Put a bunch of small potatoes in a cast iron skillet with some salt & pepper, garlic cloves, and shallots. Coat the whole thing with olive oil (or schmaltz, if you have; I have) and roast for 25 or 30 minutes in a 400 degree oven. Meanwhile, boil a couple of eggs, medium-style (but you would never over-boil them). While these things happen make a salad of escarole (or some other hearty leaf) and parsley. Chop up and add a few gherkins or cornichons. Add the eggs, quartered. Dress the whole thing lightly with olive oil and light-colored vinegar. When the potatoes are ready, add them directly to the salad, hot; they wilt the greens and bring about a nice warm coalescence. I housed this thing so fast I don’t even have any pictures to show you.

Yeah, um. “And then it hits you”… let’s hope not, actually.

Dave and I are practicing a new piano four-hands piece of mine which I wrote last summer, but actually hasn’t been premiered yet; it’s called Retro Music and it’s basically an homage to/deconstruction of the 19th-century waltz style. I’ve always felt this weird affinity towards waltz music, perhaps because so many beloved composers from my childhood wrote them: Brahms, Chopin, Ravel, Mahler, Prokofiev. For such a specifically referential thing, it has a mimic’s ability to take on the whole spectrum of moods, characters, emotions, and yet still retain that thing that makes it a waltz, which—I don’t even really know what it is. Quite mysterious.

So Dave and I will be premiering Retro Music at a couple of house concerts later this month, and to the broader public soon thereafter, I hope.

One thing I like about working with close friends is that the border between work and pleasure is very thin, almost nonexistent. Dave and I often go off on tangents during rehearsal, musical and otherwise.
Then afterwards we always cook dinner, which is as natural an extension of putting a piece of music together as I can think.

Today I wanted to show off a Chopin Nocturne I recently “discovered” (it feels rather disingenuous to use that word when talking about Chopin, and yet I had never heard the piece before)—the first of the Op. 62 pair. I read through it first a couple of days ago, finding the score open on my piano. I love the experience of reading through something completely unfamiliar for the very first time, like groping your way through your apartment with your eyes closed—you know the basic layout in your head, and yet each crevasse is somehow completely unexpected. This op. 62 Nocturne has an asymmetrical phrase structure that I haven’t completely parsed yet, and it still catches me when I play it—an odd feeling which will retreat over the next two or three runs, and which I’ll never get it back with that particular piece. In the meantime, though, I like to feel as though I’m experiencing it exactly as Chopin intended—that yes, the antecedent phrase should feel like an interruption, that the dynamics should feel slightly wonky and misplaced. If it’s too smooth then it becomes simply very pretty music.

I’m not much of a representational painter so I decided to make my piano into a more ‘conceptual piece’ (I can’t believe I’m saying this) titled How to play Beethoven’s ‘Waldstein’ Sonata. The piano is covered with a litany of instructional comments suggestive of a particularly sadistic piano teacher. Most of the pianos I saw in New York were done up in a more feel-good manner (in the spirit of the overall “Play me, I’m yours” mentality) so I thought it would be funny to contribute something slightly off-putting, almost daring you to play.

Here are some photos (click to zoom in). You’ll be able to see the finished piano in person starting April 12, in front of Rhino Records in Claremont, 235 Yale Ave. no less.

I’ve been in L.A. since Monday, rehearsing for this weekend’s concerts with Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and Wild Up. There is much to do. Of primary concern is my new piece, Old Keys. Rehearsing a brand-new orchestra piece is a process fraught with worry, all the more so in this case because I’ve tried a bunch of new things. There are sections that sound a hundred times better than I’d imagined, but in equal measure, sections where I’m beginning to puzzle over my own intentions. There are couple of parts that become crazily dense, almost like Ives; I adore Ives, of course, but should one really look to him as an orchestrational model? Perhaps it’s OK to be willfully dense at times. At least it would be reflective of me, personally.

Wild Up is absolutely fantastic. They’re playing my “election septet” Some Connecticut Gospel tonight and tomorrow afternoon. I took great pains to get to a late night rehearsal in Pasadena, to find that they didn’t need my help at all (rest assured, Andrew, Missy, you’re in good hands). It was, however, worth going to the rehearsal simply to observe the Wild Ups in their natural habitat: the top floor of a soon-to-be-defunct furniture store, partially finished but equipped with an upright piano, kitchenette, several mattresses, (possibly stray?) dog, not a single window, and more space than a New Yorker could even imagine. It could have been alarmingly David Lynchian if not for the resident musicians, friendly and convivial and happy to stay up late playing together.

I’ve had a lot of cause this year to practice my Coronation Concerto remix, and it does get a little better each time; it’s a frustrating not to be able to go back and apply that progress to the recording we did in September. There are always new things to bring out, hand-crossings and fingerings to improve, timings to adjust.

I like concertos that start with a solo passage. But the Coronation starts with a big orchestral tutti, as was standard in a Classical concerto. There’s something about sitting silently at the piano while the orchestra plays for two or three minutes that I find intensely nerve-racking; I’m not nervous up until this point, when my entrance begins to approach inexorably and I start to contemplate all the things that could go wrong. Because of this, inevitably, I flub something. It’s diabolical! Just give me something little to do first thing, like the opening bars of Beethoven’s fourth, and I’m happy. It’s the sitting there waiting that kills me. I don’t know what to do with my hands! This is similar to my feelings on pre-concert activities. That is, I need to have them. Ask me to give a pre-show talk, greet people in the lobby, iron your shirt, take tickets, anything to get me out of my dressing room, where I’ll sit and repeatedly check my email (which at this point in the day has mostly ceased to arrive), getting progressively more jittery. If I did yoga, I might at this point do yoga, but I don’t.

Cabbage is lately taking a more prominent role in my life. For so large and vegetable they are easily overlooked in the grocery store; this even seems to be true for the violently purple ones. My friend Tamar Adler’s excellent book An Everlasting Meal has a number of brilliant ideas about cabbage (among many other things) and inspired me to pick up one of the curly green ones called Savoy. I cooked it to the brink of its life in the anchovy-garlic-chili base I’m so fond of, with some spicy sausage and pecorino over some short, chewy pasta. And a couple of excellent meals I’ve had this week in L.A.’s Thai Town have integrated cabbage excitingly: an almost Flintstones-esque plate of sausage chunks served over a giant wedge of pale green, raw cabbage, accompanied by peanuts and ginger; and a brilliantly refreshing salad of shrimp, lemongrass, and shredded cabbage dressed with a lot of lime and fish sauce. What a versatile thing!

In L.A. I will be doing this, this, this, and…this? L.A. contingent, are you coming? To all five concerts? Then I’ll see you there. I look forward to having plenty to write about.

When fully dressed, he has a great deal on even in mild weather—scarf to his ears, spats, sweater, tweeds, stick, cigarette-lighter, étui wristwatch, complicated double lenses for his myopic eyes, sacred medals and fetishes pinned to his underwear—for he is superstitious—and over all, for fear of draughts, often two coats, one of fur.

From a 1935 New Yorker profile of Stravinsky by Janet Flanner.

The excellent blogger/videographer Thomas Deneuville came over to my apartment a few weeks ago and filmed me playing At the River. There are some nice scenic moments that give you a bit of a Bed Stuy atmosphere. Be careful to turn your volume down for the beginning of the video because there is a VERY INTENSE BOULEZ INTROIT which will scare your cat.

photo: WMUR New Hampshire

Today I have a present for you which I think you will like. That’s correct, a song I wrote!

It’s a setting of an inscription by Thoreau, from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Recorded in live performance by the young baritone Daniel Schwait (who also happens to be my first cousin!) and my frequent collaborator Tema Watstein on violin.

Timothy Andres: Two River Songs – II. I am Bound

Timothy Andres: Bathtub Shrine

Waterloo-Cedar Falls Symphony, Jason Weinberger, conductor

Over the past couple of out-of-town jaunts I’ve been reading Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, at the recommendation of my friend Carl Willat. It’s the third of his books I’ve read, and by far the strangest—it pulls off the trick of being fascinating and willfully boring at the same time. What initially drew me in is that it’s about a composer-pianist (!) who visits an unnamed city to give a Very Important Concert. I’m not implying that my out-of-town experiences have been anything like the events in the book (really! Don’t take this the wrong way!) but I know it will resonate with any of you itinerant musicians. There are some passing details which I know composers will enjoy, too, such as an extended debate about musical theory in which the theoretical concepts and terms are all fictional. Truly, fun times.

Now it’s back to the grindstone; looks as though the next few weeks will be free to compose. I have just delivered a new piece to the Cadillac Moon Ensemble, called Trade Secrets; the parts for Old Keys are mailed out; and the wonderful Kristin Lee is playing a short piece I wrote for her this week at a Metropolis Ensemble fundraiser, though the public-at-large will have to wait to hear it.

Which reminds me, heartiest congratulations to Andrew Cyr and Kate Gilmore, who have just produced a baby boy!