The Dissonant States - Adam Tendler

I composed this piece to expose the casual bigotry of elected...

Mon, 13 May 2013 15:33:41 -0400

I composed this piece to expose the casual bigotry of elected officials and to illustrate the connective tissue linking it to the worst kinds of hate-related tragedies. Yes, I wrote it to make people sad and mad.

Photo

Tue, 07 May 2013 16:48:18 -0400

perspective

Thu, 02 May 2013 09:06:33 -0400

every day i walk by people smiling for pictures in the spot where john lennon was shot.

tonight, in the same room where I played the piano, at the same time, was Eli Manning and Salman...

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 22:23:45 -0400

tonight, in the same room where I played the piano, at the same time, was Eli Manning and Salman Rushdie.

On Post-Performance Depression

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 13:33:00 -0400

When I first set up my social media platforms, I told myself that I would present my experience as a classical musician as honestly as possible, even if it meant not always looking cool. My colleagues always seemed to have cool stuff going on—gigs, residencies, grants, commissions—and I typically greeted their good news with a three-part mix of joy, despair, and skepticism. Meanwhile, I was mopping floors in a West Village gay bar, substitute teaching in inner-city schools, and stealing practice time whenever I could for concerts that didn’t exist yet. No, I didn’t feel cool. When people first read my blog they thought I was suicidal.

Far from it, I was fueled, like any artist, by a tenacity tangled in doubt but rooted in a core of confidence. Over the past few years, I’ve figured out how to connect the dots (also, to see them in the first place), and have begun to trust in a long endgame over which I’ve come to realize I have very little control, but a responsibility to honor with work. Constant work.

It’s part of why I shake my head when people ask if I crash after a big concert. “Of course not!” I say, because I always have something new lined up to occupy my attention. But as I trudge through this month, helplessly observing a half-present version of myself struggling through conversations and daily tasks, lashing out and self-flagellating in continuous rotation, and avoiding friends, phone calls, and social gatherings, I have to own up to the fact that this is all happening on the heels of an exhilarating performance I gave last month in Brooklyn, and that this has all happened before. Maybe I suffer from post-performance depression, after all.

Last year around this time, I’d just performed at the Rubin Museum. The performance, presented by WQXR, sold out completely. I also played well. Nearly a year of preparation and anticipation led up to the event, and I hobbled through the weeks that followed it in a fog. I’d even lined up another performance, an ambitious, multimedia “reading recital,” but found myself immobilized by a kind of grief, staring into my computer, wandering the apartment, barely practicing. Every idle moment felt like a betrayal of my potential, a squandering of my future, and worst of all, proof that I wasn’t cut from the same cloth as my very cool colleagues. The day before the reading recital, while numbly washing dishes and staring into space, a glass shattered in my hand. I’ll always have a scar where a chunk of my knuckle went missing.

Years earlier, when I finished my fifty state America 88x50 tour, I languished for a summer in Malibu, working at a veterinary clinic. I still remember staring out at the sea and crying. I was 24, living in Malibu, and had just accepted a position directing a new music nonprofit in Houston for the fall. I had nothing to cry about.

I’ve tried churches, support groups, emotional affairs, journaling, therapy, The Artist’s Way, exercise, new age spiritual reprogramming seminars, all in attempt to, as one self-help book put it, “avoid intolerable reality,” to help unblock my creativity, maximize my efficiency, and keep my mood coasting at a healthy equilibrium. But what happens is, eventually some commitment sweeps in and saves the day as I rise to its challenge. This starting-over fills the void, often excruciatingly so, and I begin again.

A musician treats their career like a garden. We plant seeds and hope they grow. The best of us never stop planting, watering, and tending, and ideally, one stretch of concerts will arc as another few breach the soil. Ideally.

I looked pretty cool last year, with concerts every month in different boroughs and time zones. I’d arrived, so it appeared—so I made it appear—and still I hustled throughout, trying to line up things for the future. My activities climaxed, I suppose, last month with that concert in Brooklyn, but my garden looks a little sad. An older student just asked what I had coming up, and before I could explain, let alone finish the words “I don’t know,” he interrupted me with “What!?“

I live on the Upper West Side with a loving (and forgiving) partner. I’m publishing a book that I’ve spent seven years developing. I’ve begun gnawing into a new program on a beautiful grand piano that I recently bought. I’m paying my bills with music—an incredible feat—and, yes, have accepted invitations to play here and there. I have no reason to panic, to have these dark, sleepless circles under my eyes, to shrug when people ask how I’m doing. But still, I’m crying in Malibu.

I suppose it’s only natural to feel vulnerable in these resetting moments, learning new music, cold-calling presenters, feeling like a beginner in every way. Back in the thick of practice and the daily grind of proposing concerts, one has only their faith to keep the engine running. Gone are the wonderfully imposing concert dates, the articles, the audiences. A musician in this purgatory is a runner at high-altitude, functioning fine enough but also intensely aware of the difference between the present moment and the ideal. We suffer privately, and in the meantime every “yes” feels like redemption and every “no thanks” like a doomed fate confirmed.

Of course I’m projecting, but I think any musician might agree, the hustle, the build, the high, the crash, the starting over, it might all be part of the artistic experience that keeps us hooked. It’s a Jacob’s Ladder of a process, sure, and remarkable that we musicians will trade in hours, days, weeks, or years of ours lives for a few moments of—not fame or recognition, but simply connection, connection with an audience, a composer, with ourselves. And then it’s over, like a novel scrawled on a blackboard, read aloud, and then erased.

Yes, we may all look very cool on our social media avatars—perhaps it comes with the job—but I think classical musicians adopt a distinct kind of humility from our vocations. We stand before a new project as one stands before a mountain, and we bravely embrace every doubt-soaked minute between then and when we share it with a single person, as miraculous. We have the privilege of tenacity, of commitment, and no particular interest in summiting anything. What summit? We climb, we stay, we explore, and we function best, at high altitude.

Muffin

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 00:45:00 -0400

I waited about ten minutes while one of my older students, a woman in her sixties, finished up a phone call with her rabbi. From the sounds of it, she was planning a bar mitzvah, arranging everything from the start time to the cake design to the seating. “I want it to be a nice,” she urged. “People should feel like it’s special.” Between breaths, she whispered apologies in my direction. I shrugged. It didn’t matter. This sounded important.

At last she hung up and came to the piano. “It’s a lot of work!” she gasped, regarding the yapping shih tzu on the floor, ”getting Muffin blessed.”

I feel so proud to have premiered this work by Seth Rozanoff for...

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 00:13:15 -0400

I feel so proud to have premiered this work by Seth Rozanoff for piano and live electronics. It’s as if he could hear all the sounds bouncing around inside my head and then conceived a piece around it. Truly forward-thinking, beautiful, and uncompromising music by a great artist and friend.

LINT / BOO, FOREVER I composed this piece very slowly in the...

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 00:34:04 -0400

LINT / BOO, FOREVER

I composed this piece very slowly in the basement of Dixon Place 4 years ago when I first arrived in New York. Rachel Brook and Will Larche performed it with me there a year later. Then I presented a solo version of it last month at Roulette. I like how this live recording came out. The piece is supposed to feel like a void. We’ve all been there.

submission

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 01:14:00 -0400

I often wonder if some pianists come away from their practice with a sense of having beaten a piece into submission, because when I finish my practice I tend to feel the opposite.

The Pinocchio Moment

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 15:12:29 -0400

One of my older students uses a piano instruction book from 1956. It has markings in it from every period of his life, and the book itself serves as a kind of time capsule from another era (the first printing was actually in the twenties), with almost every page offering some dizzying finger exercise or cluttered attempt at teaching a key signature. Of the eighty-five little pieces, several serve as politically incorrect postcards from early twentieth century America, with songs like “In Old Japan” and “The Jolly Tar.” I’m partial to “The Laughing Fairy,” but I know I’m reading into things.

The final song is called “Italian Dance,” and my student started working on it about a month ago. His book, which has accompanied him through nearly half-a-century of his life, is, needless to say, falling apart, and the last page went missing probably decades ago. “Italian Dance,” to our dismay, has no ending. In fact, we only get a measure of the Coda before we’re forced to quit.

I have a thing for scooping up old, out-of-print piano teaching materials, and so I pounced on the opportunity to find this book. For one, I think it has some good music in it. And secondly, we would get to find out how “Italian Dance” ends. I found it online, bought it for $20 (the printed price on the actual book is $3.25) and… have forgotten to bring it to our lessons ever since. I’ve peaked inside and there are only two lines of music after our forced stopping point, but for three lessons now the poor guy has asked if I remembered to bring the book, desperate to finish the piece, and I’ve had to tell him no. Today, I even went back into my apartment to bring some other new books to his lesson for us to explore. But not the one with “Italian Dance.” I know…

So, as per usual, we played through it today and stopped at the first measure of the Coda. He likes to stay focused in our lessons, but I had to say something. I told him that our relationship with “Italian Dance” reminded me of my childhood.

No, really.

See, my father and mother divorced when I was two, but he still visited every so often on weekends. With him, he would sometimes bring stacks of VHS tapes filled to capacity with dubbed movies. I don’t know if anyone besides me remembers how to do this, but one would basically wire two VCRs together and then record one tape to another. One could also select the quality of the recording: extended play or standard play. My dad chose extended play, and would pack three movies to a tape. Or, I should say… almost three.

So I’d get this succession of films on one tape—Goonies followed by Scanners followed by Return to Oz—and I’d watch them nonstop, letting them no doubt inform my subconscious to this very day. But of course movies have different lengths, and three movies will rarely fit evenly onto one VHS tape. Sometimes the endings, especially for the third movie in line, would suffer the consequences.

Such was the case with Pinocchio. I fucking loved Pinocchio. Easily, I watched it more than any other Disney film, and had it on heavy rotation along with Indiana Jones, Jaws 3, and The Worst Witch. But the ending, because of its position on the dubbed videotape, was cut off. Like, I mean, right at the pivotal moment where the whale sails toward Pinocchio for his final attack. Just then, the tape would stop and begin rewinding.

I never really saw the end. I never saw Pinocchio turn into a real boy.

Not for years, at least. I think I once begged my mom to rent it for me so I could finally see Pinocchio’s face, smooth and human. I still remember the thrill of going past that expected cut-off point, seeing the whale suddenly coming straight toward me.

I still remember the exotic despair of seeing Pinocchio face-down in the tide pool.

I still remember the initial awe of seeing him transformed.

So this is a story I told my student today.

postcard from 1945

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 23:02:18 -0400

postcard from 1945

Open Letter To Cornelia Street Cafe

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 12:18:00 -0400

“Awful.” “Shitty” “Shocking” “Horrifying.” “Gross.” ”Unbelievable.” “Outrageous.” “Disgusting.” “Despicable.”

Those are some comments already posted on my various social media platforms after I informed my friends and followers about last night’s experience at Cornelia Street Cafe, where I witnessed a performer humiliated onstage by a manager who then proceeded to verbally assault a fellow audience member and me. [Correction: Cornelia informed me via email that he is in fact a “curator,” not a manager, though when we asked a bartender at the time if he was the “manager,” she said yes.]

Let me continue: “That really sucks.” “Yelp here I come!” “Good to know.” “They don’t realize how fast word gets around.” “Insulting.” “The owner would be ashamed…” “A fucking nightmare.” “What?!” “Retweeting.” “Sharing this now.”

Okay, you get the point.

I’ve frequented Cornelia for years, and even visited multiple times last week for various concerts and a CD release party. I have no personal bone to pick with Cornelia Street Cafe. But after seeing Andy Costello, who came from Montreal to perform his 6pm recital Sunday evening, humiliated onstage by your manager because of a poor turnout and an apparently confounding program, and then, after being forced to cut his set short—he had two pieces left, 15 minutes, and this man insisted he “make it ten” because “they needed the room” (the next performance was in an hour-and-a-half)—guilt-tripped even further for having not drawn a crowd and lectured about how much money was lost… well, I was stunned. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. Never.

When I brought up the fact that I paid a full price, plus drinks, for the performance, and would have liked to have heard the whole program, this manager dismissed the objection, saying “he didn’t give a shit.” Wow. Okay. As one of my friends said: “Good to know.”

Does Cornelia, as a venue, not understand the risk in presenting music in New York City (especially a modern program at 6pm on a Sunday)? The New York classical music scene is either like high school, dominated by popular cliques, or like conservatory, where friends come to their friends’ recitals in solidarity. It’s mostly the latter, honestly—every performance I’ve attended at Cornelia has been populated mainly by acquaintances of the performers—and mostly a New York phenomenon. Someone can sell out a show out of town, have a following on the West Coast, and then play to an empty room in New York because they don’t have a devoted following of local friends. It’s reality, and it’s unfortunate, but most of all, it seems to be news to you! Anyway, Andy did his best. He marketed online (that’s how I heard about the show) and spent over a hundred dollars on physical press materials, which he spent fifty dollars sending to the venue. Where were they? Not in the front window, to be sure.

As a performer who has sold out venues nationwide but who has also suffered the misfortune of playing to virtually empty halls, I urged the manager to understand that these things happen, that it’s no one’s fault, but that interrupting a recital and tossing out a paying audience (of any size) is unacceptable and an unwise move for a presenter. His response, again, that he “doesn’t give a shit,” came as a shock from which I’ve still not totally recovered. Maybe it’s just that I’m not used to being cursed at, especially by a host at a restaurant where I just paid a bunch of money. The fact that my friend wasn’t paid his cut of the door (it would’ve been $20, but who cares, right?) only adds insult to injury. So my money, for this catastrophic experience, went straight to Cornelia and to no one else. I couldn’t be less pleased.[Cornelia has informed me via email that in a performer’s contract, it states “the first eight covers go to the house.”]

But at least I learned something. I learned that if a small audience attends a Cornelia Street Concert, Cornelia pockets all the cash, pays the performer nothing, and audiences are asked to leave early with no refund on their ticket. Got it. It goes without saying, but I also learned that Cornelia Street Cafe “doesn’t give a shit” if its patrons have a good night or not, or if performing artists have a pleasant experiencing presenting work in their space. It’s about money, after all—performers bring their friends to deliver revenue to Cornelia Street Cafe—and if that means ejecting an audience and humiliating the performer to teach us this lesson, so be it. Andy, a real class act, behaved graciously throughout, even though inside he had to have been crumbling, or fuming, or regretting having ever stepped foot in your establishment. I know I was.

It’s my duty as an artist to inform people about this experience. I think it’s very interesting, honestly. My friends and allies in the arts community, as you’ve seen, continue to find other, more imaginative words.

Yours,

Adam Tendler

contrived

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 22:46:44 -0400

someone told me today that the end of my performance sunday was contrived. only the word bothers me. isn’t any recital, by its very nature, contrived? and don’t we all contrive our performances for the sake of our audience?

from an email to frank

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 14:22:59 -0400

from an email to frank

there was a fly

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 00:36:00 -0500

The other night, a friend of mine laughed when I said, “I get a lot of thinking done at concerts.” I admit, I meant it to sound bitchy at the time—I’d just demanded we leave a less-than-inspiring performance at intermission—but in most circumstances I mean it in the most complementary way. I do get a lot of thinking done at concerts. In fact, the amount of thinking I get done helps me to gauge afterwards how much I truly enjoyed the experience. Sitting in a concert hall is the closest thing I have to meditation.

I also regret to say that I’m a terribly impatient audience member, much more understanding onstage than off. Whereas onstage, I don’t quite care about what’s going on out there in the hall, once I’m entrenched in the democracy of folding chairs and orchestra seating, any crinkling of a plastic bag, any whisper, any glance at a phone, will provoke from me a deadly stare or a tap on the shoulder. I’m proud to say that I “shh”d people at Einstein on the Beach last year at BAM, and I think fondly of the time when, at a recital by the incomparable Anthony de Mare, I asked a girl sitting next to me to stop scrolling through photos on her digital camera, an activity that, while rude, made no noise whatsoever. She was mortified.

Tonight, the spellbinding pianist (and friend), Pejda Muzijevic, had the floating concert hall of Bargemusic entranced. I was a puppy heeling before him, an eternal student in prostration. The composers’ music flowed from his head to his fingers like a waterfall, and he firmly channelled each piece’s aural image without getting in its or his own way. He was pure. He was divine.

There was also a fly. Yes, it flew around his head in a continual, frenzied orbit. Even after a sizable intermission during which it vanished, it still appeared just in time for the second half. This fly, which looked downright prehistoric in size, was a daredevil fly, an erratic fly, a provocative fly, zooming dangerously close to Pejda’s face during some of the program’s most demanding passages. In fact, Pedja seemed half-a-gasp away from swallowing this fly during Kreisleriana. Far from horrified by the idea of this, I thought it seemed like one of the only ways we could ever ensure to get rid of the thing.

There’s no negotiating with a fly. We were, all of us, in essence defenseless against this anarchic animal in its insistence on sharing the stage. Amidst my deep thinking about Pedja and his talent, his agile fingers, his elastic mind, and the weight of his program (which had me wondering if I’d played a proper recital in the last seven years) I wondered if this fly was necessary—a necessary reminder that we are all indeed tied to the here and now, as much as the contrapuntal perfume of Schumann begs to sweep us away.

Yes, there is a fly. There is always a fly.

And not only a fly. Someone kicked over a soda can right at the final chord of Kreisleriana’s Sehr langsam sixth movement. And when the waves at Bargemusic get too heavy, the pipes and metal under the barge clink and clank, which happened during one of the Morton Feldman Intermissions. And people still think that slow movements are a time to relax their manners, cough, whisper, and snack; I think the opposite.

But these injustices serve as our essential tethers to reality, and they bring a crucial quality of urgency to experiencing a live performance of classical music. It’s the dissonance between our imperfect reality and the perfection onstage—which is to say, the tangible pursuit of perfection, not unlike the Olympics—that fuels the excitement of the classical concert dynamic. It’s so strong, this dynamic, that John Cage spent a lifetime trying to dismantle it. People are still mad at Cage for violating the expected code of the concert hall.

Anyway, amidst my inevitable reverie, every time I go to a concert I’m transported to another time and place, tantalized by the idea that my experience in that moment can’t be too far off from a similar moment a hundred-and-fifty years before, or last week, or the year my mom was born. Such is the timelessness of a classical concert. But it’s not just a time machine. The instrumentalist on the stage is at work now, bearing their soul to us now, and anything can happen. They know it and we know it. So tonight, I came face to face with Schumann, Scarlatti, Cowell, Feldman, and Liszt, and yet I also had the fortune of dipping briefly into Pedja’s inner-world, a world that he could only be so bold and brave enough to share onstage. I got to see him fight without bloodshed, weep without tears, live and die with each cadence. To me, this is classical music. Irrational, alive, and buzzing.

-written on the C Train between High Street, Brooklyn, and 72nd Street in Manhattan, on an iPad

HATE SPEECH

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 21:03:00 -0500

This is the audio supplement for my new piece, Hate Speech (2013), for piano and audience cell phones. The work will have its premiere on Sunday, March 17th at 5pm, at Roulette in Brooklyn, New York.

Play it over your mobile device during a live performance, low-to-half volume, pressing play anytime within the first 30 seconds of the piece (or within 30 seconds of when you hear the first tones played on the piano).

The primary text is: “I think fruits are decorative. Hang up where they can be seen and appreciated. Call Wyoming for display instructions.”

These words, written by a Mr. Dennis Scranton, reference Matthew Shepherd, a gay 21-year-old University of Wyoming student who was tortured, murdered, and left hanging on a fence in October of 1998 because of his sexual orientation. Scranton wrote it on the Facebook wall of (now former) Big Sky Tea Party President Tim Ravndal who had posted: “Marriage is between a man and a woman period! By giving rights to those otherwise would be a violation of the constitution and my own rights.” Another user, Keith Baker, responded: “How dare you exercise your first amendment rights?” Ravndal wrote, “OOPS I forgot this aint [sic] America no more!” He then responded to Scranton’s comment by asking, “Where can I get that Wyoming printed instruction manual?” Scranton replied, “Should be able to get info Gazette archives. Maybe even an illustration. Go back a bit over ten years.”

YOU CAN ALSO ACCESS HATE SPEECH ON :

YOUTUBE

VIMEO

OR THIS LINK FOR A FREE DIRECT MP4 DOWNLOAD

miracle new york

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 22:02:06 -0500

the enduring seduction of this city goes hand in hand with the pride one feels for simply surviving in it

Sunday editing

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 16:54:44 -0500

Sunday editing

reflection on when i emptied the fridge of our last apartment

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 13:39:00 -0500

I get attached to places like I do people. When I move from an apartment and see it stripped of belongings and furniture, to me it looks alien and embarrassed, naked, vulnerable, robbed and longing for something, when perhaps only hours earlier it was a warm extension of the self, an exchange of energies, a union between soul and space. I then find myself feeling vulnerable, myself feeling guilty of abandonment, myself longing for something—not to come back, really, but to connect with it again in some way. I’ll confess that tonight the feeling bordered on the sexual; I wanted to commit some kind of private act within those walls, something sensual and intimate, something that would stay between us; one last tryst, one last time. But then the feeling subsided into something quaint and heartfelt, something simple. I wished I could just give the place a hug and tell it thank you. Thank you for sheltering me, and for keeping my secrets.

child

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 14:15:00 -0500

they surround him like a campfire. it’s the second time this week i’ve seen him playing down here in the caves below port authority. he plays well, or well enough—nuance and dynamics notwithstanding—with his strong, agile fingers out-performing any of the other child slave pianists i’ve seen on the subway platforms. but talent or not, music or mess, the spectacle always attracts a crowd, a fascinated, oddly supportive crowd, watching as the ubiquitous and stony caretaker—should i put that word in quotation marks?—watches on, almost hiding, from the sideline. money flows into the hat, homemade CDs glisten under the lights, and passers-by clap and disappear. no one winces at the piercing treble biting through the air via a ruddy amplifier attached like a leash to the boy’s keyboard. no one cringes at the tone clusters intermingled with mozart’s “turkish march” as it tumbles onward at breakneck speed. my stomach twists unto itself. i keep my distance from the spectacle, quickening my pace, resenting (which is to say, admiring) the attention and adoration and optimism showered on the boy from his silent and transient circle of admirers, these strangers. and resenting his talent, too.