A couple weeks ago there was a thread that mentioned Richard Bunger Evans' Well-Prepared Piano, a book explaining how to prepare pianos to perform music of Cage and those who followed his lead. The first edition was published in 1973, by the Colorado College Press. He produced a second edition in 1981, published by Litoral Arts Press. The second edition has 94 pages compared to 45 of the first, so I got a copy of the 2nd through interlibrary loan to see what the differences are. What I found was that the text of the first edition is re-set mostly intact. The second edition is a smaller format, so its first 63 pages are essentially exactly the same, with only three changes that I noticed in skimming, nothing very significant. The remainder of the 2nd edition contains three articles Bunger (he used his middle name early in his career) published in Contemporary Keyboard Magazine, and an extended bibliography of works using prepared piano techniques. So if you have or have access to the first edition, you essentially have all you might need from him. The articles are interesting, but don't add a lot of practical value. I'll note that Bunger is very meticulous about giving instructions so as not to harm the piano (he misses a couple things here and there, like pressing on the damper pedal before inserting things). I'll also note that Alan Eder's video covers most of the territory in the book. Regards, Fred Sturm fssturm at unm.edu "The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge, but imagination." - Einstein
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