Water Music (1952)

It's worth noting that although this composition is called "Water Music", performances of it follow a rather frustrating naming convention, as they are titled after the place and time of the performance. Thus, the recording I'm listening to, from Schleiermacher's Complete Piano Music vol. 4, is called Arolsen, February 8, 1998. It took me a little while to figure out that I did actually have a recording of this piece.

This is a "performance piece", involving a lot of visual/theatrical elements. Simply to listen to it, then, is to experience only part of the piece. However, the theatrical elements are really just the visual counterpart to what we're hearing - it's things like seeing the pianist deal a deck of cards, seeing him tip water from one jug into another, etc - and frankly, none of that stuff is remotely interesting to me. I guess my ears are rather more experimental than my eyes. I don't much care about seeing a guy mess around with a radio, though I'll probably be fascinated by the sounds that result.

Anyway, the sounds we have here are: a piano, obviously; a radio; sounds of water; various whistles; a few percussive thuds; and one sound that is difficult to identify, a sort of quiet scraping during the first couple of minutes (possibly static from the radio?). As noted above, the performer also shuffles and deals a deck of cards, although I didn't catch that (unsurprisingly, as that's going to be very quiet). Despite the variety of different sounds, this piece is actually fairly sparse. There's a lot of silence, and a lot of times where we hear just the quiet noise of the radio. Everything is used sparingly: the water pouring, for example, occurs just a couple of times towards the end; the whistles are heard only four or five times.

Since it's a solo piece, and since there was probably more going on that what I could hear, the performer is presumably quite active. The music in itself, however, is soft and calm. To me it has a sort of night-time mood. I like that the radio produces either static or distorted voices, many of which seem to be in a foreign language (it might be English that sounds foreign due to the distortion), rather than music; it reminds me of shortwave radio. I've always felt that there is something a little eerie about shortwave radio, so that really adds to the mood. A fun listen.