David Arner in Concert

Venue:  Performing Arts Center (Rhinebeck, NY)

December 26, 2003 – On the day after Christmas (how appropriate the date),  David Arner gave a solo performance at the Performing Arts Center in Rhinebeck, NY.

The spry, tall, thin, angular pianist walked on stage, bowed, sat on the bench in front of a baby grand piano and looked at the keyboard in thought. One hand playing two notes later began the setting of a framework for what Arner dubs a spontaneous composition.

The first piece established his focus: span, interval, and a unity of functioning of both hands.  Arner generated his music from the extent which the keyboard would allow.  He found the center and moved to the outskirts and back again.  He utilized small, delicate, single note movements, and grander, larger, wider chordal plants to fulfill the balance of variation.  His penchant for repeated phrases alternating with repeated single notes that climb out of phrases and clusters of notes is a signature component to Arner’s playing.  It is Arner’s mode of accenting to the point of making an accent a pure isolated element in the improvisation that catapults his compositions above any of those of its kind (of which I know).  The accents become a major factor in the construction of the music.  Their repetition serve as both the technical hinge from one set of movements to the next AND the content.

The variations which he created were based on a steadfast set of givens, recognizable in hindsight once a piece has concluded, but, if recognized during the piece, could indicate a pattern of growth.  Each spontaneous composition could be mapped out graphically.  The patterned aspect of his performance thrust it into an arena of description that had more to do with classical format than not, yet, more to do with improvisation than classical format.  The significance is that Arner is expanding the world that was established when Earle Brown said in effect that improvisation allows his classical compositions to evolve and become richer than if he premeditated his music with measures.

Arner performed one of the works from his solo recording.  COSMOS uses the piano as a percussive instrument.  He utilized mallet tools to play the strings of the piano in the sounding board.  It was thrilling to see the instrument from within make sound without the movement of keys and hammers; to see resonance controlled by an invisible pedal resulting from the up and down motion of the row of felts.  Arner alternated the use of the keys with the use of the mallets.  His touch was delicate and purposeful, intended for drawing an atmosphere and breaking it apart.  His touch caused the sound to pulsate like groups of binary stars and whir like intergalactic dust winds.

So Much Is Said

How refreshing this music is for the academic world as well for the world of the improvisers.  The music brings the two stylistic temperaments soberly together in a way that it can only be heard as itself.  So much is said with so few pitches.  So much is said with the distance between one pitch and another.  So much is said with silence as is with sound.  So much is said with a minimal number of gestures, pushed and pushed and pushed until their effect is maximal.  Totally.  Instrumentally.  Without question.

Concert Review by: Lyn Horton

View Lyn Horton’s review on jazzreview.com

CD Title: Live from the Center

Exercising both the inside and outside of the piano means that you are dealing with the entire instrument.  It means that you are dealing with all of the piano’s dynamics.  And discovering what is possible within the realm of possibilities which you know, as a musician, you cannot possibly exhaust.

David Arner’s piano vocabulary in his new solo recording is extraordinarily rich.  He has augmented his musical vocabulary with this one instrument volumetrically.

His sense of the piano is extremely acute.  He knows the piano’s relationship to how the sound will rise out of it.  The key to the relationship is the attack he will choose: planting his fingers on the keys, using his fingers to pluck the strings on the sounding board, holding a mallet to bounce on the strings.  Then, comes the music.  How the notes are put together, how the phases become sensible, and how pushing the envelope on repetitions of phrases imbues great power in a sonorous atmosphere to build its omnipresence and incessant tempo.  This atmosphere is juxtaposed to quietude, and equally present are runs and trills, silence and deeply felt and internally driven accents and sustenutos and dampening resonance.  The music is in a perfect balance.

Arner’s playing has characteristics that qualify as signature. There are times when he executes his music as if it were played on a piano roll.  It is really quite amazing.  He can manufacture brilliant continuity with the left hand which simultaneously is countered by a right-handed series of separated single, double, triple notes.  Then the two hands switch roles and the continuity evolves in another way. Just as intense as the multiplicitous ranges of note and phrase series could be a repeated, very evenly timed single note cadenza.  Arner’s choice of how to combine the tonal with the percussive gives substance to the origin of both, which is the same.

Arner approaches his improvisations with exquisite conception.  The rapidity and clarity with which his pieces precisely unfold are remarkable.  It is with certainty that I feel that his idea of time corresponds with its passage.  It is as if he doesn’t want to let one increment of time pass unnoticed, undocumented, unused.  In this way, he is bearing witness to time in its penultimate form.  For the process of improvisation is, in itself, a means to document time.  It is a means for the mind, emotion and universal view to blend into an unfettered, irrevocable, inimitable sound force.  The ramifications of that marriage are completely absorbing and a lesson in how vast is the capacity of this pianist to create exciting, energized and unforgettable music.

Arner steps beyond the academic.  It is that step which takes him into musical zones that not only require rapt attention but also render rapt attention an automatic response to the music.

Reviewed by: Lyn Horton 2005