Every year, on the 88th day of the year (towards the end of March) Piano Day rolls around and every year I think: this year I am going to compose something for Piano Day and it never happens…because I am too busy.
Well this March 2020 I have had more time, and after 10 days of self isolation with my family due to the Coronavirus I sat down at the piano and considered everything that had happened in the world recently, and put my phone into record. This is the resulting composition and I called it Together. My contribution to Piano Day 2020.
Piano day was started by Nils Frahm in 2015, a German musician and pianist who has been a real advocate of piano music and an experimenter of recording & treating the piano in different ways. He favours a very close dry recording technique with the use of a felt layer between the hammers and the strings. This creates a more muted and softer tone with fewer harmonics and fewer high frequencies and a more intimate sound generally. He has even commissioned David Klavins a piano builder to design and build a piano called an Una Chorda piano with only one string per note, more traditional upright pianos have 3 strings per note.