To cele­brate our impend­ing tour together, Gabriel Kahane and I have made an album (or is it the other way around?) called Dream Job. On it, we attempt to summon the spirits of Charles Ives & Benjamin Britten, leading to inevitable fisticuffs (as imagined by illus­tra­tor Hallie Bateman). It will be avail­able Friday, April 1 to order (digi­tally or card­board­ally) from Gabe’s Bandcamp page. In the meantime, you can listen to two songs: Gabe’s title track, and my To Whom it May Concern. Head over to Bandcamp to see the full track­list.

Our tour dates are as follows: 

March 31: The Cliburn, Ft. Worth, TX

April 2 & 3: Newman Center, Denver, CO 

April 5: Schubert Club, St. Paul, MN 

April 7: Zankel Hall, New York, NY 

April 9: Carolina Perform­ing Arts, Chapel Hill, NC 

2016 compos­ing update: compos­ing is proving no easier in the new year than it has been in past years. Facing up to a blank two-piano/two-percus­sion-shaped page at the moment, and each note I put down seems to bring me further away from having an actual idea. 

I’m not trying to be dramatic; I’m merely trying to complain. Please let me know in the comments section if you feel I’ve succeeded. 

Luckily, I’ve already written some other music for people to play this month. Sleeping Giant is coming strong out of the gate. First, a new project for our friend and favorite cellist Ashley Bathgate, and the follow­ing week, the première of a new multi­me­dia version of Hand/Eye, our piece for Eighth Blackbird. 

In between, I’m joining the violin­ist Yevgeny Kutik for an inter­est­ing show at the Phillips Collec­tion in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., curated and hosted by Nico Muhly. We’re playing two Stravin­skies, a Muhly, and a brand-new me called Words Fail.

Here at Andres & Sons we’ve been ramping up activ­i­ties related to two imminent premières: a new quartet for the Takács called Strong Language and a piano concerto for Jonathan Biss called The Blind Banister. The pieces were written back-to-back and are kind of frater­nal twins, weighing in at 23 minutes and three move­ments each, but with very differ­ent char­ac­ters. Of course it’s hard to find two more dissim­i­lar forms than a string quartet and a piano concerto, each hard to one side of the public-private dichotomy. I tend to think of myself mainly as a chamber music composer—few things are more nerve-wracking than the process of writing for orchestra—but maybe I am finally ready to embrace it. I even wrote for timpani for the first time! Adding timpani is like adding proper capi­tal­iza­tion and good formatting—suddenly whatever you’ve made looks like the genuine article. 

I hope to post at least audio excerpts soon, if not entire pieces, so check back next month.

Got some new events listed for the 2015–16 season. Pour yourself a nice Campari and soda while you peruse.

Woke up in Seattle this morning because tonight is the première of Running Theme, a new string orches­tra piece for Town Music. Josh Roman (the famous cellist & newly-minted conduc­tor) leads a mixed consort of seasoned pros and talented high-school­ers. I think it’ll be good; the piece is a fun compound-meter romp with lots of squeaky harmon­ics. You can listen to the live broad­cast here, at 7:30 PST. 

I’m a bit gutted to be missing another première that’s happen­ing tonight in Detroit. It’s been four years since Sleeping Giant first asked eighth black­bird out for coffee, and now we’re having a baby! I mean, we wrote them a big piece. It’s called Hand Eye and we couldn’t be more proud of the little terror. There will be plenty of chances to hear it subse­quently over the coming season, includ­ing a semi-staged produc­tion by the amazing Candys­ta­tions.

A few new ‘works’ pages have been added to this website in the passive voice. 

None of them have audio yet—only enough words to excite your curiosity. 

This is just to say: this website is not dead, only sleeping. The 2014–15 concert season is almost over, the last hurrah being two out-of-town premières both happen­ing June 27^th. I’ll be super­vis­ing the proceed­ings in Seattle. Thanks to everyone who came to Miller Theater last night; it was great fun to play a bit of my music with some of my favorite friends & colleagues. 

What else? I’m moving again, still within Brooklyn. (This is a great relief; please continue to refer to me as a “Brooklyn-based composer” because it is very impor­tant to my sense of identity.)

A Moleskin sketch for “Early to Rise” (I think).

I flip­pantly commented on Twitter earlier that StaffPad, a new music notation app for Microsoft Surface, had a likely audience of one—Alan Pierson, the lone musician Surface-owner I know. It’s easy to poke fun at dorky old Microsoft, but I’m genuinely just sore that I can’t try out the app. To expend as much devel­op­ment effort as StaffPad clearly has only to address the 2% share of tablets that run Windows seems like a risky business strategy, to put it mildly; I sincerely hope they’re success­ful, though, because promis­ing new software in this category doesn’t come along often. The target audience is small to begin with, and the number of talented musician-program­mers even smaller, I’d imagine. 

Perhaps, though, StaffPad isn’t even meant for me. It doesn’t appear to have real engrav­ing capa­bil­i­ties (it lacks, fir example, cross-staff beaming—a rela­tively basic feature) and there­fore wouldn’t obviate my need for Sibelius. Yet it also can’t export a Sibelius file—only MusicXML, which is far too rudi­men­tary to be useful, in my experience. 

But I have wanted a way to “do music” on my phone and iPad for awhile, and nothing I’ve seen has quite fit the bill. 

The hypo­thet­i­cal software I’ve been imag­in­ing is far less elaborate—a compan­ion to big notation programs rather than a replace­ment for them. The inter­face would be a blank sheet of music paper, and you’d just draw on it. Notes, shapes, pictures, text, whatever. Add a simple filing system, to keep all your related sketches together, along with voice memos and photos. The result would be the digital equiv­a­lent of a music Mole­sk­ine, or like a musi­cally-oriented Vesper. Maybe it could have some kind of hand­writ­ing recog­ni­tion to clean up the input a bit. 

Fully expect­ing like a dozen venture capi­tal­ists to get at me right after I hit publish on this. It’ll be the next Facebook, I tell ya!

Why are pianists always looking at the ceiling?

I always thought it was a kind of swanning, put on for dramatic display, and just yester­day noticed that I was doing it—alone, in a window­less practice room in the basement of Davies Hall. Just who was I trying to impress? 

Dismayed, I scanned through a video from my recital at the Phillips collec­tion and noticed I was doing it there, too. 

I have a theory (I almost always have a theory). On both occa­sions, I was trying to quickly accli­mate to unfa­mil­iar pianos (some­thing pianists have to learn to do regu­larly). Perhaps I was uncon­sciously trying to distance myself from the sound of the instru­ment, much as one would walk around differ­ent loca­tions of a hall to gauge the sound of someone else playing. 

I can’t imagine moving one’s head back­wards a foot or so actually changes the percep­tion of sound much—though maybe it does? Perhaps someone who knows more about hearing or sound percep­tion would care to comment. 

Still have no idea why a pianist’s head would move in the opposite direc­tion, though: 

Schubert: Impromptu in f minor, op. 142 no. 1 

Recorded Jan. 11, 2015 at the Phillips Collec­tion