Adam Tendler's Blog, page 19

july 17, 10:10pm | 2m | it's all easy

settling back into a groove. practice. cooking. laundry. made a major dinner tonight, with gwyneth paltrow’s “it’s all easy” cookbook as my guide. really good salad and a zucchini and leek soup. also some corn with spicy like butter and some naan bread. neither of us touched the corn. then we had a good ole’ fashioned argument about nothing, and now i’m in bed. yes, i am home.

didn’t come close to accomplishing what i wanted to accomplish after dinner. but at this point…

“do you think you’re still tired from jet lag?” he asked and i said, yeah that must be it.

july 16, 11:34pm | notes from plane, and from bed

I mostly enjoy listening to non-classical/concert music in my time away from stages. But I like to dip anthropologically into what everyone seems to love, pop music wise, at a particular moment, particularly if it hasn’t surrounded me in public spaces, just to check the barometer of my own emotional relation to it. Anyway, I’ve listened to the new Haïm album and think it sounds like a 21st century processing of Wilson Philips and Tom Cochran.

Came twice on this trip. Neither particularly painful, neither particularly pleasurable.

Gave a total £4 to a series of vending machines, in attempt to get a water before the flight. The machines kept taking £1, and returning the other. Eventually I had no water, and no coins. Three hours later, parched and still wanting water.

It strikes me how, in conservatory I heard certain works every week; Beethoven op. 110, Mussorgsky Picture, Franck Prelude Fugue and Variations. I haven’t heard these pieces live in what feels like ten years.

I often imagine that my sins are broadcast from their moment of committal to specifically whomever might take offense, so if at a particular I haven’t heard from said individual, in my mind I assume that they “know.” And I want to prostrate myself or simply die.

I love Griffes’s music, but 150 pages into his biography I haven’t encountered a single quote or description that endears his to me personally. Maybe even the opposite.

It happens every time I return to New York. I land excited and happy, and in the endless, absurd, agonizing journey from the airport to the apartment, I’m reminded of everything I hate about this place, and then I walk through the door furious.

We went straight to dinner. F cut his hair and looks adorable. A margarita helped me to come of my perch of absolute rage and into mere exhaustion. We returned home and I collapsed onto the couch, immediately falling asleep before dragging to bed, clutching a CPE Bach t-shirt but sleeping naked. Once in bed it took all of a second for me to disappear.

Now at 4am, the jet lag I never experienced this week might finally have stopped by to say hello. Echoes of the recording sessions, visions, postcards, all bouncing around my mind. Successes. Failures. Passagework.

Nearly finished the Griffes biography. In fact, with about five pages to go, I’d almost like to sneak to the other room to finish it now. The book served as my sole occupation on the plane. Never did I even crack open my scores or turn on my iPad. Something compelled me to finish it. Truly one of music’s great tragedies. To think, an “ultra-modern” American composer who the masses embraced as a defining new voice for the as-yet undefined American music, snuffed off the planet at 35 virtually the week of his career triumph. The doors opened to him, finally, and then he died. More tragic yet, we still never, and I mean never, see his name on concert programs, orchestral, voice, even piano. It all still remains unpublished and obscure. American tragedy. And we can, or could, turn it around.

good lord i’m sad after finishing the biography of charles...

good lord i’m sad after finishing the biography of charles griffes. this once “ultra-modern” (and unapologetically gay) american composer seemed poised, after decades of struggle, to make a sudden and indelible mark on the history of american music, and then died in 1920 at age 35 at exactly the moment of that recognition, from overwork and, perhaps, depression. the identity of american music reshaped and reidentified itself within a couple years, and his music still remains absent from programs and largely unpublished. i’ve played his work in all fifty states, and just recorded some for Tido, and yet i’m overwhelmed with the sense that there’s so much more to do, to compensate for, to discover, and to amend.

at Heathrow Airport

at Heathrow Airport

dear author, honesty don’t do that.

dear author, honesty don’t do that.

july 15, 1:11am (london) | 3m | brie

A full day today. Battled a hangover through the night. Fell asleep with the light on and hand on my groin, body positioned over the covers, and woke up that way around 4:30am. Three ibuprofen and I slept until 8:30, when I woke up and decided I should visit the Tate Modern (my first time) at 10 when it would open, then meet Nicholas for coffee, then go get Indian food, then bring samosas to the guys in the studio, then prepare to go to tonight’s concert with Zubin, and then do that. So I lived in Ubers and cabs today, but with this as my last day, and only really free day of the trip, it seemed like the only choice. Dinner didn’t happen, just a bowl of “Honey Cheerios” (I’ve virtually finished all the food) and I wish I could Uber just one more times and go to McDonald’s to have a European version of it, which I’m convinced must be healthier, or at least more locally sourced, than the U.S. variety. Just steps away from said McDonald’s, a fetish party rages on with Jack as its host. I would go, but I seem to not have a fetish, or any semblance of one on me. No gear, as it were. The other day I identified my fetish as brie. A police siren and squealing tires outside on this quiet street just froze the blood in my veins. Minimalist concert tonight with two epically long pieces. Both hypnotic, but I only really started nodding off toward the end, but wonderfully so, hallucinating and half-dreaming. A pub visit afterward. A very nice girl asked what I was working on, and suddenly, though I have the Cage concert on the 4th, I already feel the giant yawn of an empty August approaching. Fine, though.

Today at the Tate, I made it through the Black Power exhibit successfully without snapping any picture, but then, just before exiting, considered all the times in which I could have. And so, criminally, I backtracked and took a couple surreptitious shots. On my very last one, a guard came over and nicely said, “Photography is prohibited” and I felt ashamed for probably 3 hours.

july 14, 1:07am (london) | pints

whenever I’m drunk and walk about the world, I can’t believe that the sandwiches

[note from next day: i wrote this in bed on my phone after, i think, four pints at the pub with the crew to celebrate the end of the recording week, and fell asleep several times during the composition of this sentence. i don’t know where the word ‘sandwiches’ came from.]

defending 4′33″ as a standard in the piano repertoire

Thinking about tomorrow’s final day of recording, my voice already hoarse and body buzzing from three days of recording—nearly nine hours of shooting each session. 

I’ll have more than enough to say about 4'33" tomorrow before the camera and audience, but stumbled onto something just now that I’ve never thought about with regard to the piece, namely, how to defend it as a standard in the canon for instrumentalists, particularly pianists. 

Of course someone might respond with the typical argument that the piece doesn’t challenge a pianist’s technique or ability. Well, in one regard,  sure. It doesn’t involve passagework, tone, articulation or pitch. It doesn’t require accuracy with regard to notes and their production. However, it demands a crucial, maybe the crucial element, that leads to any successful performance, something that even in the most polished performer, can tend to go missing.

Poise.

And poise can mean a lot of things. It can mean stage presence—the energy one emits that tells the audience to give the work their attention—presence begets presence. Poise can mean also control, and yes this might mean resisting the urge to fiddle, stare at the clock, clear ones throat or even swallow. Poise can mean integrity, the attitude that communicates that one takes the piece and their task seriously, that they understand the background of the work, and have shaped some sort of psychological profile for it, an intention. Poise can mean focus, performing a “disciplined action,” to borrow a term Cage uses for the later 0'00", under pressure. This feels a lot like “accuracy,” because conventionally, control means executing correct notes and rhythm in the explicit manner that a piece outlines. In this case, however, Cage eliminates the details of notes, rhythm, tone, and leaves the performer with the basics of presence. It means the handling of (again traditionally) a piano lid, a clock, and a body—fingers, legs, torso. We use these parts of our body as instrumentalists, of course, but 4'33" isolates them, zooms in on them. It puts a microscope onto the passage of time and how our body—the thing that performs— behaves in that time.

Poise.

I can’t tell you the number of times I have attended a fine, accurate, acceptable and perfectly usable performance from a musician who has never actually learned to sit.

—London, July 13, 12:43am

defending 4′33″ as a standard in a piano repertoire

Thinking about tomorrow’s final day of recording, my voice already hoarse and body buzzing from three days of recording—nearly nine hours of shooting each session. 

I’ll have more than enough to say about 4'33" tomorrow before the camera and audience, but stumbled onto something just now that I’ve never thought about with regard to the piece, namely, how to defend it as a standard in the canon for instrumentalists, particularly pianists. 

Of course someone might respond with the typical argument that the piece doesn’t challenge a pianist’s technique or ability. Well, in one regard,  sure. It doesn’t involve passagework, tone, articulation or pitch. It doesn’t require accuracy with regard to notes and their production. However, it demands a crucial, maybe the crucial element, that leads to any successful performance, something that even in the most polished performer, can tend to go missing.

Poise.

And poise can mean a lot of things. It can mean stage presence—the energy one emits that tells the audience to give the work their attention—presence begets presence. Poise can mean also control, and yes this might mean resisting the urge to fiddle, stare at the clock, clear ones throat or even swallow. Poise can mean integrity, the attitude that communicates that one takes the piece and their task seriously, that they understand the background of the work, and have shaped some sort of psychological profile for it, an intention. Poise can mean focus, performing a “disciplined task,” to borrow a term Cage uses for the later 0'00", under pressure. This feels a lot like “accuracy,” because conventionally, control means executing correct notes and rhythm in the explicit manner that a piece outlines. In this case, however, it means the handling of (again traditionally) a piano lid, a clock, and a body—fingers, legs, torso. We use these parts of our body as instrumentalists, of course, but 4'33" isolates them, zooms in on them. It puts a microscope onto the passage of time and how our body—the thing that performs— behaves in that time.

Poise.

I can’t tell you the number of times I have attended a fine, accurate, acceptable and perfectly usable performance from a musician who has never actually learned to sit.

—London, July 13, 12:43am

july 12, 12:01am (london) | 1m | rain

Almost there. Not so much of a tailspin as yesterday, though I did have to delay the Crumb recording until tomorrow. The inside of a Steinway D resembles in no way a B, or my Yamaha, or the Miller in Vermont. Completely different—so despite my efforts to prevent feeling disoriented, there I stood before the strings, dumbfounded. Instead of having the tape roll and the crew watch as I struggle, I asked to practice. And tomorrow will go in before the tuner arrives. So I should go to bed. First a bath.

A lot of walking, and a bit of running, today in the rain. Just saw Nick for a drink—haven’t seen him since Austin. I remember, before he moved to Australia, how often we’d see each other. Weekday movies at 10am.

I forgot to mention that yesterday at the John Cage book launch / “Water Walk” performance, a woman collapsed during the opening remarks. She had the same reaction I would have had, and rose to her feet apologizing to everyone.