I’m in Houston, finishing up a piece for my friend Maggie, who will play it in Pasadena, California in February. Pasadena is the ancestral home of one of my pianos.

Somehow I can’t bring myself to set entire poems. The Maggie piece is just a couple of lines by Hart Crane (with repetition, of course). One of the reasons most “art song” (for want of a better term) is unsatisfying to me is the dutiful teleology of it— here’s the poem, set it to music, and when you get to the end, you’re done. Poetic form is almost always different from musical form, and letting one dictate the other seems to me like a huge cop-out.

This is the first time I’ve incorporated live electronics into a piece— in this case, a looping pedal. Maggie sings the piece over her own live, looped bass accompaniment. Looping Pedal Music is another one of those Niches of Modern Composition that almost always feels lacking in some way. A pretty musical loop is another crutch, like a poem, that can provide an easy form, but the music ends up a strange combination of directionless and predictable. (The huge exception to this is of course Ingram Marshall’s music, which incorporates live electronic elements in a beautifully unselfconscious and seamless way). Using a loop as the basis of a piece can be compared to using a passacaglia, or chaccone, or any other type of repeating ground, except that once you’ve set it running, it’s very difficult (if not impossible) to alter it. This rules out most of the interesting things you can do with such a technique— transformations, distortions, and other deviations.

I think I’ve justified the use of loops to myself in this particular piece, but in the process, made things a lot harder on Maggie; she’ll have to set and reset multiple loops on top of each other several times throughout the piece, while singing and playing the bass, that most unwieldy of instruments. It’s going to involve some fancy footwork, that’s for sure.

My brother Guthrie has been live-tweeting the current blizzard, which I think makes him the first person in history to attempt such a feat of meteorological hilarity. Though maybe they do it all the time in New Hampshire, I just don’t know. What with all the stories of pond-skating, drift-shoveling, and snow-homunculus-making crowding all of my news sources (facebook, twitter, and nytimes.com) I’m starting to feel rather left out. We’ve been attempting our own versions of wintertime activities here: tried out the skating rink at Discovery Green, a poor showing; our attempt to build a gingerbread house turned out better, if a bit rough around the edges.

At least winter makes for much better biking here! I’m happily tooling around on a borrowed Cannondale, thankful that I need not invest in studded snow tires. Those things are expensive! Sadly, drivers in Houston are quite unaccustomed to encounters with law-abiding cyclists; even on streets with bike lanes and “share the road” signs, I hear “get off the road!” (and other choice epithets) much more often than on the supposedly-rough streets of NYC.

I’m also happy because I think I may have just found my own Niche of Modern Composition: wheel-building! I may not know how to tune my own piano, but perhaps I’ll soon learn how to achieve melodious spoke tension.

Schumann’s 200th birthday is come and gone, and here are our esteemed critics recommending the same old stuff. And admitting that they have “mixed feelings” (for a while I was friends with Clara Schumann on Facebook, who I believe was in an “It’s complicated” relationship with Robert). Will Schumann forever be the “middle child” of German Romantics? Do we have to wait another century before people learn to love the piano trios, the Märchenerzählungen, and the Gesänge der Frühe? I kind of feel as if this isn’t my job— to tell people to check out Robert Schumann, of all people— but here are some of my favorite recordings:

Actually forget the recordings. Just buy this and sit yourself down at the piano (or find a friend to do it) and you’ll be happy.

My mother, who is a non-musician but an avid listener, made an interesting comment to me after hearing us play Clamber Music on Saturday, something along the lines of “I like the parts where there are so many rhythms going on at once that you can’t hear which one is the actual rhythm”. I thought this was particularly astute because those are the parts I like best, too.

If music is ultimately about repetition or the lack thereof, then it’s important to keep in mind that listeners’ perception of tempo and rhythm is relative. They have to be able to perceive something in the first place in order for it to be distorted. This exactly why the first movement of Adés’s Concerto Conciso is such visceral fun to listen to, despite its surface complexity:

Thomas Adés: “Concerto Conciso, Op. 18: 1.”

The same thing is going on in this passage from Schumann’s Fantasia in C, in the middle of the first movement, only the other way around: the music starts out shifted forward by an eighth note, and keeps shifting back and forth every couple of seconds, giving the whole passage a stumbling forward momentum, like someone excitedly trying to say too many words at once:

Robert Schumann: “Fantasia in C, Op. 17: 1.” [excerpt]

At the root of the issue is that you can write music that’s as clever (or as dumb) as you want, but people like to be able to hear at least some of what’s going on. In art, it doesn’t matter how smart you are if you lack the capacity to express yourself clearly. At least that’s what my mother always told me.

Since I’m done cramming my own art down people’s throats (at least for the next few weeks) I thought I’d use the opportunity to recommend some new work by two friends, both perfect for this prematurely crepuscular Sunday afternoon.

Jon Ehrenberg is a visual artist who I got to know recently. Though a painter by training, he’s made some lovely live-animated short films which are being shown for the next month or so at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery. You can see some excerpts from his work at his website, though I recommend going to see them in person because, full disclosure, I wrote new music for two of them: Seed and Moth. Oh well, so much for the break from self-promotion.

I wasn’t able to attend this year’s New Music New Haven orchestra concert (in fact, it’s the first one I’ve missed since my freshman year at Yale!) but I strongly suggest you take a listen to Adrian Knight’s lovely and expansive Comblé. It’s one of those generously-proportioned pieces that would definitely be too long if not for the fact that it’s incredibly detailed and well-balanced. It’s also just refreshing to hear a student orchestra work that’s not your standard 8-minute crowd-pleaser.

Through a combination of clever scheduling and happenstance, I’ve got the day off before my upcoming hat trick. This is great because it allows me to take care of all those little things that pop up before a concert— last-minute comps, ironing, fingernail clipping, face shaving (something I only have to do every three or four days), fake yoga (or fauxga), and where am I going to take my family to eat afterwards?

I also like a day off’s effect on my playing— after becoming so entrenched in a piece, it suddenly sounds fresher, more alive, after a little break. In this case, I have the luxury of being able to practice on the piano I’ll be performing on. It always helps to have a few days to get acclimated. It’s a Bösendorfer, a seven-footer like mine, though with quite a different personality— extremely responsive, built for the Autobahn, whereas mine is much more forgiving, like a buxom Bavarian lass. It makes me nervous to think of the damage I could incur.

The other thing making me nervous is that somehow I got myself into this situation where I’m expected to perform Schumann’s Kreisleriana tomorrow! It feels very different from when I was a teenager, and would blithely tackle any piano repertoire, the longer and more demanding the better. Now, I’m more acutely aware of my lack of qualifications. Playing a piece that’s so familiar to the audience is like walking a tightrope; there’s a tension in the air, as if everyone’s waiting for you to fall. I’ll play your world première any day. Here’s a little conversation I had with Metropolis Ensemble’s Nate Bachhuber (note the double H) about the thinking behind tomorrow’s concert and various other trivia.

Speaking of which, I’ve been assembling press kits lately, at the behest of and with much help from my friend Emily. If you get one of these in the mail, it means: please hire me! I’ll play a concert, compose some music, do your dishes, tune up your bike, etc.