Harry Pepl solo

From guitarist to pianist

In the early 1990s Pepl discovered the piano for himself. It allowed him to play two lines at once, improvisation and accompaniment in real time.¹ He had already played piano on record in 1987, on “Tintenfisch Inky”, the closing piece of the ECM album “Cracked Mirrors”.² He never practised: “On Flow I play piano, although I can’t actually play the piano,” he told Nikolaus Kohler. That was exactly the appeal: at the piano he did not think about guitar tricks, he sat down and played, “and that is exactly what I want”.³

“Consequence”: Bösendorfer, November 1995

In November 1995 Pepl recorded twelve freely improvised pieces on one of the company’s grand pianos at the Bösendorfer factory in Vienna and produced them himself. “It is the same concept, improvisations on the piano, only the Bösendorfer sounds completely different,” he said; he made the recording “because I simply couldn’t stop playing the piano”.⁴ In the booklet he wrote: “When playing the piano I enjoy great freedom.” After a short while he no longer noticed time, “and the notes flow all by themselves”.⁵ The cover shows a photograph from 1950, Harry Pepl as a child with his great-aunt.⁵ The finished album was shelved because the record company did not want to release two piano records at once.⁶ Fullmax Recordings released “Consequence” from the estate on 15 May 2020.⁷

“Flow”: one take at the Musikverein

On Sunday, 10 March 1996, Pepl sat down at the Steinway in the Brahms Hall of the Vienna Musikverein and played twelve pieces in a single take; Reinhard Buchta recorded them, Paul Zauner produced.⁸ Nothing was prepared, no motif, no theme: “I don’t really have the music in my head, it really is a flow with nothing in between.”³ After years of computers and MIDI he was looking for reduction: “I sit down and play only the piano, nothing else”.¹ The hall plays along, too. In “Silent Water” he plays very little and listens to the notes coming back from the room, “and somewhere in the 14th row a chair creaks”.¹ On two pieces he added a second piano track, and a few passages were shortened on the advice of his son Daniel Pepl.¹ The cover shows a picture Pepl painted himself; this is what it looks like inside him, he said. He dedicated the album to the Graz music university.⁹ PAO Records released it in 1996, and in 2023 it was reissued digitally as “Harry Pepl Piano”.⁸

Twelve pieces, twelve stories

The titles tell of Pepl’s life. “3 Mo” stands for “mottig, mollig, momentig” (moth-like, minor-ish, momentary), momentary because the music was made in the moment.¹⁰ “Improv 2” reinterprets a Schubert impromptu, “Grace and Gary” engages with the western “High Noon”, you can hear the clock ticking. “Fast Mail” sounds like a stagecoach ride over hill and dale.¹ The centrepiece is “Man könnte Klavierspielen müssen” (“One ought to have to play the piano”): it begins as a forward-pushing pseudo-fugue, thickens into a shimmering web of sound and dissolves unexpectedly. Concerto suspected an allusion in the title to Glenn Gould’s obsession with the piano.¹ Gould had occupied Pepl before: the tribute for the Lower Austrian Culture Prize of 1991 tells how he analysed the rhythmic precision of a Gould Bach recording on the computer.¹¹

Response

In Concerto, Martin Schuster called the pieces “lyrically intricate, at times stirring and insistent discourses of the improviser with himself” and placed them between Bach, Cecil Taylor, Schoenberg and Keith Jarrett, without claiming to capture them that way.¹ In Georg Pepl’s liner notes the pianist Stephen Ferguson hears Gould, Jarrett, Debussy, Cecil Taylor, Bach, Schoenberg and Schubert: “Through Pepl we hear what Pepl hears when he listens to pianistic heroes.”⁹ The guitarist Alex Machacek counted “Flow” among his favourite albums in 2006.¹² Wulf Müller, who as producer at PolyGram Austria had overseen “Schönberg Improvations”, writes of “Flow” in 2024: “The result is as pure as it gets.”¹³ And in 2024 the bassist Raphael Preuschl recalled Pepl’s “Man könnte Klavierspielen müssen” when describing how his bandmate Alex Machacek wants to overcome the limits of the guitar and acquire the polyphony of a keyboard instrument.¹⁴

Afterwards

In the Concerto interview Pepl announced another solo CD on which he wanted to play several instruments.¹ This became the work in his home studio in Hernstein, Lower Austria: as the Lonely Single Swinger Band he recorded guitar, piano, bass and drums himself, track by track, in real-time composing.¹⁵ The pianist Stefan Heckel, a winner of the Harry Pepl Prize, examined Pepl’s instant composing in his 2024 dissertation.¹⁶