news/words

meditation, hiatus

2009-07-06T23:18:00.004-04:00

Been a while since I've posted, but things have been busy. I completed a move to a new apartment, though "completed" is wishful thinking--there's so much to do still, and I'm living out of boxes. Hopefully soon it'll be more manageable.

ICE completed two great days of recording at Mount Holyoke College for Corey Dargel's song cycle, and the group is off until August, when we return to Mostly Mozart at Lincoln Center to do a concert with John Adams. Very exciting. In the meantime, I have so much to do it's scary, though I'm not bound to particular deadlines. A big summer program for Close Range--Schoenberg, Debussy, Webern, Mozart; getting acquainted with the new version of Sibelius; editing for my solo disc; composing; and much else. A few discs have been released recently; check them all out on the right sidebar. There are many more still in the works.

living it up in Chicago

2009-05-29T17:12:00.003-04:00

Just played the first of two broadcast concerts for Chicago classical radio. WFMT has streaming live audio, for those who wish to listen--the next one will be with all of ICE (or those of us who'll be in town) on Monday evening, 8-10 CST, 9-11 EST. Lots of fun to be had. Tune in!

Today's show, with my great colleague Cory Smythe, was a one-of-a-kind opportunity to play some of the classic 20th-century two-piano music I've always wanted to do. Stravinsky, Ligeti, and Kurtag; great innovators who all used the two-piano combination slightly differently. It was a great experience today.

adventures to come

2009-04-26T10:35:00.005-04:00

After last night's residency concert with Columbia University composers, I'm looking forward to what's next. 76 degrees already in New York, and it's only ten-thirty in the morning...still much to practice today.

With ICE, I'm at P.S. 122 at the end of May in Corey Dargel's performance piece Thirteen Near-Death Experiences, a fun and fantastically innovative evening-length pop cycle written for the group. Then in Chicago, two broadcast concerts on WFMT with ICE and my great friend Cory Smythe: classic works by Stravinsky, Ligeti, and Kurtag. And the next Close Range program in June will be a typical grab bag, but it's one I can't wait to play: Schumann, Szymanowski, and the Schubert c minor sonata, which will also feature heavily in next season's concerts.

spring blooms in the cold

2009-04-12T08:13:00.003-04:00

Another busy stretch, but spring is officially here, despite the lack of spring weather. It was a pleasure to be re-immersed in Ives this last month. I'll return to it in the fall, when Music at Close Range has its season premiere (location TBA), and I'll pair the Ives with the Schumann Carnaval.

In the next few weeks: editing for my solo disc, grant applications, a concert at Symphony Space with Columbia University composers, and a few days off in New Orleans.

i'm happy that

2009-03-15T12:49:00.005-04:00

...Music at Close Range is now an official registered trademark with the U.S. Patents' Office.

After a week with ICE of playing and recording music by the remarkable Arlene Sierra, it's now all about Ives. I'm doing the Concord Sonata, a piece which was partly the subject of my dissertation at Northwestern, for the first time complete in a few weeks: first at a Close Range concert, and then at the Bloomingdale School on the upper west side. I'm delighted to find that the music has never really left me. Playing the Emerson movement a few years ago in Buffalo was such an indelible experience, as was playing the other movements individually, especially doing "Thoreau" with my friend Elizabeth Ostling in Boston. The entire sonata is such an incredible journey, a rite of meditation, and a milestone of experimental musical thought.

in the thick

2009-02-20T09:04:00.003-05:00

It's been a crazy but incredibly stimulating few weeks. ICE's stint in Helsinki was great for everyone--beautiful city, great halls and audiences, and we were treated like kings. I just got back from some recording work in Buffalo, and now I'm on to the Twin Cities...as always, trying to fit in some teaching in between. Thanks to all who help me to keep my strength up.

After this, I've got a slight break for a bit: ICE does its Composer Portrait of Arlene Sierra in March at the Miller Theatre, and all the while, I'm brushing up on the Ives Concord Sonata. Good things ahead.

into the blue

2009-02-04T10:00:00.005-05:00

Two days and I'm off to Finland with ICE. It's a long-anticipated trip and I think it'll be fascinating, not least for the music we're bringing there: a enormous piece by Jason Eckardt, stuff by some of ICE's trademark composers, as well as classics from Elliott Carter and Mario Davidovsky, among others. Du Yun is also bringing a crazy new world premiere, "Impeccable Quake," and she's improvising on her Chinese zither for another piece...wild. Who knows what the Finns will make of us, but it'll be really exciting all around.

more than I can chew

2009-01-12T21:07:00.003-05:00

Kids, it's going to be a busy couple of weeks. I just finished three very good recording days up at Smith College for my solo disc; only one more day in the spring, and if editing's on schedule, the disc will be out in September. Until mid-February, I'll be immersed in repertoire for ICE's exciting Finland tour and preparing for Close Range concerts. All exciting pieces, all great events. Just a LOT of stuff.

panting into the new year

2008-12-15T22:17:00.004-05:00

Adventures ahead before December ends: a Close Range concert, a day of recording up at Smith College (repertoire with Claire and solo), and two solo shows in the Bay Area. Very excited to be in the middle of all this activity, and I think it'll be a fitting way to close out the year. What a year it's been.

space age

2008-11-23T16:15:00.007-05:00

For ICE's upcoming portrait concert at Miller Theatre of Marc-Andre Dalbavie, I'm playing synthesizer and organ. The synth part for Dalbavie's viola concerto was originally written (in the eighties) for a Yamaha DX7, but I'm not sure what I'll be playing--rest assured, it will sound funky. I've met Dalbavie once before, when I played a piece of his years ago in Chicago; Boulez conducted.

It was a really nice week in Bowling Green with Claire and then in Chicago with ICE. I was overseeing the inaugural concert of our residency at Northwestern University, my graduate school alma mater, and it was interesting to be back, no longer as a student. Chicago is very, very happy these days, post-election.

This coming week for me will be about learning more notes, and I'm gearing up for a few recording dates for my solo album.

childlike

2008-11-12T23:46:00.009-05:00

A thought after practicing the Schoenberg Suite this afternoon: writing this piece, Schoenberg was like a kid in a candy store. It is the first large-scale twelve-tone piece ever written, from 1925: six dance movements based on a single twelve-note row. Especially as he took the extra step of limiting himself in the piece's composition--using only the prime version and one transposed form of the row--Schoenberg was clearly having a blast, reveling in his own creativity and imagining the future of music fashioned in his iconoclastic image. The Suite is fantastically funny, and delightful, at every moment. It's great to play it again.

Claire Chase and I play a very different twelve-tone piece next week in Bowling Green, Boulez's Sonatine from 1946; the Sonatine is playful too, but Boulez also takes delight in his distinct brand of sonic violence.

Two weekends ago, Tony Arnold and I had a very nice few shows of Messiaen's Harawi at the Library of Congress and in (newly blue) North Carolina. It felt really good to be joining in the celebration of his centennial.

drumroll, please...

2008-10-23T22:55:00.005-04:00

I'm thrilled to announce (along with others) that flutist Claire Chase, the executive director of ICE and one of my longtime collaborators, just won first prize at this year's Concert Artist Guild competition. I played with Claire in the semifinal round of the competition and again, last night, for the winners' concert at the Kosciusko Foundation. I couldn't be happier for Claire, and I hope this means that there are many concerts in our future together. Bravissimo.

dreamy flashback

2008-10-19T01:06:00.010-04:00

The scene is southwestern rural England, August 2000, and I'm a student at the Dartington International Summer Courses. I'm studying with the pianist Joanna MacGregor during the festival, working on pieces by Bach and Harrison Birtwistle (whom I also work with that summer). It's a cool late summer night, one of the last nights of the festival, and there is a performance in a large shed in the middle of a field. No lights whatsoever, and one has to find one's way there literally by moonlight.

The show is the "final project" of one of the courses, a course in improvisation and collective composition. There's just one piece played, an hour-long set without a break, and the effect it has on me is hard to describe. I sit down with my friends on a crate-like seat on one side of the shed, and as a member of the audience I take in what this group has created, a long dreamlike collage piece in fits and starts. It's polystylistic: a section of rich classical string playing followed by a jazz section with fast drumming, then a hip-hop rap, and then a section I don't understand but get completely lost in. It is something like a slow, somewhat distracted university marching band anthem, complete with tooting low brass. A vocal group chimes in with Swingle Singers-like doo-wop asides. The piece is in 7/4 time and goes on a continuous loop through the same harmonies. I lose track of how long it goes on, but I gradually feel warm, enveloped by the sound and by the smiles of the performers.

Somehow, I believe this night was a turning point in my understanding of new music and its performance; the memory comes back to me often, and I thought of it again two weeks ago when I was up at EMPAC with ICE, doing a program, played continuously, of music from five centuries. Every kind of music informs every other, and one listens--really, to any kind of concert--simultaneously with old and new ears, ears of experience and ears which are only in the moment. In the blissful mix of styles that I heard that night at Dartington, I was inside and outside of myself all at once, and clearly, it was unforgettable.

chilly days

2008-09-25T21:02:00.007-04:00

Fall is breezing into New York.

Many exciting things coming up--it's hard not to get overwhelmed, but every project I'm involved with informs every other, and that's the way I like to work. I'm about to head up to upstate New York with ICE, to participate in a grand-opening week for the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), a state-of-the-art facility in Troy, NY, where we'll be sharing a bill with Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Wooster Group, among other great organizations. The program is a piece by Kurtag, for which I'll be playing harpsichord and harmonium. My first time on harmonium: I expect to be transported back to the turn of the last century the minute I start playing it.

My new piece, premiering at a Close Range concert on November 23, is "Gardens of the City (Lied Ohne Worte)," whose central feature is a syllabic setting, to a continuous melody, of my favorite poem by Rilke. A true song without words, it's a piece with a long history, and I'm excited to bring it to the public. A few more weeks of finishing touches and it'll be ready.

In the meantime, I'm praying for the future of the U.S., and trying to get a group together to help with polling in Pennsylvania on election day.

late-breaking

2008-09-17T08:35:00.003-04:00

If you happen to catch this in time, I'm speaking on Columbia University radio this morning at 11 AM, to promote (with ICE guitarist Dan Lippel) ICE's Abandoned Time CD. Should be a very nice hour of chat and excerpts from the disc. You can listen on WKRC online, or tune in to 89.9 FM in NYC. Our release party/concert at the Stone this past Sunday was a hoot.

forging ahead

2008-08-13T14:30:00.009-04:00

New music, or music which is new to me, is occupying my thoughts now: Schoenberg op. 11, the Busoni Fantasia Contrappuntistica, and new music of my own. I've got a lot on my plate this season, and I haven't even mentioned my activity with ICE. I'm very excited about the imminent release of our Crumb CD on Bridge, and the disc for which I spent so much time on New Focus, which we're calling Abandoned Time. Both discs are excellent representations of ICE's many strengths. Meanwhile, there's much to enjoy about the city in these last weeks of August, and the weather has been heavenly.

und jetzt...

2008-07-20T15:22:00.006-04:00

After an unbelievably intense week of coachings with Gyorgy and Marta Kurtag and my performance with Tony Arnold, I'm vacationing in Berlin. In Darmstadt, I was very aware of the town's peculiar qualities--especially how out-of-the-way it is--and how that was perfect for its unique role in the history of postwar music. No one, except the already-initiated, would know what pathbreaking things were happening there. Kurtag's piece which I performed was premiered at Darmstadt, and is very much a product of the place--full of quite a bit of angst, maximum dissonance always, and a very obscure sense of rhythm.

But it was a very rich week, and an unforgettable experience. Was with my friend the flutist Eric Lamb in Frankfurt for two days after Darmstadt, catching my breath, and then I began my vacation properly. It's been twelve years since I've been in Berlin, and it is a very, very different place than I remember. The purpose of my visit here is to get a sense of what it is now, and how I relate to the city. Last night at a bar called Mobel Olfe in the Kreuzberg neighborhood, I found myself by accident in front of a movie theater for art films that I used to go to all the time, the Babylon, now nested in super-trendy Kreuzberg, which is still charmingly shabby even to a trained eye.

settling in

2008-06-06T01:34:00.005-04:00

I'm settling in to summer in New York--haven't seen Indiana Jones yet, but I'm doing all the rest of my favorite summer things, or the ones that I have time for. There's still a lot of work to do. In addition to practicing, I'm finishing edits on the John Musto disc, and also ICE's disc of pieces for guitar and ensemble for New Focus.

That said, I'm hoping to bike around Prospect Park this weekend; it's an activity that, for me, belongs to summertime. I'm also dreaming of the sea, and spending a little bit of time at the shore--was it coincidental that during my gym workout today I was listening to Debussy's La Mer? The great recording with Reiner and the Chicago Symphony almost makes you smell seawater.

out of the woods

2008-05-08T14:47:00.005-04:00

After two and a half nonstop months, I have a bit of a break. ICE's Tres Generaciones festival was a big success and an education for all involved. Residencies at Columbia University and NYU have come and gone with great results, and the Stravinsky concerts--as present as all that amazing music still is in my head--seem in the fairly distant past. (Here's our great review in the New Yorker.) Anyway, now I can get back to work on Kurtag. Tony and I leave for Germany in a little less than two months.

Julio Estrada, the grandfather of experimental composition in Mexico and a student of Messiaen and Xenakis, was a joy to work with during the festival. A gifted teacher and a hysterically funny man, he "acted out" his piano and percussion piece for me and ICE's percussionist David Schotzko. It's amazing how working with a composer gives you insight that is only hinted at on the musical page. In working with an experimental tradition that I've only had slight prior experience with, it was invaluable to have Estrada on hand. There's been talk of a recording; I really hope it happens soon. The piece, "yuunohui'tlapoa," from Zapotec words for "fresh clay" and "calculation," is one of the most demanding scores I've ever worked on.

Today I'm editing the George Crumb disc for Bridge, which is due out at the end of the summer. It's exciting music to revisit.

points of light

2008-04-10T12:15:00.003-04:00

Last night was the first of ICE's Stravinsky concerts at the Morgan Library. I'm so proud of the group--everyone played with great finesse, and we got a wonderful reception from the crowd. The Septet was the only piece with piano, and I grew to love the piece's angular beauty and emotional reserve. Next week: the complete songs! Tony Arnold flies into town this weekend and we resume our work on some of Stravinsky's great songs for voice and piano.

counterpoint

2008-03-14T12:34:00.006-04:00

I'm dealing with many aspects of my professional life these days in a complex counterpoint: managing educational promotion for ICE, playing concerts, and teaching. It's a big effort. But I'm glad that the days are getting longer, even with the continuing cold. Last night's Close Range concert, rescheduled from February, tied together diverse areas of my recent solo work: the crispness of Haydn's well-known D major sonata and the expansive range of Chopin's Polonaise-Fantasie, coupled with Takemitsu's Rain Tree Sketches, which reflect both aspects of the earlier composers. The program closed with Schubert's great sonata in A, which has always been one of my favorites for its contradictions of character.

Later this week I play Szymanowski for the Bloomingdale School, and then a chamber piece with ICE for our short Binghamton residency focusing on young Latino composers and their teachers.

back in the saddle again

2008-02-14T22:46:00.006-05:00

There's an enormous amount to do before the end of the month, and things are just warming up. Mostly I'm preparing for events in March, but there is one more Close Range concert at the end of February: Haydn, Chopin, Takemitsu, and Schubert, a real grab bag. But all pieces that I love, some of which I've played for a long time.

Also, editing for the new ICE disc, a general sorting-out of my schedule for the rest of the spring, and hopefully, some composing too. The dozen or so projects which, up to now, have only been in my head have to bust out sometime onto staff paper.

I was inspired during my brief time in San Francisco last week by the Schoenberg second string quartet, and its ecstatic, transporting finale with soprano: "Ich fuehle Luft von anderen Planeten"--I feel the air of other planets. Not coincidentally, my asthma lifted as soon I as got to the west coast. Happy Valentine's, everyone.

winter scrambling

2008-01-19T08:58:00.000-05:00

This is the last stretch for my January business, and then I have some blessed time off at the beginning of February. My WFMT broadcast was a success--it was unfortunately not archived, but good reports came from all around. On to the next Close Range concerts this month and next, which feature some more old favorites.

A web feature that I wrote for the Bloomingdale School of Music on Janacek's piano music is live on the school's site. It includes some excerpts which I recorded, and it's a general discussion on Janacek's wonderfully eccentric output for the piano. Many lesser-known pieces are also included.

northern lights

2008-01-01T23:40:00.000-05:00

My friend, the great sound designer J. White, was in town over the new year. We had a great time drinking and talking, among other things, about teleological genesis in the songs of Paul Simon. I was making some point about "Kodachrome," but I'm not sure what it was...J., who was happy to be in New York if only briefly, is starting new projects and making rare appearances as a ukulele virtuoso in San Francisco.

It was a nice new year here in the city spent with friends, and I'm looking ahead to a busy few months. I continue to improve my German in anticipation of time next summer in Darmstadt, followed by time in Frankfurt and Berlin. It's a nice motivation. The Debussy preludes from Book II which will appear on the next Close Range concert are very present in my mind--I've written about them before, but they've only gained meaning for me in the year since I've played them. "The Fairies are Exquisite Dancers" has a pointillistic intensity to it, with delicate and ravishing harmonic turns. I think also in that piece about the concentration of a slow, chromatically winding melody--how abstract something like that can seem, but also how harmonically suggestive. The music is so free, but there's not a note wasted. I wish only that I could be half as eloquent in my life; now there's a thought for the new year.

too much cheesecake too soon

2007-12-22T23:34:00.001-05:00

I'm already experiencing a winter rut, but I'm determined to enjoy the city over the holiday and break. I'm getting ready for my Chicago broadcast recital next month, which will feature some pieces I haven't played for a large public before: Carter's 90+ (which I love more every time I come to it) and some of the Kurtag Jatekok (including the amazing "Girl With The Flaxen Hair--Enraged"). Schumann's op. 20 Humoreske is an old love, but the last time I played it was many years ago. Many thanks to WFMT for making this possible!

(...the title of this post comes from an old, great Roxy Music song, "Editions of You." Bryan Ferry's lyrics are very memorable.)