Lockdown Fantasies - Webcast Premiere

Tribeca New Music 2021-22 Festival
Lockdown Fantasies - Webcast Premiere
Music of Neil Rolnick performed by pianist Geoffrey Burleson
Thu Dec 16, 2021 6:00 PM EST - Sun Dec 19, 2021 11:00 PM EST

THIS WEBCAST PREMIERE WILL BE STREAMING FROM 6PM EST THURSDAY DECEMBER 16TH UNTIL 11PM EST SUNDAY DECEMBER 19TH.

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TNM presents the world premiere of Lockdown Fantasies by composer Neil Rolnick, performed by pianist Geoffrey Burleson and Neil Rolnick at Nancy Manocherian's the cell theatre

About the music: I intended to write a different piece. I had elaborate plans for the piece I’d write for pianist Geoffrey Burleson, ways I planned to exploit his brilliant technique and musicality, his willingness to engage with electronics to process the piano. But when I sat down to start writing the piece in March of 2020, there was no way I could follow my carefully laid out musical plans. The pandemic had upended everyone’s plans globally, and I was no exception.

So I threw away my plans, and just wrote. I thought of Geoff’s technical prowess as giving me permission to write whatever I could imagine for the piano, though I did query him about anything I thought might be unplayable. And the electronic parts, all of which are real time processing or looping of the piano, and all of which he controls while playing, seemed to grow organically out of the musical material. I think of the piano and it’s electronic aura as a single enhanced instrument, with the acoustic sounds spawning impossible electronic textures, and then re-emerging with lyrical or percussive or more traditionally contrapuntal playing. The combination is, I think, a little surreal, with echoes and processed notes floating out of acoustic playing, and merging the acoustic and the electronic, the real and the virtual.

The music coalesced into five pieces. At first I called them meditations, but they’re not really meditative. They don’t follow any particular form, each one progresses differently, and each seems to follow its own emotional or gestural threads to their end. They are just what came out when I sat down to write each day of the lockdown. So they’re fantasies. As I spent the long months of 2020-2021’s lockdown, these are the paths my fantasies travelled.