Pianist and profes­sor David Kaplan, longtime friend and collab­o­ra­tor, wrote the follow­ing liner note for The Blind Banister, out now on Nonesuch Records:

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I first met Timo when we were still lanky college students, not as a composer, but as a prodi­giously talented pianist. I remember him playing Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata on a pungent old practice room piano, storming into the piece’s clif­flike sonori­ties and creating a tempest of sound that never­the­less conveyed some­thing essen­tial about the spirit and struc­ture of this famously abstruse work. Discov­er­ing a common hobby of deliri­ously approx­i­mat­ing symphonic reper­toire on the piano, we quickly began finding ways to collab­o­rate. We premiered his two-piano suite Shy and Mighty together, and he wrote Home Stretch, his first piano concerto, for my grad­u­a­tion recital. After nearly two decades of collab­o­ra­tion and friend­ship, this new record­ing of The Blind Banister (2015), Upstate Obscura (2018), and Colorful History (2021) prompts me to reflect on how much Timo’s music has devel­oped over time, as well as what elements of his artistic voice, as pianist and composer both, were baked in from the start. 

All three works here demon­strate the extent to which Timo’s music examines the compo­si­tional process. The simple ideas that under­gird his pieces often comprise some unas­sum­ing and well-worn trinket found in the thrift store of tonal harmony—a perfect fifth, a trill, or a scale. Over the course of the piece, the object gener­ates its own meaning and interest and creates a frame­work support­ing the things we actually want to hear: gesture, melody, pulse, humor, tender­ness, drama, and eloquence. 

This anima­tion of ideas reminds me of the book, Bach and the Patterns of Inven­tion, in which Lawrence Dreyfus argues that Bach under­stood “inven­tion” as the “idea behind a piece, a musical subject whose discov­ery precedes full-scale compo­si­tion.” Borrowed from the rhetor­i­cal concept of inventio, which for Cicero and other clas­si­cal thinkers meant the inspi­ra­tion that sparked an oration, inven­tion conflates the musical content with its compo­si­tional process: “A success­ful inven­tion must be more than a static, well-crafted object, but instead like a mech­a­nism… from which a whole piece of music is shaped.” 

This under­stand­ing of inven­tion describes Timo’s creative process equally well, and differ­en­ti­ates it from the music of composers who inte­grate process and content in other ways. Brahms’s devel­op­ing vari­a­tions and Beethoven’s organic devel­op­ment are two canonic examples; in the last century, Philip Glass’s early exper­i­ments with repe­ti­tion and incre­men­tal change, Steve Reich’s phasing, Schönberg’s seri­al­ism, and Cage’s aleatori­cism come to mind. 

The Blind Banister demon­strates this inte­grated approach; on some funda­men­tal level it is an entire concerto about the compo­si­tional process of revision. Disre­gard­ing an adoles­cent but preco­cious piano concerto, perhaps remem­bered only by a handful of millen­nial alumni of the Juil­liard Pre-College Orches­tra, Banister is Timo’s third published piece for solo piano and orches­tra, follow­ing Home Stretch (2008) and Old Keys (2011). It was written for Jonathan Biss in 2015 as one of a number of response pieces to Beethoven’s own quasi-juve­nilia, the Piano Concerto in B‑flat, Op. 15. Unlike Timo’s ‘re-composed’ Mozart Coro­na­tion Concerto from 2010, it is not “a pastiche or an exercise in palimpsest” (to quote the composer’s note); it instead fixates on a palimpsest from Beethoven himself—the revised cadenza he appended to the concerto two decades after its earliest perfor­mances in Bonn. 

From this cadenza, Timo distills two motives: the Mannheim rocket arpeggio that launches it, and the sequence of descend­ing scales that follow. Together, these cause Banister to ruminate on an unre­solved dichotomy of rising and falling gestures. Timo explains that he started writing his own cadenza to Beethoven’s concerto, and ended up “devour­ing [the piece] from the inside out.” I think of whiting out a densely shaded drawing with the pencil’s eraser to create a new image in relief. 

Over time, I’ve noticed Timo’s pref­er­ence for scherzo-type second move­ments; his pieces often begin and end reflec­tively, so the oppor­tu­nity for musical snap-crackle-and-pop comes in the middle. The Piano Concerto no. 2 in B‑flat by Brahms (for whom Beethoven was a source of anxiety and influ­ence), has a scherzo creating a fervid drive in a triple meter. So does Banister with a scherzo that delights in ecstatic hemiolas, playing instru­ments in duple against those in triple, just like Groß­vater Doktor Brahms. Even­tu­ally, even the equi­lib­ri­ous spread of quin­tu­plets poses against the existing twos and threes; the five-note figures rise and fall in the flute and violin before being stolen and compressed by the piano, like a borrowed sweater shrunk in the wash, and finally soothed back to size by the clarinet. The orches­tra and piano build a texture satu­rated with polyrhythm, until finally the piano has the oppor­tu­nity of a cadenza to work out the rhythmic disagree­ments on its own. It manages to reach a peaceful accord between duples, triples, and quin­tu­plets before the scin­til­lat­ing parabola of a coda, accel­er­at­ing the music until it launches into the aether. 

Composers play the piano with varying degrees of compe­tence, convic­tion, and effec­tive­ness. Timo’s musical voice, however, speaks equally through his playing and his writing. Having worked closely with Timo wearing both hats over many years, I see his compo­si­tional process and piano playing as inex­tri­ca­ble. Other composer-pianists with a simi­larly inte­grated artistic voice were Bartók, whose jagged rhythms mani­fested in an impa­tient drive at the keyboard, and Rach­mani­nov, whose sinewy polyphony rolled natu­rally out of nimble and massive hands. Bill Evans, whose rootless voicings and velvet touch glowed amber, and Art Tatum, with his pearly dexter­ity and passage­work, both come to mind. In Timo’s case, the unpre­ten­tious rhythm and sprez­zatura of his piano playing are audible also in the music he composes, through economy of material and avoid­ance of effects for their own sake. 

Timo’s unusu­ally large hands also play a role: they lead him to write piano music that strains against anatom­i­cal limits for even the most flexible hand-yogis. I will not forget Jonathan Biss’s exclaim­ing, as Timo accom­pa­nied Gabriel Kahane on some Ives songs, “It’s just not fair!” Bari­o­lages of open-handed fifths and cascades of sixths create Nancar­row-like stacks of notes, as if the music itself is attempt­ing to tran­scend the instru­ment. While these sonori­ties don’t present an audible struggle in Timo’s own perfor­mances, one still perceives their improb­a­bil­ity and sheer mass—the uncanny sense that the piano is making a noise it doesn’t usually make, and perhaps isn’t allowed to make. In The Blind Banister, the orches­tra inte­grated the solo line: it phys­i­cally embodies but also exceeds the pianist’s natural reach. 

I think we also expe­ri­ence this inter­con­nect­ed­ness between pianist and composer in an unaf­fected rhythmic complex­ity that results from the gradual process of inven­tion and devel­op­ment in pieces like Banister. For a performer, this polyrhyth­mic satu­ra­tion can be heady and daunting. But Timo’s perfor­mances of Glass Etudes and Brahms Inter­mezzi suggest how these textures can be brought across: simply play in time and trust the disparate lines to converge. The surfaces should be clear as Swiss railway clocks, though dozens of gears turn underneath. 

The notion of “Amer­i­can­ness” in music is a longtime preoc­cu­pa­tion for Timo, which he traces back to a child­hood fasci­na­tion with fellow Connecti­cut Yankee Charles Ives. Upstate Obscura expresses this concern with American musical identity by empathiz­ing with an earlier American artist who looked to Europe for inspi­ra­tion, the nine­teenth century Kingston, New York painter John Vanderlyn. 

Upstate was orig­i­nally premiered at the Metro­pol­i­tan Museum of Art, a short walk away from the painting that inspired it—Vanderlyn’s panorama of the palace and gardens at Versailles. The concerto refers to the panorama without quite depict­ing its elab­o­rate homage to rococo splendor. Instead, it invents a musical process to paint the onlooker, who, like a deep sea diver, is both phys­i­cally surrounded by the painting, yet alien to it. Timo writes: “The overall effect of the painting is ambigu­ous; it’s hyper-detailed, yet curi­ously abstract; perfectly utopian, but with a somber, melan­choly cast… The viewer feels alone in it, ignored by the well-dressed spec­ta­tors milling about. In taking on a quin­tes­sen­tially French subject, Vander­lyn somehow came up with some­thing that feels American; it seems to regard Versailles at a bemused distance, with that char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally American distrust of anything unnec­es­sar­ily fanciful. As a New Englan­der who has never been to Versailles (Vanderlyn’s intended audience, after all), I iden­ti­fied with this out-of-placeness.” 

The musi­col­o­gist Cornelia Fales has coined the neol­o­gism ‘voice­ness’ to describe the degree to which an instru­ment embodies and repre­sents the human voice. The cello’s quin­tes­sen­tial ‘voice­ness’ helps us person­ify and identify with it. Unlike the heroic bombast of the piano or the super­hu­man falsetto of the violin, the cello sounds like a relat­able protagonist—your average concerto soloist next door. In the dramatic indi­vid­ual-versus-collec­tive rhetor­i­cal paradigm of a Romantic-era concerto, the cello is there­fore uniquely suited to express the alien­ation of a plain­tive melodic line. Timo, like most contem­po­rary composers, has all but aban­doned that tradi­tional paradigm in favor of musical multi­lat­er­al­ism (the concerto as super­charged chamber music). But Upstate never­the­less exploits the cello’s ‘voice­ness’ to convey a poignant vulner­a­bil­ity. Quiv­er­ing with stretched-out orna­men­tal figures, which Timo calls “loose chunks of masonry” borrowed from the French Baroque, the cello slowly descends the stair­case of a long scale. 

Like The Blind Banister, Upstate dispels the inex­orable descent of its opening movement with a bubble floating out of a soap bottle—a diaphanous gesture in the solo line. The satu­rated sound-world that accu­mu­lated in the first movement evap­o­rates as if it never happened; the bubble pops into an ethereal scherzo, all pizzi­cato, mutes, and harmon­ics. After the initial dazzling effect, though, the cello becomes human again, a full-voiced plain­tiff feeling trapped in the exotic panorama, some­times assert­ing its exis­tence, some­times doubting itself, alto­gether bewil­dered by the simu­lacrum around it. The winds, as ever music’s sirens and gas-lighters, take on the cello’s material, driving it into an epic tantrum. The only instru­ment that sympa­thizes with the poor cello is the orchestra’s other quasi-human, the horn, joining it for one of those french baroque orna­ments warped into a long scale. 

This warping of the orna­ments, the magni­fi­ca­tion of musical frag­ments, is typical of Timo: just as his music is very much about compo­si­tional process, that process is often about past music. While rarely resort­ing to quota­tion, each piece distills some­thing from its influ­ences, which it trans­lates into enabling constraints, rules, or proce­dures. Timo’s music wears its influ­ences easily on the surface without being derivative. 

The two-piano cycle we premiered and recorded together, Shy and Mighty, has an enduring single, How Can I Live in Your World of Ideas?, often played in a virtuoso arrange­ment for solo piano that overtly addresses this non-anxiety of influ­ence. That piece’s funky backdrop, outbursts of passage­work, and repose­ful romantic musings high up on the keyboard seem to spar and cajole one another over which style will take over the piece, and perhaps ulti­mately the composer’s nascent voice—as if Rzewski, Chopin, Monk, Ives, and John Adams were arguing in the dormi­tory dining hall, while Timo looked on. 

Colorful History is a much more recent solo piano work that simi­larly show­cases a reflex­ive inter­ac­tion of compo­si­tional process and musical refer­ence. Timo calls it a “chaconne, stemming from a single augmented triad, and follow­ing the course of various direc­tions it suggests.” As a genre, the chaconne (as well as its sibling, the passacaglia) is overtly process-oriented in that it fore­grounds a cyclic harmonic progression—literally bringing the ground to the fore. It exploits a tension between the tele­o­log­i­cal drive to tran­scend that harmonic cycle, and the static entrap­ment within it. 

More than any trope of virtu­osic bravura, intox­i­cat­ing harmony, or ravish­ing melodic swoon, this process of inven­tion, devel­op­ment, satu­ra­tion, and distil­la­tion is what gives Timo’s music its meaning and power.