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.

 

While the project is grounded in the piano, the film is not about the piano as object. Indeed, the variable tuning that the instrument is subject to in different soundscapes points, rather, to its status as a medium. We center on the piano as a set of culturally and musically influenced relationships of attunement that unfold between teachers, students, ethnographers, and film collaborators. How do we learn to adjust our sound, images, musical accents, and our very being for each other when forced to work in the kinds of fraught empowering/disempowering relationships born both of ethnographic filmmaking and cross- cultural musical learning? The goal of the film is to map visually, aurally, and experientially the ways that these connections form through the collaborative processes of filming, learning to play piano in a foreign soundscape, and teaching/composing for someone trained in a foreign musical tradition.

 

Filmmakers’ statement

We take a highly collaborative approach to filmmaking, allowing the film’s narrative to emerge through collaboration and conversation between film participants. Our practice is grounded in the belief that collaboration is the foundation of ethical filmmaking. The ethical responsibilities of ethnographic representation in film demand attentiveness—or attunement—to the context of filming, the needs of the film subjects, and to the filmmakers’ role as participants in the events unfolding on camera. This is particularly relevant to Intermittent Attunement, as a central theme of the film is the cross-cultural and cross-genre relationships that form between Alex Peh and his teachers and collaborators. Our approach is to raise questions about representation by allowing ample space for film collaborators to reveal themselves on their own terms, while also highlighting the very real and integral presence of the filmmakers in the representation. Using and displaying images of others comes with a moral responsibility to consider the ways in which images not only belong to those represented in them, but also how images are constitutive of peoples’ very being in the world.

 

Yet, filmic representations are always only partial. Thus, in Intermittent Attunement, we explore approaches to editing to signal the ongoing incompleteness of the information we present in the film and to remain faithful to the indeterminacy of experience. Our film incorporates the often frustratingly unpolished zoom footage of Alex Peh’s lessons with his teachers to allow viewers to experience first-hand the difficulties of learning piano remotely, over choppy video connections. Our hope is to lead viewers to experience the intermittence of understanding that flickers in and out of awareness in the human experience. If ethnographic representation on film is always partial, what remains are human relationships generated through the filmmaking process.