Sep
17
Sun September 17th, 2017
6:00PM
Main Space
Minimum Age: All Ages
Doors Open: 5:00PM
Show Time: 6:00PM
Event Ticket: $15 / $20
Day of Show: $20 / $25
Table Seating: $20 advance, $25 day of show
Standing Room: $15 advance, $20 day of show
“Codex” — a preview/release event for Bruce Brubaker’s new album “Codex” on InFiné Music (Warp)
Bruce Brubaker, piano
On “Codex,” American pianist Bruce Brubaker sets up a clash (or a discussion) between Terry Riley’s Keyboard Study No. 2 (1965) and pieces from the Codex Faenza, a 15th century manuscript considered to be one of the very first collections of keyboard music. By putting the work of the performer/creator above that of the composer, this back-and-forth takes the listener on a journey that is at once timeless and eminently current.
Over six centuries ago, at the dawn of the 15th century, unknown scribes – authentic artists or inspired copyists, that we do not know – collected over fifty vocal compositions, some from the previous century. Liturgical or secular, anonymous or bearing the imprint of the Ars nova’s most famous French and Italian composers (Jacopo da Bologna, Francesco Landini, Guillaume de Machaut, Pierre des Molins…), these works were transcribed on two parallel staves, which was unusual at the time and indicate that they were intended for keyboard. Thus the Codex Faenza – named after the Ravenna-adjacent town where it is kept – created circa 1420 and rediscovered in the 1930s, became an object of fascination for harpsichordists, organists and pianists the world over, as one of the oldest keyboard scores to have survived.
In 1964, in San Francisco, composer Terry Riley, then age 29, invented American repetitive music with his In C, with an ensemble featuring Morton Subotnik, Pauline Oliveros and Steve Reich. At the same time, in 1964-65, he would compose his Keyboard Studies, in the vein of In C. Based on improvisation, they are loosely articulated around the free combination of a series of melodic cells of different lengths, giving the pianist the freedom to use them following a freeform protocol. Keyboard Study No. 2, in particular, is noted on concentrically-arranged circular staves, is a series of three- to ten-note fragments, with no indication of rhythm, and which the performer can even transpose in pitch. A prototype of the young composer’s “open form,” a precursor of the extra-occidental improvisational practice he would go on to develop under Indian master Pandit Prân Nath.
Fast forward to today, with Bruce Brubaker bridging those two worlds and simultaneously resurrecting two sources – seemingly the most appropriate term in this instance – across their 550-year divide. The American pianist intertwines them on one album, working out their textures to bring out their differences – the Codex Faenza’s quasi-declaratory, rhythmically-unstable dimension contrasting with Riley’s metronomic ostinatos – as well as their similitudes, in particular their rhythmic ambiguity: in the Codex Faenza for example, the instrumentalist is sometimes free to choose the alignment of left and right hand, and thus, the piece’s dissonance.
Above all, what these sources have in common is that they allow for an infinite number of “readings” – Brubaker’s preferred term for “interpretation”: “rather than a collection of compositions, the Codex Faenza to me is almost like a collection of recordings, in the sense that it freezes a certain event in time. It brings us back to the origins of musical writing: music preceded writing, and if we started writing it down, it was in the beginning a way to record what was happening in the context of a musical practice where improvisation played an important part – and not to create something from nothing, as the romantic view of the composer would have it. As well, Terry Riley, in his score, gives us a lot of material without telling us what to do with it. In the pieces of the Codex Faenza as in Study No. 2, the authority of the composer is not an essential component of the music. It would almost be the opposite: we could claim that the identity of these pieces rests on the absence of the composer.”
“Codex” presents six possible “versions” of Terry Riley’s Keyboard Study No. 2, alternating with works extracted from the Codex Faenza. Having been fascinated by this “music that is so ancient that it almost appears to be completely new,” Brubaker was also convinced that it would sound great on a modern piano, which can sustain long notes. This is important because the crux of the project deals with time, with the passing of time. The right hand, ornamental and busy, evokes the present’s precipitousness, while the left, minimal and stripped, expresses a slower, vaster temporality. Brubaker’s discourse here, beyond simply bridging two worlds – the ancient and the new, the Europe of the Late Middle Ages and sixties America, the mainstream and the intelligentsia – is to resuscitate these breviaries of freedom to extract their substantive marrow.
Music that is, by its essence, that of the present moment.
Bruce Brubaker says:
“Hearing the pieces from the Faenza Codex and Riley’s Keyboard Study, I get the strong sense of being alive — all those long slow notes in the low register correspond to long-term changes we know are taking place in our life and, at the same time, the faster high notes seem like the busy events that occupy our consciousness.”
“In this very old music, keyboard players already were reworking and reimagining (remixing) even older music to make something new.”
Ticketing Policy
TABLE SEATING POLICY
Table seating for all seated shows is reserved exclusively for ticket holders who purchase “Table Seating” tickets. By purchasing a “Table Seating” ticket you agree to also purchase a minimum of two food and/or beverage items per person. Table seating is first come, first seated. Please arrive early for the best choice of available seats. Seating begins when doors open. Tables are communal so you may be seated with other patrons. We do not take table reservations.
A standing room area is available by the bar for all guests who purchase “Standing Room” tickets. Food and beverage can be purchased at the bar but there is no minimum purchase required in this area.
All tickets sales are final. No refund or credits.
Bruce Brubaker
In live performances from the Hollywood Bowl to New York’s Avery Fisher Hall, from Paris to Hong Kong, and in recordings for ECM, InFiné, Arabesque, and Bedroom Community — Bruce Brubaker is the new musician, a visionary virtuoso, an artistic provocateur. Bruce Brubaker performs Mozart with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Philip Glass on the BBC. Profiled on NBC’s Today show, Brubaker’s playing, writing, and collaborations continue to show a shining, and sometimes surprising future for pianists and piano playing. His blog “PianoMorphosis” appears at ArtsJournal.com.
Brubaker was presented by Carnegie Hall in New York, at the International Piano Festival at La Roque d’Anthéron, at Michigan’s Gilmore Festival, and at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, as the opening-night performer in the museum’s acclaimed Diller Scofidio + Renfro building. He is a frequent performer at New York City’s Le Poisson Rouge, and at Folle Journée in Nantes.
Bruce Brubaker is featured on Nico Muhly’s album Drones(Bedroom Community). Along with pianist Ursula Oppens, Brubaker made Piano Songs, a recording of Meredith Monk’s piano music, including four new transcriptions by Brubaker, released by ECM. Brubaker’s new recording of solo piano music by Philip Glass (Glass Piano) for InFiné (Warp Records) was remixed by six artists on Glass Piano: Versions.
Brubaker’s albums for Arabesque include Time Curve (music by Philip Glass and William Duckworth), Hope Street Tunnel Blues (music by Glass and Alvin Curran, featuring Brubaker’s transcription of a portion of Glass’s opera Einstein on the Beach), Inner Cities (including a live recording of John Adams’s Phrygian Gates and Brubaker’s transcription of part of Adams’s opera Nixon in China), and the first CD in the series, glass cage, named one of the best releases of the year by The New Yorker magazine.
Brubaker has premiered works by Glass, Meredith Monk, Nico Muhly, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Oliver Lake, Simon Hanes, and John Cage. He performed at Sanders Theater in collaboration with Cage during the composer’s tenure as Charles Eliot Norton Lecturer at Harvard University.
Following his New York debut at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, Brubaker was awarded a solo artist grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He was named “Young Musician of the Year” by Musical America. His London debut at the Wigmore Hall led to his first broadcast concert on the BBC, an all-Brahms recital. Brubaker has appeared at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival at Avery Fisher Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, Tanglewood, London’s Wigmore Hall, Leipzig’s Gewandhaus, Antwerp’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, and Finland’s Kuhmo Festival.
Bruce Brubaker has appeared on RAI in Italy and is featured in the documentary film about the Juilliard School, made for the PBS “American Masters Series.” As a member of Affiliate Artists Xerox Pianists Program, he presented residencies and performed with orchestras throughout the United States.
Brubaker has given masterclasses and forums at the Juilliard School, the Royal College of Music in London, Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy, the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, Harvard University, Columbia University, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Leipzig’s Hochschüle für Musik, the École Normale in Paris, Ghent’s Orpheus Instituut, North Carolina’s Eastern Music Festival, and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
Brubaker’s articles about music have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Piano Quarterly, Perspectives of New Music, Dutch Journal of Music Theory, and Chamber Music magazine. He was co-editor and a contributor to Pianist, Scholar, Connoisseur: Essays in Honor of Jacob Lateiner (Pendragon Press, 2000), a collection paying homage to his former teacher. His essay “Time Is Time” appears in Unfolding Time (2009), available in the U.S. from Cornell University Press. He presented the closing recital in Harvard University’s Crosscurrents conference in 2008.
Brubaker was the creator in 2000–2001 of “B-A-C-H,” a six-concert series in New York examining the connections between J. S. Bach and the composers who followed him. The previous year, at the turn of the millennium, he organized “Piano Century,” in which 100 pianists performed 101 twentieth-century pieces in eleven concerts. Brubaker created and performed Pianomorphosis, a 70-minute multidisciplinary performance piece for the Gilmore International Keyboard Festival in Michigan. Brubaker’s performance piece Haydnseek, was created together with Nico Muhly. Brubaker is the founder and artistic director of the chamber music festival SummerMusic in his native Iowa.
Brubaker trained at the Juilliard School, where he received the school’s highest award, the Edward Steuermann Prize, upon graduation. At Juilliard, where he taught from 1995 to 2004, he has appeared in public conversations with Philip Glass, Milton Babbitt, and Meredith Monk. He is now chair of the piano department at New England Conservatory in Boston.