Playing the keys? With your fingers? How passé. Composers have been experimenting with novel piano-playing techniques for over a century now. Here are a few highlights from a hundred years of bizarre things you can get up to with your piano.
1. Play with the strings
John Cage may have made this technique famous – and indeed coined the term “prepared piano” in the early 1940s – but he was not the first composer to manipulate the sound of the piano by playing around with the strings. The important experimental composer Henry Cowell coined the term “string piano” in the 1920s, and used a number of techniques, from plucking and sweeping across the strings, to flicking with a fingernail. Even he wasn’t the first, though – surprisingly, Percy Grainger had got there in 1916. The third movement (“Pastorale”) of his suite In a Nutshell requires the pianist to “Strike the strings of the piano with medium-wound Marimba mallet”. Even earlier, Erik Satie’s Le piège de Méduse of 1913 requires sheets of paper to be threaded between the piano strings.
2. Let it vibrate
If you hold down the sustain pedal and use another instrument to play sounds straight into the body of the piano, some of the strings will start to vibrate, “sympathetically” to the pitches being played. Xenakis made use of this effect in his Eonta (1963–64); so did George Crumb in Makrokosmos Volume 1 (1972) – a book of pieces in which the pianist is also asked to do quite a lot of whistling.