Hold That Thought

 

Many of my albums have been organized around a specific idea, such as time, innocence, worry, recovery, or loss of self. This particular album focuses more on the ideas themselves. There are many different methods of composing spontaneously, even when not starting with any preconceived musical material or purpose. Aesthetic quality in spontaneity is achieved through depth of experience, and, as a rule, that is achieved through focused attention. It is similar to meditation, and just as there are many different ways to meditate, there are many different ways to proceed with an improvisation.

Focused attention seems to be often mistaken for trance. Trance is where listening or some other experience occupies space in your mind but doesn’t demand your attention. If you are playing a repeated pattern, for instance, your attention can become detached from the process (mental auto-pilot) and your mind will actually wander sometimes. This is almost the antithesis of focused attention. I have had students, for instance, who have thought that the point of practicing is to reach a point where you are just listening to what you are doing and not thinking about it. Actually, the point of practice is to allow you think in ever-greater detail. Practice allows you to think about how you are going to play every single note!

When you are focusing, you must focus on something. When you are improvising, you are focusing on what you are playing, of course, but you are also creating and managing the direction of the music. This means that you are using the music you are hearing to create new music. You can repeat the “old” music, vary it in some way, or react to it with something either complementary or contrasting. With the piano, there is also the element of musical space and texture so that you have the option of moving things around from one hand to the other or varying the accompaniment, harmony, or context of the original idea.

This sort of spontaneous compositional methodology tends to result in musical pieces with certain characteristics, some of which occur on this album. The most commonly occurring structure is what I like to call the “Spring” and is related to the Linked Verse technique used in Japanese (group) oral poetry. It is where older material is always being varied and reacted to so that the music moves forward while referring back at the same time. Since the older material is being continually revised, the whole structure moves forward. The circling back is like a spiral, but because the whole thing moves forward it is more like a Spring. The first, third, and fifth track of Hold That Thought conform to this sort of structure while being completely different types of pieces.

1. Prelude is also focused on melody, and is akin to a soliloquy or opera recitative with a minimal accompaniment. The melody emotes plaintively or with flourish but always refers back in linked verse fashion.
2. Intermezzo is a complicated and varied track whose references to older material are interspersed with impetuous flourishes and extreme shifts of register. Older material does not mean vanilla.
3. Rhapsody is also somewhat impetuous but is more like a sung epic poem with an ending more like Ulysses returning home rather than Caesar returning from Gaul.
4. Sequenza developed a little differently. The material I begin with just happens to be simple, distinctive, and easily remembered. Its chromatic nature lends itself easily to variation and transposition, hence it becomes like a huge sequence. I use the term “sequenza” with apologies to Luciano Berio who used the title for a whole series of virtuosic solo works for different instruments. Instead of moving like a spring or spiral, the piece seems to move like a rogue planet that keeps swinging next to the sun and getting thrown off in a completely different direction.
5. Emergence also focuses on a single melodic idea, and though the idea can be heard in the early portions of the piece, it doesn’t become prominent until about halfway through the piece. At that point, it is repeated and sequenced in a manner reminiscent of Richard Strauss. Hence, it is as though the musical idea was discovered in the middle of the piece, much like all of a sudden becoming attracted to someone you’ve been working with for quite a while.

All of these different approaches require focus and, of course, imagination to be effective. An improviser learns that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. But you try to choose the ones that work for an album.

This is my 22^nd solo piano album and was recorded at my home in Phoenix, Arizona.

Waiting into the Night

This album of spontaneously composed piano music follows the unfortunate trail of worry through several different situations. It is usually the worry and not the situations that make things uncomfortable. Whether obsession, jealousy, phobia, or guilt, the formula never seems to end well. Often tinged with love, wrought with fear, and infused with a distinct lack of self confidence, the reaction usually causes more pain than the original action.

The music is somber and often sad but not melodramatic. It also has a number of moments of elegance and beauty, as much of the subject matter it touches is meaningful. Personally, worry has not played an important role in my own life, but I have seen enough of it in my friends and loved ones to know its pain and consequences. I tend to worry more about my own abilities than the actions of others.

1. Obsession. The first track explores the poison of obsession. Though I tend to think most good musicians tend to be rather OCD anyway, a real obsession is cancerous. The track starts with some passionate sweeps of inquiry, but quickly becomes infatuated with a descending fourth and will not let it go.
2. Waiting Into the Night. The title track takes us through the daydreaming, insecurities, fears and anticipations of waiting alone. The longer you wait, the worse the result, which is often much worse than the reason you’re waiting.
3. All is Forgiven, Don’t Do It Again. This is probably the most volatile track of the set, but also has some of the most touching sequences. Love, when accompanied by fear, makes for some difficult moments.
4. Woulda Coulda Shoulda. Worry can also extend into the past. If only . . . It tends to make you feel that you have already doomed yourself to disaster. A healthy dose of the present is the only cure. “A journey of a thousand miles begins beneath your feet.”
5. The Monster Under the Bed. In a book of vignettes about music practicing, I remember a short image by Itzhak Perlman. He said those passages that you have not fully mastered are like monsters under the bed. They come out to get you at the worst possible time. The same could be said about any ignored problem.
6. Romance and Regret. Nothing is sadder than worrying when things go right! Falling in love is one of those moments.

This album was recorded at my home in Phoenix, Arizona in the autumn of 2010.

Magic Garden

Many times I have realized that my thoughts and hopes about life, happiness, my career, and many other things have turned out to be innocent fantasy. Innocence comes in many forms, from simple naivety to outright delusion. Sometimes the effect is inconsequential; sometimes it permeates the core of our existence. This album explores innocence through the metaphor of a magic garden. From the Garden of Eden to the “Primrose Path,” we have all been there! Quaint, surprising, enchanting, mysterious, even charming, this garden is an extravagant diversion for some, and a dangerous intoxication for others.

1. Strolling. The joys of a garden are in the details. A big picture doesn’t do it. The opening track explores these little intricacies as it works its way in deeper and deeper. At the end, it realizes that it doesn’t know where it is.
2. To the Right. Tracks 2 & 6 start in the same place but go in different directions. The piece actually works its way back to the opening chord several times in the interim, but it’s where it goes in between that is the most interesting.
3. Intermezzo No. 1. What distinguishes this intermezzo is how it proceeds. It uses an idea from Japanese oral poetry called chained verse, where new verses (or in music, phrases) borrow something from the preceding verse (phrase) to create a new idea. This can make for subtle changes or wholesale shifts, depending on the idea and inspiration. The Japanese used to use haiku and other syllabic poetry forms, and would chain them together at parties, with a different person inventing each verse. It would be like taking turns singing improvised verses to “Frankie and Johnny,” and often just as racy.
4. Oven Mitt. All pianists sometimes sound like they forgot to take their gloves off. On this track, it sounds like maybe I forgot to take off an oven mitt.
5. Bluebells. Bluebells chime in a magic garden.
6. To the Left. We return to where we started in Track No. 2, but it’s not the same. Awareness is not sin, but it does take the sheen off a little bit.
7. You Can Never Return. Innocence, like ignorance, may indeed be bliss, but once it is revealed, it can never be reacquired. Paradise Lost is usually more instructive than harmful, however, and there are many other gardens to explore.

This album is a bit softer and gentler than some of my albums, and tends to be rather good-natured. It’s not that innocence doesn’t resort to delusional ranting every once in a while, but that doesn’t happen here. This album was recorded at my home in Phoenix during the fall of 2010.

Of Time and Memories

I’ve always had an interest in time, but now that more of it lies behind me than in front, I’ve come to savor its quirks and subtleties. Though time is often measured in ticks and tocks, it usually passes silently and unnoticed. “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” applies to time more than anything else. I’m still not sure I know what I had anyway.

My new solo piano album ponders the nature of both time and memories. I have chosen three silent or nearly silent clocks and three groups of memories, but the album is really about the endless patient passing of time. It seems ironic that this notion, when portrayed properly, is often referred to as “timeless.” Memories, though caught in an ever expanding and receding universe of reality, can seem to be fixed, as if forever yesterday. Though the details can become blurred, they are always emotionally vivid. The truly memorable events are always just beyond our reach. They are like bench players, always ready to substitute for the real players that become increasingly tired or flawed. This duality of how time is and how it is remembered provides the tension for the whole album.

1. Sundial. I can remember the first time I heard of a sundial, growing up in Seattle. “What use is something that only works when it’s sunny?” I thought. Now that I live in Arizona, it doesn’t bother me nearly as much. A sundial only works in the daytime, and it is different every day. That doesn’t make it unreliable; it makes it organic. It is tied to the motions of the earth and stars. Time is real, but it is not mechanical. It is punctuated by overlapping natural cycles, but is it in itself cyclical? Nobody knows.
2. Old Flames. Considering my wife and I are approaching our fortieth wedding anniversary, these memories are very old indeed. Memories are most impactful, however, when they are new, and we always remember our first stirrings of passion. Of course, when we truly allow ourselves to remember, these thoughts are not always pleasant. Embarrassment, conflict, relationships embody more yin and yang than just about anything else. And after all, these are relationships that didn’t last.
3. Hourglass. An hourglass measures a set amount of time. Then it measures it again. And again. It is good for timing a soft-boiled egg, or a Boggle game, or a fluoride rinse. But it is an illusion; there are no little bits of time, just as there are no little bits of space. The Eleventh Century Japanese Zen Monk Dogen had some very interesting things to say about time and cause and effect. He said that when a log burns; there is wood, then fire, then ash. The wood did not cause the fire, and the fire did not cause the ash. They are separate, and yet, all one thing. Time is a dimension, like space. It would be like watching a passing horse through a cardboard tube. First you would see the head, then the body, and then the tail. The head did not “cause” the tail; it is all one thing, but you experience it sequentially.
4. Young Children. Memories of young children bring back oceans of love, joy, wonder, and pride. They also bring back anxiety and fatigue. Young children have boundless energy and are always more resourceful than you think possible. I was wondering why it didn’t occur to me that this would have been a good reason to have my children at a younger age! It was, however, worth every moment!
5. Water Clock. Flowing water has been used to measure time for millennia. Ancient Persians would figure allotments of irrigation water by filling a ceramic vessel with water. As the gates were lifted, the irrigation officer would lift his finger from a small hole in the vessel. When the water had all flowed out, he closed the gate. The Greeks built a more elaborate mechanical water clock, the clepsydra, which measured time using a continuous water source. It had a refillable tank or could be run by a stream. The slow return of water to the sea is also a continuing metaphor for life itself.
6. Old Friends. One of the other realities of aging is that you begin to outlive some of your friends. When I first heard Queen’s song, “Who Wants To Live Forever?” my first reaction was, “Not if it means I have to keep getting older!” At some point we all become memories. The longer I live, the greater the number of memories I acquire and, like an old computer, the smaller the space for new experiences. I’ve always tried to live in the present; certainly this is the healthiest way to be mentally. But I’m not convinced this is how we are programmed to age. Maybe the accumulation of memories gradually makes us more obsolete than wise. I suppose that depends on the society in which you live. At any rate, the memories of old friends, especially those friends who now only exist as memories, are some of the fondest.

I alternate tracks of time with tracks of memories, but really, they mingle freely throughout. And after an entire album of timeless contemplation, the end of the last track finally gives in to tick and tock, and runs down. Though time is silent and seemingly unending, our own lives are measured in breaths and heartbeats.

Released 10/30/2017 SMS Recordings (SMS018) © Copyright 2017 Glenn Stallcop

Quail Song

Though I grew up in the Pacific Northwest (Seattle), I have lived nearly my entire adult life in the Desert Southwest (Phoenix), having moved here to play in the Phoenix Symphony at the age of 23. Though it was a bit of a shock at first, I have grown to love the desert landscape, its stark but colorful silk-screen topography, no-nonsense flora and fauna, and Technicolor sunsets. Though you would not guess it at first, the Sonoran Desert is the second most diverse biome on the planet, next to only the Amazon Rain Forest. It is continually surprising and fascinating.

Besides the cloudless skies and bottomless sunlight, one of the most notable characteristics of this part of the world is the birdlife. My first morning here I remember being bolted awake by the cacophony of birdsong that has greeted me every morning since. The number and variety is stunning, and it changes as you go from plain to canyon to mountainside to oasis.

One of my favorites is the Gambel’s Quail. They are almost always in small groups racing through the brush or along your fence, flying only if absolutely necessary and driving my cat nuts. They make many different sounds as they keep track of each other in the vegetation, but their “call”, usually by a solitary male, is a simple plaintive single note. The note droops or sighs slightly as if he is running out of breath. It is very distinctive and lonely. It is the sound of this album.

That single repeating note is a common call throughout these tracks. Though I cannot make a piano sigh, I do try to give it that timeless lonely quality that it has in the early morning or right before dusk. It appears in various contexts, sometimes subtle, sometimes overt. But, of course, the album itself is about everything else that is going on: the sprays of color, the dense thickets of chords, the emotional outbreaks, the blankets of calm . . . The quail song is just there to remind you that despite all the waves of volatility, life goes on unaffected.

Morning Song starts with a rather ominous introduction as the sun rises. The song makes its first appearance in call and response fashion with the other sounds of the morning. After another interlude, its call receives a much more desperate response and then the two mingle together as the desert wakes up.

Quail Run is about motion. There is something delightful about watching a quail family race along with a brood of chicks swarming underneath. It is tiny cauldron of boundless energy going in sixteen different directions at once. This track is about running, and parenthood, with an occasional quail song thrown it.

Empty Nest hits me closer to home. It begins with an extended slow, almost chorale-like section before gathering energy and moving on – as we must.

Covey Talk strikes me as rather domestic. There is much back and forth with some joking and some squabbling ending with a serious panic attack. But things settle down at the end as the quail song is heard and everything returns to normal.

Through the Underbrush finds the quail in probably its safest habitat. There is motion but things are more relaxed. The quail song is heard in the distance, and there is a flurry of activity before everything finally settles down for the night.

Left Alone On a Branch. When a quail is singing is just about the only time you ever see one by itself. The question: “Is the quail alone because it is singing?” or “Does the quail sing because it is alone?” I don’t know. Alone is alone; I’m not sure it matters.

Evening Song finds the quail singing accompanied by the colors of sunset, lulling the desert to sleep amid beauty and stillness.

Quail Song is my sixteenth album of solo piano improvisation and was released on July 15, 2017.

 

Bridge to Nowhere

I first heard the term “Bridge to Nowhere” during the 2008 US Presidential election in reference to the planned bridge to Gravina Island in Ketchikan, Alaska, but the term has been coined for several bridges around the world. Some other famous examples are in Norway, Kyoto, Japan, and outside Los Angeles in the San Gabriel Mountains. The artwork for this album is from a photo of a derelict bridge that appeared out of the fog on a train ride I took up the White Pass outside of Skagway, Alaska.

I am using “Bridge to Nowhere” as a metaphor for spiritual awakening. The experience is described in the literature of several religions and is characterized by replacing one’s image of oneself (ego) with an acceptance of one’s experience as oneself. It is a realization that we are not separate from the world. It is us, and we are it.

But the experience changes nothing except one’s attitude. Everything is the same. As the Buddhist Ch’ing-yüan puts it:

Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it’s just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters.

 I can’t say to have ever had this experience myself, but I have always been fascinated by what I have read about it. It is always described as a loss of self, or rather the loss of one’s image of oneself. It is sort of an intellectual and emotional suicide in order to accept the world as it is (or the world as God. depending on your viewpoint). It seems very risky. Mystical Christians have called it the “Dark Night of the Soul.”

My experience and link to understanding is through music. My music is spontaneous yet definitive. I am all the music I have played and experienced, but I also like to challenge myself creatively. It is not the same, but not different. “Not two, not one,” as the Buddhists would say.

The music in this album is more hopeful than hopeless. It is occasionally lonely, and even sometimes ominous, but is more interested in the journey than the outcome. The music is focused and detailed in a meandering sort of way. The world is beautiful, the bridge is beautiful, and nowhere is beautiful. Most of all, music is beautiful.

The tracks for this album were recorded in 2010 at my home in Phoenix, Arizona.

Of the Bells Bells Bells

Of the Bells Bells Bells has a somewhat different and more complex history than most of my albums. For most of my albums, I have used tracks that were recorded at roughly the same time.   Sometimes, they were recorded within a day or two. In the case of Night Drift, they were recorded all on the same night. But for Of the Bells Bells Bells, I took tracks that were recorded more than a year apart.

Clicking on the album cover will take you to CD Baby where you can sample entire tracks.

One of the realities of improvisation is that once it’s played, it’s gone. If something I play is bad, luckily it’s gone; if something I play is good, well, it’s gone too. Good news, bad news. Dealing with this situation is one of the lessons of improvisation, and helps alleviate any stress that might surface about not knowing what you are going to play next. After a while, it becomes pretty easy to keep a low-key attitude, and that leaves me free to relax and play on the edge of my imagination.

However, this all changes when it is time to record. Recording can become quite stressful because I can easily allow a judgmental attitude to creep in and divert my attention from what I am doing. I can’t fool myself; I know it’s not gone. Several years ago, I realized that I couldn’t record something and then go back and listen to it, as it would haunt me when I returned to record again. Unlike a Classical recording, I couldn’t go back and re-record it to play it better. And it’s not really about my playing anyway, it’s about the music. But the temptation is always there.

So I have developed a number of habits that allow me to continue to play recording sessions over the course of a few days or weeks. One of my recording habits is to play when I am not working. I need to be able to devote my full attention to it. My work schedule naturally has holes that I can use for this, but many of them are filled with other activities. So I have found that the least stressful time for me to record is during the summer, as I have about three months off. If I have a week or two during the season sometimes I will go to my cabin where I can be in seclusion, which has also worked, but usually I record in the summer.

I will record for a few days, or even weeks, but only about once a year. Recording is quite exhausting, and after a while I feel “played out.” I don’t listen to my takes for about a year afterward. I don’t want to be able to remember playing them. I need to make a fresh assessment. This is one reason why my albums were recorded a few years before I released them. The process takes some time.

On a whim I googled “five bells” and found a poem of the same name by an Australian poet, Kenneth Slessor

So when I was done editing tracks done in the fall of 2009, I had three good tracks left. In the summer of 2010, instead of recording, I had to work on a commission for an orchestral piece. I usually use an improvisation as the basis for my written pieces, and since I had these three good improvisations left over, I chose one of them as a model the orchestra piece. As I was transcribing and editing the music for the commission, I noticed that two climax points featured five bell-like strokes. On a whim, I googled “Five Bells” and found a poem of the same name by an Australian poet, Kenneth Slessor. The poem discusses time and memory in reference to the death of the poet’s friend. I had already noticed that the end of the piece made a passing reference to Richard Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration, so I gave the piece a tentative title, Five Bells (that stuck) and finished the piece with that in mind.

I didn’t get back to improvisation until late that fall with, for reasons mentioned above, mixed results. When I edited the tracks a year or two later, I realized that there were only two tracks of the first few sessions that I thought were worth keeping. Since those two tracks did not have any other good tracks recorded in close proximity, I decided to combine them with the three tracks from 2009.

About the same time, I discovered another poem, “The Bells” by Edgar Allan Poe, and thought it made a good outline for an album. (I’m not the only composer to think this, Sergei Rachmaninov wrote a choral symphony on a Russian adaptation of the same poem.) Poe wrote the poem about the times in our lives that are punctuated by church bells, other than when the bells are calling the congregation to worship or just keeping time. Three of the four sections deal with moments in individual lives: birth, marriage, and death. The other section deals with the times when bells were used to call the community to action, such as a fire, or flood, or even warfare (as in the 1812 Overture for instance). Poe arranges the sections so that each event is darker than the last, placing the call for action between marriage and death. The bells jingle and tinkle for a birth, while they moan and groan for a death.  I preferred to arrange my album around just the individual life events, so I have transformed Poe’s call to action into something more akin to work or vocation. Also I did not wish to dwell on the darker aspects of aging. Poe wrote the poem near the end of his life and was already infirm. He was already thinking a lot about that last bell.

I wanted to use the improvisation I had used for Five Bells, and work the title and program into the album plan. Poe had given me four stages of life; to that I added “Coming of Age.” The resulting improvisations are: “One Bell” about birth, “Two Bells” about coming of age, “Three Bells” about marriage, “Four Bells” about vocation, and “Five Bells” about death. I tried to choose the improvisation that best represented the subject matter.  The three earlier improvisations from 2009, each roughly ten minutes long, are the first, third, and fifth tracks. The second and fourth tracks, which are shorter, are from 2010.

One of the special features of Poe’s poem is his use of the sounds of his words, including the word “bell” itself, to give the sense of their ringing

One of the special features of Poe’s poem is his use of the sounds of his words, including the word “bell” itself, to give the sense of their ringing. The improvisations include many types of bell sounds themselves, which are a sound that I like and a sound that is very characteristic of the piano.

Of the Bells Bells Bells was released on Jan. 20, 2017, and is my fourteenth album of piano improvisation. It was recorded partly in Phoenix, AZ, and partly in my cabin outside of Ash Fork, AZ.