Film Screening, Intermittent Attunement, on May 3rd at 4pm in Wooster Hall 363

This ethnographic film follows Dr. Alex Peh, an American classically trained pianist, as he reattunes his relationship with the piano through oral lessons in piano traditions found throughout the world: Burmese sandaya, Greek rebetiko, Persian-tuned classical piano and American Jazz. Working closely with U Thet Oo (Myanmar), Ne Myo Aung (Myanmar), Nikos Ordoulidis (Greece), Hafez Modirzadeh (Iran/America), and Pooyan Azadeh (Iran), Alex reaches out into unfamiliar piano soundscapes to unsettle (Western) definitional boundaries of the piano and its music. By “detuning” his expectations about genre, what new directions can he map out for classical and contemporary piano music? What new forms of attunement do Alex and his collaborators realize? Such questions are inevitably intertwined with issues regarding authenticity, tradition, and cultural appropriation.