Exploration And Extension

With the development of technology,composers keep exploring for new sounds.The emergence of20^th century electronic music provides brand new ways for composers to search new sounds and new expressions.And the way of combining electronic music with traditional instruments is called Mixed Electronic Music,which is very common now.Either physical or electronic ways for changing the articulations of the traditional instruments belong to the art starting from the sound itself.The studying subject of this essay is the preset piano in the contemporary electronic music.Until now,classical piano is still widely utilized into many works.With time passing by,traditional sounds are not enough for composers to realize their musical ideas,so they start to look for new sounds and new timbres.That's how preset piano comes.In the early age,composers put special materials on the inside strings of piano and used mallets for altering the resonance to get the sounds which differ from the traditional ones.After electronic music was born,preset piano started to combine with it,making the sonic elements richer.This essay consists of two parts,which are macro discussions and analysis of musical examples.The first part is to introduce the background and how the new sounds come,then illustrate the definition and characteristics of preset piano.The second part is to analyze three musical examples based on the timbre of preset piano as well as the combination of preset piano and electronic music.The first example is John Cage's‘Sonatas and Interludes'.The second one is Helga Arias's‘Astraglossa or first steps in celestial syntax'.These two works not only use physical ways to change the articulations of piano,but also use electronic ways to process the sound a further step for enriching the timbres.The last piece,‘ChengFeng',for preset piano and electronic music,is written by the author as her graduate work.She explored the applications of preset piano by combining electronic music with it in her own work.