I want to issue my highest recom­men­da­tion for the Living Earth Show’s May 12^th concert at the Cell Theater. Travis Andrews and Andy Meyerson (electric guitarist and percus­sion­ist, respec­tively) have commis­sioned a remark­able body of work for them­selves over the past few years, and they throw them­selves into playing it with a gusto that is inspir­ing to behold.

And you needn’t take my word for it; their YouTube page features many compellingly-performed/pro­duced music videos of their commis­sions. In this video, the duo performs Sam Adams’s Tension Study no. 2, with the fetching trapeze artist Deanna Hammond swinging overhead.

I recently had the good fortune of my name appear­ing on a poster in the NYC subway for the first time. More people in my own age bracket responded to this adver­tise­ment than to any other listing I’ve ever gotten—comprising the coveted “young people who don’t neces­sar­ily rush to buy every new David Lang album, and in fact may not have even heard of David Lang” demo­graphic. And the audience ended up packed with those very people.

I’ve made fun of BAM’s subway posters in this space before (that’s because they were terrible), but I think they’re a great music-PR strategy, espe­cially when deployed on the G line, where one is bound to spend dozens of minutes on the plat­forms staring at the adver­tise­ments. I remember seeing a Chamber Music Society subway poster a few years ago featur­ing the excel­lent cellist Nick Canel­lakis, and maybe one with Wu Han in a red drapery? Clas­si­cal presen­ters should clearly be doing more of this!

Prac­tic­ing Shostakovich this week, along with his comrade-in-angst Mieczys­law Weinberg, for a concert with ACME. I haven’t much thought about Shostakovich’s musical language since sopho­more year of high school, when my attrac­tions tended toward the loud, the disso­nant, the minor-mode. Shostakovich symphonies were just the ticket.

It’s present­ing me with an inter­pre­ta­tional chal­lenge this time around—what to do with all the filler, the stuffing in between the themes. There’s so much of it, both in the Shostakovich and the Weinberg (which sounds a bit wackier, maybe just because I wasn’t familiar with it), page after page of passages like the following:

One of the first great myster­ies of writing music was, for me, just this—how to stuff a piece so it wasn’t just a theme, repeated a few times. What was all that musical caulk filling in the gaps? What do you do after you’ve stated your theme (and restated it, in Wein­berg’s case)?

It’s still kind of a mystery to me, what fills in the gaps in Shostakovich. We’re told the stuff is somehow “political”—that it’s purposely banal, or ironic—saying lots of words and meaning the total opposite. How to convey that in a perfor­mance, though? Power­less as music is to commu­ni­cate a concrete thought, is it even worth trying? Maybe the best I can hope for is to shout “Loud, Disso­nant, Minor”, and the rest will take care of itself.

Lately I have been greeted mornings by the clouds from The Simpsons title sequence.

I sanction every­thing but the music in this video (thanks to @ukeleleuser for the tip).

If you’re a longtime Sibelius user, like me, your favorite person in the world is probably Daniel Spread­bury. This morning he posted a new blog at Stein­berg, where he and the former Sibelius team are working on an entirely new notation program. Pretty thrilling stuff.

But did you catch this epic dig at his former employer, Avid, basi­cally implying that they have aban­doned Sibelius entirely (despite their insis­tence to the contrary)?

…the number of compa­nies actively working on profes­sional music notation software is very small, and perhaps now numbers only two (one being Stein­berg, the other MakeMusic).

Ouch.

The Polon­aise-Fantaisie is to be classed among the works which belong to the latest period of Chopin’s compo­si­tions which are all more or marked by a feverish and restless anxiety. No bold and bril­liant pictures are to be found in it; the tramp of a cavalry accus­tomed to victory is no longer heard; no more resound the heroic chants muffled no visions of defeat—the bold tones suited to the audacity of those who were always victo­ri­ous. A deep melancholy—ever broken by startled move­ments, by sudden alarms, by disturbed rest, by stifled sighs—reigns through­out. We are surrounded by such scenes and feelings as might arise among those had been surprised and encom­passed on all sides by an ambus­cade, the vast sweep of whose horizon reveals not a single ground for hope, and whose despair had giddied the brain, like a draught of that wine of Cyprus which gives a more instinc­tive rapidity all our gestures, a keener point to all our words, a more subtle flame to all our emotions, and excites the mind to a pitch of irri­tabil­ity approach­ing insanity.

—Franz Liszt, Life of Chopin.

This morning I happened on the wonder­ful “BikeNYC” portraits by Dmitri Gudkov, of New York cyclists and their bikes. This collec­tion is the strongest case I’ve seen in support of expanded bike infra­struc­ture around the city; the subjects of Gudkov’s portraits repre­sent the true range of cyclists I see in the bike lanes, espe­cially here in Bed Stuy. Many are emphat­i­cally normal-looking; there are some oddities, too, though not in the ways you might expect. The impres­sion you get is that cycling is a routine, prac­ti­cal activity, not just the domain of fixed-gear scorchers and insane people with toe-coozies. The photos them­selves are nicely done, too.

Luis The Super is one of my favorites. My god, this guy needs his own protected bike path. He’s blind in one eye and rides around with a giant bucket hanging from his handlebars.

Thomas Adès’s Mazurkas are, I believe, the finest Mazurkas yet to be written in the 21^st century. I’ll be playing all three of them on my Lincoln Center show on Sunday, February 24^th; in the meantime, I made a little home-record­ing demo of the second one. I’ve got another month or so to practice, so listen up and tell me how I could be doing better:

Thomas Adès: Second Mazurka

Timo Andres, piano

He dressed in more or less Ivy League fashion casually, infor­mally, and yet with an occa­sional touch of flam­boy­ance. As soon as he could afford to do so, he indulged his interest in good clothes freely and took inor­di­nate pride in his tailor. He often dragged along his friends to fittings which came to be known as “Lenny’s dress rehearsals.”

—From Leonard Bern­stein: A Biog­ra­phy for Young People (1960) by David Ewen.