This is the third consecutive year of Sing for Hope Pianos, a project that has placed 88 such keyboards in outdoor locations in all five boroughs.
The idea of staging so much work for piano emerged because of a project by the Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra.
Mr. Gerstein ran through a few ideas: commissioning a work; carrying out a project that marries piano playing to a visual display or dance element; or combining his roots in jazz with his classical career.
RENZO PIANO wants to turn me into a project.
Blais' piece, which was originally commissioned by the Canadian pianist, Barbara Pritchard as part of a project of contemporary piano music celebrating Christmas seemed to draw its influences from the collage pieces of Rochberg and Berio and the spectral ideas of Murail and Lachenmann.
But the modern cello and piano project a different character, brighter and somewhat brasher than their more reticent historic counterparts, the gamba and the harpsichord.
"The roots of the project started with an experimental toy piano sampling project with my brother, Ali, which eventually became the Impact Soundworks Curio: Cinematic Toy Piano Kontakt instrument, followed by a project I did at MIDI HACK 2015 where I turned a toy piano into a basic USB-MIDI controller," Lacey tells The Creators Project.
Now the two rooms are combined into a 35-foot by 60-foot space, filled not with children but with an upright piano, project tables for art and audio, three computers, and a library of 4,000 worn paperbacks running around the perimeter.
In the 1980s and 90s he worked on everything but his own music: graphic design, teaching, a piano-sampling project with inventor Clive Sinclair.
A dozen or so took the stage and danced above a projected piano, playing a tune reminiscent of Tom Hanks' performance in Big.
