Space In Between

I approach it like a child: pressing the keys as if for the first time, absorbing the esoteric output that seeps through the wooden enclosure of my pianette. Via the medium of vibrations, it ping pongs in the room and envelops my body. Then silence, or, what we call silence: the trivial sounds of the city. A child crying in a nearby playground, a moped speeding past my apartment building, two old friends wandering down the road as they talk to each other in that unmistakable tonality of complaint.

I started playing Satie’s Gymnopédies on the piano. This happened in a period of intense creative drought. I had nothing else to do, musically, because none of my usual creative outlets interested me. Apropos Satie, he coined the term furniture music: “a music which is like furniture - a music, that is, which will be part of the noises of the environment, will take them into consideration. I think of it as melodious, softening the noises of the knives and forks at dinner, not dominating them, not imposing itself. It would fill up those heavy silences that sometime fall between friends dining together.”

Window in California 2024. By Mads Kjeldgaard.

Hearing the chorus

The sheet music is in front of me. I stumble through the notes slowly, like an infant learning to read, spelling out each syllable patiently. One note after the other, each one a shocking revelation in itself. Is this music a piece of furniture? That would make it a dead, lifeless object in the room. To me it is something alive, a body swashing with blood, because I am playing it, and I am a human being, alive in this room.

The remnants of the last note ring out in the instrument’s iron frame. I find the next note with my fingers –harmonics decay to something barely perceptible – and press the keys with a motion as if tripping over a garden rake, my face finding the moist, grassy ground. As it fades out with the whole city in the background, I get a fuzzy feeling as I take it all in. There’s a poem by Whitman where he describes a similar experience:

Now I will do nothing but listen,
To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it.
…
It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast.
I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera,
Ah this indeed is music—this suits me.

Neighbourhood magpies up to no good

The practice of chi gong commends the ideal of the crane: standing still by a lake, always ready to snap a fish in its beak. It’s not asleep, it’s not moving, it’s actively relaxed and fully aware of its surroundings. By the piano, in between notes, I become a crane myself, perceiving the sounds of my surroundings. I feel the wind rustling in my feathers, and I observe the creases in the water surface from the thick, slow raindrops, smeared out by the rolling caresses of the air that just passed me by.

Windows in California and Arizona 2024 by Mads Kjeldgaard.

Eventually, this slow approach becomes a new artistic practice for me. I place microphones on the iron frame of the piano to come closer to the strings as they are struck by the hammers, this allows me to hear the reverberation, the shimmering klang of the material at hand. I record it all using loopers running at different speeds and long durations, to be able to relisten to what I heard before but from the perspective of another point in time.

Every day, after my morning routines, I guide myself to the piano as if I was a waiter showing a guest to their seat. Once properly placed, I turn my attention to the sounds that leak from the open window in between the notes – I notice the banality of it, and I love it: bird feet rustling in the rain gutter above the window, it’s the neighborhood’s magpies scheming again. Tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap. Tap.

– Mads Kjeldgaard, Nørrebro, København, 2024