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RedLine (piano) recording session

March 31, 2006

Last Monday, my dear friend Zoe Browder and I met at the Juilliard recording studio to finally record RedLine for piano. I wrote this piece at her request back at the end of 1999 (the actual date of completion on the piece is December 31st, 1999), and she premiered it about a year later. She’s played it a few times since, including at a recent BargeMusic concert in Brooklyn, but we’d never managed to schedule and execute a recording session for the piece until now.

So, Monday afternoon, our friendly recording engineer, Yvonne (who’s also a great gal) set us up:

We tried several different mic positions because the low end of this piano kept overpowering the mid-range, which is unusual, and given the prominent low-register pounding this piece requires, we had to adapt and adjust. I think we finally hit on a good mic placement and room ambience combination, and over the course of the next two hours, Zoe played until her arms came off:

I was enlisted to turn pages, which I found stressful:

I think we got some good takes on disk, though, and I’ll edit it down soon. It will have to wait, though – the next three weeks I will be in seclusion finishing “Alchemy in Silent Spaces” for the Juilliard Orchestra’s premiere in May…

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