a page from my sketch­book which became House Work.

This Sunday, August 30^th, my new clarinet quintet House Work will premiere on YouTube. I was lucky to be intro­duced to the Pogoss­ian family in Los Angeles (remotely, of course) by Jay and Helen Schlicht­ing, who suggested I write some­thing for them to learn and record during quar­an­tine, since all of our musical summer plans had been cancelled. The piece that resulted is a pocket theme-and-variations—lots of activity packed into a small space, befit­ting a family of five. We conducted rehearsals remotely over the past few weeks, then Jay (renais­sance man that he is) filmed and recorded it as part of an online concert along­side music by Coleridge-Taylor and Bartók. I’m thrilled with how the piece is sounding in the Pogoss­ian family’s capable hands, and excited to share it with you all come Sunday, August 30 at 10pm EDT / 7pm PDT.

I’ve loved Ann Southam’s Glass Houses ever since I heard pianist Sarah Cahill play one years ago. The music finds an ecstatic joy in severe, repeat­ing struc­tures, a quality it shares with much of my favorite mini­mal­ist art (as it turns out, the ‘Glass’ in the title was partly an homage to Philip’s music). One can also hear the influ­ence of East-coast fiddle music in the bright, nimble melodies arranged in strophic phrases. But the trick of the pieces lies in the way they are notated, with inde­pen­dent hands; the left hand repeats an unchang­ing pattern through­out, while the right cycles through the melodies, which are completely inde­pen­dent metri­cally, there­fore lining up a differ­ent way each time. To execute this requires a level of brain division I don’t think I’ve had to do before. I spent days doggedly stum­bling through no. 14 before I was able to play even the first couple of patterns without derail­ing myself.

This week’s video pairing traces its roots back to 2013, when Bruce Levingston asked me to write him a nocturne for piano. I’d coin­ci­den­tally been “redis­cov­er­ing” Chopin around that time (in pieces such as Old Friend)—I think most piano students, even tangen­tial ones like me, suffer from over­ex­po­sure after awhile.

As an adult, I find myself drawn to the subtler, more radical pieces—the Nocturnes and Mazurkas in place of Ballades and Etudes. I’m partic­u­larly amazed by how consis­tently surpris­ing the music is, despite its famil­iar­ity and conven­tional forms. I was partic­u­larly taken with the coda of Op. 48 no. 2, a long, slow, chro­matic descent into the tonic, which feels tragic in a way that’s out of propor­tion to the scale of the piece. I wanted that same chro­matic under­pin­ning to act as a struc­ture for Heavy Sleep, tugging it downward even as it ranges widely over the keyboard.

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.

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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.

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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