Off to New Haven right now to rehearse my new piece for Wendy Sharp and Tema Watstein, Clamber Music. The concert is this coming Sunday, the 13^th, at 2 o’ clock in Sprague Hall; post-concert I will jump back on Metro-North to catch Ensemble ACJW at Le Poisson Rouge playing their new collab­o­ra­tive dance suite, includ­ing my own contri­bu­tion, How to Pop and Lock in Thirteen Steps. It’s just a Metro-North kind of weekend.

What with the frenetic activ­i­ties of last month begin­ning to wind down (last night I submit­ted a new piece with minutes to spare, but only because I’m currently on Central time), it looks as if I may have time to post actual blog entries from time to time.

I’ve been thinking about the past couple of shows I was involved in (the Shy and Mighty release and the two Metrop­o­lis Ensemble concerts), and I have to say, they were some of the most artis­ti­cally and profes­sion­ally satis­fy­ing expe­ri­ences I’ve had in my life. I think this was partly because they were truly collaborative—composer, perform­ers, and presen­ters all with fresh and ambi­tious ideas about what we do.

That said, the follow­ing video of Metrop­o­lis Ensemble perform­ing at Trinity Wall St. is maybe not the most exciting thing to watch, but the perfor­mances them­selves are top-notch. This was our “trial run” before that evening’s show at Angel Orensanz. The music doesn‘t start until about five minutes in; there‘s some pontif­i­cat­ing (we’re talking about a giant cathe­dral, after all, pontif­i­ca­tion is the mandate). There­after, the program is my Para­phrase on Themes of Brian Eno; Andrew Norman’s Grand Turismo; Anna Clyne’s Within Her Arms; and finally Home Stretch.

Fig. 1: 8‑eyes.

Tomorrow (Monday, May 17) my co-pianist David Kaplan and I take to the stage at Le Poisson Rouge to cele­brate the release of Shy and Mighty on Nonesuch. We will also be releas­ing a live tiger; please bring hamburger meat.

Doors open at 6:30; we go on at 7:30. There will be plenty of CD’s there, as well as much merriment.

Also I was thrilled to see Dan Johnson’s lovely review in my old hometown rag, the New Haven Advocate. If you’re not reading him, you should be; he speaks truth. Happy Sunday everybody.

Fig. 1: The FedEx man brought me this today.

Shy and Mighty’s long-awaited release from captiv­ity approaches. Next week Dave gets into town and we start rehears­ing for the May 17^th show. In the meantime, some pœple had some very nice things to say about the album. Quoth Alex Ross:

…the music achieves an unhur­ried grandeur that has rarely been felt in American music since John Adams came on the scene. The language is essen­tially Romantic, but progres­sions such as you might find in Chopin and Brahms are slowed down and elon­gated; it’s as if the contents of an imperial drawing room had been strewn along the side of a desert highway. Nothing is harder for a young composer than to find an indi­vid­ual voice. Andres is on his way: more mighty than shy, he sounds like himself.

Well I don’t know what to say! I’m blushing.

Then John Jurgensen at the Wall Street Journal examined my stoner-music influ­ences.

Le Poißon Rouge is doing a package deal where you can buy a ticket to the album release concert and the CD all-in-one and save, I don’t know, $5. Enough for ⅚ of a beer.

Epic photo of Owen Dalby playing Look Around You with Albany Symphony. Seen here switch­ing from viola to violin (in the space of one and a half bars). There are more photos from the show over at the Symphony’s Flickr page.

I hope to post an audio excerpt of the piece soon; in the meantime, you can hear the première of Crashing Through Fences with Ian Rosen­baum and Mindy Heinsohn playing glock­en­spiel, piccolo, and kick­drums. Over here now.

The NY Phil­har­monic hosted another “blogger night” for its new contem­po­rary music series, CONTACT!, on Friday. I was espe­cially eager to go for a few reasons. I knew two of the composers person­ally (Sean and Nico) and was eager to see what they‘d come up with for the Phil­har­monic; I‘m also just inter­ested to watch the evolu­tion of the series, the exis­tence of which would have been unthink­able even a couple of years ago. (You can read some of my thoughts on the first CONTACT! show here.) I‘d never seen Alan Gilbert conduct before, embar­rass­ingly enough. And lastly, who am I to turn down free tickets from the NY Phil­har­monic? Just a composer who dearly hopes he might be commis­sioned someday, too! (I think was subtle. Was that subtle?)

So I met my dear friend Ted up at Symphony Space. That place still needs to get more legroom. And less carpet­ing. But other than that, it‘s a nice venue for a new music concert, and it was pretty packed on Friday, which was great to see (I wonder if the second show, at the Met museum, where they didn‘t hand out massive numbers of free tickets, was as full). I was looking forward to hearing some music, but CONTACT! wants to be all up in your face about it before­hand, which is probably why they named it that. I‘m all for putting composers in the spot­light and making them talk. But there was So Much Pontif­i­cat­ing. Alan Gilbert, John Schæfer, Magnus Lindberg PLUS Sean, Nico, and Matthias Pintscher; all smart, charis­matic, and artic­u­late people, but just too many voices. They could have cut down the talking and added a fourth piece to the program.

The music on this show felt completely in place at a New York Phil­har­monic Concert; polished and inven­tive, but not too risky. Sean’s piece, These Partic­u­lar Circum­stances, sounded ravish­ing— quite a feat in the bone-dry acoustic of Symphony Space. It struck me as cele­brat­ing a partic­u­lar kind of virtu­os­ity or craft, both compo­si­tional and instru­men­tal. The level of work­man­ship of the piece was so obvi­ously of the highest quality that the musi­cians responded by genuinely playing their best. Sean‘s musical language is very much an “embar­rass­ment of riches” kind of sound— beau­ti­ful details fly by at an alarming rate. I had the feeling of being at some sort of over­whelm­ing buffet and wanting to eat every­thing, but not being able to take it all in. The piece was struc­tured in seven or eight very short, contin­u­ous episodes, and I missed a logical thread connect­ing them, but mostly I was so amused by what was taking place at that very moment that it didn‘t bother me.

Nico joked before­hand that he wrote a piece without any detail, knowing it would be paired with Sean’s obses­sively detailed one. (Their titles, however, share a certain simi­lar­ity of tone; Nico’s is called Detailed Instruc­tions.) It actually was quite a stark change from Sean’s gesture-driven music to Nico’s, which is pulse-driven (even when he distorts the pulse with cæsuras and jump-cuts) and rigor­ously struc­tural. Here, I felt, a more flat­ter­ing acoustic would have done the music many favors; the orches­tra­tion was down­right arid, with the excep­tion of the middle section, which worked up a lovely, Brian Eno-esque soupi­ness. Overall, though, the piece felt a bit pale after Sean’s riot of color; maybe this had to do with Nico’s decision to cast out the violins in favor of more violas, which didn’t seem to adequately fill out the sound. It was as though an impor­tant frequency of the orches­tra had been EQ‘d into oblivion. Of course, this may have just been a factor of program order, and could have easily been fixed by swapping the first two pieces.

Matthias Pintscher’s songs from Solomon’s garden was clearly meant to be the “big piece” on the program, and it had a big star in it: Thomas Hampson. He looked earnest and a bit out of place in his New Music Concert­blax and avun­cu­lar reading specs. I think Hampson is a good singer, and his album of Mahler lieder saw me through high school, but I think he was a terrible choice for the Pintscher. I always have a hard time telling what pitch bari­tones are singing, much less in music that lacks any sort of tonal center, and here the vocal writing was very “generic New Music”: tritone here, minor second there, major seventh leap for a partic­u­larly expres­sive moment. I commented to Ted that I would have liked to hear a more pure-voiced singer like Theo Bleck­mann sing it; the more abstract the harmonic language, the more dead-on precise the singer’s pitch has to be.

Pintscher’s orches­tral writing was exquis­ite to a fault, but I didn’t under­stand how it related to the vocal line or the text (which was set in the original Hebrew). Every compo­si­tional decision seemed geared toward achiev­ing a partic­u­lar kind of æsthetic beauty, in a control-freak watch­maker sort of way, but as in These Partic­u­lar Circum­stances, I failed to grasp a narra­tive thread; the struc­ture of the piece seemed to be completely a function of the text. I guess I’m more of the David Lang school of text setting, where I like my words to wedge them­selves into a musical form, not vice versa. Music and text are struc­tured differ­ently for a reason; reading poetry takes place in the reader’s mind, at his own pace, while music exists in real time, meaning it can control the audience’s percep­tion of time passing. Why even bother setting text if you don’t have any of your own inter­pre­ta­tion to add? Other­wise you’re more of a glori­fied medieval trou­ba­dour, strum­ming your lute quietly along to a dramatic recita­tion. If that‘s the affect Pintscher was trying to achieve, that‘s fine, but in that case, he should have set the text in English, and made absolutely sure we could under­stand every word without follow­ing along in the program (which it was too dark to read, anyway); it would seem a safe assump­tion that Hebrew is not the primary language of New York Phil­har­monic concertgoers.

But the really impor­tant thing about this CONTACT! show: free beer instead of free flavoured vodka. Know your audience!

The first concert of the collec­tive we’re calling “Sleeping Giant” is this Monday, April 12^th at 7:30 at Le Poisson Rouge. The group is Chris Cerrone, Jacob Cooper, Ted Hearne, Rob Honstein, and I. 

I’m usually pretty wary of such group shows, which tend to be like a salad with some weird pickle in it that ruins the taste of every­thing else. In this case, I think the opposite is true; we‘ve all got a lot to say about differ­ent musical topics, and a little to say about over­lap­ping things as well. Chris did a nice inter­view about the concert with some­thing called Compo­si­tion Today; click here to read it.

I’ll be playing piano in Ted’s New Band (which is what I call it because it doesn’t have a name yet; but seri­ously, the tunes are awesome) as well as accom­pa­ny­ing cellist Jody Redhage in my Fast Flows the River. Chris will be repre­sented by his Reading a Wave, which I played on back in New Haven and I absolutely love. I listen to that piece all the time, as should you. I also often find myself going back to Jacob’s

For Time to Pour,

which will be sung by the wonder­ful Mellissa Hughes.

Rob’s piece, Patter,

will be new to me. But you have got to listen to this scene from his opera-in-progress, My Heart iz Open, based on actual tran­scripts of match.com conversations.

The first of two events this spring with the Metrop­o­lis Ensemble happens this coming Monday. I’ve been working to organize these concerts with the Ensemble’s director/founder/conductor Andrew Cyr for probably the past two years; we’ve been in touch since mid-2007, before any of these pieces were written. As such, I feel I have a large stake in the success of these events (I mean æsthetic success, rather than finan­cial); they are repre­sen­ta­tive of my current thinking about Clas­si­cal Music Program­ming. Each concert is struc­tured around pairing one of my pieces with a “core reper­toire” piece to which it relates: on Monday, I Found it by the Sea with Brahms’s Op. 25 piano quartet (which my piece quotes). I’ll be playing piano on both pieces; the Brahms is a piece I’ve liter­ally been hoping to play since I was about 11, and it somehow hasn’t happened until now, so I’m very excited. 

But the thing that makes the Metrop­o­lis Ensemble’s program­ming differ­ent from most other “Clas­si­cal Music” orga­ni­za­tions is that it is composer-centric, which, by neces­sity, means living composers. The industry standard is performer/­work-centric: the planning begins with Anne-Sophie playing the Brahms concerto, and then the rest of the 1½ hours are filled in with music that may or may not have any bearing on Brahms. That type of program­ming putters along without offend­ing anyone, but I think we can all agree that there’s more than enough of it. I think a well-designed program is like a well-curated home; on the surface, stuff; may not look right together (Mozart and Brian Eno?) but the combined effect really tells you some­thing about the resident.

The concert is free, and will fill up fast; reserve your tickets here.

UPDATE: It’s sold out!

Sitting in a coffee shop right now in downtown Albany, awaiting tonight’s première of Look Around You by the Albany Symphony. It’s suddenly frigid and blustery; a haphaz­ardly-locked mountain bike was just blown over in front of me. There’s a strange dichotomy between the scale of Albany and the feeling of it, as though its planners had envi­sioned a much grander place than actually turned out. Bars here close around 11:30; at one, we witnessed an impromptu push-up contest between the barmaid and a bouncer. 

Luckily, there are many friends here: Owen, of course, because he is playing my concerto, with his lovely girl­friend Meena; Rob, my friend from Yale, in town for the ASO’s composer readings; Anna, a composer/visual magic-maker who lives in Troy and goes to RPI; my old Hindemith Ensemble cohort Yi-Ping, holding down the ASO’s viola section. We all headed out to a rather unlikely Lebanese restau­rant last night and were fussed over like long-lost family.

Tomorrow, it’s off to New Haven for the première of Crashing Through Fences, a short piece I wrote for Ian Rosen­baum and Mindy Heinsohn for piccolo, glock­en­spiel, and two kick­drums (which I believe to be a unique combi­na­tion). I hadn’t been able to make it to New Haven to hear them rehearse, so late last night Ian drop­box’d me a WAV file of one of their run-throughs, which turned out to be completely perfect, polished, and ready for perfor­mance, without me ever saying a word. It is so grat­i­fy­ing when that happens; it’s one of the main advan­tages about writing for friends, some­thing I’m also reminded of in Owen’s fierce rendi­tion of Look Around You’s violin/viola part. If you can’t make it to New Haven for Ian’s show, you can listen to it stream­ing, live, over the internet; thanks, Fred Plaut Record­ing Studio!

Photo by Michael Wilson.

I’m thrilled to announce that on Tuesday, May 4^th, my album Shy and Mighty will be released by Nonesuch. S&M is a group of 10 works for two pianos, which I recorded with my friend David Kaplan last February. I’ve spent the past year working with the lovely people at Nonesuch to master it and make every­thing ship­shape, and I’m really pleased with the result. The liner booklet has an inter­view with me done by Ronen Givony, the impre­sario behind Wordless Music and Le Poisson Rouge, among other things, and photos by the great Michael Wilson. You’ll be able to get CD’s and down­loads starting the 4^th. Then on Monday, May 17^th, we’ll be having a record release concert at (where else?) le Poisson Rouge. Dave will be shipped in from Berlin, and an extra piano shipped in from Yamaha, and we’ll play through the entire thing. Come, have a Red Fish Ale, enjoy fresh tunes.