Plugged and Unplugged: Post-minimalist Piano Music - Bruce Brubaker

In a sense an artefact of the Industrial Revolution, the concert grand piano is in the centre of a huge range of the new music of today — music for the acoustic piano alone, and music that combines the familiar sound of the piano with new electronically-produced sounds. Postmodern art often juxtaposes seemingly disparate elements.

The programme “Plugged and Unplugged” explores the newest frictions and beauties that result from such disparity. In a “classic” such as Philip Glass’ Mad Rush, or in the first U.K. hearing of Nico Muhly’s Drones & Piano, the piano is a thoroughly vital musical participant.

Bruce Brubaker is a leader in this new world of musicking, spanning “classical” and “pop” to make something of very wide appeal.

“Plugged and Unplugged” includes music by Glass, Nico Muhly, Brubaker’s improvisations, and music by the American postminimalists Alvin Curran and Missy Mazzoli. Bruce Brubaker has performed Mozart with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Brahms on the BBC. He plays music by Philip Glass throughout the world. He is frequent performer at New York’s nightclub Le Poisson Rouge. He’s been heard at Leipzig’s Gewandhaus and the Hollywood Bowl. He made an acclaimed debut at the Wigmore Hall featuring new music by Mark-Anthony Turnage.

Listen to Bruce Brubaker's recording of Nico Muhly's Drones & Piano

One of the “Oblique Strategies” of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt is: “Repetition is a form of change.” In Philip Glass’ piano music there’s lots of repetition; recurring phrases using simple tonal harmony. Even though not very much changes during such music, the subtly “recentered” experience of the hearer may offer a sort of “development,” as the repeated material is encountered anew. This sense comes from the listener, more than from the written music. It is non-authoritarian art.

The kind of two-against-three rhythm that begins Mad Rush by Glass, recalls piano music by Robert Schumann or Brahms. This part of the music could be a nineteenth-century, middle-of-the-keyboard, character piece, except for all the repetition. This can be understood as appropriation — not literal borrowing, but stylistic, textural approximation of something familiar, something old.

When he was 20, Nico Muhly was commissioned to write Music in Transition for Bruce Brubaker. Later, Brubaker and Muhly created a performance piece involving electronic commentaries and “graffiti” overlaid on live performances of piano sonatas by Haydn. In Muhly’s new piece Drones & Piano, fragments of Haydn, as well as lexia from John Adams’ Phrygian Gates, Janáček, and the now electrified drones of William Duckworth’s Time Curve Preludes all appear, along with the Eighth Hymn by Thomas Tallis!

Muhly’s projects range wide. He wrote the score for the film The Reader. His new opera for the Metropolitan Opera and the English National Opera, Two Boys was heard in London in 2011 and will be performed in New York at the Met during the 2013-2014 season. He frequently collaborates with Björk, Anthony and the Johnsons, choreographer Benjamin Millepied, Grizzly Bear, Jónsi, Usher, and Dirty Projectors.

In Alvin Curran’s piano piece Hope Street Tunnel Blues III, none of the hundreds of highly repetitive eighth-notes is abbreviated, everything is written out. In the piece, a bent A-flat major-minor chord extends for about ten minutes. Eventually, the harmony changes and that change is a strong seismic shift. The physical action necessary to make the music is significant. Hope Street Tunnel Blues III might be allied to recent interest in “extreme sports.” For the performer, playing this very fast, repetitive music may cause considerable physical pain, like running a marathon. Perhaps physical actions are the music, as much as the sounds? It’s struggle and it’s ritual. Intense awareness of an ongoing physical task comprised of many quick gestures in time, is juxtaposed with harmonic material that for long periods seems not to move.

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