News: Liner Notes (WER CD 6649 2)

Daring to Be New

Ensembles that play only new music are plentiful these days, but soloists who play recitals devoted entirely to newly commissioned works are scarce enough to seem heroic or eccentric, or perhaps a bit of both. Guy Livingston, an American pianist who lives in Paris, has assembled a program of recent works that may be quirky enough to appeal to listeners who have doubts about modern musical language. --The New York Times, January 21st, 2000, from “Daring to be New” by Allan Kozinn

Don’t Panic

In order to assemble this unexpected program, I worked over the course of three years with performers, copyright experts, lawyers, recording engineers, dozens of concert halls, a succession of long-suffering managers and friends, and best of all, almost a hundred composers. To my astonishment, what I imagined as an avant-garde statement on reckless speed of contemporary life has turned into a performance and cd with a large and enthusiastic audience. So much the better! I seem to have become an art collector, assembling miniature pictures of composer’s thoughts, efforts and experiments, and arranging in each concert and on cd (not without difficulty) just the right juxtaposition of colors and styles. The composers responded with energy and verve, pushing the envelope or gilding the lily...Many, like me, are fascinated by the miniature, be it wild or traditional. After all, a minute is a long time. Even in Mahler, there is scope in sixty seconds for development, drama, anguish, and of course, humor. This is a disc that paints the world in sometimes surprising ways, so don’t panic: duration is entirely relative. --Guy Livingston

on Microforms

I find microforms a very viable path. I was also very curious to see how the individuality of these pieces -- or perhaps “components” is a better term -- would come across in the performance. I thought a lot about cultural models like cartoons or graffiti -- forms that scrawl across a limited space and a limited time. Apart from this, the fight was to constantly scale down and to keep paring phrases away. I ended up building Lilliputian phrases from tiny themes less than a second long. --Isak Goldschneider, composer

"A Lot Can Happen in a Minute"

Little did I suspect, in 1995, when I wrote “Speed Study 1,” a one-minute palindromic workout for American piano virtuoso Guy Livingston, that it would become the first of a set of sixty such works by sixty different composers. Not that the idea of a collection of short fixed-duration pieces was particularly new: “Minute Waltz” aside, Guy was inspired by Webern, MTV, John Zorn, Elliott Sharp’s “State of the Union” project, and above-all the Ensemble Aleph’s “Arrêts Fréquents” cycle. But “Sixty Seconds” is neither place-specific (as was Sharp’s work, with its NY Downtown artist roster) nor style-specific (Aleph’s solidly “avant garde” line-up). From New Complexity (Josh Cody’s fearsomely difficult “Two-Chord Warp”) to Newt Hinton (the slightly-skewed sentimentality of “Nakano-ku”), from neoclassicism to neo-romanticism, from neo-ragtime to neo-klezmer, dazzling pastiche, jazz-inflected sophistication or minimalism, this is a fascinating aerial photo of the world of new piano music at the dawn of the Third Millennium. It’s a landscape where eighteen countries are represented, and where the sixty composers responded to the one-minute challenge in strikingly different ways. To call these works “miniatures” would be demeaning - as Henry Moore observed, there is a crucial difference between ‘size’ and ‘scale.’ Some composers chose to add live electronics or percussion, while others sought to push the pianist’s stamina to the limit or had him scrabble around inside the instrument or even simultaneously read a text. Many works were painstakingly composed, others quickly (Louis Andriessen wrote his during intermission on the back of an envelope...). Some composers (Pierre Boulez, Luc Ferrari) refused point blank. To complete his program, Livingston organized a competition through Paris Transatlantic Magazine, which unearthed the compositional talent of Ketzel (whose piece was selected, I might add, for its purely musical merit, not in any way because Ketzel happens to be a cat). Livingston doesn’t let the rules of the game get in the way of the music: The overriding impression of a complete playthrough of these sixty works is one of exhausted jubilation. This is neither dry, dusty academicism nor flashy hip superficiality, but a joyful expression of creativity--in all its diverse forms--and humanity. These days MTV can spew out enough junk in one minute to ruin your whole day; and stock market jitters and viruses flit across the world in seconds. Today more than ever before, lots can happen in a minute. Here are sixty of them to savor. --Dan Warburton is a composer and pianist and writes for The Wire, Signal to Noise and Pulse Magazine.

Texts and Translations

Database of Desire (track 7)
by James Baiye, voice of Joana Preiss

Toute la journée je regardais par dessus mon épaule, J’attendais quelqu’un, ou quelque chose, mais je ne sais pas qui.
Quand l’avion atterri à Téhéran, j’avais juré avoir vu quelqu’un qui portait un pardessus et un chapeau mou qui nous observait. J’ai remis le jumelles dans l’étui, et je l’ai ajouté mentalement... au fichier informatique de la paranoïa.
Malgré le chapeau, j’ai cru reconnaître la belle Shivaïa, ça ne pouvait être qu’elle...dans le fichier informatique du désir.
Je chantais à New York cette nuit, et à deux heures vingt trois du matin, perdu dans un brouillard enfumé de cigares bon marché j’apercevais seulement la main de Vladimir, une main désincarné et élégante, éclairée dans la lumière jaunâtre du bar. Nous étions...dans le fichier informatique de données perdues.

All day long I was looking over my shoulder, waiting for someone, or something, I don’t know whom.
When the plane landed in Teheran, I could have sworn I saw someone in a trenchcoat and fedora following us. I put the binoculars back in their case and added it mentally ...to the database of paranoia.
Despite the hat, I thought I’d recognized the beautiful Shivaïa, it could only have been her... in the database of desire.
I was singing in New York that night, and at 2:23 am, lost in the smoke of cheap cigars, I could just make out Vladimir’s solitary and elegant hand, visible in the yellowish light of the bar. We were... in the database of wrong answers.

Hämmerklavier XI (track 26)
"what if 1 composer from 1 country wrote 60 pieces under a second for solo piano?"
text and music by Moritz Eggert

1) Prologue; 2) Prelude; 3) Overture; 4) Twinkle; 5) Fishy; 6) Song ; 7) Uprising; 8) Homage à Glenn Miller; 9) Downfall; 10) Empty; 11) Memories; 12) Love Story; 13) Soldiers Tale; 14) 1-Second Waltz; 15) All Good Things; 16) Aria; 17) Eroica; 18) Galop; 19) Elegia; 20) Dusk; 21) Curiosity killed the cat; 22) Finnegan Wakes; 23) Dawn; 24) Tombeau; 25) La Traviata; 26) Ohne Sohne; 27) Serenade; 28) Requiem; 29) Sixty Notes per Second; 30) Concerto Grosso; 31) 1"; 32) Cadenza; 33) Civilization; 34) Advanced Civilization; 35) Hymn; 36) Study ; 37) Easy Rider; 38) Absolutely; 39) Fragment; 40) Poème; 41) Interlude; 42) Peep Show ; 43) Erwartung; 44) Dialogue; 45) Erfüllung; 46) Forget Me Not; 47) Forced Laugh; 48) Pattern; 49) Far Out; 50) Toccata; 51) Mystic; 52) Scherzo; 53) Pastorale; 54) Jeux; 55) Rondo; 56) Variations; 57) Les Adieux; 58) Finale; 59) Epilogue; 60) Private Reception.

Nakano-ku (à S.D.) (track 37)
music by Chopin, text by Baudellaire????, arranged by Newt Hinton

“Now you are walking in Paris, all alone among the crowd, the herds of busses roaring all around you...”

Theft (or; one minute less) (track 60)
by Lansing McLoskey

“Theft. The funny thing about life is that it’s temporary, that is to say, temporary in the “temporal” sense of the word, meaning that all living things and all that we do are subject to the precepts and affect of time. If you live an average lifespan and escape such non-time-related hazards as fire, wolves, cancer, steep precipices, Mack trucks and bolts of lightening, you can count on somewhere in the vicinity of thirty-million minutes for you to use as you see fit according to your free will and constraints that are imposed upon you by environmental, health, economic, and political boundaries. Though this may sound more than sufficient, consider that the first nine million are spent learning to simply function and trying to figure out what your priorities are. Thirteen million of them are spent sleeping and another five million or so eating in order to obtain the energy needed to deal with the little remaining time. Of course in order to buy all this food and protect yourself from the wolves and lightening, you’ll spend some nine million working by the sweat of your brow. Untold millions are spent enduring uninteresting conversations, watching bad TV shows and doing things that you don’t like."
"You ever feel like someone just stole a minute of your life?”

Credits

Recorded and engineered by Joël Perot in Paris, June 1999. FAZIOLI piano. This disc is dedicated to Galina Belenky. Thanks to Leonardo Boccaccio, Bernadette Collette, the Ensemble Aleph, Morna, Monica, and Neale McGoldrick, Philip and Lona Livingston, Bradley K. Edmister, Maria Sperling, Stephie Büttrich, Jean-Louis and Hélène Tournigand, the Gaudeamus Foundation, The Newts, Sullivan and Cromwell, and to all the composers. Special thanks to Joana Preiss, who incarnates the sexiness of desire in track 7. “A 60-Second Ballet for Chickens” copyright 2000 by Edward B. Marks Music Company and Bolcom Music. Used by Permission.

Biography

Pianist Guy Livingston holds degrees from Yale University and the New England Conservatory of Music, where he worked with, among others, composer John Cage and pianist Stephen Drury. In 1992 Guy moved to Paris for piano study with Professor Claude Helffer and then completed a post-graduate degree at the Royal Conservatory of the Netherlands.
In recent seasons, Mr. Livingston has appeared at Lincoln Center, the Knitting Factory, De IJsbreker, the Louvre, the American Academy in Rome, and in Russia, Italy, Poland, Germany, and South Africa. He has performed at the festivals of Octobre-Normandie, MusicaVoix, and Musiques Actions (France), as well as in concerto appearances with the Orchestre de La Gironde and the Nederlands KammerOrkest.
Prizes and awards include: The Frank Huntington Beebe Scholarship, Fifth Prize at the 1995 Gaudeamus Interpreters Competition in Holland, the Harriet Hale Woolley Scholarship for study in Paris, finalist at the Sitges-Barcelona Concorso de Piano Segolo XX, semi-finalist at the 1998 Orléans International Piano Competition, and third prize at the 1996 Nuova Consonanza Piano Competition, Pescara, Italy. Guy was recently awarded a "Star of the Week" for his contribution to Munich cultural life. The Münchner Merkur wrote: “Rarely is contemporary music as varied, rich and captivating.”
Guy Livingston is also the presiding secretary of Les Amis de George Antheil, and has written extensively on Antheil, as well as performing numerous premieres of the futurist composer’s music.
Livingston is represented in North America by Omicron Artist Management, and also appears on the Konsequenza record label in Italy.

More Information about 60 Seconds:

www.parisTransatlantic.com/sixty (including biographies for each composer, press information, and upcoming performances)

Ne paniquez pas!

Aujourd'hui les ensembles qui se spécialisent dans la musique contemporaine sont nombreux, mais les solistes qui se consacrent aux programmes entièrement commandés sont suffisamment rares pour sembler héroïques ou un peu bizarres, peut-être les deux. Guy Livingston, pianiste américain résident à Paris, a mis en place un programme de compositions récentes assez excentrique pour plaire à ceux qui ont encore des doutes sur la musique contemporaine et sur son langage.
-The New York Times, 21 janvier 2000, "Daring to be New" par Allan Kozinn

les micro-formes

Guy Livingston

Notes

Theft (traduction)

Critiques

Les mots "NE PANIQUEZ PAS" étaient affichés en grand sur le mur avant ce concert fort agréable. Paniquer? Pas du tout.. Livingston sautait d'un univers musical à un autre avec une dextérité prodigieuse. Le programme entier était comme un kaléidoscope de styles musicaux actuels.

Tokyo, Amsterdam, Californie, Istanbul.. voici le travail de soixante jeunes compositeurs de dix-huit pays -- des morceaux pour piano ne dépassant pas une minute; un microcosme de la musique la plus récente. La musique contemporaine est rarement aussi multidimensionnelle, riche et passionnante.

Alphabetical Composer Index

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