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Pianist and composer Timothy Andres is known for his performance of works by his contemporaries and traditional repertoire alongside his own work. His compositions meld a classical music upbringing with diverse interests in the natural world, graphic arts, technology, cooking, and photography. He has been praised for his “acute ear” by the New York Times’s Anthony Tommasini and “stubborn nose” by the New Yorker’s Alex Ross and his debut album on Nonesuch Records, "Shy and Mighty," received widespread critical acclaim.

Program
Timothy Andres:  At the River
Robert Schumann: Waldszenen, Op. 82: 1. Eintritt
Ingram Marshall: Authentic Presence 
Robert Schumann: Waldszenen: 4. Verrufene Stelle
Ted Hearne: Parlor Diplomacy
Robert Schumann: Waldszenen: 7. Vogel als Prophet
Martin Suckling: Lieder Ohne Worte: 3. mein Herz ist zu voll 
Schumann: Waldszenen: 9. Abschied

Program Note
All music is made from the music which preceded it, and I'm interested in this process of influence and filtering, whether conscious or unconscious. When I hear a new piece of music, I like being able to parse influences; it signifies that the composer wasn't to concerned with some concept of "originality", which is a chimera anyway. Every composer can't possibly rebuild music from scratch, and why shouldn't listeners be able to guess what music you love and admire most?

This program is an experiment in that I am imposing a didactic “compositional” voice on what is supposed to be a purely interpretational activity: I hope you’ll humor me. I’ve interpolated four contemporary pieces with movements from Schumann’s nine Waldszenen (“Forest Scenes”). Schumann's work is at times denigrated (quite unfairly, I think) because of the forms he chose to work in—suites of instrumental or vocal miniatures. He struggled with larger genres, and his sonatas, quartets, and symphonies are routinely ignored by musicians and audiences. They lack the effortless, endless melodic flights of Schubert and the architectural mass and stolidity of Beethoven or Brahms.

But Schumann's strength—the ability to conceive a wild array of seemingly disparate elements within a fragmentary structure and create a coherent musical statement—is just as valuable, and perhaps rarer. It also makes his music feel more “contemporary” in a way, as musical structures have become generally shorter and less standardized. I’ve tried to play up these qualities by treating the Waldszenen as little “comments” on the contemporary pieces which precede them, in the process switching up the proportions and musical relationships of the typical Classical Music Concert.

Timothy Andres: At the River
The third in a series of pieces having to do with Charles Ives and the tradition of musical Americana, At the River is an old-school piano “fantasy” on the American hymn Shall We Gather at the River?. The tune is first exploded into a long, quasi-improvised “strumming piece”, whose repetitive figurations pay homage to the minimalist juggernauts of Alvin Curran and Charlemagne Palestine. After a gradual ascent to the top of the keyboard, a distant chorale takes up; more recognizable bits of the hymn are heard in far-flung keys.

At the River is dedicated to Ingram Marshall, whose work merges sacred and secular in mysterious and beautiful ways.

Ingram Marshall: Authentic Presence
Ingram Marshall was one of my graduate school professors, though our composition lessons were as likely to take place hunting for mushrooms in the nearby woods as at the piano. Authentic Presence is one of Ingram's few purely acoustic pieces. The electronic-music tools of delay, reverb, and sampling are integral to his composing style, taking their place alongside 1970s California minimalism, Balinese and Javanese harmonies, and early American hymns in his musical nature preserve. Hazy memories of the civil rights protest song "We Shall Overcome" cycle through the dramatic episodes of Authentic Presence; the piece has a pleasantly un-rigorous formal logic to it, concerned perhaps with following a train of thought rather than any set musical program.

Ted Hearne: Parlor Diplomacy
Ted writes: “When my good friend Timo asked me to write him a piece, I wanted to create something that would not only challenge him and show off his incredible technical ability, but also somehow honor his lifetime of performing, absorbing and living classical music. What I came up with was Parlor Diplomacy, a piece whose material is at odds with its organization.

Gestures, harmonies and rhythms from Parlor Diplomacy are extracted from the context that might have once given them a different meaning. What could have been an incidental trill is isolated and stuck under stage lights, or a series of falling figures is divorced from its historically-appropriate sequence. The result is a familiar yet unsettling landscape of fragments and echoes.

The first movement is a rhythmically-challenging and somewhat overzealous “trill-tastic” barnburner.

The second movement is a homage to Brahms’s Intermezzo, Op. 119 in B minor, portraying an echo of a ripple of a wave from the heart-breaking motif of a descending line; or perhaps imagining how Brahms might have heard each note falling at its own rate in its own universe, unencumbered by 19th-century rules of harmony and rhythm.

The third movement seeks to recreate the magic of an intermediate piano student (or not-particularly-good classical pianist such as myself) discovering a piece of music for the first time, very slowly, almost awkwardly, separated from many musical parameters necessary for a succesful performance yet somehow still uncovering and preserving some of music's essential beauty, for the ears of only the performer.

The fourth movement comes closest to respecting classical rules of form and development, beginning with a ground bass and later developing material in a style that owes much to a typical theme-and-variations. While dissonances in harmony and rhythm firmly place this music in a contemporary historical context, its method of presenting itself—that is, the preservation of the grammar as well as the sounds of classical music—makes it the most traditional of all the movements.

As Wikipedia creates a “disambiguation” page to help sort similar-sounding entries into a meaningful catalog, the final movement creates ambiguous gestures by separating them from any grid or hierarchy that might help clarify their musical role. It is a pithy collection of cadences going nowhere.”

Martin Suckling: Lieder ohne Worte
These three short piano pieces are reflections on Schubert's cycle. In their way, they are songs too: the first, a recitation; the second, port-a-beul (dancing nonsense rhymes); the third a long lyrical aria.

Der Dichter, als Prolog borrows its title from the first of Müller's Die schöne Mullerin poems (which Schubert chose not to set). Like Müller's text, it presents an external speaker introducing the world of the song cycle, the forest, the brook, and distant horn calls.

The second piece continues directly from the triumphant Mein!, the over-exuberant repetition of key phrases from this song perhaps suggesting that the miller's cry, “die geliebte Mullerin ist mein! ist mein!” is more a delusional demand than a celebratory acknowledgement.

In Pause, the tenor sings “Ich kann nicht mehr singen, mein Herz ist zu voll” (I can sing no more, my heart is too full). The third piano solo, which follows immediately, takes this line as its basis: the idea of a heart filling with song to the point of overflowing.

Lieder ohne Worte are dedicated with great affection to John Reid, and their commission was generously supported by the Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust.