I’m coming back from rehears­ing with Dave in Inwood, riding the subway, not my usual bike. Biking to Inwood is a commit­ment. But as always, bicycles are on the mind. I sat down in front of a partic­u­larly tone-deaf adver­tise­ment from BAM, of all things: 

Yeah, um. Let’s hope not, actually. 

Dave and I are prac­tic­ing a new piano four-hands piece of mine which I wrote last summer, but actually hasn’t been premiered yet; it’s called Retro Music and it’s basi­cally an homage to/deconstruction of the 19^th-century waltz style. I’ve always felt this weird affinity towards waltz music, perhaps because so many beloved composers from my child­hood wrote them: Brahms, Chopin, Ravel, Mahler, Prokofiev. For such a specif­i­cally refer­en­tial thing, it has a mimic’s ability to take on the whole spectrum of moods, char­ac­ters, emotions, and yet still retain that thing that makes it a waltz, which—I don’t even really know what it is. Quite mysterious. 

So Dave and I will be premier­ing Retro Music at a couple of house concerts later this month, and to the broader public soon there­after, I hope. 

One thing I like about working with close friends is that the border between work and pleasure is very thin, almost nonex­is­tent. Dave and I often go off on tangents during rehearsal, musical and other­wise. Then after­wards we always cook dinner, which is as natural an exten­sion of putting a piece of music together as I can think. 

Today I wanted to show off a Chopin Nocturne I recently “discov­ered” (it feels rather disin­gen­u­ous to use that word when talking about Chopin, and yet I had never heard the piece before)—the first of the Op. 62 pair. I read through it first a couple of days ago, finding the score open on my piano. I love the expe­ri­ence of reading through some­thing completely unfa­mil­iar for the very first time, like groping your way through your apart­ment with your eyes closed—you know the basic layout in your head, and yet each crevasse is somehow completely unex­pected. This op. 62 Nocturne has an asym­met­ri­cal phrase struc­ture that I haven’t completely parsed yet, and it still catches me when I play it—an odd feeling which will retreat over the next two or three runs, and which I’ll never get it back with that partic­u­lar piece. In the meantime, though, I like to feel as though I’m expe­ri­enc­ing it exactly as Chopin intended—that yes, the antecedent phrase should feel like an inter­rup­tion, that the dynamics should feel slightly wonky and misplaced. If it’s too smooth then it becomes simply very pretty music.