The Tonality of Truth

“If you put me at a piano, put me at a garbage can, put me at a cup, I’m going to find a way to make music, no matter what.” –– Peter Manning Robinson

by John Payne

I t’s a fascinating and admirable pursuit: The musician playing the music of his/her soul, regardless of whether or not such music sells, i.e., fits neatly under marketable genre umbrellas. It must be said that, no doubt, to the hordes of music-business marketers and lawyers, etc., any artist taking on such a dangerously uncommercial enterprise must be a bit cracked.

These musicians themselves, however, prefer to live their lives on another, perhaps higher plane. They don’t see any point in not pursuing a music peripheral to marketing schemes, one that is primarily about the essence of the musical experience, basically. And in my many years of conversations with these special people, I’ve met quite a few who feel they don’t really have much choice or say in the matter, and who wouldn’t sell out even if they had a clue as to who might be buying.

In Los Angeles, there is a musician named Peter Manning Robinson, a man who fits this musical gadfly image well. He’s a pianist, a composer –– and an inventor of musical instruments that needed to be invented because how else to convey the music in his head and heart?

Robinson and his creative partner Klaus Hoch have developed a musical instrument called the refractor piano. Their now 15-yearlong exploration of the instrument's particulars and potentialities was important for the advancement of Robinson’s music; it was important to him personally, too. As he puts it, “This is what I was put on the planet to do, this is what I’m supposed to do, and this is what I’m going to do.”

What is a refractor piano? Without giving away too much of its inner technical mystery, Robinson explains the concept:

“Any acoustic piano can hook up to what we call the refractor, which is a collection of hardware and software which is proprietary. Essentially, the refractor takes any acoustic sound, in this case a piano, and uses transducers or pickups on the piano to go into the refractor through an A to D [analog to digital] converter.”

As the software is basically just doing what Robinson has told it to do, each piece that he plays via the refractor piano has its own “environment.”

“When I start to compose a piece, I say, ‘All right, what kind of sounds do I want to create with the refractor piano, and what is each one of these little modules contained in it going to do?'" For a bit of music history context he cites some of the early electronic experiments conceived by Varése, and the pop world’s modular Moogs, where the music is created with small dedicated-purpose generative and sound-shaping units that are connected in various different forms, and you have pedals to control it all.

“In my case I’m doing it with software,” he says, “but I’m not using any synths, any virtual instruments; I’m not triggering any samples, I’m not overdubbing anything, there’s no prerecorded tracks. It’s simply the acoustic piano going through the refractor that I’m controlling depending on how I want to control it.”

After a lot of tinkering, enhancing and refining, Robinson took his refractor piano public.

“I wanted to wait until it could express everything that I want to do musically before I showed it,” he says. “Klaus and I worked on it for five years, and then, ‘Great, it’s ready.’ It’s gone from a Toyota to a BMW, and now it’s a Lamborghini.”

The Chicago-born/Vancouver-raised Robinson is a mostly self-taught, instinctive musician who by the time he was 12 was playing in clubs and even touring. Though he’d spent a lot of time learning the classical repertoire, “I was constantly changing and I never wanted to play anybody else’s music. I was fortunate at a very early age to play with a lot of wonderful jazz musicians like Freddie Hubbard and Phil Woods, but I didn’t really fit in with any of the groups; I was either too ‘out there’ or I didn’t want to play like anybody else.”

Despite a predilection for not fitting in with others’ musical concepts, Robinson put together his own group for recording and gigs, which did pretty well until Robinson, still only in his early 20s, developed a severe case of tendonitis which got so bad that within three years he had to stop playing live. As he had studied and worked with electronics early on in his career, he was able to work in the studios performing film scores, and people would hire him for sessions on other artists’ albums. It paid the bills, but he was miserable.

Robinson tried everything to get past the malady, to no avail.

“I’d gone to surgeons, I’d gone to acupuncturists. Everybody just said, ‘We can’t operate on you, we can’t do anything to make it a lot better –– but we can make it a lot worse.’”

One day, though, Robinson happened to meet Dr. Phil Cohen, a neuro-muscular specialist working with musicians who have what Cohen calls “interferences,” which could be anything from a physical problem to a psychological problem, or a performance problem. Robinson played for Cohen for about two minutes, at which point Cohen said, “I can have you playing again in six months, but you’ve got to relearn everything you know about the piano.”

Cohen taught Robinson a very unorthodox way of playing that would take the stress off the muscles and ligatures in the arms and wrists.

“Most pianists learn a conventional technique that uses fingers,” says Robinson. “Well, you can think of the piano as an athletic endeavor, just like any kind of sport, and the first thing you’re taught in athletics is that you use the bigger muscles to pull the smaller muscles to pull the smallest muscles. Everything comes from your core, from your back, from your shoulders, so the fingers were always the last thing you ever get to.”

Conventional piano technique, he says, runs counter to the conventional athletic wisdom.

“When you learn piano technique, and to an extent, guitar, everything comes from the fingers first, so you’ve got these small muscles trying to pull the big muscles, so most of the time it never even gets into your back or your core. Through your wrist, there are something like 47 small ligaments going through one tiny channel, which is why so many pianists get hand and wrist injuries, because they’re learning this very conventional finger technique that doesn’t do you any good.”

Under Cohen’s guidance Robinson completely transformed his playing technique.

“Luckily, I’d done some kickboxing and martial arts when I was younger, so I was familiar with this concept,” he says. “He got me into yoga and started me playing where my hands are almost flat, and I sit very low to the keyboard. You almost don’t see my hands moving; when I want to get volume out of the piano, instead of striking, I’m playing up. If somebody were to touch my hand, it would just fly off, because there’s no pressure there. Like with a martial artist or working with yoga, everything’s coming from the forearm.”

Robinson’s therapeutic re-education didn’t take six months, but within a few years he was back playing and concertizing. In order to pay those pesky bills, he took on a number of film composing jobs, including the hit TV series Without a Trace, whose ceaseless demand for fresh musical material finally took its toll on Robinson.

“I was doing very well in that, but finally the hours just kicked my ass,” he says. “I was doing 18 hours a day, 360 days a year for seven years, and I completely fried myself.”

His withdrawal from the soul-crushing world of film scoring was Robinson’s first step into a serious immersion in making music that spoke to –– and possibly defined –– himself.

Peter Manning Robinson’s music as channeled through the refractor piano is as you might gather a deeply personal form of self-expression, one that boasts a rare-ish and quite powerful ambiguity. Unlike so much film and TV scoring, it’s not plagued with a literal-mindedness that attempts to tell specified stories or interpret visual images. (His piano performances are interfaced with the video “environments” of artist Hana Kim.)

In a live performance, Robinson spontaneously reshapes the music that he’s already roughly delineated compositionally in motif, general sound and where the thing’s going to go.

“It’s like I’m going on a run and I know that at the 500-yard mark there’s going to be a little bush over here, and I’m going to pass the waterfall here. How I get to these points is determined by what I want to do with the piece, how much improvising do I want to do with the piece, how much control do I want to have over that piece. The actual composing as such combines a lot of disciplines when the music comes out. So I’m a composer, I’m an improviser, I’m a conductor, because you’re trying to move and shape everything that’s going on around you in a musical way. I’m certainly a programmer in that I’m creating all these sounds and all this software to make these things happen.”

One very big advantage in composing and performing with the refractor piano is that the composer cannot think in conventional terms when playing it.

“You cannot approach the refractor pianistically because the sounds are so complicated it turns into mud,” he says. “And you can’t look at it in a conventional orchestral way because you’re constantly feeding the refractor. It’s not like I sit down and I trigger this whole prerecorded thing and I play to it. You have to start from scratch and build everything up, and so you have to come up with interesting ways of producing sounds depending on what you want to do.”

Then, too, it seems that the refractor has a mind of its own.

“I can build in a certain amount of aleatoric stuff or I can say, ‘I think I know what I want it to do.’ It’s just going to do what it wants at times and it’s just like a group of improvising musicians: You must be able to react immediately to whatever’s coming back.”

Musicians/composers often talk of the glorious freedom to pursue their true creative muses, to follow their dreams…come hell or high water. Such an attitude, like I said, really is admirable, though not without its dangers, for these artists’ careers, obviously, but also for those of us in the audience asked to witness this fellow human being crawling up his own artistic bumhole for our own cultural good. Peter Manning Robinson is well aware of all that.

“My music is absolutely about being yourself,” he says, “and I really want to share this with people. The reason so much new music gets lost is there’s this sort of erudite approach, which is, ‘I’m going to go on stage, I’m going to play, I’m going to be exactly like this, it’s going to be very serious, and now the concert is over.’

“That’s not how I see music. I see music as joyful, whether it’s serious or not; I see music as emotional, as visceral. If you come to hear me play, you’re going to hear some things that are beautiful, some things that are unsettling, some things that are exuberant. You’re going to go on a journey, and it’s not going to be like anybody else’s. You’re going to come out of there feeling something you haven’t felt before. And that’s really what it’s all about.”

Peter Manning Robinson performs at MOCA in Los Angeles on Wednesday, October 19.

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