 waiting for the train especially late at night and this is who's kind of late and you're standing by the train you're like kind of waiting for this thing and all these sounds and things that have happened throughout the night kind of coming over into your brain washing over you like a dream like reminiscing of what just happened that night waiting for the G train maybe that doesn't really sound like that but at least that's the story he tells me so I feel obligated to tell you and relay that that that that to you and that's what inspired that piece for him but what you were hearing is just some very simple delays and granulation at the end and it's actually off of my last record on you Amsterdam called aorta which is which I'll be playing a few other pieces tonight the second one is also part of that it's it's a shorter work called limbs it's actually a third movement or a second movement of a larger three movement work by a composer named Daniel Wall who originally is from Brooklyn but now he's living out in LA and I think he's enjoying the sun and writing a lot of film scores so I haven't seen him in a while but I will probably see him this weekend and this one's called limbs I think we're pretty nice kind of introductions to what I what I do which is a lot of kind of acoustic piano playing mixed with some electronics and the next one is a little bit longer I'm gonna warn you it's about 20 minutes long and it's probably the one that's a little bit more out there but feel free to drift in and out and and daydream or nightdream or because it's by an Icelandic composer named David Bringer-Fansen and he wrote this piece for me last year it's actually a one piece out of four pieces that he thought that it would be a modular kind of work he has one for for solo trombone and electronics one for cello electronics piano electronics and a one for I believe a trio or quartet and electronics and they were supposed to exist either together you can perform them together or as separate solo pieces and he was telling me that what kind of inspired this work well the cartography of time kind of you know Jeremy cartography of time pretty self-explanatory but he recently had a child and she would always ask him to tell him her the same kind of bedtime story but by the time he finished the story she would still be awake and would ask him to tell her the story again so he started to think how can I stretch out this material over a longer period of time so hopefully by the end of it she'll be asleep well hopefully you won't be asleep by the end of it but feel free to drift in and out because it is very simple materials I'll be playing a little bit of inside the piano some very simple kind of harmonics and like muted strings but a lot of them will be manipulated and stretched out using technology with my trusty laptop here so I'm not clearly playing a solo show tonight I'm playing a duo show because a lot of it won't happen if the laptop's not performing too so I hope you enjoy it and get some good rest too hopefully you'll feel refreshed after this piece I'm gonna take a short break and I'm gonna do some things with the piano but I'll see you back in a few minutes well originally the program was supposed to only three pieces long so we would have been done but I don't know I wanted to play some of these pieces that my friends wrote because I said I would a long time ago and I'm gonna do that so the next piece I'm gonna play is a piece by Fjola Evans who's a friend of mine from Canada and also she's also part Icelandic but I met her a few years ago and I really loved her work so I asked her to write a piece for me and she's never written for the piano and she wanted to write something for prepared piano and she so she wrote this piece it's called Mammal and because she thinks of the instrument as this kind of mammoth whale of an instrument there's so many sounds and so many sound worlds and she just wanted to create kind of soundscapes so I use some very simple piano preparations kind of a la John Cage without nuts and bolts and screws but with some kind of like blue tack you know that you would use to put things on the wall and it transforms the instrument into almost I don't know I'll let you think about it I don't know maybe it sounds like a whale or maybe another beast a piece that that since it's so new and that's kind of like one of the great things about being able to work with composers who is willing to kind of collaborate with you she's still revising the piece she right now she just she graduated and where is she going to school now I think she's at Yale she's doing her master's there and I think just yesterday she was still like hey can you change the preparations on the piano like she took a photo and made a recording and so it's still a work in progress and and so every time I performed it it's still slightly different and and I'll get this recording I'll send it to her and she'll get to hear it and be like wait you know she might completely cut up a section and revise it and so next time I play it it might be completely different so you heard one version of this piece tonight but let me just take out the putty really quickly and then the next piece is a it's is the oldest work on on this program by Alvin Lucia and it's a piece that's called music for piano with slow sweep pure wave oscillators and it's exactly that what you're gonna hear is two like kind of sine wave sweeping at different pitches at different speeds and rates between the semitones and because of the natural properties of the sine waves and what I'll be playing you will hear a kind of a natural phenomenon acoustically in the space and so tonight Colin who's doing sound I think he gets to kind of perform a little bit because he was gonna be able to manipulate depending on how everything is sounding you will hear the different beatings as the tones move away from the the stable pitch that the piano will be producing but let me just take out the preparations and I'll begin that Lucia piece he wanted to kind of we went to school together we had to play a piece together by Jacob Druckmann called Come Round and I think the piano part had inside piano and on the keyboard and all these kind of crazy things and he has never seen that before you know he didn't have a composition background really but he wanted to do something like that so together about ten years ago he decided to write this piece for me and also another pianist from California named Vicki Ray who was part of another ensemble called California Ear Unit but commissioned and worked a lot with composers and performed a lot and record a lot of work that were very kind of crucial to contemporary music so hence the there's some very simple preparations in the piano actually I'm going to be using eight dimes and I'll kind of let you hear kind of what it sounds like John Cage he's famous for these pieces not as an interlude you know written 46-48 and he prepared basically 40 like half of the keys like 44 notes in the entire set which takes about maybe two hours to do but he used anything you can find you know like screws and nuts and bolts but you can try this at home just be careful to not damage or touch the hammers or touch the dampers but anyways keep these things in and it changes the pitch and it almost sounds like a gommel on ensemble unlike a viola's piece which I use something very you know malleable and soft it created more subtle tone this has a metal on metal strings so you're gonna get something that will sound like this it's a different place it's gonna change the instrument completely people say he did this because he was working in Seattle and he was playing for like a dance school asked to write some music for it and the only thing they had was an upright piano and he's like well what can I do to try and make this work you know I want to create some sound world but the only thing I have is a piano so he some people say that how he kind of creatively found a solution when there wasn't a percussion instrument so he started playing around with prepared pianos so that he can have more of an orchestra at his fingertips and it's really really fun I'll try and do this as quickly as I can this takes about five minutes cages he takes me about two hours he also asked me like what kind of music do you listen to like besides classical and I was like well you know I really like a radio head and so he was like okay let me try and create some sounds resemble that more the pieces notated and after the piece all for coming thank you for inviting me it's really a pleasure to be able to be here to share the music with you you know because it's these are odd pieces not many people get to hear it and you guys we're all part of it so thank you for staying for the entire show kind of you know before for fiola's piece it might change how it resonates oh that was not a good example this will pocket change oh yeah it's just 80 cents it's amazing so yeah like before when I was playing the cage a little bit for his centeno in 2012 yeah I had like you know bags full of different nuts and bolts and he's plastic and I don't know if you're familiar with this one but he has a cage you know a very precise measurement of his preparation and I was carrying all this screws all the time and metals the muted low note really is holding the string or yeah so you know any of these things with a lot of like yeah yeah so basically it was specifically that was just for more like the more you mute on this side of the screen