Before Boulez died on January 5, 2016, we had a party for members of our extended family in Los Angeles. This included 2 children who had never played large keyboard instruments before. As I was busy carving the tri-tip, they proceeded to my studio and started to bang and click on everything. This first had the effect that the piano music that sounded from my fine and sought after Sony SS-M7 HiFi speakers kept getting turned on and off. Once off, they went to move on to my Acrosonic spinet piano, made by Baldwin in 1949 and let us never forget that Liberace played exclusively on Baldwin, only. So, this “post-war portable grand” Acrosonic is also fine and sought after as it has all the original period parts. All of which the children were completely unaware of. As I finished carving another slice off the delicious sirloin they were playing the piano. Believe me, the sound was really cutting throughout the house as they were randomly exploring all the keys with their 4 hands. It was the rawest and most expressive music I had heard all year. Granted, it was only January 2. 3 days later Pierre Boulez died in Baden-Baden, just a one hour drive away from parents house in Mosbach. 3 days later on January 7 he contacted me via spirit communication and asked if I could go back in time with him when he was scoring a piano sonata and transcribe this directly from his mind to mine. I told him, frankly, no. I have not scored anything on paper since my teens. Recently, I have tried again using Musescore, but the inspiration left me after a few bars. As this was not a composition class with a just departed genius, I immediately offered my abilities as a middle man or “medium”: With my own mind passive, he would directly transmit the composition to me and I would play this, my weak fingers permitting! Thusly, I recorded - and then edited in Ardour - over the course of the next 2 days and nights my opus 576 entited \"Formants I-XVI\" as the album “Boulez Piano Sonata”. Spiritism meets Serialism after all.
