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.