This morning I happened on the wonderful “BikeNYC” portraits by Dmitri Gudkov, of New York cyclists and their bikes. This collection is the strongest case I’ve seen in support of expanded bike infrastructure around the city; the subjects of Gudkov’s portraits represent the true range of cyclists I see in the bike lanes, especially here in Bed Stuy. Many are emphatically normal-looking; there are some oddities, too, though not in the ways you might expect. The impression you get is that cycling is a routine, practical activity, not just the domain of fixed-gear scorchers and insane people with toe-coozies. The photos themselves are nicely done, too.

Luis The Super is one of my favorites. My god, this guy needs his own protected bike path. He’s blind in one eye and rides around with a giant bucket hanging from his handlebars.

Thomas Adès’s Mazurkas are, I believe, the finest Mazurkas yet to be written in the 21st century. I’ll be playing all three of them on my Lincoln Center show on Sunday, February 24th; in the meantime, I made a little home-recording demo of the second one. I’ve got another month or so to practice, so listen up and tell me how I could be doing better:

Thomas Adès: Second Mazurka

Timothy Andres, piano

He dressed in more or less Ivy League fashion casually, informally, and yet with an occasional touch of flamboyance. As soon as he could afford to do so, he indulged his interest in good clothes freely and took inordinate pride in his tailor. He often dragged along his friends to fittings which came to be known as “Lenny’s dress rehearsals.”

—From Leonard Bernstein: A Biography for Young People (1960) by David Ewen.

Popped over to Ft. Greene last night to hear Dave Kaplan play the Goldbergs. Dave’s playing, like his customary bow tie and corduroy suit, is instructive in the best way, without being overly didactic—his interpretations have a clarity which allow you to notice things you hadn’t before.

I’ve noticed that my interpretations (especially of “standard rep”) tend to swing between poles of naturalness and didacticism—constant reacting and re-reacting to oneself, rather than a process of winnowing down to a consistent ideal. Probably not the best way to be a “concert pianist”, but it keeps things interesting, and anyway, as Victor Borge might say, “That’s just the way I’m built”.

Afterwards we all went to Die Schwarze Kölner, one of my favorite bars (Schneider Aventinus on tap!), then home, to assemble Linzer cookies. Truly the best of Germanic culture, right here in Brooklyn.

Did everybody catch that article a couple of weeks ago in the New Yorker about the virtuoso pickpocket, Apollo Robbins?

In the video above (I know, it’s flash, terribly sorry) he demonstrates some of his methods on Adam Green, who wrote the article. What’s especially amazing to me is that even after he’s revealed his “secrets”, the routines appear, if anything, more impressive and just as impossible, because of the amount of technique involved. We should all be so lucky.

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:

Timothy Andres: Retro Music

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?