KATHLEEN RYAN

It’s a funny thing: this was a “bad break for a pianist” and required surgery to get the radius bone aligned properly. But, having had the surgery, which went very well according to my doctor, the fact that I’m a pianist makes my prognosis great. Rehab is expected to be quite successful, partly because I already have well-trained fingers, hand, & wrist.

Still am typing one-handed hunt & peck, so: yay!

UPDATE 1/12/12:
Well, it’s a measure of how disoriented I was during December that when I wrote this blog post, I had forgotten that I had already done a blog post with the video! But the video has gone missing, so I’ll just leave the text up & you can imagine a performance! Or something.

I compose music for other people, too; but you already know that, right?

Anyway, Keith Snell performed bunches of the Verbs from Book 2 at Church of Beethoven in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on 9 October 2011.

(Yes, that was the same day I performed with Lee Bartley at Piano Source in Albuquerque. That was pretty much a blow-out day, in a very good way.)

I am rather pleased with how the 24 preludes — Verbs Book 1 & Book 2 — turned out. Of course, I’ve always assumed that, as a composer, I ought to be pleased with my music. If I didn’t like it, it would be my responsibility to change it. Why would I ever inflict music on you that I myself didn’t like?

Still, I was writing for left hand alone and since I had never done that before, it seemed to me that the result was definitely in doubt. I didn’t ever say that to Keith, at least not in words, but there were many times I wondered why I had said I’d compose twenty-four preludes for piano left hand alone. For someone whose piano technique is bigger than mine, even with one hand resting in his lap. Had I lost my mind?

UPDATE 1/12/12:
That YouTube channel has been taken down; we’re working on finding out where it went! More later...

Keith has been performing a number of the Verbs from Book 2 recently (and is programming the entire book for his concerts next year). Now there exists the second YouTube video of my music, and I haven’t had to play either piece! We could call it laziness, or we could call it efficiency. You can choose. But I am thrilled that Keith’s amazing performance of (selected) Verbs is now available to the cosmos, as well as on this page here & now:

The Verbs performed here are Bloom, Beckon, Tangle, Snap, Shatter, Reflect, Release, and Bless.

This was just a part of Keith’s beautiful concert at Church of Beethoven on October 9. He also played the Bach Chaconne, as arranged by Brahms for piano left hand.

And poet Hakim Bellamy performed the poetry he created in response to my Verbs!

Some days I marvel at how very spoiled the universe is allowing me to become.

I’ve noticed that I have a similar pattern both in learning new music by another composer and in creating new music myself.

First there is the “I have a dream” stage: maybe I’ve heard and loved this Beethoven sonata, or maybe I have caught a sound of a new piece in my imagination. I know I want to learn/create the new music. I am full of anticipation!

I start to work on the new repertory or the new composition. Sometimes that can be rather frustrating because what I hear in my imagination (whether it is repertory or new work) is somewhat out of reach. But I know it’s there. At this stage my memory of the dream keeps me in the game.

(I believe that I ought to be able to skip this first stage & get right to the next stage, but for some reason I usually do this first. I think the truly great practicers know how to minimize this stage — advanced practicing: how to make one’s work play. And of course, there are the compositions that come to me essentially fully formed. A Handfull of Quietness was one of those; so was The Never-Ending Starlit Road. It is a thrilling experience to sit and cognize new music and know as I play it that it is just perfect.)

How hard can it really be to write a piano piece about a donkey?!! I mean really: he brays, he chuckles, he oozes personality, and if you doubt that, he’ll kick you. So it should be quite easy right?

Aargh!!!

Dundee Studio

A rental home that had a concert “stage” all waiting for me.

Click to view full size.

Something about working on Drivin!, which has many very up-tempo and even driving pieces (surprise!), has me in a more reflective mood than creating Under the Greenwood Tree did. It seems very odd to me that playing the “noisy” music (not that it is all noisy by any means; and I hope that none of it would ever be called noise!) gets me feeling all reflective and quiet. Maybe I’m just trying to maintain balance!

Anyway, among those photos I found last week are several of previous studios where I created some of this music. Yes, some of these pieces have been waiting for the right album for (cough cough) years. Years that span seven studio set-ups for me. I think I counted that correctly; seems like a huge number. But, as I admitted just now, some of these pieces are ... ancient. By my standards, at least.

So here is the photo of my studio in Nebraska. We only lived there a year, but the house we rented belonged to a musician, and he had concert lighting all waiting for my piano. My husband insists this was what clinched our renting the house; I remember feeling relieved to find anyplace that would rent to us with 2 cats. But the living room “stage” was definitely a plus!

I remembered something this evening that I’m not sure I ever noticed consciously before.

Here’s the pathway to the memory, which is the only way it will make any sense at all:

Keith and I have been discussing Verbs Book 2, gearing up for its publication and some performances of it that he will be doing later on this year. As we did with Book 1, we might be revising several of the pieces so they more perfectly realize the music. I suppose you could call it editing! I might end up re-writing some individual Verbs, to make them fit the left hand better, or to flesh out parts that maybe I slighted on the first pass, or just to correct errors I made. Lowering as it is to admit it, I make errors writing my own music. Alas.

Anyway, to get going, today I was playing through several of the Verbs from Book 2. The very first one is Beckon. I don’t think I ever even told Keith this, but the first motive in the melody is based on a fairly universal pattern of notes. Many children’s songs use it too. In 1=do, 2=re notation, and using the dash to fill out the rhythm, it is: 5 - 3 6 5 - 3 -. 

I suddenly realized that I have never posted any of Verbs here. That’s an omission!

No, I’m not playing. My friend the concert pianist Keith Snell is. But I composed the music! And I’m rather pleased at how it turned out, and how he performs it. Here’s a sample.

I judged a piano competition the other day. Well, I was a member of a panel of 3 judges. It was a long, exhausting, and very interesting day. There was some lovely piano playing, and some lovely repertory; there was some less sensitive performing and some less lovely repertory. When the less sensitive performing met up with the less lovely repertory, well, disaster ensued. I learned a tremendous amount about what is important to me as a musician, a pianist, and a composer, by listening to the disasters, even more than by hearing the beautifully performed music.

Here’s what became explicit for me: markings in a score — especially, but not limited to, dynamic markings and tempo markings — are very relative. It’s not just that one pianist’s forte will be louder or less loud than another pianist’s. It’s that the forte we would use in one piece might be completely out of place in another.

This was demonstrated for me most clearly in a performance of 2 Brahms Intermezzi (Op 118/1 and Op 118/2, if you are interested in hearing them for yourself). The first is marked by Brahms Allegro non assai, ma molto appassionato which translates to “lively, not very, but very passionately!” Almost all the dynamics are forte or sforzando, but the music tapers to a piano for the final sonority (which Brahms in his leisurely way takes 3 measures to complete, which is just exactly perfect after all the roiling of the music till then).

And I didn’t have to do a thing! Well, that may be understating it somewhat, so I had better clarify.

I arranged Somewhere Over the Rainbow for my friend Keith Snell and his violinist friend Matt Mazzei to perform and record. Arranging for piano left hand alone and violin was an interesting challenge for me, made even more “interesting” because Keith wanted the music pronto!

As you may have guessed from reading this blog, I really do not like to write “pronto!” What I like to do is take my time and feel my way through the depths of a song before I commit to any notes.

But Keith wanted to be able to get the video recorded before he made this trip to Bath, and therefore he wanted the music just as quickly as I could create it. Hmm... well, even though I’m a turtle at heart, I can speed up if I must. I composed the arrangement in about 3 or 4 days.

Off the music went (what did we do before computers, Sibelius, and the internet?) and Keith and Matt proclaimed themselves pleased with it, and then they recorded it. The video is up at YouTube, but hey: I embedded it above, just because I can.