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C o n c e r t i n o F o r T o y P i a n o

O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o

[duration 10:32] all rights reserved

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The artist Otacílio Melgaço has two official curators in the virtual world. A curator (from Latin: ´curare´, meaning ´to take care´) is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, keeper of a cultural heritage institution (e.g., gallery, museum, library or, as the present case: sound archive) is a content specialist charged with an institution's collections and, highlighting the context in force here, involved with the interpretation of personal (heritage) material. Both, Mr. Paz and Mr. Campbell, are, therefore, reviewers of the Melgacian works. To learn more about their missions, tasks, assignments and responsibilities by means of valuable informations regarding the compositional process, the performative rhizomes and other special features, just click the following link: otaciliomelgaco.wixsite.com/preamblebypsp
(O.M.Team; P r e l u d e)

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"The toy piano, also known as the kinderklavier (child's keyboard), is a small piano-like musical instrument. Most modern toy pianos use round metal rods, as opposed to strings in a regular piano, to produce sound. The US Library of Congress recognizes the toy piano as a unique instrument with the subject designation, Toy Piano Scores: M175 T69. The most famous example is the ´Suite for Toy Piano´ (1948) by John Cage.

George Crumb, Mauricio Kagel, Steve Beresford, Bernd Wiesemann, Promenade Theatre Orchestra, John Medeski, Larry Goldings, Tom Waits, Radiohead, Sigur Rós, The Dresden Dolls have already used the toy piano, among others.

Otacílio Melgaço reinforces his experimental horizon, altering textures and colors. Tempi and acoustic ambiences. Thus, he merges etherity and randomness. Eccentric dynamics and atonalism. Improvisation (sometimes makes me wonder: it's like a Cecil Taylor hammering a child's keyboard) and a fascinating theme that gives it the title. ´A Török - Concertino for Toy Piano -´ becomes a relevant Piece of the universal repertoire dedicated to the kinderklavier. In my view, it brings together three fundamental characteristics that justify my statement:
it´s extremely idiosyncratic; has sound effects that reopen the perspective of the use of this instrument widening its possibilities; reproducing it is a challenge of inventiveness and technique.

A special aspect that´s worth being mentioned. Because it´s a sonic vehicle originally connected to our ´infantile imaginary´, the chance that it sounds childishly is considerable. Even if the opus in which it appears does not have that purpose. Such distinct timbre is already ´in charge of making´ this link, yet contradicting the composer's own original guidelines. Definitely not what happens to the prole of Otacílio.

We can reflect on the connotations of the term toy. Toy as a plaything, bauble (this holds true for what I have just argued above) or toy - the verb - as game, gamble, throw, wager. There´s another one that makes the choices of Melgaço even more admirable (when we remember ´The Turk´): toy as puppet, dummy, manikin. Which will lead us to ... automaton!

Therefore, O.M. opens paths for the instrumentalist as a player such as a gamester, kicker, dealer; performer, mummer, impersonator; (quintessentially) artiste, craftsman; ringer ... totally sympathetic to chance, haphazard, hazard. And he creates too the perfect analogy betwixt both machines, sound and chess. It's impressive!

In short, the connotation usually obtained from toy piano is disfigured, alchemized to the point that rarely someone who has proposed to compose for child's keyboard has reached peaks so original and surprising. Come, Ladies and Gentlemen, press key to
... play and play ...
the game." (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)

"´You Americans are a very singular people,´ he later recalled to one of his friends. ´I went with my automaton all over my own country—the Germans wondered and said nothing. In France they exclaimed, Magnifique! Merveilleux! Superbe! The English set themselves to prove—one that it could be, and another that it could not be, a mere mechanism acting without a man inside. But I had not been long in your country, before a Yankee came to see me and said, 'Mr Maelzel, would you like another thing like that? I can make you one for five hundred dollars.' I laughed at his proposition. A few months afterwards, the same Yankee came to see me again, and this time he said, 'Mr Maelzel, would you like to buy another thing like that? I have one already made for you.´ (Tom Standage, The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine)

Yes, Mr. Melgaço has one already made for us.

The Turk, also known as the Mechanical Turk or Automaton Chess Player (German: Schachtürke, ´chess Turk´), was a fake chess-playing machine constructed in the late 18th century. From 1770 until its destruction by fire in 1854 it was exhibited by various owners as an automaton, though it was eventually revealed to be an elaborate hoax. Constructed and unveiled in 1770 by Wolfgang von Kempelen (Hungarian: Kempelen Farkas; 1734–1804) to impress the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, the mechanism appeared to be able to play a strong game of chess against a human opponent, as well as perform the knight's tour, a puzzle that requires the player to move a knight to occupy every square of a chessboard exactly once.

The Turk was in fact a mechanical illusion that allowed a human chess master hiding inside to operate the machine. With a skilled operator, the Turk won most of the games played during its demonstrations around Europe and the Americas for nearly 84 years, playing and defeating many challengers including statesmen such as Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. The device was later purchased in 1804 and exhibited by Johann Nepomuk Mälzel. The chess masters who secretly operated it included Johann Allgaier, Boncourt, Aaron Alexandre, William Lewis, Jacques Mouret, and William Schlumberger, but the operators within the mechanism during Kempelen's original tour remain a mystery.

Speaking of mysteries, as introduction, I´ll throw a spotlight on two details that should not go unnoticed. Thus we can observe the high degree of detail on the part of Melgaço:

1 - Turquoise is the name of a greenish-blue color, based on the gem of the same name. The word turquoise comes from the French for Turkish, as the gem was originally imported from there. Ergo, turquoise means literally ´from Turkey´. The first recorded use as a color name in English was in 1573. It´s, generally thought to consist of 70% blue and 30% green. Check again the album cover. It´s no coincidence that this color inhabits all the letters ´O´ (O.M. opted for some gradation around the Celeste, Light, Blue, Medium, Dark and Pearl Mystic turquoise).

There seems to be an additional symbology in the choice of the letter and in the protuberant arrangement/disposal of its repetitions. As if we were dealing with some kind of ´code´. I will not venture for this since would make my comments a endless exegesis but I must confide that the whole creation hovers over the enchantment that the motif suggests.

A curiosity: if you look at the cover art from a nethermost angle, that is, if you keep it at the top of your screen and lower your head, viewing at it from the bottom up, will witness that the davit icon and the typography become quite discreet (in bas-relief) but, by way of exception, the letters ´O´ remain highlighted. Like mystified shining eyes in the darkness of some Ottoman night;

2 - Why was the word that gave the name of the sound Piece not adopted in the Turkish language (´Türk´)? Because, as the composer himself confirmed to me, Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734 – 1804), author and inventor (known for his chess-playing ´automaton´ hoax and for his speaking machine), was a Hungarian. And then, in Hungarian, ´A Török´ (The Turk). A question of criterion that privileged the genesis of the contraption.

Cited both notes (would be innumerable if I set out to make such a captivating sweep/scrutiny but this I leave to each of you, if you so desire inasmuch as), I must proceed.

Let us try to imagine the transposition of a work of human wit, insight, acumen ... like The Turk into the musical universe. Let us try to suppose how this prodigious machinery would be transferred to the keys of a toy piano! Everything is ´playful´, don't you think? [Concertino is the diminutive of concerto, thus literally a short concerto. Toy piano (a small instrument), ludicity ... under the structure of a concertino: another minutia of Otacílio, setting the same diapason from concept to execution and completion. Always attentive to the Gesamtkunstwerk.] Everything is ..., in other words, ludic. In this perception, ´genius´ and ´childhood´ (don´t confuse, obviously, with mere puerility or infantilism) may be, in principle, nearly Siamese. In principle. I´m referring to intuition, an almost uncontrollable sense of freedom (of expression, of engendering, of experimentation), chiefly ingenuity ... at top levels. Undoubtedly it´s not the rationalistic meanders of chess play that were pointed out by Mr. Melgaço, that´s not what is at stake. It´s man's ability to contrive an apparatus as such, that's the dazzle.

I conclude: the three movements of the concertino are a reflection of the complexity that permeates the mind of one who invents and realizes the Schachtürke. It´s not the Cartesian nature of the rules of the grating that gains prominence but the enigmatic/illusionistic/bewitching and, at first glance and in our speculations, complicated/intricate/daedal/many-sided internal orchestration of a gear that´s proof of human endowment. [Here´s another beautiful key that deciphers, at least as a tenet, the Melgacian interweaving between the Kinderklavier and the Mechanical Turk.]

´Chess can be described as the movement of pieces eating one another´, said Marcel Duchamp. O.M., through his turquoise small concerto, metamorphoses us, listeners, into devourers and devoured simultaneously. Şah Mat!" (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)

Post Scriptum

If you don´t know what ´Şah Mat´ means, it's ´checkmate´ in Turkish.

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I - The Turk has also inspired works of literary fiction. In 1849, just a few years before the Turk was destroyed, Edgar Allan Poe published a tale "Von Kempelen and His Discovery". Ambrose Bierce's short story "Moxon's Master", published in 1909, is a morbid tale about a chess-playing automaton that resembles the Turk. In 1938, John Dickson Carr published The Crooked Hinge, a locked room mystery in his line of Dr. Gideon Fell detective novels. Among the puzzles presented included an automaton that operates in a way that is unexplainable to the characters. Gene Wolfe's 1977 science fiction short story "The Marvellous Brass Chessplaying Automaton" also features a device very similar to the Turk. Robert Loehr's 2007 novel "The Chess Machine" (published in the UK as "The Secrets of the Chess Machine") focusses on the man inside the machine. F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre's 2007 story "The Clockwork Horror" reconstructs Edgar Allan Poe's original encounter with Mälzel's chess-player, and also establishes (from contemporary advertisements in a Richmond newspaper) precisely when and where this encounter took place;

II - Walter Benjamin alludes to the Mechanical Turk in the first thesis of his Theses on the Philosophy of History (Über den Begriff der Geschichte), written in 1940;

III - Toy pianos come in many shapes, from scale models of upright or grand pianos to toys which only resemble pianos in that they possess keys. Toy pianos are usually no more than 50 cm in width, and made out of wood or plastic. The first toy pianos were made in the mid-19th century and were typically uprights, although many toy pianos made today are models of grands. Rather than hammers hitting strings as on a standard piano, the toy piano sounds by way of hammers hitting metal bars or rods which are fixed at one end. The hammers are connected to the keys by a mechanism similar to that which drives keyboard glockenspiels.

Toy pianos ostensibly use the same musical scale as full size pianos, although their tuning in all but the most expensive models is usually very approximate. Similarly, the pitch to which they are tuned is rarely close to the standard of 440 Hz for the A above middle C. A typical toy piano will have a range of one to three octaves. The cheapest models may not have black keys, or the black keys may be painted on. This means they can play the diatonic scale (or an approximately tuned version of it), but not the chromatic scale. Typically, diatonic toy pianos have only eight keys and can play one octave. Other variants may have non-functioning black keys between every key (which would make it appear to play the quarter tones between E/F and B/C), but they either do not play, play the same notes as an adjacent white key, or play a special sound effect.

...for purposes of pragmatism and clear exegesis,
Wikipedia was the main source...

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Between two parentheses...
(Atonalism, Twelve-Tone, Serialism, Musique Concrète... Acousmatic. Eletroacoustic. Magnetic Tape. Expressionism, New Objectivity, Hyperrealism, Abstractionism, Neoclassicism, Neobarbarism, Futurism, Mythic Method. Electronic...Computer Music, Spectral, Polystylism, Neoromanticism, Minimalism and Post-Minimalism...are addressed by Melgaço. Paradoxically New Simplicity and New Complexity also.
Art Rock, Free Jazz, Ethnic Dialects, Street Sounds are occasional syntax elements.
All the possibilities mentioned above and others that were not mentioned are the usual accoutrements of the composer/instrumentalist to establish his ´babelic´ glossary. We can prove this in a short passage of a single composition up along the entirety of a conceptual phonograph album. All distributed over a career and idiosyncratic records. Have we a universe before us and I propose to see it through a telescope, not a microscope.
I propose not handle very specialized topics here. Otherwise would be, with the exception of musicians and scholars, all hostages of a hermetic jargon. Because more important is to present Otacílio Melgaço to the general public and not to a segment of specialists. Faction of experts not need presentations, depart for the enjoyment beforehand. For this reason there is no niche here for intellectual onanism and encrypted musical terminology. The reason for these parentheses is to establish such elucidation. The non-adoption of technicalities leads to more panoramic, amplifier reviews. Are You always welcome. Those who do not dominate contemporary music and are introduced to the world of ubiquitous O.M. [autodidact and independent artist who, being more specific, does not belong to schools or doctrines; artist who makes Music and that´s enough; music devoid of labels or stylistic, chronological, historical paradigms or trends] and Those who belong to the métier and turn to enjoy propositions they know and also delving into advanced Melgacian sound cosmogonies...
I conclude poetically. ´Certeza/Certainty´ by Octavio Paz. ´Si es real la luz blanca De esta lámpara, real La mano que escribe, ¿son reales
Los ojos que miran lo escrito? De una palabra a la otra Lo que digo se desvanece. Yo sé que estoy vivo Entre dos paréntesis.´ If it is real the white light from this lamp, real the writing hand, are they real, the eyes looking at what I write? From one word to the other what I say vanishes. I know that I am alive between two parentheses.
We´re all more and more a-l-i-v-e now.)
- P.S.P.