OK, piano fans: picture this: You’re at the Simons Recital Hall for the Music in Time series opener (Saturday the 26th), and who should emerge but nine assorted young music students, plus their older leader (composer Stephen Scott), all wearing the same t-shirt-topped uniform. They assume their positions, clustered around a lidless 9-foot Steinway grand – the interior of which has been trussed up with what looks like miles of bundled monofilament fishing line. They’re looped around the piano’s hundreds of interior piano strings, and you can get some really strange sounds by “bowing” the piano strings — pulling back & forth on either end of the looped cords.

But wait – you can also dampen the piano strings in many ways to vary the sound; also pluck them, strum them or hammer them. I spoof you not – you could see everything going on from a pair of suspended digital cameras to the top & sides, with their images projected on the wall behind them. The 10 “players” each have their assigned functions (bower, beater, strummer, etc.), carefully pre-planned for each work they play. And looks like a kind of a freely choreographed “piano dance”, with individuals darting here & there around the instrument – here leaning over it on tippytoe, and there squeezing tightly between other players to reach their next assigned sonority. Some of them actually come into rather awkward or intimate contact while discharging their duties.

Then, faithful reader – try to imagine what this all sounds like. With all ten of them doing their piano dance, it’s like hearing some strange and wonderful primitive synthesizer, with a wealth of sounds you’ve never quite heard before forming a truly orchestral palette of pleasing and exotic sound. You simply can’t imagine the range of sounds you can coax out of piano strings.

What I’m describing is Scott’s contribution to contemporary music – namely his Bowed Piano Ensemble Not surprisingly, he’s the only person to have composed for this unique piano configuration. And the allotted hour was filled with two of his works: a purely instrumental piece called New York Drones and a protracted nine-song cycle known as The Deep Spaces. Soprano Victoria Hansen did the vocal honors – very nicely, I might add. And it’s all quite sonorous, harmonically comfy and otherwise easy on the ears – even if you’ve never heard anything remotely like it.

If you weren’t there, alas! – ‘cause you done gone and missed something very different and special. It’s an audiovisual experience you’ll never have, except from them – for Scott’s group is the only one of its kind. It’s one of those totally unique musical experiences that I’ll never forget – for both its novelty factor … and its musical quality. Why am I not surprised to hear such as this from John Kennedy’s ear-stretching series? What other amazing acts has he been hiding from us?