This Thursday at 7 PM, the chamber music series at the Columbia Museum of Art hosted by Charles Wadsworth will have its final event of the season. You'll have the chance to hear three of the top performing artists in the United States (Chee-Yun, violin; Andres Diaz, cello; Wendy Chen, piano) collaborate in chamber music performances in the intimate space of the museum's atrium. The concert, which includes Johannes Brahms' luscious C Major Trio, will be MC'd as always by the inimitable Wadsworth, who was recently recognized by a special Verner Award from the South Carolina Arts Commission.

If you didn't catch it during its run at the Columbiana Grande cinemas recently, I strongly urge you to go to the Nickelodeon theatre this week to see the documentary, "Why We Fight." It's a tremendously thought-provoking film, using as its starting point the remarkable farewell address delivered by President Eisenhower in January 1961 in which he famously warned against the rise of the "military-industrial complex." (I was born 13 days before his speech.) Yes, the film addresses 9/11, the Iraq War, and all the controversial issues therein, but connects it all to a much wider historical context. Though it has an unmistakeable point of view, it lets Richard Perle and William Kristol, among others, have their say as well. Ultimately this film is much more powerful than "Fahrenheit 9/11," in that it's considerably more sober-minded, and not merely red meat thrown to the converted (ha!--how's that for mixing metaphors?). The New York City cop whose story is at the heart of the film, comes across as a kind of American Everyman---a man whose patriotism, love of country, and belief in tradition is second to none, but whose simple expectation of honesty from his leaders is confounded. His disbelief is etched across his face and rendered by the very sound of his voice.

"Why We Fight" is running Tuesday through Thursday this week at the Nick.

They've had lovely spring weather this week in Milwaukee, so the fact that our (the group Present Music) rehearsals for Paul Dresher's "The Tyrant" have all been in the evenings has meant that I could still enjoy some of the mild temperatures and clear skies. I first heard Paul Dresher's music the same night I did my first concert with Steve Reich and Musicians, on the old "Horizons" series presented by the NY Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall, in June 1986. We shared the bill with Dresher's ensemble and the electrifying performer Rinde Eckert as they did sections from "Slow Fire." I've been an admirer of Dresher's work ever since.

Dresher's name doesn't always pop up in the first tier when American composers of his generation are discussed; some of that might have to do with the fact that he has been West Coast-based for his entire career, or maybe it's because most of his output is been for theatrical productions, quasi-operas like "Slow Fire," "Ravenshead," or the work we're doing, which is a one-man one-act one-hour opera showcasing the remarkable tenor John Duykers. But I've been involved with enough of Dresher's music to know that he has that most precious of commodities for any composer: a distinctive and unmistakeable voice. That's not to say that his music has stayed static for twenty years. "The Tyrant" finds much of his pulse-based, quasi-minimalist textures employed in the service of a (at times) harshly chromatic harmonic language that suits the text well. Perhaps from his long experience and association with artists like Duykers, Dresher also is quite adept at setting text, also a rare skill these days.

From my piano bench behind most of the action, it's hard to get a total sense of the effect of "The Tyrant." But from what I have perceived so far, Duykers is a powerful actor and there are some startling soundscapes created from the music. Dresher has created an inextricable link in virtually every moment of the work between the text, the action onstage, and the music. The work has been done before this in Seattle and Philadelphia, and critical reaction has been uniformly positive. I wish "The Tyrant" a long reign. [Update posted April 24: review of Milwaukee performance is here.]

Video clip number 1: Thanks to Terry Teachout's blog, I came across this video clip of a 1954 Art Tatum performance on TV. Simply staggering. Talk about your lack of extraneous body motion while playing! Learning some of the written-out transcriptions of Tatum's recorded performances (I often play "Cherokee")  was a big challenge, but not in the ways I expected. The biggest technical difficulty for me was not the speedy runs in the right hand (which usually lie well in the fingers) but the "walking 10ths" in the left hand (not such a feature of this particular clip, though). On close inspection you can see the size of the mitts Tatum had, so those were child's play for him. (For non-pianists, pick any white note on the piano, then count up nine notes to the right to get a sense of the hand span).

Also worth noting for piano students: how little his right hand fingers seem to "work," i.e., rise above the level of the knuckles joining them to the hand. Yet his runs have tremendous clarity. He doesn't use the fingers to generate tone or volume, all that comes from his (admittedly huge) body and arms. His body is still but his arms are fluid, unlocked at the shoulder, elbow, and wrist. Speaking of a still body, another lesson: his time is impeccable, virtually metronomic, yet there's no bobbing of the head, knee-bouncing, or anything of the sort (maybe he's tapping his toes; we can't see on the video). His time is so ingrained, so internalized, that no wasted energy needs to be spent reinforcing it to himself. His body is centered; all movement goes into the production of the music; and as a result, he can hear clearly what he is playing.

Video number 2: a friend recently turned me onto this clip of juggler Chris Bliss' beautiful routine set to music of the Beatles. These are the kinds of things I've always liked to show students (and probably has led more than one colleague to consider me a little, well, unorthodox). But to me the connection between things like juggling and playing piano seems obvious. My teacher, Leon Fleisher, constantly sought to illustrate technical or artistic points by drawing on analogies with phenomena from the natural world, or laws of the physical world. Gravity invariably figured in these analogies. After all, it's fundamental to piano playing, more so I believe than in string or wind playing. When it comes to producing sound, on the piano you're either lifting off against gravity, yielding to it, or seeking to prolong, Jordan-like, that magical moment in-between. If you watch this video of Chris Bliss, you will come away with a greater understanding of the interface between the laws of gravity and the laws of rhythm.

Then, when you shift axis again to the dimension of pitch, you start to realize that the laws of gravity and motion, resistance and release, apply there as well. Then you hear harmonic implications; you feel phrasing as a physical imperative. When you get to that point, you're really cooking.

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