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.

I was thinking more about the aforementioned discussion of composers being denied archival recordings of their own work. Of course it’s detrimental in that it makes it difficult to learn from one’s experiences, but I think it’s equally destructive in another way.

All of my pieces that have been “picked up” are the ones for which I’m able to post good recordings here on this website. That’s how people discover my music, since only a small bit is available commercially, I’m at the outset of my career, and I’m self-published.

One of the hardest things as a composer is coming by these second and third performances; world premières are comparatively common. They can come from anywhere—college students scouting out rep for their school new music ensembles, more established new-music performers, a few orchestras, my god, even Ireland. But they all have one thing in common, which is that somebody went to my website and listened to a few pieces and found something they liked.

After a few of those “second-generation” performances, word gets out more easily—through people who’ve attended those concerts, or read about them, the musicians who’ve played it passing it on to their musician friends, and so on. By then, the piece will have taken on a life of its own. This is one of the most satisfying and unbelievable things—to witness people you’ve never met taking steady interest in your work.

Putting the ‘fun’ in ‘funicular’.

In LA I rented a car for the first time in my life and drastically underestimated the cost. I harvested and smuggled home one (1) lemon, which ended in a vinaigrette. I had a party with Rob and AZ in my hotel room. Some elderly people made fun of me for wearing a tie; I pointed out that the security guard was wearing one also. In the marketplace I ate too many pupusas and tortas and had to be carried up the hill by the shortest railway in the world (see above). I was sweet-talked by Azerbaijan. I got in three (3) arguments with different Disney Hall garage attendants. I found $10 in the parking lot of a thrift store. I had the best sushi of my life (thus far). I had Gabe’s Joan Didion song on loop in my head. I watched Bill Cunningham New York and drank whiskey; I watched Lost Highway and drank ginger ale. I wrote 36 emails and 24 bars of music.

Apologies to Eric Shanfield.

Just got back from an idyllic if overly moist week at Tanglewood, where Metropolis Ensemble & I recorded what will eventually be my next record. Tanglewood’s concert season is over and the summergoers have cleared out, so we were able to take over Ozawa Hall, the beautiful medium-large loaf of brick with which Seiji Ozawa immortalized his own ego.

"You know, I never thought about it before, but you're right, I am pretty great"

I will excitedly spill all beans regarding this recording when the time comes. In the meantime I am learning sheaves of music for all these gigs coming up in the next month: Druckman with ACME! Derek with Derek! NOW Ensemble!

Nico Muhly has a good post up about how difficult it can be to get recordings of one’s music from orchestras. You can not imagine how much I want everybody to hear Nightjar, but this is the reason you can’t. It’s especially frustrating because in this case, the recording is really, really good, and it would hurt exactly zero people if I were to post it (except me, that is. I might could get sued!).

Courtesy of New York Magazine’s Michael Hirschorn in the 9/11 anniversary issue:

It takes only a cursory review of the events of the past ten years to see how ineffective irony—both of the self-congratulatory spokie variety (Où sont les trucker caps d’antan? ask furry Brooklynites now earnestly singing call-and-response songs from the fifteenth century at their Montauk CSAs) and the Swiftian exposing-the-absurdity-of-the-modern-condition variety—has been against the forces of darkness.

Henceforth there will be a mandatory reblog policy for anything relating to Steve Jobs and bicycles.

It’s funny, for all the time I’ve spent hanging around composers and playing their music, I haven’t had many pieces written specifically for me, Timo, the Pianist. So earlier this year I asked a couple fellow Sleeping Giants, Jacob and Ted, to write me new solo pieces. I didn’t give them any direction or tell them to play to my specific strengths (such as they are)—and I got two wildly different pieces. Jacob’s Clifton Gates is a rather monolithic, slowly-building meditation on various live electronics techniques; Ted’s Parlour Diplomacy, on the other hand, contains a wild assortment of material over five movements and 20 minutes, and treats Classical Style in tones alternately reverent and satirical.

Last month Ted and I drove up to Ryan Streber’s Oktaven Audio in Yonkers to record Parlour Diplomacy on the wonderful Hamburg Steinway that lives there. It was an intense session followed by even more intense martinis next door. Here’s the first movement. I’m very pleased with how it turned out because it makes me sound like a much more virtuosic pianist than in reality I am.

Ted Hearne: Parlour Diplomacy I. Five

Timothy Andres, piano; Ryan Streber, recording engineer

I highly recommend you click through to Ted’s Site and listen to the rest of the piece. Over here now.

This afternoon’s massive thunderstorm caught me while I was out on my bike, so I ducked into a nearby Goodwill for shelter. My little brother (that is, younger & narrower) mentioned recently that he needed a tweed jacket (for what nefarious purposes I’m not certain) and in my idle browsing I found a handsome one made by Burberry. It appeared to be unworn—the pockets were still sewn shut. Once the storm let up I packed it into my waterproof pannier and set off, only to be met by another torrential downpour crossing the Manhattan bridge. I arrived home soaked, but the jacket was nice and dry. Upon further examination, it wasn’t completely unused—there were two slips of paper in the inner pocket with Arabic script on them, indecipherable to me except for the word TRANSTU. This turns out to be the Tunisian public transit system. So, some diminutive chap wore his spotless made-in-the-USA Burberry blazer on a trip to Tunisia, all the while with nowhere to stuff his wallet, and donated it the Goodwill immediately upon returning? Who the hell was this guy? Where else has that thing been? This is one reason a love buying from thrift stores, aside from the relatively prosaic fact that I bought my brother a Burberry blazer for $25.

Next in our ongoing series of “Strong-Smelling Summer Sauces”: salsa verde. I’ve been really interested in this one lately. I’m not ashamed to say I learned it from Tom Colicchio’s recipe in the ‘witchcraft cookbook. But really, you don’t need a recipe.

Salsa Verde

garlic
shallots (twice as much as you put garlic)
capers (enough)
olive oil (to lubricate)
white wine or sherry vinegar (acid)
salt & pepper (to taste)
parsley, flat-leaf (lots)

Dice up all the ingredients, put them in your mortar (or food processor I suppose, but that’s not very photogenic, is it?) and pound the mixture into a fine slurry.

You can use this pungent condiment on anything you see fit. It’s especially good accompanying skirt steak, or any cut of meat flavorful enough to stand up to it. The other day I used it on a BLT in place of aïoli. Not bad!