It’s a long climb to the rehearsal room where Michael Pisaro is scheduled to play his new composition, Pi–four flights up in the second-oldest building on the Northwestern University campus. There’s no elevator to this space from another century, a high-ceilinged octagon with half-moon windows and stenciled walls, dominated by a shiny black baby grand. At six o’clock, just 14 people are scattered in the rows of chairs facing the piano, waiting for Pisaro to begin his five-minute performance.
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The note for tonight is the third highest on the piano keyboard, B flat, a high, hollow “plink” devoid of resonance. Pisaro hits it repeatedly, pauses, then hits it again, tapping out a code. The machinelike regularity invites a count: one two three, pause; one, a longer pause; one two three four. No plink is longer or louder than another–a performance in Morse code would be deeply expressive in comparison. Soon the plinks become background, making us acutely aware of external noises, welcome, familiar sounds: the wind buffeting the old building, moaning against the windows; a train rumbling past; a car horn. Plink plink plink plink plink plink, pause. Pisaro never looks up. At the end of the appointed five minutes and 20 seconds, he stops for the closing silence. Then he’s on his feet, thanking us for being there, hoping to see us again–at the next performance perhaps, two days hence, or any of a dozen others this month. The performances increase from 5 to 54 minutes in length, and each features a different solo note.
Perfectly clear? No? Well, don’t blame him. “It’s not what most people think of as music, but it didn’t start with me,” he says. “There’s a long tradition of experimental music in this country. For me, it starts with John Cage. The tradition itself has more to do with exploring the fundamental nature of sound than it does with trying to communicate something through a performance. The audience is like a coconspirator, exploring with you. What counts is that something happened. It might not matter if it’s an hour or if it’s five minutes.”
