What
My new album, released today on Navona records. This is the first commercial released album dedicated to my music.

Who
Yes, me, but really, this album is the brainchild and accomplishment of Joseph Vaz. Joey was my student and he’s become my friend and collaborator. Looking back on this project from the beginning, it was all his idea and he bamboozled me into doing it.

His first step was to ask me to write him a piano sonata that he could play on his master’s recital at CCM. I was very happy to oblige him on this, and it was my first of many sanity-saving lockdown-era composition projects. Because of Covid and other exigencies, he wasn’t able to play it on his master’s recital, but he did play it on his doctoral recital* at the CUNY Grad Center, where he’s currently finishing up his DMA in piano performance. He’s also performed it in Maine and in Seattle.

After the success of that piece, Joey asked me to write a set of 11 Bagatelles, an oddly specific request, but he thought it would be a good idea to do some miniatures after a big honking sonata. His logic made sense to me, and when a virtuoso tells you to write more music for them, you do it.

At this point, I felt I had basically written everything I could possibly write for the solo piano. Frankly, I never thought of myself as someone who would or could write well for the piano. It’s an instrument with which I have a fraught relationship, and I’ve always been a little embarrassed by my own lack of prowess at the keyboard.

And yet, it was at this point that Joseph proposed that I write just enough more music so that there would be enough for an album. I will freely admit, he really had to bring me around to his way of thinking about this, both in terms of writing more piano music and in terms of producing a commercially released album of all this stuff.

He wore me down, and I wrote the final solo work for the album**, which ended up being the title track, a suite titled Galanteries. What is a galanterie? Allow me to quote the album’s liner notes: “The term “galanterie” was used by 18th-century composers to describe the optional movements of a Baroque dance suite. A suite required four standard movements — the allemande, courante, sarabande, and gigue — but between the sarabande and the gigue a composer could insert a rogue dance: a bourrée, gavotte, minuet, or passacaglia, just to name a few of the options.”

* I continue to be of the opinion that, since my music has now been performed in two recitals for doctoral performance degrees, I should be awarded an honorary doctorate in composition.

** There’s actually one more piece on the album, an arrangement of one of my own hymns, which I made into a pianistic fantasia. It’s really a piano piece with optional voice, which Joey adapted very slightly to account for the few places where the voice has a bit more prominence.

Where
We recorded the album at Oktaven Studios in Mount Vernon, NY, which is the most magical spot imaginable, and a studio that I can recommend most highly to other recording artists (not that they need my endorsement — they seem to be booked 12 hours a day every day.)

The big story of the recording session is that my piano sonata (or maybe Joey’s thumb) is cursed. Every time he’s played it, he’s broken a piano string. Well, we (I) stupidly jinxed ourselves by telling this to the owner of the studio, and he assured us that they had recently restrung their piano (an astonishingly beautiful Hamburg Steinway) with a new extra-tensile string that was all but unbreakable.

Reader, do I have to tell you what happened next? I still have the string.

Shout-out to Oktaven’s amazing emergency piano tech!

How
I mean look, if you want to get an album made, all you really need is money. I don’t have much, but in comparison to many of the delusional, self-aggrandizing recordings I’ve sunk my money into, this one was pretty cheap, and I’m sure it’s the best product I’ve ever made.

To me, the real question here is: how did Joey do it? How did he learn all those notes and dash them off in take after take over so many hours of recording, so consistently? If I didn’t know his parents personally, I’d swear he was a demigod. He’s just a talented, driven, diligent young man, and I can but marvel at his abilities and accomplishments. The fact that he’s chosen to champion my music is an honor beyond belief. I think it’s supposed to go the other way, like with the older musician helping out the younger one, but hey, I’ll take it!

Why
Because we love you. 😘