I was surprised by the extent to which the arrival of the Work Songs CDs this week made the album feel “real” to me. I don’t often listen to CDs anymore, but I like having a physical repre­sen­ta­tion of some­thing that I’ve worked hard on, but has only ever existed “in the aether.” It also feels much more generous and cele­bra­tory to send a CD to people (don’t worry, it comes with a download code). Head on over to the Albums page to get your own copy.

Cover drawing by Harley Jessup; design by me

I frequently talk with compo­si­tion students about the diffi­culty and neces­sity of gaining multiple perspec­tives on one’s own music. When immersed in the minutiae of writing the thing, it’s nearly impos­si­ble to under­stand how a piece will feel to an actual audience. What’s more, you’re unlikely to ever be surprised by hearing yourself, to have your own expec­ta­tions either foiled or confirmed, when you know what’s around every bend. 

I’ve been thinking quite seri­ously that the best way around this quandary would be for a composer to write so much music that remem­ber­ing all of it would grad­u­ally become impos­si­ble. The details of each piece would blur together, such that after enough time had elapsed—say 15 or 20 years—the composer could then listen to a perfor­mance of their own work with true objec­tiv­ity and without preconceptions. 

There have been occa­sions when I’ve felt vertig­i­nous hints of this unlearn­ing process, not yet for entire pieces, but in short bursts. Listen­ing recently to a live record­ing of It takes a long time to become a good composer, I remem­bered the major facts of the piece, but found myself surprised by the way certain tran­si­tions unfolded, or how many times a figure repeated. It struck me as being one of my strangest pieces, not disagree­ably so, but in the tenuous ways the chunks of music related to each other, like floating objects in a surre­al­ist painting. It takes a long time is nearly a decade old, but it’s not a piece I’ve heard performed frequently or recorded, which is perhaps why it makes a good case study. I’m excited to neglect it for another decade, writing another 50-some­thing pieces in the meantime, and revisit this exper­i­ment in 2029.

A short bulletin to let you know that today is the wide release of Work Songs. You can (finally!) listen to the album on the platform of your choice—I suggest Bandcamp—and you can also order a physical, tangible CD, which will ship next month. I’m pleased as punch to have this long-gestat­ing, short-playing work out in the wide world. For much more about it, read this post.

Here’s the “single,” to a poem by Andrea Cohen:

Timo Andres: Work Songs: 3. To Whom it May Concern

perform­ers Becca Stevens, voice & guitar; Gabriel Kahane, voice & guitar; Ted Hearne, voice; Nathan Koci, accor­dion; Taylor Levine, guitar; Timo Andres, piano & keyboard

After the past week’s flurry of premières, I’m turning back into a pianist in prepa­ra­tion for a solo recital at Caramoor on June 20. It’s the same program west-coasters might’ve heard in San Fran­cisco, inter­lac­ing selec­tions from Janáçek’s On An Over­grown Path with recent works by Caroline Shaw, Eric Shan­field, and Christo­pher Cerrone. Here’s a “cura­to­r­ial state­ment” in answer to your ques­tions: “what and why?”

There’s a good reason for all the evoca­tive titles on this program, which is that all the works are based on visual images, either real or imagined. What I liked was that all the pieces have to do with differ­ent mediums, or chains of mediums, like a game of inspi­ra­tional tele­phone. Caroline’s Gustave le Gray is named after a pioneer in photog­ra­phy, and is half an analogue to his images, and half an imagined portrait of the photog­ra­pher himself. Chris was inspired by an artist friend’s render­ing of a beau­ti­ful brutal­ist bridge in southern Italy—the two-dimen­sional repre­sen­ta­tion of a three-dimen­sional form, trans­lated into a musical form. Eric’s Utopia Parkway is an homage to the sculptor Joseph Cornell—musical “objects” move against each other in shifting posi­tions, like the objects in one of Cornell’s shadow boxes.

And it’s not known exactly what inspired the titles of Janáçek’s On An Over­grown Path, though I believe they were given only just before being published—it seems likely they were images or phrases out of his own head. But they are amaz­ingly evoca­tive in a way that is picto­r­ial but nonethe­less abstract. 

I suppose what I’m trying to “say”, if one can speak through one’s program­ming, is that the way an artist sees art and the world is not usually confined to a single form or disci­pline. The qual­i­ties that move me in music are the same that move me about a building, a photo­graph, or a piece of chore­og­ra­phy. They’re all related in cryptic ways.

Caramoor is a short Metro-North trip from Grand Central and I can’t recom­mend it highly enough. It’s beau­ti­ful and the archi­tec­ture is slightly outra­geous. I even composed the bell chimes which summon you To Concert, so the entire evening promises to be some­thing of a Gesamtkunst­werk.

If “clas­si­cal music” is a niche market, and “new music” a niche within it, then those of us who care deeply about recent devel­op­ments in notation software must be a small fraction of the popu­la­tion indeed; for us, the advent of Dorico, the first new indus­trial-strength notation program in decades, has been nothing less than thrilling. By now the circum­stances surround­ing its birth have been well-told. The progress of the software has also been painstak­ingly docu­mented. But two and a half years after its initial release, I haven’t seen much written from the perspec­tive of composers about the expe­ri­ence of working in Dorico long-term. I’ve been using it since the first version came out in October of 2016—at first gingerly, on small side projects. At that point I’d spent half my life using Sibelius.

As artists, and espe­cially as composers, our tools matter. We’re using them to make musical scores, which are essen­tially tools for other people. Anything we can do to make our work more readable, stan­dard­ized, error-free, and beau­ti­ful is some­thing we should feel compelled to do. But our tools have to be well-made and stream­lined enough for us to want to use them, too (other­wise we’d all be writing in SCORE). I can’t over­state how nice Dorico is as a daily tool. The inter­face is clean, crisp, and non-distract­ing; fonts and icons are sharp and tasteful; palettes and dialogues have effi­cient and sensible work­flows. All the small design choices add up to a coherent whole, just like the details in a well-engraved musical score.

The process of compos­ing is differ­ent for everyone, of course. I like to write straight into the computer, sitting at either a piano or a MIDI keyboard. And the actual day-to-day inde­ci­sion of compos­ing is fluid and graceful in Dorico—jotting down ideas quickly and then wrestling with them over long periods, trans­form­ing, cutting, splicing, and rear­rang­ing them every which way. You can edit without fear of trig­ger­ing a cascade of errors and messes else­where in the score. The program will never protest about a tuplet; extra­mu­si­cal lines and indi­ca­tions move in lockstep with notes; extra­ne­ous rests are cleaned up for you; beams are re-beamed correctly. Its handling of rhythms is so good that it surpasses mere conve­nience and becomes an actual creative tool. All of these things initially felt, and continue to feel, like small miracles.

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The New York Times ran a nice feature today survey­ing a handful of artists on their favorite five minutes of piano music. (They’ve been doing more pieces like this lately, and fewer reviews—which I suppose is good—they are useful for a broader audience). It’s an impos­si­ble question for me to answer, so I decided to narrow it down: what are the most piano‑y five minutes of piano music? What takes advan­tage of the partic­u­lar qual­i­ties of the piano in such a way that it would be unimag­in­able to play on any other instrument?

The piano is unique in that it contains its own acoustics, as well as the tools to modulate them. A violin or oboe needs a proper concert hall to sound its best, but all a piano needs is its own case. Inside, 200 or so criss-crossed strings vibrate sympa­thet­i­cally, produc­ing ringing stacks of harmonic feedback—a kind of built-in reverb module. A sensi­tive pianist can control all of this using minute grada­tions of the sustain pedal.

I ended up choosing Debussy’s enig­matic prélude La terrasse des audi­ences du claire de lune (or “the other Clair de Lune”), mostly because I’ve had Debussy on the mind lately, having just finished Stephen Walsh’s excel­lent new biog­ra­phy (thanks to the thought­ful people at Knopf for sending it to me). Other­wise I think my “alter­nate” would’ve been the Nocturne Op. 62 No. 1 by Chopin, a piece simi­larly dense with aston­ish­ing twists and details.

In other nocturne news: cellist Caitlin Sullivan has released her début album, which is full of new music from friends & colleagues. It includes a record­ing we made of my 2008 piece Fast Flows the River for cello and Hammond B3 organ. I’m quite pleased with how the record­ing turned out; producer Dan Bora created exactly the “warm bath” envelop­ing the cello that I had in mind. You can listen on Bandcamp or the stream­ing service of your preference.

I’m thrilled to announce that Work Songs is coming out on New Amster­dam Records.

You can preorder the digital album on Bandcamp for delivery May 24^th; you can also stream it there today, if you’re a NewAm subscriber. I’ll have physical copies for sale in May as well.

I’m grateful to many people for helping Work Songs along its winding journey, but most of all I’d like to thank the people who play on the album, and for whom the piece was written: Becca Stevens, Gabriel Kahane, Ted Hearne, Nathan Koci, and Taylor Levine. Alex Venguer mixed the album, and the cover was drawn by Pixar’s own Harley Jessup.

Here’s the liner note I wrote about the piece:

Artists’ working habits have always fasci­nated me—Matisse sculpt­ing in bed, Charles Ives’s Bach-ian eye-openers, Alice Munro’s strict quotas (very useful)—not so much for the insight they provide into the actual work, but more as an ideal­ized template for how to organize one’s life. 

The Work Songs project began to form eight years ago, in the spring of 2011. I had wanted to make some­thing having to do with American song tradi­tions. One of the first musical “scores” I encoun­tered in my child­hood was the Fireside Book of Folk Songs (a 1940’s edition, I think, with beau­ti­ful spot-color illus­tra­tions) which my parents owned. There are many work songs in the Fireside anthol­ogy, mostly about differ­ent kinds of manual labor. I grad­u­ally formed the idea to write a kind of artist-centric set of work songs, using simi­larly straight-backed, apho­ris­tic texts. Some are songs of hardship and complaint, while others are meant to provide comfort, empathy, or possible solu­tions to problems. But they all, in some way, attempt to address exis­ten­tial questions—what do “artists” do, exactly, and how should we exist in the world? 

Unlike a typical commis­sion, Work Songs is a piece I wanted to write, for a specific group of friends and collab­o­ra­tors: Becca Stevens, Gabriel Kahane, Ted Hearne, and Nathan Koci. Becca, Gabriel, and Ted sing, as well as help play whatever instru­ments are at hand—a hodge­podge of guitars and keyboards—with Nathan and me on accor­dion and piano. The indis­pens­able guitarist Taylor Levine joined the band further down the line. Since I wrote Work Songs for specific people, I was able to tailor each song to their partic­u­lar indi­vid­ual strengths. The piece feels like a team effort in this regard, which is appro­pri­ate, since these fellow artists not only inspire me with their work, but help me find answers to those exis­ten­tial questions.

By way of intro­duc­tion, “Art”: Melville lists the contra­dic­tions inherent in its creation (always comfort­ing to think, when frus­tra­tion arises, that Herman Melville felt it too). “Unem­ploy­ment” describes a musician so burnt-out—artistically, emotion­ally, financially—that he is unable to hear the music anymore. “To Whom it May Concern” gives playful voice to a familiar feeling: that the grass is greener on the other side of the Atlantic (ah, for that progres­sive, demo­c­ra­tic-social­ist, Scan­di­na­vian grass). “Poet’s Work” is about whit­tling some­thing down to its essence—a poem pared down to an aphorism, set over a slowly contract­ing musical process. And finally, Woody Guthrie’s list of new year’s reso­lu­tions— “Rulin’s”, he calls them—are as good and simple advice as anything I’ve read. Write a song a day. Learn people better. Change bedclothes often. 

Perform­ing “Work Songs” with the band in St. Paul, MN.

The new Sufjan Stevens/Justin Peck ballet that I orches­trated has, at long last, a title—Prin­cipia, after Newton. Or rather, after Étienne-Louis Boullée, whose Cenotaph for Sir Isaac Newton (above) inspired the piece. Knowing this, I’d been imag­in­ing the dancers as subatomic parti­cles constantly rear­rang­ing them­selves; others, it turns out, were reminded of arti­chokes. Since dance is maybe the second-most abstract art form after music, and vege­ta­tion is in the eye of the beholder, you’ll have to come decide for yourselves—the ballet opens this Thursday.

Update: here’s a little inter­view I did about the Prin­cipia working process.

Here’s a solid list from art critic Jerry Saltz about “how to be an artist”, much of which is applic­a­ble to musi­cians as well. (I don’t know how artists relate to Saltz—I suspect with the same circum­spect suspi­cion with which musi­cians regard our critics. But that’s fine—we’re not their audience.)

I liked the follow­ing chunk partic­u­larly; just replace “state­ment” with “program note”. 

Don’t use art jargon; write in your own voice, write how you talk. Don’t try to write smart. Keep your state­ment direct, clear, to the point. Don’t oppose big concepts like “nature” and “culture.” Don’t use words like inter­ro­gate, recon­cep­tu­al­ize, decon­struct, symbol­ize, tran­scen­den­tal, mystical, commod­ity culture, liminal space, or haptic. Don’t quote Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida. Those guys are great. But don’t quote them. Come up with your own theory. People who claim to hate or have no theory: That’s your theory, you idiots!

Impor­tant things are hard to write about. That’s the way it is. Deal with it. And if it’s preten­tious to say, don’t say it.

I find that most program note writing suffers less from overuse of tech­ni­cal “art jargon” than simply from a reliance on bromide and cliché; Jeremy Denk goes into this in his indis­pen­si­ble mani­festo from a few years ago.

A Thanks­giv­ing show alert: Anna RG & I will be playing a combined set at The Owl Music Parlor in Brooklyn this Saturday, November 24^th. It’ll be a variety show of the best kind, that is to say, a bunch of music that might have vague things in common, but I’m not a musi­col­o­gist, so I’m not really sure (Anna is more of one than I am, with her vast first­hand knowl­edge of American folk music tradi­tions). That is to say: Robin Holcomb, Charles Ives, Hobart Smith, François Couperin, Laurie Spiegel, and Samuel Barber will all be represented.

Last week I was happy to be part of a differ­ent variety show, which was Gabe’s iter­a­tion of “Nightcap”, the NY Phil’s new late-night series hosted by Nadia. The entire affair felt convivial and relaxed in a way that “CONTACT!”, the Phil’s previous new-music effort, never did; Gabe’s deft program­ming and Nadia’s low-key erudi­tion surely had some­thing to do with it. I’m looking forward to playing on another edition of Nightcap in March, curated by John Adams.