Smashedpiano gives participating artists a password-protected link enabling them to access a 'web tool' created by Canada's Arraymusic. Participating artists can generate a webpage easily and quickly and update their information on the fly. New event news is automatically ported to the website's main 'events-listing page' and stale-dated concert news takes itself out of commission.
The smashed piano is a symbol of breaking down the walls between just listening and really hearing. Before The Who started smashing their guitars and drum kits on stage, experimental musicians and performance artists were taking sledgehammers to pianos, shoving them out large windows, or burning them to see what sounds they would produce. This website's name is inspired by such acts of defiance, as well as by the baby grand piano that Laurel and Hardy dropped down a flight of stairs and South Park Kenny's and by the Toons' characters disrepair beneath the piano's crush. Don't we all deserve a little smashedpiano today if it means we can reinvent and revitalize tomorrow?
Encompassing a vanguard of today's music rebels, revelers, investigative cognoscentes and open-hearted patrons who share a desire to 'be true to one's musical self', music found on smashedpiano.com is smart, nervy, full of surprises and fascination, authentic in its desire to express life in new ways using sounds as its palate. Its creators can capably synthesize a superabundance of musical sources because they're open and gamesome and sometimes extremely rigorous or intellectual. They write music that takes turns being minimal, serial, static, extreme and often preternaturally beautiful or even downright weird. Smashedpiano.com gives a berth to musical artists who enable us all to "breathe the air of other planets" without leaving earth.*
"It sounded like a drunken jazz concert on a ship in a hurricane, frozen in surreal slo-mo..." says a Village Voice critic of a piece of music you can expect to find on smashedpiano.com.
Smashedpiano.com was completed by Arraymusic with special funding support provided by Canadian Heritage and Canada Council for the Arts and additional funding support for (upcoming) design improvements provided by the Ontario Trillium Foundation.
*Poet Stefan George, speaking about Schoenberg's music.
We cannot let the closing of New York's Tonic go unnoticed, partly because the administrators of smashedpiano face a similar fate. Notice has been given to Arraymusic by its landlord Artscape that the organization must vacate its studio in the artist-occupied 60 Atlantic building because building owner Tedco intends to put up condominiums - further evidence of an ongoing trend in Toronto's Liberty Village that has very nearly completely replaced a once thriving artistic community with creative commerce and condos.
Despite gracious assurances from Artscape that they will secure a suitable space in Toronto's downtown core for Arraymusic so we might continue to affordably host rehearsals and concerts of new music artists here, we can't help but feel concern. If Tonic's closing is the canary in New York's coal mine, New York's lack of support for its creative music artists may well be Toronto's bird.
A major central new music venue for over a decade in the apple, part of Tonic's attempts to balance its books involved reducing the amount of financially risky music they chose to present - partly why John Zorn established The Stone, a small venue he subsidizes 100% from door proceeds (to pay the musicians) and out of his own pocket as well as from recordings donated to Zorn's non-profit record label Tzadik by New York's established musicians. Suzanne Fiol's non-profit Issue Project room is also helping provide a New York space for rare / premiere new music performance.
Note to our sister city's creative music artists: If Toronto's artists can help in your struggle to secure a building from your government, please let us know... even if we do currently seem powerless to help ourselves, we're willing to step up. Meanwhile, Toronto's new music venues Arraymusic and The Music Gallery are continuing to attempt to find a solution here to fulfilling a growing need for improved, secure, sustainable and centrally-located rehearsal and performance space for Toronto's creative music artists and international touring guest artists.
Arraymusic is seeking savvy volunteers to assist with the promotion, proliferation and web management of smashedpiano.com. If you have an interest, some expertise and / or a passion for the art that might help, kindly contact us at your convenience. click here
Some links / fodder to help feed the boundless appetites of composers' and sound artists' enquiring minds:
Behold the kinetic sculptors of Theo Jansen click here
Brian Eno's visual music, or 77 Million Paintings software, is now for sale and installation on home TVs and computers; transforms their dead hole in the wall downtime into randomly recombined images generating a constantly evolving painting click here
We want one! View interior and graphic designer 3Deluxe's Leonardo Glass Cube, inside and out, for a peek at some futuristic architecture; also scope Scape while you're there click here (tip: find it via projekt)
Internet as culture killer? Who should be culture's arbiters of taste? Read author Andrew Keen's blog about his controversial new book Cult of the Amateur, How today's Internet is killing our culture click here
MoOM: The ultimate portal to museums online click here
Wall animation by Blu (warning: not for the squeamish): walking (2 times); created in Berlin for Backjump #3 click here
Browse private collector Joseph Muller's Collection of Music and Other Portraits, featuring engravings, lithographs and drawings of composers and musicians, among others, dating from the 16th to early 20th Centuries click here
Arts & Letters Daily: If you haven't been yet... find compendium links to every arts and science related article going; also give away as a gift link on those special occasions click here
Wednesday, April 18th, 2007, as Spring was springing, members of Toronto's new music community treked their fabulous lives to the Arraymusic Studio where Smashedpiano.com was presented for the first time. Those who had previously 'beta tested' the website - manimazinani, the music gallery, Arraymusic artistic director bob stevenson and others - were present as web-wizard / site-designer Steve Webster (VHCS) 'demo-ed' its interface. Arraymusic general manager Sandra Bell described how the site grew organically out of Arraymusic's goals to build awareness for the myriad of musical activities happening in the studio and become a true 'Centre for the Discovery and Creation of Today's Creative Music'. Artists around the table offered constructive suggestions and embraced the concept. Andy Gann of Canadian Heritage, which lent financial support, was on hand with Canadian Music Centre's Jason van Eyk. All determined Smashedpiano.com should go live with a redesign and relaunch to follow. Jonny Bunce of The Music Gallery suggested we mark that shiny occasion with a party. Brilliance and sunshine and a new community website.
Arraymusic, owner/operator of Smashedpiano.com on behalf of this online creative music community, has received an invitation from the George Cedric Metcalf Charitable Foundation (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) to apply for their next round of funding with a deadline of April 23, 2007. This permits us to request funding support to further develop and operate Smashedpiano.com We are preparing an application and need letters of support from Smashedpiano's members prior to this date to help bolster our application's chances for success. If you can, please send your thoughts click here prior to April 23rd about how our new community website might benefit you and your music, or your organization. Many thanks in advance!
We plan to launch a weekly column in this space that supplies little known facts about some composer, musician or sound artist (e.g. what their favorite places in the world are; what their preferred Sunday afternoon looks like). Watch for it... If you want to suggest someone to feature, please forward this to admin(at)arraymusic.com
This new skin has a wider column for events. It's called 'biggerevents'.
''Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but it could be true.'' - Sandor Ajzenstat, sound sculpturist.
