Creation : 30/05/2006 – Jay Gottlieb, Percussions de Strasbourg. France, Strasbourg, Rhine Opera
Musicians : for main piano and five percussionists
Duration : 14′
One day, bored by the lack of ideas (working without a basic text is too abstract for my head), I wrote down practically in one go everything the piano would play. There were about fifteen minutes of piano music. And from this material, I began to enlarge the sound of the piano by means of the instruments that Jean-Paul Bernard had patiently presented to me and recorded. But the mayonnaise didn’t take. One day, I had an image: as in an open-heart operation, five percussionists were fiddling around inside a piano. It was the missing link. From this image the piece wrote itself. I called it “Toy” because for me percussion and the piano have something archetypal about childhood. I have the impression that my music sounds like a huge, noisy toy.
Oscar Strasnoy