Just think of all the nervous energy coursing through all those kiddies lined up for this Sunday afternoon’s piano recital. And then think of all the victims of this ritual that came before and of all those that are yet to take their turn on the bench of doom.
Jolts of adrenaline produce the excess of glucose and increased blood flow that are the stuff of stage fright. Multiply this restive resource by the millions who have sweated, shaken and shone, from the church hall to Carnegie Hall, and those 88 black-and-white keys start looking—and sounding—a lot greener. If these chemicals and currents, these turbines of terror, could be harnessed, the world would now be relaxing into a sustainable future that would make all that Bach, Beethoven and Brahms worth the botching.
Academic conferences share more than a few features with those youthful (and not so youthful) keyboard revues, though presenters and performers don’t generally show their nerves. Yet behind the professional façade, things can fray and even spark, given that some 80% of university professors suffer from imposter syndrome. In the case of musicology meetings coupled with concerts, one rightly expects collegiality, but one also knows that disaster looms and loiters, ready to heckle from the back row of the id or to extend an icy hand and stale croissant at the mid-morning coffee break that comes just after a rocky Q&A session or just before a lengthy and embarrassing PowerPoint kerfuffle.
The Musical Patriot has been trudging up and down the spiral staircase of the Ivory Tower for decades and is by now okay with admitting that he was such a hot mess for the “Keyboard Energies” conference and concerts held at Cornell University this past weekend that if he’d been strapped to a heat exchanger he could have given plenty of kilowattage back to the grid, indeed probably powered the entire weekend.
Though the Musical Patriot’s nervous potential has as yet remained untapped, he was wired into the Friday evening concert entitled “Elemental Energies” during which the Romanesque brick bastion of Barnes Hall was invaded by a flotilla of keyboards. These crafts, both acoustic and electric, were tied to the dock of the stage with cords and cables, and bobbed and buzzed at their loudspeaker anchors.
Friday’s musical program began and ended with Wagner, starting in the watery depths with the epic E-flat evocation of the Rhine River that opens The Ring. The night ended on the mountaintop in the fire that encircles Brünnhilde at the close of the cycle’s second opera, The Valkyrie. Ten Keyboards—one (a mid-19th-century Pleyel piano) contemporaneous with Wagner’s Gods-and-Monsters masterpiece, the others either a century older or a century newer—were deployed by way of downsizing Mad Dick’s orchestra of nearly a hundred. Electricity can mean unemployment for many.
In between these Rhinemaidens and Brünnhilde bookends came, first, a twenty-handed romp through four minutes of the Magic Flute. A lush lament of deathly sweet sonorities then oozed from organ and piano, their plaint haunted by electrical noise. A high-voltage surge from synth pioneer and minimal-modular mystic David Borden’s landmark Continuing Story of Counterpoint was heard on its original instruments, including two Minimoogs that had been touched and tinkered with not only by the composer, but also by Robert Moog himself. Moog got his Ph.D. in engineering physics from Cornell in 1965 and invented his synthesizers a dozen miles from Barnes Hall.
Next, a set of uncanny epigrams about lightning, land, time and space from Cornell composer Jasmine Morris migrated between workstations. Later, granite sound-slabs were quarried from a Steinway. A rococo chamber organ crowned by a painted wooden cut-out of King David at his harp was pumped and played from the Romanesque apse — or was it a candlelit alcove of the 1750s? A clavichord of the same vintage sighed unamplified before being ventriloquized by its 1970s doppelgänger, a Hohner Clavinet of Stevie Wonder “Superstition” fame. The séance then channeled that vibe into an extended funk fantasy. A Parisian salon of the ancien régime got an electric upgrade across three keyboards (two French, one German). A Fender Rhodes and Viennese fortepiano dueled over a Mozart duet. Both players not only survived, but came out smiling. A Bach sonata was switched on à la Wendy Carlos.
All these relics and replicas, innovations and obsolescence are normally housed—and humidified—at various depots of the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards, the event’s host. The Barnes Hall footlights, bought especially for the show, shone first in aqueous blue, but ended in a fiery red that helped to transform Wagner’s magic-tragic Gods-and-Monsters masterpiece into a post-historical vision of off-world escape: salvage as salvation.
Among the aims of this conclave were investigating, extolling and coaxing into sounding life not just keyboard innovations of the Atomic Age (the aforementioned analog synthesizers, electric pianos and electra-harpsichords) but also bringing these innovations into musical dialogue with their forbears, from the most ancient (the organ) to the oldest stringed keyboard instrument (the clavichord) to the slender fortepianos known to Mozart to the hulking grand pianos that are the battleships of the modern concert stage.
The keyboard arranged more-or-less like that of the Steinway has been the default interface for the fingers (and sometimes the feet) for at least 600 years: twelve keys per octave, with seven on the lower plane and five narrower ones above, was and remains the ubiquitous arrangement. If one were to guide the blind German organist Arnold Schlick, who, in 1511 published the very first book about organ building and playing, to a Moog synthesizer from 1970, he would immediately be able to find his way around the keys, though it would take him more than a little while to make any sense of all the knobs that calibrate a dizzying array of variables—decay, echo, glide, wave forms, among others. Would the infinite possibilities blow his mind or make him ask why a single beautiful sound is not enough for the moderns?
The Saturday of Keyboard Energies arrived, gray and raining. Production from the rural solar “farms” tucked away in the hinterland far from the central campus was down, so the Cornell Baroque Organ did its program of Bach’s music of wind and water fully off-grid: a confrontation with the terrifying, transformative turbulence of the Holy Spirit on that windiest of days, the Pentecost ; the Jordan and the Waters of Babylon ran forever free and pure in the musical imagination and were not the dammed ecological disasters they have been turned into by the insatiable appetites of industrial agriculture and energy consumption; a final frenzied Toccata was ripped through as if by extreme weather. Up in the dungeon-like tower, an Italian piano virtuoso pumped the bellows. No electric lights were turned on to chase away the shadows playing across the music desk. The audience sat in sepulchral contemplation. The concert was not streamed, not recorded, not archived. It blew in and then away like a wind-grieved ghost.
On either side of Saturday’s midday recital, there was fascinating scholarly talk of early electrified music coming through light bulbs; of Tesla’s championing of alternating current sent across New York State from Niagara Falls in the 1890s; of 19th-century organs shipped down the Erie Canal. Energized by Manifold Destiny, the King of Instrument made his way west. Once applied to organs, electricity made the monarch so big that he couldn’t help but topple, and so he did in the Crash of 1929. Half a century later, multi-keyboard maestro Herbie Hancock went digital and won a Grammy.
We also heard of the illusory domestic bliss promised to American women by electric gadgets included the revolutionary Hammond organ as well as another 1930s invention in which the current coursed through the player’s body all the way to the tips of her fingers at touch-sensitive metal keys. Keyboard innovation could literally be hair-raising.
The conference culminated in a concert on Cornell’s Hammond B-3 played by Gary Versace. A professor at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester not so far away from Cornell’s Ithaca campus, Versace is renowned the world over as an unsurpassed master of the instrument. Its inventor, Laurens Hammond, graduated from Cornell with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1913, and the Keyboard Energies hosts therefore laid partial claim to this watershed innovation.
Like their leader, the other two members of Versace’s ad hoc trio had successfully triangulated their way to Ithaca, the centrally isolated midpoint of New York State. Guitarist Nate Radley’s phlegmatic stage persona worked in vivid counterpoint to his fleet virtuosity and wit. A consummate collaborator, Michael Sarin never grabbed for attention, yet his drumming was endlessly attentive—dynamic, incisive, inventive.
Though the members of the trio have worked together in other ensembles and configurations (Snapshots of 2023 from the Radley-Versace duo is a compelling, kaleidoscopic portrait of pair’s musical partnership), the three had never played before as a single unit. Yet Saturday’s synthesis sizzled and smoked. There was an insouciantly upbeat Funny Valetine, a bluesy Big Reach (a Radley original) and a de-arranged, as Versace put it, “Love for Sale.” The Cole Parker classic was stalked by a bespoke countermelody, the tune’s sly emotional charge delivered with furtive hands and feet, while also winking at the commercial impulses that, as outlined earlier in the day by one keyboard scholar, had propelled Hammonds into tens of thousands of churches and homes in America and across the world, including Versace’s own boyhood living room.
Over these two days there were keyboards in quantity and a surplus of keyboardists of quality to operate them. After the plug was pulled on Keyboard Energies late Saturday night, the enervated Musical Patriot realized that he had been shocked into awe not by the electrical marvels but by the sustainable power of the people who had played them.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest albums, “In the Cabinet of Wonders” and “Handel’s Organ Banquet” are now available from False Azure Records.)
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