I was honored to spend the past weekend remem­ber­ing Ingram Marshall in an appraisal for the New York Times.

With an unlikely fusion of loose, stream-of-conscious­ness forms and old-school contra­pun­tal tech­nique, he constructed mono­liths of sound, then obscured them. He wove elab­o­rate textures out of canons, inver­sions, elon­ga­tions and diminu­tions. His gamelan-inspired arpeg­gios undulate gently in and out of sun and shadow. Frequent quota­tions and refer­ences give the music a sense of porous­ness and muta­bil­ity. Every­thing coexists in what feels like a physical acoustic space — rich and rever­ber­ant, but also distant, held at a remove, seen through a dense fog. Above all, there is the emotional flavor of it. For him, music wasn’t just an abstrac­tion, an intel­lec­tual game of pitches and forms. It was also about express­ing some­thing sincerely.

Read the full piece here.

Composer Danny Clay and The Living Earth Show collab­o­rated on the album Music For Hard Times, for which I was honored to write the follow­ing liner note.

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In March 2020, when composer Danny Clay wrote a series of eight Calming Strate­gies, his and other working musi­cians’ lives all over the world had suddenly come to a surreal and terri­fy­ing stand­still. Clay had begun work on the Strate­gies trying to answer a seem­ingly simple question: how can composers and conser­va­tory-trained instru­men­tal­ists use their special­ized skills to help people feel better? And if the music they’re playing makes the musician feel some­thing as they’re playing it, is there a way to transmit that same feeling to the listener? 

The test harness for these strate­gies were Clay’s longtime collab­o­ra­tors Andy Meyerson and Travis Andrews, of the adven­tur­ous electric guitar and percus­sion duo The Living Earth Show. Andy and Travis spent the follow­ing weeks record­ing the 16 hours of raw material which became Music For Hard Times Book 1. In the process, they helped not just to refine Clay’s vision and notation, but to estab­lish a timbral and gestural palette for subse­quent real­iza­tions of the work. Those real­iza­tions would follow shortly. That winter, the duo enlisted the San Fran­cisco Girls’ Chorus and students from the San Fran­cisco Conser­va­tory, two insti­tu­tions eager to look beyond what had by then become rote multi-tracked online perfor­mances of standard reper­toire. Here was a project that allowed their students room to exper­i­ment with process, collab­o­rate with each other remotely, and create some­thing new, refram­ing clas­si­cal music’s tradi­tional emphasis on faithful, polished execu­tion of demand­ing scores. Music For Hard Times Book 2 emerged as the collec­tive product of hundreds of hours of record­ings by these scat­tered forces. 

Clay constructed Book 2 like a gener­a­tive collage or puzzle, first pairing sounds that felt as if they related to each other, layering them, and building outward from there. The Living Earth Show filled out these textures with yet more record­ings, anchor­ing the ensemble from the back of the virtual stage in a kind of reverse concerto. They also acted as stewards of the piece’s oral tradi­tion, coaching and guiding the students in their inter­pre­ta­tions. In contrast to Book 1, the record­ings from the chorus members and conser­va­tory instru­men­tal­ists range broadly over not just instru­men­tal timbres, but sound qual­i­ties, record­ing tech­niques, and acoustic envi­ron­ments. In some contexts this could be consid­ered unde­sir­able, if not down­right unwork­able, espe­cially when record­ing so many tracks in isola­tion for a studio album. Clay deftly turned these gulfs in produc­tion values into yet another musical para­me­ter to be consid­ered, toyed with, and emotion­ally charged. Inci­den­tal noises, envi­ron­men­tal sounds, intru­sions that could be consid­ered “imper­fec­tions” were encour­aged. The solo cello which opens Book 2’s Epilogue feels homespun, slightly crude; there’s no vibrato on it, barely any reverb. It’s the plainest version of the A which has anchored the entire album. In contrast, the long, drawn-out cymbal rolls against a beatific choral back­ground on Book 2 / Part 6 sound lush, detailed, expen­sive. In combin­ing these elements, the finished product subverts our idea of what consti­tutes a “good record­ing”; hearing a sound recorded at a specific quality in a partic­u­lar acoustic trans­forms it into an artifact of time and place. Book 2 is essen­tially a cata­logue of indi­vid­ual spaces united in time—in many cases, record­ings made liter­ally during the same hours of January 2021, all over the world, then Dropbox-ed to Clay’s home studio in San Francisco. 

The title acknowl­edges that times were hard in general, but hard for whom? The music itself bears neither a geopo­lit­i­cal nor a personal message. Rather, it serves a social purpose—communal self-care—making it Gebrauchsmusik (“music for use”). Taken together, the Calming Strate­gies and these real­iza­tions of them stand in quiet rebuke to the sleek, corpo­rate rebrand­ing of “self-care” that has taken place over the past decade. Instead of asking us to buy some­thing, they invite us to make some­thing for each other and for ourselves. But what, exactly, is being made? The original inten­tion was to fashion a tool for musi­cians, and in turn, a balm for listen­ers at large. But it proved to be much more than that. As they recorded their initial real­iza­tions, Andy and Travis realized that the Calming Strate­gies were improv­ing their own senses of well-being, too. It was not merely the distrac­tion of having a project which felt somehow center­ing, but the specific qual­i­ties of the project itself. The Strate­gies them­selves at times ask the player to use their own emotional responses as a gauge, and in doing so become a form of medi­ta­tion. Strategy #1, for instance, is meant to last “slightly longer than you are comfort­able, or until you feel it has made a signif­i­cant effect on you”; #4 prompts to “add a small sound to your envi­ron­ment, to remind it you’re still there.” 

These open-ended text instruc­tions trace their roots back to the Fluxus movement, Pauline Oliveros’s Tuning Medi­ta­tions, and Brian Eno’s Oblique Strate­gies. But from the outset, Clay was concerned less with concep­tual rigor or novelty, and instead with produc­ing a reliably beau­ti­ful result—and it is through the uncom­pli­cated plea­sures of making and listen­ing to beau­ti­ful sounds that Music for Hard Times succeeds. There’s a clear timbral and harmonic palette that binds the album together. Espe­cially in its larger choral-orches­tral real­iza­tion, there’s an ASMR-like detail to the sounds, an envelop­ing coziness which draws the listener inward. Clay plays games with the listener’s sense of space and distance, bringing a producer’s keen ear to the physical place­ment of each indi­vid­ual sample. In Part 1, a trio of inter­twin­ing melodies on flutes and cellos, close and detailed enough that they could be in the room with you, suddenly zooms out to a wide land­scape of choral harmonies. These kinds of juxta­po­si­tions give the music a sense of perspec­tive, and an immer­sive, three-dimen­sional depth. As we listen, we’re lifted out of our claus­tro­pho­bic quar­an­tine apart­ments and into the wider world, along­side the musi­cians themselves. 

That one-to-one emotional rela­tion­ship which Clay and the Living Earth Show orig­i­nally set out to inves­ti­gate is rare in pure music (that is, music without lyrics), because it’s an abstract language. There’s a fine line between giving people agency to expe­ri­ence the Calming Strate­gies for them­selves, and nudging them in the direc­tion of a musical narra­tive. That’s where Clay’s confi­dent compo­si­tional hand becomes apparent. As befits the communal nature of the work, he takes a light touch, subli­mat­ing any sense of artist’s ego. Music For Hard Times rearranges and compli­cates the order of oper­a­tions typi­cally demanded by “composed” work, though it retains the core Clas­si­cal Music triumvi­rate: composer, score, inter­preters. Instead of produc­ing a detailed document and giving it to perform­ers to execute, Clay provides prompts, gathers responses, and then molds the result into just one of infinite possible “perfor­mances.” For this reason, it’s partic­u­larly educa­tional to have two real­iza­tions to compare. Take Part 2 from both books; both employ Strategy #5 (“Pick one object, or musical idea. Record as many vari­a­tions on it as you can”). Book 1’s treat­ment is a simple dialogue of a chord cycle in various inver­sions, while Book 2’s choral version is more discur­sive, voices swooping in from differ­ent direc­tions, each breaking down a differ­ent melodic cell. It would be diffi­cult, if not impos­si­ble, to identify both as having roots in the same “score.”

In this openness, Music For Hard Times stands in quiet oppo­si­tion to the academic conser­va­tory training its musi­cians possess. Clas­si­cal music has always been, by nature, econom­i­cally exclu­sive, locking the majority out of partic­i­pat­ing in it; in equip­ment and years of study, it costs hundreds of thou­sands of dollars for a bassoon­ist, say, to be able to play the opening of The Rite of Spring. Music For Hard Times contin­ues a thread that runs through much of Clay’s work, which looks for ways to make the music acces­si­ble and applic­a­ble to anybody. Though written with the virtuosi of The Living Earth Show in mind, the work deepened its focus in moving beyond guitar and percus­sion. Adapting the strate­gies didn’t require changing them so much as broad­en­ing the language of the instruc­tions to account for breath, so as to include singers and wind players, and the partic­i­pa­tion of students, amateur musi­cians, and even non-musi­cians (a few of the strate­gies contain notated music, but all have options for non-music readers to contribute as well). 

Though its creators describe Music For Hard Times as a “New Age” album, the music is more exper­i­men­tal and adven­tur­ous than one might expect from such a label. Instead of spread­ing out on a flat, hori­zon­tal plane and acting as wall­pa­per, each track gently artic­u­lates emotional peaks and valleys. These aren’t evident in the wording or notation of the strate­gies them­selves, which only shape the land­scape by produc­ing varied textures of music: melodies, sustained tones, loops, percus­sive events. Instead, these land­scapes are the result of the composer shaping the perfor­mance after it’s taken place. It’s not quite narra­tive, but it is sculptural. 

When composers speak of musical “archi­tec­ture” we’re usually talking about form: what happens, when, for how long. But Music For Hard Times becomes a more literal sort of archi­tec­ture in our minds as we partic­i­pate in it; it’s a well-consid­ered space to exist in for a while, one which merits atten­tion without demand­ing it. In this way, the whole process func­tions as a bridge, connect­ing conser­va­tory training to instru­men­tal practice to what it means to be a human being. People become artists because of a deep and inex­plic­a­ble urge to make things: for them­selves, for each other, and for the wider world. As long as they are able to do this, they continue to grow and thrive. The Calming Strate­gies, and this specific docu­men­ta­tion of them, function above all as a record of artists doing exactly that, during a memo­rably hard time. 

–Timo Andres, July 2021

On Thursday, December 16^th, I’ll be playing a solo recital on Kaufmann Center’s Piano Dialogues series. Lots of concert series have clever names like this but this program truly is a dialogue. My close friends Sarah Gold­feather and Eric Shan­field have written new pieces for me which will both be heard in public for the first time. Eric’s piece, Timo Vari­a­tions, is a hefty set after a theme I composed for him in 2019. Here’s the theme—

—which Eric pleas­antly evis­cer­ates, in a series of sly and affec­tion­ate homages to other composers, among them: Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, Bach, Pärt, Webern, Ligeti, Nyman, and Glass.

Sarah’s new piece, called Fern Canyon, is a stunning pastorale, made up of tiny repeat­ing patterns progres­sively stacked on each other. As it becomes an increas­ingly-complex thicket, the forest suddenly gives way to a dramatic vista.

In between, one of my favorite pastoral/metaphysical trav­el­ogues: Robert Schu­man­n’s Wald­szenen (Forest Scenes); in the video above, I play the cryptic Vogel als Prophet (Bird as Prophet).

The score to Honest Labor, my recent solo piano piece, is now avail­able for purchase. The piece was premièred this past week in New York City by the fasci­nat­ing and adven­tur­ous pianist Robert Fleitz.

Two good things occur­ring this coming Friday, May 21:

Chris Cerrone’s new album The Arching Path comes out on In A Circle Records. Above, a film we made for the title track with the bril­liant fellows at Four/Ten Media. I’m honored to join a cast of real all-stars on the rest of the album: Lindsay Kessel­man, Ian Rosen­baum, and Mingzhe Wang (whom longtime readers of this website will remember from his unim­peach­able dumpling recipe). Jen Gersten wrote the insight­ful liner notes, and I designed the bright blue packaging.

Second and more press­ingly: I am playing a solo program at Barge­mu­sic that same night at 7; two tickets remain. Invite a friend from whom you’d like to sit some distance, and come hear some Southam, Adams, Schumann, Elling­ton, Debussy, Rorem, and Andres (Timo—me—the person writing this).

This new film of My Lips From Speaking is the latest episode in my “year of the Wolfe.” Orig­i­nally scored for six pianos (count ’em), the piece was later arranged for a mere two, which is the version I’ve recorded here, joined by my doppel­gänger. It’s a char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally single­minded piece, based on the opening riff of Aretha Franklin’s “Think.” Like much Wolfe, it’s relent­lessly method­i­cal in how it treats its musical material, violently decon­struct­ing, recon­struct­ing, and finally tran­scend­ing it.

I’m indebted to Kettle Corn New Music for commis­sion­ing and present­ing this new film, which is undoubt­edly one of the most complex and diffi­cult I’ve made so far, from both a musical and tech­ni­cal perspec­tive. The two piano version contains most of the notes of the six piano—at times, literal fistfuls of them. The music is also constantly, almost cartoon­ishly synco­pated, the parts lining up, or often not lining up, at unpre­dictable moments. This means it has to be rhyth­mi­cally ultra-precise—it’s a delicate illusion that can be destroyed by mere millisec­onds of vari­a­tion in timing, causing the whole thing to sound like a haphaz­ard jumble. What I was striving for in this perfor­mance was to super­sede the “counting like hell” feeling that can plague perfor­mances of such rhyth­mi­cally intri­cate music, and give it some­thing of the loose, rolling groove of its source material—leaning into the synco­pa­tions, easing off the strong beats.

This piece is also just loud—it tested my record­ing setup, my poor long-suffer­ing piano, and my physical stamina. It’s a chal­lenge to find and savor the few moments of respite within its struc­tural jugger­naut. Playing both parts let me fine-tune the dynamics on a moment-to-moment level and find some trans­parency in the dense inter­play, allowing details to come through that may not be audible in the six-piano version. Of course, you lose some of the wonder­fully over-the-top ridicu­lous­ness of the original—though the ending comes close, I think.

My concert film with violin­ist Rachel Lee Priday is avail­able to stream from the Phillips Collec­tion this week. Above, our perfor­mance of Julia Wolfe’s Mink Stole, a barn-burner from the late 90’s. I’m espe­cially proud to have recorded this piece, which was, until now, impos­si­ble to hear online.

Louis Andriessen’s The Only One is out today on Nonesuch Records, avail­able to hear on the platform of your choice. Here’s the liner note I wrote about the piece.

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A composer who’s always delighted in thumbing his nose at the estab­lish­ment, audi­ences’ expec­ta­tions, and cultural, polit­i­cal, and aesthetic conven­tions, Louis Andriessen embodies the urbane, eclectic post­mod­ernist. “Highbrow” and “lowbrow” glee­fully collide in his music, sending frag­ments flying in all direc­tions. He’s lived to see the old cultural divi­sions break down, his polyglot revo­lu­tion reassem­ble the lingua franca. 

Despite a riotous mix of influ­ences, Andriessen’s style is often seen as the heir to Stravinsky’s cool, formal detach­ment. Even at its most intense, his music retains a certain emotional distance. “I need to have emotional expe­ri­ences to become a better person,” Andriessen has said, “but I never like to express myself when I write music.” That’s not to say his music isn’t personal. In a certain way, Andriessen has always been a char­ac­ter in the back­ground of his own music, both because of its urgent polit­i­cal agenda, and because it so frequently examines the nature of art itself and the people who make it. De Staat (1988) sati­rizes, or maybe ideal­izes, Plato’s asser­tion that the power of certain sounds can disrupt polit­i­cal order; the opera Rosa (1994) kills off its main char­ac­ter, who happens to be a composer; De Stijl (1985) sets mani­festo-like math­e­mat­ics texts against a musical depic­tion of Piet Mondrian’s bright, rhythmic paint­ings. All these pieces maintain a brutal objec­tiv­ity towards their subjects. 

In this context, The Only One seems like a curious outlier. These six songs feel jarringly personal, as though Andriessen is subject­ing his music to Freudian analysis. Cryp­ti­cally confes­sional poems by Delphine Lecompte trap us in the claus­tro­pho­bic interior world of their narrator’s head. Here is an artist confronting the various indig­ni­ties and vagaries of her profes­sion: “I dig up my talents/they are yellowed and rendered obsolete,” she repeats in the opening song, helpless in the face of unhappy parents and dysfunc­tional rela­tion­ships. Later, she compares her aimless daily routines to those of people with ordinary jobs, “who whistling, cycle to a future that is bright and volup­tuous and also merciful, healthy and hospitable.” She’s trying to come to terms with that common dilemma: the artist’s becoming inter­change­able with—and mistaken for—her own work, and coming up disap­point­ingly short. Compound­ing these feelings of alien­ation is a kind of dysmor­phia; she appears to others as an adult, yet does not feel like one. Many of the poems find their narrator caught between a desire for perceived safety—of home, parents, her own bed—and, simul­ta­ne­ously, over­whelm­ing claus­tro­pho­bia at feeling trapped by these things. 

But the tone of Andriessen’s music is hardly self-pitying. More often, his melodies sound like frag­ments of children’s songs, making light of their singer’s anguish. Bathos and dark humor are familiar Andriessen tropes, that under­score a confronta­tional, even contra­dic­tory, rela­tion­ship between music and text. The Only One’s orches­tra, though tame by Andriessen stan­dards, serves as both co-conspir­a­tor and antag­o­nist, some­times aping the text so closely it feels mocking rather than sympa­thetic. The singer’s valiant attempt at self-confi­dence are accom­pa­nied by brief bursts of brassy fanfare that dissolve just as quickly into diffi­dent ostinati. At one partic­u­larly low point, the trom­bones indulge in a cartoon­ish Dies irae. In ‘Broken Morning,’ the intru­sion of some­thing halfway between mariachi band and ländler sets the scene of a tavern filled with grotesque char­ac­ters who welcome the narrator as one of their own. Yet these and other refer­en­tial moments are mirages, evap­o­rat­ing in seconds, products of a febrile mind exam­in­ing itself too closely. 

The combi­na­tion of vulner­a­bil­ity and muta­bil­ity suits The Only One’s soloist and inspi­ra­tion, the protean young vocalist Nora Fischer. Hers is a perfor­mance practice that didn’t exist at the begin­ning of Andriessen’s career, when bound­aries between singing styles were more rigidly enforced. Fischer’s voice has little in common with the bel canto operatic sound typi­cally found in an orches­tral context, yet it’s equally far from the studiously affect­less “straight tone” voices employed by so much contem­po­rary music. Fischer fuses the hyper-expres­siv­ity of a pop singer like Björk with the cabaret tradi­tion of Kurt Weill, unafraid to push her voice into situ­a­tions that sound awkward, even ugly; it’s easy to see why a composer like Andriessen found it compelling. He responded by writing her songs that sit at the inter­sec­tion of jazz standard and lied, but weirder and more frag­men­tary than either. In The Only One’s title song, the score instructs the voice to progress from “elegant” to “scream” over the course of a minute and a half. During concert perfor­mances of the work, Fischer wanders through the orches­tra, micro­phone in hand, gently ribbing the musi­cians and changing costumes during the two instru­men­tal interludes. 

In fact, it’s during these two inter­ludes that the orches­tral music sounds freer to express genuine emotion. In place of the raw power of Andriessen’s usual “terri­fy­ing 21^st-century orches­tra” are more subtle grada­tions of light and shade. The instru­men­ta­tion still skews to his pref­er­ences, with the inclu­sion of saxo­phones and guitars and a reliance on the clean attacks of piano, harp and percus­sion, but the sound is far from the hard-edged snarl so char­ac­ter­is­tic of his style. Here, harmonies are softer and simpler, the usual triads refracted through hazy mid-after­noon light. This is Andriessen stripped down to his essence, all the compo­nent parts of his language laid bare. There’s much in this music that brings to mind the idea of “late style,” that myste­ri­ous sense of maturity shared by many other­wise dissim­i­lar artists. There is undoubt­edly an autumnal quality from the very outset of The Only One, a sense of its composer having come to terms with the past, present, and future. The willful stub­born­ness that gives Andriessen’s earlier works their single-minded power is no longer the govern­ing force. The Only One is not a mani­festo; there’s nothing left to prove. Instead, Andriessen seems freed to express the most concen­trated form of an idea, then move on to the next one. 

But The Only One still brings tremen­dous focus to its brief forms. The piece enjoys the same obses­sion with its own mate­ri­als as a late Beethoven quartet; simple, familiar-sounding scraps of music are constantly being trans­formed and scat­tered across the score. The main musical motto of the piece is a dotted rhythm, a musical iamb (short-long, short-long) which grows out of a brittle marimba and piano toccata at the begin­ning of the piece. This rhythm reap­pears in differ­ent guises through­out, ranging from elegant baroque overture to sing-song play­ground chant to sickly limp. In ‘The Early Bird’ the iambs straighten them­selves out for a moment, taking on the rhythmic stolid­ity of a hymn or anthem, as the narrator ideal­izes the simple lives and opti­mistic outlook of the “strange workers” around her. But the music turns uneven again as her own efforts at optimism are rudely rebuffed (“grains of sand and used condoms are spat in my face”). 

Later, ‘Twist and Shame’ opens with a jagged, disso­nant fanfare, a nearly-complete 12-tone row. (It’s missing one note.) If this is a coin­ci­dence, it’s a striking one. Andriessen composed using the 12-tone method for a brief period in his early 20s, and never looked back. Are these bars a remi­nis­cence of youthful folly? Another nose-thumbing refer­ence? The narrator, at any rate, seems unable to overcome her regrets. “Shame is a wasted emotion,” she repeats to herself, to no avail. She takes a train (through time, it seems) to sit with her ances­tors, but finds nothing in common with these people, who absorb them­selves in pedes­trian concerns: work, sex, minor aches and pains. 

In fact, the narrator finds no comfort in the corpo­real. Her sexu­al­ity is instead just another chance for humil­i­a­tion. In the final song, ‘Grown Up,’ a symbol­i­cally coded encounter on a nudist beach quickly leads to loss of innocence—puberty, preg­nancy, “outra­geous waltzes with masked men” (accom­pa­nied by cartoon­ishly Viennese music, of course). Though she longs for the safety of her house, her bed, her own thoughts, the womb—by the end of the piece, she seems to have recon­ciled herself to becoming “the grown-up that betrayed my inner child.” That this betrayal isn’t accom­pa­nied by musical histri­on­ics makes it all the more shat­ter­ing. Andriessen ends the piece with a Stravin­skian shrug, a gently clashing chord repeated eight times at medium volume, as if to say: “that’s life.” 

–Timo Andres, November 2020