The project's title refers to the notion of "automatic playing," a musical analogue to automatic writing. Its conceptual roots reach back to the research of Gertrude Stein, whose psychological investigations at Bryn Mawr College were conducted under the influence of William James' emerging ideas about consciousness, habit, and attention. Stein's experiments examined forms of motor automatism and the possibility that actions could arise outside deliberate conscious control. The Automatic Playing Project adapts these questions to the keyboard: What happens when the performer suspends judgment, planning, and self-censorship? What music appears when conscious authorship loosens its grip?
The recordings also draw from a broader lineage of practices devoted to bypassing ordinary control. Psychoanalytic free association sought to reveal hidden currents of thought through unfiltered speech. Spirit-medium writing and psychography proposed the hand as a conduit for forces beyond the conscious self. Glossolalia transformed language into pure sound, detached from semantic obligation. In each case, the individual becomes both participant and witness, observing material as it arrives rather than constructing it according to predetermined designs.
At the piano, these ideas become physical. The hands move before analysis can intervene. Gestures proliferate, dissolve, repeat, and mutate. Certain passages seem purposeful; others feel accidental. Fragments of lyricism surface only to be abandoned. Rhythms emerge, collapse, and reorganize. Throughout the project, the improviser inhabits a shifting boundary between agency and surrender, between playing the instrument and being carried by the act of playing.
Yet these recordings do not claim to reveal some pure unconscious truth. Instead, they document a practice of radical openness. Every improvisation contains traces of memory, habit, training, mood, fatigue, curiosity, and circumstance. The unconscious, if it appears at all, arrives entangled with everything else. What remains audible is the process itself: a musician entering an uncertain space and allowing that uncertainty to shape the music.
Heard individually, each ten-minute performance is a self-contained event. Heard as a sequence, the thirty improvisations become a diary of transformation. Patterns recur unexpectedly across days. Certain textures persist; others vanish. The listener encounters not a finished statement but a developing relationship between performer, instrument, and process. The project accumulates meaning through repetition, like pages in a journal or entries in a laboratory notebook.
The Automatic Playing Project invites listening without expectation of destination. These recordings ask us to consider improvisation not merely as composition in real time, but as a form of inquiry: an experiment in attention, a study of emergence, and a sustained encounter with the mysterious territory between intention and instinct. In that space, the piano becomes more than an instrument. It becomes a medium through which thought, gesture, memory, and chance briefly converge, leaving behind traces of a month-long exploration into what can happen when playing learns to play itself.
