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Order Shy and Mighty, now available from Nonesuch.
1 September 2010
So this past weekend I should have been finishing up my piece for ACJW (which, don’t worry, I did!) but mostly I was procrastinating by working on my bike. I’m sure about two people who read this blog are interested in this sort of thing, so I thought it would be funny to write about it.
Installing these new Velo Orange fenders took by far the most time (and inspired the most cursing). I’d put a different pair of them on my old Peugeot, and while it took some fiddling, the job was relatively straightforward. My new Mercian has what we refer to as “tighter clearances” meaning you really have to wedge the thing up in the fork there (see above). Unfortunately the “fork crown daruma” that VO includes to hang it there was too long and poked into the top of the tire. OK, no problem, I thought, I’ll just measure and cut the bolt shorter. Here is where the cursing commenced; I cut the bolt too short, so that I couldn’t thread the nut on. Note to future self: measure twice, cut once.
I remembered seeing some VO fenders for sale down at Bespoke Bicycles in Fort Greene, and luckily, they had an extra daruma bolt they were willing to sell me for five dollars. I think I would have happily paid $50 at that point, so great was my consternation. Thanks, Bespoke, for not taking advantage of my predicament. So I threw my fender-less bike back together for a quick trip to pick up the bolt, raced back, cut the new bolt about half a centimeter longer this time, stuck it up in there, and the wheel still rubbed. Not much, but I still needed another two or three millimeters of extra space. I decided I had to to replace the big rubber washer that goes up against the fender with something half the thickness, so I took out my X-acto and traced a new one into a scrap of rubber padding from a cheap light bracket that was lying around. Guess what it works. I think that took about 18 hours total. Moral: don’t hire me as a professional bike mechanic.
Also I hate the included bendy clip for the rear fender, so I drilled a hole in the top of the fender to attach it to the seat stay bridge with an L-bracket and a couple of leather washers (to dampen vibrations). Much more elegant:
I also threw on a nifty mud flap that is supposed to protect your shoes from getting damp:
Oh and also I waxed the chain, as per Grant Petersen. I'm not entirely convinced— things seem a bit noisy now— but it sure is clean.
26 August 2010
Some piecemeal updates:
Nước chấm sauce is really “whetting my whistle” these days. I used to get it alongside dishes at Vietnamese restaurants, and always thought it was magical stuff— and there was never enough of it. Only recently did I discover how simple a thing it is to create. Just today I poured it only to some roasted eggplant; lovely.
I posted ACME’s recording of Thrive on Routine a few days ago; it sounds fantastic. Special thanks are due Ryan Streber, who did an amazing recording job in a not-so-acoustically-ideal space.
LOTS of things in the works for this coming season. Every day this week has been partially occupied by some sort of scheming in this regard. Keep your eyes peeled, and your ears clean.
13 August 2010
On my way up to Great Barrington right now to here the wonderful ACME Quartet première Thrive on Routine at a place called Crissey Farm, which I’m seriously hoping is an actual farm, because my piece contains a movement called “potatoes”. This will be the second piece I’ve written for the group, and I couldn’t be happier to be working with them again; these are the type of players who basically do all your work for you, and then you just come in at the last minute and mumble incoherent things about “shape” and “gesture” and then they smile and nod and play it even better. So pretty much, if you’re in the Berkshires, which I know many of you are this time of the season, you’ve got no excuse not to be there.
What else is kind of amazing is that I just wrote and posted this from a Peter Pan BUS.
6 August 2010
Sometimes when I’m listening to the best music, I have the feeling that it is the only music that exists. I get that feeling listening to a Mahler symphony; I had it last night, pounding through Pictures at an Exhibition at my piano (badly); and on Wednesday night, during Arcade Fire’s set at Madison Square Garden.
31 July 2010
Here is how to keep yourself happy and cool all of a summer’s day:
Buy a bag of lemons, oranges, grapefruits, and a bunch of limes and squeeze them into a bowl. (Limes are 25 for a dollar at Pioneer! Get them while they’re hot)
Combine the juice with a batch of simple syrup (2 cups sugar, 2 cups water, boiled); if you’re feeling fancy you can throw some interesting herbs into this. Once I used Holy Basil.
Stir in a couple trayfulls of iced cubes.
If possible, serve in laboratory glassware.
2 July 2010
Photo by Adi Shiderman.
Multimedia evidence has been flooding in lately from my shows with Metropolis Ensemble, which you can view/hear over at their exemplary website. I’ve also posted the MP3 for Paraphrase on Themes of Brian Eno for download.
Happy Independence Day from Charlie Ives, everyone:
1 July 2010
I got my first bad review a few days ago, of Shy and Mighty. My reaction was initially one of outrage: “how could this guy I’ve never heard of not like my music?” To make matters worse, the one track he singled out as worthwhile— Flirtation Avenue— is the one that‘s kind of purposely “bad”. (No accounting for taste, I suppose.) After receiving a few condolences from friends who’d seen the writeup, I began to see the issue more philosophically. In fact, why would I want entirely good reviews? If one’s music is a little bit polarizing, isn’t that a good thing? My god, I have friends who don’t even like Brahms, so what hope do I have?
20 June 2010
Happy second-to-longest day of the year, everyone. Life’s entirely downhill from tomorrow on out.
In the waxing crepuscular hours, you may as well peruse Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s new website for Project 440. Come then, look beyond the clip-arty logo, listen to five-minute musical excerpts from each of 60 nominated composers, and leave friendly comments about your favorites (I think that was pretty subtle).
14 June 2010
Fig. 1: Top 10 Hottest Cartoon Characters, no. 10.
Fans of The Books will no doubt recognize the lyric “I can’t find the books/ They must be in La Jolla”. I always assumed it was no more than a passing reference to the group’s name, perhaps from an old movie or TV show. In the car yesterday on the way from New Haven to New York, I caught part of a This American Life program, rebroadcast from 2002, that revealed the line to be so much more. Turns out it is excerpted from a “viral voicemail” (people had to amuse themselves somehow before YouTube) that was circulated around the Columbia campus during the early 1990’s (perhaps around the time Paul de Jong was working as an assistant to Otto Luening). All these little unexpected connections between things; the line now takes on a completely different meaning, which I think is just the kind of cultural archæology The Books love. I won’t spoil the episode by revealing the content of said voicemail, but you can listen to the entire episode, which is excellent, here.
Both of my Sunday concerts (at Yale and LPR) went swimmingly; Wendy’s concert was a heartwarming, family affair, which can happen when you come from a family of string players. I’ve already got a solid recording of Clamber Music up for you to hear (thanks, Fred Plaut Recording Studio!). LPR was also a pretty emotional scene, because it was the last Ensemble ACJW concert of the season, and lots of its members are “graduating”; scary, to be cast out into the open sea of New York Musicians with no nourishing mother to get you gigs and order you around.
Tangentially related: Why is Carnegie Hall‘s website so terrible? I feel like it’s 1998 and I'm loading it on my G3 Powerbook in Internet Explorer 4. Half the thing doesn’t even show up on my iPhone/iPad. You’d think mobile devices would be one of their primary targets (imagine you‘re out and about and wonder what’s on tonight. Just try pulling up the site on your iPhone; the calendar won’t load. You could always go to the very user-friendly text only version). The design is a weird mishmash of fonts and colors jammed together into one hideous mosaic. To round it all out, there’s a huge, empty black footer. Carnegie Hall, you’re so wonderful in so many ways; your web presence is not one of them, and it doesn’t do you justice.
12 June 2010
So proud of this woman I could practically burst: my grandmother, Marian Seldes, is getting a “lifetime achievement” Tony award tomorrow (which is not for her work on the Lifetime Channel).
Here is an article in this week’s New York Times Magazine about her; I recommend you read all the way to the end for a vivid description of the smell of Le Poisson Rouge’s dressing room.
11 June 2010
Off to New Haven right now to rehearse my new piece for Wendy Sharp and Tema Watstein, Clamber Music. The concert is this coming Sunday, the 13th, at 2 o’ clock in Sprague Hall; post-concert I will jump back on Metro-North to catch Ensemble ACJW at Le Poisson Rouge playing their new collaborative dance suite, including my own contribution, How to Pop and Lock in Thirteen Steps. It’s just a Metro-North kind of weekend.
2 June 2010
What with the frenetic activities of last month beginning to wind down (last night I submitted a new piece with minutes to spare, but only because I’m currently on Central time), it looks as if I may have time to post actual blog entries from time to time.
I’ve been thinking about the past couple of shows I was involved in (the Shy and Mighty release and the two Metropolis Ensemble concerts), and I have to say, they were some of the most artistically and professionally satisfying experiences I’ve had in my life. I think this was partly because they were truly collaborative— composer, performers, and presenters all with fresh and ambitious ideas about what we do.
That said, the following video of Metropolis Ensemble performing at Trinity Wall St. is maybe not the most exciting thing to watch, but the performances themselves are top-notch. This was our “trial run” before that evening’s show at Angel Orensanz. The music doesn‘t start until about five minutes in; there‘s some pontificating (we’re talking about a giant cathedral, after all, pontification is the mandate). Thereafter, the program is my Paraphrase on Themes of Brian Eno; Andrew Norman’s Grand Turismo; Anna Clyne’s Within Her Arms; and finally Home Stretch.
16 May 2010
Fig. 1: 8-eyes.
Tomorrow (Monday, May 17) my co-pianist David Kaplan and I take to the stage at Le Poisson Rouge to celebrate the release of Shy and Mighty on Nonesuch. We will also be releasing a live tiger; please bring hamburger meat.
Doors open at 6:30; we go on at 7:30. There will be plenty of CD’s there, as well as much merriment.
Also I was thrilled to see Dan Johnson’s lovely review in my old hometown rag, the New Haven Advocate. If you’re not reading him, you should be; he speaks truth. Happy Sunday everybody.
5 May 2010
Fig. 1: The FedEx man brought me this today.
Shy and Mighty’s long-awaited release from captivity approaches. Next week Dave gets into town and we start rehearsing for the May 17th show. In the meantime, some pœple had some very nice things to say about the album. Quoth Alex Ross:
…the music achieves an unhurried grandeur that has rarely been felt in American music since John Adams came on the scene. The language is essentially Romantic, but progressions such as you might find in Chopin and Brahms are slowed down and elongated; it’s as if the contents of an imperial drawing room had been strewn along the side of a desert highway. Nothing is harder for a young composer than to find an individual voice. Andres is on his way: more mighty than shy, he sounds like himself.
Well I don’t know what to say! I’m blushing.
Then John Jurgensen at the Wall Street Journal examined my stoner-music influences.
Le Poißon Rouge is doing a package deal where you can buy a ticket to the album release concert and the CD all-in-one and save, I don’t know, $5. Enough for ⅚ of a beer.
3 May 2010
Epic photo of Owen Dalby playing Look Around You with Albany Symphony. Seen here switching from viola to violin (in the space of one and a half bars). There are more photos from the show over at the Symphony’s Flickr page.
I hope to post an audio excerpt of the piece soon; in the meantime, you can hear the première of Crashing Through Fences with Ian Rosenbaum and Mindy Heinsohn playing glockenspiel, piccolo, and kickdrums. Over here now.
24 April 2010
Fig. 1: contact.
The NY Philharmonic hosted another “blogger night” for its new contemporary music series, CONTACT!, on Friday. I was especially eager to go for a few reasons. I knew two of the composers personally (Sean and Nico) and was eager to see what they‘d come up with for the Philharmonic; I‘m also just interested to watch the evolution of the series, the existence of which would have been unthinkable even a couple of years ago. (You can read some of my thoughts on the first CONTACT! show here.) I‘d never seen Alan Gilbert conduct before, embarrassingly enough. And lastly, who am I to turn down free tickets from the NY Philharmonic? Just a composer who dearly hopes he might be commissioned someday, too! (I think was subtle. Was that subtle?)
So I met my dear friend Ted up at Symphony Space. That place still needs to get more legroom. And less carpeting. But other than that, it‘s a nice venue for a new music concert, and it was pretty packed on Friday, which was great to see (I wonder if the second show, at the Met museum, where they didn‘t hand out massive numbers of free tickets, was as full). I was looking forward to hearing some music, but CONTACT! wants to be all up in your face about it beforehand, which is probably why they named it that. I‘m all for putting composers in the spotlight and making them talk. But there was So Much Pontificating. Alan Gilbert, John Schæfer, Magnus Lindberg PLUS Sean, Nico, and Matthias Pintscher; all smart, charismatic, and articulate people, but just too many voices. They could have cut down the talking and added a fourth piece to the program.
The music on this show felt completely in place at a New York Philharmonic Concert; polished and inventive, but not too risky. Sean’s piece, These Particular Circumstances, sounded ravishing— quite a feat in the bone-dry acoustic of Symphony Space. It struck me as celebrating a particular kind of virtuosity or craft, both compositional and instrumental. The level of workmanship of the piece was so obviously of the highest quality that the musicians responded by genuinely playing their best. Sean‘s musical language is very much an “embarrassment of riches” kind of sound— beautiful details fly by at an alarming rate. I had the feeling of being at some sort of overwhelming buffet and wanting to eat everything, but not being able to take it all in. The piece was structured in seven or eight very short, continuous episodes, and I missed a logical thread connecting them, but mostly I was so amused by what was taking place at that very moment that it didn‘t bother me.
Nico joked beforehand that he wrote a piece without any detail, knowing it would be paired with Sean’s obsessively detailed one. (Their titles, however, share a certain similarity of tone; Nico’s is called Detailed Instructions.) It actually was quite a stark change from Sean’s gesture-driven music to Nico’s, which is pulse-driven (even when he distorts the pulse with cæsuras and jump-cuts) and rigorously structural. Here, I felt, a more flattering acoustic would have done the music many favors; the orchestration was downright arid, with the exception of the middle section, which worked up a lovely, Brian Eno-esque soupiness. Overall, though, the piece felt a bit pale after Sean’s riot of color; maybe this had to do with Nico’s decision to cast out the violins in favor of more violas, which didn’t seem to adequately fill out the sound. It was as though an important frequency of the orchestra had been EQ‘d into oblivion. Of course, this may have just been a factor of program order, and could have easily been fixed by swapping the first two pieces.
Matthias Pintscher’s songs from Solomon’s garden was clearly meant to be the “big piece” on the program, and it had a big star in it: Thomas Hampson. He looked earnest and a bit out of place in his New Music Concertblax and avuncular reading specs. I think Hampson is a good singer, and his album of Mahler lieder saw me through high school, but I think he was a terrible choice for the Pintscher. I always have a hard time telling what pitch baritones are singing, much less in music that lacks any sort of tonal center, and here the vocal writing was very “generic New Music”: tritone here, minor second there, major seventh leap for a particularly expressive moment. I commented to Ted that I would have liked to hear a more pure-voiced singer like Theo Bleckmann sing it; the more abstract the harmonic language, the more dead-on precise the singer’s pitch has to be.
Pintscher’s orchestral writing was exquisite to a fault, but I didn’t understand how it related to the vocal line or the text (which was set in the original Hebrew). Every compositional decision seemed geared toward achieving a particular kind of æsthetic beauty, in a control-freak watchmaker sort of way, but as in These Particular Circumstances, I failed to grasp a narrative thread; the structure of the piece seemed to be completely a function of the text. I guess I’m more of the David Lang school of text setting, where I like my words to wedge themselves into a musical form, not vice versa. Music and text are structured differently for a reason; reading poetry takes place in the reader’s mind, at his own pace, while music exists in real time, meaning it can control the audience’s perception of time passing. Why even bother setting text if you don’t have any of your own interpretation to add? Otherwise you’re more of a glorified medieval troubadour, strumming your lute quietly along to a dramatic recitation. If that‘s the affect Pintscher was trying to achieve, that‘s fine, but in that case, he should have set the text in English, and made absolutely sure we could understand every word without following along in the program (which it was too dark to read, anyway); it would seem a safe assumption that Hebrew is not the primary language of New York Philharmonic concertgoers.
But the really important thing about this CONTACT! show: free beer instead of free flavoured vodka. Know your audience!
8 April 2010
The first concert of the collective we're calling “Sleeping Giant” is this Monday, April 12th at 7:30 at Le Poisson Rouge. The group is Chris Cerrone, Jacob Cooper, Ted Hearne, Rob Honstein, and I.
I‘m usually pretty wary of such group shows, which tend to be like a salad with some weird pickle in it that ruins the taste of everything else. In this case, I think the opposite is true; we‘ve all got a lot to say about different musical topics, and a little to say about overlapping things as well. Chris did a nice interview about the concert with something called Composition Today; click here to read it.
I‘ll be playing piano in Ted's New Band (which is what I call it because it doesn't have a name yet; but seriously, the tunes are awesome) as well as accompanying cellist Jody Redhage in my Fast Flows the River. Chris will be represented by his Reading a Wave, which I played on back in New Haven and I absolutely love. I listen to that piece all the time, as should you. I also often find myself going back to Jacob's For Time to Pour, which will be sung by the wonderful Mellissa Hughes. Rob's piece, Patter, will be new to me. But you have got to listen to this scene from his opera-in-progress, My Heart iz Open, based on actual transcripts of match.com conversations.
30 March 2010
The first of two events this spring with the Metropolis Ensemble happens this coming Monday. I’ve been working to organize these concerts with the Ensemble’s director/founder/conductor Andrew Cyr for probably the past two years; we’ve been in touch since mid-2007, before any of these pieces were written. As such, I feel I have a large stake in the success of these events (I mean æsthetic success, rather than financial); they are representative of my current thinking about Classical Music Programming. Each concert is structured around pairing one of my pieces with a “core repertoire” piece to which it relates: on Monday, I Found it by the Sea with Brahms’s Op. 25 piano quartet (which my piece quotes). I’ll be playing piano on both pieces; the Brahms is a piece I’ve literally been hoping to play since I was about 11, and it somehow hasn’t happened until now, so I’m very excited.
But the thing that makes the Metropolis Ensemble’s programming different from most other “Classical Music” organizations is that it is composer-centric, which, by necessity, means living composers. The industry standard is performer/work-centric: the planning begins with Anne-Sophie playing the Brahms concerto, and then the rest of the 1½ hours are filled in with music that may or may not have any bearing on Brahms. That type of programming putters along without offending anyone, but I think we can all agree that there’s more than enough of it. I think a well-designed program is like a well-curated home; on the surface, stuff; may not look right together (Mozart and Brian Eno?) but the combined effect really tells you something about the resident.
The concert is free, and will fill up fast; reserve your tickets here.
UPDATE: It’s sold out!
26 March 2010
Sitting in a coffee shop right now in downtown Albany, awaiting tonight's première of Look Around You by the Albany Symphony. It's suddenly frigid and blustery; a haphazardly-locked mountain bike was just blown over in front of me. There's a strange dichotomy between the scale of Albany and the feeling of it, as though its planners had envisioned a much grander place than actually turned out. Bars here close around 11:30; at one, we witnessed an impromptu push-up contest between the barmaid and a bouncer.
Luckily, there are many friends here: Owen, of course, because he is playing my concerto, with his lovely girlfriend Meena; Rob, my friend from Yale, in town for the ASO's composer readings; Anna, a composer/visual magic-maker who lives in Troy and goes to RPI; my old Hindemith Ensemble cohort Yi-Ping, holding down the ASO's viola section. We all headed out to a rather unlikely Lebanese restaurant last night and were fussed over like long-lost family.
Tomorrow, it's off to New Haven for the première of Crashing Through Fences, a short piece I wrote for Ian Rosenbaum and Mindy Heinsohn for piccolo, glockenspiel, and two kickdrums (which I believe to be a unique combination). I hadn't been able to make it to New Haven to hear them rehearse, so late last night Ian dropbox'd me a WAV file of one of their run-throughs, which turned out to be completely perfect, polished, and ready for performance, without me ever saying a word. It is so gratifying when that happens; it's one of the main advantages about writing for friends, something I'm also reminded of in Owen's fierce rendition of Look Around You’s violin/viola part. If you can't make it to New Haven for Ian's show, you can listen to it streaming, live, over the internet; thanks, Fred Plaut Recording Studio!
22 March 2010
I'm thrilled to announce that on Tuesday, May 4th, my album Shy and Mighty will be released by Nonesuch. S&M is a group of 10 works for two pianos, which I recorded with my friend David Kaplan last February. I've spent the past year working with the lovely people at Nonesuch to master it and make everything shipshape, and I'm really pleased with the result. The liner booklet has an interview with me done by Ronen Givony, the impresario behind Wordless Music and Le Poisson Rouge, among other things, and photos by the great Michael Wilson. You'll be able to get CD's and downloads starting the 4th. Then on Monday, May 17th, we'll be having a record release concert at (where else?) le Poisson Rouge. Dave will be shipped in from Berlin, and an extra piano shipped in from Yamaha, and we'll play through the entire thing. Come, have a Red Fish Ale, enjoy fresh tunes.
13 March 2010
Quick reminder: tomorrow, Sunday, March 14th is the aforementioned ACME show at Le Poisson Rouge. Doors open at 6:30 for a 7:30 show. John Luther Adams, but also loads of other things, like Kevin Volans.
Andy Goldsworthy, only tangentially related, does things like suspend snowballs from preëxisting saplings.
2 March 2010
Just love reviews like this one, of Bang on a Can's annual People's Commissioning Fund concert. Its blandness surpasses that of even pure reportage; it is like the least offensive press release ever written. Makes me long for the days of Bernard Holland, who at least expressed opinions, no matter how they caused us to cough and sputter in indignation.
I have a sneaking suspicion, however, that there is more than laziness at work here; I'm worried that it's an official New York Times style guideline, a misguided attempt at advocacy. Better not to scare anyone off, the thinking goes, or wantonly damage some poor musician's already delicate career. This type of “criticism” has the opposite effect, actually, which is to make every event sound utterly interchangeable. These days, I can barely slog through a review of something I'd actually be interested in, because the quality of the writing is so maddeningly noncommittal.
I would rather be panned than be subjected to this non-treatment.
1 March 2010
I've got a show in two weeks that I'm pretty excited about. I'll be joining the ACME quartet for a dual-composer-portrait of John Luther Adams and Kevin Volans at Le Poisson Rouge. I'll be playing piano and celeste in The Farthest Place and In a Treeless Place. These ACME guys are really something special, and I'm honored to work with them again; these are the folks who completely went to town on Senior at Carnegie last year. To the left, my brother in a place neither particularly far nor treeless, but at least snowy.
23 February 2010
Wow, I've been a pretty delinquent blogger of late. Moving to Brooklyn took up a big chunk of time and energy. Now I am nestled in a nice place on the border between Clinton Hill and Bed-Stuy. I like to have that kind of dichotomy in my life. The Bösendorfer is here as well, though I wouldn't describe it as “nestling”. “Dominating” is more accurate. Here too is a psychedelic Previa that sometimes shows up on my block.
There's another NOW Ensemble shindig on Thursday at the Greenwich House Music School. They're doing Night Jaunt and some other cool stuff including Steve Gorbos's great piece Signals. More info here.
6 January 2010
Just a quick note for those of you in and around Williamstown, MA: The I/O Fest is presenting a concert tomorrow night called “after hours” at the ’62 Center, featuring pieces by Trevor Gureckis, Missy Mazzoli, Sarah Snider, and my own Night Jaunt. Performed by what I assume is the first NOW Ensemble cover band ever, made up of Williams College students.
