“Niobrara” is “ararboin” spelled backwards. Does this mean that, if you play this music backwards, Ararboin is the piece you’ll get? I’m not sure. Try it and find out.

Improvisation: Niobrara

Download (2:13 / 2.6 M)

Just some good clean fun with with notes.

Improvisation: Goshen

Download (0:47 / 0.9 M)

I just liked the word, but it turns out that “Goshen” is actually a place mentioned in Genesis. I am sure half of you already knew this, but for me, it is an exciting new fact. Seems I ought to search this here “inter-net” more often!

Me teetse, ye teetse, we all teetse for…

Improvisation: Meeteetse

Download (1:41 / 2.0 M)

In case you’re wondering (not that it’s likely you were), I come up with the piece first, then choose a title that fits. It’s usually the same way with the compositions.

Today’s recording brings In the Hands over the one hour mark: since I started this blog at the end of August, it’s brought over 65 minutes of free piano music to the web. Yay!

This recording also marks a more dubious milestone: for the first time I’m late with the post (it just turned Wednesday in Minnesota as I type this). I’m not sure anyone cares, or even notices, but I do try to keep myself honest with this Tuesday/Saturday plan.

Chopin can get very complex, virtuosic, or just generally full of big piano sounds. But always, in everything he writes, there’s something pure and elemental at the heart of his music. In this waltz, that elemental core is bare. In a piece like this, it’s hard for me not to look at the score and wonder: It’s so simple! How can there be so much in so few notes? Where is the magic hiding?

Frédéric Chopin
Waltz Op 34 No 2 (in A minor)

Download (7:06 / 8.2 M)

This Chopin waltz is doubly special to me — not only because it’s a great piece, but also because, like this nocturne from a few entries back, my mom plays it too. (Her glasses have changed since that photo was taken, but not her smile!)

Hoback, Wyoming has a population of about 1500. It has nothing to do with this piece — thus the name.

Improvisation: Hoback

Download (0:55 / 1.1 M)

When I first saw the sheet music for today’s piece, I was a bit boggled. I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered a piece that sounded less like it looked! You might figure it for some sort of virtuosic toccata thing, all flash and texture, but no, it is slow, minimal melody with a lush, dark accompaniment.

The notation makes a little more sense if you think of Bach’s preludes. Do I grow predictable claiming everything is full of Bach? Very well, I grow predictable. This one is full of Bach: the layering; the figuration built out of a series of surprising chord changes, and the sense of counterpoint hidden in those changes; the walks around the circle of fifths.

Really, I don’t know how the twentieth century managed to stay so obsessed for so long with the idea of newness at all costs; all that paranoia about being derivative was really overblown, and I hope we’re growing out of it. The best art, it seems to me, always derives from the past, and escapes imitation through synthesis, not through obsessive novelty. More on that train of thought some other time.

Learning this, I felt like Brahms was searching in some of the same places I am in my own music: the piece is perpetually ambiguous and unresolved, yet within that ambiguity is a deep sense of order, an abundance of logical patterns. It’s a powerful tension, simultaneous ambiguity and order. The effect is strongly emotional, but it’s hard to name exactly what the emotion is. I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader (one with no right answer)!

Johannes Brahms
Intermezzo Op 117 No 2

Download (5:19 / 6.1 M)

This is the second in a set of three pieces, the first of which was the first piece I posted in this blog. I don’t play the third yet, though I certainly mean to in the future — it is also a marvelous piece, and the three together are one of my favorite sets.

One of the most fundamental, most important principles in music is return: when things happen, they come back. Throughout a piece of music, there are recurring elements that unite the whole. The beginning and the end connect. If we depart from where we started, we return there — or at least look back.

The familiar verse / chorus / bridge form that underlies so many pop songs follows this principle: we might get a new melody, the bridge ("Why she had to leave, I don’t know"), but we still come back to the original repeating verse / chorus music ("Yesterday…"). Many, many classical pieces follow “binary” or “ABA” form: thing 1, thing 2, thing 1 again. That includes many of the pieces I’ve posted in this blog. Even in a less clearly delineated structure, you’ll hear the principle of return: listen to Bach letting new material unfold continuously so that same initial idea keeps resurfacing in new forms, or Brahms letting several distinct ideas mingle and interact with one another.

Return can be the operating principle even when it’s not immediately obvious: the three parts of Three Places are all built out of the same material, and the melody that was floating on top of a thick swirl of sound at the beginning comes back at the very end, transformed (the swirl is gone, and it’s bare now) but still present. The point is: look for return, and you’ll find it.

Then we have today’s piece by Chopin. Everything in it happens twice … and then never comes back. It’s like a series of matryoshka dolls that you cannot put back together once you’ve opened them. It moves through four distinct musical worlds, each more inward than the last, constantly curling in on itself and finally leaving us far from where we started, as if, having gone into whatever strange interior world this is, it is impossible to return to the place where we began, or even to imagine what that place was like.

There is no reason this piece should work. It is, to my mind, a miracle. This is one I keep returning to, searching for its secret as a composer, and marveling at it as a human.

Frédéric Chopin
Nocturne Op 15 No 3 (in G minor)

Download (5:54 / 6.8 M)

Tonight was a pleasantly social concert. My fellow composer Matthew (from the Composers’ Syndicate) brought his whole family over, making this the first Zo Family Night ever. His kids, who are great in general, were a great audience, and drew some awesome pictures while I was playing. And I had the pleasure of introducing Matthew’s wife Lauren, who illustrates picture books, to the wonder that is the Church Mouse books.

Denise, a fine singer I know from buying sheet music at The Podium, also came and was an honorary part of the family. Alas, The Podium is not going to sell sheet music anymore, focusing only on guitars. I will thus not make such acquaintances there in the future since the only guitar I play is the 200-some-string variety. As far as I know, this leaves us without a good classical sheet music store in the Twin Cities. The silver lining is that all their classical sheet music is now 75% off, so a I highly recommend that all you locals dash over there and clean them out.

The music, you say? Oh yes, there was some of that, too. You know, I think I’m actually on the verge of playing that Chopin ballade well.

• Cantrell – Three Places
• Brahms – Intermezzo Op 117 No 2
• Brahms – Intermezzo Op 117 No 1
• Chopin – Ballade No 3
• Cantrell – Cradle Waltz
• Chopin – Nocturne Op 15 No 2
• Chopin – Nocturne Op 15 No 3
• Brahms – Ballade Op 10 No 4