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I have a piano concert tonight. It’s a solo concert, and it’s also a CD release – for an album that was recorded at another solo concert a few years ago. These events are a little out of the ordinary, and I don’t do them often – but I’ve done a number of them over the past decade and I think it’s worth saying a little bit about them here.
The unusual thing about these concerts is that I have essentially no idea what I will do before I take the stage. They are completely improvised. I literally walk out on stage, sit down at the piano and look for a friendly-looking note (or chord) to start out with. Generally I am in an acute state of concentration for the first few moments, and whatever comes out as the first ‘idea’ becomes the motive or theme for everything that follows. Another way to look at it: the first few notes are the crystal around which the rest of the music forms.
It’s really a kind of leap into the unknown, a combination of faith and abandon, an act of trust that I will be able to summon the muse and be clear enough, ‘in the moment’ enough to allow something to come through. The intimate, stripped-down setting (just me and a piano) also helps put me into a meditative space, and from this space surprising things can emerge.
I should stress that this is very different than just sitting and playing freely for myself. It is a concert setting, there is an audience, and I am convinced that the presence and attention and energy they bring is essential to the experience, and to the music that is created in the process. I am frequently quite surprised at what forms this takes – often I have ‘looking-over-my-own-shoulder’ moments where I watch my hands and listen and think, hmm, that’s odd, I’m pretty sure I don’t know how to do that; in any case, I have never played anything like it before.
The CD that I am ‘releasing’ tonight is a document of a particularly special concert – my first such performance on European soil, here in Berlin in 2006. I have made a number of these albums before (continuum:one, the first in the series; The Broken Saints Concert, inspired by and based on themes from my soundtrack to the motion comic epic of the same name; and The Cathedral Concert, performed in Montreal’s Christ Church Cathedral in 2004) and the process has always involved some editing – partly for length, partly to remove background noises or passages that seemed to detract from, rather than contribute to, the flow. In this case I have decided to release the whole concert – every note that was played, complete and unabridged, unvarnished, warts-and-all…
So, wish me luck… it’ll be an interesting adventure, anyway. I will be filming and will try to cobble together a kind of highlights-reel for presentation online, as well as the audio recording. So if you can’t make it in person, stay tuned for the post-game wrap-up…
I should apologize that this is my first entry in some while. The project that will be documented here, the really big cliff I’m standing on the edge of, has already presented enormous challenges for me that have been very demanding over the last few weeks, as I move towards project ‘launch’. Intrepid readers will likely have figured out by now what this site is really all about, and the next installment, in the next few days, will lay it out specifically. Watch this space!!!
- tobias
