Music has survived several millen­nia of societal and polit­i­cal change. But it may not survive you not coming to my several upcoming concerts with fellow pianist Aaron Diehl.

A couple of our collab­o­ra­tions are culmi­nat­ing over the next few weeks. Namely:

Wednesday–Thursday, December 31–January 1, 8:30 / 2:00 PM — Minneapolis, MN

Made of Tunes, the concerto I wrote for Aaron which premiered in 2024 in Los Angeles, comes to the Minnesota Orches­tra for this all-American New Year’s program, conducted by Teddy Abrams. The piece is likely to become a staple of the season; I’m told Alicia Keys will perform its plain­tive second-movement theme just before the ball drops in Times Square next year.

Sunday, January 25, 4:00 PM — Beacon, NY

Aaron and I have been steadily chipping away at our two-piano duo show since we debuted it at the Phillips Collec­tion last spring. We’ll be doing a Hudson Valley preview of the program which a couple days later we perform at…

Wednesday, January 28, 7:30 PM — New York, NY

…Carnegie Hall. The program features music by Billy Stray­horn, Thelo­nious Monk (in exten­sive new re-workings), Julia Wolfe (the Aretha Franklin-inspired banger my lips from speaking), music from my 2010 album Shy and Mighty, and a couple of other surprises.

Thursday–Saturday, February 19–21, 7:30 PM / 11:00 AM / 7:30 PM — Cleveland, OH

Finally, Aaron takes Made of Tunes back out on the road, this time to the Cleve­land Orches­tra. John Adams conducts the program, which also includes his great new mini-symphony Frenzy.

On Thursday, November 13, I’ll be joining my Mannes colleagues Rebecca Fischer and Jia Kim for a perfor­mance of my 2018 Piano Trio. The evening will also feature music by Gubaidulina and Wynton Marsalis, all performed by Mannes faculty. This is a chance to hear some very exciting music played by stellar musi­cians for cheap as free. Come through!

I’ll be joining the faculty for Art Of Piano 2026 at the Banff Centre in Alberta this coming June. Though this program is typi­cally focussed on piano perfor­mance, I’ll be accept­ing a limited number of composer–pianists into my “studio” for the two-week session. There are still very few oppor­tu­ni­ties for students with this specific focus, so please apply and help spread the word. Appli­ca­tions are open until December 3, 2025.

Perform­ing, humidly, at Little Island last month (photo by Rob Davidson). In case you missed it and were hoping for another scenic outdoor piano recital: you’re in luck, because I’ll be playing at Caramoor’s Spanish Court­yard July 24. The follow­ing is a brief note I wrote about the program:

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When I’m working to under­stand a piece of music, I find it helpful to think about its balance of complex­ity versus simplicity—which aspects operate on which levels, how do they relate to each other, how do they define the piece’s language and struc­ture? My favorite pieces are usually a calcu­lated mix of the two, rather than being all to one side or the other. This dialec­tic might be a useful way to approach tonight’s program, whose contents might, at first glance, seem only tangen­tially related.

Robert Schumann’s music is usually asso­ci­ated with a kind of hyper-Romantic emotional complex­ity, hinging on dramatic contrasts, idio­syn­cratic forms, and dense webs of personal and literary refer­ences. I’ve long admired his Canonic Etudes, in part because they play against these stereo­types so strongly. Composed orig­i­nally for the Pedalflügel, a special piano fitted with an organ-like foot-operated keyboard connected to the bass register, the Etudes are beau­ti­fully under­stated studies in the contra­pun­tal possi­bil­i­ties enabled by two extra appendages (they are most often heard today in their four-hand or two-piano arrange­ments). All six etudes are, in fact, perfect canons, with the canonic voice some­times at the unison and some­times at the fifth, for a more fugal effect. Schumann’s stead­fast commit­ment to coun­ter­point some­times results in unex­pected harmonic twists, yet the music never feels haphaz­ard or under­worked. Just beneath the wild Roman­ti­cism, Schumann turns out to have been every bit as rigorous a tech­ni­cian as Bach or Brahms; it’s just that he usually chose to empha­size the complex­ity of other aspects of his music. In the Canonic Etudes, he knew to keep the rhetoric simple: all are short, A‑B-A forms with clearly-delin­eated and tradi­tion­ally-phrased melodies and neatly resolved endings, relating to each other in shared attitude and compo­si­tional process, rather than any sort of over­ar­ch­ing drama or shared themes. 

When I composed the suite It takes a long time to become a good composer in 2010, I was thinking about Schumann. The piece is an attempt to fuse some of Schumann’s more radical struc­tural ideas (the tele­scop­ing, nesting doll forms of pieces like Carnaval and Kreis­le­ri­ana) with a pared-down, anti-virtu­osic piano language derived from Copland and Stravin­sky. The result­ing music is, in some ways, less commit­ted to struc­tural rigor than anything I’ve written. I didn’t compose it with an overall through-line or process in mind. Instead, its devel­op­men­tal engine comes from its odd cocktail of jump-cuts and styl­is­tic refer­ences jostling against each other. The core of the piece is its long central movement, Every­thing is an onion, which grad­u­ally surrounds a somber passacaglia with buzzing activity before disman­tling it (fittingly) into layers. As the piece progresses, it moves gener­ally from the idea of music as “material”—small, abstract chunks of harmony, texture, or figurations—to music as melody, and, finally, song. The effect is a gradual de-tension­ing of the struc­ture, a progres­sively freer inter­re­la­tion of mate­ri­als, like falling asleep directly into a strange dream. 

It’s been remarked that the Piano Sonata repre­sents Copland at his sparest, most severe, most aspir­ingly “modernist”; its language is all planes and angles, harmonies stripped to their essence, ornament elim­i­nated. The sense of “place­ness” asso­ci­ated with Copland’s music is absent here, or perhaps it places itself in an imag­i­nary realm halfway between the American West and a 1920s Paris salon. The musical texture is notable for its absence of coun­ter­point, instead often focusing on unadorned melodic lines. Chords seem as though they have big chunks of missing notes, the yawning gaps between their inter­vals creating star­tling and uncom­fort­able disso­nances. Tempos change frequently, and phrases fill uneven numbers of bars, cutting each other off without warning. Essen­tially, Copland has found the reverse balance of complex­ity and simplic­ity of Schumann’s; the richness of his Sonata lies in the contrast of its surface and its rhetoric. It commu­ni­cates complex ideas in admirably clear language. The effect is dramatic, almost in a theatri­cal sense as if musical material were playing differ­ent char­ac­ters (perhaps it’s not coin­ci­den­tal that the piece is dedi­cated to the play­wright Clifford Odets). Some­times the music is a dialogue, as it is between the right hand and the left in the second movement, and other times a mono­logue, in the long, discur­sive, ulti­mately tragic arias of the third. In the end, we feel as if we’ve absorbed a story much grander than the piece’s 23 minutes could possibly contain, full of vivid settings, plot twists, inter­sect­ing char­ac­ter arcs, and sharply-observed details.

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.