Music and Cats / Book of Abstracts - Catalog - Page 25
Abstracts
Panel 6: Cats as Musicians
16:55 – 17:10
An Analysis of CATcerto
A Concerto for Cat and Chamber Orchestra by
Mindaugas Piečaitis
Christine Boone / St. Olaf College
In 2007, a video was posted to YouTube of a cat
named Nora playing the piano. Nora sits on her
hindquarters on the piano bench, and reaches her
front paws forward to play the Yamaha. She is also
occasionally accompanied by a second piano;
Nora’s owners are piano teachers, and have two
pianos side by side in their home studio.
Predictably, this is very cute. Surprisingly, it’s also
quite musical at times. Nora plays both tone
clusters and single notes, and her owners’ impulse
to play along with her is understandable, given the
repetitive patterns that Nora plays. This impulse
was shared by Lithuanian composer Mindaugas
Piečaitis, who composed a CATcerto for cat and
chamber orchestra, with Nora as the cat soloist. To
be clear, this is not a piece for a cat to perform live
in a concert hall (a sure recipe for disaster). Nora
had already pre-composed her solo, which was
captured in the aforementioned YouTube
video, and Piecaitis wrote the orchestral
accompaniment to fit that solo. The Klaipėda
Chamber Orchestra premiered the CATcerto in
Lithuania in 2009. They played live, while a
video of Nora was projected above the stage.
This paper is a music theoretical analysis of
the CATcerto that answers various analytical
questions, including: How does a composer
write a concerto for an extant solo? How does
Piečaitis contextualize the sounds of a cat
pressing piano keys to emphasize and increase
their musicality? Does it matter that a cat
“composed” these sounds? Does it make the
piece
any
less
legitimate,
given
the
unintentionality of the source material?
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