Sounding Board by Anthony Coleman
COMPOSED AND PERFORMED BY ANTHONY COLEMAN
PRODUCED BY ELLIOTT SHARP
This disc is about a lot of things. But what is music actually about? In my next life, maybe I’ll be a musical semiotician and try to answer this question. But one thing I can say this disc is about is 1947 Steinway Model M Grand Piano. Serial #323218. My whole tortured relationship to the piano could be the subject of a Odets-ian drama. I’ve vacillated between thinking of the piano mainly as a compositional tool and as an expressive vehicle in itself. But me and #323218 have come together at a rather late, but nonetheless propitious time of my life. All kinds of nuances of touch and sound have left the realm of the conceptual and are living in my back room as pure sensuosity.
Each piece on this disc is the examination of one or more elements of sonic phenomena, working within the constraints of being at home, with my own new small Grand. I’ve never before made a record like this. I never could have!
Anthony Coleman - Sept. 8, 2025
Sitting within that back room of Anthony's home with he at the piano...or perhaps I should say sitting inside the extended piano of Anthony Coleman: strings, metal, wood, mechanisms, and the extension of his sounding board, the room, the resonator that manifests the sounds. Of course the X factor, Anthony himself: conceptualist, composer, performer, educator, raconteur. It all coalesced as fingers touched keys, feet on pedals, splayed arrays of overtones emerging in and around the pitches themselves, the piano moving in four dimensions. One may tease strands of sonic DNA from these tracks: Ellington, Monk, Ligeti, Cecil Taylor, Webern, Jelly Roll Morton, Kurtag... but to recognize them does not diminish in any way the originality of the pieces presented here, their pathos and soul embodied in structure and sound.
Elliott Sharp - Sept. 9, 2025
Tracklist
| 1. | Antonomasia | 4:43 |
| 2. | Saccharide Antennae | 4:58 |
| 3. | Hangburkolot | 5:09 |
| 4. | Kumbalon | 6:01 |
| 5. | Pécloterions | 9:00 |
| 6. | For Cy Twombly | 5:31 |
| 7. | Ligand Chelation | 6:54 |
| 8. | Turgor | 6:13 |
Credits
Recorded August 11, 2025 by E# using the Zoom H6, a matched pair AKG 460B condensor mics, Zoom M-S microphone.
Mixed and mastered at Studio zOaR - NYC by E#, Aug. 15, 20.
Published by Anthony Coleman - BMI
Anthony Coleman photograph and inside piano - Cy Fore
Design - Janene Higgins
Anthony Coleman thanks: Todd Lindeblad and Lindeblad Piano Restoration, Mike Kunis and Kunis Piano Moving, Masayuki Takaku, Danilo Randjic - Coleman, Janene Higgins, Elliott Sharp - and, of course, my neighbors.
License
All rights reserved.
Anthony Coleman is a composer, improvising keyboardist and educator. His ensembles have included Sephardic Tinge and Selfhaters Orchestra. Coleman has toured and recorded with John Zorn, Elliott Sharp, Marc Ribot, Shelley Hirsch, Roy Nathanson and many others. Coleman is currently on faculty at Mannes College the New School for Music and the New England Conservatory.