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.

⁂

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.

3.

Rimsky or La Monte Young: are they history’s strangest pair of musical bedfel­lows, a case of mistaken identity, or mutually exclu­sive? Louis Andriessen’s piece opens with a clear refer­ence to Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano—a “long tone” played at full volume—and contin­ues with a sudden flurry of Flight of the Bumble­bee-esque activity. But Rimsky, La Monte, and Louis aren’t the only ones in the room. The grinding figu­ra­tions and predictably regular harmonic changes of Carl Czerny’s School of Velocity are clearly the butt of the joke (we could certainly cate­go­rize this as another étude) though occa­sion­ally they morph into an outtake from Stravinsky’s neoclas­si­cal period. It’s a thick stew of refer­ences contained in just two minutes of music, but the piece’s quirky, acerbic wit could only be Andriessen.

4.

John Adams’s epony­mous I Still Play is one of the meatier pieces in the collection—a full set of theme and variations—but its leisurely, rumi­na­tive pacing makes it feel even roomier than its five minutes. The theme is Adams at his most romantic, each phrase a series of sighs over a bass line that moves gingerly by half-steps. The triple-meter pulse, too slow for a waltz, instead marks a return to the gymnopédies found in his earlier Death of Kling­hof­fer and Century Rolls. Each of the subse­quent vari­a­tions also alludes to dance: the first an irreg­u­lar two-step, constantly tripping over itself, the second lilt­ingly Viennese, and the third a stylized rag by way of Conlon Nancar­row. The fourth is all jump-cuts and sudden tempo changes, includ­ing a presto episode which feels almost like a dare. The final vari­a­tion alter­nately emerges from and recedes back into the chro­matic fog.

5.

Evening Song No. 2 prolongs the autumnal mood, though in place of Adams’s search­ing chro­mati­cism, Philip Glass immerses us in a warm F major bath. The music’s syntax has a medi­ta­tive regu­lar­ity, breath­ing in for eight beats, then out. The form is symmet­ri­cal, too; the most elab­o­rate of the piece’s five sections is nestled at the center of a palin­drome. Inci­den­tally, Evening Song No. 2 is an example of a short piece that gave rise to longer works—the Quartet Satz (written for Kronos Quartet) and the much-expanded solo piano version Distant Figure. In each of these re-workings, although addi­tional sections are slipped into the form, it remains palin­dromic. Taken as a trio, these musical siblings provide a fasci­nat­ing look at a composer’s working process—and how a simple idea can lead to diver­gent paths.

6.

At first listen, Laurie Anderson’s Song For Bob seems to be the most enig­matic piece on the album. Short musical modules, sepa­rated by lengthy pauses, disap­pear into near silence. These mottoes share basic simi­lar­i­ties, though they’re rarely repeated liter­ally; the rhetor­i­cal effect is of somebody trying to express the same idea in slightly differ­ent words. The key to the piece may be found in Anderson’s labeling of certain phrases as “echoes”—and in the real­iza­tion that the pianist’s two hands have been echoing each other the whole time. In live perfor­mances, Anderson often achieves this effect with her violin fed through elec­tronic process­ing, causing the phrase she’s just played to spiral away in a series of trans­posed delays. The same is true of each of the gnomic modules compris­ing Song For Bob, but here the pianist must create the illusion acoustically.

7.

As a title, L.A. Pastorale at first seems like an oxymoron—Los Angeles isn’t a place typi­cally asso­ci­ated with shep­herds on rocks. Brad Mehldau’s piece nonethe­less finds a few minutes of repose, as he writes, “amidst the urban facades, the brash adver­tise­ments that promise impos­si­ble salva­tion, and the cease­less flow of humans.” This secret beauty is mirrored in the way Mehldau arranges his musical voices. An apparent melody, on top, consists of a single repeated tone, will­fully flat and steady. But it’s shaped by active harmonies and moving lines just under the surface—a hidden land­scape smoothed by asphalt. Even­tu­ally, as each phrase becomes more expres­sive and involved, these under­cur­rents rise to overtake the monotone as the primary melody. L.A. Pastorale also contains unex­pected (and completely coin­ci­den­tal) inter­sec­tions with some of the other pieces on the album. The harmonic twists and turns, often spurred on by chro­matic inner voices, recall the bass line of I Still Play; another phrase, about halfway through, halt­ingly echoes the Beethoven-derived theme of Wise Words.

8.

For Bob is a true curios­ity among Steve Reich’s works: a piece for solo performer without either elec­tronic process­ing or prere­corded track. As such, it’s also one of the few in which canonic inter­play between voices (an animat­ing force in Reich’s music from the begin­ning) takes a back seat. Every­thing else about the music is nonethe­less remark­ably recog­niz­able: the insis­tent four-against-three rhythmic patterns, the rich, suspen­sion-filled chords, and the common-tone modu­la­tions, around which the music pivots in two-bar phrases. The struc­ture, too, is unmis­tak­ably Reich, super-compressed. There’s even a tiny “slow movement” in the center which recalls his recent Quartet, and a conclu­sion which ascends a bright ladder of inver­sions, much like the final moments of 1985’s Sextet.

9.

Pat Metheny’s 42 Years is a study in subtle but striking contrasts. The piece opens on a series of musical switch­backs, each phrase twisting back as if to cancel itself out. This harmonic ambi­gu­ity serves a delib­er­ate purpose—to set, in stark relief, the simple, wistful tune that follows. Performed here with easy, flexible pacing and under­stated expres­siv­ity by Metheny’s some­times duo partner Brad Mehldau, this is music with that hard-to-pin-down quality of being familiar, yet not—a love song from a long-forgot­ten musical, perhaps?—which just as quickly slips through our fingers. 

10.

Donnacha Dennehy’s Her Wits (About Him) also begins as if it is lost in an exis­ten­tial haze, trying to remember some­thing just beyond reach. The music lurches forward then pulls back, see-sawing between major and minor chords at the very top of the keyboard. Dennehy plays hypnotic games with his mate­ri­als, rotating patterns of chords and rhythms simul­ta­ne­ously so they end up in minutely varied permu­ta­tions (he calls the piece “a paean to detail”). About halfway through, we hear the suddenly confi­dent, almost demon­i­cally driven coun­ter­part of this opening material: three long sentences which just as swiftly vanish back into the stratos­phere (“like a ghost of what’s just been,” as the score indi­cates). The piece has an emotional compass which belies its five minutes, and in fact, it serves as the struc­tural basis for Dennehy’s Broken Unison, a 20-minute percus­sion quartet.

11.

And finally, an unex­pected encore: Randy Newman’s Reces­sional. It’s a mock-serious march, the grand­ness of its gestures under­mined by its hilar­i­ously diminu­tive scale. In both size and tone, the piece recalls Schumann’s Wichtige Begeben­heit (“An Impor­tant Event”) from the Kinder­szenen. Yes, it’s worth pausing to commem­o­rate a life’s tran­si­tions and achieve­ments, the piece seems to say—but only for a moment. It’s what comes next that really matters. 

And after all, Bob Hurwitz has never been one to stand on ceremony. As the Laurie Anderson lyric goes: “This is the time, and this is the record of the time.” That’s what Bob’s work at Nonesuch has always been: to make records of the time, to tell us about our time.

–Timo Andres, February 2020