can really do an unlimited number of things on the inside of the piano if you have at your disposal an exploded keyboard”
As Cage explains in a foreword to Richard Bunger’s The Well-Prepared Piano_,_ he was inspired to begin altering the piano while working as an accompanist for a dance class in Seattle. Tasked with writing music to accompany a performance by the dancer Syvilla Fort, Cage lamented the lack of room on stage for percussion instruments. “I decided that what was wrong was not me but the piano,” he writes in the foreword.
“When I first placed objects between piano strings, it was with a desire to possess sounds,” writes Cage. “But, as the music left my home and went from piano to piano and from pianist to pianist, it became clear that not only are two pianists essentially different from one another, but two pianos are not the same either. Instead of the possibility of repetition, we are faced in life with the unique qualities and characteristics of each occasion.”