I’ve been anticipating this weekend’s première of Upstate Obscura for some time. The piece (a cello concerto written for Inbal Segev and Metropolis Ensemble) has been in some stage of the working process since 2014, when Inbal first asked me about writing it. I set her up with Metropolis (who are old friends, having commissioned no less than three pieces) and then we all arrived at the Metropolitan Museum, where I settled on writing a piece about John Vanderlyn’s Versailles panorama (detail above) which occupies its own room in the American Wing.

The piece itself was written over the past summer and fall, and I returned to the panorama many times during the writing process. It’s my first concerto for an instrument other than piano, a circumstance which presented its own set of challenges. Here’s a short note about the painting, and how exactly it informs the piece:

The question of what constitutes “Americanness” in art has long interested me. It’s a somewhat self-serving interest, of course, since I’m an American composer. But it’s useful to think about. It was little more than 100 years ago that composers started writing music that sounded “American,” transcending the Eurocentric pastiches of earlier efforts. It’s a recent enough occurrence that one can still imagine different paths composers could’ve taken, could still take. In this spirit, Upstate Obscura is a kind of thought experiment set in the primordial ooze of the 19th century, when American artists mostly looked to replicate European models.

John Vanderlyn was one such artist—an ambitious painter from Kingston, New York, who spent years studying in Paris. Upon his return, he formed a grand (and misguided) plan to paint a gigantic panoramic scene of the palace and gardens of Versailles, and to exhibit the 360-degree work inside a rotunda of his own construction, in the hope of securing his reputation and fortune. But Americans had little interest in paying to see a replica of a fancy French palace; the work was simultaneously too realistic and too abstract to cause anything but befuddlement among the Kingstonians of its day. The panorama was a financial failure and faded into obscurity until the 1950s, when the Metropolitan Museum built a passageway in the American Wing to display it.

I stumbled on it there a few years ago (if one can speak of “stumbling” on a thing so massive). I was taken aback by its sheer scale, and also by the tricky way it uses perspective to convey even greater scale. But the overall effect of the painting is ambiguous; it’s hyper-detailed, yet curiously abstract; perfectly utopian, but with a sombre, melancholy cast. The light in the painting is a flat upstate New York light, and the viewer feels alone in it, ignored by the well-dressed spectators milling about. In taking on a quintessentially French subject, Vanderlyn somehow came up with something that feels American; it seems to regard Versailles at a bemused distance, with that characteristically American distrust of anything unnecessarily fanciful. As a New Englander who has never been to Versailles (Vanderlyn’s intended audience, after all), I identified with this out-of-placeness.

It was that uncanny sense of contradiction and tension in the painting that started me thinking about it as the subject for a piece of music. My plan was to start with fragments of musical ornament from the French Baroque tradition—like loose chunks of masonry—and stretch them out until they no longer felt like ornaments. All the melodic material in Upstate Obscura is generated this way. Each movement takes those stretched-out fragments and points them in different directions; I wanted to use register, and transitions between registers, as a way to translate the forced perspective of the panorama into a sonic illusion of physical space. The solo cello moves through these registers, just as a viewer might explore a virtual world—at times wandering, at times with purpose.

The first movement, “Valley of strange shapes,” finds the soloist moving slowly down a grand, sweeping staircase, past stylized musical objects played by the orchestra. The second finds the same protagonist lost in a topiary maze, or hall of mirrors; the music keeps restarting, turning back on itself, refracting into smaller reflections. “Vanishing Point,” an extended coda, turns its gaze upwards, towards an indistinct horizon.

Update 4/20/18: The New York Times published a detailed look (with audio excerpts from a rehearsal) at how the Vanderlyn panorama relates to Upstate Obscura.

I’m playing a solo piano recital in New York next week, my first such concert in a little while. It’s at Bargemusic on Friday, March 9 at 8.00 PM (a reliable, old-fashioned time for a piano recital). Here’s a little blurb I wrote about the same program for San Francisco Performances:

There’s a good reason for all the evocative titles [in this program]—all the works are based on visual images, either real or imagined. What’s particularly interesting to me is that all the pieces have to do with different mediums, or chains of mediums, like a game of inspirational telephone. Caroline Shaw’s piece Gustave le Gray is named after a pioneer in photography, and is half an analogue to his images, half an imagined portrait of the photographer himself. Chris Cerrone was inspired by an artist friend’s rendering of a beautiful brutalist bridge in southern Italy—the two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional form, translated into a musical form. Eric Shanfield’s Utopia Parkway is an homage to the sculptor Joseph Cornell—musical “objects” move against each other in shifting positions, like the objects in one of Cornell’s boxes.

And it’s not known exactly what inspired the titles of Janáček’s On an Overgrown Path, though I believe they were given only just before being published—it seems likely they were images or phrases out of his own head. But they are amazingly evocative in a way that’s pictorial but nonetheless abstract.

I suppose what I’m trying to “say” (if one can speak through programming) is that the way an artist sees art and the world is not usually connected to a single form or discipline. The qualities that move me in music are the same ones that move me in a building, a photograph, or a piece of choreography. They’re all related in cryptic ways.

Maybe this year I will write in this space more than once. I used to use it as a kind of public diary and travelogue, and then…Twitter occurred? I got busier? I remember neither un-busyness nor life before Twitter; tragic, I know.

In a week, I’m flying to San Francisco, where I will play in three quite different things. The first, on January 23, is a show by LA Dance Project; I’ll play Glass’s Mad Rush in a piece choreographed by Benjamin Millepied called Closer. (Is Mad Rush a piece about the gold rush? This struck me only now).

Second, and maybe most excitingly, I’ve been preparing a new solo piano program—my first in awhile—which I’ll play on January 26th. The program is movements from Janáček’s On An Overgrown Path interlaced with works by Caroline Shaw, Eric Shanfield, and Chris Cerrone. Here’s a short note I wrote about the idea behind the program:

There’s a good reason for all the evocative titles, which is that all the works are based on visual images, either real or imagined. What I liked was that all the pieces have to do with different mediums, or chains of mediums, like a game of inspirational telephone. Caroline’s Gustave le Gray is named after a pioneer in photography, and is half an analogue to his images, and half an imagined portrait of the photographer himself. Chris was inspired by an artist friend’s rendering of a beautiful brutalist bridge in southern Italy—the two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional form, translated into a musical form. Eric’s Utopia Parkway is an homage to the sculptor Joseph Cornell—musical “objects” move against each other in shifting positions, like the objects in one of Cornell’s shadow boxes.

And it’s not known exactly what inspired the titles of Janáček’s On An Overgrown Path, though I believe they were given only just before being published—it seems likely they were images or phrases out of his own head. But they are amazingly evocative in a way that is pictorial but nonetheless abstract.

I suppose what I’m trying to “say”, if one can speak through one’s programming, is that the way an artist sees art and the world is not usually confined to a single form or discipline. The qualities that move me in music are the same that move me about a building, a photograph, or a piece of choreography. They’re all related in cryptic ways.

And lastly, on February 2nd, I’ll be joining the legendary Kronos Quartet for a program centered on Glass—some solo piano music, some quartet music, a bit with all five of us, and some conversation between David Harrington and me.

The fact that I’m not playing any of my own music on these programs feels almost like I’m getting away with something. It also makes me wildly anxious (am I an interesting enough pianist to be just a pianist?)