Last night the fourth annual season of the San Francisco International Piano Festival ventured out onto the “bleeding edge” with a program entitled #45miniatures Project: A Musical Protest. The program was the result of a “Call for Scores” initiated by pianist Nicholas Phillips and distributed through Facebook. The idea behind the invitation was that “composers were welcome to use anything related to our 45th President (tweets, speeches, etc.) as source material to create a miniature, or small collection of miniatures, for solo piano. These serve as commentary on, or reaction to, words, attitudes, policies, and general behavior that they find amusing, unacceptable, confusing, disturbing, and so on.” Last night Phillips played sixteen of the scores he had harvested in a live-streamed performance, whose video content has now been saved on a YouTube Web page. I suspect that the coincidence of this performance with last night’s Republican National Convention was entirely accidental, but there is no doubt that it was fortuitous.
One of Nicholas Phillips’ pre-recorded (and subtitled) selections (screen shot from the video being discussed)
It is hard to keep track of an hour’s worth of sixteen compositions, each distinctively unique in its own way, on the basis of a single viewing. Thus, I would like to begin by praising Phillips for producing one of the best conceived videos I have encountered since video-streaming became the most viable alternative to concert-going. Rather than a “live broadcast” of Phillips seated at a piano bouncing from one selection to the next, lounge-lizard style, Phillips pre-recorded the sixteen pieces on his program. This allowed him the flexibility to make sure he was representing each composition to the best of his abilities. Furthermore, each recording was post-processed to display the name of the composer and the title of the composition as a subtitle. Phillips still gave brief introductions for each of these videos, basically summarizing the intentions behind each composer; but those subtitles made sure that viewers were given a clear account of composer names and composition titles.
I must confess that only one of the composers was familiar to me. “Tweets of Orange Fear” was composed by Mark Mellits, but I have not yet heard enough to his music to determine whether his contribution was typical of his other work. The greater challenge for Phillips was presenting premiere performances of sixteen compositions without any “interventions of past familiarity.” For the most part, each work established its own unique identity. Nevertheless, I realized that cognitive fatigue was beginning to set in after about 45 minutes (an appropriate number, under the circumstances). However, persevering through the entire program to the final offering was not an undue strain, due to
both the style and the rhetoric across those sixteen selections. Ethan Wickman’s “Through a Glass, Darkly” was so intricately conceived that the second half consisted of the first half played in reverse, a technique best associated with the interlude music in the second act of Alban Berg’s Lulu. No one would compare the new work with Berg, but the idea of fashioning such a sophisticated structure to evoke a President who seems to free-associate his speech from one word to the next carried a distinctive irony. The only real disappointment was Brendan Kinsella’s “SAD!,” which required Phillips to deliver a text while playing; and the spoken account was barely audible.
Personally, I hope that Phillips will take the time to update the text description on his YouTube page. I, for one, would be interested in revisiting selections from the collection. The pieces are too short to be given separate videos. However, if Phillips were to provide a “table of contents” with the time-code of the beginning of each piece, he would allow those that enjoyed his project to return to it with a little more guidance through the entire hour of content.
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