We need a work song about working on Work Songs.

Begin­ning to realize that I dislike repeat signs, nota­tion­ally and concep­tu­ally. They are tiny worm­holes in music during which I seem to give up on anything inter­pre­tive; I don’t know what to do with them. 

I some­times feel a creeping dissat­is­fac­tion with my perfor­mances of the first section of Kreis­le­ri­ana (and yes, I realize my obses­sion with Kreis­le­ri­ana)—even when the phrases were phrased, the notes hit accu­rately, and the pedaling clean, the overall form had an inap­pro­pri­ately sing-song quality, the over-neatness of rhymed couplets. The relent­less modu­la­tions and impul­sive rhythms felt pinned down. 

The problem, I think, is with the little air-spaces between repeats—between achieve­ment of the high D and return to the initial A—during which the whole thing slackens and comes tumbling down; the visual disrup­tion of moving one’s eyes back­wards over a chunk of music becomes a few millisec­onds of help­less­ness. My theory is that this all could have been avoided by writing out the repeats, so the music was simply contin­u­ous, which of course is how it should sound.

Accord­ing to a global search of my iMessage database:

• you don’t have a laptop.
• you don’t have to justify your evils to me.
• you don’t have a printer?
• you don’t have to punish yourself :)
• you don’t have that problem
• you don’t have a performance?
• you don’t have this problem, do you?
• you don’t have my extra rugs, do you?
• you don’t have to fuck to be a fucker.
• you don’t have a score, do you?
• you don’t have to worry about how you stuff it in your pocket.
• you don’t have to drank.
• you don’t have to give me a comp.
• you don’t have 5 seconds to respond saying “sorry i’m busy”
• you don’t have an iPad
• you don’t have any interest in selling a tux, do you?
• you don’t have almonds?
• you don’t have an iPhone 5?
• you don’t have to say why.
• you don’t have a Japanese girlfriend
• you don’t have to come all the way here :)
• you don’t have to make your own quesadilla
• you don’t have to tell me
• you don’t have HIV
• you don’t have to kill them to get the feathers!
• you don’t have to thank John Adams.
• you don’t have to go to school tomorrow!
• you don’t have iOS 7 on your iPhone?
• you don’t have a toilet-side table?
• you don’t have your songs played on the radio
• you don’t have to wait an extra month
• you don’t have to get on a plane
• you don’t have a thermometer.
• you don’t have a big ego?
• you don’t have any money?
• you don’t have to write them out, but they’re confus­ing how you’ve got them

Leaving town tomorrow for a three-stop tour of sorts. First, it’s Univer­sity of Notre Dame for the première of Auster­ity Measures, a 25-minute quartet for Third Coast Percus­sion. I’ve written briefly about the piece here.

Next I’m meeting Gabe(riel Kahane) in Vancou­ver for two nights on the Push Festival, presented by Music On Main. We’ll be doing our two pianos/song and dance routine, featur­ing our own music along­side songs and pieces by Britten, Ives, Adès, Norman, Schumann, Schubert, and Bach.

And finally to Boston, to witness Kirill Gerstein at Jordan Hall. He’ll be playing my Old Friend, as well as music by upstarts Modest Mussorgsky and Robert Schumann. It’s the Boston première!

I’ve been happy to see Woody Guthrie’s list of “New Years Rulin’s” being shared widely online—not just because it’s quite a worthy list, but because over the summer I set the whole thing to music, as the conclu­sion of a new piece called Work Songs. The set is written for three singers: Becca Stevens, Gabriel Kahane, and Ted Hearne (who leads “Rulins” with some savage high C’s)—all playing instru­ments, and backed up by Nathan Koci on accor­dion and me on piano. It’ll be premièred in March at the Ecstatic Music Festival in New York and Liquid Music in St. Paul.

The follow­ing is an article I wrote for Fort­night Journal in Spring 2012, during the course of writing Old Friend for the pianist Kirill Gerstein. Since Fort­night is now defunct, they’ve kindly given me permis­sion to re-publish it here.

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It’s not quite a convic­tion, more of a nagging suspi­cion, that I get each time I’m faced with the task of writing a new piece: it’s finally happened, the jig’s up, you’ve alto­gether run out of ideas. Oh well, it was nice while it lasted. 

There are plenty of histor­i­cal examples of composers who actually did “run out of ideas”. Aaron Copland spent his last two decades conduct­ing his own previous works; Charles Ives was stymied working on his wildly imprac­ti­ca­ble Universe Symphony, falling silent for the follow­ing 35 years; around the same time, Sibelius’s inabil­ity to complete an eighth symphony cast the last 30 years of his life into self-destruc­tive depres­sion. The pop world can be even harsher; there’s a kind of critical glee when an artist fails to live up to the creative promise of their 20’s.

There’s some­thing about being a composer which feels slightly fraud­u­lent. It’s a far less Promethean occu­pa­tion than the “composer” of popular conscious­ness. Writing music is more like refash­ion­ing some­thing which already existed, had always existed; it’s making a suffi­ciently unrec­og­niz­able collage out of other peoples’ mate­ri­als. Adding to this percep­tion is the fact that it can be so much fun (people pay me to do this?) and that much of the process doesn’t feel like “work” in the tradi­tional sense, at least not how I do it. 

This week’s “work” is starting on a new piece for solo piano. Again, by all appear­ances, I am not exactly working, but instead playing through Chopin’s third Scherzo rather badly. I am enjoying myself immensely. Sight-reading, as opposed to goal-oriented prac­tic­ing, is very freeing. You don’t have to stop and sort out all the little tech­ni­cal problems of learning a piece, instead you just revel in its partic­u­lar world, enjoy the sounds of the piano, the blocky chords and approx­i­mated arpeg­gios. In the moment, you manage to convince yourself of the bril­liance of your own seat-of-the-pants interpretation—yes, that’s how Chopin meant for it to be played!—even though you’ve put in no careful thought and consid­er­a­tion, only tried one of a thousand possi­bil­i­ties. In the Chopin Scherzo, my “reve­la­tion” is to take absolutely no liber­ties with the tempo—I’m playing every rhythm exactly as notated. This is the kind of extrem­ist approach that may even­tu­ally lead to a useful approach to the piece, but in its unadul­ter­ated form sounds more like a stubborn bulldozer. 

Still, the bull­dozer approach has some merit—particularly in the middle section, where that beau­ti­ful block chord chorale alter­nates with fantas­tic-sounding descend­ing arpeg­gios from the top of the keyboard. Under­stand­ably, most pianists I’ve heard take their time here; it’s a deeply expres­sive passage, full of satis­fy­ing harmonic shifts and suspen­sions (little held-over notes which, when added to an unsus­pect­ing chord, make it sound even better—like harmonic salt). The disad­van­tage of all this swooning is that one loses the sense of forward momentum. It’s just chords and arpeg­gios randomly situated in time, rather than a long melody stretched over a harmonic progres­sion leading to an inevitable conclu­sion. Some rhythmic disci­pline seems to be in order. 

continue reading →

Very few things require embed­ding in this website more urgently than the above video, from Andrew Yee of the Attacca Quartet.

Broadway World:

…highly antic­i­pated West Coast premiere of Timothy Andres’ [sic] humorous Bathtub Shrine…

Humorous for an elegy written in memory of a conduc­tor who died of AIDS at age 36, that is. Yup, a real laugh riot.