National Sawdust concert and series of short films (2022)

Alex Peh: Intermittent Attunement from National Sawdust on Vimeo.

Pianist Alex Peh explores parallel piano worlds that unsettle boundaries of genre, tradition, and style. Peh collaborates with ethnographic videographers, Lauren Meeker, Alyson Hummer, and Madelyn Colonna to create a multi-modal experience revealing the process of intercultural collaboration, and the intimate bonds between musicians as they attune to one another to create new compositions. This series of short films were integrated into Peh’s concert held on June 18, 2022 at 7:30 pm at National Sawdust that featured four new world premieres. Composer Anna Clyne’s new work Red Nines, is a collection of nine short movements in hybrid styles, composed as part of a “game music” series. Red Nines borrows its title from a simple card game played in south-west London during the 1950s. Ne Myo Aung’s work, Padetha, which translates to “mixed” in Burmese, deconstructs genre within Burmese Sandaya piano traditions, mixing popular, classical and folk idioms to create a virtuosic piano piece. Greek composer-performer Nikos Ordoulidis’ “Piece of Minds”, questions identity, culture and traditional practice. Sounds from Ordoulidis’ experience communicate with one another through which a (real) musical place is created. Pooyan Azadeh’s, Ba Yadash, pays homage to his teacher, the great Persian classical pianist, Javad Maroufi. The evening also featured new solo and duo arrangements of work by Hafez Modirzadeh and Susie Ibarra, who performed with Peh on stage. Hafez Modirzadeh’s cycle of miniatures entitled “Facets” for re-tuned piano explores the work as a solo meditation. Susie Ibarra joined Peh in a duo performance of Talking Gong, a work originally for improvising piano trio, that explores the sonority of the Kulintang and piano in conversation.

To watch the films individually, see our vimeo showcase.

 

Intermittent Attunement (2023) (trt 1:06)

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.

Intermittent Attunement (Short Version, 2024)