Hi everyone, sorry for the delay— my neighbor was listen­ing to Rihanna really loudly and for a long time and I couldn’t hear my cross­fades properly. But I perse­vered and managed to edit and upload some new record­ings for you, includ­ing some excerpts from It takes a long time to become a good composer and Schu­man­n’s Kreis­le­ri­ana, as well as a fierce new perfor­mance of Clamber Music by Tema Watstein and Owen Dalby. All were recorded live by the talented Ryan Streber.

It’s defi­nitely booking season. I’ve been saying “Yes!” to many lovely things lately, and I wish I could share them all with you right now, so excited am I. But I don’t think it’s yet “Season Announce­ment Season” and I imagine it’s gauche to spill the beans about these things.

(That reminds me; did you know that cran­berry beans are the same as borlotti beans are the same as Roman beans? This was a reve­la­tion to me as I’ve recently become enamored of the cran­berry bean, but lamented its rarity, and only just now have found out that they are all around!)

This month is a bit out of the ordinary, compos­ing-wise, in that I’ve agreed to write about an hour of new music for a fashion show (completely separate from last summer’s Chanel incident). It’s for a prodi­gious young designer in New York named Frank Tell, and when I found out what he wanted from me, my first reaction was a double take; it’s kind of crazy, as a musician in the “clas­si­cal world”, to be asked to write so much so fast. (Usually it’s more along the lines of “Get psyched to write nine minutes of music by 2013!”) In this case, it’s a real “Gebrauchsmusik” job: write music to strut to, as beau­ti­fully as possible— like a ballet, except with very little direct relation between the music and the stage action. (I’ve never seen a full produc­tion of Daphnis et Chloé, but there are sections where the musical gestures are liter­ally balletic; you can hear every pirou­ette and jeté. In a fashion show, it’s pretty much just strut­ting, but you still need to do more than just a brisk andante.)

From a produc­tiv­ity stand­point, this project has neces­si­tated a differ­ent sort of writing style. I’ve uncon­cerned myself with such beloved composerly tricks as “devel­op­ing vari­a­tion” and “form” or even “themes”, though I guess if I were forced to choose I would call it an “ambient ritor­nello”. Sections follow each other stream-of-concious­ness style, occa­sion­ally looking back to gestures from previous sections, but mostly just running their course. The orches­tra­tion is also minimal by neces­sity— there’s no piano at the venue, so I’m playing entirely with elec­tron­ics, and my friend Tema Watstein is joining me on violin (you know her from Clamber Music). One piece I’m refer­ring to as a prece­dent is LCD Soundsys­tem’s 45:33, which was commis­sioned by Nike as a sound­track for people’s workouts. Even though I’m not a runner I’ve always enjoyed listen­ing to it as a great piece of func­tional, minimal compo­si­tion. I’m glad people didn’t give James Murphy a hard time about “selling out”; I think the reason must be that 45:33 is just so good (this is confirmed by the fact that big chunks of it were rein­car­nated as songs on Sound of Silver). If I’m lucky, I may be able to pull a similar stunt and plunder my project for material in the future.

One thing that’s making my life better right now: my new Magic Trackpad. This is one of those products you never knew existed until you have an hour to spare on the Upper West Side and are forced to take shelter in the Apple Store. It’s a stand­alone version of a laptop trackpad, but much larger, and wireless. Its surface is glass, like an iPhone, and you can do the same sort of gestures on it. The thing is also so well-made it’s ridicu­lous. Look at how well it fits next to the keyboard:

Those are some small manu­fac­tur­ing toler­ances right there.

I think there’s no question that it beats a mouse. Even the fancy multi-touch Apple mouse has a tendency to get clogged with dust on the bottom, and it’s too heavy because it’s full of batter­ies, and I also have a tendency to knock it off my desk. The touch surface on the trackpad is much more useful, too, because it’s about twice as big, making the legendary “four-finger swipe” a possi­bil­ity. OK, I’ll stop shilling for Apple now and get back to work. Actually, that’s a joke. I’ll never stop shilling for Apple.

Just a quick last-minute reminder to come hear me play Jeffer­son Friedman with ACME and Craig Wedren tomorrow night at Merkin Hall. The Ecstatic Music Festival is taking over! My life! I just got home from two rehearsals for this show (six hours combined) and I can guar­an­tee an evening of general intensity. 

Now I’m going to watch Top Chef. I mean really, what else could I possibly do at this point.

Here’s a video trailer for the entire Ecstatic Music Festival. I’m very proud that it uses the first track from Shy and Mighty as the back­ground music:

I realize I haven’t written here about my iPad, and several people asked me about it after Monday’s Ecstatic Music Marathon so I thought I would explain. First of all, I did not wake up one morning and think “You know what would be super CUTTING EDGE? Reading music off an iPad”. Rather it evolved during the process of writing It takes a long time to become a good composer.

I write directly into the computer, and while I have a nice 88-key controller and good sampler courtesy of Logic, things feel and sound completely differ­ent on my real piano, which is about 15 feet away. So instead of wasting reams of paper printing out drafts just to walk them over to the piano, I began moving PDF files over to my iPad. I got to like this way of working so much that I never actually printed the piece at all, even once it was finished (which, granted, was about two days before the première). Page-turns that would have been an issue with a paper score are easy when all you have to do is flick a screen; there’s no pinch-seperate-lift-turn and perhaps best of all, the oper­a­tion is totally silent. I have nothing against page turners (the unfor­tu­nate souls who are compelled, usually at the last minute, to perch beside the pianist and arise stealth­ily at just the right moment), but it feels better and looks more stream­lined to rely on oneself. Plus you don’t owe anyone any favors afterward.

I was happy to see a New York Times story on the building at 33 Flatbush Ave. a couple of days ago. The former bank in downtown Brooklyn is home to a rough cöop­er­a­tive of artists, scien­tists, chefs, design­ers and other creative types; my friend Lainie Feffer­man recently laid claim to a small space there, a kind of “studio away from home” for composers, called Exapno. A weath­ered mountain-man named Al holds the place down, and fills it with his collec­tion of salvaged furni­ture and other urban archi­tec­tural detritus. 

Lainie set me loose in 33 Flatbush a few months ago with my camera. It’s a fasci­nat­ing space, made more wonder­ful by the vast and random assort­ment of activ­i­ties going inside it (and on top of it). Here are some of my favorite photos from that afternoon. 

My website’s done. I just flipped the switch on the Visuals page at long last, and took away the little beta thing on the logo. You can now scroll endlessly back and forth through some of my favorite photos, drawings, and other miscel­lany from the past several years. Great for “visual learners.”

I’m in Houston, finish­ing up a piece for my friend Maggie, who will play it in Pasadena, Cali­for­nia in February. Pasadena is the ances­tral home of one of my pianos. 

Somehow I can’t bring myself to set entire poems. The Maggie piece is just a couple of lines by Hart Crane (with repe­ti­tion, of course). One of the reasons most “art song” (for want of a better term) is unsat­is­fy­ing to me is the dutiful tele­ol­ogy of it— here’s the poem, set it to music, and when you get to the end, you’re done. Poetic form is almost always differ­ent from musical form, and letting one dictate the other seems to me like a huge cop-out. 

This is the first time I’ve incor­po­rated live elec­tron­ics into a piece— in this case, a looping pedal. Maggie sings the piece over her own live, looped bass accom­pa­ni­ment. Looping Pedal Music is another one of those Niches of Modern Compo­si­tion that almost always feels lacking in some way. A pretty musical loop is another crutch, like a poem, that can provide an easy form, but the music ends up a strange combi­na­tion of direc­tion­less and predictable. (The huge excep­tion to this is of course Ingram Marshal­l’s music, which incor­po­rates live elec­tronic elements in a beau­ti­fully unself­con­scious and seamless way). Using a loop as the basis of a piece can be compared to using a passacaglia, or chaccone, or any other type of repeat­ing ground, except that once you’ve set it running, it’s very diffi­cult (if not impos­si­ble) to alter it. This rules out most of the inter­est­ing things you can do with such a tech­nique— trans­for­ma­tions, distor­tions, and other deviations. 

I think I’ve justi­fied the use of loops to myself in this partic­u­lar piece, but in the process, made things a lot harder on Maggie; she’ll have to set and reset multiple loops on top of each other several times through­out the piece, while singing and playing the bass, that most unwieldy of instru­ments. It’s going to involve some fancy footwork, that’s for sure. 

My brother Guthrie has been live-tweeting the current blizzard, which I think makes him the first person in history to attempt such a feat of mete­o­ro­log­i­cal hilarity. Though maybe they do it all the time in New Hamp­shire, I just don’t know. What with all the stories of pond-skating, drift-shov­el­ing, and snow-homuncu­lus-making crowding all of my news sources (facebook, twitter, and nytimes.com) I’m starting to feel rather left out. We’ve been attempt­ing our own versions of winter­time activ­i­ties here: tried out the skating rink at Discov­ery Green, a poor showing; our attempt to build a ginger­bread house turned out better, if a bit rough around the edges. 

At least winter makes for much better biking here! I’m happily tooling around on a borrowed Cannon­dale, thankful that I need not invest in studded snow tires. Those things are expen­sive! Sadly, drivers in Houston are quite unac­cus­tomed to encoun­ters with law-abiding cyclists; even on streets with bike lanes and “share the road” signs, I hear “get off the road!” (and other choice epithets) much more often than on the suppos­edly-rough streets of NYC. 

I’m also happy because I think I may have just found my own Niche of Modern Compo­si­tion: wheel-building! I may not know how to tune my own piano, but perhaps I’ll soon learn how to achieve melo­di­ous spoke tension.

Schu­man­n’s 200^th birthday is come and gone, and here are our esteemed critics recom­mend­ing the same old stuff. And admit­ting that they have “mixed feelings” (for a while I was friends with Clara Schumann on Facebook, who I believe was in an “It’s compli­cated” rela­tion­ship with Robert). Will Schumann forever be the “middle child” of German Roman­tics? Do we have to wait another century before people learn to love the piano trios, the Märch­en­erzäh­lun­gen, and the Gesänge der Frühe? I kind of feel as if this isn’t my job— to tell people to check out Robert Schumann, of all people— but here are some of my favorite recordings:

Actually forget the record­ings. Just buy this and sit yourself down at the piano (or find a friend to do it) and you’ll be happy.