I’m very pleased to help trumpet the announce­ment of Sufjan Steven­s’s new album Reflec­tions, a two-piano ballet score that I recorded with Conor Hanick. The bril­liant video above, directed by Brian Paccione, is a perfor­mance of the first track, Ekstasis. The full album is out May 19.

In other Sufjan-related news, I’ve created new arrange­ments and orches­tra­tions for his 2005 album Illinois, which has been chore­o­graphed in its entirety by Justin Peck, premier­ing June 23 at Bard Summer­scape.

Happy new year. In an heroic act of procras­ti­na­tion from writing, I’ve made a new subsec­tion of this site listing the various things I’ve written about music over the years. Thanks to all the artists and record labels who have asked me to write about their record­ings; doing so always teaches me new ways to listen and think about music.

I’m very pleased to present my new work for natural horn quartet, Loud Ciphers. The piece is somewhat atypical in that it was composed, recorded, filmed, and released over the course of just a month—a rare instance of imme­di­ate grat­i­fi­ca­tion in the usually glacial world of commis­sion­ing new work.

The piece was commis­sioned and performed by the extra­or­di­nary young natural horn special­ist Isaac Shieh, who I was intro­duced to by Nico Muhly (thanks, Nico!). The above perfor­mance seems all the more remark­able with the knowl­edge that it was made during the past week’s intense European heat wave.

Here’s a bit more about the piece, and you can also purchase scores and parts.

I was honored to spend the past weekend remem­ber­ing Ingram Marshall in an appraisal for the New York Times.

With an unlikely fusion of loose, stream-of-conscious­ness forms and old-school contra­pun­tal tech­nique, he constructed mono­liths of sound, then obscured them. He wove elab­o­rate textures out of canons, inver­sions, elon­ga­tions and diminu­tions. His gamelan-inspired arpeg­gios undulate gently in and out of sun and shadow. Frequent quota­tions and refer­ences give the music a sense of porous­ness and muta­bil­ity. Every­thing coexists in what feels like a physical acoustic space — rich and rever­ber­ant, but also distant, held at a remove, seen through a dense fog. Above all, there is the emotional flavor of it. For him, music wasn’t just an abstrac­tion, an intel­lec­tual game of pitches and forms. It was also about express­ing some­thing sincerely.

Read the full piece here.

Composer Danny Clay and The Living Earth Show collab­o­rated on the album Music For Hard Times, for which I was honored to write the follow­ing liner note.

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In March 2020, when composer Danny Clay wrote a series of eight Calming Strate­gies, his and other working musi­cians’ lives all over the world had suddenly come to a surreal and terri­fy­ing stand­still. Clay had begun work on the Strate­gies trying to answer a seem­ingly simple question: how can composers and conser­va­tory-trained instru­men­tal­ists use their special­ized skills to help people feel better? And if the music they’re playing makes the musician feel some­thing as they’re playing it, is there a way to transmit that same feeling to the listener? 

The test harness for these strate­gies were Clay’s longtime collab­o­ra­tors Andy Meyerson and Travis Andrews, of the adven­tur­ous electric guitar and percus­sion duo The Living Earth Show. Andy and Travis spent the follow­ing weeks record­ing the 16 hours of raw material which became Music For Hard Times Book 1. In the process, they helped not just to refine Clay’s vision and notation, but to estab­lish a timbral and gestural palette for subse­quent real­iza­tions of the work. Those real­iza­tions would follow shortly. That winter, the duo enlisted the San Fran­cisco Girls’ Chorus and students from the San Fran­cisco Conser­va­tory, two insti­tu­tions eager to look beyond what had by then become rote multi-tracked online perfor­mances of standard reper­toire. Here was a project that allowed their students room to exper­i­ment with process, collab­o­rate with each other remotely, and create some­thing new, refram­ing clas­si­cal music’s tradi­tional emphasis on faithful, polished execu­tion of demand­ing scores. Music For Hard Times Book 2 emerged as the collec­tive product of hundreds of hours of record­ings by these scat­tered forces. 

Clay constructed Book 2 like a gener­a­tive collage or puzzle, first pairing sounds that felt as if they related to each other, layering them, and building outward from there. The Living Earth Show filled out these textures with yet more record­ings, anchor­ing the ensemble from the back of the virtual stage in a kind of reverse concerto. They also acted as stewards of the piece’s oral tradi­tion, coaching and guiding the students in their inter­pre­ta­tions. In contrast to Book 1, the record­ings from the chorus members and conser­va­tory instru­men­tal­ists range broadly over not just instru­men­tal timbres, but sound qual­i­ties, record­ing tech­niques, and acoustic envi­ron­ments. In some contexts this could be consid­ered unde­sir­able, if not down­right unwork­able, espe­cially when record­ing so many tracks in isola­tion for a studio album. Clay deftly turned these gulfs in produc­tion values into yet another musical para­me­ter to be consid­ered, toyed with, and emotion­ally charged. Inci­den­tal noises, envi­ron­men­tal sounds, intru­sions that could be consid­ered “imper­fec­tions” were encour­aged. The solo cello which opens Book 2’s Epilogue feels homespun, slightly crude; there’s no vibrato on it, barely any reverb. It’s the plainest version of the A which has anchored the entire album. In contrast, the long, drawn-out cymbal rolls against a beatific choral back­ground on Book 2 / Part 6 sound lush, detailed, expen­sive. In combin­ing these elements, the finished product subverts our idea of what consti­tutes a “good record­ing”; hearing a sound recorded at a specific quality in a partic­u­lar acoustic trans­forms it into an artifact of time and place. Book 2 is essen­tially a cata­logue of indi­vid­ual spaces united in time—in many cases, record­ings made liter­ally during the same hours of January 2021, all over the world, then Dropbox-ed to Clay’s home studio in San Francisco. 

The title acknowl­edges that times were hard in general, but hard for whom? The music itself bears neither a geopo­lit­i­cal nor a personal message. Rather, it serves a social purpose—communal self-care—making it Gebrauchsmusik (“music for use”). Taken together, the Calming Strate­gies and these real­iza­tions of them stand in quiet rebuke to the sleek, corpo­rate rebrand­ing of “self-care” that has taken place over the past decade. Instead of asking us to buy some­thing, they invite us to make some­thing for each other and for ourselves. But what, exactly, is being made? The original inten­tion was to fashion a tool for musi­cians, and in turn, a balm for listen­ers at large. But it proved to be much more than that. As they recorded their initial real­iza­tions, Andy and Travis realized that the Calming Strate­gies were improv­ing their own senses of well-being, too. It was not merely the distrac­tion of having a project which felt somehow center­ing, but the specific qual­i­ties of the project itself. The Strate­gies them­selves at times ask the player to use their own emotional responses as a gauge, and in doing so become a form of medi­ta­tion. Strategy #1, for instance, is meant to last “slightly longer than you are comfort­able, or until you feel it has made a signif­i­cant effect on you”; #4 prompts to “add a small sound to your envi­ron­ment, to remind it you’re still there.” 

These open-ended text instruc­tions trace their roots back to the Fluxus movement, Pauline Oliveros’s Tuning Medi­ta­tions, and Brian Eno’s Oblique Strate­gies. But from the outset, Clay was concerned less with concep­tual rigor or novelty, and instead with produc­ing a reliably beau­ti­ful result—and it is through the uncom­pli­cated plea­sures of making and listen­ing to beau­ti­ful sounds that Music for Hard Times succeeds. There’s a clear timbral and harmonic palette that binds the album together. Espe­cially in its larger choral-orches­tral real­iza­tion, there’s an ASMR-like detail to the sounds, an envelop­ing coziness which draws the listener inward. Clay plays games with the listener’s sense of space and distance, bringing a producer’s keen ear to the physical place­ment of each indi­vid­ual sample. In Part 1, a trio of inter­twin­ing melodies on flutes and cellos, close and detailed enough that they could be in the room with you, suddenly zooms out to a wide land­scape of choral harmonies. These kinds of juxta­po­si­tions give the music a sense of perspec­tive, and an immer­sive, three-dimen­sional depth. As we listen, we’re lifted out of our claus­tro­pho­bic quar­an­tine apart­ments and into the wider world, along­side the musi­cians themselves. 

That one-to-one emotional rela­tion­ship which Clay and the Living Earth Show orig­i­nally set out to inves­ti­gate is rare in pure music (that is, music without lyrics), because it’s an abstract language. There’s a fine line between giving people agency to expe­ri­ence the Calming Strate­gies for them­selves, and nudging them in the direc­tion of a musical narra­tive. That’s where Clay’s confi­dent compo­si­tional hand becomes apparent. As befits the communal nature of the work, he takes a light touch, subli­mat­ing any sense of artist’s ego. Music For Hard Times rearranges and compli­cates the order of oper­a­tions typi­cally demanded by “composed” work, though it retains the core Clas­si­cal Music triumvi­rate: composer, score, inter­preters. Instead of produc­ing a detailed document and giving it to perform­ers to execute, Clay provides prompts, gathers responses, and then molds the result into just one of infinite possible “perfor­mances.” For this reason, it’s partic­u­larly educa­tional to have two real­iza­tions to compare. Take Part 2 from both books; both employ Strategy #5 (“Pick one object, or musical idea. Record as many vari­a­tions on it as you can”). Book 1’s treat­ment is a simple dialogue of a chord cycle in various inver­sions, while Book 2’s choral version is more discur­sive, voices swooping in from differ­ent direc­tions, each breaking down a differ­ent melodic cell. It would be diffi­cult, if not impos­si­ble, to identify both as having roots in the same “score.”

In this openness, Music For Hard Times stands in quiet oppo­si­tion to the academic conser­va­tory training its musi­cians possess. Clas­si­cal music has always been, by nature, econom­i­cally exclu­sive, locking the majority out of partic­i­pat­ing in it; in equip­ment and years of study, it costs hundreds of thou­sands of dollars for a bassoon­ist, say, to be able to play the opening of The Rite of Spring. Music For Hard Times contin­ues a thread that runs through much of Clay’s work, which looks for ways to make the music acces­si­ble and applic­a­ble to anybody. Though written with the virtuosi of The Living Earth Show in mind, the work deepened its focus in moving beyond guitar and percus­sion. Adapting the strate­gies didn’t require changing them so much as broad­en­ing the language of the instruc­tions to account for breath, so as to include singers and wind players, and the partic­i­pa­tion of students, amateur musi­cians, and even non-musi­cians (a few of the strate­gies contain notated music, but all have options for non-music readers to contribute as well). 

Though its creators describe Music For Hard Times as a “New Age” album, the music is more exper­i­men­tal and adven­tur­ous than one might expect from such a label. Instead of spread­ing out on a flat, hori­zon­tal plane and acting as wall­pa­per, each track gently artic­u­lates emotional peaks and valleys. These aren’t evident in the wording or notation of the strate­gies them­selves, which only shape the land­scape by produc­ing varied textures of music: melodies, sustained tones, loops, percus­sive events. Instead, these land­scapes are the result of the composer shaping the perfor­mance after it’s taken place. It’s not quite narra­tive, but it is sculptural. 

When composers speak of musical “archi­tec­ture” we’re usually talking about form: what happens, when, for how long. But Music For Hard Times becomes a more literal sort of archi­tec­ture in our minds as we partic­i­pate in it; it’s a well-consid­ered space to exist in for a while, one which merits atten­tion without demand­ing it. In this way, the whole process func­tions as a bridge, connect­ing conser­va­tory training to instru­men­tal practice to what it means to be a human being. People become artists because of a deep and inex­plic­a­ble urge to make things: for them­selves, for each other, and for the wider world. As long as they are able to do this, they continue to grow and thrive. The Calming Strate­gies, and this specific docu­men­ta­tion of them, function above all as a record of artists doing exactly that, during a memo­rably hard time. 

–Timo Andres, July 2021

On Thursday, December 16^th, I’ll be playing a solo recital on Kaufmann Center’s Piano Dialogues series. Lots of concert series have clever names like this but this program truly is a dialogue. My close friends Sarah Gold­feather and Eric Shan­field have written new pieces for me which will both be heard in public for the first time. Eric’s piece, Timo Vari­a­tions, is a hefty set after a theme I composed for him in 2019. Here’s the theme—

—which Eric pleas­antly evis­cer­ates, in a series of sly and affec­tion­ate homages to other composers, among them: Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, Bach, Pärt, Webern, Ligeti, Nyman, and Glass.

Sarah’s new piece, called Fern Canyon, is a stunning pastorale, made up of tiny repeat­ing patterns progres­sively stacked on each other. As it becomes an increas­ingly-complex thicket, the forest suddenly gives way to a dramatic vista.

In between, one of my favorite pastoral/metaphysical trav­el­ogues: Robert Schu­man­n’s Wald­szenen (Forest Scenes); in the video above, I play the cryptic Vogel als Prophet (Bird as Prophet).