In the Hands

The Broken Mirror of Memory is now released! (Fanfare!) And the best place to get it is straight from the artist. (That’s me!) In this episode is one track from the new album. This is part 2; you heard part 1 in the last episode. The bass clarinet has a kind of talking quality throughout part 2 that involves some unusual sounds you might not have heard before. You’ll hear a few bends and microtonal adjustments, and in many spots, Pat actually sings through the body of the instrument while playing. This does not produce two distinct notes as you might expect; instead, the voice and reed combine in a strange and beautiful way. You’ll also hear some damped notes in the piano, where I touch the end of the string while the hammer strikes. In the mixing process, I used a whole bunch of techniques to accentuate all these strange sounds, and make them even a bit more strange and emotionally immediate. The point of all of these effects — beside just that they’re cool — is not to stand strikingly apart from the rest of the music, but to integrate with it. I always list Jimi Hendrix as one of my big influences, which sometimes gets strange looks, but I mean it. One of things he did so well was to take what we might call “extended technique” and make it feel not extended at all, but perfectly integrated into the musical expression, utterly a part of the syntax. I was after some of that in part 2. I was also thinking of some traditional Bulgarian singing where vocal ornaments and strange uses of the voice meld perfectly into captivating sinewy melodies. Coming out of the tense entanglement of part 1 into a vast, abstract, empty space, here is: Paul Cantrell ▶️ The Broken Mirror of Memory – 2. Soliloquy Paul Cantrell, piano Pat O’Keefe, bass clarinet View score for The Broken Mirror of Memory – 2. Soliloquy ⬇️ Download audio file for The Broken Mirror of Memory – 2. Soliloquy (4:19 / 11.6 M) Buy CD or lossless audio The equilibrium the music finds at the end of part 2, after all that wrestling, opens the door for the big emotional pivot that begins part 3. If you’d like to hear the whole piece, you can listen on this site or get yourself a CD with some really lovely cover art. My heartfelt thanks to everybody on Kickstarter who made this possible. I can’t tell you what it means to be able to release this recording.

The Kickstarter project for The Broken Mirror of Memory has passed its first major milestone! I’m now able to pay for printing the CD, and distributing in online music stores. Huzzah!! In celebration, and as a huge thank you to all the awesome backers who have pitched in so far, I’m posting part 1 (out of 4) of the piece. Here it is! Paul Cantrell ▶️ The Broken Mirror of Memory – 1. Entanglement Paul Cantrell, piano Pat O’Keefe, bass clarinet View score for The Broken Mirror of Memory – 1. Entanglement ⬇️ Download audio file for The Broken Mirror of Memory – 1. Entanglement (2:00 / 6.8 M) Buy CD or lossless audio This music comes right out of the gate at full speed, the piano and the bass clarinet in a state of swirling mutual entanglement. On the first note, Pat actually growls into the instrument while playing, producing a rough sound that punches right through the mix — but then the bass clarinet is immediately submerged under the piano, resurfacing, submerging again…. <!-- The structure of part 1 is essentially a compressed sonata form. (I didn’t plan it that way from the beginning; I just let the music evolved, then realized this is a reasonable way to talk about it. Description, not prescription.) For those who don’t know the term, “sonata form” is a loose structure which essentially works as follows: Exposition: The music makes a journey from point A to point B. Sometimes this happens once, sometimes twice. (We talk about the “A theme” and “B theme,” but there may be many other themes in between. The important thing is that it’s a journey of contrasts.) Development: That journey then gets varied, expounded upon, and mixed around. The themes from the exposition appear in new orders, new contexts, new flavors. They may struggle against one another; they may overlap or unite. Recapitulation (a.k.a. “recap”): We make that original journey from A to B once again, but now see it in a new light because of whatever insights the development revealed. The journey may be almost identical, but usually it changes in some way — a new key, a new emotion, a new ending. In this piece, the piano opens carrying the A theme, which pushes toward agitation and complexity. Then, at 0:15, the bass clarinet bursts through with the B theme, a soaring melody. At that moment, you know that this is not a just thrill ride. There is something in the music that wants to burst through and find a kind of freedom — and it’s going to take the journey of the entire piece, all four parts, for it to find it. The exposition repeats at 0:24, the agitation even more extreme, the melody even more soaring. At 0:48, the development begins. The instruments trade back and forth, bits of A and B emerging and sinking back in, doing a dance of shifting identity. At 1:13, we get a full-throated singing of the B theme — and as it lingers, everything dissolves, the turbulence in suspension. For a moment, the music seems to be reaching beyond its entanglement&nbsp;… …and then at 1:39, the recap, the A theme comes crashing back in, folded in on itself, now forceful and unstoppable. At this point, if it were a strict sonata form, we would hear the whole B theme once more — but at 1:48, the clarinet manages only a truncated, punctuated echo of it. There is no space left for that soaring melody; it is completely subsumed into the piano’s swirling waters. --> The movement leaves us hanging with a big thorny knot, energy spent but unresolved. It was only two minutes, but the music covered a lot of ground — and never once gave us a chance to truly rest. We’re desperate to catch our breath, and that is just what Part 2 does, answering density with spareness, crowded turbulence with isolated wandering in an abstract vastness. When we get a bit farther down the road of Kickstarter goals, I’ll post it. We’re now stretching for the next goal on Kickstarter: raising enough to get the word out about the recording. If you haven’t backed the project yet, please consider it! You can get a CD and/or the full-quality digital version, which have a clarity and fullness of sound that these low-bitrate MP3 lack. (Plus, of course, the CD will have the complete piece!) Update: The Kickstarter campaign was a smashing success! The recording is now released!

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 thought I’d bring it back to the podcast as well. The piece has been a popular one on In the Hands — people have left many comments on it. I suspect that’s because it’s so popular with advanced beginner / intermediate 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. In reach of a dedicated beginner, perhaps, but not easy.) 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) Paul Cantrell, piano ⬇️ Download audio file for Prelude Op. 28 No. 4 (in E minor) (2:41 / 3.7 M) Frédéric Chopin ▶️ Prelude Op. 28 No. 9 (in E major) Paul Cantrell, piano ⬇️ Download audio file for Prelude Op. 28 No. 9 (in E major) (1:36 / 2.4 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, improvisation Todd Harper, piano, improvisation ⬇️ Download audio file for Nomade à Clef (3:48 / 11.2 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) Paul Cantrell, piano View score for Manic Dance (rough version) ⬇️ Download audio file for Manic Dance (rough version) (2:28 / 6.0 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.

As I went through some old recordings, I found that these two 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 Paul Cantrell, piano ⬇️ Download audio file for Sinfonia No. 5 (3:58 / 5.0 M) Robert Schumann ▶️ Bunte Blätter No. 6 Paul Cantrell, piano ⬇️ Download audio file for Bunte Blätter No. 6 (2:06 / 2.9 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 bass clarinet / piano 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 ▶️ Questions Kim Sueoka, soprano John Minczeski, poetry Paul Cantrell, piano ⬇️ Download audio file for Questions (2:19 / 3.3 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!

After a cold (which left my voice in bad shape for podcasting) and MinneBar (which was a great pleasure), it’s back to In the Hands! I’m continuing from last time the series of recordings I made recently with soprano Kim Sueoka of songs by Todd Harper. For several years, Todd has been writing songs full of the sort of jazz changes that are his roots, but as much in the tradition of lieder as anything. He always makes them short, sweet, and very focused — haiku-like — and when he’s setting a text longer than a few lines, he’ll often break it into a chain of very short songs, each only a few words long. I don’t know of anybody who does anything quite like it. The four songs of this short cycle are almost a sort of “found haiku” — the text is from actual police reports in an unnamed northern Minnesota town. Yes, they are real. No, Todd will not tell you which town it is. They’re absolutely hilarious — Kim does a perfect deadpan delivery of their painfully earnest description of the mundane and mildly ridiculous things the police in a small town have to deal with. Audiences have different reactions to the humor: when we did them at an ACF Tuesday Salon, the very polite “high art crowd” audience murmured appreciatively at the humor, but seemed to be waiting for permission to laugh; when we did them shortly afterwards at Patrick’s Cabaret, the audience let out such an incredible stream of roars and guffaws, we were barely able to stay together! There’s something in them beyond the humor, however: a sweetness, a tender love for the world of a small towns. Our sense of scale is relative in all things — space, time, what’s important — and in a little town, a disheveled stranger, a fence knocked down … these things matter. Todd lets the humor in, but it’s not mocking — it’s tender. He’s laughing about what he loves, I think. Todd Harper ▶️ Northwoods Police Report Kim Sueoka, soprano Paul Cantrell, piano ⬇️ Download audio file for Northwoods Police Report (3:57 / 5.2 M)

Here, for the first time in a long time, is something I wrote — but it’s not the music! A couple of weeks ago, I recorded some of my friend Todd Harper’s songs with Kim Sueoka, a marvelous local soprano who sings with (among others) the Rose Ensemble and a first-rate voice/guitar duo called Voce y Cuerdas. She’s great, Todd’s great, and by golly, we had a wonderful time making the recordings! Todd mostly writes voice / piano duets — and that’s mostly what we recorded — but he also did a lovely a cappella setting of one of my poems, and that’s what I’m publishing first. The poem is short, and so is the song. Todd Harper ▶️ First Autumn Night Kim Sueoka, soprano Paul Cantrell, poetry ⬇️ Download audio file for First Autumn Night (0:26 / 1.0 M) The poem is a haiku. Syllable-counters in the audience may object that the lines do not follow the 5-7-5 pattern haiku are supposed to follow, but the syllable count rule isn’t important in modern English haiku, and many poets ignore it altogether. It only really makes sense in Japanese — English syllables are a very different ilk from their Japanese cousins. Moreover, the syllable count isn’t really the heart of the form. What is the heart, then, you ask? A haiku is a direct experience, a single moment of perception caught before the mind has fully digested perception into narrative and meaning. It is typically tied to nature, often tied to a season*, but these are both optional in modern haiku. Perhaps most important feature is that the haiku has two parts: first a direct perception, then some second perception or mental twist that deepens the first part or casts it in a new light. The separation between the two halves is a significant moment. In this song, Todd renders it (“halo”) with the highest note, and the snaking, tonally shifting, rising melody of the first part (the autumn night, the moon) becomes sweet, diatonic, and falling (the illusion of the halo). Nicely done, Todd. And nicely done, Kim. More songs to come! * OK, I know it’s not autumn here in the Northern Hemisphere. You caught me.

Here is a second selection from this year’s Keys Please to follow Todd’s little musical rattlesnake adventure. This is an improvisation by Carei Thomas, the rattlesnake’s narrator, now on piano. I thought — and he said afterward — that there was a little nod to my own funny little improvs in this one, especially in the way it starts with a very low note and a very high one … but it’s definitely a Carei thing! Some improvs have a definite form (head-solo-head, fugue, tala) or a definitely style (Dixieland, bebop, Ghanaian drumming) … but this is one of those that’s just completely spontaneous and organic, and grew out of silence in a completely organic way — like a spring daffodil poking its head up through the jumbled twigs and dead leaves. Todd and I actually murmured to one another during the applause, “Oo! Where did that come from?” Only Carei knows, I suppose, and maybe not even him. ▶️ The Usual Topic Carei Thomas, piano, improvisation ⬇️ Download audio file for The Usual Topic (2:28 / 7.8 M) I took care of my girlfriend Paige’s pet parakeet Pegasus recently while her landlord did some emergency plumbing work, and Pegasus joined in one day while I was practicing the piano. It was not the standard chirping, but a complex mix of all sorts of sounds Pegasus doesn’t normally make, which followed the music quite well – louder in the loud parts and softer in the soft, somehow matching the texture and fitting into the spaces in a birdsong sort of way. It was like she was a soloing on my material — a really wonderful bit of inter-species improv. I tried to capture it in a recording the next time I practiced, but she wasn’t as interested in the piano that time. Too bad! I did, however, manage to capture a bit of a human singer on the microphones, which I will share next time.

Things don’t look good for me to create more new piano recordings in my home studio in the immediate future, so I’m going to have to stall — but I figure I might at least stall with something good! This is a piece from the most recent Keys Please! concert. It adds a nice little bit of variation to the blog: not only is it not Cantrell, Chopin, or Brahms, but … it doesn’t even have a piano in it! (Yes, I’m really going out on a limb.) It’s also stylistically different from what I’ve published so far, hopefully in a refreshing way. It’s from my buddy Todd. He says of it: [This song] I have to share credit for, because I did not write the words. I was at my mom’s at Thanksgiving, and I found some old articles my dad wrote when he was alive, for the newspaper, the Forest Lake Times — and they’re about snakes. … This is about an expedition he took, and I thought, “This would set really well for cello and voice.” Todd uses some inspired bits of semi-improvised sound painting, beautifully performed by Jacqueline, to accentuate the miniature drama in Carei’s reading of this little story. I hope you’ll find it as charming as I do! Todd Harper ▶️ Rattlesnake Song No. 2 Jacqueline Ultan, cello, improvisation Carei Thomas, narration ⬇️ Download audio file for Rattlesnake Song No. 2 (3:42 / 11.3 M) Music lovers take note: Jacqueline plays in a wonderful cello duo called Jelloslave, and they have a new CD!

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 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) Paul Cantrell, piano ⬇️ Download audio file for Song For Lost Things (slightly rough version) (2:58 / 3.9 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.

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 Schubert ▶️ Impromptu D899 No. 4 (a.k.a. Op. 90 No. 4, in A flat minor) Donald Betts, piano ⬇️ Download audio file for Impromptu D899 No. 4 (a.k.a. Op. 90 No. 4, in A flat minor) (8:39 / 10.4 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.

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 Schubert ▶️ Piano Piece D946 No. 1 (in E flat minor) Donald Betts, piano ⬇️ Download audio file for Piano Piece D946 No. 1 (in E flat minor) (10:10 / 12.1 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.

In the Hands is primarily for my own recordings, but today I have a special exception to make: over the summer, I recorded Don Betts, my piano teacher, playing in his home. Don has made a great many excellent recordings over the years — including the Chopin album available on this web site — but these recordings we made in his living room are something entirely different. They have a special kind of magic about them. The Chopin album was recorded in a concert hall, and it has a concert hall feeling: it’s Don the performer, playing a big piano in a big space, and with a big manner to match. The way I really think of him, though, is Don the teacher: playing to an audience of one, not performing so much as sharing, hoping you will share his love and his sense of wonder for the music. These recordings are the first that truly capture the Don Betts I know best. We recorded several pieces, and after much fiddling with EQ, I finally have the first recording prepared and sounding quite decent (though more work is needed!). Robert Schumann ▶️ Arabesque (Op. 18) Donald Betts, piano ⬇️ Download audio file for Arabesque (Op. 18) (7:29 / 9.1 M) Recording in this setting posed some challenges: I had to adapt a recording setup designed for my home studio to an entirely different piano in an entirely different space. It took some experimenting to get mic positions that worked. Don’s piano isn’t a concert instrument, and there was a funny buzz to contend with, plus the noises from outside — you can even hear Don’s fingernails clicking on the keys! I worry a little that listeners used to hearing clinically perfect studio recordings will be put off, but I think you’ll find that there is so much life in this music, your mind won’t notice the surface details for long. Close your eyes and imagine: you’re standing next to a master of the art, in his home, sharing with you what he loves.

My recent mastering experiments have been all about reproducing … well, not the literal sound, but the musical spirit of real-life piano — but of course there’s another side to this software I’m using, and it seemed a shame not to play with it! So I went and had some fun with Niobrara. (Some fragments of another improv are also tucked away in there; a free CD to the first person to correctly identify which one.) I hope you enjoy this little musical excursion! ▶️ Niobrara (Interstellar Medium Remix) Paul Cantrell, piano, improvisation ⬇️ Download audio file for Niobrara (Interstellar Medium Remix) (3:02 / 4.0 M) All these sounds are acoustic piano processed in various ways. The software you’re hearing: Logic Express, Eqium, SupaPhaser, Bouncy, Scrubby, SoundHack, and Stereo Image Munger. My mom heard a bit of this stuff when I started fooling with it in Colorado, and called it “Sybil Music” after the wonderful watercolors of Sibyl Stork. Alas, the photos on her web site don’t do the paintings justice!

This is the second half of the thrilling chronicles of my attempts at mastering the piano recordings. (Here’s part one.) ▶️ Mastering Experiments, Part 2: EQ &amp; Imaging Paul Cantrell, piano ⬇️ Download audio file for Mastering Experiments, Part 2: EQ &amp; Imaging (12:42 / 15.4 M) I’m constantly changing things — I’ve tweaked the process since my last post, and even while making the explanation, I suddenly noticed a new EQ adjustement. It never ends. These experiments are now coming up against the limits of my ears, the point where I spiral endlessly varying some parameter or other, eventually unable to tell whether the result sounds better or worse, or even any different at all. This week, I’m going to enlist the aid of some more knowledgeable friends, and of the listening public (that would be you!), then call it good and move on. And yes, I really am interested in how it sounds to you, on your speakers and to your ears. Once again, Logic Express is heavily involved in what you hear, as is some custom code of my own which handles the stereo image manipulation. But the real software star here is Firium. I’m generally unimpressed with the quality of audio software: it’s typically convoluted, opaque, crashy, ridiculously finicky about its environment, and an embarrassing distant last place in getting compatible with a new OS revision or new hardware. Even much-praised Logic, while it has an excellent set of capabilities, suffers from most of these complaints. It just doesn’t feel polished; it’s certainly no Adobe Illustrator. And then there’s Elemental Audio’s products. They’re elegant. They offer powerful capabilities through a simple, carefully considered feature set, expressed in interface that explains itself clearly and makes what’s most important most obvious, yet rewards exploration and handles exceptional needs gracefully. On top of all that, to my ears, their stuff sounds fantastic.

Loyal readers of In the Hands might reasonably ask: “Paul! Where the heck are you? What have you been up to?” Well, there are many answers to that — preparing my McKnight fellowship application and visiting my parents in Colorado among them — but the piano recordings have not been neglected. I just purchased a round of new software to really try to get my mastering process right. (“Mastering,” for those of you not in on the audio tech speak, is the process of finessing the sound quality of a recording after it’s made.) Today’s recording is first in a two-part audio explanation of what I’m doing. ▶️ Mastering Experiments, Part 1: Reverb Paul Cantrell, piano ⬇️ Download audio file for Mastering Experiments, Part 1: Reverb (15:06 / 18.2 M) For those who are wondering, the software packages behind what you’ll hear are Logic Express and Ambience.

I have been busy applying for a fellowship, and also writing writing writing more music. Here is a new one in the set of dances I’ve been working on — as with the others I’ve recorded, a rough performance (there’s a section in the middle that is horrendously hobbled together), but enough to give you the idea. (The score.) Paul Cantrell ▶️ Disembodied Dance (rough version) Paul Cantrell, piano ⬇️ Download audio file for Disembodied Dance (rough version) (5:04 / 6.2 M) This is probably the weirdest, most abstract thing I’ve ever written. I love it. But be warned: those of you who found the Dance for Remembering and Forgetting a bit puzzling will be completely freaked out by this one. That is OK. It is your prerogative to be freaked out. And yes, this is the same set of dances that includes the Cradle Waltz. I promise it will all make sense in the end. Fascinating fun fact: I thought as I was writing this that it would turn out about three or four minutes long. As I got to the end, I though, “Well, it’s run up to five.” It wasn’t until I made this recording that I realized how long it actually is, and it took me completely by surprise. It doesn’t feel over seven minutes long to me — just as the third ballade doesn’t feel under ten. Strange how music alters our sense of the passage of time. Update: I made some substantial practices and made a re-recording, now it’s five. Was the finished length always in my mind? Moral: composition is as much a mystery to the composer as to everyone else.

What do you do when your piano’s a touch out of tune? You record an improv like this. Or at least I do. ▶️ Smoot Paul Cantrell, piano, improvisation ⬇️ Download audio file for Smoot (0:58 / 1.6 M) Oh, you say you wanted a piano improv with actual notes? Well then, check out Chris Morris’s very clever tip of the hat to the In the Hands improvs. Yes, it’s this site’s very first piece of fan art ever — and nicely done at that! So awesome. Thanks, Chris! He has a bunch of other music on his site, more jazz-leaning and thus a nice counterpoint to the stuff here, all ready for your downloading and listening delectation. Don’t keep the man waiting. Go visit!

I wrote recently about the the danger that virtuosity can make us neglect the virtues of simplicity, and even neglect the music itself. That is true not only of a simple masterpiece like the prelude I was talking about, but also of technically difficult pieces — such as the Chopin ballades. In everything Chopin writes, no matter how complex and virtuosic, that powerful simplicity is there at the core. Although he wrote some very difficult and impressive stuff, the ultimate effect of his music, I feel, should never really be to impress. But that’s exactly what the pianists we usually hear are striving to do: impress the contest judges, the critics, the public. The world we classical performers live in gives us very little room not to play big show pieces, or make everything we play into one. Chopin’s third ballade suffers particularly from this problem. The ballades are all difficult, but it’s the easiest of them (sort of like the shortest Himalaya). It seems as though all the star performers I’ve heard end up trying to make it as hard as the others by plowing through it with virtuosic flare, and thus trivializing it. What wonderful music it is that gets plowed under when that happens! I could spend the whole next month talking about this piece, about how Chopin plays with the sense of return, about his use of dissonance as an architectural device, about all those wonderful melodies … but for now, I’ll just leave you with this one thought to perhaps open a mental door: The melody that opens the piece is the stepping-off point for all that follows in the next two and a half minutes, but then it disappears, and the music goes somewhere else entirely. Listen for it. The experience of wanting that melody to return, and it not returning and not returning and then — that’s the force that shapes the piece. Frédéric Chopin ▶️ Ballade No. 3 (Op. 47, in A flat major) Paul Cantrell, piano ⬇️ Download audio file for Ballade No. 3 (Op. 47, in A flat major) (9:11 / 11.1 M) So this is my current take on the other, non-virtuosic side of Chopin’s third ballade. I actually recorded this several weeks ago, but found that listening back to the recording and hearing all the little nuances I could play slightly differently, all the little things I want to fix, all the different options in all the takes I’d already done, sent me into a tailspin of endless revision from which there would have been no return save in the back of a van wearing a straight jacket. (I mean me wearing the straight jacket, not the van.) So I give myself a little breather until I could make it through the process of editing, mastering, and posting the piece with my sanity (such as it is) intact. Gosh, I sure play this piece differently than when I was 21 — more differently than I’d remembered. Better? Heck if I know; it’s too late at night to decide stuff like that. Don’s version is also quite different. And in a few years, I’ll probably play it yet another new way. It’s a cheerful thought: I take great comfort in knowing that it’s not possible for me to ever exhaust the interpretive possibilities of Chopin.

To conclude this trip down prelude memory lane (at least for the time being), here is the veeery first piece I worked on with Don Betts. I’ve actually hardly played this one since that first year of lessons, but I found it came back quickly. Is playing a piece like riding a bicycle? Maybe a little. Frédéric Chopin ▶️ Prelude Op. 28 No. 4 (in E minor) Paul Cantrell, piano ⬇️ Download audio file for Prelude Op. 28 No. 4 (in E minor) (2:41 / 3.7 M) Don always gives this one to his beginner students. At the time, although I’d had piano lessons for many years as a child, and had recently played piano in a dixie band, I was still really a beginner in many ways. I’d brought Louis Lortie’s recording of the Chopin études (or more accurately, stolen it from my parents), and as I fell in love with Chopin, I began to think that taking piano lessons might not be such a bad thing. So I signed up, Don gave me this piece, and now here I am, quitting my job to noodle around with the piano all day. I realize just now as I write this that my first lesson with Don would have been ten years ago this month. Gosh.

As long as I’m on this Chopin prelude kick…. Frédéric Chopin ▶️ Prelude Op. 28 No. 20 (in C minor) Paul Cantrell, piano ⬇️ Download audio file for Prelude Op. 28 No. 20 (in C minor) (2:19 / 3.2 M) This piece is easy to sink one’s teeth into, I think, very dramatic and engaging on the first listen. But subsequent digging reveals a lot of subtlety in the way the different voices move, the modulation and chromaticism, the emotional shape. It has a fascinatingly unusual structure: many piece start softly and work to a crescendo, but this one starts loud and fades to a whisper. Many pieces in binary form have an initial section that’s repeated twice (AAB) — like this or this or both the first and second larger sections of this taken individually — but this prelude repeats only the second part (ABB). What fascinating fellow Chopin was. But enough with the analytical rambling. What a fine piece. After next Tuesday’s recording, I’ll be switching to a once-a-week-Tuesday schedule, at least for a while. I want to focus on composition for a while, and I’m behind on some of my other projects. Fear not! Updates will keep coming; “Paul gets a job” armageddon is not yet upon us.

We live in a time of superhuman performers. The stars of the classical piano world do things that hardly seem humanly possible — certainly that are far beyond me — and people love it, demand it. It’s a mixed blessing: on the one hand, it’s amazing to hear the most difficult works performed with such ability; on the other hand, the emphasis on the performer, the great cult of the virtuoso, can make us forget about the music itself. Should hearing a piece of music be like watching somebody juggle 9 bowling balls on a tightrope, or like embracing an old friend? It is often true of the composers dearest to me, Chopin first among them, that much of their finest work is their least virtuosic, and thus their most neglected. How many virtuosic pianists just gloss over a little piece like this one? (Yes, Martha Argerich, I’m talking to you.) But it is a masterpiece, not simplistic but simple, yet as wonderful as any music we pianists have the chance to explore — and painted in so few strokes, with such subtlety…. The world of music could learn from the world of math a reverence for the simple and elegant. Genius shows itself in simplicity. So here, brave listeners, take a moment to forget about virtuosity and performers and Grammies and all that nonsense, and listen to the music itself as if it matters. Frédéric Chopin ▶️ Prelude Op. 28 No. 6 (in B minor) Paul Cantrell, piano ⬇️ Download audio file for Prelude Op. 28 No. 6 (in B minor) (2:30 / 3.4 M)

An old favorite, brought from the past to the present for your listening enjoyment. Frédéric Chopin ▶️ Prelude Op. 28 No. 9 (in E major) Paul Cantrell, piano ⬇️ Download audio file for Prelude Op. 28 No. 9 (in E major) (1:36 / 2.4 M) I love the steady outpouring of energy, the unbrokenness of the flow as it goes through such a dramatic series of changes, the perfect balance of the different sections, the tremendous sense of scope of this mere 95 seconds, a single printed page of music. Chopin is totally my hero. Esoteric Musicological Aside There’s an interesting controversy about this piece: in certain places, Chopin notated the melody as dotted eighth + sixteenth on top of three triplets. For those of you who don’t know music notation, that’s corresponds to the fractions 3/4 + 1/4 = 1 beat on the top, and 1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 = 1 beat underneath. With me so far? Now if you work out the math, the sixteenth note (that 1/4 of a beat) should come slightly after the last of the three triplets — but in the autograph Chopin very clearly and consistently notated it directly above that last triplet, implying that they should come at the same time. So his math and his visual language contradict each other; which do we take? Composers did sometimes write dotted-eight + sixteenth as a shorthand for (quarter + eight) triplet — that is, the rhythm that would make them line up. That was a sort of outdated practice in Chopin’s time, but it’s still quite possible he would have done it. His obvious visual positioning, which really is quite consistent in the autograph, suggests that’s what he was doing. And at other points, he used a double-dotted rhythm to show very clearly that last note of the melody coming after the three triplets (at 1:02, for example), and in those spots, he doesn’t align the notes vertically in the autograph. I really think that “at the same time” is what he meant, and that’s how I play it. (I differ with the venerable Paderewski edition on this question.) For a fun home experiment, compare to your favorite recording!

Today’s improv is a bit of fun with one of my favorite sounds from extended piano technique, made by damping a low string with a finger or two at about the point where the copper winding ends. This sound also makes a prominent appearance in the second movement of The Broken Mirror of Memory. ▶️ Rozer Paul Cantrell, piano, improvisation ⬇️ Download audio file for Rozer (1:50 / 2.7 M) I have been practicing some new material to record, and I’m getting the piano tuned later this week in anticipation of actually recording it. So stick around — I hope to have a few treats for you in February!

Here’s another piece from the suite of dances I’m working on, the same set which also includes the Entropic Waltz and Cradle Waltz. The composition, which was tricky, has actually been done for a while … but learning to play it has proved quite a bit of work! Though it may not sound like it, the piece is quite difficult — it has different layers moving in different registers of the keyboard, and so playing it essentially involves using two hands to create the illusion of three or four. Actually, I’m still just barely able to play it, so this is just a rough performance to give an idea of how it works. The layers don’t have the independence and evenness I’d like, and it’s a bit faltering and probably a hair under tempo. Still, if you use your imagination, I think there’s enough here for you to get the idea. Paul Cantrell ▶️ Dance for Remembering and Forgetting (rough version) Paul Cantrell, piano ⬇️ Download audio file for Dance for Remembering and Forgetting (rough version) (2:12 / 3.0 M) I’ll be working on this piece all week to give a hopefully slightly more polished performance at Keys Please next weekend, along with the Entropic Waltz!

As long as we’re conducting experiments on the familiar C major prelude… Some years ago, Don and I heard Angela Hewitt play a marvelous concert of Bach and Messiaen. (There’s a combination!) She gave the most unusual performance of the C major prelude I’ve ever heard: very fast, very light, either a bit of pedal or just a superhuman legato (don’t remember which), and certain notes voiced to give the rapid running pattern some shape. It was almost impressionistic. Now if there’s a right way to play this prelude, this is definitely not it. But it was really quite a marvelous treat to hear something so familiar in such a surprising new guise; if it wasn’t “right,” it sure was good! Here is an imitation — a rather poor one, I’m afraid — of my memory of that performance: Johann Sebastian Bach ▶️ The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, Prelude 1 (in C major) à la Hewitt Paul Cantrell, piano ⬇️ Download audio file for The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, Prelude 1 (in C major) à la Hewitt (1:23 / 2.1 M) Don and I both immediately ran off to get her recording of it, and were immediately disappointed: she played the piece in a completely ordinary way. It was fine; it just wasn’t at all the daring version we’d heard live. I came up with two theories about this: She came up with the novel interpretation in the few years between the recording and the concert, or afraid of critical reaction, she played it safe on the recording and left the risk-taking for the live performances. I don’t know if the second theory was true here, but it’s definitely true in general: musicians don’t want to give critics anything to criticize, and thus focus first — particularly on recordings — on having no mistakes, no risks, nothing extreme, nothing wrong. The result of this is the current glut of recordings that are perfect but not very good. To heck with that! Give me risk-taking! I’d rather hear performances that miss the mark half the time than the bland, play-it-safe perfectionism we usually get.

So here’s the deal with the mystery recording (Ahree got it right): It is, of course, a familiar Bach prelude. I learned to play the piece backwards — that is, playing the notes in reverse order — recorded it that way, then reversed the recording. Got it? So even though you hear the strange sound of backwards piano, growing instead of decaying, the notes come in the right order. Here’s what I actually played — and here’s the final backward-is-foward result again: Johann Sebastian Bach ▶️ Mystery recording Paul Cantrell, piano ⬇️ Download audio file for Mystery recording (2:12 / 3.0 M) Jimi Hendrix used to use this same trick, most notably on the masterpiece Castles Made of Sand. Unlike him — he was reportedly able to think the music backwards in his head — I worked out the backwards prelude on paper, a task which Sibelius made much less tedious. I cheated a bit on what music theorists would call the literal “retrograde,” changing where the left hand notes start…er…end in order to make them sound like they’re starting in the right place when listening backwards. An interesting phenomenon, the one Joel and I were discusssing that lead to this idea, is that the music doesn’t make sense backwards. Listen to what I played, that is, the prelude with all the notes in reverse order. It keeps seeming like it’s about to start making sense, but it never quite does. You might think that this is only because the piece is so familiar, or because the tonality and musical language are so well-established, but that’s not it! Joel and I were discussing Niobrara — just to be silly, I’d asked if the piece played backwards would be “Ararboin,” so Joel actually tried playing it backwards, and found just the same thing: even Niobrara, which is barely tonal, quite unfamiliar (I made it up on the spot!), and rather meandering, keeps sounding like it’s about to make sense but never does. Is it that piano just doesn’t make sense when you play it backwards, Joel wondered? Having the notes swell up instead of decaying prevents our ears from finding musical sense? No, I claimed — and today’s recording is the evidence. The Hendrix-style prelude definitely sounds weird, but it makes sense. With the piano forward but the notes in backwards order, it doesn’t. QEF. So what’s the deal? Why don’t the backwards versions make sense? Music has syntax. Even all those funny improvs do. Backwards work doesn’t syntax the, language verbal with as and. It’s hard to pin down exactly how musical syntax works; in fact, I don’t think anybody’s really managed to do a satisfactory job for music in general, just rough ideas for certain specific styles. But even if we can’t express the syntax as a set of rules, we can sure tell when it’s out of whack! It’s yet further evidence for one of these little speeches I keep giving: the point of music is not understanding the experience — which nobody, nobody really does — but the experience itself. Your experiential mind knows things about music that your reasoning mind does not.

Here’s an amusing little idea Joel and I came up with while talking on the phone. Why did I do this, you ask? Because it’s the internet. Because I can. Johann Sebastian Bach ▶️ Mystery recording Paul Cantrell, piano ⬇️ Download audio file for Mystery recording (2:12 / 3.0 M) The first one to figure out what’s going on here gets … um, actually I don’t have a prize. Sorry. Still, try to figure it out! If you want the full surprise effect, play the song without looking at the title of the next post, which contains the answer.

Crystalizing, particle by particle. ▶️ Jelm Paul Cantrell, piano, improvisation ⬇️ Download audio file for Jelm (2:24 / 3.2 M) That’s the last of the January improvaganza. I’ve been composing day and night (and it’s a perfect night for it tonight: new snow and a near-full moon!), and that will yield some new recordings just as soon as I manage to get some of these new pieces learned. But next time, I have a quirky little treat in the works for you. No, no, it’s a secret. Only Joel knows.

A sudden outpouring with no resolution! ▶️ Natrona Paul Cantrell, piano, improvisation ⬇️ Download audio file for Natrona (2:08 / 2.9 M) I sat down and played this once, then for some reason started it again a couple of times — perhaps trying to find a resolution that wasn’t there to be found. But I ended up using that first take after all. It somehow reminds me of GMH: Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:   Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;   Selves—goes its self; myself it speaks and spells, Crying What I do is me: for that I came. (Here’s the whole poem.)

I can’t decide: is this one emotionally charged, walking in an unfamiliar place, breath held? Or is it something moving without human intention, like water flowing beneath the ice, seen through human eyes? ▶️ Wyarno Paul Cantrell, piano, improvisation ⬇️ Download audio file for Wyarno (2:59 / 3.9 M) Hmm. I think this one went on too long, but I do like the ending.

Shelter. A safe place. ▶️ Alcova Paul Cantrell, piano, improvisation ⬇️ Download audio file for Alcova (2:37 / 3.5 M) I’m returning from Colorado tomorrow, but it will likely be a while before my piano is back in tune and I’m recording again. Will the blog go silent, you ask? Fear not! I recorded a little round of improvs a few weeks ago, so that’s likely what you’ll be hearing here for the next couple of weeks. When I post a bunch of improvs in a row like this, part of me cringes at them starting to feel like filler material — but I set out to post recordings twice a week, and by golly, I’m sticking to that! So I hope you can enjoy these pieces for their emotional variety and in-the-moment rawness as you await the Return of the Composer. If nothing else, you can enjoy the names, which Wyoming provided and my parents helped me select.

Bells? The memory of bells? A fanciful description of the memory of bells? ▶️ Sublette Paul Cantrell, piano, improvisation ⬇️ Download audio file for Sublette (2:03 / 2.8 M) Maybe not bells at all.

At the New Year’s Eve party my family has been attending for the last … oh, at least 20 years, we have a tradition of doing waltzes. By “doing,” I don’t much mean dancing — sadly, only a few brave souls do that — but playing them, since it’s a musical crowd and it’s easy to form a pickup group. (It’s another instance of the sort of informal playing together, not playing for, that I wrote about in Comparing Notes.) Waltzes for the new year are a tradition our hosts imported from Austria, and one I’m now importing from their party to my blog. OK, you caught me, I already posted one recording for the new year. So now I’ve posted two! Johannes Brahms ▶️ Waltz Op. 39 No. 15 (in A flat major) Paul Cantrell, piano ⬇️ Download audio file for Waltz Op. 39 No. 15 (in A flat major) (1:42 / 2.4 M) This isn’t quite as polished and unique as the previous Brahms recording I posted, I’m afraid, but I hope you’ll overlook that and enjoy the piece. It’s a wonderful little masterpiece of sophisticated simplicity.

This one’s for all you Gregorians out there, celebrating the new year: ▶️ Ethete Paul Cantrell, piano, improvisation ⬇️ Download audio file for Ethete (2:09 / 2.9 M) A mysterious song, still unformed and incorporeal, full of potential!

The word “étude” means study — a practice piece, designed to exercise a particular technique. Études for musicians are generally dry, repetitious pieces, not music to perform, but just exercises for practice. So Chopin’s choice of that title may seem a little understated, or even ironic: his études certainly do exercise one’s technique, but they are expressive, poetic, passionate, and anything but dry. I think the title fits beautifully: shouldn’t learning always be this way? Frédéric Chopin ▶️ Étude Op. 25 No. 1 (in A flat major) Paul Cantrell, piano ⬇️ Download audio file for Étude Op. 25 No. 1 (in A flat major) (3:13 / 4.2 M) An interesting aspect of the piece I work to bring out, one which you don’t always hear, is the inner voices. This comes straight from my teacher, Don Betts, who is very particular about that in this piece. He quotes Schumann remarking on how Chopin himself brought them out. (To have a recording of Chopin…!) That’s thirdhand information, of course, but Chopin certainly does notate them clearly. What’s the “inner voice?” Well, the piece is made of sort of rapid, repeating cycle of notes, and a melody — a “voice” — emerges from the topmost notes. That’s the “upper voice.” But there are sections in the piece where other melodies emerge, not on the top, but in the middle, and those are the “inner voices.” Listen, for example, to 0:50–1:10, or 1:46–2:01. Does that make sense? Let me know if it’s confusing, and I’ll try to explain it better. Don himself has a recording of this piece on this site, from his Chopin album, and our two versions make an interesting comparison, I think. Of course I love his handling of the inner voices. He’s more technically adept, especially at the end. And his sense of the shape of the phrases is quite different in some spots — not the way I’d play it, but the way he would! Sometimes, when I’m in the middle of learning and understanding a piece, I can’t stand to hear somebody else’s version. But right now, hearing Don’s version gives me tremendous pleasure, and makes me want to think through the piece all over again. One of the marvelous things about composed music is just this: Don and I can both play this piece, and through that shared experience I can learn from the master even as I derive personal satisfaction from playing it my own way. A piece of music is not just its own world, but many worlds in many hands at many times, never perfected, always satisfying.

I’ve been meaning to record this one for a long time. Johannes Brahms ▶️ Ballade Op. 10 No. 4 Paul Cantrell, piano ⬇️ Download audio file for Ballade Op. 10 No. 4 (11:48 / 14.0 M) This is one of those mysterious and introspective pieces like Chopin’s nocturne 15.3 that has a strange logic all its own. It’s low and, even in the crescendos, somehow hushed throughout. There’s not a trace of virtuosic flashiness in it; it’s definitely not a piece that’s about the pianist. The way it unfolds is … well, a nice fellow from Paris named Frank who emailed me about piano recording, and who is also learning to play it, said it well: it’s almost as if the whole piece were a single long phrase. And it ends by dissolving and fading away — a sentence without a period. I would expect a piece like this to be a late work, from a composer with much wisdom and little to prove to the rest of the world — think, for example, of Beethoven’s Opus 111 or Shostakovich’s late string quartets — but Brahms wrote this when he was 21, or maybe 20. To see inside that young man’s mind…! The mystery deepens! In spite of the mystery, or really because of it, this is one of my favorite pieces. My interpretation is a little unorthodox, but then so it the music. I hope you enjoy it!

▶️ Uinta Paul Cantrell, piano, improvisation ⬇️ Download audio file for Uinta (5:44 / 7.1 M) Cold, thin air. Winter light. A solitary high place.

I love the word “invention” — it may capture what’s going on in the pieces of music it names better than any title I know of. What’s this? It’s just an idea, a creative spark. Bach has fun, and he’s sharing. Just an idea: one scale coming up, one going down, alternating steps. And from that idea, a little world unfolds. Johann Sebastian Bach ▶️ Invention No. 6 Paul Cantrell, piano ⬇️ Download audio file for Invention No. 6 (3:30 / 4.5 M)

Here is the fourth movement of The Broken Mirror of Memory, with Diana Frazier on cello. The second movement, the one from Saturday’s post, comes straight out of the cello, and all the extraordinary sounds it can make. (It also serves as a break for the pianist, who has rather an exhausting job in the first movement.) This movement doesn’t have all those wild sounds; it is pure and unabashed melodic counterpoint, a melody that’s been there playing all along throughout the piece. But listen closely — that second movement sneaks in there at a certain point…. Or, if you prefer, don’t listen for anything in particular at all, and just enjoy. Paul Cantrell ▶️ The Broken Mirror of Memory​ (cello version) – Part 4 Paul Cantrell, piano ⬇️ Download audio file for The Broken Mirror of Memory​ (cello version) – Part 4 (7:03 / 8.5 M) This movement begins on page 16 of the score.

This is one movement of my cello piece, The Broken Mirror of Memory. Unlike most of the recordings in this blog, this isn’t a recording from my home studio, but rather from a concert at Macalester. And yes, I admit, it’s actually an old recording (2003), which is sort of cheating on this whole “two new recordings every week” scheme — but it is at least previously unreleased, so I hope you’ll enjoy it anyway. The cellist is Diana Frazier, a family friend who was just wonderful in taking on the huge task of learning this piece (the whole thing is about 20 minutes, and it’s not easy). Alas, we never really got a chance to record the whole thing properly in its finished form — I have decent recordings of the 2nd and 4th movements from this concert, but the other two I have only in a “quick and dirty” form. And since she lives in Lincoln, NE, which is quite a hike from Minneapolis, we may not get a chance to record it soon. I do hope we get a chance eventually, and if we do, you’ll read about it here! Paul Cantrell ▶️ The Broken Mirror of Memory​ (cello version) – Part 2 Paul Cantrell, piano ⬇️ Download audio file for The Broken Mirror of Memory​ (cello version) – Part 2 (4:29 / 5.6 M) This movement begins on page 6 of the score.

I wrote this piece for a former piano student of mine. He was (and presumably still is) exceptionally thoughtful, patient, and sensitive for an eight-year-old; in fact, he had the better of most adults I’ve known in those respects. I wanted a piece that would give him a chance to be really musical — he had the right stuff for it — but was within his technical reach and within the physical limitations of the birth defect in his right hand. So this is what I came up with. Paul Cantrell ▶️ Noah’s Song Paul Cantrell, piano ⬇️ Download audio file for Noah’s Song (0:51 / 1.5 M) He did learn it, and played it quite nicely. This, of course, gratified me to no end. Some things are clichés simply because they’re true; “teaching is rewarding” is one such.

Here’s a preview of a piece I’m working on — this is the march that opens Chopin’s Fantasty. The whole piece is quite an epic (about 14 minutes), and rather difficult, so I’m not going to be posting the whole thing in the near future. This opening, however, is neither so long nor so difficult, and so I’m posting a rough version of it as a little appetizer. It almost stands as a little piece on its own, but right where I stop in this recording, instead of winding to a close, the music takes off full throttle. Frédéric Chopin ▶️ Fantasy in F minor (introduction) Paul Cantrell, piano ⬇️ Download audio file for Fantasy in F minor (introduction) (3:18 / 4.3 M) In the future, the whole thing!

Here’s a little composition from my tender youth. I remember that I was a little befuddled at the time about how to write down the rhythms! This piece thus lived only in my head for a long time, yet I still remember it quite clearly. It will be obvious why when you hear it — it’s kind of catchy. Paul Cantrell ▶️ The Walking Concert Paul Cantrell, piano ⬇️ Download audio file for The Walking Concert (0:59 / 1.6 M) Hearing this again makes me smile. Perhaps it’s just pleasant memories of sixth grade (which was a happy year for me), but I hope that the tune is enjoyable for you even without the personal associations!

In college, I won an award from the Math/CS department for being the most outstanding procrastinator of my senior class. I don’t think it’s exactly fair to say that I procrastinate, though; I’m just perpetually late. My life is like a finely tuned Swiss watch that’s set to the wrong time. So I finally got around to putting The Monster from Keys Please! up on the site. To celebrate the occasion, here’s the opening number in its original, bare, single-piano form: Paul Cantrell ▶️ The Monster’s Theme Paul Cantrell, piano ⬇️ Download audio file for The Monster’s Theme (1:07 / 1.7 M) Compare that with the full-on decked-out two-pianos-with-Todd-belting-it-out-in-his-monster-voice version from the concert! I should mention that, if you’re one of these retro folks who likes physical media with high-quality sound and high-resolution artwork, you can buy the CD of the concert. This will also be of interest to those of you who like to support independent artists! And, in keeping with the “always behind but never idle” theme of this post, I’ve revamped my music home page as I’ve been meaning to do for the last six months. New! Improved! Bright, not just white!

Here’s a little gem of a piece that my dear friend Todd Harper (of Keys Please fame) gave me as a present for my 25th birthday. Naturally this charmed my socks off. So tonight, with my socks back on (no shoes, though, as usual at the piano), I recorded it to share with you. He has it marked “really quiet,” with “really” underlined twice, so in addition to playing it that way, I kept this recording mastered a bit low. Todd Harper ▶️ Thoughts at 4 AM Paul Cantrell, piano ⬇️ Download audio file for Thoughts at 4 AM (1:31 / 2.2 M) What? Oh, yes, of course I recorded it at 4 AM! Well, actually it was more like ten after, but I think that still counts in the poetic sense we’re talking about here.

The Niobrara River starts in Wyoming and flows through Nebraska. Wikipedia tells me that the original native name in the Omaha-Ponca language, Ní Ubthátha khe, means something akin to “water spread out horizontally” or “wide-spreading waters.” I did not know that when I chose the title; the word’s music simply seemed to me to fit my piano’s music. Though it’s accidental, it seems to me that the visual fits. ▶️ Niobrara Paul Cantrell, piano, improvisation ⬇️ Download audio file for Niobrara (2:13 / 3.0 M) I later produced a remix of this piece, with an electronic feel (even though this acoustic piano recording is the only sound source). (“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.)