Should­n’t perform­ers have broader musical taste than composers, not the other way around, as so often seems to be the case?

One of the most fun things to happen up at Bangle­wood was that I asked cellist/New Music Super­star Nick Photinos to play Fast Flows the River with me. And he said yes!

Here is a photo (by the talented designer Liz Plahn):

Look, that brick wall is all palimpsesty.

There is also a video up on YouTube, complete with unfor­tu­nate sound quality, but here is a link anyway.

Look, NPR has a feature on friend Jacob Cooper’s slow-mo popera, Timberbrit! And it’s produced by friend (and harpist) Claire Happel. If you haven’t heard Timberbrit yet you should probably take my advice and check it out&#8212 it’s pretty out there (also, pretty).

I’ll let you in on a shameful secret: I don’t care for/actively dislike most Contem­po­rary Music. For this reason I’m kind of stunned by how much I liked Satur­day’s Bang on a Can Marathon, which, I’m embar­rassed to say, was the first I’ve attended. (This was actually more like a mini-marathon; only six hours or so. I think the NYC ones are longer, and the ones I used to produce at Yale went until dawn.) Here is the white­board back­stage. You can see that David Lang made every­thing a little late, but they managed to get back on schedule. Right on.

Every time I hear Meredith Monk’s music I am totally entranced. She has a tiny two-piano piece called Ellis Island that I like to listen to on repeat. On the Marathon we heard Three Heavens and Hells, a 25-minute setting of a 7 years old child’s poetry with animal noises. This sounds like the thing I might hate most in the world, but it was actually fantas­tic. (My parents, conversely, were either bored or scared and left right after this piece.) Even the poem was pretty good, better than I could do at least, and it didn’t rely on being cute.

Right after that was Zorn’s Cat o’ Nine Tails (subtitle, thanks to David Lang: “Tex Avery directs the Marquis de Sade”). Actually now that I think about it, this piece is kind of cute. It relies pretty heavily on sudden jump cuts from {noise + disso­nance} to {outdated music genre + conso­nance}, but, if performed well (and it was!) these juxta­po­si­tions are jarring and hilar­i­ous. Andi Hemenway was wearing some serious peeky-toe leather booths, befit­ting her role as violist/S&M dungeon master.

I love Julie Wolfe’s piece Dark Full Ride, because it is loud and badass and I feel badass after I listen to it. Dave Cossin remarked that it sounds like a 70’s cop show without the bass or saxo­phone. Someone else remarked that it had the most “testos­terone” of any music on the male-domi­nated program. That seemed like a weird comment to me. Are female composers supposed to write quiet, pretty music? And then go knit little hats or something?

Then Shaker Loops. I don’t really need to describe this piece. I love it more each time I hear it, and it is espe­cially great in a really tight live perfor­mance. Which this was. It was also heavily ampli­fied, but Tommasini wasn’t there, so no one complained. (By the way, did you know that parts of Shaker Loops were used in the game Civi­liza­tion IV? Because I didn’t.)

Everyone said Todd Reynold­s’s perfor­mance of Michael Gordon’s Light is Calling was a high­light, but I missed it because I was back­stage getting primed for the grande finale, George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique. Not the original version for 24 player-pianos and 96 hot water heaters (or whatever) but a slightly less ridicu­lous version for four pianos and a huge battery of percus­sion. It’s still a piece of extremes; of volume, tempo, musical banality and catch­i­ness (these inane frag­ments will be running through my head for weeks). I’m not sure I like the piece; it’s like saying you like a USB drive, it either works or it doesn’t. But I sure enjoyed playing it, and my three fellow pianists (Vicki Ray, Richard Vali­tutto, and Andrew Drannon) were a pleasure to play with.

A Couple Things I Didn’t Under­stand About the Marathon

There were several pieces by younger composers that were Way Way Too Long. Aren’t we supposed to be the ones with short atten­tion spans and texting and guitar hero and stuff? News flash, unnamed composer, you are not Morton Feldman! Lisa Bielawa’s The Boat, a funny setting of Gertrude Stein, was notably Just the Right Length™. Maybe you should be more like her.

There were a few musi­cians in resi­dence who came over from Kyrgyzs­tan and Uzbek­istan and played tradi­tional instru­ments and musiks. This was a cool idea and I’m all for cross-cultural exchange, but it gave me a funny feeling. Espe­cially when the two handsome fellows from Kyrgyzs­tan came out in their tradi­tional ethnic garb, complete with upright white bowler-like hats. No one else on the marathon had to dress up at all, in fact many just wore jeans and the BoaC T‑shirt. The whole thing reeked of exoti­cism. Musi­cally, I didn’t under­stand the connec­tion to the rest of the marathon, if there was one at all; it’s nice to hear new things, but you can’t just take Kyrgyzs­tani folk music played on chopo chuors and sybyzgys and temir ooz komyzs, amplify it a bunch, and expect it to fit in with a bunch of over­thought, over­wrought contem­po­rary American concert music. Because it doesn’t.

I don’t like being negative (actually who am I kidding&#8212 I love it) so here is a picture of some graffiti I found on an aban­doned building on the Mass MoCA campus:

Happily ensconced up here in North Adams, MA at the Bang on a Can festival. They keep us busy here; not a lot of time to “blog”. Here is last night’s 3‑hour rehearsal of Steve Reich’s Music For 18 Musicians:

That’s Brian Calhoon on the left. At one point I get up from my piano and join him on the top line of the marimba. I love how Reich treats pianists (the most finicky of musi­cians) as nothing more than auxil­iary percus­sion­ists (some of the most down-to-earth). Props for putting us in our place, Steve. The perfor­mance, and my grand marimba début, are coming up on Saturday. (Side note: we were trying to explain to an Aussie percus­sion­ist the meaning of the expres­sion “props”, and decided it is to prop someone up with a stage prop, like a teapot or something.)

A couple days ago I played Derek John­son’s solo piano piece Infinity Plunge in front of some apoc­a­lyp­tic Anselm Kiefer land­scapes. The piece is a pretty stunning showcase of both compo­si­tional and pianis­tic virtu­os­ity, and has a wonder­ful dramatic sweep over the course of 3 and a half move­ments (which are all linked by related gestures, motives, and tempi). You can listen here:

Derek Johnson: “Infinity Plunge”

Right now I’m off to rehearse Antheil’s Ballet Mechanique. This festival is all about testing the stamina of massed pianists; the Ballet is almost more taxing in the few instances I’m not playing, but fran­ti­cally counting the rests until the next time I come in. Funny how that works.

Trans­former di Roboter covers Michael Jack­son’s Stranger in Moscow. Make sure to turn your speakers all the way up:

Trans­former di Roboter: Stranger in Moscow

Synes­the­sia via Kitsune Noir. Beau­ti­ful and strange.

Moving, again, in about a week. I wonder when this will stop becoming a yearly ritual (slash feat of strength) for me. First to Wash­ing­ton, CT, to dump the contents of my apart­ment on my parents for a month (thanks, parents!) and then moving all that to NYC in August.

Moving involves lots of inter­est­ing chores. For instance, finding creative ways to use up the varied contents of the pantry and refrigerator:

Couscous, sun-dried tomato, a vidalia onion, green olives. And a cucumber. And some eggs! It only gets more improb­a­ble from here. Actually this was surpris­ingly good. I love this pan in the photo; it’s from the 70’s (I think) made by some Danes, and it weighs about 15 pounds. Found it at Salva­tion Army for $4!

Also, inner ear self- irri­ga­tion using a MUJI dishsoap pump! Highly recom­mended. Now I can hear high frequen­cies again. I’ve been seeing neti pots all over the place recently, but I really think ear cleaning is more neces­sary. People say I have tiny ears so maybe stuff just gets trapped up in there more easily.

For the past 13 years or so I’ve had these reels of 1/2‑inch tape sitting in the top of my closet. They were made by the legendary engineer David Hancock, the last record­ings he made before his death (of Parkin­son’s disease). I must have been about 11 when these tapes were made, and had been studying piano with his wife, Eleanor, for a couple of years.

Gene and Jason at the Fred Plaut studio rolled out their reel-to-reel machine the other day and helped me transfer them to digital files:

Motion blur. That tape is going by at 30 inches per second!

Here is 11-year-old me playing Prokofiev’s third piano sonata (approx­i­mately six and a half years before I learned what the marking p stood for):

Prokofiev: Piano Sonata no. 3

Here is a little about the micro­phones David appar­ently used to record this.

Here are the Fred Plaut’s micro­phones, all in a pile:

$40,000 worth of micro­phone. And a razor blade!