François Tusques - Dazibao N°2 (1971)

When it comes to prepared piano music, I think there are mainly two ways to go, and none of them exactly your more academic John Cage way (even if it got the ball running), or Pascal Comelade's disingenuous musique naïve: you either go for atmospheric timbral explorations, forfeiting notation and composition in any rigid sense of the word, or you go for real childlike abandon with a brand new toy. 

The joy of more or less arbitrarily sabotaging a highly evolved musical instrument is not only to extract different sounds and textures, but to really open it (and the music it can offer) to happy accidents, embracing unpredictability. To then reign it all back in, in the controlled form of written music, and pass it off as a studied form of art, seems to me close to an inherently fraudulent proposition. When you add to that the puerile sounds most 'preparations' tend to emit, in an artistic blend of calculation and children’s toys, then the whole thing threatens to turn into a most perilous social enterprise, a musical breeding ground for evil geniuses. 

François Tusques' approach, thankfully, does not feel calculated for a minute, despite its heavy-handed political pronouncements and imagery, which don’t really have any sort of musical bearing. He just seems to go for it and see where it leads him - which is often to sound like a drunken one-man gamelan ensemble, thanks to all the microtonal deviations of the piano notes that he hammers non-stop, in a sort of rhythmic trance, while playing with different ranges and thingies and such. That’s it. 

It might not exactly be revolutionary (pun intended), but it does make me feel like a toddler watching a buffoon magically draw wacky sounds out of a large piece of furniture, and apparently I am still not mature enough not to be reasonably entertained by that.