Monthly Archives: June 2022
Johannes Moser’s new album Alone Together is out, which includes my eight-cello piece Ogee alongside many other new and exciting works with multiple electric cellos.
UPDATE, 6/16/22: everything in the store should be up and running smoothly. As always, please let me know if you think something is not as it should be. I may even reward you with a “bug bounty.”
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A quick word of advice for those of you here to purchase scores: the Andres & Sons Bakery shop is in the midst of a transition to a new backend service, which should be completed in the next week. In the meantime, you may find that certain pieces are unavailable; rest assured our crack team of webmasters is on the case. For urgent inquiries, please contact the bakery. Thank you for your patience.
Monoliths of Sound
I was honored to spend the past weekend remembering Ingram Marshall in an appraisal for the New York Times.
With an unlikely fusion of loose, stream-of-consciousness forms and old-school contrapuntal technique, he constructed monoliths of sound, then obscured them. He wove elaborate textures out of canons, inversions, elongations and diminutions. His gamelan-inspired arpeggios undulate gently in and out of sun and shadow. Frequent quotations and references give the music a sense of porousness and mutability. Everything coexists in what feels like a physical acoustic space — rich and reverberant, but also distant, held at a remove, seen through a dense fog. Above all, there is the emotional flavor of it. For him, music wasn’t just an abstraction, an intellectual game of pitches and forms. It was also about expressing something sincerely.
Read the full piece here.
The composer Ingram Marshall died last week at 80. Ingram was my teacher, mentor, friend, and needless to say, an enormous influence on my music and life. I’m working on writing an appraisal of Ingram’s music, explaining why it meant so much to his small but passionate audience. In the meantime, here is a new film of his solo piano piece Authentic Presence from 2002.
When I performed the piece at Wigmore Hall in 2012, I wrote in the program note:
Authentic Presence is one of Ingram’s few purely acoustic pieces. The electronic-music tools of delay, reverb, and sampling are integral to his composing style, taking their place alongside 1970s California minimalism, Balinese and Javanese harmonies, and early American hymns in his musical nature preserve. Hazy memories of the civil rights protest song “We Shall Overcome” cycle through the dramatic episodes of Authentic Presence; the piece has a pleasantly un-rigorous formal logic to it, concerned perhaps with following a train of thought rather than any set musical program.
NPR has a beautifully-written obiturary by Lara Pellegrinelli.