Stephen Scott: New Music for Bowed Piano

Stephen Scott is truly one of our current iconoclastic composers. Though his career has culminated to center around bowed piano works, Scott has a background in recorder, saxophone, and clarinet. He studied composition at Brown and the University of Oregon, and has done quite a bit of musical study in Africa. Many of his works are African influenced, and though the album discussed in this entry does not seem to be, it is. Scott met Steve Reich, one of the prepared piano kings, in 1970 while studying music in Ghana.
“New Music for Bowed Piano” is a culmination of ambient and meditative works for, of course, bowed piano. “Rainbows I”, with its rhythmic and melodic intensity, is definitely the selection with the highest verve-factor, but each of the six pieces has their own unique texture and ambience. The other pieces on the album tend to be less melodic and more based around an ambient, pulsating chordal texture. There is not a complete lack of rhythmic interest-- it is just more dispersed than the demeanor portrayed in “Rainbows I”.
Since Scott composes for bowed piano, he also creates bows, bowing techniques, and choreography for the performances of his pieces. In “New Music for Bowed Piano” Scott's musicians used popsicle sticks with rosined horsehair attached to them. The rhythmic passages of the piece are based around a staccato style, so Scott trained his musicians to play the music with abbreviated wrist flicks. In order to perform each one of Stephen Scott’s pieces, the musicians must use a strict pattern of choreography in order to avoid becoming tangled in one another while in concert.
When all is said and done, the vast amount of work that must go in to making a bowed piano performance possible is truly worth it. You’ll never see anything else like it.