The album I Still Play is out today, avail­able to hear on the platform of your choice. I’ve written previ­ously about the origins of this music, but here’s the liner note I wrote, which gets into a bit more depth about each indi­vid­ual piece.

⁂

The exis­tence of I Still Play as an album is a bit of a paradox. Each of these 11 tributes to Bob Hurwitz was written for an audience of one, on a partic­u­lar Steinway in a specific Upper West Side living room. And yet here they are, making their way into the wider world. None are loftily ambi­tious or daringly exper­i­men­tal compo­si­tions. Rather, each distills an aspect of its author’s voice to a concen­trated minia­ture. The prevail­ing tone is conver­sa­tional rather than declam­a­tory, though it’s a wide-ranging conver­sa­tion. Large ques­tions are posed but rarely answered in full. If the listener has the odd feeling of having stumbled into an exchange between two friends and missing an inside joke or shared refer­ence here and there—that’s not far from the truth.

Composers are usually known for works that push extremes of length, complex­ity, virtu­os­ity, volume, scope, profundity—the St. Matthew Passions or Rite of Springs of the world. (Few disser­ta­tions have been written on Ravel’s Menuet sur la nom de Haydn, for example). Yet over the course of a career, short pieces written for friends and rela­tives, music for weddings and birth­days, gifts for patrons and mentors, and other occa­sional works, can provide a differ­ent kind of insight into a composer’s voice. These pieces can contain unre­al­ized poten­tial, and have often become studies for larger works. But just as often, they’re follies, one-offs, blind alleys, musical ideas useful only for that original two or three minutes. In rare cases, these unas­sum­ing pieces become widely known, but this is a mixed blessing—Für Elise or Clair de Lune can sound mawkish and banal by the five hundredth hearing, when its charm has been subsumed by omnipres­ence. It’s enough that one almost feels a bit protec­tive of the I Still Play cycle. These are pieces that best divulge their secrets in private—in small rooms, for a handful of audience, or perhaps none at all besides the pianist.

1.

Nico Muhly’s Move launches itself with a brisk volley of arpeg­gios broken between the hands. But what appears at first to be a playful moto perpetuo soon comes to a sudden halt; quiet intro­spec­tion lurks just beneath its kinetic surface. The phrases are direc­tion­ally restless, moving up or down by step, never sitting still for long. They feint towards a groove only to under­mine it with a rhythmic hiccup, an unex­pected harmonic or tempo shift. The first 90 of the piece’s 100 bars occupy only the middle and upper regis­ters of the keyboard; in the final 10, the piano’s lowest A sounds like a small reve­la­tion, as if it were suddenly equipped with organ pedals. The opening theme still sparkles in the treble, but now its feet are firmly on the ground—its chirpi­ness mellowed, its impli­ca­tions deepened—before finally trailing off. A last melan­cholic snatch of chorale gives Move its final punc­tu­a­tion mark.

2.

A few of the works on I Still Play can be clas­si­fied as études, not in the barn-burning mode of Chopin or Liszt, but of a gentler sort, befit­ting a pianist studying at their own leisure. Such is the case in my own Wise Words. I remember visiting Bob at his office during the fall of 2016 and noticing the score of Beethoven’s Op. 90 Piano Sonata open on the piano; Bob mentioned he’d been working on it. Beethoven’s second theme is accom­pa­nied by a partic­u­larly awkward pattern of broken 10ths in the left hand, which became the subject of Wise Words’s “étude.” This pattern is the harmonic and rhythmic motor of the piece, accom­pa­ny­ing a frag­men­tary melody of descend­ing fifths (which also gesture at Op. 90). Having never quite decided whether to be major or minor, the piece concludes, appro­pri­ately, on an open-ended dominant chord.

continue reading →

Monday was the tenth anniver­sary of the release of my first album, Shy and Mighty. It’s cliché to say, but it feels simul­ta­ne­ously an age ago and also yester­day. In May 2010, Dave Kaplan & I cele­brated the release with a packed and raucous concert at Le Poisson Rouge (then only two years old). The memory of it is all the more wistful as Nonesuch & I prepare to release an album tomorrow, with no such festivites possible.

I decided that the best way to mark Shy and Mighty’s tenth birthday was to give it a makeover of sorts, so as to help it to find its way into other pianists’ hands. With a lot of extra time on my hands—some might say too much—I spent the past couple of months grad­u­ally re-engrav­ing the score from scratch, imple­ment­ing all the correc­tions, anno­ta­tions, and perfor­mance direc­tions I’ve added to my personal copy over the years. The old score was, after all, the work of a student composer, and though I’d fixed details here and there, it didn’t reflect anything close to my current edito­r­ial stan­dards or engrav­ing taste. The end result is a more complete and instruc­tive document, not to mention a more beau­ti­ful and easier-to-read one.

Since I’m self-published, I can under­take this work without too much trouble, so I’ve been seizing the moment. It’s all so old at this point that I don’t remember anything about having composed it; it feels merely like music I’ve known for a long time, and that I have a firm idea of how it should go. It is from this certainty that I derive my edito­r­ial edicts.

Along­side Shy and Mighty, the solo version of How can I live in your world of ideas?, Sorbet, and Some Connecti­cut Gospel have all received similar treat­ment, with more to follow. If you’ve bought PDFs of this music from my website, you should receive an email with a link to download the new mate­ri­als automatically.

(It should go without saying that all this work was done using Dorico. If you aren’t at least consid­er­ing switch­ing to Dorico at this point, my only question for you is: how come?)

► Watch the concert on demand via YouTube.

I’m “playing” a concert today, though it’s more accurate to say I’m “releas­ing” it, on YouTube. One of the strange things about this concert, which I was supposed to play tonight down­stairs at Carnegie Hall—my first solo recital there—was that it began with the idea of a living room, and it’s ended up in one. The original impetus behind it was a set of piano pieces collec­tively called I Still Play, which were written for former Nonesuch Records pres­i­dent Bob Hurwitz as a retire­ment gift from 11 Nonesuch artists. Though the pieces were written with the idea that Bob might enjoy prac­tic­ing them at home, we ended up premier­ing them at the big BAM opera house, and they’ve gone on to lead active public lives since; they’ll be released on record May 22.

But of course, for the past six weeks, they’ve returned home, where they’re likely to remain for the time being. When I got word that Carnegie Hall would be closed through at least mid-May, I was disap­pointed but hardly surprised—I’d been dreading the email as I watched cancel­la­tions pile up. What do you do when a day you’ve been antic­i­pat­ing, with an odd mixture of fear and joy, nervous excite­ment, and, I’ll admit, pride, for years—suddenly becomes a regular day? I mean, what do you liter­ally do, in that moment? I can tell you that after sending the news to a few iMessage threads (fishing for sympathy, I suppose) I spent the rest of the evening drinking very good whiskey, and a few days later deleted the event from my calendar and my website. The initial need for sympathy faded quickly, I’m relieved to say. But the disap­point­ment persists.

What I most missed was the chance to share the work I’d already done. I’d devised a varied and inter­est­ing program, focusing on some of the American piano liter­a­ture I love the most. I’d been prac­tic­ing in earnest since November, had put my writing schedule on hold, had convinced Carnegie to commis­sion a new piece, from the wonder­ful composer Gabriella Smith (her first for solo piano). I’d gotten my friends at Yamaha to send over my favorite Bösendor­fer piano for the night. I’d even gotten a very sharp new suit made, which now feels like an absolutely insane thing to have done. But most of all, it was the prac­tic­ing that I worried would vanish in a small puff of wasted effort. 

Inspired by similar efforts by musician friends like Nadia Sirota, who very quickly devel­oped and produced a thriving stream­ing show called Living Music, and Cécile McLorin Salvant, whose live-streamed living room shows feel like real occa­sions, I threw myself into docu­ment­ing my Carnegie program before it inevitably fell victim to the entropy of No Deadline. If nothing else, it provided a project, some­thing to struc­ture my days around, and a way to follow through on the months of work. My methods were extremely DIY—I was suddenly my own piano tuner, record­ing engineer, video­g­ra­pher, editor, promoter. I’m not equally good at these things, and some I’m distinctly bad at. You can hear the record­ing quality get better over the course of the project, as I learned how to better capture my piano’s strengths. The equip­ment I used was just what I had on hand—my iPhone, a couple of mediocre mics I’ve owned since grad school, some old de-noising software from a long-disbanded torrent site.

I wanted to make it in this slow, method­i­cal way, rather than as a livestream, because it seemed like a chance for the docu­men­ta­tion to become part of the process—not only the prepa­ra­tion for a kind of high-wire act that the public never gets to see, but a record of what life has been in confine­ment. It also afforded me a chance to shift perspec­tives. Now that audi­ences are virtual, I could be my own test audience. I was in two places at once, literally—at the piano, but also behind the camera and micro­phones (I don’t think I’ve ever spent so much time watching and listen­ing to myself as I have in the past six weeks).

The music has taken on new depth during that process—I suppose I’ll always think of this as my “quar­an­tine program,” for better or worse. I love it all even more now. Each of the I Still Play pieces is a little conver­sa­tional gem, distill­ing an aspect of its author’s voice into a concen­trated nugget. Gabriella’s Imag­i­nary Pancake is a knockout, not only a blis­ter­ingly virtu­osic show­piece but a beau­ti­ful, grand, sculp­tural form—I’m glad for it not to sit indef­i­nitely in un-premiered limbo, and can’t wait to hear other pianists tackle it. Robin Holcomb’s Wherein Lies The Good has quickly become one of my favorite pieces to perform—it encap­su­lates so many partic­u­larly American musical moods, at once familiar and diffi­cult to place. There’s a piece of my own on the program that’s new, at least to my fingers—Old Ground, which has to do with an idea of a specif­i­cally American original sin. Record­ing it has allowed me to get that needed distance away from having written it, so I can begin to see what works and what doesn’t. The two pieces I’ve known the longest are Rzewski’s Winns­boro Cotton Mill Blues and Copland’s Piano Sonata. Both pieces repre­sent, to me, the best qual­i­ties in American music—a direct­ness, almost blunt­ness, that manages to be at once vernac­u­lar and avant-garde. I also find both pieces deeply tragic—the Copland in a rhetor­i­cal, elegiac mode, a stark contrast to Rzewski’s angry polemic.

I don’t know yet if a concert works as a YouTube playlist—this is all an exper­i­ment. I look forward to being able to share it with you in person. But I’ve loved making these videos for you in the meantime. Making things feels espe­cially satis­fy­ing just now, whether it’s a record­ing or the pork shoulder I’ve got in the oven this after­noon. Between those two things I feel we’ll pull through this.

A quick thanks to Carnegie Hall and Nonesuch Records, for giving me permis­sion and encour­age­ment to do this, to Yamaha Artist Services, and to Gabriella Smith for writing Imag­i­nary Pancake, and to Chris Cerrone for his invalu­able record­ing advice. And as always, to you, for listening.

I’m happy to help trumpet the release of I Still Play, a new album of piano music from Nonesuch coming out May 22^nd. It feels like a bright piece of news in a dispir­it­ing time, and perhaps a useful one as well. This is music written to be played—if not under quarantine—then at least in the home, as I explain in the liner note:

The exis­tence of I Still Play as an album is a bit of a paradox. Each of these 11 tributes to [former Nonesuch pres­i­dent] Bob Hurwitz was written for an audience of one, on a partic­u­lar Steinway in a specific Upper West Side living room. And yet here they are, making their way into the wider world. None are loftily ambi­tious or daringly exper­i­men­tal compo­si­tions. Rather, each distills an aspect of its author’s voice to a concen­trated minia­ture. The prevail­ing tone is conver­sa­tional rather than declam­a­tory, though it’s a wide-ranging conver­sa­tion. Large ques­tions are posed but rarely answered in full. If the listener has the odd feeling of having stumbled into an exchange between two friends and missing an inside joke or shared refer­ence here and there—that’s not far from the truth.

The pieces were premièred as a set in April 2017; I contributed Wise Words and later recorded seven of them (the other pianists being Jeremy Denk, Brad Mehldau, and Randy Newman). The video above, of Nico Muhly’s Move, was made by Robert Edridge-Waks and filmed a few of weeks ago in my apart­ment, where I am now of course ensconced indefinitely.

Nine of the pieces were to have formed the core of my Carnegie recital in April, now cancelled, along with every­thing else. I feel less sad than simply unmoored by these circum­stances. Antic­i­pa­tion of the next perfor­mance, the next new piece, has always lent struc­ture to my life; with these things suddenly revoked, I feel my produc­tive impulses going into hiber­na­tion, as if they’re making prepa­ra­tions for a long-haul flight.

I know I’ll return to work in earnest soon. In the meantime, I’m cocoon­ing, and I’m not too opti­mistic or naïve to imagine this result­ing in any growth—personal, artistic, or other­wise. I live with a doctor, and in a way I’m grateful to be able to simply set every­thing aside and be the support crew, keeping the house tidy and pantry well-stocked. 

And I do, in fact, still play; here’s evidence from Nadia Sirota’s Living Music show last week, in a new working-from-home format.

Here’s Woody Guthrie’s list of “New Years Rulin’s” from January 1, 1943. I post this most years, but it’s never not good and true.

And this year, I’ve got a song to go with it. Here’s my setting of Guthrie’s text, from the album Work Songs, which was released this past year:

perform­ers Becca Stevens, Gabriel Kahane, Ted Hearne, Nathan Koci, Taylor Levine, Timo Andres

Next week I’m helping to put together the first iter­a­tion of the Cincin­nati Sympho­ny’s Proof series, which is happen­ing Friday, November 22^nd.

The idea behind Proof is to use careful musical curation, along with some tools borrowed from theater, to design a very inten­tional kind of concert. My favorite concerts, and the ones I’ve found most memo­rable, are ones where I’m not just enter­tained or even moved, but ones that have uncov­er­ered some­thing new for me, drawn connec­tions between things I hadn’t seeen as related, helped me see the artist or work from a differ­ent perspective.

In the Proof show I’ve curated, which is called “American Perspec­tive,” that means a couple differ­ent things. Most obvi­ously, the audience will see the hall, concert stage, and orches­tra from a liter­ally new perspective—they’ll be right up there on the stage, all together. I’ve worked with the chore­o­g­ra­pher John Hegin­botham and his company to find ways not only to express some of the music through dance, but to create a kind of seamless flow of movement across the entire program, involv­ing musi­cians, singers, stage­hands, lighting, and video projections—the whole machin­ery of a concert.

The show’s program­ming grapples with the idea of an American concert music tradi­tion and sound, trying to unearth and high­light some of the threads that connect differ­ent kinds of music to each other. We’ll hear some 19^th-century hymnody from the Cincin­nati Sacred Harp singers, how Charles Ives fused that with (at the time) brand-new ragtime music, invent­ing a specific kind of American modernism. Tania León and Robin Holcomb take up that mantle and stack even more on top of it; León’s Indígena frac­tures and then recon­structs a Cuban street band, and Holcom­b’s solo piano piece Wherein Lies The Good makes a beau­ti­ful quilt out of refer­ences to country music and American parlor songs. We’ll also hear my own Upstate Obscura, played by Inbal Segev, which imagines a 19^th-century American artist strug­gling to sound American under the burden of European hegemony.

I’m incred­i­bly happy to see the CSO really throwing their weight behind this series, and this show. It makes me opti­mistic to see a vener­a­ble orches­tra pushing against the bound­aries of what a concert can and should be.

A record­ing of Every­thing Happens So Much, the piece I wrote for the Boston Symphony, is out today. You can listen to it on the stream­ing service of your choice and also buy a CD if you enjoy that sort of thing. Also on the album: BSO commis­sions by friends & colleagues Eric Nathan, Sean Shepherd, and George Tsontakis.

True to its cryptic title, Every­thing Happens So Much pivots between two differ­ent kinds of simul­tane­ity. The opening is an orches­tral sequencer grad­u­ally gath­er­ing complex­ity and momentum, perfectly aligned to a 32^nd-note grid. Its mirror image (counter-coun­ter­point?) is suspended, floating, a little woozy; instru­ments circle each other, never quite agreeing, each with its own sense of time. I wanted to maintain the illusion of multiple inde­pen­dent instances of rubato which somehow “magi­cally” align to create a distinct harmonic direc­tion. The result is a piece which feels a bit like one of those taffy-pulling machines: alter­nately stretch­ing and slack­en­ing, but always churning.

I’m grateful for the virtu­os­ity and dedi­ca­tion of the Boston Symphony musi­cians and their conduc­tor, Andris Nelsons, in bringing this dense score to life, as well as to Nick Squire for his wizardry and patience in the editing and mixing process.

I’m pleased to join the chorus of announce­ments for Sufjan Steven­s’s The Deca­logue. Written as a ballet score for Justin Peck, The Deca­logue is an austere solo-piano coun­ter­part to the elab­o­rate orches­tra­tions for Prin­cipia I worked on last year. Struc­tured in ten move­ments, each a takeoff on one of the ten command­ments, the music is by turns pithy and medi­ta­tive, never grandiose. I had a great deal of fun inter­pret­ing it.

I recorded the album at Oktaven Audio with the wonder­ful Ryan Streber at the controls and Sufjan produc­ing. Perhaps most excit­ingly, you can preorder the deluxe vinyl edition which includes sheet music (which I engraved in Dorico, naturally).

Contin­u­ing the summer’s flurry of albums, Chris Thomp­son’s new LP Every­thing Imag­in­able Comes True is out. I was happy to design the incred­i­bly fancy and labor-inten­sive pack­ag­ing for it. The entire sleeve is letter­press-printed and suitable for framing (you can also order a stand­alone print of the cover art). Not to mention that it’s an excel­lent and surpris­ing album featur­ing many of your favorite new music eminences. If you only know Chris as the virtu­osic yet self-effacing percus­sion­ist in Alarm Will Sound—then you need to hear his music.

Art & design by me; printed by Middle Press in Brooklyn

Chris Cerrone has a fantas­tic new album of vocal music out today called The Pieces That Fall To Earth. I was very happy to write the liner notes for it, which you can read at Chris’s website. I’ll also be playing with Theo Bleck­mann and Rachel Lee Priday at the NYC album release party on August 2.

And speaking of new albums: ASH is coming out Septem­ber 27^th. This is a collab­o­ra­tive work by Sleeping Giant for cellist Ashley Bathgate, includ­ing my own piece Small Wonder. In the meantime, you can watch the video for Jacob Cooper’s hypnotic Ley Line.