Swept Away (1994) | event score for piano
Piano Piece with Pendulum (2002) | amplified realization with swinging stereo microphone
Duration variable
LISTEN
Swept Away with Pendulum (2001/2022) | 3′39″ | Stereo realization made from a pendulum-microphone recording at Schloss Honhardt, Germany, in 2001. Remastered and released in 2022 on INDIVISIBLES by Subtropics Editions.
SWEPT AWAY
Swept Away (A la deriva) began in 1994, while I was temporarily looking after Russell Frehling’s baby grand piano at my home in El Portal, Florida. The piano occupied a Florida room beside Little River. One morning, reflections from the moving water shimmered across the ceiling. As I imagined myself floating with them, I placed my forearms over the keyboard and began rocking from side to side.
The forearms function as one connected body. Lowering one elbow into the keys and slowly transferring the weight toward the other depresses them just short of making the hammers strike the strings. The movement may also approach the black keys, pivoting near the point where the hands meet. What emerges is the quiet mechanical life of the piano: keys, levers and hammers moving without necessarily producing conventional piano tones.
Occasional tones are almost unavoidable, particularly when the performer’s attention is absorbed by the imagined movement. They are not mistakes to be corrected. They become part of the unstable relationship between the task, the body and what the performer hears.
The score describes two simultaneous situations: MIND and BODY. The performer imagines being an object floating in water, rocks in response to its movement and listens. At the same time, the physical instructions guide the forearms across the keyboard. Listening to the piano’s mechanism then influences the movement, allowing the performance to discover sounds within the instrument rather than impose music upon it.
I premiered Swept Away at the VIII Festival Latinoamericano de Música in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1994.
THE PENDULUM
During a residency at Schloss Honhardt in Germany in 2001, the cold and dry conditions made the piano’s mechanical sounds unusually prominent. A mezzanine overlooked the instrument, allowing me to suspend a stereo microphone above its open strings.
After recording several performances, I pushed the hanging microphone sideways and allowed it to swing while I played. Its changing distance and position continuously altered the recording of the instrument. This unplanned experiment strengthened the sensation of rocking already present in the score.
In 2002, I incorporated the pendulum into amplified realizations of the work under the title Piano Piece with Pendulum. The pendulum is not required for every performance of Swept Away, but when amplification is used, it extends the motion of the performer into the movement and spatial projection of the sound.
PIANO MARINA — 2007
In 2007, Swept Away | Piano Piece with Pendulum expanded into Piano Marina, a six-hour performance and installation commissioned for the inaugural Sleepless Night Miami Beach. It took place in Studio Five at Miami City Ballet.
The City of Miami Beach supplied a grand piano and arranged for it to be delivered to the studio. When I arrived, a piano technician was tuning it, oiling the keys and carefully eliminating the incidental mechanical noises that a concert piano is not supposed to make. I had failed to explain that those supposedly unwanted sounds were the primary material of my piece.
The piano played beautifully whenever my movement caused a hammer to strike a string. Producing its quieter mechanical sounds, however, became remarkably difficult. The performance lasted six uninterrupted hours—the longest six hours I have experienced as a sound artist.
For this realization, I commissioned a friend to construct a mechanism that kept the pendulum microphone moving above the open piano. Several loudspeakers surrounding the instrument carried gated recordings made inside a rocking sailboat. The piano’s quiet mechanical activity opened the gates, allowing fragments of doors, wood, cookware, rigging and other parts of the boat to emerge through the speakers.
The recordings had been made during an overnight sail in southern Biscayne Bay aboard a boat belonging to Todd Jonas. Rough weather kept the anchored boat in continuous motion, activating its interior in ways I had never heard before. Those sounds expanded the gentler marina-like behavior I had originally discovered in the piano.
As the stereo microphone swung above the instrument, it encountered the piano and different portions of the surrounding sound field from continuously changing positions. Its signal was transmitted wirelessly to two loudspeakers on the sidewalk outside the building, in front of Studio Five’s large window. Passersby could first encounter the work through sound, see the solitary performer through the glass and then enter the studio.
The room was intended to remain dark. Streetlights and other exterior light inevitably entered through the windows, and one or two additional lights were eventually introduced to shape the visible scene without turning it into a theatrical spectacle.
At the time, I was thinking about Buckminster Fuller’s distinction between an environment—what surrounds an observer—and a universe, which includes the observer within it. The studio window appeared to separate an interior performance from the city outside, while the wireless transmission carried the interior sound across that boundary. Performer, instrument, room, street and listener became parts of the same situation.
SWEPT AWAY WITH PENDULUM — 2022
In 2022, I returned to the recording made at Schloss Honhardt in 2001. I remastered it and created a four-channel acousmatic realization for And Sometimes the Space Is Full of a Previous Space at the Deering Estate Theater in Miami.
A stereo realization, titled Swept Away with Pendulum, was released that year on INDIVISIBLES, an art album published by Subtropics Editions. The physical pendulum is no longer present before the listener, but the changing spatial relationships created by its motion remain embedded in the recording.
SELECTED PERFORMANCES AND REALIZATIONS
2022
And Sometimes the Space Is Full of a Previous Space
Swept Away with Pendulum
Four-channel acousmatic realization from the remastered 2001 recording
Deering Estate Theater, Miami, Florida
Stereo realization released on INDIVISIBLES, Subtropics Editions
2007
Piano Marina
Sleepless Night Miami Beach
Six-hour performance and installation with mechanized pendulum
Studio Five, Miami City Ballet
Miami Beach, Florida
2005
Piano Piece with Pendulum
CubaCultur
Münster, Germany
2001
Swept Away
Experimental realization and recording with pendulum microphone
Residency at Schloss Honhardt, Dell Arte GmbH
Germany
1998
In a Fishtank
Florida/Brazil Festival
Ambrosino Gallery, Miami, Florida
1998
In a Fishtank
St. Louis Alive! / New Music Circle
St. Louis, Missouri
1996
In a Fishtank
Interpretations Series
Merkin Hall, New York City
1995
Monday at Twilight
University of Miami
Miami, Florida
1994 — WORLD PREMIERE
VIII Festival Latinoamericano de Música
Swept Away (A la deriva)
Original version without pendulum
Performed by Gustavo Matamoros
Sala José Félix Ribas, Caracas, Venezuela
SCORE
Swept Away | Piano Piece with Pendulum
Swept Away, 1994 | pendulum incorporated, 2002 | score subsequently revised
Score: Swept Away | Piano Piece with Pendulum
The score divides the performance into simultaneous MIND and BODY instructions. The performer imagines being an object floating in water while the forearms negotiate the keys, hammers and internal mechanism of the piano. A later version incorporates the swinging stereo microphone for amplified realizations.
FORTHCOMING PUBLICATION
Score-Making: Creative Prompts for Mapping Personal Experience through Sound
Jennie Gottschalk
Forthcoming, October 2026
Swept Away was selected for inclusion in Gottschalk’s book devoted to scores and score-making.