My attempt to return to semi-regularly blogging is below, but if you are interested in some of my previous writing…
Here is a pdf of my dissertation, “The Interaction of Linear and Vertical Time in Minimalist and Postminimalist Piano Music,” a bit of which was turned into an article for the CeReNeM Journal, “Temporality as an Analytical Approach to Minimalist Music: Tom Johnson’s An Hour for Piano.”
I’ve also done some writing for I Care If You Listen and NewMusicBox.
There has been a flurry of news lately, so I’ll do my best to keep it brief. First, my 11th album, Inner Monologues, is now available to order. Downloads are available now, and CDs will ship early in May. Give it a listen.
I also was interviewed in The Log Journal by Steve Smith. We covered a range of topics from how my interest in minimal music developed and upcoming releases to a massive, nine-day-long album project and my online concert series.
Steve Smith was also kind enough to review my recent performance at Spectrum, where I played Book I of The Time Curve Preludes by William Duckworth and Alvin Curran’s Inner Cities 8. Smith wrote that my performance of the later was a showcase for my “patience, even-handedness, and knack for continuity among disparate modes of expression.” I’ll be including that piece on an Invisible Rail performance soon.
Finally, I’ll be heading to the New Music Gathering the second weekend in May. I’ll play some Jürg Frey, present on a panel about failure, and generally have a great time with people that I frequently see online but almost never in person. I’m sure I’ll see many of you there!
Here are YouTube videos from my Invisible Rail Series concert this afternoon. As always, please “like” the page to receive notifications of when I’m live. I’ll also be posting, well, everywhere about when the next concert will be. Thanks for listening!
I just wanted to offer a quick update on a project that I’m working to get off the ground. Over the last few months, I’ve been doing Facebook Live concerts under the heading Invisible Rail Series. In time, once I build up a bit of a following, I’d like to expand the roster of performers beyond myself. That probably won’t begin until the fall, but if that’s of interest to you, shoot me an email. I’ll probably want to stick to quieter music for the time being, but I’m open to ideas.
A couple of days ago, I posted the following picture across my social media accounts, which garnered a bit more of a reaction than I was expecting
There were lots of questions about specifics and functionality of my new set up, so I thought I’d list the details and offer a bit of a review now that I’ve had the chance to try it in a performance setting.
I keep thinking I’m going to get around writing a personal year-in-review, but how could I write about anything good that has happened?
— R. Andrew Lee (@AndyLeeDMA) December 28, 2016
I wrote this tweet shortly after learning about the death of Debbie Reynolds, who passed only a day after her daughter, Carrie Fisher. I wrote it because I’ve been trying to write this post for a little while now to no avail. It’s the end of the year, and as everyone writes about their favorite events and albums, it seemed fitting (professionally speaking) to offer a summary of what I’ve done this year. But how could I do that in the wake of tragedy after tragedy? How does one say, “Hey, things were pretty good over here!” without coming off as dismissive or insensitive. Luckily, it didn’t take me long to figure it out.
Well, after a lot of experimentation and failure, I finally have a new website design (and cms) that I’m happy with. Please let me know if you see anything amiss (andyleedma@gmail.com).
In other news, Irritable Hedgehog is running its annual holiday sale, so you can pick up my CDs for the price of a download. That is, $4 for an EP, $7 for a full album, and $12 for a 2CD album!
I’ve a number of friends and family members in England, so I’ve been following the Brexit referendum with more than casual curiosity. In the wake of the vote, I’ve seen many, many posts on social networks that mirror the Guardian article, “Racist incidents feared to be linked to Brexit vote.” Of course, here in the States, there have been more than a few similar incidents in the wake of Trump’s candidacy, and it’s been heart-breaking to see such stories.
This post is the fourth in (what I hope will become) a long series of posts telling the stories behind my albums. An archive of all posts in the series can be found here: The Stories of Irritable Hedgehog.
My wife once asked me, as I was gearing up for a recent recording session, if I was anxious about the process. After all, if you mess up, you get a chance to go back and try it again. I though for a moment and responded that a mistake in a live performance, while annoying, is fleeting and can be forgiven. In a recording session, you have to be able to execute every note perfectly within a few takes; if you can’t do that, your imperfections become enshrined.
Intellectually, I knew this as I warmed up for my first recording session, but nothing could prepare me for that new type of performance anxiety.
I was asked to expand on my post about my recent encounter with Felicia Day for NewMusicBox. The title of the piece is “Good Career Hunting: On Being a Deer Chaser.” Here’s a brief excerpt:
I experienced [a tipping point near miss] with my album Dennis Johnson: November. It was reviewed in publications around the world, including sources such as The Wire and Gramophone, we quickly sold out of the first two pressings, and it helped me get my first gigs in London and New York. The icing on the cake was making a large number of “best of” lists that year, including the #1 classical album of 2013 in Time Out New York. That in turn landed me a big award from my alma mater and an interview with Colorado Public Radio, among other things.
Yet nothing I’ve done since has been even close to that successful, and I’ve spent many hours since wondering what I might have done differently to make that less of a deer chaser moment and more of a tipping point.
If you’re wondering what I mean by “deer chaser,” well, you’ll just have to give it a read. 🙂
This post is the third in (what I hope will become) a long series of posts telling the stories behind my albums. An archive of all posts in the series can be found here: The Stories of Irritable Hedgehog.
Quarter note equals 59.225 beats per minute. That remains the oddest metronome marking I’ve encountered in my admittedly short career. The reason Tom Johnson used that tempo for An Hour for Piano is easy enough to deduce—he wrote a piece that was 3,553.5 beats long and wanted it to have a final duration of exactly one hour (3553.5 beats / 60 min = 59.225 bpm)—but to understand why the tempo remains unwavering and why an hour is important, we have to turn to the man himself.
