What If

Hauschka — the Düsseldorf composer Volker Bertelmann — builds "What If" around his signature prepared piano, the instrument transformed by objects placed among its strings into something that clangs, buzzes, and resonates in ways an acoustic piano shouldn't. Yet the effect isn't alienating; within seconds the altered timbres become a vocabulary of their own, and you find yourself drawn into a music that is simultaneously familiar and strange. The track poses its titular question structurally as much as emotionally: what if the piano were something else? What if the rules of composition were suggestions? The rhythmic propulsion is unusually strong for contemporary classical — Hauschka's background in jazz gives the music a pulse that drives rather than meditates — and the piece builds through repetition and variation with the logic of minimalism filtered through European post-punk experimentalism. There's an intellectual playfulness to the work that keeps emotional sentimentality at bay, but the music isn't cold — curiosity and warmth coexist in the prepared piano's weird beauty. German in its precision and slightly perverse in its methods, "What If" belongs to a tradition of composers who believe music should ask questions rather than answer them. For listeners who want their feelings complicated by ideas.