Modus Calls the Alternative Piano the New Mainstream
After a piece by Hania Rani, Šarūnas Nakas draws the boundary. This episode of Modus will consider a piano that no longer performs as athlete, acrobat or fakir. It speaks quietly and at close range, with pedal and key mechanism left audible; it prefers the room, the storeroom and the shoreline to the official concert hall. By the end Mindaugas Urbaitis will note that the supposedly alternative piano has become the mainstream one. In less than an hour, the hosts have described not a niche but a transfer of power.
Nakas first links that transfer to wabi-sabi, exhaustion with technological polish and a desire to escape cultural officialdom. His sharpest observation is that refusing beauty soon produces another beauty code: abrasion and incompleteness can harden into style as readily as gloss. The argument weakens when Japanese aesthetics, roughened opera productions, tracksuits on stage and a close-miked piano are filed under one heading. They rhyme, but resemblance is not genealogy. A tracksuit in an opera house is not yet a source in wabi-sabi musicology.
The real dispute begins after Eydís Evensen's Challenger Deep. Urbaitis wonders whether music once played at home is now outsourced to professionals, while Nakas recalls the theory that radio stopped people singing because the radio did it better. The history is too neat, but the question is excellent. Recording culture redrew the border between making music and consuming it. Intimacy, once a domestic circumstance, became a professionally manufactured product.
Nakas then moves from diagnosis to sentence. Evensen's piece is, in his account, a pianist's generic improvisation, a chain of ready-made constructions and the continuation of school exercises without an individual language. There is evidence available for that criticism: familiar harmony, a predictable dynamic arc, a salon gesture inherited rather than transformed. But familiarity alone does not prove an absence of logic. One still has to show where proportion, harmonic direction or development fail. Nakas's pianist as a DJ with ten fingers and one pedal is excellent radio. It is not yet a musical proof.
The conversation immediately supplies its own counterexample. In Nils Frahm's recording, the same signs of proximity become marks of authorship: mechanism noise, touch, air and the refusal of stage polish. Frahm may indeed control these devices more compellingly than Evensen. If so, microphone and piano action have to count as musical material in both cases. The imaginary storeroom can have an art director too; carefully designed authenticity may require more production than a tailcoat.
The hosts are at their best when they describe what this music does to attention. It can accompany driving, conversation or drilling into a wall. The listener becomes a passer-by in a station, or someone looking through a keyhole into another room. That is a precise account of a contemporary listening contract: the music permits company without demanding that life stop. Yet permission to drift is not the same as an inability to reward concentration. Music can tolerate the background and still rise out of it.
The register changes when Ryuichi Sakamoto arrives. Nakas calls him an entirely different level and reaches for the NBA, relegating the preceding music to an amateur league. The difference is audible. Sakamoto's pauses alter the meaning of earlier chords, shifts of register give the piece direction, and time is shaped rather than filled. But the basketball image ends the analysis at the very point where it should begin. More revealing is the hosts' disagreement: Nakas invokes classical lineage and cultural context; Urbaitis says the music itself is enough. Sakamoto's name may help us notice structure, but it should not manufacture structure on the work's behalf.
Urbaitis also refuses to confuse difficulty with value. Many of these pieces could be played by amateurs, he says, and that shortens the distance between pianist and listener. Anti-virtuosity may conceal a shortage of means, but it can also be an aesthetic ethic. Piano competitions occasionally behave as if harder must mean better. The history of composition has signed no such regulation.
Hauschka's Talking to My Father brings the argument to its comic and philosophical centre. Urbaitis asks why one cannot speak to a father in clusters. Nakas replies that a father cannot be fooled. The social intuition is clear: for many listeners the cluster still signals elite action, affectation or excess, while slow tonal piano has become the ready language of ordinary sincerity. Yet a habit of reception is not a law of nature. A cluster is no more inherently dishonest than a major triad is a confession. An elbow can act; so can a breath placed close to the microphone.
Nakas is on still thinner ground when he speculates that some of these composers may not know the avant-garde. A work can reveal which devices its maker selected, not which histories that maker has never encountered. Conservatism may be deliberate, market-rewarded or simply the audible result. Nakas later usefully softens his own border by calling the divisions between serious, light and entertainment music artificial. Genre walls may be invented while differences of quality remain real.
Gender enters the discussion less through arithmetic than through the distribution of personhood. Four women and three men are heard. Hania Rani and Sophie Hutchings are not mocked, while Hauschka receives substantial criticism, so a flat accusation of misogyny would be as lazy as the music the hosts distrust. Still, the women more often become symptoms of a trend: Evensen is returned to the schoolroom, Alexandra Stréliski to the soundtrack of a manor-house serial. The men more often remain singular authors: Frahm the pioneer, Sakamoto the standard, Hauschka the subject of a philosophical quarrel. The issue is not who gets criticised, but who is allowed to be an individual and who must stand for a diagnosis. A stereotype is also a ready-made construction. It does not even need a pedal.
This is why Modus remains worth hearing when its measuring stick bends. Nakas is quick with verdicts and memorable images; Urbaitis tests premises, changes scale and admits counterarguments. Their disagreement gives the programme motion, while the excerpts run long enough for listeners to disobey the commentary. Together they connect sound with recording technology, private feeling with mass markets, and technical modesty with changing ideas of value. They are least convincing when reputation, mockery or an imagined education replaces musical evidence. A good criticism programme need not be infallible. It needs to make listening less automatic. After Dar kitoks fortepijonas, the quiet chord no longer arrives alone: we hear the microphone, the market and the hand issuing its artistic licence.