Eric Glick Rieman is a musician and composer who performs on the piano, melodica, the prepared/extended Rhodes electric piano, celeste, Waterphone, and toy piano. His recordings have been released on Water Goes Into the Air, ReR Megacorp, Accretions, and Full Bleed. He has recorded with artists such as Lesli Dalaba, Stuart Dempster, Fred Frith, Carla Kihlstedt, Zoe Keating, and Tom Heasley, and he has performed with artists such as Ikue Mori, Sudhu Tewari, Marcos Fernandes, Amy Denio, Matt Ingalls, David Slusser, Kristin Miltner, and John Ingle. 

     Eric Glick Rieman will be performing in Chicago soon. He will be performing solo piano and conducting the Chicago Scratch Orchestra at Heaven Gallery on Friday, January 7; during a double-bill concert with Keith Kirchoff, as part of the Experimental Piano Series at PianoForte on Saturday, January 8; and in a double-bill concert with Keith Kirchoff at the Experimental Sound Studio on Sunday, January 9.Recently I spoke with Eric about his influences and ongoing projects. 

Dan: How did you first get interested in music?

Eric: My family, my church. I don't remember a time that music wasn't a big part of my life. Everyone in our family played at least one instrument -- and we all sang.  Almost everyone I was close to as a child ( and I had a very large family by today's standards -- 53 first cousins) was at least a good singer. The church we went to, a Church of the Brethren church, had singing as a major part of the worship service. We sang in parts, and I sang bass, like my Daddy. My sisters and I all played the piano, and my mother was a piano teacher. I remember singing myself to sleep at night. I seldom do that anymore, although I do sing my kids to sleep with cowboy music.

Dan: How did you get interested in avant-garde music? Did you have family members who introduced you to it? 

Eric: None of my immediate family, with the notable exception of my mother, have been aficionados of New Music. My mother and I would often discuss the most avant garde pieces on the orchestral performances that we went to together (still do). We were very interested in the reasons people were making music, and this got us interested in the exploration of sound and techniques that typifies the contemporary avant garde.

Dan: Who are some of your musical influences?

Eric: I loved Bartok as a child, and played many of his piano pieces. As a teen, I was as much influenced by progressive Rock, like Yes, King Crimson, Led Zeppelin, and PInk Floyd as Stravinsky, Beethoven, Ruggles, and Bach. I discovered Fred Frith and Henry Cow about the time I discovered The Ramones and Devo. I discovered Parliament/Funkadelic about the time I was researching Monk, Earl Hines, and Coltrane and exploring the work of The Deep Listening Band. All along my musical path I've listened to a wide variety of genres, and never felt any strong elitism as to their relative importance in the intellectual history. More recently, I love Morton Feldman's work, Eliane Radigue's work, and that of Olivier Messiaen. 

Dan: You have a wide range of influences, including electronic and traditional musical forms. 

Eric: Yes, and living in an era of the integration of electronic music and traditional musical forms has really influenced my approach. Electronic music is at least less segregated than it was initially. The music of Brian Eno is a big influence, and the work of Terry Riley, John Cage, Scott Joplin. I could go on for a long time on this, writing names of people I've listened to and tried to understand.

Dan: Would you say your focus on performing and composing music draws on influences that extend beyond music? 

Eric: I think now I'm more interested in assimilating ideas and concepts from other places than the musical sphere, and trying to bring these into my music. Music is an art of patterns, and there are patterns everywhere when you look for them. I'm also interested in listening to the world, and bringing what I hear into my work. So -- paying attention.

Dan: How did you first get interested in composing music?

Eric: I wanted to be a composer from the beginning. The hard thing about composing for me as a young man was letting go of the preciousness of everything I composed - because the act of composition itself was very difficult. Now I compose a lot -- and throw out a lot. I write as many ideas down as I have time for, but only develop some of them. I try to document as many of the ideas I have as I can, and use these as soup stock for those times when the cupboard is bare.

Dan: Who are some of your influences, in terms of composing?

Eric: I love Feldman's aesthetic. He didn't know why he made things the way he made them -- and he didn't use a system. He followed his own irrational self, and kept working. I'm interested in using some numeric ideas in music, or any ideas that involve pattern manipulation and don't seem too hackneyed. Cage is clearly a big influence on my compositions and improvisations, because he posed what I think of as the most difficult compositional questions people are working with today. Questions of how we look at music -- a focus on perspective in music. This has led me toward working with animals and trying to involve their perspective in my work, hence the Biosonicist tack.

Dan: I think you and I were in Douglas Ewart’s class together at Mills College. That was a great class. What are some things that you remember about that class?

Eric: Yes, I was in that class, and I was playing the piano. 

Dan: What are some things you remember about that class? 

Eric: I remember Douglas encouraging me to get more physical with the piano. At that time, I was just beginning to play with clusters and non-traditional hand positions. He said something like, "People do play that way, you know. You can do that." I was playing Henry Cowell and studying with Chris Brown (piano) also at that time, so the cluster thing was in the air.

During that class and time period I learned a lot about staying physically safe at the piano, even when totally engaged with the improvisations at a frantic level. I hurt myself many times, and had to learn how to stretch like an athlete before performing. 

Dan: You’ve recorded a lot of interesting projects over the years. How would you say some of your thinking has evolved over the years, in terms of how you approach recording projects. 

Eric: Improvised recording projects are all about the musician/performers for me. I think about the people I know who might be willing to get together and do something - usually for barter - and the project comes from that. I imagine the various flavors that these performers can bring to a recording. Often I want to get players together who might be unfamiliar with one another, but who's work I respect. I also think a lot about who I want to work with - who is fun to be around, who I can enjoy talking with about minutia. I strongly consider how much players are willing to use rests in their music - I don't like to work with players who always have something to say and can't contain their impulses to say it. 

I try to record when I have the players and the cash to pay for a good studio or live recording, but it takes me a long time to get things released these days. I don't have the money to make CDs, and the world hasn't gone completely digital yet. So in the experimental music world, you still have to put out CDs to get reviewed, even if you hire a publicist. And there is kind of no point in putting out music that won't be listened to, I think.

As to solo work, I record myself many times a year, both compositions and improvisations. I always have a number of solo projects happening. Eventually the floodgates will open, and a vast number of recordings will get released.

Dan: You play piano and other keyboard instruments, including the prepared Rhodes electric piano. Would you say you approach the piano differently from how you approach other keyboard instruments? If so, how?

Eric: Well, the piano is a big kettle of worms. Good worms. Maybe good compost. (I'd like to fill one with worms sometime.) I have a love/hate relationship with it. It is my primary instrument, and it is what I play every day (almost without fail). My work with the Rhodes feels more comfortable, but probably because there aren't many people doing what I'm doing with the Rhodes. I like the freedom I get from having an instrument I don't care about - there are no boundaries as to what I can do to abuse and torture it. The piano is such an icon it is hard to find a new sound on it. Even with electronics.

Dan: How did you come up with the idea for the prepared Rhodes electric piano?

Eric: Years ago, in the '80s, I had a Rhodes piano that my boss at a musical electronics repair shop gave me. It had been dropped off the back of a truck, had no top, and its case was cracked. A musical friend and I experimented with it, and I finally gave it to my friend, as I remember. It sat on my kitchen table for a few months. The insides of a Rhodes are quite compelling, visually - sonically -  its a kind of forest of tempting metal to play with.

Almost 20 years later,  following my impulses under the influence of Mills College and John Cage; I had an instrument; I opened it up; I began to record extended techniques with it. I added things to it - I hit it with things, not a hugely complicated thought process. I realized after my first explorations with it that one of my teachers, Chris Brown, had developed an instrument from electric piano parts years before I studied with him. It just made sense to me to do it. It reminds me of a piece I wrote that used the players' breath to measure durations. I had no idea that Pauline Oliveros had written pieces like that already. But I've learned to follow the ideas that excite me sonically, without editing. They lead me in interesting directions.

Dan: How has your prepared Rhodes electric piano evolved over the years?

Eric: I originally got the Rhodes I began preparing from the leader of a cover band I was in - he couldn't wait to see it go out the door, since it always went out of tune (unlike samplers), and weighed 125 pounds.. He didn't appreciate it. Maybe he'd heard it play "Disco Inferno" one too many times. I gave him $75 for it.

When I started doing the preparations in 1998, I was preparing that 1974 88 key Rhodes, and I used all kinds of things ( including peanuts in the shell as mutes) ! I added bowable rods to it, after an idea I'd seen Tom Nunn use in his "Space Plates". I did some pieces with it, and wrote my MFA thesis at Mills College partially about its development. Then I recorded "Ten to the Googolplex" with Jeff Karsin in 1999.

I had issues with that Rhodes and how I was using it  - around ground noise. Even with a pre-amp, it didn't have the volume I wanted for extremely small sounds. They have pickups, you know, one for each note assembly, and they're noisy. So I started imagining a new instrument, one that had the same capacities of the original Rhodes, but was small enough to travel with easily, and would have many more outputs. Each output would give me a more discreet way of directing and effecting the sounds in a mix. Kind of like a modular synthesizer, as far as routing. I built that in 2004, and that is the instrument I'm still using. It has a couple of stereo fields with contact mics, bowable rods, an amplified hammer mechanism, and the pickup outputs are split into three sections. I took out 30 of the tine assemblies and rebuilt what they call the harp. It came out funky, but very much the way I'd envisioned it. 43 keys, in memory of Harry Partch's musical scale. 

It still weighs 85 lb.s in its case, and I would like to build a new generation of instruments out of Rhodes parts that are a bit lighter to ship, but I haven't been able to get grant money or a residency to do it. 

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