After many hours in the studio, I’ve cobbled together a nice clean version of Shy and Mighty, which Dave Kaplan and I recorded back in February. Listen to some full tracks here. Special thanks go to Gene Kimball and Jason Robins at the Fred Plaut record­ing studio for all their instruc­tion and patience.

I got better-than-front-row seats to last night’s Lisa Moore/Karen Bentley Pollick concert at Klavier­haus (page turning). The high­light for me was getting to hear them play Sam Adams’s Aves Nostradamus, one of the most madden­ing and nerve-wracking pieces I’ve ever had the pleasure of working on (back in December). That’s why it was so much fun to sit back and listen to other people go to town. It’s a terrif­i­cally exciting and spastic piece which uses lots of extended piano and violin tech­niques without ever seeming gimmicky or strained (this Fazioli piano took a lot of abuse from Lisa; it looked to be about 13 feet long and I’m told it costs $200,000).

Sam doesn’t have a website or even a MySpace (!) so there’s no way I can point you to a record­ing; Sam, get yourself a domain. You’ll have to do better than www.samadams.com, though.

NEWS FLASH/UPDATE: Sam actually does have a website.

I was happy to see Alex Ross shout-out Prokofiev’s sixth symphony yester­day. I was obsessed with that piece when I was in high school, and like Alex, I’ve never heard it played live.

I kind of stopped listen­ing to Prokofiev as much when I started college; this was a conscious decision on my part, because his music had been such a recog­niz­able influ­ence on me, and I wanted to diver­sify. How I wrote music in my early teens was like this: choose a piece by Prokofiev, steal the form, then just fill in my own music! Easy. I have an old piece that is the same as the first movement of his sixth piano sonata, pretty much down to the bar.

Back to op. 111. This piece totally under­mines the simplis­tic idea of Prokofiev as the “happy Soviet”, the self-portrait he so oblig­ingly paints in the fifth symphony. It out-Shostakoviches Dmitri. The first movement is a kind of slowed-down taran­tella in e‑flat minor, one of the darkest (and most diffi­cult) keys. The middle movement is a sprawl­ing mili­taris­tic mess that I can’t make head of tail of. And the last movement starts out as a sunny, jaunty rondo with more marching soldiers, but in the end, which Alex writes about&#8212 I don’t want to spoil it, but it’s wonder­fully tragic and creepy. The last chord is a trade­mark Prokofiev cackle, but in this case it just makes you shudder.

I’ll write about the seventh symphony some other time. That piece is like the Russian great-grand­mother I never knew.

We got reviewed! Anthony Tommasini has nice things to say about the New York Youth Symphony, ACME Quartet, and Senior.

Kind of a big week for website redesigns… at least among sites I frequent. Pitch­fork’s was long-overdue&#8212 it hadn’t changed a bit since I started reading it as a freshman in college. The new website is clean, lovely and much richer (though admit­tedly the bar set by the old one was pretty low; it didn’t even have a working search function). However, the aesthetic clean­li­ness brings with it a much more corpo­rate feeling (I’ll leave the impli­ca­tions for others to debate). I also think the grid struc­ture feels overly complex; it’s hard to tell which infor­ma­tion is most impor­tant at first glance, even though it’s all presented quite clearly.

Also, Facebook— I feel as though for all the atten­tion it gets, nobody talks about why Facebook is such a fantas­tic platform, which is that they are totally obsessed with design. Like Apple, the Facebook design­ers aren’t afraid to make sweeping changes for the better, even if it means getting some bad press and vocal complaints (remember when they launched the news feeds?). The new page layout is an incre­men­tal change, but the grid feels more natural and orga­nized now. The font size for wall posts went up a notch, making commu­ni­ca­tions a bit easier to read and creating a nice hier­ar­chy of infor­ma­tion. And I like the new rounded corners on profile pictures (round rects are every­where).

OK, back to part-making (new piece for the Yale Symphony. Working title: Bathtub Shrine.)

Heads up, ev’rybody&#8212 there’s rather a large icicle about to melt on you, meaning my Carnegie Hall debut must be coming up (Sunday, March 22). You can get tickets for as little as $10, so nobody has an excuse not to come.

I spent last Sunday in Flushing listen­ing to the ACME quartet and NY Youth Symphony play Senior for the first time; with two weeks to go until Carnegie I think we’re in very good shape. The quartet already sounds fantastic&#8212 can’t say I’m surprised, what with such illus­tri­ous member­ship. The orches­tra members need perhaps a little more time for the music to “settle”. Ryan took my advice and merci­lessly cut back the string sections (which are other­wise HUGE) and the piece sounded appro­pri­ately buoyant and nimble, really like slightly beefed-up chamber music in some parts.

I’m really excited for what’s sure to be a memo­rable concert. The orches­tra is also playing Carlos Chavez’s Sinfonia India and Brahms 1, both of which I over­heard in rehearsal and already sound quite persuasive.

This morning I immersed myself in early period John Adams, listen­ing to the two versions of Shaker Loops back-to-back and watching an old docu­men­tary about Harmo­nium.

It’s funny to look back to the early 80’s and see what an insti­tu­tion Adams had already become. The film­mak­ers tried desper­ately to roman­ti­cize him and his music, and he seemed to handle it well, posing for the camera in picturesque situ­a­tions, compos­ing in his impec­ca­ble mountain cabin or gazing thought­fully over the San Fran­cisco bay. Pretty banal stuff, though Adams did have some inter­est­ing things to say, includ­ing his own handy defi­n­i­tion of Mini­mal­ism: “A vast reit­er­a­tion of smaller units to create a larger archi­tec­ture”. He plays some licks from Nixon in China on his wonder­ful old clavi­nova to demon­strate this. It was also fun to see the 1980’s choris­ters struggle with Harmo­nium’s hemiola rhythms, which sound so staid now, precisely because Adams and others have reit­er­ated those gestures to the point of cliché. 

The piece itself, though, is still resound­ingly success­ful. The epic crescendo/accelerando into “Wild Nights” must have sounded incred­i­bly daring in 1982, and it still never fails to move me. Though it strikes me as a subver­sion of the poem, not to mention a manip­u­la­tion of the audience, to empha­size the line “were I with thee” as much as Adams does by repeat­ing it dal niente in the final section. It makes the ending sadder and more poignant, but is it true to the meaning of the text? I suppose that’s why so many composers set Emily Dick­in­son, because she can’t very well complain.

Though the original septet version used a quasi-aleatoric system of looped phrases and cues, Shaker Loops is always heard today in its later through-composed scoring. (I love looking at weird, unknown versions of familiar pieces, seeing how composers thought differ­ently about their own music as it contin­ued to evolve.) That said, in the way it sounds, the original version resem­bles the written-out version closely. The entire middle of the piece, includ­ing the entire second and most of the third move­ments, has no inde­ter­mi­nate notation what­so­ever. It’s as if Adams started compos­ing using the idea of loops, then as he became more involved with the music he was writing, aban­doned the idea in favor of increased control. I suppose this was a learning expe­ri­ence for him, because he was progress­ing closer toward the type of music he has become known for. There are a few details that are lost with a massed string texture, however; for example, the trills in the second movement become more of a textural effect, whereas the solo strings artic­u­late them as florid orna­men­tal lines. Contrary to Adams’s own state­ments, I think the main advan­tage of the written-out version is not increased compo­si­tional control, but increased confi­dence on the players’ part, simply because the notation is more tradi­tional. This results in tighter and more controlled perfor­mances, even without a conduc­tor (but with plenty of head-banging).