The connecting c(h)ord

An on-again, off-again project has been seeping, brewing, marinating.

And by on-again, off-again, I really mean: 

ON (offer! concert offered! Learn more of these!) … practice, practice, practice - oh wait, these are HARD - maybe wait until my technique is better / the planets align / my cat can clean its own litterbox - or until I can play them perfectly. Practice, oh wait, here’s my opera season for the year, so better get on THAT because that is sure money, and that is how the world {somehow} sees me these days ::: keep going, keep going, keep GOING (thank you, Berio and Samuel Beckett!).

Literally, this project, now calling my name very strongly, is starting to boil over. Like a pot, or sauce, on very slow boil.

Try … seven or eight YEARS. All of my cells are different from the time I started. 

Today I experimented with the recorded sound - visual of pairing my new Zoom h5 with my Nikon DSLR 5100. I have never paired an audio mic of this quality to the DSLR, but I was in the middle of blissfully practicing solo music, and then thought - 

“I’m going to check out what I look - and sound - like, in this moment!”

So I figured out how to pair the two, and set up the machine. Lo and behold, I came up with something fun! I also played around with filters and captions. The video is about a minute long.

https://youtu.be/wdM0fLnYydI

The connecting c(h)ord. The one I used today to connect the two machines. The one that Shostakovich uses to get from one harmony, to the next. He links back the opening a minor with the bell-tone “E” - the dominant, the overtone. Each chord struck is a riff on the one before, a connection to what is to come.  

{I'm at the midway-point through the program of OperaWorks. This is my first time on faculty here and it's a joy to be here for four weeks. 

 

The curriculum here is very much based on the joy of creation. Thus, it contains a lot of improvisation and play.}

It’s now mid-August, or about a month after I began this post. I returned home on July 25th and have been home for now a period of three weeks. I know that I’ve taken the “best” of what that program has to offer, and in doing so, am closer to answering some long-time questions that I have. 

The questions were,

”Why record a solo CD?” 

“Who will buy it or listen to it?"

“What value do these add to my market?"

“Are these my own voice?" 

 

 

My siblings have been after me for a long time about “solo material,” knowing that I mostly earn my living playing with, or for, others. 

The project:

Bach, Well-Tempered Clavier, Volume II (on harpsichord)

Shostakovich, Preludes and Fugues, Opus 87 (on piano) 

And:

Some improvisations - my own “voice” tying the pieces together. 

Here’s the first one, recorded casually in one take (on my iPhone) - 

 

Please return to read more about the process ...

 

PHOTO: a "Bach" in Colorado (March, 2015)

Semi-simple summer

Greetings everyone! 

I was intentionally absent from the blog-o-sphere when Zheng and I took a much-needed vacation to the San Francisco Bay Area. Photos forthcoming. We had an amazing time exploring that time. I had not returned since my summer at Merola (2007!) so it was amazing to be back there. 

I’m now hard at work on a project involving the musical history of Darmstadt, Germany along with my current position and relationships at UNM. The project is to present solo piano works of current UNM composers and their pieces, alongside pair-able German works in the common repertoire (occasional Bach or Brahms) or with a composer who was at Darmstadt during the initial years of the summer course (Berio, Babbitt, Messiaen). 

 

 

I have my first “outing” of some of the pieces this coming Thursday and Saturday, for a house concert (visit this post if you haven’t seen it before).

I have downtime this summer as well - so the summer is some playing and some resting. 

Semi-simple.

PHOTO: The opening to Milton Babbitt’s “Semi-Simple Variations.”