I was recently alerted, via a reader, to the most hilariously over-the-top bad review I’ve ever received. For posterity’s sake, here’s the excerpt in full:

…the evening’s major offense [was] Timothy Andres’s “Crashing Through Fences” for piccolo, glockenspiel, and drums, a brain-damaging assault on listeners’ delicate hearing and sound-center processing apparati. This terroristic thought experiment in cognitive dissonance and shock would’ve been best left as such. As it was, its performance did more than simply produce headaches; it made more than one listener disoriented and distressed. Andres’s technique was simple: Juxtapose soft and subtle high-kHz sounds with unpredictably occurring percussions most reminiscent of random gunshots. In an era in which terror is no figment, one hopes that malevolent governments don’t get hold of Andres’s score, and that he doesn’t receive a contract from the C.I.A. to develop the musical equivalent of waterboarding torture devices.

If you’re reading this, and you’re from the CIA, call me and we’ll work out a licensing deal? You have my number.

I’m having a week of domesticity and editing: baking bread, doing laundry, and finishing up my piece for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. I’ve dragged out the state of being “nearly done” with this piece for months, somehow; it’s one of those creatures that you can’t leave alone, otherwise it’s suddenly in the corner doing something terribly risky with an electrical cord. Every page presents its own set of problems, some more easily remedied than others (why on earth are the clarinets marked ‘arco’? And how can this modulation feel totally earned?).

The other thing to worry about at this step is giving the piece a title. I’m finicky about what I call my pieces (and what other composers call theirs—let me know if you need some pointed criticism). I don’t think a title actually has to bear too much on the substance of the piece. It’s more about spurring a kind of process with a few words, because you can’t very well just change the title after everything’s done. It’s got to make an initial impression, perhaps be unique or memorable, but then you’ve got to be able to live with it. The best titles take on their own meaning over time, distinct from the meaning of the words themselves, more to do with the music. A side benefit of having a solid title is that it can contribute to the popularity of a piece (see: Short Ride in a Fast Machine, any of the “named” Beethoven sonatas, etc.).

The words I’m turning over in my head right now are “boulder pushing”. Titles can predate the pieces they suit, sometimes by years. “Boulder pushing” has been a sticky note on my desktop for at least that long; before that it was inexplicably a repeating event in my calendar; I think one of my brothers must have put it in there. It fits the musical substance of this piece, much of which has to do with a feeling of gravitational pull—gradually speeding up as it works its way from high to low, or vice versa. Sections almost never sit still, instead agitating to move on to the next thing. The themes are quite simple in themselves (one of them is an arpeggiated triad) but are constantly overlaid with copies of themselves, often at different tempi and in different keys, gradually accruing tension and momentum. These kind of gestures are rooted in my obsession with Ligeti’s music, one of the best at imbuing register with meaning.

Boulder Pushing sounds difficult, arduous, not like something to which one would willingly subject oneself (it’s no Tod und Verklärung, but still). That said, it’s a piano concerto we’re talking about. Is there any classical form more associated with struggle, weight, even heroism? Then again, isn’t all that a bit romantic, old-fashioned, Sturm und Drang for 2011? I’m going to be playing this thing, after all, and doesn’t it seem egomaniacal to cast oneself in such a role? Maybe I’m thinking about this entire thing too literally, too programmatically. It’s not as though this piece has a story. It’s abstract, about form, gesture, process…I’m a serious composer. Wait, did I really just say that out loud?

Thinking about titles can get you into these self-defeating knots. That’s why you sometimes have to surrender to the visceral, intuitive choice. Over-thought titles are the worst.

My friend Aaron over at WQXR sent me some questions regarding Sunday’s Beethoven orgy. And here is what I answered:

1. How did you meet Beethoven?

When I was eight, I came home from having oral surgery to find volume I of Beethoven’s sonatas waiting on the piano—a convalescence gift from my parents. I sat down and started to sight-read them, starting with Op. 2, and I haven’t stopped.

2. Why did you pick this sonata(s)?

The two sonatas I picked are a study in opposites: the Waldstein is grand, virtuosic, popular, boldy experimental, and in the bright, familiar key of C major. It’s Beethoven at his most joyous—the joy of playing the piano, and of being alive.

Op. 78 is tiny (just ten minutes), little-known (undeservedly), and in the exotic key of F sharp. The first movement is an oddly textbook sonata form (two repeats!), the mature composer demonstrating his facility through humble, almost ascetic means. Apparently it was one of his own favorites of the 32, and I can understand why; it has the contained brilliance of a precocious child.

There’s some overlap, though. Both sonatas have a certain sense of melodic ease that didn’t always come naturally to Beethoven. They mostly forgo the characteristic moodiness of the Tempest or Appassionata, and lack the contrapuntal rigor that marks the later sonatas. And they have that endearing Teutonic sense of humor; the fake-out at the recapitulation of the Waldstein, the goofy chromatic flights in Op. 78′s scherzo.

3. What does Beethoven mean to you today?

I think pretty much the same thing Beethoven has always meant to everyone: a composer who wrote fascinating, strange, amazing music.

Took a bike jaunt up to Inwood yesterday to visit the Bros. Kaplan. We drank some champagne, ate some pork with pork on it, played some Beethoven. It was my first time visiting Inwood, which is about 20 miles from my place, so I spent the night. The weather was tremendous for the ride back to Brooklyn this morning. I took a few photos with my phone:

The fog on the Hudson reminded me of this Simon & Garfunkel song:

Simon & Garfunkel: Bleecker Street

I stopped for lunch at one of my favorite Chinatown holes in the wall, Prosperity Dumpling. Sesame pancake sandwiches with five-spice pork and vegetables.

As you may have gathered from yesterday’s announcement, I am now a published composer. Semi-published, at any rate: six of my pieces are available from the new edition Project Schott New York. I’m excited for this not because I put great stock in “being published”(after all, Andres & Sons Bakery is a very reputable imprint) but because of just how PSNY is going about it.

I’m writing this, as usual, on my iPad, which has also become my preferred score-reading device. The problem is, it can be difficult to buy scores in digital form. Most public domain (“old”) music is easy to download, thanks to imslp.org, but perversely, the music of living composers is often only available through old-fashioned, ugly, messy, slow, expensive rentals. PSNY is the first well-done attempt I’ve seen to move music publishing into the present, and it’s incredibly simple: a list of composers, each with a selection of DRM-free PDFs to purchase and download—that’s it. Each piece has a score preview, and most have recordings (flash is, sadly, required). Right now I’m listening to Greg Spears’s ingenious string quartet Buttonwood. You can also order printed materials, though only in the US. Most of the repertoire is for solo and small chamber combinations, which is what makes the most sense to order digitally. Orchestral scores are tall and unwieldy and they’re going to need to make a much bigger iPad for that.

The website itself is quite nice as well. No clutter, no ads, simple navigation and structure. I do wish these search fields lined up perfectly (or even better, if there were just one search field that you could specifically narrow down). As it turns out, the PSNY identity is the work of David Rudnick, who I’ve known since he started the quite aesthetically pleasing Volume magazine in college.

I’ll be watching with great interest to see how PSNY fares. It’s a great step forward in making contemporary music more accessible.

Sleeping Giant had our first fundraiser concert/party yesterday, at a lovely home right at Fulton Ferry Landing. It reminded that I’m quite grateful to find myself living in the midst of a thriving milieu of composers and musicians here in New York. One of the benefits of this is that we get to do projects together, which makes life less lonely than it otherwise would be for a composer. Sleeping Giant is merely one of the more public faces of this. At one point in my life I might have scoffed at the idea of a “composers’ collective” (the term sometimes seems shorthand for “none of us is quite interesting enough to carry a show on our own”) but I can’t help but see Sleeping Giant as something different. For one thing, it’s simply giving a name to a set of relationships, collaborators, artistic friends and foils that would have existed anyway.

The following is an example of one of these efforts. Clifton Gates is a piece written for me by Jacob Cooper, which I played back in June at Bargemusic. The combination of solo piano and electronic processing took some finagling to get right, but I think Jacob arrived at a pretty brilliant combination of sounds, something that melds his longer, more purely electronic experiments with beautifully moody, intricate piano writing. The title is in fact a reference to John Adams’s beloved Phrygian Gates, though it takes the metaphorical electronic gates and makes them literal.

Jacob Cooper: Clifton Gates

Timothy Andres, piano

Clifton Gates was recorded a couple weeks ago at my apartment on Clifton Place by Jacob and fellow Giant (and budding audio engineer) Chris Cerrone. Some days my living room is a recording studio and my bedroom a makeshift control room, as you can see.

A funny thing has been happening over the past day, which is that friends and family have been writing to console me about the death of someone I didn’t know. I wouldn’t say Steve Jobs was my “hero”—I’m not sure he would’ve liked the concept of heroes, anyway—but there are few people whose life’s work have mattered to me more.

It’s partly because his work has enabled almost everything I do. My first piano teacher was a Mac—a DuoDock if I remember correctly—running a program called the Miracle Piano Teaching System, which was hooked up to a MIDI keyboard. I became entranced with music and Macs in tandem. The early Internet beguiled me with its downloadable shareware and exquisite animated GIFs. I made my own custom folder icons in Photoshop and constructed narrative adventures in HyperCard. Even those beige plastic cases were somehow elegant enough to spark my early interest in design, and I started drawing my own sketches of laptops, speakers, and mice.

In sixth grade I started saving up for my dream computer, which, if you can believe it, looked like this. That was when Apple was at its nadir (I sat through an Amelio keynote!), and I proudly wore my Dad’s old Apple T-shirts to school to express my devotion to the cause. My family and I feel about Apple the way some families feel about their hometown baseball team, dissecting each product announcement as if it were a championship game.

I didn’t actually succeed in saving up enough to buy my own Mac until my first year of college, when I spent it all on the very nicest PowerBook G4. The iTunes store may be the more important invention, but it was iTunes library sharing that most changed my musical life. Through my classmates’s libraries, most of which were shared over the school network, I discovered all sorts of music that was new to me. And thanks to some “gentleman’s software” and a college freshman’s questionable sense of ethics, I was able to download it all onto my first iPod, my constant accompaniment on walks across campus and trips on Metro-North.

All the music I’ve written has been on a Mac. Even as a child I was frustrated by how slow it was to write music by hand; using a MIDI keyboard and Sibelius let me notate the ideas down as they occurred to me.

One of the amazing things about the tributes and retrospectives being published about Steve Jobs is that they are unanimous in their thanks and praise for the tools Steve helped create, as if he were a kind uncle or generous philanthropist. I think he saw himself that way, too, which I think is why I feel sort of personally affronted when someone criticizes an Apple product, or even the company, to me. It seems disrespectful in a way, like insulting the food at a friend’s dinner party. This stuff is Steve’s present to us, and he nearly always knew exactly what we wanted.

Sent from my iPad

Addendum: Chris Thompson, who I am heading off to rehearse with just this moment, has a lovely blog post with much cuter pictures.

I was thinking more about the aforementioned discussion of composers being denied archival recordings of their own work. Of course it’s detrimental in that it makes it difficult to learn from one’s experiences, but I think it’s equally destructive in another way.

All of my pieces that have been “picked up” are the ones for which I’m able to post good recordings here on this website. That’s how people discover my music, since only a small bit is available commercially, I’m at the outset of my career, and I’m self-published.

One of the hardest things as a composer is coming by these second and third performances; world premières are comparatively common. They can come from anywhere—college students scouting out rep for their school new music ensembles, more established new-music performers, a few orchestras, my god, even Ireland. But they all have one thing in common, which is that somebody went to my website and listened to a few pieces and found something they liked.

After a few of those “second-generation” performances, word gets out more easily—through people who’ve attended those concerts, or read about them, the musicians who’ve played it passing it on to their musician friends, and so on. By then, the piece will have taken on a life of its own. This is one of the most satisfying and unbelievable things—to witness people you’ve never met taking steady interest in your work.