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

In what must surely be the most impor­tant career devel­op­ment of 2015, I have made my cooking show début. Thanks to Adrienne Stortz for the video.

The yMusic album “Balance Problems” is out, and contains the piece I wrote for them last year, Safe Travels.

The album is a little differ­ent from your typical composer-compi­la­tion, which is a good thing. I’d say it’s more of an inter­pre­tive album, albeit of music that all happens to have been written for the group. But it’s not weighed down trying to be the defin­i­tive version of any of these pieces, a burden which can some­times lead to dutiful, bland record­ings. This is largely a factor of the sheen of futur­is­tic studio produc­tion provided by Ryan Lott (a.k.a Son Lux). 

It also helps that the music is so good and varied throughout—I’m chuffed to be sharing space with Marcos Balter, Andrew Norman, Mark Dancigers, Nico Muhly, Sufjan Stevens, and Jeremy Turner. 

And yes, if it wasn’t already evident, we live in the age of the Insta­gram Album Cover.

yMusic plays live in NYC on Oct. 10, at Rockwood Music Hall.

I figure if anything goes up here, it’s this photo. Tweets are fleeting, blog posts are forever, or some­thing like that.

David Cossin (center) anchors our perfor­mance of Steve Reich’s Four Organs last night at BAM, with Philip Glass, Nico Muhly, Mr. Reich, and yours truly. You can see Nico & me engaging in some subtle conduct­ing. Photo by Stephanie Berger.

Here is a liner note I wrote to accom­pany the CD/DVD release of Louis Andriessen’s La Commedia in 2014.

—

Louis Andriessen initially found noto­ri­ety as some­thing of a provo­ca­teur, a composer whose noisy, auda­cious jugger­nauts combined mini­mal­ism, leftist politics, and his char­ac­ter­is­tic “terri­fy­ing twenty-first century orches­tra.” La Commedia is his fourth “opera”, really a cycle of five mini-cantatas—not exactly an adap­ta­tion of Dante’s Divine Comedy, but a wide-ranging setting of parts of it. But what happens when Andriessen—at 75, still some­thing of an iconoclast—decides to tackle one of the monu­ments of western thought? And is he doing so with a straight face, or being a bit of a prankster?

The first tableau, The City of Dis or: The Ship of Fools opens with a busy surround-sound collage: car horns, bicycle bells, jack­ham­mers, sirens, and motor­cy­cles blend with lightly unpre­dictable mini­mal­ist urbanity. It sounds familiar, appear­ing nonthreatening—the sound­scape is of Andriessen’s native Amsterdam—but the city’s earthly appear­ance masks what truly happens in Dis. Its world mirrors our own, but not every­thing is as it seems. Though it resem­bles a typical city, with its frenzy of activity and profu­sion of archi­tec­tural styles (includ­ing Jewish and Islamic ones—heretical, after all), Dis is essen­tially a huge, hot torture chamber. A rowdy men’s chorus sings a passage from “The Blue Barge”, a common Renais­sance version of the “Ship of Fools” allegory; crewed by vari­ously inept and sinful char­ac­ters, the barge is a symbol of the unknow­ing and uncaring damned. In fact, we are already deep inside the pit of Dante’s Hell. Dis (a name given to the Devil as well as a city he some­times occupies) encom­passes the sixth through ninth circles of “Nether Hell”, and it is here that the most mali­cious crim­i­nals are punished. 

Though La Commedia calls for a mish-mash of vocal styles, the default Louis Andriessen affect is close to that of early music singing. Much of the expo­si­tion of the piece is in dense Bach-ian chorale, but notes and words remain intel­li­gi­ble thanks to minimal use of vibrato. Falling, melting gestures char­ac­ter­ize much of the vocal writing of the first three parts of La Commedia, denoting both physical downward motion and keening lamen­ta­tion. Chords take on an over­whelm­ing gravity; normal major and minor triads have been larded with tritones and seconds, and can do nothing but descend.

Of course, there is nothing partic­u­larly unique about word-painting or “madri­gal­ism”, a device which has been used in text setting since at least the 16^th century; what makes Andriessen’s use notable is its integrity within his style. Perhaps because there is some­thing cartoon­ish, or Pop Art, in his music already, he is able to make choices which in another composer’s work would come off as overly literal, out of place. Alluring and distanc­ing at the same time, these musical quota­tion marks frame La Commedia with a cool objec­tiv­ity even in its most impas­sioned moments. It’s a canny way to take a massive work like the Divine Comedy and capture it in a series of emblem­atic portraits.

Racconto dell’Inferno is intro­duced by those same chorale chords from Dis, heard in stark, percus­sive unison. An agoniz­ing descent intro­duces the body of the piece, which tells of Dante’s descent into the tar pit (György Ligeti’s Devil’s Stair­case étude, perhaps, borne down by heavy goo?) and of the demons and devils he encoun­ters there. Bass clar­inets and pianos scurry unpre­dictably in and out of muddy orches­tral timbres; the music describes hideous crea­tures, half-human, half-reptile, tortur­ing sinners and each other. Dante’s narra­tion is sung by a contralto, in lilting, discon­nected chant-like bits—the 14^th-century Italian lowering himself into an ageless, culture-less pit. 

Though intensely refer­en­tial, La Commedia is far from rever­en­tial. This is typical of Andriessen’s music, which has codified awkward juxta­po­si­tions into a style of surpris­ing power. Chunks that sound wildly differ­ent from each other are mashed together haphaz­ardly, or adul­ter­ated; the sacred becomes profane. Debussy and Ravel make appear­ances in cartoon­ish form, as visitors from the ‘easy listen­ing’ Clas­si­cal bin. Granitic chunks of music allude to the cere­mo­nial modu­lar­ity of Stravin­sky, Messiaen, and Bach. And espe­cially in the second half of the piece, popular styles pervade, ranging from Floren­tine folk music to bebop, rock, and musical theater, often swerving reck­lessly from one to the next in the span of a few minutes. 

It is perhaps not music at all, but the spirit of Hierony­mus Bosch which most strongly pervades La Commedia—partic­u­larly his triptych “Garden of Earthly Delights”. Like Bosch, Andriessen crams a huge amount of detail into what is essen­tially a flat plane; one has the sense that the work could very well expand ad infini­tum in either musical time or visual space. Bosch gives us a birds’-eye sliver of enormous worlds, and Andriessen only emblem­atic moments of Dante. Both revel in the bizarre, the obscene, and the grotesque (it’s no coin­ci­dence that both Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” and Andriessen’s Racconto dell’Inferno include somebody making “a trumpet out of his ass”). Andriessen’s music is some­thing of a Boschian creature itself, its own peculiar form assem­bled from the “wrong” parts of other music. 

Most vividly picto­r­ial is Andriessen’s portrait of the Devil himself in Lucifer. This is truly beastly, physical music. A long intro­duc­tory section broods and thrashes around in the depths of the orches­tra, chewing on the same material for eight minutes, as if unable to look away, before any voices enter. The orches­tra­tion here is will­fully dense; thick, repeated chords in snarling winds and cimbalom, attack after down-bow attack in the strings, and an elec­tronic borbo­ryg­mus of crack­ling embers and thunder. Andriessen’s famously stubborn brand of repe­ti­tion becomes program­matic here; neither musical nor polit­i­cal state­ment, it is instead telling a story of obses­sive, unending destruc­tion: Lucifer’s planned revenge on God and Humans. Male chorus narrates this story over an ostinato of bass guitar, cimbalom and drumset, sounding like nothing so much as Andriessen-ized death metal—which makes perfect sense, given that genre’s preoc­cu­pa­tion with all things Hellish. 

The Garden of Earthly Delights is the most frag­men­tary movement, contain­ing passages that are both uproar­i­ously funny and surpris­ingly heart­felt. Styl­is­tic plural­ism reigns here; the musi­cians are instructed to swing eighth notes, like an old-fash­ioned jazz band. The music never quite coheres, though, before moving on to the next thing. Andriessen, like Bosch, encour­ages the eye (or the ear) to wander. There is such a lot to take in, so much beau­ti­ful absur­dity, it seems to say—unthinkable to linger in any one place for too long. The jazz licks turn a sharp corner into Ital­ianate folk ballad—actually a poem from Dante’s Convivio, sung here by his friend Casella, and harmo­nized with a Stravin­skian tang; next, a banal fanfare bursting out of nowhere, trumpets and strings glee­fully out of sync. 

In the center of the Garden, Dante sees two angels swoop down to attack a snake (“the same perhaps that offered Eve the bitter fruit”). Sinuous, chro­matic lines depict the serpent as liter­ally as any Renais­sance madrigal; when the angels drive it off, the music turns leering, burlesque, decid­edly secular—some pageantry put on for the benefit of our tourist-hero, perhaps. The movement closes with an excerpt from the Song of Songs, set to rich harmonies straight from a Nino Rota film score—a swoon­ingly Romantic conver­gence of text and music in relief from the mostly Apol­lon­ian canvas. The moment passes quickly, though, and Garden of Earthly Delights ends equiv­o­cally with a series of softly clashing octa­tonic chords. 

The final tableau of La Commedia may be the only Lux Aeterna ever written in irony. Harp and children’s choir (winking clichés) intro­duce the movement in archaic-sounding Dorian mode. But the angelic timbres are soon under­mined by quietly disso­nant tutti chords—the same that accom­pa­nied our journey through Hell—alongside echoes of Dante’s narra­tive chants from Racconto. Even though we are now in Heaven, the music is coloured by Dante’s expe­ri­ence in Hell; as bard and histo­rian, it’s his duty to remember these things, Andriessen’s music seems to say, by rote. 

Though La Commedia is mostly not an explic­itly polit­i­cal work, Andriessen and Dante align polit­i­cally in the perversely contrast­ing middle section of Luce Etterna. Here is an extended encounter with Dante’s great-great-grand­fa­ther, Cacciaguida, bitterly lament­ing the degra­da­tion of Floren­tine society and the corrup­tion of its nobility. But rather than Dante’s Italian, Andriessen uses a contem­po­rary Dutch trans­la­tion, and treats the entire passage as a kind of extended rap verse—spoken over insis­tent percus­sion. Andriessen himself invites us to read into this musical decision in his program note for Die Staat (The Republic), a seminal work of 1970’s mini­mal­ist agitprop: 

How you arrange your musical material, the tech­niques you use and the instru­ments you score for, are largely deter­mined by your own social circum­stances and listen­ing experience…the moment the musical material is ordered it becomes culture and hence a social entity.

Cacciaguida’s speech is lifted from 1100’s Florence into Andriessen’s contem­po­rary Europe. But both the speech and the setting artic­u­late the same thing—an oppo­si­tion to the conspic­u­ously “high culture”, and a longing for a more demo­c­ra­tic society. By refer­enc­ing a musical style that has wide popu­lar­ity yet little accep­tance from the gate­keep­ers of the “high art” orches­tral world, Andriessen uses Cacciaguida’s mono­logue to subtly jab modern-day elitism. 

A brief finale serves as some­thing like a punch line to the entire drama. The opening harps of Luce Etterna are recast as one of Andriessen’s ragged fanfares, over which, in sing-song Dutch, the children’s choir recites an impudent moral: 

These are all my notes for you, and if you do not get it, you won’t get the Last Judge­ment you will never get it, ever.

In Dante’s Paradiso, this passage is a solemn warning spoken by a divine eagle. Andriessen trans­forms it into a kind of self-refer­en­tial gag. After close to two hours of dense, eventful music, a bunch of unruly kids break down the fourth wall, teasing the audience: if that was too much for you, well, you’re beyond help. It’s just a comedy, they seem to be saying—there’s nothing partic­u­larly divine about it.