Toccata for Piano by Emma Lou Diemer - my thoughts

When I talk about this piece, I always open by saying that it is one of the most strenuous things I’ve ever done. Watching the video above will give you an idea far more than looking at a score would, but it still understates the physicality of the Toccata significantly. Prepared piano is not easy - on you or the piano. (I remember one of my fellow ASFA music students telling me that it was very out of tune the next day from all the times I had to touch the strings.)

Emma Lou Diemer’s Toccata for Piano was my first real exposure to the concept of extended techniques on the piano, and to how they can be used in a piece. Extended techniques are hard to implement - at least the way I see it - because they are almost all percussive in nature, and piano is already a very percussive instrument. (Also, doing things like standing up to mute the strings with one hand limits you to only one hand on the keyboard and interferes with your action. There are a lot of problems to deal with there, and I think that at a slow or moderate tempo it might be near impossible to make extended techniques sound good. But that’s only my opinion, and as I said, I don’t know much yet.

As for what I actually thought about the Toccata? I liked it, and I know for a fact that it was the highlight of my senior recital, but I don’t think I plan to play it again. It is an excellent piece - to make extended techniques work it has to be - and it reminds me of some of Muczynski’s work in how it dances around conventional tonality. It’s a wonderful work of art, and a very impressive one, but I don’t really want to go through playing it again. And I don’t think the ASFA grand pianos do either.