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This is the official web-site for news and information about my music performance activities as a classical and jazz pianist. I just redesigned the site for the first time since I started it back in 1997. It should be a lot easier to find things now. Thanks for visiting my site – I appreciate your interest in my music.
Select a category from the four lines of links in the header at the top of each page. If you can’t find what you’re looking for directly from the banner, click on the “site map” link near the end of the first line of the header to see a simple list of every web-page on this site. You can also just ask us by phone or e-mail: our office’s contact information is available by clicking on the “contact” link in the header above.
Greetings (recommended for first-time visitors to this site)
New web-pages and updates
Testimonial of Louis Moyse
The Latest – What’s New (news about my musical activities, written November, 2009)
More about this web-site
Would you like to help?
New web-pages about my personal (non-music) interests
You can browse this particular page by simply scrolling down its contents, or, you can skip down it faster using one of the above quick links. After reading the particular portion you jumped to, you should be able to return to this point on the page by pressing the “back” button on your web browser. If this doesn’t work, scroll back up to the top of the page to get back to this index of quick links.
Welcome to my web-site. The main portion of this site is devoted to a description of my activities as a pianist. I perform widely as a classical concert pianist, and I also play jazz piano engagements, both in concerts and in informal settings.
You can also find here various essays and articles I have written over the years on music topics; I hope you will find these pieces thought-provoking, and I post the more interesting comments I receive from readers in response to these articles. For shorter writings and thoughtsI am also starting a blog called “Sweet Spontaneous” (this name is part of a line of poetry by e.e. cummings). I think this might be pretty interesting for those of you who might enjoy getting a “fly on the wall” view of what it’s like to be a concert pianist. I have some material up already on the blog site www.michaelarnowitt.blogspot.com and the individual posts will start up in full swing in December.
Also on this site is a section with material relevant to a few of my personal interests.
New web-pages:
Classical piano program offerings for 2010 and 2011
Descriptions of all current concert programs, including
From East to West, three brand-new recital programs
(one an all-Russian program), Ligeti and his Influences,
Beethoven & Arnowitt VII, a piano duet program with
Jeffrey Chappell, the multi-media program Water Music, and more
Pdf version of color brochure of new classical programs for 2010 and 2011 (downloadable to your computer)
Description of new lecture-demonstration “The Music of Poetry”
“If Music Be the Food of Love...” (a new multi-sensory event combining music and food)
Selected list of pieces performed in the last few years
Discography of Michael Arnowitt (first-time ever discography page, with listings of what selections are on each recording)
Created a Photos and Press Materials main page
Jazz for Gaza, benefit event earlier this year for medical aid for a hospital in Gaza
Private Teaching information page
Site Map (complete list of all web-pages on this site)
Updates to existent web-pages:
Calendar of engagements (last updated June 7)
List of jazz tunes I play (updated November 2009)
Descriptions of original jazz tunes (updated November 2009)
Descriptions of Jazz and other Improvisational Music Performance Programs
Classical and jazz mp3 sound samples (1 classical mp3 added, 7 jazz mp3s added)
Lecture-Demonstrations Information Page
(internationally-renowned flutist and composer – this statement written when Moyse was in his 90’s)
“During my long musical career, I have met few really great artists in the various disciplines of the field and I am very pleased to name Michael Arnowitt, pianist and musician as one of them.
“Michael combines all the necessary qualifications and qualities to express his art on the highest level. I have great respect for his technical skill, his interpretation and his way to communicate to any audience his feelings through his love for music.”
My fall began in a very pleasant way as I had the good fortune of having some performances of one of the very best piano concertos ever written, Mozart’s no. 23 in A major, K. 488. I had a great time practicing this concerto over the summer, refamiliarizing myself with this extraordinary music that I hadn’t played since my teenage student days. In particular, I discovered so many sensitive touches in the orchestration, surely the most underappreciated aspect of Mozart’s genius. Of course, every set of liner notes about the piano concertos of Mozart will mention his talents in handling the woodwind instruments, but as they say, “God is in the details.” For example, Mozart will sometimes present a 4-part choir hymn sound with 2 clarinets and 2 bassoons in perfect close harmony and counterpoint, but elsewhere he will carefully omit certain winds, so he might drop out the clarinets and you will hear a more open sound with the flute and two bassoons alone (the space in the middle either left empty for the bassoons to resonate up into, or occupied by melody notes in the piano or violins) – at other moments, Mozart subtly brings in the French horns to play an extremely soft, sustained octave behind the piano as a supporting sound-bed. So simple, yet it has an amazing effect to provide a warmth and a radiance to the total sound, similar to a master painter casting a reflective, diffuse light to one portion of a canvas.
As I studied the music more, I realized Mozart takes the same care with the string instruments’ orchestration as he does with the handling of the woodwinds. While sometimes the strings play as a block, at other points only the two or three upper-most or lower-most string sections will play, and sometimes a portion, but not all, of the strings will join a predominantly woodwind texture to create new color combinations. In many ways, this chamber music-like approach to orchestration foreshadowed the exquisite sounds Mahler created in his pieces for voice and orchestra the Kindertotenlieder and Das Lied von der Erde over a hundred years later.
As I have done with other Mozart concertos in the past, I decided to perform the solo piano cadenza at the end of the first movement (where the orchestra is completely silent) as an improvisation. I tried to do this improv as much as I possibly could in the exact style of Mozart (as he would have done himself at a performance in his own time, as all classical musicians were able to improvise back then). Many pianists perform souped-up big Romantic cadenzas, and it has always seemed to me to be disruptive at best, and egotistical at worst, to suddenly change gears to Liszt or Tchaikovsky-land in the middle of Mozart’s unique sound-world. So as best I could, I tried to improvise something Mozartean. Perhaps one advantage to improvising cadenzas, particularly in classical-period concertos, is that it gives the performance a moment of freshness and spontaneity, a little extra life that might stimulate the listener not only during the cadenza itself but for the rest of the piece. The concerts went over very well and I received a lot of positive comments about my improvised cadenzas from both members of the orchestra and people in the audience.
After the Mozart concerto, my next major performances were of two pieces by Olivier Messiaen. The first piece, “The Robin,” is from a set of six “Little Bird Sketches” he composed in 1985 near the end of his life. The robin is in the thrush family and many of the musical phrases Messiaen wrote reminded me of the enormously varied song of the wood-thrush I hear where I live in Vermont. The challenge of performing this piece is how to group and pace all the mostly short bird-song fragments into larger structures. Fortunately, I had done a fair amount of listening to birds earlier in the year and had some sense for their style of rhythm, dynamics, and articulation. I noticed there was a short two-note motif that would repeat at different places in the piece, and I decided to consider these to be section-ending “amen”-like cadences. I was able to memorize some of the harmonies by thinking of them as jazz chords with an added minor ninth dissonance or two, or as a poly-chord where two chords from different tonalities are juxtaposed on top of one another.
The second piece of Messiaen I performed was the sixth piece from his Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus (20 Views on the Child-Jesus), one of the most imaginative piano compositions of the twentieth century. This is an exciting, thrilling piece on a huge scale (about 15 minutes long) on the subject of the creation of the universe. Messiaen said he was inspired here by things as diverse as the shape of spiral galaxies, thunderbolts, and stalactites, and at the final climaxes he brings in both his beloved birds, emiting a few joyful squawks in appreciation of the creation, as well as a superb evocation of a cathedral carillon, the chords resonating in the unique, slightly out-of-tune colorations of those gigantic bells.
One of the fascinating aspects of this piece is how Messiaen depicts the creation’s Big Bang through musical lines that truly undergo a growth process of organic development. For example, he will take a group of say 11 notes and repeat them a number of times: on each repetition, he keeps certain notes stationary (pitches unchanged each time) – say notes numbered 1, 4, 5, and 11 – while he moves notes 2, 3, 9, and 10 up a half-step with each repetition of the sequence, and moves notes 6, 7, and 8 down a half-step each repetition. As the section progresses, you do feel this irregular expansion of the shape, sort of the way human bodies or plants grow (or galaxies, I suppose). I’m not too confident my three live performances this fall came out too well but I do have a good recording of this piece on one of my early CD’s, “Constellation.”
In the jazz and improvised music part of my life I have had a good year. Over the summer I had my first taste of realizing an idea I have had for a long time, to improvise piano simultaneous with the creation live on stage of visual art. I connected up with some local painters to try this, my friends Maggie Neale, Janet Van Fleet, Cully Renwick, and Missy Storrow. We had some technical issues trying to figure out how best to set up the performance space so that both the audience and I could see the art as it was being created (as the painter’s own body can block line of sight to the canvas) but on the whole I feel our performance was a good first attempt at the concept.
I put some thought into what might be analogous elements in painting and music. Both types of art have line and texture, and the different micro-regions of the piano’s 88 keys, each with its distinctive sound quality, could parallel different sections of an artist’s canvas. Musical harmonies, major, minor, and otherwise, could be seen as analogous to a painter’s choice of color. I was interested to learn that many painters of the early twentieth century (my favorite period of music and art history) were really in to the connections between painting and music, even trying to create a sense of rhythm in visual art. I have been reading a book about Paul Klee by Hajo Duchting titled “Painting Music,” which is all about the artists of that period and their interest in music. Many of Klee’s paintings have intriguing titles that refer to classical or jazz music.
In jazz, I’ve been trying more and more to write my own tunes, and I had a burst of creative energy earlier this year. I’ve gotten some compliments from fellow musicians about my new songs, and I’m pretty sure I’ve made a major step forward from my earlier efforts. My largest composition of 2009 was “Rogue Cloud,” a long multi-section piece; some of the other tunes I wrote this year that I like are “Medium Message,” “Bulgarian Hoedown,” “The Crying Candle,” and “Migratory Mood.” This past summer and fall, a jazz quintet I am in had a series of performances featuring almost exclusively my own originals. I’m definitely grateful to these musicians for all their work learning my new compositions and putting them into the air for the first time.
I also recently made a suite of jazz arrangements of music from different parts of Bernstein’s “West Side Story.” The best jazz arrangements, I think, don’t follow slavishly to the original, and since West Side Story is such familiar music, especially to people of a certain age, I definitely got a few “I don’t remember it going this way” comments from musicians. I think most of what I did in the arrangements came out well, especially “A Boy Like That,” whose raw abrupt energy made it a good vehicle for a Coltrane-like approach, and “Maria,” which I turned into a slow, bossa nova in which I lengthened the number of measures of certain harmonies to create more of a suspended feel, a floating sensation that is really at the heart of the bossa nova. (OK, I know Maria was Puerto Rican, not Brazilian...)
What am I working on now? In classical music, I’m learning for the first time Bach’s Partita no. 3 in A minor. The six partitas of Bach are some of his best pieces, and so far in my life I have performed no. 1, 2, and 5. I hope in the not too distant future to have all six learned, as I think a performance of the complete partitas would make a great program. I have never seen any pianist program this A minor partita (to be honest, very few pianists these days seem to program any of Bach’s partitas, which seems strange). Hopefully I won’t find out that there’s a reason this particular partita is less frequently heard. Another piece I am learning from scratch is György Ligeti’s Étude no. 8 from Book 2, Fém (Metal), a bright piece based on perfect fifths, which have sort of become my favorite interval recently: I think it is interesting that they are tonal without being major or minor. I’m also re-learning Beethoven’s Sonata no. 27 in E minor, op. 90 for some upcoming performances and am beginning to face the reality that I have to perform Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata starting later in 2010. Well, it took Beethoven about a year to compose it, and it might take me almost that long to learn it, so I better get cracking.
On the jazz front, I am hoping to finish a song I started a while back called “Zombie Banks Breakdown.” It’s about Wall Street and the financial crisis, which hasn’t exactly proved to be the easiest subject matter for a jazz tune. I tried to combine some bebop strains with more free-jazz oriented depictions of big, teetering skyscrapers and Morse-code like rhythms and other strange sounds to evoke computers gone haywire. So far, the elements aren’t gelling, so it’s still unfinished, and once in a while I fear if I don’t get it done soon the financial companies might actually get their act together, end their corruption and greed, become solid citizens and thereby make my new song less topical. But ... so far, little chance of that. I am also hoping in the not too distant future to release a commercial recording entirely of my own jazz compositions, but have been a little undecided on personnel and where to do it (the lack of a good piano rules out a lot of studios).
One of the things I’ve been working on recently that I’m very excited about is a new lecture-demonstration called “The Music of Poetry.” This is a talk about the musical aspects – sound and time – in poetry, song lyrics, and other literature. I think I’ve come up with a great set of examples from all sorts of different literary sources and I am currently searching about for places such as libraries, colleges, or writers’ workshops that might be interested in sponsoring me to give the talk. I’ve written a short description of the presentation which you can read by clicking here.
Also this fall, I’ve been trying to start my own blog. It’s called “Sweet Spontaneous” and I am still figuring out some of the technical aspects of how blog sites work. So far I do have up a few short fun lists such as my ten best classical pieces of the past millennium, my ten favorite jazz recordings of all time, and similar confections to tide you over until the blog is in full swing (hopefully by early December).
[Click here to read the What’s New piece I wrote most recently before this one. It includes a chronicle of a tour I made to Europe with a jazz quartet, plus a story from a past tour of Russia, a little bit about getting to play with Pete Seeger, some thoughts on my experience being the subject of a documentary film, and a round-up of different collaborations I have done in recent years and ideas I have for future projects.]
I have posted on this web-site a number of music essays and articles I have written over the years. I encourage you to respond to any of these essays with your comments; I include below each article excerpts from the most interesting replies I receive. I am sure people would be interested to know the town and country you are from, so, if you’re willing, perhaps you could mention that when you e-mail me your thoughts.
There is a link on this site to the Ursa Minor Records web-page; this company carries most of my recordings. In addition to what is available by mail-order from Ursa Minor, there’s about 40 minutes of excerpts from various live piano performances on the audio track of the documentary film about me, “Beyond 88 Keys,” now available on VHS or DVD. Click on the film link at the top of the page for more information.
The film is the first release available of any of my live performances: all my other recordings are not from live concerts, although they have all been recorded in real halls rather than studios and none of my discs have any reverb added. My disc on the Musical Heritage Society label, “Classical/Jazz,” unfortunately, may be out of print – at least, it was when I last asked about five years ago.
Over the years, I have appeared on a variety of other musicians’ recordings, playing individual pieces here and there. I can’t totally endorse these albums as good examples of what I am trying to create artistically, as they are generally released without my being consulted about which takes to use or how to edit segments together. (Yes, I know, welcome to the real world ...) So, to get the best impression of what my music-making is like, stick to my solo piano recordings.
Your feedback about this site is valued. Unlike live performance, the internet is a medium where it can be hard to know how things are going over. So, we welcome your reactions – let us know what you particularly like on this site, or any suggestions you may have for improvements. Go to the “contact” link at the top of any page to find our contact information and phone, regular mail, or e-mail us as you prefer.
If you would like to stay in touch with me, we encourage you to join our mailing list. Click on the “mailing list sign-up” link in the header of any page, follow the instructions there, and you will receive the occasional flyer or e-mail about live performances near where you live, or new recordings as they are released.
If you have an idea for where I might be able to perform a classical concert or play a jazz engagement, please let us know. In addition to the obvious places where performances happen, such as concert series, festivals, schools of various sorts, and nightspots, I have also performed in places such as libraries, museums and art galleries, churches and synagogues, theaters, and town halls. Please let us know of any leads for where I might perform, especially if you know anyone connected to the organization and can put in a good word on my behalf to help get the ball rolling.
Also helpful are friends you might have in either Canada or Europe as I organize tours to those areas every couple of years. Even if the person you know there isn’t directly involved with a concert organization, any person who lives in a locality I may be touring to could be potentially helpful in providing information or leading us to someone who is more directly involved with the music scene. Hospitality and logistical help is also always appreciated when touring in a foreign country.
I would also be extremely interested to create a tour to eastern Asia for the 2012-2013 season. I have not yet performed in Asia but my mother was born in Korea and I have always been interested in the cultures of the Far East and Southeast Asia in particular.
I am occasionally also in need of a travel assistant for my tours, so if that would be of interest to you, please contact us and let me know what financial arrangements you would or would not require.
Also, if you have a suggestion as to where the documentary film about me might be shown, we’re trying to get more screenings and broadcasts of the film. There seems to be good interest from arts groups in showing the film, optionally in conjunction with some sort of live piano performance or question and answer period with me after the film is viewed.
The filmmakers have made an attractive brochure oriented towards organizations that might consider showing the film. If you have a connection to an arts organization, theater, school, library, or film festival that you think might be interested in hosting a film screening, let me know and I’ll send you one of these brochures and a DVD copy of the documentary.
Last updated: June 7, 2010 © 1997-2010 by Michael Arnowitt