Playing Piano with Speakers for Reverbs Only”

This concert, Playing Piano with Speakers for Reverbs Only, was conceived as a version of the completely unplugged solo piano concert Playing Piano with No Speakers, which took place in September 2015. A solo piano concert using speakers comes with the disadvantage that the pianist cannot do a sound check. This is an obvious issue, as it’s impossible to move around while playing the piano during rehearsal and check the sound in other parts of the venue. However, this became a significant source of stress for me.

In Playing Piano with No Speakers, I decided to address this by performing an unplugged concert with no use of speakers or microphones, simply playing the piano’s natural sound without any amplification. In this setup, I performed with no breaks, no MC, and no encores, just pure music. During this concert, the sound of my fingers on the piano and the reverberation of the hall were always vividly heard, giving a different sensation and feedback compared to other solo piano concerts I had played.

At that moment, I realized that by maintaining the piano’s natural sound and only controlling the reverberation, I could create a new relationship between the piano and the space. The piano’s sound itself would not be amplified through speakers, but I could transform the reverberation component using various sampling reverb techniques, and then play this altered reverberation through 16-channel speakers arranged throughout the space. This setup could be thought of as a dub mix, where sampling reverb is applied to the piano, but the original piano sound remains natural and unamplified. In my imagination, this created the ideal setting, one where I felt like I was playing the piano in a church that didn’t exist in reality.

In the end, this attempt was successful. The performance continued in a perfectly natural reverb without using any monitor speakers, and it felt as though I was swimming through the sound, with the audience experiencing the sensation that the sound of the piano was coming down from the ceiling. Many of them mentioned that they found themselves gazing up in a daze. The sound engineering was handled by Yoshiyuki Kanamori, who had worked on many of my past concerts, both domestic and international, and was familiar with my sonic preferences and approach. Thanks to him, I believe we were able to create a unique relationship between the piano and the space that had never existed before. I plan to continue updating and using this format in the future.

Furthermore, visual elements were minimized to the extreme, creating a boundary between darkness and light, which significantly increased the focus on the performance and listening experience. In the concert two years ago at Spiral Hall, I asked Masayoshi Takada, who had handled the lighting, to focus not on lighting as a mere effect, but on how to light the piano and space in relation to the sound. This concert was composed with only one piano, one light, and the reverberation of the space. To reiterate, the piano’s sound was not amplified through speakers. However, I didn’t want the nostalgic tension of straining to hear sounds that aren’t easily audible, so I decided a piano with sufficient volume to fill the hall was necessary. That’s why I chose a Steinway Model D concert grand piano. The piano used at Spiral Hall two years ago could be brought in via an elevator, but it was clearly insufficient in volume for a concert relying solely on the natural sound of the piano. The Steinway Model D, which is 274 cm long, is a full concert grand, so it had to be lifted by a crane from the road outside the venue on the day of the concert. The piano was lifted into the air. Coincidentally, this also aligned with my new project.

Keiichiro Shibuya