Orange Mountain to Release New Dinnerstein

This coming Friday, Orange Mountain Music, which describes itself on its home page as “a record company created to serve the fans, aficionados and academics studying the music of Philip Glass,” will release the latest solo album of pianist Simone Dinnerstein. The title of the album is Undersong; and Dinnerstein justifies her selection of that word as follows: “Undersong is an archaic term for a song with a refrain, and to me it also suggests a hidden text. Glass, Schumann, Couperin and Satie all seem to be attempting to find what they want to say through repetition, as though their constant change and recycling will focus the ear and the mind.” As usual, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders of this new release.

The single score page for Erik Satie’s “Vexations” (uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Sonia y natalia, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

I would say that situating Glass to rub shoulders with the likes of Erik Satie, Robert Schumann, and François Couperin is a bold move. Of the three, Satie is probably the one that comes closest to Glass in exploring provocative approaches to repetition. Even before Glass was born, Satie had set a very high bar with “Vexations.” This piece is based on a thirteen-beat theme presented in two different voicing arrangements, along with text instructions that those 26 beats are to be played 840 times without interruption. Glass never went to such an extreme (even if some of his early compositions feel that way)! Both Schumann and Couperin also knew how to work with a refrain-based structure, but neither of them pushed repetition to Glass-level limits.

What strikes me as interesting is that, as I become more familiar with Glass’ approaches to expressiveness, I find myself less interested in “repetition in the small” and more in the idea of an overall rhetorical framework. Dinnerstein’s selection on this album is “Mad Rush;” and it involves a strict alternation between an almost motionless quietude and the “mad rush” motif. Since both of these sections are repeated, it would be unfair to call one the “refrain” and the other a “stanza.” It might even be preferable to call “Mad Rush” a musical realization of the dialectical method!

Nevertheless, whether or not there is any agenda to this album, I have to say that I am almost always drawn to the focused precision of Dinnerstein’s keyboard technique. Readers may recall that, in December of 2020, I was blown away by a streamed performance in the Live from Columbia concert series during which, through skilled camera work, my attention was divided between detailed views of the keyboard technique and broader images that included the Hudson River skyline featuring both Riverside Church and Grant’s Tomb. Would Undersong benefit from a similarly richly-streamed account of both the music and the music-making venue?