My concert film with violin­ist Rachel Lee Priday is avail­able to stream from the Phillips Collec­tion this week. Above, our perfor­mance of Julia Wolfe’s Mink Stole, a barn-burner from the late 90’s. I’m espe­cially proud to have recorded this piece, which was, until now, impos­si­ble to hear online.

Louis Andriessen’s The Only One is out today on Nonesuch Records, avail­able to hear on the platform of your choice. Here’s the liner note I wrote about the piece.

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A composer who’s always delighted in thumbing his nose at the estab­lish­ment, audi­ences’ expec­ta­tions, and cultural, polit­i­cal, and aesthetic conven­tions, Louis Andriessen embodies the urbane, eclectic post­mod­ernist. “Highbrow” and “lowbrow” glee­fully collide in his music, sending frag­ments flying in all direc­tions. He’s lived to see the old cultural divi­sions break down, his polyglot revo­lu­tion reassem­ble the lingua franca. 

Despite a riotous mix of influ­ences, Andriessen’s style is often seen as the heir to Stravinsky’s cool, formal detach­ment. Even at its most intense, his music retains a certain emotional distance. “I need to have emotional expe­ri­ences to become a better person,” Andriessen has said, “but I never like to express myself when I write music.” That’s not to say his music isn’t personal. In a certain way, Andriessen has always been a char­ac­ter in the back­ground of his own music, both because of its urgent polit­i­cal agenda, and because it so frequently examines the nature of art itself and the people who make it. De Staat (1988) sati­rizes, or maybe ideal­izes, Plato’s asser­tion that the power of certain sounds can disrupt polit­i­cal order; the opera Rosa (1994) kills off its main char­ac­ter, who happens to be a composer; De Stijl (1985) sets mani­festo-like math­e­mat­ics texts against a musical depic­tion of Piet Mondrian’s bright, rhythmic paint­ings. All these pieces maintain a brutal objec­tiv­ity towards their subjects. 

In this context, The Only One seems like a curious outlier. These six songs feel jarringly personal, as though Andriessen is subject­ing his music to Freudian analysis. Cryp­ti­cally confes­sional poems by Delphine Lecompte trap us in the claus­tro­pho­bic interior world of their narrator’s head. Here is an artist confronting the various indig­ni­ties and vagaries of her profes­sion: “I dig up my talents/they are yellowed and rendered obsolete,” she repeats in the opening song, helpless in the face of unhappy parents and dysfunc­tional rela­tion­ships. Later, she compares her aimless daily routines to those of people with ordinary jobs, “who whistling, cycle to a future that is bright and volup­tuous and also merciful, healthy and hospitable.” She’s trying to come to terms with that common dilemma: the artist’s becoming inter­change­able with—and mistaken for—her own work, and coming up disap­point­ingly short. Compound­ing these feelings of alien­ation is a kind of dysmor­phia; she appears to others as an adult, yet does not feel like one. Many of the poems find their narrator caught between a desire for perceived safety—of home, parents, her own bed—and, simul­ta­ne­ously, over­whelm­ing claus­tro­pho­bia at feeling trapped by these things. 

But the tone of Andriessen’s music is hardly self-pitying. More often, his melodies sound like frag­ments of children’s songs, making light of their singer’s anguish. Bathos and dark humor are familiar Andriessen tropes, that under­score a confronta­tional, even contra­dic­tory, rela­tion­ship between music and text. The Only One’s orches­tra, though tame by Andriessen stan­dards, serves as both co-conspir­a­tor and antag­o­nist, some­times aping the text so closely it feels mocking rather than sympa­thetic. The singer’s valiant attempt at self-confi­dence are accom­pa­nied by brief bursts of brassy fanfare that dissolve just as quickly into diffi­dent ostinati. At one partic­u­larly low point, the trom­bones indulge in a cartoon­ish Dies irae. In ‘Broken Morning,’ the intru­sion of some­thing halfway between mariachi band and ländler sets the scene of a tavern filled with grotesque char­ac­ters who welcome the narrator as one of their own. Yet these and other refer­en­tial moments are mirages, evap­o­rat­ing in seconds, products of a febrile mind exam­in­ing itself too closely. 

The combi­na­tion of vulner­a­bil­ity and muta­bil­ity suits The Only One’s soloist and inspi­ra­tion, the protean young vocalist Nora Fischer. Hers is a perfor­mance practice that didn’t exist at the begin­ning of Andriessen’s career, when bound­aries between singing styles were more rigidly enforced. Fischer’s voice has little in common with the bel canto operatic sound typi­cally found in an orches­tral context, yet it’s equally far from the studiously affect­less “straight tone” voices employed by so much contem­po­rary music. Fischer fuses the hyper-expres­siv­ity of a pop singer like Björk with the cabaret tradi­tion of Kurt Weill, unafraid to push her voice into situ­a­tions that sound awkward, even ugly; it’s easy to see why a composer like Andriessen found it compelling. He responded by writing her songs that sit at the inter­sec­tion of jazz standard and lied, but weirder and more frag­men­tary than either. In The Only One’s title song, the score instructs the voice to progress from “elegant” to “scream” over the course of a minute and a half. During concert perfor­mances of the work, Fischer wanders through the orches­tra, micro­phone in hand, gently ribbing the musi­cians and changing costumes during the two instru­men­tal interludes. 

In fact, it’s during these two inter­ludes that the orches­tral music sounds freer to express genuine emotion. In place of the raw power of Andriessen’s usual “terri­fy­ing 21^st-century orches­tra” are more subtle grada­tions of light and shade. The instru­men­ta­tion still skews to his pref­er­ences, with the inclu­sion of saxo­phones and guitars and a reliance on the clean attacks of piano, harp and percus­sion, but the sound is far from the hard-edged snarl so char­ac­ter­is­tic of his style. Here, harmonies are softer and simpler, the usual triads refracted through hazy mid-after­noon light. This is Andriessen stripped down to his essence, all the compo­nent parts of his language laid bare. There’s much in this music that brings to mind the idea of “late style,” that myste­ri­ous sense of maturity shared by many other­wise dissim­i­lar artists. There is undoubt­edly an autumnal quality from the very outset of The Only One, a sense of its composer having come to terms with the past, present, and future. The willful stub­born­ness that gives Andriessen’s earlier works their single-minded power is no longer the govern­ing force. The Only One is not a mani­festo; there’s nothing left to prove. Instead, Andriessen seems freed to express the most concen­trated form of an idea, then move on to the next one. 

But The Only One still brings tremen­dous focus to its brief forms. The piece enjoys the same obses­sion with its own mate­ri­als as a late Beethoven quartet; simple, familiar-sounding scraps of music are constantly being trans­formed and scat­tered across the score. The main musical motto of the piece is a dotted rhythm, a musical iamb (short-long, short-long) which grows out of a brittle marimba and piano toccata at the begin­ning of the piece. This rhythm reap­pears in differ­ent guises through­out, ranging from elegant baroque overture to sing-song play­ground chant to sickly limp. In ‘The Early Bird’ the iambs straighten them­selves out for a moment, taking on the rhythmic stolid­ity of a hymn or anthem, as the narrator ideal­izes the simple lives and opti­mistic outlook of the “strange workers” around her. But the music turns uneven again as her own efforts at optimism are rudely rebuffed (“grains of sand and used condoms are spat in my face”). 

Later, ‘Twist and Shame’ opens with a jagged, disso­nant fanfare, a nearly-complete 12-tone row. (It’s missing one note.) If this is a coin­ci­dence, it’s a striking one. Andriessen composed using the 12-tone method for a brief period in his early 20s, and never looked back. Are these bars a remi­nis­cence of youthful folly? Another nose-thumbing refer­ence? The narrator, at any rate, seems unable to overcome her regrets. “Shame is a wasted emotion,” she repeats to herself, to no avail. She takes a train (through time, it seems) to sit with her ances­tors, but finds nothing in common with these people, who absorb them­selves in pedes­trian concerns: work, sex, minor aches and pains. 

In fact, the narrator finds no comfort in the corpo­real. Her sexu­al­ity is instead just another chance for humil­i­a­tion. In the final song, ‘Grown Up,’ a symbol­i­cally coded encounter on a nudist beach quickly leads to loss of innocence—puberty, preg­nancy, “outra­geous waltzes with masked men” (accom­pa­nied by cartoon­ishly Viennese music, of course). Though she longs for the safety of her house, her bed, her own thoughts, the womb—by the end of the piece, she seems to have recon­ciled herself to becoming “the grown-up that betrayed my inner child.” That this betrayal isn’t accom­pa­nied by musical histri­on­ics makes it all the more shat­ter­ing. Andriessen ends the piece with a Stravin­skian shrug, a gently clashing chord repeated eight times at medium volume, as if to say: “that’s life.” 

–Timo Andres, November 2020

As promised, my first concert film for San Fran­cisco Perfor­mances is now avail­able to watch at their website. The Youtube video above is just a preview of the full program, which includes two matched pairs of Glass Etudes and Schubert Impromptus.

A second program for SFP is currently in the works, set to premiere on February 25. That one will be pithier and more eclectic, and feature music by Meredith Monk, John Adams, Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann, Duke Elling­ton, François Couperin, Alvin Single­ton, Francis Poulenc, and Sir Roland Hanna.

Happy new year, everyone. Well, new year. Here’s a video I made last week of one of my favorite holiday-themed pieces: Georgs Pelē­cis’s New Year’s Music. I discov­ered this piece on an album by the wonder­ful pianist Alexei Lubimov when I was in college and have always wanted to program it; well, now’s my chance, I thought. I don’t know too much about the piece other than that it was written in the 1970’s for brass band, and tran­scribed for piano in 1996. It has an irre­press­ibly rambunc­tious spirit to it, an impro­visatory shag­gi­ness, despite being written in almost perfect couplets through­out. I’ve compared its sound to Russian folk songs blended up with Christ­mas carols and Keith Jarrett; comments on my Insta­gram point to George Winston and Joe Scarbury. I think its over-the-top kitsch­i­ness is meant in absolute earnest, and I love it for that.

My pace on YouTube has slowed a bit over the past couple of months, but that’s not because I’ve stopped making videos. In fact, I’m making more than ever, just now they’re turning into full concerts. One that I’m partic­u­larly excited about is a recital with the violin­ist Rachel Lee Priday (our Cerrone/Holcomb/Andres/Ives/Wolfe/Copland program) that we filmed and recorded right here in my home studio (living room). That’ll be released March 21. I’m also working on a couple of solo programs for San Fran­cisco Perfor­mances; keep an eye out for more about those shortly.

Tonight at 10:30 PM EST/7:30 PM PST on YouTube: violin­ist Rachel Lee Priday and I present a special concert of American music. Sonatas by Chris Cerrone, Charles Ives, and Aaron Copland; Julia Wolfe’s rarely-heard banger Mink Stole; and two solos, Robin Holcom­b’s Wherein Lies the Good, and the world premiere of my Three Suns for solo violin, which Rachel commis­sioned. It’s a good day to cele­brate American music, and I hope you can join us.

The impetus for this week’s video, my tran­scrip­tion of Stravin­sky’s Symphonies of Wind Instru­ments, goes back about a year, and touches on almost every aspect of my musical life. It’s a piece I’ve known for awhile, and I’d turned to it as an example of “modular” form for a couple of my compo­si­tion students, but in doing so, realized I didn’t fully under­stand it myself. It’s famously cryptic music, put together from lots of little stylized, angular gestures, which recur and evolve in intri­cately nested patterns. But the core of it is the last few minutes—a spacious, mournful chorale based around plain­spo­ken minor-7^th chords that casts the preced­ing music in an entirely differ­ent light. I think it’s one of the most moving passages in all of Stravinsky—not in a heart-on-the-sleeve way, but more like the feeling of walking from a small room into a vast cathedral.

This music, as it turns out, was composed for an album of short pieces in memory of Debussy contributed by various composers, exactly 100 years ago. Stravin­sky expanded and elab­o­rated on it in the first version of Symphonies of Wind Instru­ments that same year (the word “symphonies” used rather self-conciously in the antique sense, to mean “sounding together”). In discov­er­ing this, and playing through those wonder­ful chords, trying out differ­ent voicings, I began to wonder if the rest of the piece would be possible to play on the piano, too. So the tran­scrip­tion began more as a way of studying Stravin­sky’s compo­si­tional process, trying to figure out how this seem­ingly unbal­anced struc­ture stood up so well.

At the same time, I’d begun writing a piece for flute-viola-harp trio, and Stravin­sky’s modular forms began to have an effect on that, too. In my writing, I’m usually quite concerned with the tran­si­tions between things—hiding them, blending them, obvi­at­ing the need for them in various crafty ways—but here was a chance to try some­thing differ­ent. The material still develops, moving from thing to thing, it’s just that the seams are exposed, and in fact, become impor­tant musical events in themselves.

Over the summer, I started prac­tic­ing the tran­scrip­tion I’d finished, which had turned out to be quite a thorny nine minutes of music. Stravin­sky’s wide chord spacings and unpre­dictable layer­ings make for some real pianis­tic puzzles. At times, this demanded some triage—figuring out which notes to forgo, in which octaves, to retain the greater sense of harmony and orches­tra­tion. I thought it would be inter­est­ing to see the musical and logis­ti­cal solu­tions behind some of these, so I filmed the finished version in the combi­na­tion “hands-down/s­core follower” style, which owes a creative debt to Robert Edridge-Waks’s I Still Play videos from this past spring. Between teaching, to writing, to perform­ing, and produc­ing a video record­ing, Symphonies has been a mainstay of my year, and I can’t think of another 100-year-old I’d have preferred to spend it with.

N.B. if you’re inter­ested in a real Stravin­sky schol­ar’s analysis of the piece, I recom­mend this Taruskin talk (though the perfor­mance in it is a little rough).

More Ann Southam on the YouTube channel this week, and more Schubert, at the point they intersect.

I’m not sure Southam was refer­ring to a specific piece in her Remem­ber­ing Schubert. But one of the things about which intrigues me is that it was one of Schu­bert’s unas­sum­ing accom­pa­ni­men­tal figures stuck in her head, rather than one of those famous tunes. It’s from this Alberti-ish pattern of arpeg­gios that the piece gently evolves. I can picture Southam enjoying a Schubert lied—say Die Tauben­post—alone at her piano, at first imag­in­ing the singer’s melody before real­iz­ing that the humble arpeg­gios have their own narrative.

The behind-the-scenes work for this video included re-engrav­ing the Southam score from scratch; the score I got from the Canadian Music Centre was so poorly laid out that I found myself completely unable to figure out which notes were supposed to go where (I have no doubt Southam’s hand­writ­ten manu­script was clearer). The chal­lenge here is making the rhythmic spacing consis­tent while retain­ing the detailed voicings Southam indicated—the moments where accom­pa­ni­ment becomes melody.

Before, L; after, R

I find myself doing this kind of re-engrav­ing of other composers’ music more and more, whether it’s to save space on my screen, make an abbre­vi­ated short score or cue sheet, or simply rearrange things in a way that makes more sense to me visually. The process is also helpful for learning the music; one tends to notice differ­ent things about a score in the process of tran­scrib­ing it, partic­u­larly the various ways composers use slurs, artic­u­la­tions, and repeat­ing patterns.

a page from my sketch­book which became House Work.

This Sunday, August 30^th, my new clarinet quintet House Work will premiere on YouTube. I was lucky to be intro­duced to the Pogoss­ian family in Los Angeles (remotely, of course) by Jay and Helen Schlicht­ing, who suggested I write some­thing for them to learn and record during quar­an­tine, since all of our musical summer plans had been cancelled. The piece that resulted is a pocket theme-and-variations—lots of activity packed into a small space, befit­ting a family of five. We conducted rehearsals remotely over the past few weeks, then Jay (renais­sance man that he is) filmed and recorded it as part of an online concert along­side music by Coleridge-Taylor and Bartók. I’m thrilled with how the piece is sounding in the Pogoss­ian family’s capable hands, and excited to share it with you all come Sunday, August 30 at 10pm EDT / 7pm PDT.

I’ve loved Ann Southam’s Glass Houses ever since I heard pianist Sarah Cahill play one years ago. The music finds an ecstatic joy in severe, repeat­ing struc­tures, a quality it shares with much of my favorite mini­mal­ist art (as it turns out, the ‘Glass’ in the title was partly an homage to Philip’s music). One can also hear the influ­ence of East-coast fiddle music in the bright, nimble melodies arranged in strophic phrases. But the trick of the pieces lies in the way they are notated, with inde­pen­dent hands; the left hand repeats an unchang­ing pattern through­out, while the right cycles through the melodies, which are completely inde­pen­dent metri­cally, there­fore lining up a differ­ent way each time. To execute this requires a level of brain division I don’t think I’ve had to do before. I spent days doggedly stum­bling through no. 14 before I was able to play even the first couple of patterns without derail­ing myself.

This week’s video pairing traces its roots back to 2013, when Bruce Levingston asked me to write him a nocturne for piano. I’d coin­ci­den­tally been “redis­cov­er­ing” Chopin around that time (in pieces such as Old Friend)—I think most piano students, even tangen­tial ones like me, suffer from over­ex­po­sure after awhile.

As an adult, I find myself drawn to the subtler, more radical pieces—the Nocturnes and Mazurkas in place of Ballades and Etudes. I’m partic­u­larly amazed by how consis­tently surpris­ing the music is, despite its famil­iar­ity and conven­tional forms. I was partic­u­larly taken with the coda of Op. 48 no. 2, a long, slow, chro­matic descent into the tonic, which feels tragic in a way that’s out of propor­tion to the scale of the piece. I wanted that same chro­matic under­pin­ning to act as a struc­ture for Heavy Sleep, tugging it downward even as it ranges widely over the keyboard.