"I've long been interested in exploring the elongation of the piano's decay. The shō's clean harmonics offered an enticing texture to incorporate into my experiments with slow-moving piano works." - Samuel Reinhard

To be slow and to be still: through his ongoing explorations of repetition, New York-based Swiss composer Samuel Reinhard extends this invitation to both listeners and the musicians who perform his compositions. 'For Piano and shō' brings together Haruna Higashida, a Tokyo-based gagaku performer active in contemporary music, and Copenhagen-based Canadian pianist Paul Jacob Fossum, who also performed on Reinhard's 2023 release 'Two Pianos and String Trio'. The album's two pieces were recorded between Copenhagen and Tokyo, where Reinhard was in residence in 2023.

In the first piece, recorded in a multitrack session, three pianos pursue and repeat their respective thread-like motifs, slowly encircling each other, each at their own pace. The pianos are accompanied by three shōs, playing individual notes and chords from a circumscribed pool of material and providing harmonic "reflections" of the melodic motifs played by the pianos. Together, the resulting material is ever-changing. In the second piece, a piano moves through a trio of figures-an arpeggio, an improvisation, a chord-for the duration of the performance. Each iteration of this sequence is accompanied by a single shō, which freely selects and plays a note or chord, emerging from the piano's first figure and disappearing into the third.

Throughout, players hold notes through touch or breath until sound decays. Small improvisations, a piano note coming into contact with the delicate asymmetry of the shō's intervals, dissolve into pools of deepening quiet. Reinhard has remarked that, by giving performers freedom to play less or more within a given duration, they are able to "do nothing and just listen for periods of time as they are performing, creating a kinship between the performer and the listener-where both engage in a deep and concentrated way of listening." Here, the shared act of listening, completed by the piece's audience, leaves its mark as an afterglow-a sensation of time stretched, all the details and feelings that emerge from a world slowed. "-elsewhere

"The shō (笙) is a Japanese free reed musical instrument that was introduced from China during the Nara period (AD 710 to 794). It is descended from the Chinese sheng,[1] of the Tang Dynasty era, although the shō tends to be smaller in size than its contemporary sheng relatives. It consists of 17 slender bamboo pipes, each of which is fitted in its base with a metal free reed. Two of the pipes are silent, although research suggests that they were used in some music during the Heian period. It is speculated that even though the pipes are silent, they were kept as part of the instrument to keep the symmetrical shape.[2]

The instrument's sound is said to imitate the call of a phoenix, and it is for this reason that the two silent pipes of the shō are kept-as an aesthetic element, making two symmetrical "wings". Similar to the Chinese sheng, the pipes are tuned carefully with a drop of a dense resinous wax preparation containing fine lead shot. As (breath) moisture collected in the shō's pipes prevents it from sounding, performers can be seen warming the instrument over a small charcoal brazier or electric burner when they are not playing. The instrument produces sound when the player's breath is inhaled or exhaled, allowing long periods of uninterrupted play. The shō is one of the three primary woodwind instruments used in gagaku, Japan's imperial court music. Its traditional playing technique in gagaku involves the use of tone clusters called aitake (合竹), which move gradually from one to the other, providing accompaniment to the melody.

A larger size of shō, called u (derived from the Chinese yu), is not widely used, although some performers, such as Hiromi Yoshida and Ko Ishikawa, began to revive it in the late 20th century."-Wikipedia