Review Of The Rauschenberg Scores

Between the notes, there is the white space, the emptiness and there is much to contemplate, both in dark
times, and perhaps also in less dark time. This is a wonderfully fine release. 

DANNY MCCARTHY - THE RAUSCHENBERG SCORES 
(CD by Far Point Recordings)
Playing paintings and screens as if they were musical scores is of course not really something new. Here we have Cork based Danny McCarthy who was invited by the Rauschenberg Foundation in Florida and worked in the studio in which Rauschenberg created his prints to play the piano; keys of which have been played before by John Cage and David Tudor, among others.Sometimes there would be mysterious ‘other’ sounds happening at night, but if they are captured on tape, they are surely not easy to hear. You could glance at the package or look up Rauschenberg on the Internet, or you could, as I did, sit back and don’t do anything at all, and just take the music in. There is no accurate playing of scores like this; it is more like a response to what the player sees and how he interpreters the works he sees, translated into some very sparse piano music. There is quite a bit of silence between the notes and McCarthy uses, as far as I can judge these things (not being a piano player myself), the entire instrument and extended techniques to play it. The strings and the body are as much part of the musical piece as the hammers and thekeys. I have no idea how this was captured on tape, but sometimes it seems quite far away and over the course of these fifty minutes it seems as if the distance is only growing. As I was mourning over the loss of a friend this week (like I’m sure many others did who have some connection with the world that Vital Weekly is part of), this is the sort of contemplative music that goes down well at such moments, even when it is perhaps not something that McCarthy intended as such. Between the notes, there is the white space, the emptiness and there is much to contemplate, both in dark times, and perhaps also in less dark time. This is a wonderfully fine release. (FdW)
––– Address: http://www.farpointrecordings.com