May 2012
4 posts
a hobo on the E train approaches me, regards my Carnegie Hall bag, then points in my face and says: “Never… trust… anyone who doesn’t appreciate some form of music — Shakespeare, baby!”
5 tags
Purposeless Play: John Cage As Gamifier →
April 2012
14 posts
crumbs
the other day i went to crumbs for an americano, handing my coffee punch card to the guy behind the counter. he began to glow, bubbling over with the news that crumbs had in fact changed their coffee punch card format, and it turned out i’d already filled my quota for a free coffee and a cupcake. my americano would be “on the house!” he exclaimed, and as another employee set to...
journal from 8-19-09
With each passing day, I’m more convinced that Midtown is hell on earth. So hot. I get here and instantly start sweating, instantly feel ugly, pimply, fat. It’s nothing but stores, but no real customers. Everyone is in transit. Nothing permanant [sic]. ”No restroom” yells the Starbucks attendant behind me. Of course there’s not.
And I’m here why? For...
credo in taylor swift
a 12-year-old student halfheartedly plays a taylor swift song when i interrupt her. ”your job as a pianist is to make me believe that the music is good — not that you’re good.”
program notes : "things i've never done in pubic"
so yesterday i was creating some very poetic program notes when suddenly i decided to wash some dishes. then this happened (with my left hand inside the glass)…
then this happened…
(yes, that’s fatty tissue).
And then this happened…
In the panic of the moment, running around the apartment with blood seeping from my knuckle, I must have lost all my program notes...
we have a vigilante
… and this vigilante rummages through the trash of our building to rescue uneaten food. They don’t eat the food, but rather, they just collect it all and leave it on our stoop for others to eat, or what usually ends up happening — for others to observe. Sometimes F’s and my discarded items are featured, like a loaf of moldy bread that we tossed last week which reappeared...
john cage remixed - dubble8 dubs up my baltimore...
[statement from the remixer, Eric Spangler, a.k.a. Dubble8]
Pianist Adam Tendler performed John Cage’s “Sonatas and Interludes” for prepared piano on the Mobtown Modern music series this past Valentine’s Day, 2012. I recorded the concert for my Sound Art class at MICA- my students’ assignment was to create beats or remixes based on samples from this performance....
March 2012
11 posts
Define "Maverick"
[from an email to a friend]
I think I’m going to head to Carnegie Hall this morning to try to grab some “rush” tickets to [Harrison’s] Organ Concerto tonight. For the most part, this American Mavericks series is making great choices. I love the attention they’re giving Cage, Harrison, Cowell… it’s very “west coast,” and after all I suppose...
PORTLAND BLOG ABOUT MY CAGE CONCERT →
George Colligan, American jazz pianist/composer/educator who lives in Portland and teaches at Portland State University, responds to Adam Tendler’s concert of John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes at PSU.
BALTIMORE BLOG OF MY CAGE CONCERT →
BALTIMORE REVIEW OF MY CAGE CONCERT →
dispatch from the fourth row
[from an email i wrote tonight]
… the audience was half the show, honestly. I literally saw some insane concertgoer who lost his seat after abandoning it in the middle of the _____ first yell at the person who took it, then give him the finger while sitting cross-legged on the floor directly before the stage, and then finally PUNCHING the seated man in the shoulder before bolting up the...
post concert confession
“…so i owe my life in music to a double-cheeseburger…”
“…is that so wrong?”
NEW YORK INTERVIEW ABOUT MY CAGE CONCERT →
PORTLAND REVIEW OF MY CAGE CONCERT →
PIANO TEACHER'S CREDO
It’s 9 a.m. on the Upper East Side, and I’m hovering over a digital piano explaining “Middle C” to a pop singer as her miniature Pomeranian humps my leg. She apologizes, but I really want her to get this, so I focus her back to the page, feeling the tiny dog’s clutch tighten. Two minutes later, he urinates on a lamp. The lesson is suspended.
It’s time like these when I start to analyze how...
sage words
“there is always something interesting to learn from every person, no matter how retarded he is.” - my 10:30 a.m student, 22
February 2012
5 posts
LOUNGE PIANO GANGBANG
[composed entirely on the Notes application of my iPhone between Rockefeller Center and 2nd Avenue on the F subway line, and also in bed between 4-6 a.m. this morning, because I couldn’t sleep. Presented unedited.]
I’ve never thought that being a whore would bother me. I mean, like, an actual whore. Somehow I think I could separate love and sex (God knows I’ve done it before)...
ASK AND IT IS GIVEN
Just before I get off the 1 train, a woman looks up from her book and says to me, “Celebrate your freedom.”
Conversation With a Nine Year Old Student That...
Him: “What?” Me: “Nothing I’m just sighing.”
dispatch from the titanic
…turning 30 in five days, i remember half-a-decade ago, standing before this fountain with my closest friends, saturated with three days’ worth of $2 margaritas and Pepto Bismol (hit communally from the bottle between cocktails), watching this show with this song by accident as we walked to our airport shuttle about to be swept to our different parts of the country; mine was texas....
January 2012
6 posts
New York Compliment
“Of course I talk to my therapist about you!”
Chicken or the Egg
I have no inspiration to teach people who have no inspiration to learn.
Conflict / Resolution
I think every musician is in some way addicted to conflict. Why else would we practice? “The search for perfection,” answers the wide-eyed conservatory student. Well, I won’t argue, but I also won’t say there’s any difference. Forget music, ask anyone who’s ever looked for perfection in anything — in a spouse, for instance. Do these searches ever end...
PUSHED INTO THE CLOSET
Come on guys. Haven’t you ever come out before? We, of all people, should know that the Tim Tebow blogcircus will do nothing to bring him, or anyone else for that matter, out of the closet; that is, if they in fact live closeted lives in the first place.
Exhibit A: The first 25 years of my life. I talked a certain way, liked certain things, did certain activities, and even as everyone...
FAITH AND DELUSION
I’ve been disappointed by rejection but never once discouraged. Having faced rejection, say, about three to five times a week for the past thirteen years, the common onlooker might suggest I examine the fine line between persistence and insanity, faith and delusion, but I also might suggest that this onlooker simply doesn’t get it. Wait for positive feedback? Who has the time?...
Free Downloadable Album: ADAM TENDLER: LIVE IN...
Free Download
ADAM TENDLER: LIVE IN MAUI — JOHN CAGE’S SONATAS AND INTERLUDES FOR PREPARED PIANO
or go to bit.ly/sonatasandinterludes
December 2011
7 posts
a memory before bed - "you're not special"
I played the saxophone for a year when I was ten. I might have been good at it, too, but I already played the piano, and I knew I was better that. As a keyboard player, the issue of “what should I do with the school band?” would haunt me for awhile. In the elementary marching band, my role was that of banner holder, in high school, I played xylophone — piano, xylophone, same...
VERMONT FRAGMENT
(MAY/JUNE, 2006)
When I returned to Vermont, the first thing I did was have surgery on a hernia I gave myself a two Februarys prior after my hospital dispatch and an irresponsible weight lifting regime. Lately it had been more visible than ever on my lower-right pelvis, and if I coughed or laughed, it would pop out like a tumor. Since my health insurance was running out [soon], this was my last...
"WOAH YOU'RE HERE!" - TEXAS FRAGMENTS
(TEXAS, 4/22/06)
The next morning, instead of taking I-10 west across Texas, I took the less-direct but more scenic Highway 90, stretching from Houston through the southern Texas desert. The terrain was desolate and rocky, sometimes flat, sometimes immense and mountainous, giant hedges of earth colored like brown sugar. Birds that looked like vultures coasted in large, calm circles against a sky...
VERMONT ARTICLES
ONLY HUMAN - EASTER IN NEW ORLEANS
(NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA, Easter Sunday 2006)
My Hyundai snaked through the narrow streets and cobble-stoned corridors of New Orleans, Matilda serving as tour guide from the tiny tomb of the backseat, legs folded in against her body, and Ernesto sitting disinterestedly in the passenger seat. I couldn’t use my rearview mirror because someone had smashed it the night before; I wasn’t sure...
LOUISIANA FRAGMENT
(ST. BERNARD PARISH, LOUISIANA, 4-12?-06)
It was the only sign of life for miles. THREE FREE HOT MEALS A DAY! EMERGENCY COMMUNITIES. MADE WITH LOVE CAFÉ AND GRILL.
I parked the car and walked toward two enormous domed tents.
They guarded a small city of camping tents, Army tents, porta-potties, and even a few teepees.
Tractor-trailers had been converted into giant refrigerators, powered...
TALES OF BILOXI
(BILOXI, MISSISSIPPI, early-April 2006)
While working in the houses of the dead and displaced, we met those neighbors who survived, and furthermore, who chose to stay, living in campers and FEMA trailers, and often they would come out and tell us their stories — stories about bodies in the streets and people drowned in attics. One day they decided prepare us a crawfish boil as a gesture of...
November 2011
9 posts
GEORGIA FRAGMENT
(AUGUSTA, GEORGIA, 3/23/06)
…at a visual and performing arts high school, [in] a concrete room with blue walls and bright fluorescent lights, a young girl was playing Bach’s Minuet in G on a Baldwin grand piano in the corner. When she got up, another girl took her place and began Bach’s c minor prelude from Book One of The Well-Tempered Clavier, the same prelude I once used for my...
MICHIGAN FRAGMENT
(“FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE,” KALAMAZOO, MICHIGAN, 3/20/06)
“I was in touch with some residents who will have dinner with you,” said Corrine, my concert organizer, “if that’s okay with you.”
“Sounds great.”
“They’re eating at four forty-five, which is,” she looked at her watch, “now.”
“That’ll work.”
Corrine led me to a table in the cafeteria where three older women sat. They all had white...
Postcard from Zuccotti
The air smells of halal food and doughnuts from a fortress of vendors surrounding Zuccotti Park. It’s cloudy and cold, and men are hanging Christmas lights. My best friend and I sit on one of the granite walls winding through the park as someone from Occupy Wall Street tells a group of people behind us to step off the mounds of mud these walls protect to avoid risking another eviction from...