Q&A with Samuel Reinhard about For Piano and Shō
"I’m extending an invitation to momentarily be still and to just listen—to notice the small things that swell at the periphery of our attention when we reduce the density of inputs and settle into slower temporalities.” — Samuel Reinhard
Yuko Zama (YZ): How did you come up with the ideas for these pieces for piano and shō? And can you also tell me a little bit about the framework of the compositions?
Samuel Reinhard (SR): I first came across the shō in a beautiful rendition of John Cage's “Two4" (for violin and shō) by Aisha Orazbayeva and Naomi Sato. When the opportunity arose to spend a month on residency in Japan, I reached out to Naomi Sato (based in the Netherlands) who kindly put me in touch with Haruna Higashida, who eventually would go on to perform the shō parts in these pieces.
I’ve long been interested in exploring the elongation or “preservation" of the piano's decay. In recent years, I mostly pursued this notion in electroacoustic collages, and in very slow and sparse pieces for multiple pianos. The shō's clean harmonics offered an enticing texture to incorporate into my experiments with slow-moving piano works.
As for the compositions, in the first piece, three pianos pursue and repeat their own respective threadbare motifs— not in sync, but slowly orbiting each other at their own pace, thereby creating ever-changing resulting material. The pianos are accompanied by three shōs, each also moving at their own pace, playing individual notes and chords from a pool of material and providing harmonic “reflections" of the melodic motifs played by the pianos. In the second piece, a piano moves through a trio of figures—an arpeggio, an improvisation, a chord—for the duration of the performance. Each iteration of this sequence is accompanied by a single shō, which freely selects and plays a note or chord, emerging from the piano's first figure and disappearing into the third.
YZ: You composed and recorded these pieces during your residency in Tokyo in 2023. Could you tell me about how your project took shape during the residency, including the pre- and post-production? Did living in Japan affect your composition in any way?
SR: I actually started writing the pieces at home in New York as I was preparing to embark on my trip to Tokyo. I had a pretty clear idea of how I wanted to organize the material structurally. So my first step was to develop the colors I wanted to work with. As in most of my chamber pieces, the musical building blocks are of utmost simplicity. The notated piano figures consist of very simple intervallic structures, leaving plenty of space for potentially denser chords and clusters played by the shō. I had never written anything for shō prior to this trip, so once I got to Tokyo, Haruna and I started discussing the specifics of the shō and what figures and combinations of notes might or might not be possible to achieve with the instrument. After some minor adjustments to the score, it was all pretty straightforward and we recorded the two pieces in a single day. The piano parts were also recorded in just a day, remotely in Copenhagen, on a gorgeous Fazioli concert grand.
Post-production for my work is usually very minimal, and mostly limited to balancing levels, as I try to leave the recordings as close to the state in which they were captured as possible.
As far as spending time in Japan, all I can say is that it was an overwhelmingly wonderful experience. I’m profoundly grateful to have been able to spend time in the country and meet so many old friends in person and so many new friends. I’m hoping to return for a longer stay in the not too distant future.
YZ: I was very impressed with the performances of the two musicians, Haruna and Paul Jacob, on this album. They seem to be extremely sensitive and to deeply understand the subtleties of your pieces. How did you start working with them?
SR: I’m tremendously lucky to have been introduced to Haruna, who is an incredibly perceptive, intuitive, and just overall a very gifted performer. Paul Jacob has been part of a small group of musicians with whom I’ve been closely working for a few years now. PJ has played an integral role in bringing my chamber pieces to life over the past couple of years. I’m grateful to have such a deeply attuned partner in my musical pursuits.
YZ: I have listened to these two pieces many times during the CD production process, and I feel that each time I listen to them, they give me a slightly different impression. Perhaps there is an element in these pieces that communicates with the listener's inner self, making the listening experience fresh and new each time. What are your thoughts on the relationship between performer and listener in your work?
SR: I think when working with such radically limited material and with this much space in a piece of music, whatever the performers and listeners bring to the experience inevitably becomes part of the work. Naturally, what we bring to a piece as listeners changes with every listen. And with that, the way these pieces are perceived upon each listen also slightly changes. I like to think of this kind of music as porous: porous to what the performers and listeners bring to the experience, and porous to the spaces and environments in which the music is played and listened to.
My scores grant a certain degree of freedom to the performers to play as much or as little as they like within an indicated time-bracket, allowing them “to do nothing” and just listen for periods of time as they perform. This not only creates unforeseeable musical results, but it allows for a kind of kinship between the performers and the listeners, where both engage in an act of deep and concentrated listening as a piece unfolds.
YZ: Even though the structures of these compositions are so simple, I found the context very rich despite the sparseness of the notes, almost narrative, and after listening it leaves an impressive afterglow and a deep, time-stretched feeling that fills the room with tranquility. I found this quite fascinating.
"The music I was discovering was defined by a kind of inner equilibrium, harmonically and structurally. These pieces were resting in themselves; they weren’t striving to get anywhere; they were non-directional and in a sense being still. Furthermore, they were defined by slowness, by a tranquil and measured pace, and the driving organizational principle underlying these compositions was repetition."
Can you explain what "stillness, silence, slowness, and repetition" mean to you when composing?
SR: Repetition is the primary organizational force in my compositions. Repetition allows for deep attention. Already knowing what comes next can eliminate concern for the future. In a state without anticipatory anxiety our minds can be at ease in ways that allow to just perceive. Each performer pursues and repeats their assigned motif at their own respective pace; each inhabiting their own time. What unfolds is a stream of constantly evolving combinations of notes and harmonies. Nothing ever really changes, and yet you never hear the same thing twice. Slowness is another critical aspect in my work as I’ve realized that interesting things can happen if I allow the musical material time to breathe, time to rest before reappearing. This is where silence comes into play. Silence employed as a contrapuntal force ascribes moments where something is played and moments where nothing is played equal importance. This allows for the observation of a composition’s in-betweens, populated by resonances and traces of notes played by human bodies. And lastly, stillness. Stillness in permitting the performers to be still, to do nothing for certain periods, and to simply listen as the music develops.
YZ: Who has influenced you musically over the years (and also more recently)?
SR: I’m not classically trained in that I didn’t study at conservatory. I went to art school and graduated from a masters program combining music and media arts, visual arts, performance and literature. Before art school, I was deeply immersed in electronic music. So my musical background is primarily rooted in experimental electronic music and a lot of my early influences are from that world; people like William Basinski, Carsten Nicolai, Darren Cunningham (Actress), Eliane Radigue, or Akira Rabelais and Harold Budd all had a major impact on me. While studying, I became more familiar with the work of John Cage, the “New York School”, and particularly Morton Feldman, whose music I deeply admire. In terms of contemporaries, I’m very fond of Sarah Davachi’s work, both, in the field of electronic music, as well as her work with chamber ensembles. I also cherish the work of Japanese sound artist and composer FUJI||||||||||TA, and of Swiss-Vietnamese composer, bass player, and frequent collaborator of mine, Vincent Yuen Ruiz.
YZ: Besides the field of music, are there any other major influences on you?
SR: I’m generally drawn to work that manages to capture the complexities of human perception and experience within a limited means of expression. In the visual arts, the abstract-expressionist painter Agnes Martin comes to mind. Also Mark Rothko, and the work of Robert Irwin or Walter De Maria. I should also mention the composer-performer-turned-artist Max Neuhaus, who has multiple permanent sound installations in public spaces, both in my hometown of Bern, Switzerland as well as here in New York City, and Beacon, NY. Experiencing these works from an early age, simply as parts of my town’s architecture, imprinted deeply on me.
YZ: What inspires (or motivates, triggers) you to compose a new piece?
SR: The short answer is that this is simply the kind of music I most enjoy listening to. The long answer is that the music I write invokes a perceptional state in which I feel most comfortable. Where I feel most at home. The sparseness and absence in my music, the lack of directional development, allow me to notice and examine the few things that are happening, as they are happening—in the present. From the conspicuous to the infinitesimal. I think of my music as a metaphorical space, where it is safe to temporarily let down my guard and to experience the full breadth and depth of what I am actually capable of perceiving once I allow myself to do so. An act that defies instinct and impulse, in a world that is so dominated by sensory onslaught and overwhelming transmissions. So you could argue that there is an escapist component to my work. But at the same time, I would like to believe that there is a social aspect to it too. I think figuring out ways to translate and communicate how we individually experience the world, in ways that can be understood and appreciated by others, is key to a lot of artistic expression. It’s a form of non-verbal communication that to me feels very innate to human existence and our desires to create. So if I were to distill these little dispatches of mine, I would say that I’m extending an invitation to be perceptive. An encouragement to whomever is inclined, to momentarily be still and to just listen—to notice the small things that swell at the periphery of our attention when we reduce the density of inputs and settle into slower temporalities.
To be slow and to be still: through his ongoing explorations of repetition, New York–based Swiss composer Samuel Reinhard extends this invitation to both listeners and the musicians who perform his compositions. For Piano and Shō brings together Haruna Higashida, a Tokyo-based gagaku performer active in contemporary music, and Copenhagen-based Canadian pianist Paul Jacob Fossum, who also performed on Reinhard’s 2023 release Two Pianos and String Trio. The album’s two pieces were recorded between Copenhagen and Tokyo, where Reinhard was in residence in 2023.
