Here’s some­thing hot off the press: a video of last week­end’s perfor­mance of The Great Span at Peoples’ Symphony. It’s always a pleasure to play with the Calder Quartet; I love their under­stated inten­sity, rhythmic integrity, and tech­ni­cal preci­sion, qual­i­ties which apply to this piece partic­u­larly well. The venue (new to me) of NYC’s WPA-era High School of Fashion Indus­tries, atmos­pheric in both spirit and decay, also seemed to suit music concerned primar­ily with pattern, craft, and links between seem­ingly distant histor­i­cal periods.

Many thanks to the Peoples’ Symphony for allowing the use of this record­ing, captured by Studio42.

The follow­ing is a list of upcoming perfor­mances. I would be so pleased to play for you at any and all:

Saturday, May 17, 7:30 PM — New York, NY — The People’s Symphony

The wonder­ful Calder Quartet are coming from Los Angeles to play The Great Span, a nice meaty quintet I wrote for us to play together in 2023. Also on the program: music by Schubert, Ann Southam, and Debussy.

Friday, June 13 / Monday, June 16, 8:00 PM — Hamburg, Germany / Berlin, Germany — Elbphilharmonie / Philharmonie Berlin

The complete Glass Etudes in Hamburg and Berlin, played by a stellar lineup of ten pianists.

Sunday, June 22, 10:00 PM — New York, NY — Little Island

A solo late show at “The Glade” on Little Island. Come, bring a picnic, maybe a bathing suit? I will be playing a minimal-ish program of Southam, Glass, Andres, Schubert, and a world premiere by Christo­pher Cerrone.

Thursday, July 24, 7:00 PM — Katonah, NY — Caramoor

Solo show at Caramoor’s Spanish Court­yard. Typi­cally, I have decided to play only “the hits”: Schu­man­n’s Canonic Etudes in my own tran­scrip­tion, Copland’s Piano Sonata, and my 2010 suite It takes a long time to become a good composer.

Saturday / Sunday, July 26–27 — La Jolla, CA — La Jolla Music Society Summerfest

The complete Glass Etudes at La Jolla Music Festival, plus a concert of “New York Composers” the follow­ing day, featur­ing Fiddle­head and Every­thing is an Onion.

Des pas sur la neige / bear-ruin’d choirs

The Blind Banister made it onto three “best albums of 2024” lists (that I’m aware of): The New York Times, NPR, and Gramo­phone. Since few publi­ca­tions review them now, it’s diffi­cult to gauge a new album’s recep­tion until such year-end deluges are tabu­lated. In karmic return, I’ll offer a recom­men­da­tion of my own: Stefan Jackiw and Jeremy Denk’s new record­ing of the Ives violin sonatas, which I don’t think I’ve ever heard played with such under­stand­ing, wit, and—not unimportantly—accuracy.

A couple of my pieces have appeared on friends’ albums over the past few months: most recently Adam Tendler’s sensi­tive reading of An Open Book, which I wrote for him in 2022 for the Inher­i­tances project. Speaking of long-gestat­ing solo piano projects, David Kaplan’s New Dances of the League of David has finally emerged, worth the wait. It contains some stun­ningly daring Schumann playing as well as my own trifle Saccades, written for the project in 2014 (!). More ancient history making recent news: an arrange­ment of Out Of Shape (from 2007’s Shy and Mighty) for two pianos and two electric guitars, recorded by the estimable quartet of Marielle and Katia Labèque, David Chalmin, and Bryce Dessner. I’ve also been working with Bryce recently on a few of his film scores; you can hear my piano playing (and my very own piano) on the sound­tracks of We Live In Time, A Good Person, and She Came To Me (catch it on your next Delta flight).

Other news: the long essay I’ve been writing on and off since 2020 on the complete works of Steve Reich will accom­pany None­such’s 27–CD festschrift, due in March 2025. Think of it as a “listen­er’s guide” from the somewhat partic­u­lar perspec­tive of a fellow composer. Grateful to all who made this happen: Bob Hurwitz for asking me to write it, Karina Beznicki and David Bither for shep­herd­ing the project along over the years, Sidney Chen, Jake Wilder-Smith and Maya Bouvier-Lyons for their edito­r­ial over­sight, to Katharine Andres for being, as always, my primary reader and most merci­less editor, and of course to Steve for sharing his time, insights, and recollections.

I’ve just yester­day finished one last piece for 2024, which is a hefty solo piano work for Jeffrey Kahane called Simple Secrets. It’s a contin­u­ous 25–minute movement with no slow sections; wish him luck! The plan is that we will get to hear it at some point in the 25–26 season; stay tuned.

I recently made a new record­ing and film of Gabriella Smith’s Imag­i­nary Pancake, which she wrote for me in 2020. Why re-record? The first version I made was part of my pandemic-era “Carnegie recital from home”; I’d had about two months with the piece at that point. Now, nearly five years later, having performed the piece many times, working it up and letting it lie fallow in cycles, I feel more that it is “my” piece, in a way. Not to say it isn’t still Gabriella’s—surely nobody else could’ve written it—but I think I’ve mostly surmounted its signif­i­cant tech­ni­cal diffi­cul­ties and inter­nal­ized its char­ac­ter­is­tic peaks and valleys. Not to mention, the new record­ing reflects five years of studio upgrades and knowl­edge gained about the record­ing process. Good to be reminded that world premieres are often a rough outline of what’s to come.

Michael Wilson has been taking photographs of Nonesuch Records artists for 25 years, and of me for 15. Above, a portrait as a fresh New Yorker in 2009, included in a special compendium of 25 of Michael’s pictures Nonesuch has just published. I was honored to write the intro­duc­tory note. And here it is:

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Michael Wilson approaches a portrait session as a conver­sa­tion. His pictures become mementos of mutual trust between photog­ra­pher and subject. This ad hoc rela­tion­ship cannot be antic­i­pated or constructed in advance; it must be discov­ered through trial and error, impro­vi­sa­tion, and meeting halfway. Like with live perfor­mances, there’s a spon­tane­ity to the result. For those who know the music of the artists Michael has photographed for Nonesuch Records (drawn here from 67 projects begin­ning in 1998), the photographs suggest potent metaphors without forcing them, fusing sound-images with faces, musical compo­si­tions with visual ones. The rigorous struc­tures of Steve Reich’s music seem to manifest in the grid of a mono­lithic wall filling the frame, the composer’s iconic profile an accent in the lower corner. Audra McDonald’s musical story­telling seems to lead the viewer’s gaze down the wooded path behind her.

In the more formal portraits (Rhiannon Giddens, Ambrose Akin­musire, or Philip Glass) one feels the momen­tary atten­tion of a person­al­ity in a specific place, on a certain day. Such photo­graphic inten­sity would not be possible without craft—that is to say, working within the given constraints to find resource­ful solu­tions to the problems they impose. Michael’s default constraint is the square frame of his medium format Rolleiflex—the closest thing to a physical embod­i­ment of his mind’s eye, as he puts it. Within the square, he arranges subject and setting with a graphic artist’s sense of rhythm, visual echoes rebound­ing. The members of Kronos Quartet, backed into a corner but looking defiant, are crowned by the four cardinal direc­tions of a compass rose. Ry Cooder and Manuel Galbán are dwarfed by a monu­men­tal door, whose pattern of tele­scop­ing squares hangs above the two men like so many empty picture frames.

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New little bagatelle for you today—four hands in four minutes. This is Tangent, written for the Yale Schwarz­man Center and premiered in New York City last night. Thanks to the redoubtable Conor Hanick for laying down those triplets.

BTS moment last week at LA Phil. Photo by Maria Jarzyna.

Pianist and profes­sor David Kaplan, longtime friend and collab­o­ra­tor, wrote the follow­ing liner note for The Blind Banister, out now on Nonesuch Records:

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I first met Timo when we were still lanky college students, not as a composer, but as a prodi­giously talented pianist. I remember him playing Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata on a pungent old practice room piano, storming into the piece’s clif­flike sonori­ties and creating a tempest of sound that never­the­less conveyed some­thing essen­tial about the spirit and struc­ture of this famously abstruse work. Discov­er­ing a common hobby of deliri­ously approx­i­mat­ing symphonic reper­toire on the piano, we quickly began finding ways to collab­o­rate. We premiered his two-piano suite Shy and Mighty together, and he wrote Home Stretch, his first piano concerto, for my grad­u­a­tion recital. After nearly two decades of collab­o­ra­tion and friend­ship, this new record­ing of The Blind Banister (2015), Upstate Obscura (2018), and Colorful History (2021) prompts me to reflect on how much Timo’s music has devel­oped over time, as well as what elements of his artistic voice, as pianist and composer both, were baked in from the start. 

All three works here demon­strate the extent to which Timo’s music examines the compo­si­tional process. The simple ideas that under­gird his pieces often comprise some unas­sum­ing and well-worn trinket found in the thrift store of tonal harmony—a perfect fifth, a trill, or a scale. Over the course of the piece, the object gener­ates its own meaning and interest and creates a frame­work support­ing the things we actually want to hear: gesture, melody, pulse, humor, tender­ness, drama, and eloquence. 

This anima­tion of ideas reminds me of the book, Bach and the Patterns of Inven­tion, in which Lawrence Dreyfus argues that Bach under­stood “inven­tion” as the “idea behind a piece, a musical subject whose discov­ery precedes full-scale compo­si­tion.” Borrowed from the rhetor­i­cal concept of inventio, which for Cicero and other clas­si­cal thinkers meant the inspi­ra­tion that sparked an oration, inven­tion conflates the musical content with its compo­si­tional process: “A success­ful inven­tion must be more than a static, well-crafted object, but instead like a mech­a­nism… from which a whole piece of music is shaped.” 

This under­stand­ing of inven­tion describes Timo’s creative process equally well, and differ­en­ti­ates it from the music of composers who inte­grate process and content in other ways. Brahms’s devel­op­ing vari­a­tions and Beethoven’s organic devel­op­ment are two canonic examples; in the last century, Philip Glass’s early exper­i­ments with repe­ti­tion and incre­men­tal change, Steve Reich’s phasing, Schönberg’s seri­al­ism, and Cage’s aleatori­cism come to mind. 

Cover photo­graph by Jason Fulford; design by Ben Tousley

The Blind Banister demon­strates this inte­grated approach; on some funda­men­tal level it is an entire concerto about the compo­si­tional process of revision. Disre­gard­ing an adoles­cent but preco­cious piano concerto, perhaps remem­bered only by a handful of millen­nial alumni of the Juil­liard Pre-College Orches­tra, Banister is Timo’s third published piece for solo piano and orches­tra, follow­ing Home Stretch (2008) and Old Keys (2011). It was written for Jonathan Biss in 2015 as one of a number of response pieces to Beethoven’s own quasi-juve­nilia, the Piano Concerto in B‑flat, Op. 15. Unlike Timo’s ‘re-composed’ Mozart Coro­na­tion Concerto from 2010, it is not “a pastiche or an exercise in palimpsest” (to quote the composer’s note); it instead fixates on a palimpsest from Beethoven himself—the revised cadenza he appended to the concerto two decades after its earliest perfor­mances in Bonn. 

From this cadenza, Timo distills two motives: the Mannheim rocket arpeggio that launches it, and the sequence of descend­ing scales that follow. Together, these cause Banister to ruminate on an unre­solved dichotomy of rising and falling gestures. Timo explains that he started writing his own cadenza to Beethoven’s concerto, and ended up “devour­ing [the piece] from the inside out.” I think of whiting out a densely shaded drawing with the pencil’s eraser to create a new image in relief. 

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