Notating and producing multiphonic in the piano: a brief introduction

The constant research for new materials and sonorities has made composers and performers look after new instrumental possibilities through music’s history. This process has implicated in different ways of playing instruments, increasing thus the universe of possible instrumental sonorities. In this context, the multiphonics presents themselves as one of the many possibilities of instrumental expansion. In a general way, they can be defined as the simultaneous production of more than one audible sound. Historically, we can perceive that the multiphonic’s use has become more frequent after the publication, in the beginning of 1960, of the book New Sounds for Woodwind (the Portuguese translation has been published in 1967) by the composer Bruno Bartolozzi. It’s not difficult to find examples of the multiphonics use in works from composers of the second half of the XXth Century, particularly the multiphonics played by wind instruments.

Whereas the use of multiphonics in wind instruments is a practice widely known and documented, we can easily find books and manuals about the subject, the use of these multiple sonorities in string instruments – rubbed or not – still isn’t. According to Thelin (2011) the first comprehensive description of the multiphonics in string instruments is from 1995, when the French contrabass player Jean-Pierre Robert published, in collaboration with the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique Musique – IRCAM, the book Les modes de jeu de la contrebasse – un dictionaire de son. Among the works recently published about the issue, we emphasize the contribution of three authors; Håkon Thelin, Michael Liebman and Ellen Fallowfield. In his paper Multiphonics on the double bass: An investigation on the development and use of mutiphonics on the double bass in contemporary music (2011), Thelin approach the use of multiphonics by the performer’s perspective, defining the different kinds of possible multiphonics in the double bass and giving musical examples of them. Liebman has also an extensive work about the multiphonics in the cello and double bass (Liebman 2001). Among the composers who use multiphonics in string instruments, written in different ways, we highlight Caspar Johannes Walter, Mauricio Sotelo and also Michael Liebman. It’s possible to find among the works of these composers many excerpts in which they use multiphonics, as in the pieces: “versunkene Form” (2004) and 3 Studien für Klarinette, Cello und Klavier (2011) from Caspar Johannes Walter, Memoriæ (1994) from Mauricio Sotelo and “Movement of Repose (1998, 2009)” from Michael Liebman.

This paper proposes itself to investigate aspects related to multiphonic’s notation and production specifically in the piano. To achieve this goal we tested some multiphonics written for piano found in the work of the composer Caspar Johannes Walter. In the process of this research we found a material elaborated by Ellen Fallowfield (available in the website Cello Map) and adapted her multiphonic’s approach to the piano. From that, we recorded and compared the multiphonics played in two pianos. The recordings were made using the software Audacity in pianos of two different manufactures (Stenways & Sons and Yamaha) so that we could observe the peculiarities of each instrument, in the perspective of the performance and also in the perspective of the resonant feature of the multiphonics.

The conclusions were made from the comparison of the results. In the notational aspect, we verified more clarity in the indication, by the composer, of the fundamental plus the note above which the multiphonic is build (notated with the “diamond head”) and the more salient resulting notes, with their respective numbers from the harmonic series. From the performance point of view, we verified first that the multiphonic is more easily produced on the double and simple strings. Besides that, it’s possible to play, in the double strings, two different multiphonics from one fundamental note, or to play one multiphonic plus one harmonic. The major difficulty found was the huge variation of the produced multiphonic’s result with very subtle variation of the finger’s position in the string. The final artistic goal of this research is the creation of new pieces using the researched materials through the continuous and ancient process of composer-performer collaboration.