Riley Nicholson Live-Streams from C4NM

This afternoon D. Riley Nicholson, Project Manager at the Center for New Music (C4NM), presented a solo piano recital which was live-streamed through YouTube and is now available for subsequent viewing. The title of his program was Influences; and, true to that title, he surveyed the influences of four key composers. He then concluded with the world premiere of his recent solo composition, “Without,” suggesting that the short movements of this ten-minute piece reflected the influences of the compositions he had just played.

Those past influences constituted what statisticians would call a “bimodal distribution” along the time line. (They could also be called two “clustered pairs.”) The earliest influence came from Erik Satie from a set of four preludes composed between 1888 and 1892 and given the title Quatre prélude posthumes. The “posthumous” adjective was typical Satie humor, since the preludes were written long before his death in 1925. The last two were called preludes for the Nazarene, and Nicholson played the second of these. This was followed by “A pied” (on foot), the first of the ten short pieces in Francis Poulenc’s Promenades collection, composed in 1921 and probably reflecting the composer’s familiarity with Satie’s music. Nicholson’s influences then leap into the second half of the twentieth century with two selections from Hans Otte’s Das Buch der Klänge (the book of sounds), composed between 1979 and 1982. Otte shares this “cluster” with Meredith Monk, whose “Railroad (Travel Song)” was composed in 1981.

Each of these offerings had its own distinctive approach to quietude, what John Cage sometimes referred to as a calming of the mind. There was a certain deadpan quality to Nicholson’s interpretations, but this amounted to making good the intention of letting the voice of each piece speak for itself. The brevity of each of these offerings encouraged a focus of attention that dwelled more on the emerging sonorities than on any conventional wisdom about themes and harmonic progressions. That almost primal approach to listening then served Nicholson’s performance of “Without” as well as it had served the influences behind that new composition. The result was a thoroughly engaging program, which, when taken in its entirety, transcended many of the expectations one brings to a recital and most of the labels invoked to classify different genres of composition.