As a musical instrument the piano is, both literally and figuratively, black and white. A paradigm of discipline and order, the natural notes here, the sharps and flats here, carefully tuned such that all intervals between the notes are the same, and that all keys, major and minor, sound with an absolute maximum of consistent, consonant clarity.

Composers tend not to be interested in or satisfied by black and white. Indeed, even all the myriad shades of grey in between are often insufficient. Regardless of what it may look like, and how it might have been designed, arranged and built, for many composers an instrument is less a full stop than a question mark, a collection of materials that have the potential to constitute a panoply of multicoloured technical possibilities.

So it is with the music on this album. To compose microtonal piano music, to explore the infinitesimal gaps between the white and black keys, is to embrace the necessity to rethink, retool and, of course, retune the instrument in order to expand or simply reconfigure its tonal makeup and capabilities. Such an exploration extends to other aspects too, to timbre, structure, melody, and most obviously — and radically — to harmony.

The five composers on this album, Eivind Buene, Keiko Harada, Øyvind Mæland, Michelle Agnes Magalhaes and Andreas Gundersen, all take a distinct, individual approach in their exploration beyond the conventional limits of the piano.

Says the artist: “The solo works on this album have all been commissioned during my time as an artistic research fellow at the Norwegian Academy of Music. Through my project I have tried to demonstrate, as a performer, how microtonality can increase the expressive possibilities of the acoustic piano.”