childlike

A thought after practicing the Schoenberg Suite this afternoon: writing this piece, Schoenberg was like a kid in a candy store. It is the first large-scale twelve-tone piece ever written, from 1925: six dance movements based on a single twelve-note row. Especially as he took the extra step of limiting himself in the piece's composition--using only the prime version and one transposed form of the row--Schoenberg was clearly having a blast, reveling in his own creativity and imagining the future of music fashioned in his iconoclastic image. The Suite is fantastically funny, and delightful, at every moment. It's great to play it again.

Claire Chase and I play a very different twelve-tone piece next week in Bowling Green, Boulez's Sonatine from 1946; the Sonatine is playful too, but Boulez also takes delight in his distinct brand of sonic violence.

Two weekends ago, Tony Arnold and I had a very nice few shows of Messiaen's Harawi at the Library of Congress and in (newly blue) North Carolina. It felt really good to be joining in the celebration of his centennial.

drumroll, please...

I'm thrilled to announce (along with others) that flutist Claire Chase, the executive director of ICE and one of my longtime collaborators, just won first prize at this year's Concert Artist Guild competition. I played with Claire in the semifinal round of the competition and again, last night, for the winners' concert at the Kosciusko Foundation. I couldn't be happier for Claire, and I hope this means that there are many concerts in our future together. Bravissimo.

dreamy flashback

The scene is southwestern rural England, August 2000, and I'm a student at the Dartington International Summer Courses. I'm studying with the pianist Joanna MacGregor during the festival, working on pieces by Bach and Harrison Birtwistle (whom I also work with that summer). It's a cool late summer night, one of the last nights of the festival, and there is a performance in a large shed in the middle of a field. No lights whatsoever, and one has to find one's way there literally by moonlight.

The show is the "final project" of one of the courses, a course in improvisation and collective composition. There's just one piece played, an hour-long set without a break, and the effect it has on me is hard to describe. I sit down with my friends on a crate-like seat on one side of the shed, and as a member of the audience I take in what this group has created, a long dreamlike collage piece in fits and starts. It's polystylistic: a section of rich classical string playing followed by a jazz section with fast drumming, then a hip-hop rap, and then a section I don't understand but get completely lost in. It is something like a slow, somewhat distracted university marching band anthem, complete with tooting low brass. A vocal group chimes in with Swingle Singers-like doo-wop asides. The piece is in 7/4 time and goes on a continuous loop through the same harmonies. I lose track of how long it goes on, but I gradually feel warm, enveloped by the sound and by the smiles of the performers.

Somehow, I believe this night was a turning point in my understanding of new music and its performance; the memory comes back to me often, and I thought of it again two weeks ago when I was up at EMPAC with ICE, doing a program, played continuously, of music from five centuries. Every kind of music informs every other, and one listens--really, to any kind of concert--simultaneously with old and new ears, ears of experience and ears which are only in the moment. In the blissful mix of styles that I heard that night at Dartington, I was inside and outside of myself all at once, and clearly, it was unforgettable.

chilly days

Fall is breezing into New York.

Many exciting things coming up--it's hard not to get overwhelmed, but every project I'm involved with informs every other, and that's the way I like to work. I'm about to head up to upstate New York with ICE, to participate in a grand-opening week for the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), a state-of-the-art facility in Troy, NY, where we'll be sharing a bill with Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Wooster Group, among other great organizations. The program is a piece by Kurtag, for which I'll be playing harpsichord and harmonium. My first time on harmonium: I expect to be transported back to the turn of the last century the minute I start playing it.

My new piece, premiering at a Close Range concert on November 23, is "Gardens of the City (Lied Ohne Worte)," whose central feature is a syllabic setting, to a continuous melody, of my favorite poem by Rilke. A true song without words, it's a piece with a long history, and I'm excited to bring it to the public. A few more weeks of finishing touches and it'll be ready.

In the meantime, I'm praying for the future of the U.S., and trying to get a group together to help with polling in Pennsylvania on election day.

late-breaking

If you happen to catch this in time, I'm speaking on Columbia University radio this morning at 11 AM, to promote (with ICE guitarist Dan Lippel) ICE's Abandoned Time CD. Should be a very nice hour of chat and excerpts from the disc. You can listen on WKRC online, or tune in to 89.9 FM in NYC. Our release party/concert at the Stone this past Sunday was a hoot.

forging ahead

New music, or music which is new to me, is occupying my thoughts now: Schoenberg op. 11, the Busoni Fantasia Contrappuntistica, and new music of my own. I've got a lot on my plate this season, and I haven't even mentioned my activity with ICE. I'm very excited about the imminent release of our Crumb CD on Bridge, and the disc for which I spent so much time on New Focus, which we're calling Abandoned Time. Both discs are excellent representations of ICE's many strengths. Meanwhile, there's much to enjoy about the city in these last weeks of August, and the weather has been heavenly.

und jetzt...

After an unbelievably intense week of coachings with Gyorgy and Marta Kurtag and my performance with Tony Arnold, I'm vacationing in Berlin. In Darmstadt, I was very aware of the town's peculiar qualities--especially how out-of-the-way it is--and how that was perfect for its unique role in the history of postwar music. No one, except the already-initiated, would know what pathbreaking things were happening there. Kurtag's piece which I performed was premiered at Darmstadt, and is very much a product of the place--full of quite a bit of angst, maximum dissonance always, and a very obscure sense of rhythm.

But it was a very rich week, and an unforgettable experience. Was with my friend the flutist Eric Lamb in Frankfurt for two days after Darmstadt, catching my breath, and then I began my vacation properly. It's been twelve years since I've been in Berlin, and it is a very, very different place than I remember. The purpose of my visit here is to get a sense of what it is now, and how I relate to the city. Last night at a bar called Mobel Olfe in the Kreuzberg neighborhood, I found myself by accident in front of a movie theater for art films that I used to go to all the time, the Babylon, now nested in super-trendy Kreuzberg, which is still charmingly shabby even to a trained eye.