Eastward Piano

This book follows the piano through musical worlds typically overlooked in the instrument’s history. Grounded in practice-led research, it treats the piano as a mobile, adaptive resource rather than a fixed cultural artefact. By engaging with early commercial recordings from Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa, this book unsettles the rigid oppositions (East/West, oral/literate, folk/scholarly) through which the piano’s presence has typically been read. The concept of ‘modeness’ attends to music as realised performance, while Foucault’s ‘heterotopias’ frame the instrument’s eastward trajectories. A central case study—the author’s 2015 album The Rebetiko Era—brings these threads into the studio, examining arrangement, improvisation and recording as compositional acts. Moving beyond a conventional musicological study, the volume also provides the musical scores for nine of the album’s tracks, complete with insightful commentary. Designed for researchers, educators, practitioners, and students of the piano, the book proposes a mode of enquiry in which artistic practice, historical and discographic research, and critical reflection inform one another, and in which the piano emerges not as a belated arrival but as a participant whose eastward journeys have been audible all along.