Results tagged “Philip Glass” from PianoMorphosis

I perform a piece with Butoh artist Maureen Fleming in which I play Philip Glass's Etude No. 5. The performance includes a video of Maureen moving, projected larger-than-life-size on a scrim. Behind the scrim, Maureen performs live. In front of the scrim, onstage, I sit at a piano and play the etude.

Maureen made the video first. She started improvising movements and shooting video, with careful, subtle lighting. The movements are slow and slow changing. Her body makes the shape of a triangle: her back arched, her thighs down flat, one forward, one back, her knees and feet bent up and grasped and ungrasped by her hand behind her back.

The film was made in segments and edited. The angle of the camera shifts very slightly through the finished piece. After the film was nearly complete, Maureen found the music. She fitted Glass's own recording of his Fifth Piano Etude to the images.

Before our first rehearsals together, Maureen gave me the video with Glass's playing as the soundtrack. This is music I have played quite often. I didn't want to copy the details of Philip's playing. I tried to find the points of coincidence between notable details of the movement, and punctuations and cadences in the music.

My goal was to be able to accompany the film (with the sound turned down), making the phrases of music line up or make sense with Maureen's filmed movement -- without exactly mimicking Philip's tempos or rhythmic inflections. It's tricky. Some phrases of the movement patterns go by more quickly. A completely steady, unvaried pace in playing the music is not possible.

Once we got into rehearsals, I played through the music with the video several times, as Maureen drew my attention to details of the movement. "You see my thumb touches the floor there." Or, " My chin disappears behind my arm, on 'four'."

On stage, Maureen performs these same movements live. She can see some of the projected moving image, and she can hear my playing. Often, her live performance virtually matches the film, but never exactly. I feel that a lot of the beauty and overall emotional quality of the work come from this friction -- this failure of the live performing to exactly coincide with the movements seen in the film.

So there are layers:

• There's the video that doesn't change (although it's murkier or easier to see depending on conditions in each theater).

• There's me trying to match my live playing of the music to what I can see in the video.

• And there's Maureen watching and listening, and doing the movements in sequence in real time.

I've done performances with other dancers using "live video" -- real time projection of events taking place in the moment. Some critics and audience members thought my performances with Maureen used live video. Perhaps these observers were mesmerized, and didn't notice the subtle changing of camera vantage point, or slightly asynchronous cadences.

Live video would be easier. I could play more freely. But then, the fragile, elusive links from the "script" -- the pre-made video -- to me, and to Maureen, would not be part of the art.

Tim Page suggested I play some music by Philip Glass. It was a solo piano arrangement of part of the opera Satyagraha -- Gandhi's final, Act 3 aria. Tim wanted this music for a solo piano CD we were making for BMG's Catalyst label.

The arrangement wasn't easy. According to Tim, the pianist Rudolf Firkusny had struggled with it, and given up -- Firkusny thought it was too hard to play! Though the Catalyst recording was never made (some details of the story are in Norman Lebrecht's The Life and Death of Classical Music), I learned the Satyagraha arrangement and performed it.

Glass himself got me involved in a dance performance at St. Mark's in New York, in the East Village, in which I played "Metamorphosis 2." That piece seems to exert a strong pull on choreographers. Since the performances with Polly Motley at St. Mark's (a two-dancer piece), I've done the same music with Maureen Fleming (her entrancing solo "The Stairs"), and again in a larger-scaled piece,"Extremely Close" by Alejandro Cerrudo at Hubbard Street Dance in Chicago.

The unmade Catalyst recording morphed into another project. I prepared all five pieces of Glass's Metamorphosis, as well as Mad Rush, and the Satyagraha arrangement. I went down to Third Street to play the pieces for Glass. (Before my first visit to his house, he gave meticulous directions about how to get there on the subway, including details regarding which end of the platform to use to transfer trains, and which stairways are most expedient.)

On Philip's home Baldwin, I found the middle C and the A below it (his favorite two notes!) almost toneless -- worn out. He was encouraging, mentioning a few ideas about how the recording might be engineered, and advising me to carefully count out all the repetitions within pieces...

Glass's piano music is personal. He plays it himself. At the same time, he seems to welcome others playing it. He showed me a cadenza he wrote for a piano concerto by Mozart, and got me a copy of the six etudes he wrote in 1994. Glass was writing more etudes and reserved the right to make the first recording himself, but he encouraged me to learn the music.

I returned to play through the six etudes for him. Philip penciled a few alterations into my score. And I did perform these etudes at Harvard University, in London, in Los Angeles, and in Manila. Philip continues writing piano etudes. He recorded ten of them in 2003. My own recording of the original six etudes has just appeared this month.

Talking to an internet start-up guy, it struck me: I need an intern.

There's a new CD -- Time Curve -- coming out very soon on Arabesque (my playing of music by Glass and Duckworth). It's not quite "classical," not "new age" (although that may be how Amazon.com and other internet sellers will niche it). Some people use the term "alternative classical" or "alt classical"...

From the statistics I have, the people who download my recordings also listen to Radiohead, Death Cab for Cutie, Carl Craig, Aphex Twin, and yes, even to music by Mozart played by Radu Lupu. And that's why my intern is needed -- a flexible young musico-marketer-acrobat -- a sherpa who might help maneuver through this brave new world. Figure out how to expose the new recording to ALL the right people...

Charming though it may be, the review we used to covet in The Gramophone is far from enough. Ah, to be on Stereogum.com or Pitchfork.

Potential applicants, I'm posting on Craigslist.

Sometimes a piece of music is "withdrawn" from a composer's catalog. Music that was composed, published, and available is taken back -- rescinded. You can't get it anymore. Usually, the composer has thought better of it: the music doesn't hold up now, the composer's style has changed a lot, it's an early piece that just doesn't seem good enough for public display...

All of Philip Glass's early non-tonal music is unavailable now. I play(ed) a gospel-hued piano piece by Marc-Anthony Turnage (that I believe is excellent), a piece that was recast, and then withdrawn. Sometimes, pieces are revised, the new version meant to replace the old. Luciano Berio significantly reworked his piano sonata, as my student Francesco Tristano Schlimé learned shortly before going into the studio to record it! I still play original versions of études by Glass that he gave me, although, in his own performances, he's changed the music (and re-numbered some of the pieces).

On programs, we see that some pianists offer the 1913 version of Rachmaninoff's Second Sonata, or that a conductor chooses Stravinsky's 1945 version of music from the "Firebird." (Some music was revised to recapture lost royalties in the New World.)

Generally, record labels have "deleted" sound recordings from their catalogs as a matter of commerce -- items that don't sell, or that run out and are not worth the additional investment necessary to "repress" (make more of) them.

The changing technologies of recorded sound have effectively withdrawn a lot of recorded material, as new formats eliminate older ones. But then come reissues. A lot of old recordings reappeared with the advent of CDs -- as they did with the birth of LPs decades earlier. Huge boxed compilations of the recorded playing of Jascha Heifetz or Vladimir Horowitz. I questioned the reluctance of Jacob Lateiner to approve the re-issue on CD of his RCA recordings of music by Beethoven. "I use those as examples of how not to play," he said. He opted to let the material remain unavailable -- except to collectors who might seek out the old LPs.

Though we might grant today's composers authority to withdraw or revise, with old music it seems to be different. Some composers had a clear sense of what was public and private. Brahms burned sketches and drafts. Beethoven's designated "Opus 1" comes after several earlier (less worthy?) published pieces. Chopin left it to the untrustworthiness of others. Unable to destroy some manuscripts himself, he left them to be burned after he died. Of course, they were never put into the fire, Julian Fontana made an edition, and we have the Fantasy-Impromptu...

Some pianists prefer early versions of later-revised piano pieces by Robert Schumann. ("He went crazy you know...") In contemporary performances of Schumann's Symphonic Etudes, we frequently get a conflation of elements from different versions, including material certainly deleted by Schumann.

Online downloads and the digital sharing of recorded music seem to be mooting the issue of "deletions" in recorded music. Will everything be available in perpetuity? Maybe not, but I did find one of Lateiner's Beethoven recordings on YouTube.

In Cleveland, at the Ohio Theatre, they told me Philip Glass just recently played there on the piano I was using. The next pianist coming soon is Krystian Zimerman. This sort of thing makes you feel humble.

And it occurred to me -- that might even be about where my playing is artistically (?), pianistically (!), or aesthetically, somewhere in between Glass and Zimerman...

"Bruce Brubaker on Breaking Down Boundaries" -- extensive audio interview at PittsburghNewMusicNet.com

"Heavy on the Ivories" -- Andrea Shea's story for WBUR about Bruce Brubaker's performances and recording of "The Time Curve Preludes" by William Duckworh

"Feeding Those Young and Curious Listeners" -- Anthony Tommasini in The New York Times on the first anniversary of the Poisson Rouge

"The Post-Postmodern Pianist" -- Damian Da Costa profiles Bruce Brubaker in The New York Observer

Bruce Brubaker questioned at NewYorkPianist.net

PianoMorphosis on Twitter

"Finding the keys to the heart of Jordan Hall" -- Joan Anderman in the Boston Globe on the search for a new concert grand piano

"Hearing and Seeing" -- Philip Glass speaks with Bruce Brubaker and Jon Magnussen, Princeton, Institute for Advanced Study

Bruce Brubaker about Messiaen's bird music, NPR, "Here and Now"

"I Hear America: Gunther Schuller at 80" -- notes and programs for concert series, New England Conservatory, Harvard University, Boston Symphony Orchestra

"A Conversation That Never Occurred About the Irene Diamond Concert," Juilliard Journal

Bruce Brubaker plays music by Alvin Curran at (le) Poisson Rouge