Just a quick note to say: I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox I have posted two new recordings up on here:
A complete & much improved version of It takes a long time to become a good composer, from my show at LPR last May;
and the première of Comfort Food, from Milwaukee last weekend.
Last night I went to the Basilica of St. Josaphat (could they not have picked a more dignified-sounding Saint?) to hear the Milwaukee Symphony. Two of my school chums play in the group—Margot, a violinist, and Aaron, a bassoonist. It’s a great-sounding orchestra, though it was hard to hear very much detail in the Basilica, which acoustic makes our old stomping ground of Woolsey Hall look bone-dry by comparison. The strings started off with an unfamiliar Pärt piece, Trisagion, gloriously well-suited to such a space; same for the next piece, a stolid if uninspiring hunk of ponderous Russian Orthodoxy by one Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev (or as he is better known, 1 Chain).
The second half of the show was utterly confounding: Ravel’s Ma Mère l’Oye suite, and then TOD UND VERKLÄRUNG. What was even going on here? The program allegedly had some sort of theme—“transformation”, perhaps?—but I’ll be damned if I could’ve figured that one out on my own. I am actually having a hard time thinking of two pieces more ill-suited to being a) bedfellows on the same program-half or b) played inside a giant, echoey Basilica. It’s the kind of thoughtless juxtaposition which, instead of illuminating the similarities or contrasts of both pieces, serves only to make each one sound ridiculous—cartoonish, even, and Strauss’s tone-poems border on caricature already. If the mood isn’t right, the only thing you can think about is: indeed, yes, we are hearing a piece written by a 25-year-old egomaniac entitled DEATH AND TRANSFIGURATION. My god, if I ever try anything like that, please somebody send me to Siberia.
St. Josaphat’s Basilica is an entertaining space: vast & ornate with some of the most convincing trompe-l’oeil marble I’ve seen. The pews were encouragingly packed, with children and young couples well-represented. Nice to see you, Milwaukee!
My hotel contains (possibly a convincing replica of) an old-fashioned diner counter, where breakfast is served; the waitresses are attentive and one’s coffee remains miraculously full. I’ve reached the point in life where I would much rather do without the standard-issue complimentary hotel breakfast—in fact I can think of little more stomach-turning than the little polystyrene muffins in their glass mausoleum. It is thrilling to be able to pay actual money for smoked salmon & scrambled eggs & hash browns.
Speaking of which: this afternoon is the première of my new choral piece, Comfort Food, on Present Music’s annual Thanksgiving concert. Again we find ourselves in a cathedral, though it is one of a slightly more manageable size. Rehearsal yesterday was quite encouraging, and I’m as un-nervous as it is possible to be for these occasions. Again, some detail is unavoidably lost to the acoustic, but it’s not a piece where I miss it much, even though I put in all those details myself. The text may be beyond comprehension, but when is a text sung by a chorus ever comprehensible?
Present Music is doing something kind of great thing on the concert, which they are calling an “Ives Mashup”— cutting up his song The Things Our Fathers Loved into small chunks and splicing into it a panoply of folk songs, popular tunes, marches, etc. and in true Ivesian manner, having roving battalions of instrumentalists and singers and children’s choirs play and sing in multilayered antiphonal parades. I wouldn’t have thought this would be a good idea, mostly because it’s hard to imagine splitting apart one of my favorite songs, but The Things Our Fathers Loved is by nature fragmentary, and this further interpolation doesn’t bother me at all—in fact, it comes across as a triumphant homage. I’m not quite sure what to expect from the rest of the program, which will feature Native American Drumming as well as me playing The Alcotts. What is clear is that somebody thought about this concert.
Watching Sandy’s approach over the deserted George Washington Bridge.
I am writing to you from Grand Rapids, MI, home of Steelcase furniture and the Grand Rapids Symphony Orchestra. I am here to supervise the performance of two pieces—Nightjar and Paraphrase on Themes of Brian Eno. Yesterday’s rehearsal was astoundingly good. It’s heartening to hear playing like that right away, and it allows me to do my job, which is to push & pull at the tempos a bit, sit in the hall and adjust for balances, tell politely ask the glockenspielist to use softer mallets, the pianist to use more pedal here and less there. Most of this is just stuff I forgot to put in the score anyway, which I then do when I get home, which makes life easier for the next people who perform the piece. There are performances tonight and tomorrow; in the meantime I am keeping fueled with Madcap Coffee while working on this new piano quintet.
If you thought the whole “Made in America” movement was big in Brooklyn, you should experience Grand Rapids; there is an urgency to it here. I scoped out a local bike shop yesterday (as I usually do when visiting a new city, yes) and got into a conversation with the owner about an unfamiliar brand of frames; he sounded deeply apologetic as he explained that they were manufactured in Taiwan (“but by a Dutchman!”), even though the company was in Seattle. I wanted to comfort him! There are shops proudly devoted to American-made wares, like Wolverine boots and Filson bags, all with their requisite back-stories on display; I hoped nobody could deduce the traitorous provenance of my raincoat (Uniqlo, naturally).
Writing about music is hard; try it for a moment, see if you don’t get discouraged! If you’d like to read an example of good music writing, look no further than Alex Ross’s article on the Franck Symphony in this week’s New Yorker (subscription required, unfortunately). It accomplished what the best music writing can achieve: it made me want to listen to the music it was describing, which in this case was a piece I’m pretty sure I can’t stand. It’s so easy to simply make fun of a piece like the Franck Symphony (and Alex does get a few jabs in there) but that’s also the easy way out—it’s much more difficult to be generous, to listen with a truly open mind—and to convince your readers to do the same.
(I still can’t do Franck though. I tried.)
Last week a bunch of us crowded into a couple of cars and headed up to Yonkers, where Ryan Streber maintains the great Oktaven Audio. In addition to recording Rob Honstein’s Beginnings (listen up!), Dave and I (both with pathetically leaking noses) recorded a nice clean version of Retro Music, my four-hands piece from last year. The whole thing comes together in a way that I don’t think the previous live recording quite captured; it makes sense to me, of all people, at long last. Here you go:
recorded at Oktaven Studios, Yonkers, NY, September 2012
performers David Kaplan & Timothy Andres, piano four-hands
I am sitting in my unseasonably warm apartment awaiting the arrival of a new composition student. Yes, wonder of wonders, I have a student! Does this mean I have to start following my own advice?
I’ve finally put up the first round of events for 2012-2013 so HEADS UP. As usual, more to come as details are finalized/I find out about them.
As I settle into my new apartment I want to take a moment to recommend the services of Safeway Piano Movers of Kinnelon, New Jersey. They have moved my Bösendorfer twice now, both times dealing with tricky spaces (lots of tight corners and stairs). They are good-natured and reasonably priced and they are True American Heroes, so go ahead, give them a call: 973-283-0900.
It’s been a summer mostly of anxiety and changes, and I’m happy to see it out. I spent most of it working on what may be my most luxuriant, stable, comforting piece—the title, in fact, is Comfort Food—not a conscious response to my circumstances, I don’t think, but an interesting juxtaposition if you go by those sorts of biographical details. The final score left the nest a few days ago, winging towards Milwaukee, so it feels like a natural time to draw the season to a close.
Comfort Food is partly a piece about another season: Thanksgiving-time, when it will be premièred by Present Music and the Milwaukee Choral Artists. There are holiday periods during which a certain type of person feels obliged to make lists, whether it’s “Things 2 B Thankful 4” or New Year’s resolutions or those perennial end-of-year critic’s “best of/worst of” lists. I can abide none of the aforementioned so I made a list of comfort foods, collected haphazardly from my friends and family as well as members of the chorus. I didn’t use the entire collection, but here is how the text of the piece turned out:
Nutella
buttered toast
pastina
pasta with peperoncino, garlic, and olive oil
kedgeree
liver and onions
fish and chips the English way
ramen
my mother’s meatloaf
pancakes
red wine
chicken noodle soup
matzoh ball soup
red-cooked pork belly
rye whiskey
potatoes of almost any kind
solitude
walking
cats
quiet
company
a good chair
my own bed
“Sense and Sensibility” with Emma Thompson
take-out Chinese food on Christmas Eve
the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person
Prokofiev seventh symphony
As you can see the text begins in the ploddingly pedestrian, gradually moves into depressants, and ends up somewhere a bit metaphysical—a familiar evening trajectory. The penultimate line is from either George Eliot or somebody named Dinah Craik. The last line refers to something I tweeted back in May—pedestrian indeed, but the original inspiration for the piece nonetheless.
I’m moving to a new apartment this week, out of transient hipster G-train-land and further into the venerable heart of Bedford-Stuyvesant (Bed Stuy for short). Another double bar of some kind, and also what feels like a tiny step further into adulthood. I’ve never had my own domain that wasn’t shared with a roommate or significant other, and I’m more excited about the impending solitude than I would have imagined.
I meant to write about this weeks ago, but as so often happens, I got sidetracked because I was probably looking at a weird bug or something. I went to this concert at Avery Fischer wherein John Adams conducted a super-orchestra of students from Juilliard and the Royal Academy of music. The program was: Respighi’s Feste Romane, Ravel’s G major piano concerto, and John’s new-ish symphony City Noir. I’m going to write about Respighi because I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned the man up here, and you all probably know how I feel about Ravel and Mr. Adams.
There are certain pieces that I think should only be played by youths, and Feste Romane is at the top of the list (joining, let’s see here: The Planets, Academic Festival Overture, and most every Tchaikovsky symphony). I’m not even sure these pieces should be recorded; at least, I can’t imagine a situation in which I would choose to listen to them. But sit me down in a concert hall in front of a hundred bristling teenagers or twenty-somethings and I’ll enjoy every minute. There’s something I find incredibly moving about watching & listening to a young orchestra (I sound like my mother here, shock). Perhaps I’m just projecting my own (limited) experience of playing in orchestras. It’s a defining experience, the first time you play one of these “hit” pieces. Sure, you’ll go on to play 4,000 more performances of Tchaik 6 but you’ll always remember the first time. It’s like watching 100 people lose their virginity on stage! Always brings a tear to the eye.
Feste Romane is a piece I’d heard only once before, and I’m in no hurry to hear it again (not sure my delicate eardrums could take it). It’s experiential music, meant to be enjoyed in the moment and then forgotten, as technically assured as a Spielberg picture. There are all kinds of cinematic baubles to catch your attention along the way—the piece is a shoo-in for the ‘Best Visual Effects’ Oscar. The final episode feels like one of those overwhelming chase sequences through a bustling marketplace (bustling with stereotypes, that is): a snatch of balalaika in the left channel, and the next second we’re on to the marching band!—a kind of modernist pastiche with all that scary modernism drained away (the Hollywood adaptation of Gruppen?). But despite all of my snobbish quibbles, I had 100% of a good time thanks to the enthusiasm and virtuosity of these youngsters. The grown-ups at NY Phil or the BSO or even the fun-times LA Phil shouldn’t ever touch this stuff.
Since it’s summer I’m solidly in composer-mode. Many of my colleagues have taken off for “Artist’s Colonies”. I’ve never quite understood the attraction of such places. I think many of us were rather too deeply affected by reading about Mahler’s summer composing huts, and subconsciously think to ourselves “I must have a hut”. If you’re a professional artist I firmly believe that you should be able to work at home, or wherever else you happen to be, not have to go off to some special “artists only” place to be coddled. If you can’t work at home than you need to reevaluate your living situation, or get a studio, or something—it would make me too nervous for my productivity to rely on the whims of an admissions committee.
The last true summer festival I went to was Tanglewood, in 2006. There are a variety of huts on the premises but they are primarily used by adventurous teenaged couples from BUTI. I think Tanglewood probably ruins other summer festivals for most people because it’s kind of the be-all, end-all. Therefore I am happy in my festival/colony of one, holed up in my air-conditioned apartment orchestrating choral music, slowly learning some Adès ditties.
I’ve finally gotten around to posting a few things on my site. You can now listen to full recordings of both Retro Music and Trade Winds, as well as a lovely new studio version of You broke it, you bought it.
recorded Zankel Hall at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY
performers Ensemble ACJW
recorded live at (le) Poisson Rouge, New York, NY, May 2012
performers David Kaplan & Timothy Andres, piano four-hands
Timothy Andres: You broke it, you bought it
performers The Living Earth Show: Travis Andrews, guitar; Andy Meyerson, percussion.
Just back from my London trip, enjoying a jet-lagged and cloudless day. Everybody I met in London apologized for the gray weather there, though I don’t think any of them were at fault. I didn’t mind, even though I failed to find a proper mackintosh. Today is devoted to those post-travel chores which seem extremely necessary; delivering dry cleaning, facing the ball of black once-lettuce in the fridge.
Can anyone explain the following phenomenon: Until this morning, I hadn’t touched a piano since playing the final note of my Wigmore show last Friday, and now I sound fantastic. I just ran through Schumann’s Gesänge der Frühe, a perennial favorite, and I think it may have been the best I’ve ever played it in my life. Now, I am sure that this is really not the case; it must be some sort of aural/perceptual illusion at work. But even so, I had some quite real interpretational ideas about the piece, new details I hadn’t uncovered in the last 12 or so years I’ve played it. I suppose I’ve just proved true the pedestrian advice that taking a break is sometimes helpful. But I wonder how many professional musicians make a point to take time off their instruments. Most of the ones I know seem too neurotic by half.
Lots of people told me that (the) Wigmore Hall (it’s got a parenthetical pronoun like [le] Poisson Rouge) is a fantastic place to play, and I’m happy to report that it is. The experience is very old-world; there is nothing superfluous. The hall is ornamented but not overbearingly so, and the stage is just about the perfect size for a concert grand and a body. The acoustic is perfect, which is to say you don’t notice it; the piano just sounds like the best possible version of itself. There was a nice-sized crowd of what looked to be mostly young people; apparently I scared most of the gray-haired ladies off (I love you too, gray-haired ladies! You’ll come around eventually). There are different ratios for things in London; for instance, I think Wigmore must have the largest for size-of-green room to size-of-hall. My hotel also had the largest size-of-shower-head to size-of-bathroom ratio of all time. I’d say about 20% of the bathroom was shower-head. Wigmore Hall also has a dreadfully polite coughing policy which, as far as I could tell, appears to work quite well.
Tried many interesting foodstuffs. Did not try the Brown Sauce. I’d say that I prefer Eccles cake over Eton mess, and kedgeree over everything. For a proper take on kedgeree, watch this video, then commit it to memory.
