Cor Fuhler
Cor Fuhler – piano, keyboards, live electronics, composition
“A modern day renaissance man. Cor Fuhler is hard to pin down. He’s known variously as a jazz pianist, a composer, a maverick instrument builder, a gamelan performer, noise musician and occasional turntablist. What binds these contrasting activities is a restless sense of exploration and a healthy sense of humour. Cor’s list of projects is dazzling.”
ABC, New Music Up Late
BIOGRAPHY
Cor Fuhler is a tinkerer. He once studied carpentry, and from early on he’s been poking around inside electric organs (I wonder what’d happen if you attached a wire… here) and pianos. He’s designed and built his own instrument, the keyolin—bowed violin whose pitches are ‘fingered’ with a keyboard. He loves fooling with antiquated electronic keyboards or cheap battery-powered gizmos. Under the hood of a grand piano, he’ll scrape an object along the strings for slide guitar effects, place metal bars across the strings to change their pitch or overtones when struck, place an electromagnetic E-bow over a string to set it humming, or zoom in on individual strings with guitar pickups to amplify selected sounds.
Even the music he writes can be do-it-yourself. For his Corkestra, he’s written a collection of catchy riffs, bass vamps, and fast or slow, shorter or longer melody lines, which the players then assemble like building blocks, combining and superimposing them to create a new piece on the spot. Sometimes a score specifies time values but not pitches, or vice versa. The musicians may be given a choice of two versions of the same theme, or be allowed to skip notes here and there. Players may also pick their own tempo or key, or be allowed to play certain notes sharp or flat, which makes for curious parallel harmonies. And musicians who aren’t following the score can embellish a tune or create a counter-melody. The same melodic fragments might turn up in new guises in the course of a set, enabling thematic unity rare in improvised music.
It’s fun for musicians, to get to flesh out a chart that way, and Fuhler’s puckish little tunes aim for just such a sense of play. A particularly good vehicle for his composed melodies has been the trio Fuhler/de Joode/Bennink, with bassist Wilbert de J and drummer Han B, where the loose interpretations may be more spontaneous. His love of spontaneous counterpoint was nurtured by his conservatory studies with Misha Mengelberg, a mentor.
Away from the keyboard, Fuhler also plays in the quartet Pluk, with de Joode on bass, Nora Mulder on cymbalon and Oscar Jan Hoogland on electric clavichord. There Cor explores electric guitar, which, like piano, he treats as a box full of resonating strings.
In 2010 he relocated with his Australian wife and children to Australia. Since moving there he has had his works performed by Ensemble Offspring in Sydney and at the Melbourne Recital Centre, composed and made the sound design for a Lullaby project that was premiered at Port Fairy Music Festival and the Mona Foma festival 2013, performed at the annual Now Now festival in Sydney, recorded for ABC-fm and interviewed for a portrait program on New Music Up Late to be broadcast in February 2013, performed in the Handmade festival in Melbourne 2011, Melbourne Jazz Festival 2010, Sound Out Festival in Canberra and completed a tour in New Zealand.
MUSIC
VIDEO
GROUPS
- Fuhler/Bennink/De Joode
- Corkestra
- Cortet
