Piano Ergonomics_Overview

I would like to talk about an overview of the piano solo album Piano Ergonomics. For detailed commentary on each piece and articles about the production process, links to all articles are provided at the bottom, so please take a look there.

Concept

① A Collection of Concert Piano Solo Pieces Incorporating a Modern Sense of Music

The world of music is constantly being updated. Music heard through television, films, commercials, online videos, and games changes our sense of music, regardless of our individual tastes and preferences. In this collection, I incorporated the sounds and musical approaches of genres that many of us frequently encounter today — such as techno, house, EDM, IDM, and game music — into concert-oriented piano solo pieces. The aim was to create something that connects digitally produced sounds, such as those made with DAWs, with the most direct form of musical experience: the classical concert setting.

② A Collection That Is Less Burdensome for Pianists and Easy to Incorporate into Concert Programs

I believe every pianist has pieces they admire and plans for their musical journey. For example: “I want to be able to play Chopin’s Études,” “I’ll perform Ravel at my next concert,” or “Someday I’d like to play Kapustin,” and so on. Also, the piano is an instrument that often requires months of practice in preparation for stepping onto the stage. Given that reality, it may be difficult to suddenly add music that is extremely complex or excessively demanding to perform. With that in mind, I aimed to provide pieces whose technical difficulty would not interfere with each pianist’s own musical path, while still offering a rewarding playing experience and a strong effect in performance.

There is no fixed order for the collection, and it was not particularly intended to be performed straight through as a complete program. I would be happy if these pieces could be freely picked up and used whenever you want to explore lighter contemporary works, or when you happen to have some extra time available in a concert program.

Title and Composition Theme

“Ergonomics” is the study of the natural and optimal relationship between people, objects, and their environment. As I continued composing while keeping the two concepts above in mind, I felt that this word fit the project very well. The compositional theme is to create something interesting by considering sounds that naturally fit human perception, as well as the relationship between the piano and the body that plays it. And to clearly state that this collection is intended for the piano, I added “Piano” at the beginning, which resulted in the title Piano Ergonomics. I felt that it ended up sounding somewhat like the title of a piano method book, but I thought that was interesting in its own way, so I decided to keep it.

Future Perspective

With the development of DAWs and the recent emergence of AI, the way people engage with music is entering a period of significant change. In such a situation, I feel that the act of people actually performing and expressing music may come to hold even greater value as an experience than before. In contrast to digital media, which cannot go beyond the barrier of speakers, live performance remains the most direct musical experience even today. It is the hope of this work that it may contribute, even in a small way, to updating that value for the present era.

For this project, I uploaded videos on YouTube featuring DAW-produced audio together with the score as the form of presentation for the work, but they were also intended to serve as reference demos for those who may wish to perform these pieces.

What I can create is only the script — the score itself. Creating the special experience called music from that point onward is only possible through the power of performers.

That concludes the overview. I have written more in-depth thoughts on the background and compositional process behind this work in a separate article, Piano Ergonomics_Compositional Background and Process, so please take a look if you are interested.(Link)

Thank you for reading.