Milton Babbitt – About Time

Thomas Feng, piano

recorded March 3, 2022
special thanks to Ryan McCullough and Andrew Zhou

Milton Babbitt – Partitions

0:00 – I.
5:00 – II.

Thomas Feng, piano

I met Eve in 2017 at a festival in Vermont, where she was a faculty composer. We became fast friends, and have collaborated frequently and fruitfully over the years since. I have always adored the meeting in Eve’s music of elegant structural concepts and processes (be they serial, post-minimal, or otherwise) with a heartfelt lyricism; I find her music witty, playful, ecstatic, nostalgic – sometimes all at once.

Unearthly Booty coalesced from multiple strands of inspiration. One summer, Eve took me walking through the woods of Vermont, and we came across a patch of ghostly white flowers, which we later learned were called “ghost pipes”. They are plants, but don’t have chlorophyll and can’t photosynthesize, feeding parasitically instead on fungi. During the pandemic, Eve dove deeply into the work of Emily Dickinson, and found a letter in which Dickinson described picking a bunch of ghost pipes as a child – an ‘unearthly booty’.

Eve and I also both share an affection for the music and personage of Milton Babbitt, with whom she studied as an undergraduate at Princeton. She once told me that my embrace of Babbitt struck her as like I was “eating him”, and thought to write me a piano piece in which Babbitt’s music would be decomposed and metabolized. As a result, Unearthly Booty is a two-movement fantasy on a brief cello piece Babbitt wrote for her in 1978 ("Eppesithalamium").

The first movement traces and retraces the rhythmic and melodic contours of Babbitt’s original piece, as if building it up bit by bit, in increasingly elaborate repetitions, before disassembling it once again. Moments of elegance leaven the pointillistic texture, evoking Babbitt’s own sly (musical and personal) charm.

This swift, chatty banter gives way to singing and dancing in the second movement. Eve takes the initial material increasingly afield: a chorale, a moto perpetuo, a reverie – and finally a cryptic wink.

Eve Beglarian – Unearthly Booty

Ambient piece comprised mainly of manipulated music box and guitar.

Danaïd

Night Psalm (2009)
by Eve Beglarian (evbvd.com, soundcloud.com/evbvd)

Thomas Feng, piano
July 2018

Eve Beglarian – Night Psalm

Miranda's Kiss (1988)
for solo piano
by Eve Beglarian (evbvd.com, @evbvd)

Thomas Feng, piano
recorded live, 2/1/2019, at Manhattan School of Music

***
Miranda is a signing chimpanzee James Merrill meets early on in his visionary trilogy, The Changing Light at Sandover.

Miranda’s Kiss is both a programmatic piece describing their meeting (Miranda’s exuberant but hesitant approach, and their kiss, which like most first kisses, wavers between concentrating on the experience itself and one’s excitedly nervous awareness: Yes! I am (finally) kissing her!) and also an evocation of Merrill’s merging of two worlds:

"Between one floating realm unseen powers rule
(Rod upon mild silver rod, like meter
Broken in fleet cahoots with subject matter)
And one we feel is ours, and call the real,

The flat distinction of Miranda’s kiss
Floods both. No longer, as in bad old pre-
Ephraim days, do I naively pray
For the remission of their synthesis."

Miranda’s Kiss was written for and premiered by Tony de Mare. It was begun at the Leighton Artist Colony in Banff, Alberta and completed in New York City.

– Eve Beglarian

Eve Beglarian – Miranda's Kiss (LIVE)

Ringtone #1

The text for Making Hey is a gratuitously excellent piece of anonymous work that arrived in an email offering to increase my penis size or refinance my mortgage. I no longer remember which, since I lack both. 

I have set the text (unchanged except for punctuation) to an adaptation of a two-piano piece called Making Hay, which I wrote in 1980 and dedicated to my teacher, JK Randall, at that time. This new piece starts out with the same student piece, but gradually clarifies and simplifies it in response to the bass and percussion line I have added all these years later.

The bass and percussion are an adaptation of a Gnawa performance I’ve totally fallen in love with. You can listen to it at this Youtube link:
https://youtu.be/wxvI_lao_U0

Making Hey

The Bus Driver Didn't Change His Mind  - Eve Beglarian

Performed: Concept Ensemble
Clarinets: Jack Lundie-Jenkins
Piano: Crystal Smith
Percussion: Joyce To
Electric Guitar - Matthew Teakle
Cello - Eugenie Puskarz-Thomas
Elias Kokkoris - Bass

Recording: Sam Hogg, Brayden Clark
Post Production: Sam Hogg

Making Hey

evbvd

Recent comments

stephen rathe

Related tracks