The album I Still Play is out today, avail­able to hear on the platform of your choice. I’ve written previ­ously about the origins of this music, but here’s the liner note I wrote, which gets into a bit more depth about each indi­vid­ual piece.

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The exis­tence of I Still Play as an album is a bit of a paradox. Each of these 11 tributes to Bob Hurwitz was written for an audience of one, on a partic­u­lar Steinway in a specific Upper West Side living room. And yet here they are, making their way into the wider world. None are loftily ambi­tious or daringly exper­i­men­tal compo­si­tions. Rather, each distills an aspect of its author’s voice to a concen­trated minia­ture. The prevail­ing tone is conver­sa­tional rather than declam­a­tory, though it’s a wide-ranging conver­sa­tion. Large ques­tions are posed but rarely answered in full. If the listener has the odd feeling of having stumbled into an exchange between two friends and missing an inside joke or shared refer­ence here and there—that’s not far from the truth.

Composers are usually known for works that push extremes of length, complex­ity, virtu­os­ity, volume, scope, profundity—the St. Matthew Passions or Rite of Springs of the world. (Few disser­ta­tions have been written on Ravel’s Menuet sur la nom de Haydn, for example). Yet over the course of a career, short pieces written for friends and rela­tives, music for weddings and birth­days, gifts for patrons and mentors, and other occa­sional works, can provide a differ­ent kind of insight into a composer’s voice. These pieces can contain unre­al­ized poten­tial, and have often become studies for larger works. But just as often, they’re follies, one-offs, blind alleys, musical ideas useful only for that original two or three minutes. In rare cases, these unas­sum­ing pieces become widely known, but this is a mixed blessing—Für Elise or Clair de Lune can sound mawkish and banal by the five hundredth hearing, when its charm has been subsumed by omnipres­ence. It’s enough that one almost feels a bit protec­tive of the I Still Play cycle. These are pieces that best divulge their secrets in private—in small rooms, for a handful of audience, or perhaps none at all besides the pianist.

1.

Nico Muhly’s Move launches itself with a brisk volley of arpeg­gios broken between the hands. But what appears at first to be a playful moto perpetuo soon comes to a sudden halt; quiet intro­spec­tion lurks just beneath its kinetic surface. The phrases are direc­tion­ally restless, moving up or down by step, never sitting still for long. They feint towards a groove only to under­mine it with a rhythmic hiccup, an unex­pected harmonic or tempo shift. The first 90 of the piece’s 100 bars occupy only the middle and upper regis­ters of the keyboard; in the final 10, the piano’s lowest A sounds like a small reve­la­tion, as if it were suddenly equipped with organ pedals. The opening theme still sparkles in the treble, but now its feet are firmly on the ground—its chirpi­ness mellowed, its impli­ca­tions deepened—before finally trailing off. A last melan­cholic snatch of chorale gives Move its final punc­tu­a­tion mark.

2.

A few of the works on I Still Play can be clas­si­fied as études, not in the barn-burning mode of Chopin or Liszt, but of a gentler sort, befit­ting a pianist studying at their own leisure. Such is the case in my own Wise Words. I remember visiting Bob at his office during the fall of 2016 and noticing the score of Beethoven’s Op. 90 Piano Sonata open on the piano; Bob mentioned he’d been working on it. Beethoven’s second theme is accom­pa­nied by a partic­u­larly awkward pattern of broken 10ths in the left hand, which became the subject of Wise Words’s “étude.” This pattern is the harmonic and rhythmic motor of the piece, accom­pa­ny­ing a frag­men­tary melody of descend­ing fifths (which also gesture at Op. 90). Having never quite decided whether to be major or minor, the piece concludes, appro­pri­ately, on an open-ended dominant chord.

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Monday was the tenth anniver­sary of the release of my first album, Shy and Mighty. It’s cliché to say, but it feels simul­ta­ne­ously an age ago and also yester­day. In May 2010, Dave Kaplan & I cele­brated the release with a packed and raucous concert at Le Poisson Rouge (then only two years old). The memory of it is all the more wistful as Nonesuch & I prepare to release an album tomorrow, with no such festivites possible.

I decided that the best way to mark Shy and Mighty’s tenth birthday was to give it a makeover of sorts, so as to help it to find its way into other pianists’ hands. With a lot of extra time on my hands—some might say too much—I spent the past couple of months grad­u­ally re-engrav­ing the score from scratch, imple­ment­ing all the correc­tions, anno­ta­tions, and perfor­mance direc­tions I’ve added to my personal copy over the years. The old score was, after all, the work of a student composer, and though I’d fixed details here and there, it didn’t reflect anything close to my current edito­r­ial stan­dards or engrav­ing taste. The end result is a more complete and instruc­tive document, not to mention a more beau­ti­ful and easier-to-read one.

Since I’m self-published, I can under­take this work without too much trouble, so I’ve been seizing the moment. It’s all so old at this point that I don’t remember anything about having composed it; it feels merely like music I’ve known for a long time, and that I have a firm idea of how it should go. It is from this certainty that I derive my edito­r­ial edicts.

Along­side Shy and Mighty, the solo version of How can I live in your world of ideas?, Sorbet, and Some Connecti­cut Gospel have all received similar treat­ment, with more to follow. If you’ve bought PDFs of this music from my website, you should receive an email with a link to download the new mate­ri­als automatically.

(It should go without saying that all this work was done using Dorico. If you aren’t at least consid­er­ing switch­ing to Dorico at this point, my only question for you is: how come?)