• Ming Tsao
  • Plus or Minus (2017)
    (for two pianos and electronics)

  • Henry Litolff’s Verlag GmbH & Co. KG (World)
  • 2pf/electronics
  • 41 min
    • 28th June 2025, Akademie der Künste am Hanseatenweg, Berlin, Germany
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Programme Note

Plus or Minus, for two pianos and electronics, is a 50–minute free realization of Stockhausen’s open score composition of the same name from 1963. It refers to all 7 pages of the open score and utilizes two layers of activity, each of which is represented by one piano. The pianos themselves are transformed with transducer speakers placed throughout a piano’s chamber so that sound is essentially “spatialized” within. Single piano tones emerge and disappear continuously between transducer speakers that use the wood inside the piano as a vibrating source. Strange resonances emerge from the music of each performer that suggests seismic, often geological forces of activity that place human expression into its proper place as one aspect of a much more complex sound world.

 

Scores

Reviews

[...] It is perhaps the best piece of the festival, which could be the merit of the GrauSchumacher piano duo. The 53-minute work surpasses all others heard in Witten in terms of complexity, degree of elaboration and presumably also compositional skill. On the one hand, Plus or Minus presents itself with a repellent autonomy; on the other hand, it offers a disarming clarity of vocal layering. [...]

Anton Schlatz, https://konzertkritikopernkritikberlin.blog/
5th May 2025

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