Visiting the house of my composer friend Matthew Smith (who has an outstanding CD out now, by the way), I noticed the score to Chopin’s E minor prelude out on the piano. It turns out that his wife, children’s book illustrator and author Lauren Stringer, is taking piano lessons, and she has been working on it. I was delighted — the piece is a favorite of mine. I dug out my recording of it for her to hear, and decided it was high time that I release a remastered version.

The piece has been a popular one on In the Hands — people have left many comments on it — and I think that’s because it’s so popular with beginning piano students like Lauren. All of us who are, or once were, beginners owe Chopin our thanks for this piece: it is a great one, yet it’s within reach of a beginning pianist. (That’s not to undercut the task of learning it. Any pianist who has learned to play it well ought to be proud of their accomplishment! It is not in any way a trivial thing.)

I abhor the idea that material for beginners should be dumbed down. Simplicity is necessary, but simplicity need not be dumb. We are especially guilty of doing this to children, but it happens to beginners of all ages. It’s kind of bait and switch: somebody loves music so much that they find the courage to start taking lessons, then we give them music that’s not worth loving, holding off the real stuff until they’re more advanced. It’s disrespectful, and it’s counterproductive: the lessons of substance and meaning do not need to follow years and years after the lessons of reading and technique. We do the same thing with reading, with math — especially with math! — oh, don’t get me started.

I see it as a challenge to us composers: Chopin, who wrote some of the most difficult piano music out there, managed to produce this music of tremendous depth without needing to make it tremendously difficult. If he can do it, why can’t we? OK, actually, making something both great and simple is one of the most difficult artistic challenges there is, but it’s also one of the worthiest. Lauren certainly knows that: the best picture books can tell compelling stories that tackle layered, subtle, and difficult ideas using only a very few words and elemental artwork, and they are powerful for their simplicity. Her gorgeous latest book is a nice essay on how the choices we make in our perception of reality shape that reality and our lives — though she says it much more simply, and more effectively!

I’ve paired the E minor prelude with the E major one. The latter is a bit more difficult (mostly because of the wider stretches), but is also within a dedicated beginner’s reach, and also a great one. It has a wonderful chord progression, and a very interesting structure: we set out from the same point of departure three times (0:00, 0:28, 0:58), each time finding a new path with newly surprising modulations. I learned these two preludes one after the other, and think they make a great segue. I do like the big contrasts!

Frédéric Chopin
Prelude Op 28 No 4 (in E minor)

Download (2:40 / 3.3 M)

Frédéric Chopin
Prelude Op 28 No 9 (in E major)

Download (1:36 / 1.9 M)

Attention, beginners, would-be beginners, and especially those who say, “Oh, I wish I could learn to play the piano! But I’m just too old / too busy / too tonedeaf / too whatever.” Rubbish! Balderdash! Pish, piffle, and poppycock! It is never too late to start. Be bold! Lauren was; you can be too. Great music is not out of your reach.

I don’t usually write jazz tunes, but my friend Todd asked me to write one for him. It sounded like fun, and he had written several great pieces for me, so I took up the challenge. Nomade à Clef is the result.

Todd premiered it at this year’s Keys Please, with David Edminster on tenor sax, and I think they did just a marvelous job with it. They really made it fly. I only wrote a lead sheet (just melody and chords) with a bare-bones piano part underneath to suggest voicings in the piano — the rest of the work is theirs, including Todd’s solo intro and all of David’s development of the melody. I feel like this recording is their piece more than mine … and that feeling is a good one, the pleasure of a successful handoff. I suppose this is the nature of jazz? No, it is the nature of all music written by one person and performed by another, no matter how explicitly notated or how little improvised: in playing music, if we play it well, we necessarily make it our own.

Recorded live in concert, here is…

Paul Cantrell
Nomade à Clef
David Edminster, tenor sax
Todd Harper, piano

Download (3:35 / 4.2 M)

The title means “Nomad in a Key,” a wanderer with a home.

Things may have been quiet on the blog, but I’ve been doing tons of music work lately. The recent round of Zo went well: I took a bit of a risk playing mostly pieces that were fresh out of the practice oven (or, in a couple of cases, still baking), but people seemed to enjoy it, and I was certainly satisfied.

(If you want to know about future concerts, you should get on the mailing list.)

Concerts done, I’m now composing day and night, quite productively. I now have a complete first draft of my set of dances! The last big obstacle was a sort of “keystone moment” in the piece, where everything has to come together just so — but with some dogged persistence and late nights, I pushed through and filled in the final hole in the cycle. It’s very exciting; I’ve been working on them since forever.

Even though I have a complete draft, however, a huge amount of work remains: there’s a lot of refining and revising, practicing, and polishing the interpretation necessary in order to get a really good recording together. It will be a good long while before you can hear the full cycle.

In the meantime, I’m recording rough versions of the pieces as I learn to play them. I always hesitate a bit to do that, because the rough versions are, in fact, rough, and don’t completely convey the ideas of the music. There’s always a danger that the ideas will be so muddled that the music will just sound like a jumble of notes. Performance really matters!

However, I don’t like the alternative of not sharing anything until it’s perfect; I’d rather keep people at least somewhat in the loop on what I’ve been doing — partly because folks seem to enjoy it, and partly because I’m eager to share! Enough of the music comes through in these rough versions, I think, to let you in on the fun of watching the whole cycle emerge.

In that spirit, then, here’s one I finished writing a couple of months ago and am now playing somewhat successfully. It was a hit with the audience at Zo. As per the warning above: the performance is not yet completely assured: you’ll hear me struggling for notes in some spots. Use your imagination a bit, and pretend it’s rock-solid steady. Or just pretend it rocks.

Paul Cantrell
Manic Dance (rough version)

Download (2:32 / 3.3 M)

The sound at the beginning is a whack from the music desk being pushed back. After that, throughout the piece, you’ll hear fingertips damping the strings — sometimes after the hammer strikes and sometimes as it strikes. I love that sound, and this isn’t the first time I’ve used it.

Can this really be the sixth year? Groundhog Day approaches fast, and that means it’s time for Keys Please!

Carei Thomas, Todd Harper and I have been running this annual tradition of a playful, genre-bending celebration of keyboard music since 2001, and by golly, I think we’ve got something special going. It shows a slightly different side of my musical life than In the Hands, and it’s unlike any other concert I know of. For those of you who don’t know about Keys Please, Minnesota Public Radio did a wonderful feature on last year’s concert.

This year’s special guest is David Edminster, who is mostly a tenor sax player, but will also be slipping in some bassoon and clarinet. The guy has got some serious jazz in him; you don’t want to miss this.

Keys Please 6: The Reckoning
Friday, February 2 - 8:00 PM
Janet Wallace Concert Hall
Macalester College, St. Paul, MN
$10 at the door / all students free

Two weeks from today. Reckon I’ll see you there? Hope so!

Update: Here’s a flyer you can stick on your fridge, or wear as a hat. Print it out, cut it in half, and give one to a friend! Thanks to Walter Velez for the very cool font.

Of interest to listeners in the Minneapolis / St. Paul area: I have scheduled some house concerts for next week. I’ll be playing some Chopin and original work not yet heard on In the Hands!

Dates, more info, and reservations here.

As regular readers of In the Hands know, I’ve been working through my older recordings and applying my up-to-date mastering process — making them sound better, in other words. As I went through the list, I found that these two recordings make a nice pair. Arranging nice little transitions like this is one of my favorite parts of doing a concert. It’s the same little pleasure as assembling a mix CD or playing DJ: even the simple act of ordering songs is a kind of composition, and carries the joy of being creative.

The keys of the two pieces (E flat and A flat) are related and make for a smooth transition, but beyond that, it’s hard to pin down what exactly connects them so well. The deliberate, thoughtful way both unfold? The way both of them seem to talk? Their sense of intimacy? Those are all getting warm, but none of them really pin it down. It doesn’t matter, though — it is fine to be musically confident on intuition alone, and I say they fit. Phooey to the 20th century and its obsession with having a conscious rationale for everything in music!

When something musical works well, it’s natural to wonder why, and we learn a great deal in the process of trying to come up with explanations. But our musical explanations (like all models of reality) are always incomplete; good music remains half-submerged in the unknown, and thus always carries the magic shared by all mysterious things. This is the dilemma of a performer and, even more, of a composer: constantly dissecting, looking for order, developing explanations and rationales — and at the same time never losing sight of the incompleteness of these explanations, but embracing the unknown and holding on to the magic. The skill of smoothly changing frame between reasoning and intuition, known and unknown, dissected part and organic whole, is a core part of both composition and computer programming. Those are two things I spent a lot of my time doing, and I claim they overlap a great deal in the brain, in large part because of this “frame shifting.”

Oh, right, I had a recording to share. Enough philosophizing. On with the music!

Johann Sebastian Bach
Sinfonia No 5 (in E flat major)

Download (3:58 / 4.6 M)

Robert Schumann
Bunte Blätter No 6

Download (2:05 / 2.5 M)

These both come from wonderful sets of pieces — Bach’s two- and three-part inventions, and Schumann’s Albumblätter (“Album Leaves,” which is a subset of Bunte Blätter, “Colored Leaves”). I’d like to learn more of both sets (and improve my Bach playing in general, because it’s very weak). Too much great music and not enough time! What’s a fellow to do?

Perhaps it would have been better if I’d just admitted to myself (and the world) that I’d be taking the summer off from In the Hands. But where’s the fun without the suspense?

Here’s what I currently have in the pipeline (not necessarily in this order):

• Some newly composed pieces of my own.
• A new recording of at least some part of The Broken Mirror of Memory, my cello work.
• A fine new recording from Don Betts.
• The remaining remasterings of my older recordings.

…And that’s my autumn of music pretty well booked up right there.

First, however, is the last of the three songs by Todd that Kim and I recorded last spring. This one is a setting of a poem by local poet John Minczeski, Questions, which sits somewhere between Zen koan and children’s book. It is a single poem, but Todd has split it into four separate little songs, zooming in on each each question and giving it its own character. I think they’re quite marvelous. It’s a wonderful way to read a poem — as the Internet makes us more accustomed to reading text fast, the music makes it possible to slow down and give each line of the poem its own space and weight.

Todd Harper, music
John Minczeski, words
Questions
Kim Sueoka, soprano
Paul Cantrell, piano

Download (2:19 / 2.9 M)

This is the last of Todd’s songs Kim and I have recorded together; it’s back to solo piano in the next episode. Be sure to also check out Northwoods Police Report and First Autumn Night if you haven’t already!

Last weekend, I lead a session at MinneBar entitled “The Internet and the Future of Art,” in which I talked about my experiences producing In the Hands, my sense of the past relationships between art and society, and my wishes for the future. The audience joined in, and it was a very interesting 40 minutes of discussion.

Tim Wilson has very kindly made an audio recording of the session available on They Savvy Technologist. He did a good job of capturing a very interactive session with only a single mic in a noisy room. Well done!

If any of you want to follow along with the session, here are slightly cleaned up versions of the two “idea map” diagrams you’ll hear me producing on my Powerbook during the session:

• 20th century (PDF, 82k)
• 21st century (PDF, 80k)

Note that these are rough, still in process, and entirely up for discussion. I’m still figuring all of this out, along with the rest of the world!

It was a pleasure doing the session, and a pleasure attending the conference. I’m grateful to all who planned and sponsored it! If there’s a BarCamp in your area, I highly recommend checking it out.