The title of Pianazzolla (2007) comes from a synthesis of the words pianola and Piazzolla. Pianola refers to the player piano, and Piazzolla refers to the great Nuevo-Tango composer, Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992). Piazzolla’s music had a very important role in my personal musical formation; as I fell in love with his music at the impressionable age of adolescence.
While Pianazzolla may draw upon the music of Piazzolla, it is not really a pure homage. Rather, Pianazzolla is a struggle between an artist and his/her material. Imagine an artist painting a picture of a green pasture, but his color green did not want to be the color green! Instead, all his green pigment wanted to be blue, so with all his creative will the artist feverishly adds yellow to the painting to temper the blue back into green. Similarly, Piazzolla’s materials are based on symmetrical pitch structures and collections (or, if you prefer, green). However, these formulated materials do not seem to want to be nicely balanced. Rather, they are unstable, with sudden outbursts and patchy textures. Against their creator’s wishes, these materials have a mind of their own; they would prefer to dance a tango (metaphorically speaking; blue).
Notes the performer:
Pianazzolla can be performed in two different ways. The first is the preferred method of including a live Yamaha disklavier (or any other MIDI player piano) as part of the performance along with a CD audio track. The performer may play on this player piano or a separate grand piano (preferred). The second way is use a pre-recorded player piano part recorded onto the CD audio track. No disklavier is necessary.
For many of the improvised sections of the music I list the scales/pitches that I would like the performer to use in their improvisation. THESE ARE NOT TO BE PLAYED AS SCALES. Rather, they serve as a pitch collection that I’d like the performer to draw a wealth of materials from in their playing. I highly encourage the pianist to use their own creative spirit in these improvisations; particularly during the central section that asks the pianist to play inside the piano.
The total duration is about 9’30”.
A video of a performance of Pianazzolla can be found at my website:
-Nick Sibicky