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?)