I’m having a week of domes­tic­ity and editing: baking bread, doing laundry, and finish­ing up my piece for the Los Angeles Chamber Orches­tra. I’ve dragged out the state of being “nearly done” with this piece for months, somehow; it’s one of those crea­tures that you can’t leave alone, other­wise it’s suddenly in the corner doing some­thing terribly risky with an elec­tri­cal cord. Every page presents its own set of problems, some more easily remedied than others (why on earth are the clar­inets marked ‘arco’? And how can this modu­la­tion feel totally earned?).

The other thing to worry about at this step is giving the piece a title. I’m finicky about what I call my pieces (and what other composers call theirs—let me know if you need some pointed crit­i­cism). I don’t think a title actually has to bear too much on the substance of the piece. It’s more about spurring a kind of process with a few words, because you can’t very well just change the title after every­thing’s done. It’s got to make an initial impres­sion, perhaps be unique or memo­rable, but then you’ve got to be able to live with it. The best titles take on their own meaning over time, distinct from the meaning of the words them­selves, more to do with the music. A side benefit of having a solid title is that it can contribute to the popu­lar­ity of a piece (see: Short Ride in a Fast Machine, any of the “named” Beethoven sonatas, etc.).

The words I’m turning over in my head right now are “boulder pushing”. Titles can predate the pieces they suit, some­times by years. “Boulder pushing” has been a sticky note on my desktop for at least that long; before that it was inex­plic­a­bly a repeat­ing event in my calendar; I think one of my brothers must have put it in there. It fits the musical substance of this piece, much of which has to do with a feeling of grav­i­ta­tional pull—gradually speeding up as it works its way from high to low, or vice versa. Sections almost never sit still, instead agitat­ing to move on to the next thing. The themes are quite simple in them­selves (one of them is an arpeg­giated triad) but are constantly overlaid with copies of them­selves, often at differ­ent tempi and in differ­ent keys, grad­u­ally accruing tension and momentum. These kind of gestures are rooted in my obses­sion with Ligeti’s music, one of the best at imbuing register with meaning.

Boulder Pushing sounds diffi­cult, arduous, not like some­thing to which one would will­ingly subject oneself (it’s no Tod und Verk­lärung, but still). That said, it’s a piano concerto we’re talking about. Is there any clas­si­cal form more asso­ci­ated with struggle, weight, even heroism? Then again, isn’t all that a bit romantic, old-fash­ioned, Sturm und Drang for 2011? I’m going to be playing this thing, after all, and doesn’t it seem egoma­ni­a­cal to cast oneself in such a role? Maybe I’m thinking about this entire thing too liter­ally, too program­mat­i­cally. It’s not as though this piece has a story. It’s abstract, about form, gesture, process…I’m a serious composer. Wait, did I really just say that out loud?

Thinking about titles can get you into these self-defeat­ing knots. That’s why you some­times have to surren­der to the visceral, intu­itive choice. Over-thought titles are the worst.

My friend Aaron over at WQXR sent me some ques­tions regard­ing Sunday’s Beethoven orgy. And here is what I answered:

1. How did you meet Beethoven? 

When I was eight, I came home from having oral surgery to find volume I of Beethoven’s sonatas waiting on the piano—a conva­les­cence gift from my parents. I sat down and started to sight-read them, starting with Op. 2, and I haven’t stopped.

2. Why did you pick this sonata(s)?

The two sonatas I picked are a study in oppo­sites: the Wald­stein is grand, virtu­osic, popular, boldy exper­i­men­tal, and in the bright, familiar key of C major. It’s Beethoven at his most joyous—the joy of playing the piano, and of being alive.

Op. 78 is tiny (just ten minutes), little-known (unde­servedly), and in the exotic key of F sharp. The first movement is an oddly textbook sonata form (two repeats!), the mature composer demon­strat­ing his facility through humble, almost ascetic means. Appar­ently it was one of his own favorites of the 32, and I can under­stand why; it has the contained bril­liance of a preco­cious child.

There’s some overlap, though. Both sonatas have a certain sense of melodic ease that didn’t always come natu­rally to Beethoven. They mostly forgo the char­ac­ter­is­tic mood­i­ness of the Tempest or Appas­sion­ata, and lack the contra­pun­tal rigor that marks the later sonatas. And they have that endear­ing Teutonic sense of humor; the fake-out at the reca­pit­u­la­tion of the Wald­stein, the goofy chro­matic flights in Op. 78’s scherzo.

3. What does Beethoven mean to you today?

I think pretty much the same thing Beethoven has always meant to everyone: a composer who wrote fasci­nat­ing, strange, amazing music.

Took a bike jaunt up to Inwood yester­day to visit the Bros. Kaplan. We drank some cham­pagne, ate some pork with pork on it, played some Beethoven. It was my first time visiting Inwood, which is about 20 miles from my place, so I spent the night. The weather was tremen­dous for the ride back to Brooklyn this morning. I took a few photos with my phone: 

The fog on the Hudson reminded me of this Simon & Garfunkel song: 

I stopped for lunch at one of my favorite China­town holes in the wall, Pros­per­ity Dumpling. Sesame pancake sand­wiches with five-spice pork and vegetables.

Inter­view with Nate Bach­hu­ber, November 2010. 

⁂

Nate Bach­hu­ber: Tell me about the name: It takes a long time to become a good composer. 

Timothy Andres: I keep a sheet of names for pieces, actually a bunch of stickies on my computer, and some­times they’re on there for years and years before I use them. 

NB: So is this an old one. 

TA: This isn’t partic­u­larly old. I thought of it in the past year or so. 

NB: So these are just things that pop into your head. 

TA: Often they’re things I read some­where, or some­thing someone said, just phrases that catch my ear. This partic­u­lar title probably came from reading an inter­view with someone, but I didn’t think to write down who said it. 

NB: Do you often assign names to pieces before they’re complete? 

TA: I do. That was defi­nitely the case with Clamber Music.

NB: Which is also going to be on the program. 

TA: Right. I was like, “I think I’m ready to write Clamber Music.”

NB: The word “composer” is in the title of this piece so… 

TA: Initially when Andrew Cyr and I were planning this concert he said, “I want you to do some­thing involv­ing your work and someone else’s work, but having some­thing to do with your influ­ences.” This was a hard assign­ment because, well, I like to think I’m still devel­op­ing and being influ­enced. I didn’t want to present some­thing as “this is a reduc­tive portrait of who I am as a musician in one tidy little hour-long bunch.” I can’t even do that. 

NB: There isn’t an hour of music that sums up a composer. 

TA: Right, and much less in terms of music that I can play on the piano by myself. 

NB: Tell me about the influ­ence of Schumann on this piece. 

TA: I’ve been working on Kreis­le­ri­ana on and off over the years though I’ve never performed it. What initi­ated the idea was that I had so much fun playing the Brahms Piano Quartet last season, and I was thinking how much I wanted to do some­thing like that. I don’t really play standard reper­toire. That’s not my job, or at least hasn’t been since high school. So this is an exotic idea for me. It’s as exotic as playing a Mozart Concerto and re-writing the left hand. I don’t play Mozart Concertos.

NB: So did you feel that last season’s concert, Home Stretch, put some new chal­lenges in front of you? 

TA: Yeah, it was a little nerve wracking. 

NB: For me, when I think about you as a musician I always think composer / pianist. How do you feel about that title? 

TA: That’s good! I think of myself that way, too, it’s just that mostly the pianist side of me is playing my own music or my friends’ music, or contem­po­rary pieces in general and not so much the clas­si­cal canon— which nonethe­less is the stuff I grew up on. It’s the stuff I still play for fun now. When I listen to music on iTunes, it’s not usually clas­si­cal music at all. But when I’m making music for my own enjoy­ment, I like to play Beethoven and Schubert… what can I say? It just sounds really good on my piano. 

Actually the thought never occurred to me, but this is a Schumann anniver­sary year. He was born in 1810 so he’s two hundred years old. But that didn’t even cross my mind. I don’t like the composer birthday calendar as a program­ming tool. It’s random and unin­ter­est­ing, and is just used as an excuse for orches­tras to play more Mozart and Brahms. 

NB: You have to program what you love but it also happens to be an anniversary. 

TA: Yes, and I just got back from Tennessee where I was playing another Schumann concert with my friend Mingzhe Wang, a clar­inetist. He paired three Schumann pieces with pieces by living composers who are influ­enced by Schumann. So we played Märch­en­erzäh­lun­gen: clarinet, viola, and piano, paired with Kurtág’s Homage à R. Sch., the Gesänge der Frühe and a portion of It takes a long time…. Another group of musi­cians played Schu­man­n’s third trio and a Wolfgang Rihm trio. 

NB: Did the perfor­mance influ­ence your thinking about the piece for Metrop­o­lis, or change anything you ended up writing? 

TA: No, it more confirmed things. I thought both the Kurtág and the Rihm were extremely cool, and very differ­ent from each other in the way they incor­po­rated Schu­man­n’s influ­ence. Kurtág takes Schumann minia­tures and minia­tur­ized them, so the piece is super, super concen­trated, and you get these move­ments that are four bars long and last 16 seconds. The Rihm takes the sturm und drang Schumann (what I think of as the “Brahm­sian” Schumann) and distorts it, making it more extreme. 

NB: And how do you think your piece would look if you analyzed it that way? 

TA: I think I’m taking more of a Kurtá­gian angle, in that I’m working with form more than actual quotation. 

People who think they know some­thing about music like to say that Schumann was a great minia­tur­ist. There’s this popular idea that when it came to larger clas­si­cal forms, like string quartets, sonatas, and symphonies, Schumann was Brahms’s inferior. This is a surpris­ingly espoused notion— “Schumann is a minia­tur­ist”— done and done. So I was analyz­ing Kreis­le­ri­ana. And it is, at face value, struc­tured as a series of minia­tures. But actually it’s a fractal form where you zoom out and you get larger units; and you zoom out again and they’re halves; and then you zoom out again and see that it’s an entire thing— that half an hour of music is one unit. It succeeds as bril­liantly as any Beethoven sonata. but it is inter­est­ing to me how he accom­plished this using recur­ring material and alter­na­tion of musical moods— the piece is osten­si­bly inspired by E.T.A. Hoff­man’s char­ac­ter Johannes Kreisler, the manic-depres­sive musical genius with whom Schumann iden­ti­fied quite deeply. In Kreis­le­ri­ana, you get very intel­lec­tual, rational music juxta­posed with the Sturm und Drang— they alter­nate. This is the very basic struc­ture of the piece. But then you talk a step back, and these pairings become quadru­plings. I’ve been trying to dissect how he did this and struc­ture my piece in a similar way, and it’s really difficult. 

NB: Let’s talk about Metrop­o­lis in general. This is your third performance. 

TA: I don’t think I actually under­stood the extent to which Andrew liked my music. I thought he’d do one concert and get tired of it. In the past year since I moved to New York, it’s really become a composer-in-resi­dence kind of job, or artist-in-resi­dence, as Andrew terms it. Not only are there concerts, but some­times he’s asked me to write for the website, or even involved with the design of concerts and media, building the orga­ni­za­tion, doing outreach. 

NB: That’s some­thing different. 

TA: I’ve really become invested in Metrop­o­lis— I feel I’m involved in a way that I’m not in other orga­ni­za­tions. I don’t know if this is some­thing I set out to do— it just sort of happened. I’m happy to be Andrew’s sounding board when he need someone to talk to and run ideas by. I think we have reached a point where we are willing to say to each other, “I don’t think that’s going to work” or “how about this random idea?” 

NB: So Andrew’s not just saying “can you do all this other stuff for us.” He’s listen­ing to your input and giving you the space to form the program, and use the ensemble in the way you need or want. 

TA: Yeah, it’s quite flat­ter­ing to be asked about these things that I don’t really have expe­ri­ence in. 

NB: But it seems like many musi­cians, espe­cially contem­po­rary music players and composers, go to a lot of concerts and have ideas about what works or doesn’t.

TA: Living in the world of contem­po­rary music and perfor­mances, there are certain things that you become sort of inured to almost. Through repe­ti­tion they become tiresome or you don’t even notice them. 

NB: So this concert is going to be in a private home, but it’s a public concert. How does that situ­a­tion affect you? Do you think about it when you are compos­ing at all? 

TA: I feel as though the genre of the Piano Recital is really some­thing that came out of the salon tradi­tion. When you see Alfred Brendel perform­ing a solo recital at Carnegie Hall it might be great, but can you actually have a fulfill­ing musical expe­ri­ence sitting in a huge hall, listen­ing to one guy play this rela­tively tiny instru­ment? I find that more and more, I can’t. I never go to piano recitals anymore, and it wasn’t a conscious decision, I think I’m just not in the right world. I’m not a conser­va­tory pianist and piano recitals don’t happen much these days outside the academy. Having said all that, I really like the core idea. 

NB: It’s a really simple thing that doesn’t seem like it’s enough. 

TA: Yeah, every­body thinks you need to add a video instal­la­tion or some­thing. But I really like the format of a piano recital. It’s some­thing I am inter­ested in doing some­thing fresh with. And of course, Andrew suggested we add Clamber Music, which is a chamber piece with two violins and piano. So it’s not truly a piano recital anymore, it’s got a bonus appe­tizer, but I think the piece fits in with the overall scheme of the backward-looking music I’m writing. 

NB: This concert doesn’t have a video instal­la­tion, but we have Central Park in the background. 

TA: It’s true! The entire Manhat­tan land­scape— it’s a pretty amazing situ­a­tion. I like the idea of playing in someone’s living room. I would rather do that and have people sitting in my lap than feel so removed playing in a huge hall. When you’re thinking musi­cally about that setting, you write differ­ently. I’m going to write more subtle, detail-oriented things in this piece than I would if I were going to première it in Disney Hall (which I think is the largest venue I’ve played solo in, and was really scary). 

NB: Was that the Green Umbrella series? 

TA: Yes, I played a solo piano piece of mine on the Green Umbrella series and I felt like I was floating in the ocean. 

NB: What else is coming up? 

TA: I’m working on a number of projects for the spring. Doing this show at Zankel Hall with Brad Mehldau, where we are playing two piano stuff: some of mine and a new piece that he is writing. 

NB: A stretch? 

TA: We’re coming at things from our differ­ent worlds, but not really. We get together and talk about the music that we both love, and it’s Brahms. And I’ve been a Brad Mehldau fan for many years, so it’s some­thing I had in my ear before I knew him. So I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch. I think if you listen to some of the pieces on Shy and Mighty back-to-back with some Mehldau tracks you can hear some similarities. 

Speaking of piano recitals, I think one of the best piano recitals I’ve been to in the past year was going to hear Brad play at the Highline Ballroom, just a solo set. I was more riveted by that than I can remember being by anything in a while. 

I’m planning a concert with singer-song­writer Gabriel Kahane who I’ve gotten to know recently. Here’s another person where perhaps at face value, we come from differ­ent worlds, but we get together and sight-read Schumann. Gabe is a person who grew up on clas­si­cal music— his dad is a concert pianist, and he’s a very accom­plished pianist himself. So we are mixing up our various influ­ences and focusing on Ives and the Amer­i­cana tradi­tion. We’ll both be writing new things for that show as well. 

NB: I know Gabe is a great singer as well as pianist. Have you written a lot for voice? 

TA No, though that’s some­thing I’ll be doing a little more coming up. I wrote a tiny set of pieces for Gabe to sing and play. I’m also working on a piece for my friend Maggie Hass­pacher, who’s a bass player and jazz singer. She’s also going to sing and play at the same time. Gives them some­thing to do with their hands when they’re singing. 

NB: I’ve never seen anything like that. Is there a tradi­tion of music for bass and voice? 

TA: There is in the jazz world. I was kind of at a loss and then my friend Ted Hearne took me to hear the incred­i­ble singer René Marie, and she opened her set with a bass-and-voice cover of House of the Rising Sun. It was the most awesome thing I’ve seen in a while. It turns out, there is this mini-tradi­tion in the jazz world of singing with just bass. Obvi­ously there’s that huge regis­tral differ­ence— I like the sense of physical space that it creates. 

In general, though, writing vocal music is some­thing I haven’t really come to terms with. I’m almost a little scared of it, to tell you the truth. Most of the vocal music that I listen to doesn’t come out of the clas­si­cal tradi­tion at all. And the idea of an art song recital is very prob­lem­atic. I’m still working on finding some­thing that works for me. As for Maggie— she sings stan­dards. This isn’t my home turf either, so I think what I come up with could be either really inter­est­ing and a huge step forward, or just a complete and total failure. 

NB: That’s fun. 

TA: You’ve got to try these things.

As you may have gathered from yester­day’s announce­ment, I am now a published composer. Semi-published, at any rate: six of my pieces are avail­able from the new edition Project Schott New York. I’m excited for this not because I put great stock in “being published”(after all, Andres & Sons Bakery is a very reputable imprint) but because of just how PSNY is going about it.

I’m writing this, as usual, on my iPad, which has also become my preferred score-reading device. The problem is, it can be diffi­cult to buy scores in digital form. Most public domain (“old”) music is easy to download, thanks to imslp.org, but perversely, the music of living composers is often only avail­able through old-fash­ioned, ugly, messy, slow, expen­sive rentals. PSNY is the first well-done attempt I’ve seen to move music publish­ing into the present, and it’s incred­i­bly simple: a list of composers, each with a selec­tion of DRM-free PDFs to purchase and download—that’s it. Each piece has a score preview, and most have record­ings (flash is, sadly, required). Right now I’m listen­ing to Greg Spears’s inge­nious string quartet Button­wood. You can also order printed mate­ri­als, though only in the US. Most of the reper­toire is for solo and small chamber combi­na­tions, which is what makes the most sense to order digi­tally. Orches­tral scores are tall and unwieldy and they’re going to need to make a much bigger iPad for that. 

The website itself is quite nice as well. No clutter, no ads, simple navi­ga­tion and struc­ture. I do wish these search fields lined up perfectly (or even better, if there were just one search field that you could specif­i­cally narrow down). As it turns out, the PSNY identity is the work of David Rudnick, who I’ve known since he started the quite aesthet­i­cally pleasing Volume magazine in college. 

I’ll be watching with great interest to see how PSNY fares. It’s a great step forward in making contem­po­rary music more accessible.

Sleeping Giant had our first fundraiser concert/party yester­day, at a lovely home right at Fulton Ferry Landing. It reminded that I’m quite grateful to find myself living in the midst of a thriving milieu of composers and musi­cians here in New York. One of the benefits of this is that we get to do projects together, which makes life less lonely than it other­wise would be for a composer. Sleeping Giant is merely one of the more public faces of this. At one point in my life I might have scoffed at the idea of a “composers’ collec­tive” (the term some­times seems short­hand for “none of us is quite inter­est­ing enough to carry a show on our own”) but I can’t help but see Sleeping Giant as some­thing differ­ent. For one thing, it’s simply giving a name to a set of rela­tion­ships, collab­o­ra­tors, artistic friends and foils that would have existed anyway. 

The follow­ing is an example of one of these efforts. Clifton Gates is a piece written for me by Jacob Cooper, which I played back in June at Barge­mu­sic. The combi­na­tion of solo piano and elec­tronic process­ing took some finagling to get right, but I think Jacob arrived at a pretty bril­liant combi­na­tion of sounds, some­thing that melds his longer, more purely elec­tronic exper­i­ments with beau­ti­fully moody, intri­cate piano writing. The title is in fact a refer­ence to John Adams’s beloved Phrygian Gates, though it takes the metaphor­i­cal elec­tronic gates and makes them literal. 

Jacob Cooper: Clifton Gates

Timo Andres, piano

Clifton Gates was recorded a couple weeks ago at my apart­ment on Clifton Place by Jacob and fellow Giant (and budding audio engineer) Chris Cerrone. Some days my living room is a record­ing studio and my bedroom a makeshift control room, as you can see.

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.