Marta Sánchez is a Spanish, Brooklyn-based pianist and composer, who is active in the New York’s modern jazz and contemporary creative music scenes, including in David Murray’s Quartet and Webber/Morris Big Band and her own quintet, and is known for her innovative piano aesthetics.
For The Space You Left is Sánchez’ first solo prepared piano album. The nine pieces began to be shaped during her 2017 residency at MacDowell Art Center in New Hampshire, where she experimented with piano preparation and confronted her long-standing fear: playing solo piano. She wanted to translate her compositional language – built around layers, interlocking rhythms, and counterpoint – into a single timbre, and piano preparations were the solution. She found out that she can create with the prepared piano multiple, resonant inner voices, and suggest a highly personal ecosystem of contrasting textures. The MacDowell experience, where Sánchez resided in a remote, isolated cabin, surrounded by woods and snowstorms, often spending entire days without seeing anyone, informed the sensibilities of vulnerability, introspection, and self-doubt in her new music. Sánchez returned to these solo prepared piano pieces during the COVID-19 lockdown, when experiencing isolation again, but this time reflecting a more intense inner world, shaped by emotional saturation of feelings of loss, love, uncertainty, and existential questions.
For The Space You Left relates to these two forms of solitude, processed through different emotional lenses. It traces Sánchez’s piano preparations transformation from highly specific and complex piano preparation for each piece into a new, simpler, and flexible set-up of non-invasive preparations (paper, Blu-Tack, and tape) that were used for most pieces with only minimal adjustments. The album was recorded at Opus Studios in Berkeley in February 2024.
Sánchez has established a captivating and rich personal language for this brilliant album. She sounds as if conducting a small orchestra, with enigmatic percussive instruments, that corresponds equally with contemporary music and modern jazz. You can hear in Sánchez’ music echoes of African music, especially marimba-based traditions and vocal polyphony, the subtle changes within repetition of electronic music, the impressionist, austere lyricism of the ECM school, and ideas taken from sound art focusing on the attack and decay of arbitrary, supposedly «ugly» sounds.
Sánchez’ compositions are thoughtful, carefully layered, and juggle contrasting compositional ideas, clever melodic counterpoints, and interlocking rhythmic patterns and rhythmic loops. But at the same time, Sánchez’ playfulness has an immediate emotional impact. The music’s vulnerability is matched with an eloquent sonic vision, and performed with masterful elegance. Sánchez says that she had learnt an important lesson about life while creating this album: «Beauty does not exist in isolation, but gains meaning through imperfection, discomfort, and contrast. Steadiness and unease coexist, shaping one another rather than competing».
Eyal Hareuveni
Marta Sánchez (prepared piano)
