The follow­ing is an essay/program note I wrote for my Wigmore Hall program on June 8. It also applies to this Tues­day’s LPR show (there will be an extra-special surprise that night as well).

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When I was set the task of coming up with an hour’s musical “self-portrait” I started to mentally cate­go­rize the rela­tion­ships that comprise my musical life. There’s the self-contained: writing some­thing to perform myself (which is how I began compos­ing, about 20 years ago); writing for perform­ers who aren’t me, which has its advan­tages and draw­backs; the reverse of that, when I perform someone else’s music—usually, but not always, that person being alive; then there’s a sea of conscious and uncon­scious influ­ences on my own writing—teachers and friends, critics, the constant barrage of music in everyday life; and finally the lines between all these things to an audience, either real or imagined. 

The six pieces I chose form a skeletal kind of connect-the-dots among these forces. I asked Ted Hearne to write me some­thing about a year ago. I’ve known Ted since graduate school, and we’ve gone on to become collab­o­ra­tors, confi­dantes, and Brooklyn neigh­bors. The five-movement Parlor Diplo­macy (I’ll play the first three) is by turns hilar­i­ous, combat­ive, and beau­ti­fully reverent; tropes from the Clas­si­cal canon are severed, chopped up, and recon­tex­tu­al­ized into some­thing new and strange, yet oddly familiar. In the first movement, that element is a banal five-one trill; in the second, it’s the falling arpeg­giated thirds from (not coïn­ci­den­tally!) Brahms’s B minor inter­mezzo. The third movement, perhaps the heart of the piece, is a painstak­ing Gradus ad Parnas­sum, which revels in the frag­men­tary beauty of learning. 

I took on related 19^th-century baggage in How can I live in your world of ideas?, the center­piece from my 2010 album Shy and Mighty. This piece, however, is more concerned with inte­grat­ing capital‑C Clas­si­cal Music into my own, 21^st-century world, and all the diffi­culty and satis­fac­tion that results from it. Conceived as a series of esca­lat­ing inter­rup­tions between two pianos, I subse­quently arranged it for solo performer. This demands a unique split-person­al­ity virtuosity. 

Ingram Marshall was one of my graduate school profes­sors, though our compo­si­tion lessons were as likely to take place hunting for mush­rooms in the nearby woods as at the piano. 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. 

During a concert year or so ago, I had the spur-of-the-moment idea to follow Authen­tic Presence directly with the first inter­mezzo of Brahms’s op. 119. It was a game of harmonic free-asso­ci­a­tion more than anything (the piece begins with the same major-seventh chord Ingram’s ends on). But I liked the effect so much that I decided to retain the pairing. It’s often said that the late piano pieces are like super-concen­trated versions of Brahms’s symphonies and sonatas, and op. 119 no. 1 might be the most intensely distilled of the lot. The skeleton is decep­tively traditional—a simple A‑B-A form made up of regular eight-bar segments. But the music constantly subverts these expec­ta­tions, playing little rhythmic and contra­pun­tal games, creating chains of ever-longer nested phrases. There’s so much subterfuge going on that it allows a deli­cious inter­pre­ta­tional freedom: one can’t possibly do justice to every element in a single perfor­mance, but any choice will work out all right. It ends in one of those trade­mark Brahm­sian twilights, summing up far more than the piece’s three minutes could possibly contain.

Schu­man­n’s work is at times deni­grated (quite unfairly, I think) because of the forms he chose to work in—suites of instru­men­tal or vocal minia­tures. He strug­gled with larger genres, and his sonatas, quartets, and symphonies are routinely ignored by musi­cians and audi­ences. They lack the effort­less, endless melodic flights of Schubert and the archi­tec­tural mass and stolid­ity of Beethoven or Brahms. 

But Schu­man­n’s strength—the ability to conceive a wild array of seem­ingly disparate elements within a frag­men­tary struc­ture and create a coherent musical statement—is just as valuable, and perhaps rarer. In the piano suite Kreis­le­ri­ana, he nests recur­ring material in tele­scopic move­ments, alter­nat­ing between serene and stormy. A couple of summers ago I devel­oped a severe obses­sion with this piece, which led to the creation of a “compan­ion” to play along­side it. I wanted to create a similar kind of form, at first appear­ing to be a series of minia­tures, but from a bird’s eye view reveal­ing a coherent whole. The title I chose—It takes a long time to become a good composer—is a tongue-in-cheek refer­ence to the idea that musical duration equals compo­si­tional achieve­ment (it’s also some­thing my roommate once said, which was too good not to write down). 

To close, I’ll play one of the most char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally Schu­mann­ian minia­tures: Vogel als Prophet (Bird as Prophet) from the set of nine Wald­szenen, which focus on the natural world (a fantas­tic and not alto­gether reality-based one, for sure). Bird as Prophet surrounds a tiny, six-bar chorale (the “prophecy”?) with a gnomic swirl of arpeg­gios, each ending in an upward inflec­tion. This music never really resolves; rather it contin­u­ally ques­tions what came before it—“What now? And what then?” The melody consists mainly of leading tones (the “wrong” notes which border the actual harmonies); even as the figu­ra­tion of the music is fanciful, the affect is baleful, needling. The closing section is iden­ti­cal to the first; the bird is revealed a false prophet, and the piece is left as a series of unan­swered questions.