I was surprised by the extent to which the arrival of the Work Songs CDs this week made the album feel “real” to me. I don’t often listen to CDs anymore, but I like having a physical representation of something that I’ve worked hard on, but has only ever existed “in the aether.” It also feels much more generous and celebratory to send a CD to people (don’t worry, it comes with a download code). Head on over to the Albums page to get your own copy.
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The great Irish singer Lisa Hannigan released a live album with the chamber orchestra stargaze last month, on which they perform my arrangement of her haunting song Barton.
Don’t remind me
I frequently talk with composition students about the difficulty and necessity of gaining multiple perspectives on one’s own music. When immersed in the minutiae of writing the thing, it’s nearly impossible to understand how a piece will feel to an actual audience. What’s more, you’re unlikely to ever be surprised by hearing yourself, to have your own expectations either foiled or confirmed, when you know what’s around every bend.
I’ve been thinking quite seriously that the best way around this quandary would be for a composer to write so much music that remembering all of it would gradually become impossible. The details of each piece would blur together, such that after enough time had elapsed—say 15 or 20 years—the composer could then listen to a performance of their own work with true objectivity and without preconceptions.
There have been occasions when I’ve felt vertiginous hints of this unlearning process, not yet for entire pieces, but in short bursts. Listening recently to a live recording of It takes a long time to become a good composer, I remembered the major facts of the piece, but found myself surprised by the way certain transitions unfolded, or how many times a figure repeated. It struck me as being one of my strangest pieces, not disagreeably so, but in the tenuous ways the chunks of music related to each other, like floating objects in a surrealist painting. It takes a long time is nearly a decade old, but it’s not a piece I’ve heard performed frequently or recorded, which is perhaps why it makes a good case study. I’m excited to neglect it for another decade, writing another 50-something pieces in the meantime, and revisit this experiment in 2029.
Right to roam
A short bulletin to let you know that today is the wide release of Work Songs. You can (finally!) listen to the album on the platform of your choice—I suggest Bandcamp—and you can also order a physical, tangible CD, which will ship next month. I’m pleased as punch to have this long-gestating, short-playing work out in the wide world. For much more about it, read this post.
Here’s the “single,” to a poem by Andrea Cohen:
Timo Andres: Work Songs: 3. To Whom it May Concern
performers Becca Stevens, voice & guitar; Gabriel Kahane, voice & guitar; Ted Hearne, voice; Nathan Koci, accordion; Taylor Levine, guitar; Timo Andres, piano & keyboard
Everything’s Overgrown
After the past week’s flurry of premières, I’m turning back into a pianist in preparation for a solo recital at Caramoor on June 20. It’s the same program west-coasters might’ve heard in San Francisco, interlacing selections from Janáçek’s On An Overgrown Path with recent works by Caroline Shaw, Eric Shanfield, and Christopher Cerrone. Here’s a “curatorial statement” in answer to your questions: “what and why?”
There’s a good reason for all the evocative titles on this program, which is that all the works are based on visual images, either real or imagined. What I liked was that all the pieces have to do with different mediums, or chains of mediums, like a game of inspirational telephone. Caroline’s Gustave le Gray is named after a pioneer in photography, and is half an analogue to his images, and half an imagined portrait of the photographer himself. Chris was inspired by an artist friend’s rendering of a beautiful brutalist bridge in southern Italy—the two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional form, translated into a musical form. Eric’s Utopia Parkway is an homage to the sculptor Joseph Cornell—musical “objects” move against each other in shifting positions, like the objects in one of Cornell’s shadow boxes.
And it’s not known exactly what inspired the titles of Janáçek’s On An Overgrown Path, though I believe they were given only just before being published—it seems likely they were images or phrases out of his own head. But they are amazingly evocative in a way that is pictorial but nonetheless abstract.
I suppose what I’m trying to “say”, if one can speak through one’s programming, is that the way an artist sees art and the world is not usually confined to a single form or discipline. The qualities that move me in music are the same that move me about a building, a photograph, or a piece of choreography. They’re all related in cryptic ways.
Caramoor is a short Metro-North trip from Grand Central and I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s beautiful and the architecture is slightly outrageous. I even composed the bell chimes which summon you To Concert, so the entire evening promises to be something of a Gesamtkunstwerk.
Machine, Learning
Note
Machine, Learning is a short string quartet that interrogates the possibilities of a sequence of intervals over the course of three movements. The first, Light Weight, subjects the sequence to several rhythmic processes. As the instruments chase each other in canon, they cycle rapidly through every permutation of the intervals.
The second movement, Hammerspace, tries at a more grammatically coherent sort of music by making a lilting tune from the same intervals, but it keeps getting jumbled, interrupted, or stuck.
Finally, in Earthly Bodies, the interval pattern is sufficiently slowed down as to reveal the melody hidden within the mechanism.
Listen
Timo Andres: Machine, Learning: 3. Earthly Bodiesrecorded live at Herbst Theater, San Francisco, CA, October 2023
performers Calder Quartet
Purchase
-
Machine, Learning score & parts, print edition
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Machine, Learning score & parts, PDF edition
23 pages, 9×12 format. Includes full score and 4 parts.
Fast Flows and Lines of Beauty
If “classical music” is a niche market, and “new music” a niche within it, then those of us who care deeply about recent developments in notation software must be a small fraction of the population indeed; for us, the advent of Dorico, the first new industrial-strength notation program in decades, has been nothing less than thrilling. By now the circumstances surrounding its birth have been well-told. The progress of the software has also been painstakingly documented. But two and a half years after its initial release, I haven’t seen much written from the perspective of composers about the experience of working in Dorico long-term. I’ve been using it since the first version came out in October of 2016—at first gingerly, on small side projects. At that point I’d spent half my life using Sibelius.
As artists, and especially as composers, our tools matter. We’re using them to make musical scores, which are essentially tools for other people. Anything we can do to make our work more readable, standardized, error-free, and beautiful is something we should feel compelled to do. But our tools have to be well-made and streamlined enough for us to want to use them, too (otherwise we’d all be writing in SCORE). I can’t overstate how nice Dorico is as a daily tool. The interface is clean, crisp, and non-distracting; fonts and icons are sharp and tasteful; palettes and dialogues have efficient and sensible workflows. All the small design choices add up to a coherent whole, just like the details in a well-engraved musical score.
The process of composing is different for everyone, of course. I like to write straight into the computer, sitting at either a piano or a MIDI keyboard. And the actual day-to-day indecision of composing is fluid and graceful in Dorico—jotting down ideas quickly and then wrestling with them over long periods, transforming, cutting, splicing, and rearranging them every which way. You can edit without fear of triggering a cascade of errors and messes elsewhere in the score. The program will never protest about a tuplet; extramusical lines and indications move in lockstep with notes; extraneous rests are cleaned up for you; beams are re-beamed correctly. Its handling of rhythms is so good that it surpasses mere convenience and becomes an actual creative tool. All of these things initially felt, and continue to feel, like small miracles.
Moon, River
The New York Times ran a nice feature today surveying a handful of artists on their favorite five minutes of piano music. (They’ve been doing more pieces like this lately, and fewer reviews—which I suppose is good—they are useful for a broader audience). It’s an impossible question for me to answer, so I decided to narrow it down: what are the most piano‑y five minutes of piano music? What takes advantage of the particular qualities of the piano in such a way that it would be unimaginable to play on any other instrument?
The piano is unique in that it contains its own acoustics, as well as the tools to modulate them. A violin or oboe needs a proper concert hall to sound its best, but all a piano needs is its own case. Inside, 200 or so criss-crossed strings vibrate sympathetically, producing ringing stacks of harmonic feedback—a kind of built-in reverb module. A sensitive pianist can control all of this using minute gradations of the sustain pedal.
I ended up choosing Debussy’s enigmatic prélude La terrasse des audiences du claire de lune (or “the other Clair de Lune”), mostly because I’ve had Debussy on the mind lately, having just finished Stephen Walsh’s excellent new biography (thanks to the thoughtful people at Knopf for sending it to me). Otherwise I think my “alternate” would’ve been the Nocturne Op. 62 No. 1 by Chopin, a piece similarly dense with astonishing twists and details.
In other nocturne news: cellist Caitlin Sullivan has released her début album, which is full of new music from friends & colleagues. It includes a recording we made of my 2008 piece Fast Flows the River for cello and Hammond B3 organ. I’m quite pleased with how the recording turned out; producer Dan Bora created exactly the “warm bath” enveloping the cello that I had in mind. You can listen on Bandcamp or the streaming service of your preference.
Land Mass
Note
I have always been drawn to the sound of liturgical music—its simplicity, scale, and the communal, consolatory aspect of it. The message being delivered, for me, is secondary to the method of delivery. With this in mind, I composed Land Mass from beginning to end with no words at all. I wanted to fuse the chorus’s parts to the structure of the music itself, rather than to that of a text, hoping to carry the piece through its half-hour duration with a sense of purpose and inevitability.
Only after I’d composed this music did I let what I’d written guide me to choose texts concerned with oceans, tectonic plates, natural disasters, and the motions of interstellar objects. Thinking and writing about these geographic, geologic “masses” feels pressingly urgent, but Land Mass is not a piece with a particular agenda or message. Instead it’s a collection of histories, curiosities, facts, fictions, juxtapositions, and suggestions, hoping to extend that sense of communal consolation to listeners and performers alike.
Land Mass is built from three roughly equal-size parts, each with its own topic and mood. The piece begins simply, with an invented folk-like melody unspooling over a mechanistic 16th-note ostinato. In rhythmic unison, as if learning by rote, the chorus lists facts about the natural world—excerpts from the Orbis Pictus, one of the first widely-used textbooks. Syncopated pulses in the winds and percussion begin to punctuate these horizontal lines as the music expands in register, volume, and harmonic complexity. The movement concludes with a line of text that takes on the ominous weight of a prophecy: “[even in the highest mountains and landlocked countries] we find the products of the sea enclosed in hardest marble.” The movement fades away with distant brass calls, the 16th-note ostinato still growling away in the basses.
The second movement sets a legend (explanatory text) from Gerardus Mercator’s 1569 world map. I chose this legend because of its fantastical imagery and wild inaccuracy; it asserts that the North Pole conceals a giant, magnetic mountain, which pulls the wind and ocean currents toward it from all directions, forming an inescapable vortex. The movement opens with a series of deliberately-paced, almost ritualistic episodes, which eventually build momentum into a swirling, vigorous middle section. In contrast to the choral writing in the first movement, here it becomes densely contrapuntal, each voice moving in independent eddies and cascades. It struck me in setting this text that a fictive map might be preferable to no map at all. Though it fails to serve a concrete function, it still provides a measure of consolation—if we can find ourselves on it.
The third movement is the most narrative, even as its musical substrate is highly procedural. It sets Pliny the Younger’s letter describing his uncle’s experiences during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. At first, the music acts as a foil to the drama of the text, as if it were being remembered rather than experienced. Slow, arching melodies emerge from a cyclic series of chords, or chaconne. This chaconne is atypical in that it modulates down by a half-step with each repetition. As the music grows progressively lower and darker, it finally explodes, fracturing the foundations of the chaconne from within. This builds to a frantic dialogue between the Plinys, Younger and Elder, with scenes of pandemonium interrupted by the famous humanist axiom “God is man helping man.” But the last, emphatic choral injunction is echoed only weakly by a stunned, broken orchestra; it remains to be seen whether man will, in the end, help man.
Listen
Timo Andres: Land Mass: 1. Terra Cognita [excerpt] Timo Andres: Land Mass: 2. Legend [excerpt] Timo Andres: Land Mass: 3. Subduction Chaconne [excerpt]recorded live at Staatstheater Cottbus, DE, May 31, 2019
performers Opernchor and Singakademie Cottbus, Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Cottbus, Michael Wendeberg
Purchase
Land Mass full score, print edition
Land Mass full score, PDF edition
Land Mass choral score, print edition
Land Mass choral score, PDF edition
94 pages, 11×17 format. Choral score 65 pages, 9 x 12 format. Purchase includes scores only. Parts and choral scores are available for rental; please email rentals@andres.com for a quote.
Work Songs, arise!
I’m thrilled to announce that Work Songs is coming out on New Amsterdam Records.
You can preorder the digital album on Bandcamp for delivery May 24th; you can also stream it there today, if you’re a NewAm subscriber. I’ll have physical copies for sale in May as well.
I’m grateful to many people for helping Work Songs along its winding journey, but most of all I’d like to thank the people who play on the album, and for whom the piece was written: Becca Stevens, Gabriel Kahane, Ted Hearne, Nathan Koci, and Taylor Levine. Alex Venguer mixed the album, and the cover was drawn by Pixar’s own Harley Jessup.
Here’s the liner note I wrote about the piece:
Artists’ working habits have always fascinated me—Matisse sculpting in bed, Charles Ives’s Bach-ian eye-openers, Alice Munro’s strict quotas (very useful)—not so much for the insight they provide into the actual work, but more as an idealized template for how to organize one’s life.
The Work Songs project began to form eight years ago, in the spring of 2011. I had wanted to make something having to do with American song traditions. One of the first musical “scores” I encountered in my childhood was the Fireside Book of Folk Songs (a 1940’s edition, I think, with beautiful spot-color illustrations) which my parents owned. There are many work songs in the Fireside anthology, mostly about different kinds of manual labor. I gradually formed the idea to write a kind of artist-centric set of work songs, using similarly straight-backed, aphoristic texts. Some are songs of hardship and complaint, while others are meant to provide comfort, empathy, or possible solutions to problems. But they all, in some way, attempt to address existential questions—what do “artists” do, exactly, and how should we exist in the world?
Unlike a typical commission, Work Songs is a piece I wanted to write, for a specific group of friends and collaborators: Becca Stevens, Gabriel Kahane, Ted Hearne, and Nathan Koci. Becca, Gabriel, and Ted sing, as well as help play whatever instruments are at hand—a hodgepodge of guitars and keyboards—with Nathan and me on accordion and piano. The indispensable guitarist Taylor Levine joined the band further down the line. Since I wrote Work Songs for specific people, I was able to tailor each song to their particular individual strengths. The piece feels like a team effort in this regard, which is appropriate, since these fellow artists not only inspire me with their work, but help me find answers to those existential questions.
By way of introduction, “Art”: Melville lists the contradictions inherent in its creation (always comforting to think, when frustration arises, that Herman Melville felt it too). “Unemployment” describes a musician so burnt-out—artistically, emotionally, financially—that he is unable to hear the music anymore. “To Whom it May Concern” gives playful voice to a familiar feeling: that the grass is greener on the other side of the Atlantic (ah, for that progressive, democratic-socialist, Scandinavian grass). “Poet’s Work” is about whittling something down to its essence—a poem pared down to an aphorism, set over a slowly contracting musical process. And finally, Woody Guthrie’s list of new year’s resolutions— “Rulin’s”, he calls them—are as good and simple advice as anything I’ve read. Write a song a day. Learn people better. Change bedclothes often.