creating the hartke piano mute
As seen in King of the Sun, Meanwhile AND soon to be seen in my piece The Aquarium The Silent World, you too can create the Stephen Hartke soft piano mute!
Stephen Hartke wrote these instructions in Meanwhile:
"Soft piano mutes are required beginning in movement III. These are made by filling a child’s cotton sock with about four pounds of BBs, sewing the end of the sock closed, then enclosing it in two more socks, each of them sewn shut as well. The mute is roughly a foot long and when laid across the strings near the tuning pins and gently tamped down, produces an effect similar to that of individually hand-muting the strings, but has the advantage of muting about an octave and a half."
I have decided to construct these mutes because stuffing a piano full of kitchen towels didn't work as well as I'd hoped.
What you need:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Why Compose When You Can Blog? to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.