When I started In the Hands, I also started recording little unplanned improvisations. I’d done some of this same sort of work during college in the Macalester New Music Ensemble, and some things like it at Keys Please, but it wasn’t until last year that I started putting a regular, concerted effort into playing and recording these.

They’re perhaps not as interestingly layered or as structurally satisfying as the compositions, but they have a raw energy and spirit of playfulness that I like. They’re also good calisthenics: doing them helps keep me loose and flexible for composing. Writing music, it’s easy to get bogged down in endless revision or over-conceptualized note derivation; these improvs help me maintain the balance between conception and intuition.

I originally had the idea of giving the improvs nonsense word names, like “Fleedle” and “Scrunkic", but when I recorded these three, they somehow fit perfectly the names of three little towns in Wyoming my family has always loved for their too-good-to-be true poetic names: Lusk, Lingle, and Torrington. Since then, I’ve been naming all the improvs after Wyoming towns and counties — it turns out that the state is a gold mine of wonderful words!

Improvisation: Lingle

Download (2:22 / 2.8 M)

Improvisation: Torrington Lope

Download (1:05 / 1.4 M)

Improvisation: Lusk

Download (2:15 / 2.7 M)

These three make a set of sorts: I sat down with no plan or preconception and played them back to back, just as you hear them here — in this order, in fact. My little Wyoming triptych!

This piece is my old, trusted standby. I wrote it back in college, in the winter and spring of 1998, and since then it’s been the one piece of my own that I’ve continually kept in my hands and head, always at the ready when somebody says, “Play something you wrote, Paul!” It still remains satisfying to me: the shape is simple, but interesting little puzzles keep emerging from within.

In all that time, however, only live audiences have had a chance to really experience the music — but just now, listening to the remastered version, I finally had the sense of “Yes, that’s it, that’s Three Places.” It’s not just that it finally sounds realistic; it’s the first time the music of the piece has really come through in the recording, from the three-dimensional layers of the opening, to the warmth of the whispered final low note against the cold of the final high one.

People often ask if they are three specific places. They aren’t. At the time, my mom was writing a lot about the “idea of place,” and I thought I’d call these three little pieces musical places. So I have no explanation of what the piece “means,” but I will offer this: I often like to include a little quote at the end of my pieces, not an explanation, but an evocative image or idea to open the piece to exploration. This piece’s epigraph is from the Mahabharata (William Buck’s translation):

As Lord Brahma sleeps, he hears something lost mentioned in his dream of life, and he remembers and it appears again among us as it was long ago.

Paul Cantrell
Three Places

Download (5:09 / 6.0 M)

Compare this to the old mastering process, or to a different recording made in a concert hall. Whoa! Here’s the score.

My mastering experiments are complete, at least for now, which means two things: First, I’m back to composing and practicing again, so new recordings are on the horizon. Second, I’m reposting all my old recordings using the new mastering process, starting today!

This is the first recording I posted to In the Hands, so it seemed fitting that it be the first to go out in its remastered form. It’s a piece Brahms wrote late in life, a lullaby. He included a motto at the top, which in English is roughly: Sleep, my child, now softly sleep / It grieves my heart to see you weep. That quote might at first suggest something depressing and morose, but no, it’s the lullaby image, the parent cradling the child, that gets at the heart of the piece: this is profoundly comforting music. Brahms is perhaps the most humane composer I know, a quality which shines through in the elegant simplicity of a piece like this one. I wrote last week about the embrace between the music and the listener; this music’s embrace is tender and compassionate, and in its arms, we are all children, all loved.

Johannes Brahms
Intermezzo Op 117 No 1

Download (5:57 / 6.9 M)

If you’re keen on comparing the old and new mastering processes, the old version of this recording is still available here. Don’t worry: the fortuitous thunderclap is still in there.