My new album on Urlicht Audiovisual is called Invisible Colors after Brian Ferneyhough’s piece Unsichtbare Farben. If you google the words “unsichtbare farben”, you’ll get websites of German companies selling glow-in-the-dark paint. I applied some photo filters to the album cover to give the picture that sort of effect.

The album features five pieces by three composers: Ferneyhough, Elliott Carter and Stefan Wolpe.

In my musical explorations, I try to go as far as I can with each musical idea or sound so that I understand and communicate its varied aspects. Ferneyhough’s pieces often involve such complex, dense textures and rhythms that performers, myself included, flail at playing them and this becomes a lot of the drama of the piece. I feel the qualities of hyperactivity and overload in much of his music reflect the modern state of the world, with its multi-layered barrage of information, internet data, and connections.

While I musically enjoy that barrage and effort toward coping, I became fascinated with his unusually spare, linear, distilled piece Unsichtbare Farben, which offers an opportunity to fully hear all the expressive phrases, notes, and harmonies. I gave it a lot of care in playing a meticulous rendition. [See also his program note, which I found months after the album’s release.]  Exploring it in this way, I approached the even more intricate Intermedio alla ciaconna in a similarly patient, inquisitive vein.