Piano, gamelan and the Matrix

Last night, watching Charles Rosen perform solo piano works by Beethoven, Chopin and Brahms, I thought about how strange this must seem, and probably boring, to someone unfamiliar with classical music. The piano is pretty much the only instrument on which people play long, solo recitals, a tradition begun by the 19th-century virtuoso Franz Liszt ("le récital, c'est moi"). It doesn't have the sonic variety of the orchestra, or even the capability of changing the sound once a note starts: you press a key and make a sound, and it decays. You can play soft or loud (which explains the instrument's original name, "piano-forte"), and you can make notes sustain by pressing the damper pedal. That's it. Yet with this limited palette, composers have written volumes and volumes of music in every style imaginable. And discerning listeners recognize the "voice" of different composers and pianists just in the way they write for the piano, or play it. In the monochromatic timbre, or sound-color, of the piano, super-signals lie embedded, like the messages of Morse code emerging from undifferentiated dots and dashes. It's not by accident that piano keys are black and white.

These thoughts last night led me to Bali, where I visited last summer to play gamelan music. The gamelan is a metal percussion orchestra, tuned differently than western instruments: instead of 12 pitches, there are only seven, or even sometimes four or five. To uninitiated listeners the music may all sound the same (very fast and loud). But Balinese listeners follow the intricacies of the music, and hear wondrous variety in each piece, commenting on daring compositional gambits, unexpected flourishes, and so on. This kind of not-understanding, or snobbery, can happen in almost any kind of music or art—your parents don't understand the music you listen to. But something about the monochromaticism of the piano, or the limited pitches of the gamelan, seem to put this issue into relief: hearing the super-signal becomes even more important when the surface of the sound is relatively undifferentiated.

It makes me think of the scene in The Matrix where Neo and another character are looking at the green computer symbols cascading down the videoscreens before them. Neo (the uninitiated) sees only symbols; but the adept sees "a blond here, a redhead there." He sees past the surface, directly into the super-signal. This kind of seeing, or hearing, lies behind all kinds of human activity—it's pattern recognition. Perhaps the reason piano music appeals to so many of us is because it strenuously exercises our powers of high-level pattern recognition.