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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An early sketch for the first movement of “Made of Tunes.”

“Made of Tunes” is my fifth piano concerto, written for Aaron Diehl and the Los Angeles Phil­har­monic. It premieres this Friday, March 22 (the same day my third concerto, The Blind Banister, is released on Nonesuch Records).

In a way, this feels like a home­com­ing and a culmi­na­tion. One of my first real commis­sions came from the LA Phil, for their long-running new music series Green Umbrella; John Adams conducted the premiere of that piece, Nightjar, and will also lead this week­end’s perfor­mances of Tunes. I’ve worked on several things with John and the LA Phil in the inter­ven­ing years, includ­ing Ingram Marshal­l’s chamber concerto Flow. But I’ve never gotten to work with the full band on a main­stage, subscrip­tion series concert. (“Subscrip­tion series” is an odd distinc­tion, but it’s essen­tially the bread and butter of orches­tral program­ming; as a result, these concerts tend to be more musi­cally conser­v­a­tive.) I don’t take such an oppor­tu­nity lightly; I hope audi­ences consider their 27 minutes to have been well-spent.

As a kind of amuse–bouche to the week, there’s a Glass Etudes evening on Tuesday the 19^th. I’ll be playing my standbys, nos. 5 & 6, as well as two that are new to my reper­toire, 11 & 12.

I wrote Fiddle­head in the depths of December doldrums, and look how it turned out. This little confec­tion will open my Carnegie program on Friday. Score avail­able here.

Tiny Desk Concert cele­brat­ing the release of the new edition of Philip Glass’s Piano Etudes. Filmed at the NPR offices in DC about a month ago. Here I play nos. 5 & 6. Next month in Los Angeles I’ll join Maki Namekawa, Anton Batagov, Jenny Lin, and Lara Downes for a complete perfor­mance at Disney Hall.