Here is a liner note I wrote to accom­pany the album An Economy of Means by fellow Sleeping Giant Robert Honstein.

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Robert Honstein has always found hidden pathos in clean, well-lighted places. 

In Honstein’s music, as in much of 21^st-century life, those “places” are often virtual: an online dating site, an inbox full of missed connec­tions and mistaken iden­ti­ties, even the internal commu­ni­ca­tion channels between comput­ers them­selves. His pieces have titles like Alone Together, Talking In Circles, Why are you not answer­ing?—prosaic language stripped of context, hinting at unseen depths of alienation. 

But isola­tion can also be an end in itself, spare­ness an aesthetic impetus. This is the terri­tory of An Economy of Means: a piece for solo vibra­phone, an album, but also perhaps a kind of mission state­ment. Inspi­ra­tion through limi­ta­tion (self-imposed and other­wise)  is the subject at hand. There are prac­ti­cal consid­er­a­tions to this: it’s easier to haul your vibra­phone to a gig than an armada of timpani. But even more so, these two works fit into a long tradi­tion of grand compo­si­tional state­ments built from humble musical mate­ri­als, stretch­ing from Bach’s epigram­matic fugue subjects to Stravinsky’s stylized banal­i­ties and on through Philip Glass’s method­i­cal, cyclic forms. These pieces wear their ambition lightly, as if to say: more econom­i­cal means to greater ends. 

Writing music for a single performer is another form of limi­ta­tion. No matter how many char­ac­ters the soloist strives to embody, every­thing remains, in a sense, mono­logue. This can be turned to an advan­tage, though, and a major topic of An Economy of Means is the inherent drama of a lone performer tackling a large-scale work. Prolonged encoun­ters between soloist and instru­ment tempt us to imagine a first-person narra­tive, even auto­bi­og­ra­phy, the performer sitting in for the composer. It’s also a matter of sheer physical endurance. If virtu­os­ity is the art of making the diffi­cult appear easy, then a form of empathy rises from watching a performer really sweat (In Liszt’s Années de Pèleri­nage, for instance, the epitome of the Romantic trav­el­ogue, the pianist must dispatch feats of strength and simul­ta­ne­ously embody the sensi­tive Byronic hero. Simi­larly, a pianist must maintain an Olympic grace to navigate the leaps and dives of Strada Nuova.) This struggle can be hard to convey on a record­ing, of course—but it’s not an accident that one of the more athletic move­ments here is titled Cross Fit.

That quality of emphatic alone-ness also contributes to the first-person, diaris­tic feeling of Honstein’s forms. Grand Tour is not a piece about sight­see­ing but rather about a specific traveler’s expe­ri­ence of travel—music written from a point-of-view, about a point-of-view. Many move­ments explore only a single musical gesture. Others progress in a gradual, exploratory fashion, intro­duc­ing new sounds and ideas with extra­or­di­nary care. But despite this method­i­cal approach, the music remains surpris­ing and unex­pected. One reason for this is that one is never quite sure at the outset of a movement just how far Honstein will take an idea. Some remain intimate and obser­va­tional (Passeg­giata); others unfurl extended essays leading to dramatic conclu­sions (Fast Notes, Long Tones).

Much of the music is initi­ated from small focus points of activity: the suspended isorhyth­mic bookends of Grand Tour, the shim­mer­ing, shifting white-key patterns opening An Economy. But in keeping with the scale of the two pieces, these fixed points are often pushed to extremes. Inter­est­ingly, the way Honstein develops his mate­ri­als here does not take the form of Baroque fort­spin­nung or 19^th-century devel­op­ing vari­a­tion, but some­thing more linear, organic, almost stream-of-conscious­ness. Though these forms some­times sound like the product of “process music” (a tech­nique by which a composer prede­ter­mines the course of a piece by subject­ing the music to trans­for­ma­tional rules), Honstein writes that there are no large-scale processes at work here. The dramatic cruxes of the album confirm this: no calcu­lated process could lead the placid swells of Broken Chords to such breath­tak­ingly chro­matic terri­tory in just a few minutes, or govern the wayward harmonies of Per. It is more the affect of process that one hears, the sound of a human mind turning some­thing over and over, trace­able but in the end illogical.

That’s not to say the album is a closed system, free from outward intru­sions. Grand Tour, espe­cially, is highly refer­en­tial; in fact, the music is liter­ally set in motion by images and expe­ri­ences of Venice, a city long asso­ci­ated with exotic “other­ness” and, as such, a desti­na­tion for gener­a­tions of young northern-European aris­to­crats. Each movement of Grand Tour gives a sense of a limited world­view being disrupted and altered by a foreign element. Aimless foot­falls become a break­neck dash through swarms of tourists; outra­geous Baroque orna­men­ta­tion, Neoclas­si­cal purity, and moder­nity corrupt and swallow each other; enormous cruise ships, vulgar yet beau­ti­ful, advance and recede inex­orably; a rumi­na­tive evening on the lagoons turns dramatic; finally, night falls, and we retrace these wander­ing steps, exhausted. In the end, the grandios­ity of this tour is revealed to be a bit of irony, a folly; the city is as unknow­able as ever, the piece only a series of private, discon­nected impres­sions by a single traveler.

If Grand Tour is a cata­logue of expe­ri­ences, then An Economy of Means is a compendium of a differ­ent sort. “Percus­sion” is, of course, not an instru­ment, but a huge category of miscel­la­neous instru­ments that fit into no other section of the orches­tra. In this sense, composers can be forced into limi­ta­tions the minute they decide to write percus­sion music. Setups contain­ing multiple instru­ments can create either coloris­tic contrast or a single ur-instru­ment; here, Honstein stretches the bound­aries of just a single instru­ment (and the tech­ni­cal capa­bil­i­ties of its player), augmented by a large battery of mallets and strate­gi­cally-placed props. The result is a vibra­phone piece that doesn’t always sound like vibra­phone. The six move­ments of An Economy reveal secret voices hidden within a familiar instru­ment, combin­ing and over­lap­ping them like the manuals of an organ. It turns out to be a piece with multiple “setups” after all; they’re just contained within the purview of a single instrument—admirable economy, indeed.

I’ve been antic­i­pat­ing this week­end’s première of Upstate Obscura for some time. The piece (a cello concerto written for Inbal Segev and Metrop­o­lis Ensemble) has been in some stage of the working process since 2014, when Inbal first asked me about writing it. I set her up with Metrop­o­lis (who are old friends, having commis­sioned no less than three pieces) and then we all arrived at the Metro­pol­i­tan Museum, where I settled on writing a piece about John Vander­lyn’s Versailles panorama (detail above) which occupies its own room in the American Wing.

The piece itself was written over the past summer and fall, and I returned to the panorama many times during the writing process. It’s my first concerto for an instru­ment other than piano, a circum­stance which presented its own set of chal­lenges. Here’s a short note about the painting, and how exactly it informs the piece:

The question of what consti­tutes “Amer­i­can­ness” in art has long inter­ested me. It’s a somewhat self-serving interest, of course, since I’m an American composer. But it’s useful to think about. It was little more than 100 years ago that composers started writing music that sounded “American,” tran­scend­ing the Euro­cen­tric pastiches of earlier efforts. It’s a recent enough occur­rence that one can still imagine differ­ent paths composers could’ve taken, could still take. In this spirit, Upstate Obscura is a kind of thought exper­i­ment set in the primor­dial ooze of the 19^th century, when American artists mostly looked to repli­cate European models.

John Vander­lyn was one such artist—an ambi­tious painter from Kingston, New York, who spent years studying in Paris. Upon his return, he formed a grand (and misguided) plan to paint a gigantic panoramic scene of the palace and gardens of Versailles, and to exhibit the 360-degree work inside a rotunda of his own construc­tion, in the hope of securing his repu­ta­tion and fortune. But Amer­i­cans had little interest in paying to see a replica of a fancy French palace; the work was simul­ta­ne­ously too real­is­tic and too abstract to cause anything but befud­dle­ment among the Kingsto­ni­ans of its day. The panorama was a finan­cial failure and faded into obscu­rity until the 1950s, when the Metro­pol­i­tan Museum built a passage­way in the American Wing to display it.

I stumbled on it there a few years ago (if one can speak of “stum­bling” on a thing so massive). I was taken aback by its sheer scale, and also by the tricky way it uses perspec­tive to convey even greater scale. But the overall effect of the painting is ambigu­ous; it’s hyper-detailed, yet curi­ously abstract; perfectly utopian, but with a sombre, melan­choly cast. The light in the painting is a flat upstate New York light, and the viewer feels alone in it, ignored by the well-dressed spec­ta­tors milling about. In taking on a quin­tes­sen­tially French subject, Vander­lyn somehow came up with some­thing that feels American; it seems to regard Versailles at a bemused distance, with that char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally American distrust of anything unnec­es­sar­ily fanciful. As a New Englan­der who has never been to Versailles (Vanderlyn’s intended audience, after all), I iden­ti­fied with this out-of-placeness.

It was that uncanny sense of contra­dic­tion and tension in the painting that started me thinking about it as the subject for a piece of music. My plan was to start with frag­ments of musical ornament from the French Baroque tradition—like loose chunks of masonry—and stretch them out until they no longer felt like orna­ments. All the melodic material in Upstate Obscura is gener­ated this way. Each movement takes those stretched-out frag­ments and points them in differ­ent direc­tions; I wanted to use register, and tran­si­tions between regis­ters, as a way to trans­late the forced perspec­tive of the panorama into a sonic illusion of physical space. The solo cello moves through these regis­ters, just as a viewer might explore a virtual world—at times wander­ing, at times with purpose.

The first movement, “Valley of strange shapes,” finds the soloist moving slowly down a grand, sweeping stair­case, past stylized musical objects played by the orches­tra. The second finds the same protag­o­nist lost in a topiary maze, or hall of mirrors; the music keeps restart­ing, turning back on itself, refract­ing into smaller reflec­tions. “Vanish­ing Point,” an extended coda, turns its gaze upwards, towards an indis­tinct horizon.

At the Vander­lyn panorama at the Met. Photo by Karsten Moran for The New York Times.

Update 4/20/18: The New York Times published a detailed look (with audio excerpts from a rehearsal) at how the Vander­lyn panorama relates to Upstate Obscura.

Brad Mehldau’s album After Bach is out this month on Nonesuch Records. I had the pleasure of listen­ing to it many times and writing the liner note, as follows.

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When we think of Bach, we tend to think of him as the schol­arly artist, a consum­mate crafts­man turning out work after work of immutable bril­liance. But we can’t know the half of it; as a profes­sional organist, much of Bach’s work took the form of impro­vi­sa­tion, and during his lifetime it was the virtu­os­ity and complex­ity of these impro­vi­sa­tions for which he was most admired. As the disci­plines of composer and performer became increas­ingly special­ized, they became separate jobs; impro­vi­sa­tion left the tradi­tion over time, as written scores became more complex and virtuosic.

Some three centuries after the fact, Brad Mehldau takes up this tradi­tion and applies it to a frus­trat­ingly unknow­able aspect of Bach’s art. In the process, he makes a case for a third stream of Bach inter­pre­ta­tion, sitting comfort­ably along­side the indi­vid­u­al­ist (think Glenn Gould) and the histor­i­cally-faithful (John Eliot Gardiner’s cantata cycle). There have always been elements of Mehldau’s style that recall Bach, espe­cially his densely-woven voicing—but he’s not striving to imitate or play dress-up. Rather, After Bach surveys their shared ground as keyboardists, impro­vis­ers, and composers, making implicit paral­lels explicit. 

The album’s prologue, Before Bach: Bene­dic­tion, begins indeli­bly, its falling fifth calling to mind the same interval which opens Bach’s Art of the Fugue. But right off the bat, Mehldau’s subject wanders through brazenly distant harmonies—one quickly realizes that this fugue will not abide by Bach’s rules. Devel­op­ment begins imme­di­ately, rolling triplets pushing inex­orably higher, that falling fifth ringing out from all regis­ters of the piano. Rhythms increase in speed and complex­ity, the triplets turning into 16^th-notes and finally vertig­i­nous 16^th-note triplets, ascend­ing the keyboard until they liter­ally run out of space. The piece ends in the pensive mode it began, its harmonies still restless, finally sticking the landing with a last-minute swerve into D major.

The simplic­ity of the C# major prelude allows us to parse some of what makes Mehldau’s Bach playing unique. It’s an under­stated perpetuum mobile, tumbling noncha­lantly in mirrored phrases. That phrasing, in fact, is what offers a clue. Pianists are usually taught to follow the contour of a phrase by under­scor­ing it dynamically—increasing or decreas­ing the volume in imita­tion of an ideal­ized “vocal” inter­pre­ta­tion. This is all the more impor­tant with a percus­sion instru­ment like the piano, which cannot sustain a note like a string or wind instru­ment; the player must create the illusion of phrasing by stretch­ing the dynamic fabric across each indi­vid­ual note, connect­ing them like the frames of a movie. Mehldau’s playing of Bach does this in a unique way; he’s all relaxed synco­pa­tion, even in this adamantly regular prelude. Unex­pected notes pop out here and there from the texture, spurring the music on, not quite a swing, but a lilting dance—one wonders if he could he possibly be impro­vis­ing this, too. (Inter­est­ingly, Mehldau’s frequent partner in impro­vi­sa­tion Chris Thile brings a similar easy­go­ing­ness to his Bach on the mandolin.)

It is just this synco­pa­tion that gives rise to After Bach: Rondo. Mehldau’s fondness for recast­ing familiar tunes in odd meters is well known. He’ll add or subtract beats and frac­tions of beats from some­thing that had been regular, familiar. It’s not so much to make it “his own” as it is to insert a small impro­vi­sa­tional hook—a piece of grit around which the piece’s devel­op­ment takes form. Here, Bach’s regular ³⁄₈ turns into a bouncy ²⁰⁄₁₆ (though it doesn’t stay there for long, either). Which means that it’s obvious from the very first bar that, despite the imme­di­ate famil­iar­ity of the material, we’re no longer in Bach’s terri­tory. Mehldau also throws in a harmonic twist, taking the sixth scale degree down a half step, throwing a melan­cholic minor shade over the major proceedings.

The term “rondo,” much like “sonata,” has referred to musical forms of varying complex­ity over the centuries. All essen­tially combine a recur­ring theme or phrase inter­spersed with varied depar­tures from it. Bach contributed only two short rondeaux in the French style—slight, graceful move­ments in the context of dance suites. Mehldau’s “Rondo” is clearly of the bigger-boned Clas­si­cal-period mold, though he inverts the form’s order; the recur­ring theme is not the one we hear first (the odd-meter Bach) but the original one that follows—a playful act of deference.

One of the diffi­cul­ties presented by Bach’s keyboard music is its blithe disre­gard for the primacy of either hand. In the vast majority of keyboard writing, the right hand plays the melody while the left fills out the harmonies with a simple, repet­i­tive accom­pa­ni­ment. Not so in Bach—his coun­ter­point is equal-oppor­tu­nity and all-encom­pass­ing. Just as his harmonic struc­tures arise from melodic inter­play, his keyboard tech­nique evidently evolved to suit his compo­si­tional purposes (his obituary made a point to mention that “all his fingers were equally prac­ticed”). Mehldau, simi­larly, is known for his catholic voicings. If you’ve listened to him impro­vise on Smells Like Teen Spirit or Black­bird, you’ll have noticed an effect similar to the treat­ment of a fugue subject or Lutheran chorale tune in Bach, the melodies emerging from active textures in the tenor or alto voice, plucked out by alter­nat­ing thumbs. This ability to simul­ta­ne­ously think and play in separate, inter­lock­ing layers ties his craft directly back to the Baroque tradi­tion. He approaches the piano not as a mono­lithic row of similar buttons, but as all the manuals of the organ combined. One has the sense that if the piano had a pedal keyboard, he’d make good use of that, too.

In addition to his work as a composer and performer, Bach was also an educator, and much of his music comes from this didactic (and auto-didactic) impulse. The Well-Tempered Clavier is such a work. But the cycle is no dry textbook; its inspi­ra­tion is propor­tion­ate to its compre­hen­sive­ness. Composers have often had special asso­ci­a­tions with musical keys; in his double circum­nav­i­ga­tion of them, Bach seems to have attempted some­thing like char­ac­ter studies of each. In choosing the WTC for the basis of his project, Mehldau casts himself in the role of pupil and acolyte. His compo­si­tions and impro­vi­sa­tions are studies on top of studies, extend­ing that char­ac­ter devel­op­ment, expand­ing the map in direc­tions Bach could’ve never imagined.

There’s certainly a shared love of complex­ity, of harmonic spirals leading to whiplash-quick flights of modu­la­tion. But there’s an equal, and opposite, attrac­tion to the stabil­ity of the pedal tone, a constant under­ly­ing note so-called because it was often played on the organ’s foot-pedal keyboard. A pedal tone doesn’t neces­sar­ily guar­an­tee harmonic stasis, but it provides an anchor that can both ground a passage and give rise to all sorts of devel­op­men­tal possi­bil­i­ties; it’s an aural point of refer­ence by which the listener can better perceive the changes occur­ring around it. This tech­nique is taken to an extreme in After Bach: Ostinato. The repeated-note motto which char­ac­ter­izes Bach’s somber G‑minor fugue is recast as accom­pa­ni­ment and idée fixe; it sounds through the entire piece, with the excep­tion of four heart-stopping bars at the end in which it’s raised to—an antic­i­pa­tory G sharp!—then back to a recon­cil­ia­tory G, which now feels old and new at the same time.

Mehldau seems to take the opposite approach as he launches into After Bach: Flux. He applies chro­matic permu­ta­tions to the E‑minor prelude’s left hand, turning it into some­thing spiky and irre­press­ible, all restless motion. But the music keeps getting drawn back to the magnetic pole of E major. As the piece progresses, that E takes on an increas­ingly central role—it’s been another pedal point the whole time, and the music comes to rest on it gently. Pastorale, too, is neatly divided between change and stabil­ity, its long intro­duc­tory theme wander­ing into nearly atonal terri­tory, a lone figure lost in a land­scape. But again, it’s a trick; in the second part, Mehldau manages to harmo­nize a slowed-down version of the tune with a series of repeated seventh chords. It’s not until After Bach: Dream that he completely unmoors us, letting the intensely chro­matic motion of Bach’s F‑minor fugue drift into unknown terri­tory. Arching arpeg­gios take over the range of the keyboard, churning inex­orably through harmonies as Bach’s subject carries them along.

Finally we arrive at Prayer for Healing, a well-deserved rest from the contra­pun­tal activity that animates much of the album. Gently chiming chords trace the outline of a wistful melody, direct and unem­bell­ished. It is here that we realize Mehldau’s project has gone far beyond impro­vis­ing on Bach, or even in the style of Bach; it’s “before” and “after” but it’s also why and because. To play Bach is neces­sar­ily to be able to juggle and recon­cile compet­ing thoughts, to hold simul­ta­ne­ous contra­dic­tory opinions. In an increas­ingly polar­ized, compart­men­tal­ized world, to study Bach is an attempt to view some­thing from every angle, from all possible posi­tions. Perhaps the answer to Mehldau’s prayer has been here all along.

–Timo Andres, February 2018

I’m playing a solo piano recital in New York next week, my first such concert in a little while. It’s at Barge­mu­sic on Friday, March 9 at 8.00 PM (a reliable, old-fash­ioned time for a piano recital). Here’s a little blurb I wrote about the same program for San Fran­cisco Performances.

The follow­ing is a liner note I wrote for the new Steve Reich Album “Pulse / Quartet,” out today on Nonesuch Records.

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Every composer has a distinct working process, but one way of under­stand­ing them is to divide them into two groups: planning composers, and intu­itive composers. Steve Reich began his career writing music as rigor­ously system­atic as any: early on, the plan was the piece. Some of his earliest, most severely minimal “process pieces,” Pendulum Music (1968) and Four Organs (1970), made pulse both the topic and struc­tural heart of the music: a regular rhythm grad­u­ally slowed to the point of imper­cep­ti­bil­ity. What thrilled in this music was the feeling of hearing an immense object move through time and space, even while antic­i­pat­ing exactly where it would end up.

As he expanded his compo­si­tional toolbox, his harmonies, which had been resolutely static, began to move and develop, artic­u­lat­ing new forms. Music For 18 Musi­cians (1976) stretches a sequence of 11 chords across an ecstatic hour. The two outer sections of the piece, in which the chords are heard in quick sequence, are titled “Pulses”. Pulse and harmony had become the two struc­tural poles of his style.

Over the decades, he’s moved in an increas­ingly intu­itive direc­tion. Typical Reich-ian struc­tural plans—setting up harmonic struc­ture around an ambigu­ously func­tional chord, putting canons in motion on top of it, then modu­lat­ing upwards, increas­ing tension—all but guar­an­tee a sense of musical form: begin­ning, depar­ture, and arrival. The two pieces on this album stretch that template in increas­ingly non-system­atic ways.

First there’s Pulse, whose emblem­atic title hints at a retro­spec­tive of the 40 years. But it is not the piece one might initially expect. The opening moments are pure American lyricism, the sustained timbres of violins, flutes and clar­inets. When the “pulse” does arrive, it’s gentle, easy, intimate, the pulse of a person at rest: open, ringing piano chords, warm electric bass rounding out the low end (Reich prefers electric to acoustic bass, for its crisp artic­u­la­tion). This two-instru­ment rhythm section serves as a core around which the opening melody spirals and evolves. And it’s within that evolu­tion that we find the music’s retro­spec­tive element: those same harmonies from the opening of Music For 18 Musi­cians.

It’s diffi­cult to over­state how inte­grated the instru­men­ta­tion is to the musical concept of Pulse, and vice versa. The unlikely band comprises 11 treble (high) instru­ments (counting the piano, which here never ventures below middle C) set against one very low one. The yawning regis­tral chasm between the bass and the rest of the ensemble creates a sense of physical space in which the melodic pere­gri­na­tions can rever­ber­ate freely. The overall effect is that Pulse is the most vocal of Reich’s instru­men­tal pieces.

Never one to over-annotate a score, it’s nonethe­less striking that the written dynamics of Pulse never rise above mezzo-forte—that simul­ta­ne­ously non-commit­tal and enig­matic volume, right in the middle of the dial. Given this narrow compass, its mono-thematic quality, and its constant tempo, Pulse’s 15-minute struc­ture is paced, there­fore, by harmony (of course) and by contin­u­ous vari­a­tion of that single theme. It can be diffi­cult to deduce sections within music that’s this contin­u­ous, but differ­ent treat­ments of the melody provide clues. Material that might at first seem like a new theme actually proves to be that same melody, but stretched out into long sustained notes, or chopped up into short repeated sections to form a tense canon. It’s a slightly sneaky feat of compo­si­tional virtu­os­ity which lends that neces­sary sense of depar­ture and return while never actually leaving the station.

The musical jumping-off point for Quartet began with a friendly game of composer one-upsman­ship. Reich had been debating the merits of key signa­tures with Nico Muhly (who subscribes to the modernist tradi­tion of forgoing them). Muhly, in turn, ribbed Reich (who uses them frequently) with an emailed photo of a locksmith’s window sign—“keys made fast and accurate”. So Reich decided to write an entire piece in response, one that would change keys more often—and more ambiguously—than anything he’d written yet. 

After the conti­nu­ity of Pulse, the opening of Quartet feels like a bracing jump into a cold pool. Where Pulse is cohesive, even textu­rally static, Quartet is all rambunc­tious energy and hyper­ac­tive change. The piece is clearly in the lineage of 2x5, Radio Rewrite, and Double Sextet—music propelled by strong beats, driving synco­pa­tion, layered bits of those Ghanaian drumming patterns he studied in the 70’s. But here, Reich has chopped these influ­ences into smaller chunks than ever before. The effect is somewhat dizzying. Grooves start and stop without warning, the ensemble comes to halt after screech­ing halt, instru­ments spiral off in differ­ent direc­tions that lead nowhere. It’s all very unlike typical process of setting up a steady groove over which a series of canons play out. The effect is not unlike one of those “Reich remixed” albums, but this time the DJ is Reich himself. 

In fact, listen­ing to the first and third move­ments of Quartet, one begins to realize how close the breaking down of a sample is to the clas­si­cal practice of “devel­op­ing vari­a­tion” (a term coined by Schön­berg, no less, to describe how composers would struc­ture a large work by spinning out small bits of musical material). Even the title “quartet” puts the piece in a Clas­si­cal frame of refer­ence. Just as the string quartet lies at the root of the clas­si­cal orches­tra, keyboards, vibra­phones, and marimbas frequently form the core of Reich’s instru­men­tal combi­na­tions. Which makes perfect sense given his musical language: these instru­ments have clear, defined attacks and pure timbres, making harmonic change and contra­pun­tal inter­play all the more apparent. Like almost all of Reich’s ensem­bles, Quartet (two vibra­phones, two pianos) divides in half stereo­phon­i­cally, allowing material to seam­lessly mirror and layer over itself; there are few Reich pieces in which this kind of canonic coun­ter­point is not an integral technique.

For all the jostling activity of the outer move­ments, the slow center of Quartet leaves the strongest impres­sion. The pulse is still there, but obscured, slowed down to the point where it’s hardly felt at all; the music feels daringly spare, even haunted. One begins to imagine Quartet as a symbolic inverse of, or coun­ter­point to, Pulse, called “Harmony.” Lapidary chords are passed between the instru­ments, cohering into diffuse melodies, which are spiked here and there with evap­o­rat­ing canonic frag­ments. But every­thing is blurred, stretched, and over­lapped. The texture evokes Reich’s rever­ence for the French tradi­tion, the effect not unlike Debussy’s tone-painting piano Préludes; intox­i­cat­ing, even dramatic, but at a remove. This feels like a new addition in Reich’s ever-expand­ing toolbox: music with a protag­o­nist, a private space surrounded by but protected from the world’s bustle. Here, moments of change are less struc­tural signage, more changes of color, shifts of light. Those old obses­sions with pulse and harmony have led us into new territory.

–Timo Andres, November 2017

Maybe this year I will write in this space more than once. I used to use it as a kind of public diary and trav­el­ogue, and then…Twitter occurred? I got busier? I remember neither un-busyness nor life before Twitter; tragic, I know. 

In a week, I’m flying to San Fran­cisco, where I will play in three quite differ­ent things. The first, on January 23, is a show by LA Dance Project; I’ll play Glass’s Mad Rush in a piece chore­o­graphed by Benjamin Millepied called Closer. (Is Mad Rush a piece about the gold rush? This struck me only now). 

Second, and maybe most excit­ingly, I’ve been prepar­ing a new solo piano program—my first in awhile—which I’ll play on January 26^th. The program is move­ments from Janáçek’s On An Over­grown Path inter­laced with works by Caroline Shaw, Eric Shan­field, and Chris Cerrone. Here’s a short note I wrote about the idea behind the program: 

There’s a good reason for all the evoca­tive titles, 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.

And lastly, on February 2^nd, I’ll be joining the legendary Kronos Quartet for a program centered on Glass—some solo piano music, some quartet music, a bit with all five of us, and some conver­sa­tion between David Harring­ton and me. 

The fact that I’m not playing any of my own music on these programs feels almost like I’m getting away with some­thing. It also makes me wildly anxious (am I an inter­est­ing enough pianist to be just a pianist?) 

About to perform Stravin­sky’s Rite of Spring on two pianos at the Guild­hal­l’s Milton Court tonight with David Kaplan, and remem­bered this journal entry which I wrote for Carolina Perform­ing Arts on the occasion of the piece’s centen­nial. Since it’s not avail­able online anymore, I thought I’d repub­lish it here. 

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When I was in high school, a friend of mine got the opening bars of the Rite of Spring tattooed on his calf. This struck me as an entirely appro­pri­ate response to the piece, for several reasons. I can imagine that making a small sacri­fice (a percent­age of skin) at the altar of Stravin­sky could only be good for one’s compo­si­tional devel­op­ment. So much the better that it involved trans­gres­sion of the law (I suspect my friend was not 18 at the time). And the Rite reflected its own badassery on what is no longer a partic­u­larly badass act. For the Rite of Spring is a completely badass piece of music. It’s a musical super­hero’s first display of his full powers. This brings with it a satis­fy­ing type of emotional thrill: it’s Iron Man strap­ping on his suit and blasting off for the first time, and our viscera rise in our throats along with him. We forgive the brash­ness, the arro­gance, because in this case it is truly deserved: I listen to the century-old piece of music and think, I could not do that.

What makes matters worse is the poverty of Stravin­sky’s mate­ri­als. Like Frank Gehry’s chain-link fence house, it’s employ­ing a brutal kind of virtu­os­ity. How did he achieve so improb­a­bly much with so little? Here’s what I mean: try whistling some of the tunes from the Rite to yourself. Not exactly Brahms’s first symphony, are they? Stravin­sky’s melodies tend to encom­pass four or five pitches, not really going anyplace, but circling around the same figu­ra­tions in odd, gimpy-sounding group­ings. Again, it feels almost insolent: look what I can do with this singu­larly unpromis­ing handful of notes. 

Stravin­sky wields the orches­tra like a danger­ous weapon, with a finesse that belies the savagery of its sound. An incred­i­ble percent­age of the piece is scored tutti, even in quiet passages, which make them all the more terrifying—a giant chorus of whispers and mutter­ing. The indi­vid­ual parts are also remark­ably inter­est­ing and involved, an especial accom­plish­ment consid­er­ing the vast instru­men­tal forces employed. A quick perusal of the score confirms that, yes, the second piccolo is absolutely neces­sary, and kept quite busy at that; same goes for the second bass clarinet, the second contra­bas­soon, horns five through eight, and so on. There’s a profli­gacy to this sort of ensemble, for certain, but here it’s not a case of mega­lo­ma­nia. Each timbre is thor­oughly uncon­ven­tional, care­fully modu­lated, under­scored, or subverted—it’s not a piece you can hear in your head if you look at the score, because the instru­ments are used in such unex­pected ways. 

If all this sounds like a rather cold, unemo­tional piece, it’s because, in a way, it is. Nothing is tradi­tion­ally ‘expres­sive’, in the romantic sense, so there’s no heroic journey from dark to light (or vice versa). Nor is there the kind of harmonic telos that guides a listener through, say, a Mahler symphony. Instead, the dramatic struc­ture relies much more heavily on timing, repe­ti­tion, and layering. In this way the Rite works much more like a piece of mini­mal­ist or post-mini­mal­ist music: modular, not devel­op­men­tal. It’s a weirdly short distance from here to Steve Reich’s Drumming (as well as a short jaunt in the opposite direc­tion, to Elliott Carter). I imagine this was what truly disturbed 1912 audi­ences, even if the sour disso­nances and brash, multi-layered timbres were the more obvious scandal. All these elements would figure impor­tantly in Stravin­sky’s later works, but it’s easy to forget just how present they are in the Rite, for all of its sound and fury. 

But there is also some­thing which, to me, sets the Rite apart from much Stravin­sky’s music—I find it extra­or­di­nar­ily moving. I don’t mean this as a slight to those other pieces; I love and admire them, but in a more intel­lec­tual, reserved way. Faced with the Rite I am power­less to analyze. Perhaps this has some­thing to do with the fact that I’ve been listen­ing to it for quite a long time; it can be diffi­cult to gain an adult-like perspec­tive on the things which defined my child­hood and adoles­cence, almost as if I’m still listen­ing to that music with 14-year-old ears. 

I first heard the Rite listen­ing to the radio in the car with my dad, driving home from school. He wasn’t quite sure what it was but he thought it might be the Rite of Spring. Over the radio it sounded like a wild but not at all disagree­able tangle of notes; the colors and the hugeness weren’t lost in trans­la­tion, but I could tell that they were being hemmed in. I bought the Abaddo record­ing on my next trip to New York, at the Barnes & Noble across from Juil­liard. It still sounded like a thicket, albeit one I grew familiar with little by little. 

And after awhile, it began to take that powerful emotional hold. Its affect on me has only inten­si­fied over the years; the piece has the odd property of getting stronger with age and repeated exposure. It doesn’t matter if I’m listen­ing through small, tinny speakers, as I was that first time, or to a great orches­tra live in a concert hall, or watching a minus­cule version of the ballet on my iPhone—I find the Rite of Spring hypnotic and completely immobilizing.

A rather unique collec­tion of Bach pieces is out today on Nonesuch, performed by Chris Thile, Yo-Yo Ma, and Edgar Meyer. I had the pleasure of writing a liner note for the album, as follow.

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Put any random combi­na­tion of musi­cians in a room together, and no matter their instru­ments, histo­ries, person­al­i­ties, it’s more than likely that they’ll find common ground playing Bach.

This is partly because Bach addressed so many musical contexts over the course of his lifetime. Though he is revered as a protean creator and obses­sive crafts­man, he was also equal parts humble artisan and compul­sive speed-writer. Suffer­ing was not yet a require­ment for 18^th–century artists; in Bach’s music, one senses instead a musician eager to make himself as useful as possible, to find every outlet for his immense skill and energy.

In a musician’s reper­toire, there­fore, Bach is both a foun­da­tion and a pinnacle. You start your training with some­thing from the Note­books for Anna Magdalena, a two-part inven­tion or simple prelude—music that teaches you not just how to play, but how to listen to harmony, coun­ter­point, voice-leading, and form. And you grad­u­ally ascend to the heights of instru­men­tal and compo­si­tional virtuosity—the Goldberg Vari­a­tions, the D‑minor Chaconne, The Art of the Fugue.

In these epic pieces, the performer neces­sar­ily channels the composer through a kind of indi­vid­ual heroism. But at the core, Bach was an intensely collab­o­ra­tive musician. Part of the utility of his music is its protean adapt­abil­ity to any number of instru­men­tal combi­na­tions; the labor of perform­ing is divided easily into voices or parts, each a satis­fy­ing narra­tive thread on its own. The more diverse the voices, the more it becomes possible to tease out the movement of these separate lines. There’s always some­thing inter­est­ing happen­ing, no matter which frequency you decide to listen to at a given moment. The act of hearing the mercu­r­ial A‑minor fugue from The Well-Tempered Clavier Book II becomes a kind of auditory tennis match, as subjects and sequences volley among players at warp speed.

One of the joys here is the extra­or­di­nary chamber group, comprised of three virtuosi: Chris Thile, Yo-Yo Ma, and Edgar Meyer. Mandolin, cello, and double bass are, at face value, an unlikely instru­men­tal combi­na­tion, but this is an obvi­ously harmo­nious set of person­al­i­ties and musical predilec­tions. Indeed, the history of collab­o­ra­tion between these three is long and wide-ranging; they first found them­selves playing Bach together as encores while touring in support of the “Goat Rodeo Sessions” in 2012. 

There is a huge range of possi­bil­ity in Bach inter­pre­ta­tion, from the revi­sion­ist, almost autho­r­ial approach (Busoni or Glenn Gould) to the schol­arly and histor­i­cally informed (epit­o­mized by John Eliot Gardiner). There’s much to be gained from both schools, and, wisely, the Thile/Ma/Meyer trio finds its voice some­where in the middle of the spectrum. Here, drawn in by the direct­ness of the music itself, it’s entirely possible to lose oneself for long stretches, just listening.

The trio sonatas book­end­ing the album are straight­for­ward and direct, with all the athletic rhythmic snap of the best period-instru­men­tal­ists. In fact, through some sleight-of-hand sonic mimicry, it sounds remark­ably Baroque. Chris Thile’s mandolin takes on the personae of harp­si­chord, lute, or even some­thing close to a piano; Yo-Yo Ma’s cello, a whole chorus of human voices and a few centuries of styl­is­tic string playing besides. Other moments, though, are unmis­tak­able musical signa­tures. The rollick­ing arpeg­gios in Kommst du nun, Jesu, jaunty with the barest hint of swing, could only be Mr. Thile; the chorale tune answer­ing it, complete in its shape and phrasing, char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally Mr. Ma. Edgar Meyer’s bass, vaulting far above the instrument’s typical continuo register, gives a vigorous rhythmic punch to the opening subject of the A minor Fugue.

This unique and shifting orches­tra­tion brings an unex­pected trans­parency to some familiar music. Though one thinks of cello and bass as simi­larly dark-hued instru­ments, here they tend to take opposite roles in the three-part harmony, with the cello melody soaring above. The mandolin, so idiomat­i­cally suited to moving, contra­pun­tal lines, keeps the pulse while main­tain­ing a crys­talline clarity. Simi­larly, when the mandolin takes the highest voice, as in the bustling Sonata for Viola da Gamba, its short rever­ber­a­tion moves aside quickly, allowing the ear to parse the maze of inter­changes and switch­backs between cello and bass. Even more complex is the massive E‑minor Prelude and Fugue, orig­i­nally an organ piece. Far from making things simpler, dividing the soloist’s labor among three creates an oppor­tu­nity to show off the trio’s virtu­os­ity. The central section of the fugue is trans­formed into an over-the-top chase scene, cello pouncing on the mandolin’s tail in endless barrages of running notes. This tech­nique, called hocket, in which musi­cians inter­rupt each other at just the right moment to form a contin­u­ous musical line, is found in every­thing from central African Pygmy music to the work of the contem­po­rary Dutch composer Louis Andriessen. 

Not every­thing is quite so rough-and-tumble. Moments of suspended, almost shocking harmonic beauty abound, espe­cially in the chorale-derived works. In the second phrase of Ich ruf’ zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ, the continuo (bass accom­pa­ni­ment) stub­bornly clings to the same note two beats longer than the ear expects—interrupting long enough that the arc of the vocal line (here a plangent and nearly vibrato-less cello) turns into a sequence of unstable, disso­nant inter­vals on its downward path, sounding simul­ta­ne­ously inevitable and lost.

The organ chorale Erbarm dich mein, o Herre Gott also features the cello as vocalist, though it is the unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cally stark accom­pa­ni­ment that stands out—plucked bass, with Thile now joining on guitar, strum­ming a constant eighth-note pulse. The complete absence of contra­pun­tal activity draws atten­tion to a sly harmonic ambi­gu­ity: begin­ning seem­ingly in B minor, constantly feinting at D major, but never quite sticking the landing. The final phrase ends on B minor’s dominant, F sharp, as if to say, “Again.” Light and shade give way to each other in an endless cycle.

Bach’s music gives the player a sense of making some­thing tangible, conjur­ing the physical out of the abstrac­tion of a fugue or chorale. A musical score is, of course, just a set of instructions—the steps to take in construc­tion, with little spec­i­fied about the finished product. In Bach’s cata­logue, we have an entire city in plans, its cathe­dral ringing with organ preludes, its back rooms full of chamber music. That everyone has access to this trove—and can, with a little expe­ri­ence, will these same creations into being—is one of the most profoundly demo­c­ra­tic facts I know of, and stands as a great equal­izer in an unequal world.

—Timo Andres, December 2016

Another summer draws to a close; here’s a mawkish seascape to commem­o­rate the occasion. 

I spent mine finish­ing one piece (Every­thing Happens So Much, for the Boston Symphony) and starting another (a yet-to-be-titled two piano concerto). I prac­ticed little and gardened abor­tively (you should see how well I do in the winter). 

A new 2016–17 season calendar is up, too, with bold new format­ting that’s kid tested, mother approved. 

Closing in fast: a lovely new concerto for piano and chamber orches­tra that Ingram Marshal­l’s written me. The later part of the season will fill out as things get confirmed. I’m partic­u­larly excited about a series I’ll be present­ing at National Sawdust, and a couple of addi­tional events in London.

I was happy to read Timo’s response to David Allen’s article; it put his comments from the article in context, and revealed that he and I have much common ground in how we think about these “response pieces” (I’m not a big fan of the word “sequel”, here). 

Because much of the article focused on my Beethoven/5 Project, of which The Blind Banister is the first fruit, and because my own aspi­ra­tions in embark­ing on the project did not really make it into the piece, I’m happy to have this oppor­tu­nity to clarify a few points. Early in the article, Mr. Allen asks: “Why this, and why now? After all, in an ideal world composers would be allowed to write whatever they please.” And soon after, he boils it down to this: “The core assump­tion is that many, if not most, clas­si­cal concert­go­ers have a built-in distaste toward modern music.” While I certainly cannot speak for every performer or concert program­mer, I can say that that is not my “core assump­tion”, nor my moti­va­tion in solic­it­ing new music that is, somehow, inspired by old music. 

I’ve often felt troubled by the way the clas­si­cal world segre­gates new music from old. Ensem­bles and present­ing orga­ni­za­tions devoted exclu­sively to new music provide a vital service—facilitating the creation and giving bril­liant perfor­mances of new work in a volume that would be impos­si­ble without them. But the notion of “new music” as its own genre, and the atten­dant impli­ca­tion that it lacks a deep connec­tion to music that was written 20, 50, and 200 years ago, is distress­ing to me. It is a notion that flatters neither old nor new music. To my ears, anyway, a truly great perfor­mance of Mozart or Beethoven will always be relevant, but it’s deeply danger­ous to think of them as exem­plars of an art form that died in 1917 after a long illness. And while yes, in an ideal world, composers would be able to write whatever they please, I hardly think that that ideal world would be some sort of vacuum. A piece of music’s rela­tion­ship to the past needn’t be explicit, or admiring, but I have a hard time imag­in­ing that any piece worth listen­ing to would be discon­nected from it. 

So, that was the genesis of Beethoven/5: my desire for everyone involved—composer, performer, and listener—to think of old and new music as existing on the same contin­uum. And why Beethoven specif­i­cally? Because composers have been using him as inspi­ra­tion, source material, and light­ning rod since his death nearly 200 years ago. Schubert’s A Major Piano Sonata (Beethoven Op. 31 no. 1), Mendelssohn’s String Quartet Op. 13 (Op. 132), Schumann’s Fantasy (An die ferne Geliebte), and John Adams’s Absolute Jest (several of the late string quartets) are just the first four examples to occur to me. Given that composers have been wrestling with him for close to two centuries, I thought that asking a diverse and fasci­nat­ing group of composers to think about Beethoven was sure to produce diverse and fasci­nat­ing results. 

That those four works I cited have roots in Beethoven’s music is not debat­able. But equally, those roots are not the reason those pieces are being performed again and again—if they weren’t capti­vat­ing on their own merits, their antecedents wouldn’t make them so. And that is the thinking I’ve applied to Beethoven/5: I want the composers to take the Beethoven concerti as a starting point, and in their first airings, at least, I want them to be heard in that context. But beyond that, I’ve spec­i­fied nothing—I haven’t asked for the works to contain a quota­tion, or resemble the Beethoven in length, or form, or any other partic­u­lar. And I greatly look forward to the day on which I sit in the audience and listen to The Blind Banister played by another pianist, in the context of a completely differ­ent program. The specifics of the commis­sion will no longer matter; the work will have joined several hundred years of concerto reper­toire. And if a composer is in that audience as well, perhaps The Blind Banister will itself provide the germ for a new piece of music. To me, that isn’t inertia, but artistic regen­er­a­tion: a key compo­nent of my ideal world. 

–Jonathan Biss