A short bulletin to let you know that today is the wide release of Work Songs. You can (finally!) listen to the album on the platform of your choice—I suggest Bandcamp—and you can also order a physical, tangible CD, which will ship next month. I’m pleased as punch to have this long-gestat­ing, short-playing work out in the wide world. For much more about it, read this post.

Here’s the “single,” to a poem by Andrea Cohen:

Timo Andres: Work Songs: 3. To Whom it May Concern

perform­ers Becca Stevens, voice & guitar; Gabriel Kahane, voice & guitar; Ted Hearne, voice; Nathan Koci, accor­dion; Taylor Levine, guitar; Timo Andres, piano & keyboard

After the past week’s flurry of premières, I’m turning back into a pianist in prepa­ra­tion for a solo recital at Caramoor on June 20. It’s the same program west-coasters might’ve heard in San Fran­cisco, inter­lac­ing selec­tions from Janáçek’s On An Over­grown Path with recent works by Caroline Shaw, Eric Shan­field, and Christo­pher Cerrone. Here’s a “cura­to­r­ial state­ment” in answer to your ques­tions: “what and why?”

There’s a good reason for all the evoca­tive titles on this program, which is that all the works are based on visual images, either real or imagined. What I liked was that all the pieces have to do with differ­ent mediums, or chains of mediums, like a game of inspi­ra­tional tele­phone. Caroline’s Gustave le Gray is named after a pioneer in photog­ra­phy, and is half an analogue to his images, and half an imagined portrait of the photog­ra­pher himself. Chris was inspired by an artist friend’s render­ing of a beau­ti­ful brutal­ist bridge in southern Italy—the two-dimen­sional repre­sen­ta­tion of a three-dimen­sional form, trans­lated into a musical form. Eric’s Utopia Parkway is an homage to the sculptor Joseph Cornell—musical “objects” move against each other in shifting posi­tions, like the objects in one of Cornell’s shadow boxes.

And it’s not known exactly what inspired the titles of Janáçek’s On An Over­grown Path, though I believe they were given only just before being published—it seems likely they were images or phrases out of his own head. But they are amaz­ingly evoca­tive in a way that is picto­r­ial but nonethe­less abstract. 

I suppose what I’m trying to “say”, if one can speak through one’s program­ming, is that the way an artist sees art and the world is not usually confined to a single form or disci­pline. The qual­i­ties that move me in music are the same that move me about a building, a photo­graph, or a piece of chore­og­ra­phy. They’re all related in cryptic ways.

Caramoor is a short Metro-North trip from Grand Central and I can’t recom­mend it highly enough. It’s beau­ti­ful and the archi­tec­ture is slightly outra­geous. I even composed the bell chimes which summon you To Concert, so the entire evening promises to be some­thing of a Gesamtkunst­werk.