Here is the Program Note for the MATA Concert Next Week

One of the enduring challenges of my short career has been coming up with a suitable epithet to describe what it is that I do. When I first began performing my own music as a pianist and singer in late 2005, I thought I was writing pop songs. Yet my less naïve friends smirked at my ignorance when I told them, lurching toward the piano, that I was going to give Avril Lavigne a run for her money, and then would sit down to play— of a Sunday evening at the Sidewalk Café—thirty-two bars rife with ostentatious polymeter and murky bitonality. Complicated, indeed. After the set, all seven of us would shuffle off to engage in a post-collegiate post-mortem…

TREY: Too much dissonance, too many meter changes, for this to be pop music. Nevermind that you’re sitting at a piano with a microphone in a bar that summons all sorts of olfactory nightmares. Nevermind your feeble banter. “This next song is for Jocelyn Elders and all the other brave advocates of onanism”??? WTF, man. You want another Red Stripe?

ME: Okay, too many meter changes, too much dissonance. What about Schubert or Schumann? Is that pop music? A repetitive refrain, a nice melody over some simple changes.

TREY: No, no, no, no, no way, dude. That’s German Lied. That’s not pop music. And it’s in German.

ME: But what about those Heine poems? Aren’t they sort of like proto-Conor-Oberstien outpourings of unmitigated adolescent emotion? “I see the snake all up in your heart, girl??? I can’t get down with that. 

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Thus goes the conversation with my (imaginary?) interlocutor Trey, who has an immaculately cropped beard and a tattoo (blue ink) of the Verrazano Bridge on his right ring foreknuckle from which one is supposed to infer (I guess) that he definitely does not live in Park Slope and that he probably is squatting in Bay Ridge with his Italian second cousin who may or may not be linked to organized crime (via a weird numbers game slash pure-bred kitten racket), and thus has mad cred with his “peeps” in Bushwick.

And so I got to thinking, how can we put these specious distinctions—what is pop music? what is art song?—to rest, once and for all?

And thus the genesis for this concert: why not make genre walk the plank in evening dress? I’m certain that we can all agree that the phrases “genre-bending” and “genre-defying” are not long for this world. This program sets out to 1. euthanize the both of them and 2. hold a kind of Irish wake in their dishonour.

The plan is very simple: create a static frame—in this case, the pianist who sings— and then offer varied repertoire in an attempt to demonstrate that perhaps the frame and not the text determines how we perceive the relative “browiness” of the work.

I commissioned, through the insane generosity of new music guardian angels Linda and Stuart Nelson, ten songs from ten gifted composers specifically for “singing pianist” to serve as a companion piece for Dichterliebe, which I believe to be a kind of proto-pop song cycle. Yes, there are the troves of elegantly sinuous passages for piano, and yes it’s in German, and yes it was written some hundred and seventy years ago, and yes Schumann tied a piece of raw meat to his hand to strengthen his fourth finger. But I defy you not to hear pop music in Ich Grolle Nicht. It was at least good enough for that great tunesmith of the twentieth century, Cole Porter, who borrowed verbatim the rising fifth/descending step motif that provides the climax for both Schumann’s song and Porter’s “So In Love”, lifting too the general sentiment of Heine’s poem. (“I begrudge you not” becomes “So taunt me and hurt me, deceive me,  desert me” in the final stanza of Porter’s song.) And throughout, whether in strophic settings or otherwise, Schumann dares us not to leave humming his tunes, each of which is so deftly supported by rich and imaginative harmony that nonetheless clings largely to a diatonic soundworld.  So I’m gonna sing THAT from the piano as well, temerarious as that may be.

Oh yes, but back to the new songs: I wanted to commission composers from all corners of various musical worlds to write fully notated music for a singing pianist– a performance practice that we generally do not associate with the reading or interpreting of fully notated music. The composers whom I’ve commissioned range from those trained in the academy to a certain bluegrass mandolinist (and dear friend) and everything in between. I’ve developed a serious crush on this body of work in the six weeks I’ve had the scores, and I trust that this patchwork cycle will have a long life beyond tonight’s performance.

Finally, I hope that in hearing these new songs against Schumann’s masterpiece and a few of my own tunes, all framed by a single performer at a piano with a microphone (and all of the attendant connotations), the listener will come to the conclusion that distinctions of genre can be done away with, leaving us with Duke Ellington’s oft-quoted nugget: “There are only two kinds of music: good music, and the other kind. “

– Gabriel Kahane, November 11, 2010

Heirloom Peruvian scarves, suspiciously non-dog-eared copies of Motherless Brooklyn, long, thoughtful looks… that should set the scene.

Heinrich Heine, “Ich Grolle Nicht”, loosely translated by yrs trly.

When I asked my friend Timo Andres to write a song for singing pianist, he acquiesced, citing in part his confidence that I would not be able to make annoying gestures with my hands while singing if I was made to play the piano simultaneously.

This is classic post-structuralist French shit that I am totally butchering. See Derrida on the Parergon to get a more cogent sense of this frame v. text constellation.

Or so the story goes.