My new album on Urlicht Audiovisual is called Invisible Colors after Brian Ferneyhough’s piece Unsichtbare Farben. It’s handy to be able to use a title from the music and I thought this sounded more evocative than Wolpe’s Piece in Two Parts or Ferneyhough’s Intermedio alla ciaconna. If you google the words “unsichtbare farben”, you’ll get websites of German companies selling glow-in-the-dark paint. I applied some photo filters to the album cover to give the picture that sort of effect.

The album features five pieces by three composers: Ferneyhough, Elliott Carter and Stefan Wolpe. It will be released digitally on March 31 and available as CD. I’m playing a concert to celebrate the release on April 5 at National Sawdust, where the album was recorded. Hope you can come.

In my musical explorations, I want to go as far as I can with each idea or world of sound so that I commit my all to understand and experience its varied aspects. Whether in one concert process or multiple.  Ferneyhough’s pieces often involve such complex, dense textures and rhythms that performers, myself included, flail at executing them and this becomes a lot of the drama of the piece. I feel the qualities of hyperactivity and overload in much of his music reflect the modern state of the world, with its multi-layered barrage of information, internet data, and connections.

While I musically enjoy that barrage and the effort toward coping, I became fascinated with his unusually spare, linear, distilled piece “Unsichtbare Farben”, which offers an opportunity to fully hear all the expressive phrases, notes, and harmonies. I gave it a lot of care in playing a meticulous rendition. [See also his program note, which I discovered months after the album’s release.]  Exploring it in this way, I also approached the even more intricate Intermedio alla ciaconna in a similarly patient, inquisitive vein.

I’ve played a lot of Elliott Carter’s music, from the Duo and the Violin Concerto to the Triple Duo, Canon for 4, and other chamber pieces. I love the “character study” quality of the Four Lauds, the way Carter depicted the banjos in Copland’s music, Robert Mann’s brusque verbal declarations, the ornately woven style of Roger Sessions. I’m drawn to the taut tension and unfolding of Carter’s intervals and harmonies, the long lines, and the back-and-forth between the gruff and the sweet and singing.

Stefan Wolpe was a philosophical composer whose music is like mobile sculptures, with musical ideas taking up distinct pitch-space and interacting across irregular sections of time. He had a wide and impactful influence among both classical and jazz composers of his time. I enjoyed performing these two Wolpe pieces on a festival of his music presented by the Wolpe Society in New York.