Sorry for the long hiatus. It’s been a busy time: my latest sabbatical is running to its end, I’m broke, and back to job hunting. So I’ve been having to put aside the music and be all practical lately.

Still, I have not left In the Hands completely neglected. Listening to some other podcasts — and some of those old school … what are they called? … oh yes, radio shows — I noticed what a difference a really nice audio logo or theme song makes. It functions as an announcement, of course: “Pay attention! Your show is on!” And it’s a cue to get in the right frame of mind to enjoy what’s coming next. But most of all, I realized I love the ritual of the theme song, the anticipation and cozy excitement that comes from the conditioning of hearing the same theme again and again. It’s amazing how deep that conditioning goes: though they are from my single-digit years, my heartbeat still involuntarily quickens when I hear these unmistakable sounds! (Yay for Delia Derbyshire.)

The trick is, I don’t want a tune that’s so catchy it interferes with the music I’m about to play; my opening music needs to have a sort of palate-cleansing effect. I decided the thing to do was to make a collage of several different pieces, to get you in that piano mood without a piano tune in your head. Here’s the what I came up with.

This new audio logo won’t make much difference to those of you reading the text version, but for those listening to the podcast, here’s how it sounds as part of an episode.

(For those of you who didn’t even know there’s an audio version of this commentary, here are instructions for subscribing in iTunes.)

I’m doing something today that I haven’t done in far too long: sharing a recording of a new composition in progress.

I’ve been working for some time on a set of piano pieces, all of them dances in one way or another — and all of them, in one way or another, full of the feeling of entropy, full of things falling apart and things slipping away.

This particular one has much sweetness in it, but its main ingredient is ambiguity. Its different layers are centered in different keys, different places. They mesh so that a note which sounds unresolved in its own layer often harmonizes with what is going on in a layer above or below — and then when that note resolves within its own layer, it must move away from resolution with respect to that other layer it seemed to agree with a moment ago. This means that the layers are always pulling against each other, entwined but tugging in different directions, and the music is always simultaneously both resolving and unresolving.

Of course, this all happens quickly, and it’s hard to hear all these little individual motions. Instead, it all blends together to give the music a restless, floating, perpetually suspended quality. The music does eventually find a place to rest, but it’s fleeting — remember: falling apart, slipping away — ah, but I’m giving away too much! I’ll let the music tell its own story:

Paul Cantrell
Song For Lost Things (slightly rough version)

Download (2:58 / 3.5 M)

I still haven’t fully worked out the interpretation, so I’m calling this performance “slightly rough:” as I live with the music for a while, I’m sure I’ll find that I want to play some things differently. It may come as a surprise, but even with the things I write, I still have to go through the same careful process of interpretation, figuring out how the music works, and how to play it just so.

There are nine pieces in the whole set, of which I’ve posted this one and four others in rough form: Entropic Waltz, Dance for Remembering and Forgetting, Cradle Waltz, and Disembodied Dance. Wish me luck learning the rest!

Update: Here’s the score.

I had a request for “MORE CHOPIN!” which made me realize that I’ve been neglecting the poor fellow — and he’s such a favorite of mine! I’ve been working on two new Chopin nocturnes, and I’ll hopefully be ready to record them soon. In the meantime, however, here’s one I’ve played for a long time, in a freshly remastered recording.

I like what I wrote about this piece when I posted this recording in its earlier, less acoustically pristine form, so I’ll say it again: It’s organic, and sounds almost improvised — except that it is impossibly perfect in every detail. Its soundscape is vast, deep, and richly pianistic, but look at the construction and you’ll see the spare elegance of Bach. It has a loving tenderness, and a longing, that’s unlike anything else, yet seems instantly familiar. And it’s gorgeous.

Frédéric Chopin
Nocturne Op 15 No 2 (in F sharp major)

Download (4:32 / 5.3 M)

There’s nothing quite like learning to play a piece of music to really get inside it. With this one, like many I’ve shared here, I knew it was excellent music before I started learning it — but once I’m inside it, once I’m feeling through the piece with my own hands and working through its many parts with the microscope of learning, once I really start to “get it” about the music … it’s just staggering how good it is. It just floors me. I don’t know how much of that comes across in my playing — certainly I’m only communicating a small shadow of that experience — but I hope you can share my sense of wonder that we have this music in our world.

The latest episode of the always-excellent Bowed Radio features a movement of The Broken Mirror of Memory. The whole episode is quite wonderful, well worth hearing (listen) — and the great sound of the other selections really makes me wish I had a higher-quality recording of Diana’s nice work on Mirror! Adrian graciously describes In the Hands as a “must-listen” for piano lovers, and gets big bonus points for pronouncing my last name right.

Uwe Hermann’s podcast featured one of my Chopin étude recordings. I was especially pleased that he didn’t shy away from including a classical piece — it drives me crazy how there’s this weird wall between classical music and the rest of the musical world, a wall which a lot of people on both sides work awfully hard to keep in place. I have a dream that one day my music will live in a world where it’s judged not by its categorization or its genre, but by the content of its character.

Kyle Gann tells me he’s added In a Perfectly Wounded Sky and Three Places to the playlist over at PostClassic Radio, which plays a fine selection of “weirdly beautiful new music.” The show seems mostly oriented to the credentialed circles, so I was very pleased with Kyle’s graciousness in including a small-timer.

And finally, Netherlands-based Robkast featured last week’s Brahms Intermezzo. I don’t speak Dutch, so I have no idea what Mr. Rob of Robkast is saying (listen) — but careful listening suggests that he may be announcing the name of the piece.

This is a very familiar piece (to piano aficionados, anyway) — but you’ll find Don’s performance a little refreshingly unfamiliar. It’s not a wild departure from custom, but there’s just a subtle tip in the balance in his performance that makes the feeling of the piece quite different.

In the last entry I mentioned the question of foreground and background. When most pianists play this piece, they put the right hand squarely in the foreground: what you hear is a series of speedy cascades down, a fun bit of finger gymnastics. But when Don plays it, he balances foreground between the left and the right, and what emerges is the slower underlying chord progression. Instead of a nervously flitting thing, it becomes a smoothly unfolding one. That reading brings us to what is to me the essential nature of Schubert: a tiny thing with a vast interior, a world opening from a single moment.

Franz Scubert
Impromptu D899 No 4 (a.k.a. Op 90 No 4, in A flat minor)
Donald Betts, piano

Download (8:39 / 10.0 M)

There is one more recording from Don’s living room I’ll post. After that, he recently made two more in the concert hall that are quite special that I’d like to share with you.

This was the first Brahms I ever learned to play. It looked to me like a relatively easy piece, simply because it doesn’t have all that many notes — but I was wrong: never having played Brahms, I didn’t recognize the difficulty that was there. Brahms doesn’t always divide his music into clear layers of melody and accompaniment; he’ll have bits of melodic thread appearing in different voices, different layers. None of these threads is complete in itself, but they form a complete whole that doesn’t emerge from any single place. Much like Renaissance polyphony, the “foreground” of the music emerges from a delicate interplay of layers.

So yes, not many notes, but this piece turned out to require a great deal of care in fingering and voicing, to give just the right weight to each note, and the right shape to the many parts. After I “got it” with this one, I found it much easier to work my way into other Brahms. Playing music requires a certain empathy with the composer; it is much like making friends.

Though it proved a bit tricky to learn, it’s certainly not tricky to listen to: the music is pure bliss, and though it passes through many landscape-changing shades of light and dark, nothing breaks the floating bubble between the first note and the last.

Johannes Brahms
Intermezzo Op 116 No 4 (in E major)

Download (4:40 / 5.4 M)

Here’s an older piece of mine, newly remastered. I’ve gone back and forth in the past on whether I like this one, but I like it very much today, so I’m publishing it!

The title is based on my mishearing of a Tori Amos lyric (from Cruel). I generally go for titles that are evocative and somehow seem to fit, without actually having any clear meaning that listeners will try to impose on the piece — I want the title to be an opening into the music, not a box to stuff it in.

Another one of those “openings into the music” is the little epigraphs I often put at the end of the piece. I almost always choose both the quote and the title after writing the music, so they’re more a reflection on where I ended up than an explanation of what I was doing. The epigraph for this piece is a hokku by Masahide:

Now that my storehouse
has burned down, nothing
conceals the moon.

Paul Cantrell
In a Perfectly Wounded Sky

Download (5:04 / 5.9 M)

For those following along with the audio engineering side of things, I used a touch of a look-ahead limiter on this one (which I usually don’t do), because of the huge variance between the attacks on the harsher chords and the very quiet intervening sections. I also cranked the scaling on the Gain Shaper a hair higher than usual.

For those interested in music notation, here is the score. Fun with parallel fifths!

I’m a fellow of diverse musical tastes, and there are a great many composers I love who don’t appear in the meager list over on the right of this page. So it’s a delight to post this recording, because I get to add a “Schubert” category. Yay for Schubert!

This is another one of the recordings I made in the living room of my teacher, Don Betts. He’s playing a little gem of Schubert’s that one doesn’t hear often — in fact, I’d never heard it at all until he played it for me. When I looked up some recordings by others, I was surprised to find that most people play it very fast, even presto, making it a silly sort of sing-songy horse gallop. Now admittedly I’m a slow tempo kind of guy, and heck, maybe Schubert intended it to be a silly horse gallop, but man do I ever prefer Don’s tempo.

Schubert’s music is a rarified world, full of repeating simple patterns built from the same few simple ingredients, where subtle changes create tremendous moments — just a shift from minor to major, and a whole new world opens up. In Don’s performance, you can feel the weight of each of those little moments, the overwhelmingly vast interior of this tiny little world, like one of Georgia O’Keefe’s flower paintings.

Franz Scubert
Piano Piece D946 No 1 (in E flat minor)
Donald Betts, piano

Download (10:09 / 11.7 M)

Speaking of repeating patterns, there’s a stretch at about 1:40 that sounds almost like a bit of 20th century minimalism. I wonder if Philip Glass likes Schubert? (Hmm. Apparently so. You know, you could probably get a decent Glass parody by taking some random Schubert, and repeating each measure 2-4 times.)

I tried a slightly different approach with the sound on this one than with the Arabesque. It still doesn’t sound quite right — honestly, I wish Don would come to my studio to make some recordings, but he wanted to do this at his house, and when he decides that things should be a certain way, his mind is not easy to change! I guess I sympathize: it’s a bit of a hike over here for him. Anyway, if anybody feels like comparing, let me know what you think of the different sound.