Inter­view with Nate Bach­hu­ber, November 2010. 

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Nate Bach­hu­ber: Tell me about the name: It takes a long time to become a good composer. 

Timothy Andres: I keep a sheet of names for pieces, actually a bunch of stickies on my computer, and some­times they’re on there for years and years before I use them. 

NB: So is this an old one. 

TA: This isn’t partic­u­larly old. I thought of it in the past year or so. 

NB: So these are just things that pop into your head. 

TA: Often they’re things I read some­where, or some­thing someone said, just phrases that catch my ear. This partic­u­lar title probably came from reading an inter­view with someone, but I didn’t think to write down who said it. 

NB: Do you often assign names to pieces before they’re complete? 

TA: I do. That was defi­nitely the case with Clamber Music.

NB: Which is also going to be on the program. 

TA: Right. I was like, “I think I’m ready to write Clamber Music.”

NB: The word “composer” is in the title of this piece so… 

TA: Initially when Andrew Cyr and I were planning this concert he said, “I want you to do some­thing involv­ing your work and someone else’s work, but having some­thing to do with your influ­ences.” This was a hard assign­ment because, well, I like to think I’m still devel­op­ing and being influ­enced. I didn’t want to present some­thing as “this is a reduc­tive portrait of who I am as a musician in one tidy little hour-long bunch.” I can’t even do that. 

NB: There isn’t an hour of music that sums up a composer. 

TA: Right, and much less in terms of music that I can play on the piano by myself. 

NB: Tell me about the influ­ence of Schumann on this piece. 

TA: I’ve been working on Kreis­le­ri­ana on and off over the years though I’ve never performed it. What initi­ated the idea was that I had so much fun playing the Brahms Piano Quartet last season, and I was thinking how much I wanted to do some­thing like that. I don’t really play standard reper­toire. That’s not my job, or at least hasn’t been since high school. So this is an exotic idea for me. It’s as exotic as playing a Mozart Concerto and re-writing the left hand. I don’t play Mozart Concertos.

NB: So did you feel that last season’s concert, Home Stretch, put some new chal­lenges in front of you? 

TA: Yeah, it was a little nerve wracking. 

NB: For me, when I think about you as a musician I always think composer / pianist. How do you feel about that title? 

TA: That’s good! I think of myself that way, too, it’s just that mostly the pianist side of me is playing my own music or my friends’ music, or contem­po­rary pieces in general and not so much the clas­si­cal canon— which nonethe­less is the stuff I grew up on. It’s the stuff I still play for fun now. When I listen to music on iTunes, it’s not usually clas­si­cal music at all. But when I’m making music for my own enjoy­ment, I like to play Beethoven and Schubert… what can I say? It just sounds really good on my piano. 

Actually the thought never occurred to me, but this is a Schumann anniver­sary year. He was born in 1810 so he’s two hundred years old. But that didn’t even cross my mind. I don’t like the composer birthday calendar as a program­ming tool. It’s random and unin­ter­est­ing, and is just used as an excuse for orches­tras to play more Mozart and Brahms. 

NB: You have to program what you love but it also happens to be an anniversary. 

TA: Yes, and I just got back from Tennessee where I was playing another Schumann concert with my friend Mingzhe Wang, a clar­inetist. He paired three Schumann pieces with pieces by living composers who are influ­enced by Schumann. So we played Märch­en­erzäh­lun­gen: clarinet, viola, and piano, paired with Kurtág’s Homage à R. Sch., the Gesänge der Frühe and a portion of It takes a long time…. Another group of musi­cians played Schu­man­n’s third trio and a Wolfgang Rihm trio. 

NB: Did the perfor­mance influ­ence your thinking about the piece for Metrop­o­lis, or change anything you ended up writing? 

TA: No, it more confirmed things. I thought both the Kurtág and the Rihm were extremely cool, and very differ­ent from each other in the way they incor­po­rated Schu­man­n’s influ­ence. Kurtág takes Schumann minia­tures and minia­tur­ized them, so the piece is super, super concen­trated, and you get these move­ments that are four bars long and last 16 seconds. The Rihm takes the sturm und drang Schumann (what I think of as the “Brahm­sian” Schumann) and distorts it, making it more extreme. 

NB: And how do you think your piece would look if you analyzed it that way? 

TA: I think I’m taking more of a Kurtá­gian angle, in that I’m working with form more than actual quotation. 

People who think they know some­thing about music like to say that Schumann was a great minia­tur­ist. There’s this popular idea that when it came to larger clas­si­cal forms, like string quartets, sonatas, and symphonies, Schumann was Brahms’s inferior. This is a surpris­ingly espoused notion— “Schumann is a minia­tur­ist”— done and done. So I was analyz­ing Kreis­le­ri­ana. And it is, at face value, struc­tured as a series of minia­tures. But actually it’s a fractal form where you zoom out and you get larger units; and you zoom out again and they’re halves; and then you zoom out again and see that it’s an entire thing— that half an hour of music is one unit. It succeeds as bril­liantly as any Beethoven sonata. but it is inter­est­ing to me how he accom­plished this using recur­ring material and alter­na­tion of musical moods— the piece is osten­si­bly inspired by E.T.A. Hoff­man’s char­ac­ter Johannes Kreisler, the manic-depres­sive musical genius with whom Schumann iden­ti­fied quite deeply. In Kreis­le­ri­ana, you get very intel­lec­tual, rational music juxta­posed with the Sturm und Drang— they alter­nate. This is the very basic struc­ture of the piece. But then you talk a step back, and these pairings become quadru­plings. I’ve been trying to dissect how he did this and struc­ture my piece in a similar way, and it’s really difficult. 

NB: Let’s talk about Metrop­o­lis in general. This is your third performance. 

TA: I don’t think I actually under­stood the extent to which Andrew liked my music. I thought he’d do one concert and get tired of it. In the past year since I moved to New York, it’s really become a composer-in-resi­dence kind of job, or artist-in-resi­dence, as Andrew terms it. Not only are there concerts, but some­times he’s asked me to write for the website, or even involved with the design of concerts and media, building the orga­ni­za­tion, doing outreach. 

NB: That’s some­thing different. 

TA: I’ve really become invested in Metrop­o­lis— I feel I’m involved in a way that I’m not in other orga­ni­za­tions. I don’t know if this is some­thing I set out to do— it just sort of happened. I’m happy to be Andrew’s sounding board when he need someone to talk to and run ideas by. I think we have reached a point where we are willing to say to each other, “I don’t think that’s going to work” or “how about this random idea?” 

NB: So Andrew’s not just saying “can you do all this other stuff for us.” He’s listen­ing to your input and giving you the space to form the program, and use the ensemble in the way you need or want. 

TA: Yeah, it’s quite flat­ter­ing to be asked about these things that I don’t really have expe­ri­ence in. 

NB: But it seems like many musi­cians, espe­cially contem­po­rary music players and composers, go to a lot of concerts and have ideas about what works or doesn’t.

TA: Living in the world of contem­po­rary music and perfor­mances, there are certain things that you become sort of inured to almost. Through repe­ti­tion they become tiresome or you don’t even notice them. 

NB: So this concert is going to be in a private home, but it’s a public concert. How does that situ­a­tion affect you? Do you think about it when you are compos­ing at all? 

TA: I feel as though the genre of the Piano Recital is really some­thing that came out of the salon tradi­tion. When you see Alfred Brendel perform­ing a solo recital at Carnegie Hall it might be great, but can you actually have a fulfill­ing musical expe­ri­ence sitting in a huge hall, listen­ing to one guy play this rela­tively tiny instru­ment? I find that more and more, I can’t. I never go to piano recitals anymore, and it wasn’t a conscious decision, I think I’m just not in the right world. I’m not a conser­va­tory pianist and piano recitals don’t happen much these days outside the academy. Having said all that, I really like the core idea. 

NB: It’s a really simple thing that doesn’t seem like it’s enough. 

TA: Yeah, every­body thinks you need to add a video instal­la­tion or some­thing. But I really like the format of a piano recital. It’s some­thing I am inter­ested in doing some­thing fresh with. And of course, Andrew suggested we add Clamber Music, which is a chamber piece with two violins and piano. So it’s not truly a piano recital anymore, it’s got a bonus appe­tizer, but I think the piece fits in with the overall scheme of the backward-looking music I’m writing. 

NB: This concert doesn’t have a video instal­la­tion, but we have Central Park in the background. 

TA: It’s true! The entire Manhat­tan land­scape— it’s a pretty amazing situ­a­tion. I like the idea of playing in someone’s living room. I would rather do that and have people sitting in my lap than feel so removed playing in a huge hall. When you’re thinking musi­cally about that setting, you write differ­ently. I’m going to write more subtle, detail-oriented things in this piece than I would if I were going to première it in Disney Hall (which I think is the largest venue I’ve played solo in, and was really scary). 

NB: Was that the Green Umbrella series? 

TA: Yes, I played a solo piano piece of mine on the Green Umbrella series and I felt like I was floating in the ocean. 

NB: What else is coming up? 

TA: I’m working on a number of projects for the spring. Doing this show at Zankel Hall with Brad Mehldau, where we are playing two piano stuff: some of mine and a new piece that he is writing. 

NB: A stretch? 

TA: We’re coming at things from our differ­ent worlds, but not really. We get together and talk about the music that we both love, and it’s Brahms. And I’ve been a Brad Mehldau fan for many years, so it’s some­thing I had in my ear before I knew him. So I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch. I think if you listen to some of the pieces on Shy and Mighty back-to-back with some Mehldau tracks you can hear some similarities. 

Speaking of piano recitals, I think one of the best piano recitals I’ve been to in the past year was going to hear Brad play at the Highline Ballroom, just a solo set. I was more riveted by that than I can remember being by anything in a while. 

I’m planning a concert with singer-song­writer Gabriel Kahane who I’ve gotten to know recently. Here’s another person where perhaps at face value, we come from differ­ent worlds, but we get together and sight-read Schumann. Gabe is a person who grew up on clas­si­cal music— his dad is a concert pianist, and he’s a very accom­plished pianist himself. So we are mixing up our various influ­ences and focusing on Ives and the Amer­i­cana tradi­tion. We’ll both be writing new things for that show as well. 

NB: I know Gabe is a great singer as well as pianist. Have you written a lot for voice? 

TA No, though that’s some­thing I’ll be doing a little more coming up. I wrote a tiny set of pieces for Gabe to sing and play. I’m also working on a piece for my friend Maggie Hass­pacher, who’s a bass player and jazz singer. She’s also going to sing and play at the same time. Gives them some­thing to do with their hands when they’re singing. 

NB: I’ve never seen anything like that. Is there a tradi­tion of music for bass and voice? 

TA: There is in the jazz world. I was kind of at a loss and then my friend Ted Hearne took me to hear the incred­i­ble singer René Marie, and she opened her set with a bass-and-voice cover of House of the Rising Sun. It was the most awesome thing I’ve seen in a while. It turns out, there is this mini-tradi­tion in the jazz world of singing with just bass. Obvi­ously there’s that huge regis­tral differ­ence— I like the sense of physical space that it creates. 

In general, though, writing vocal music is some­thing I haven’t really come to terms with. I’m almost a little scared of it, to tell you the truth. Most of the vocal music that I listen to doesn’t come out of the clas­si­cal tradi­tion at all. And the idea of an art song recital is very prob­lem­atic. I’m still working on finding some­thing that works for me. As for Maggie— she sings stan­dards. This isn’t my home turf either, so I think what I come up with could be either really inter­est­ing and a huge step forward, or just a complete and total failure. 

NB: That’s fun. 

TA: You’ve got to try these things.