American polymath Elliott Sharp confesses that he is “not a pianist, just a composer with intermittent access to a piano”. He studied to play the piano as a child, and when he was seven years old, in his first-ever performance, he played Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody Nr. 2 at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York.
Sharp returned to the piano with his experimental compositions for the album K!L!A!V! (Newport Classic, 1990), using algorithmic and generative software that allowed him to channel Cecil Taylor’s volcanic approach or Conlon Nancarrow’s radical counterpoint. He continued to compose experimental pieces for piano, including “Oligosono” (from The Boreal, Starkland, 2015), for pianist Jenny Lin, using language based on genetics, physics, and the acoustics of resonance, demanding extended techniques such as
