Following the 1973 award not a single prize has been awarded to whole organism biology. To put this in perspective, all Nobel prizes in the previous several decades had been awarded for reductionist approaches to molecular medicine. This was the first and the last time that the prize was awarded for animal behavior – ethology. In 1973 the Nobel prize for Physiology or Medicine went to a rather unlikely triumvirate: Karl von Frisch, Konrad Lorenz, and Niko Tinbergen. One where matter becomes a computational collaborator and not merely a mechanical servant. Both Chopin and Jarrett were experiencing exbodiment – that state of cognition characterized by a collaboration between organismal mind and environmentally sourced matter. And it took a similar experience to dislocate Chopin into the baroque lyric of his Preludes. It took a harmonically compromised piano to lure Jarrett away from experimental jazz into a space hitherto dominated by modern classical composers. Jarrett’s isorhythms of involuntary serialism are reminiscent of the contemporary experiments of Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and Steve Reich with sparse arpeggios and polyrhythms. Jarrett achieved his effects throughout the first movement by abstaining from the use of the sustain pedal. The mini grand sounds less like a piano and more like a fortepiano and it wants to be played like a harpsichord. Like Chopin’s Bauza, Jarret’s physical instrument had “ideas of its own.” And these did not align with anyone’s ideal tonalities. When you have problems one after another you forget what you are doing.” As Jarret describes it, “We had the wrong piano rented… I had a Bosendorfer I really didn’t like…I had not slept for two days… everything was wrong. On the night of the performance, Jarret was delivered a vastly less edifying, and out of tune, Bosendorfer baby grand. It was over a hundred and thirty years after Chopin that the thirty-year-old Jarrett planned to perform a solo piano recital on a Bosendorfer 290 Imperial concert grand. In reflecting on the condition of his piano, Jarrett himself described it as not worthy of recording. In Majorca he composed not as Bach’s epigone but as his heir apparent.įrom the pub-like keys of a practice piano in a lugubrious Köln winter in 1975, Keith Jarrett improvised a composition that would go on to become the best-selling Jazz album of all time.
It is as if the further Chopin moved from his Platonic musical ideals, into the texture and tension of physicality, the more his imagination found the space to become creative. Paul Kildea writes Chopin’s Piano, his thoughtful history of Bauza, “it was out of date before it was completed… unable to support thicker or longer strings, greater tension or larger compass… its wooden frame hostage to the island’s fierce climate.”Īnd yet it was on this nominally wretched instrument that Chopin wrote the Preludes and not on the far more sonorous Pleyel pianos on which he was accustomed to composing. The piano was by the standards of its time a dud.
And the piano on which Chopin composed the Preludes was locally constructed by an otherwise unknown carpenter, Juan Bauza. No workroom could be worse equipped for acoustics than the cell in Valldemossa. The novelist George Sand, Chopin’s partner at the time wrote, “His genius was filled with the mysterious sounds of nature, but transformed into sublime equivalents in musical thought…” As it turns out both Natural history and instrumental history. Chopin described his cell as “shaped like a tall coffin.”Ĭhopin’s Preludes followed the template of Bach’s 48 Preludes and Fugues published in his Well-Tempered Clavier from 1722. The preludes were written between 18 in a remote and chilly Carthusian cell in the monastery of Valldemossa in Majorca. – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Cause and Effect: Intuitive AwarenessĬhopin’s Preludes for solo piano are regarded as some of the more trailblazing compositions in the history of piano music.
“ If a stone could think he would think that he wished to drop.”