Over phone, text, and Zoom, a Philly pianist and LA composer make new music
For Dynasty Battles and Ted Hearne, the pandemic and technology reshaped the conversation between composer and performer.
Feeling isolated and stymied during the pandemic, Philadelphia pianist Dynasty Battles and Los Angeles composer Ted Hearne hatched a project to work on a composition together. They passed ideas back and forth long distance and came up with Study Buddy — a short, energetic piano work that Battles filmed and which is now making the rounds on social media.
Composers have often written for the specific qualities of particular performers and with their advice : Brahms and violinist Joseph Joachim, Shostakovich and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, Luciano Berio and mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian.
For Battles and Hearne, the pandemic and technology shaped the traditional conversation between composer and performer. They exchanged ideas via texts, phone calls, emails, Zoom, and in person.
Here, in an edited Q&A, they talk about how the new work, filmed at Cunningham Piano Company in Germantown by Four/Ten Media, came to be.
How did you two meet, and how did the idea for this ‘Study Buddy’ emerge?
Hearne: We met in 2018 in London, where Dynasty was playing with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and I was there on tour with them, because they were doing a piece of mine, and he was performing on the same performance in a really amazing piece by Julius Eastman. We hit it off pretty quick and shared a ride back to the airport out of town and got started talking about music then.
Battles: The original goal was for Ted to compose a piano concerto for me, but the pandemic followed shortly after, therefore we wanted an outlet, being that everything was shut down. So Ted decided to write a short piece that’s good enough for video to capture people’s attention, which is how Study Buddy was created. Which is why it has really cool crossovers. The piece doesn’t demand those crossovers, technically, but it’s also aesthetically cool.
In piano parlance, what is a ‘crossover?’
Battles: A crossover is when you cross one hand over the other to play at the opposite end of the keyboard.
Hearne: The piece is about this conversation that’s happening with the player and the instrument. I wanted to have Dynasty travel all over the keyboard in the course of this short little piece. Sometimes one hand is in charge of one musical idea in one portion of the keyboard, and then the other hand is free to move both to the top and to the bottom, thus the crossovers.
Did you collaborate in the writing process?
Hearne: Dynasty was able to record himself playing in Philly, and I’d come up with an idea and send him a little sketch and he could record something and send it back. It was a little frustrating because we were just ready to go and were going to start working together in person and then the pandemic hit. But that just helped us figure out a new path, and then we ended up making this video piece, which I don’t think would have happened otherwise.
Dynasty, what was it about Ted’s music that made you want him write for you?
Battles: When I hear Ted’s music, I just don’t hear classical, I don’t hear rock, I don’t hear hip hop. I like how Ted takes different ideas from different genres, different cultures, and fuses them together. And that’s what I appreciate about Ted, because it reminds me of my background of when I grew up listening to different kinds of music.
Hearne: The piece the LA Phil was playing is called Law of Mosaics, a string orchestra piece, that was on the same concert as Dynasty was playing. And in that piece, some of it is made up of chunks of preexisting classical music that is cut and pasted into unexpected places, unexpected sequences. He really responded to that. That was the first conversation we had.
Battles: That was my introduction to you. I’m glad I stayed for that second half [of the concert]. And I remember on the ride that we shared back to the airport you talked about Kendrick Lamar winning the Pulitzer Prize and your thoughts behind that were so amazing, to support a person who wasn’t — let’s just call him nonclassical. I really knew you were onto something, that I had to work with you.
‘Study Buddy’ comes across as an etude, an exercise, but there’s something more going on. What’s the message of the piece?
Hearne: It does feel like an etude in the sense that it’s focused on rhythm and it’s a short, flashy piece. It should be a fun piece to hear at the end of a concert. There’s a musical conversation going on in it that speaks to the conversation that I’ve learned getting to know Dynasty and his background as a musician. For me, the conversation is happening between the spiky rhythmic music in the piece and this kind of tweaked Romantic music. It’s like sped-up Rachmaninoff. The piece is constructed so that it goes back and forth between these two different types of music. For me that’s getting to know Dynasty as a player. The first thing I heard him play was this work by Chopin, and he really got into the expressive Romantic core of that music in a way I wanted to honor.
Dynasty, in one of our previous conversations, you might have mentioned that there’s something of the emotion of the pandemic era in this piece?
Battles: Definitely. Especially in our recording session. The way that Ted described it to me before was Romanticism in a blender. I feel a layer of emotions when playing that piece. There were people who were going through so much push and pull, including myself, and some of those interruptions in those beautiful sections — it could be, for example, somebody receiving really good news, just to have bad news that would follow it. Things were so uncertain during those times. I think Ted captured the wave of the pandemic in that piece.
Are there historical precedents for this way of working between performer and composer that you were conscious of during the process?
Hearne: I take my collaborations and my collaborators very seriously. But I haven’t worked as much with those who are really coming from the classical music space. After hearing Dynasty’s Dame Myra Hess concert [the Chicago concert series], the way you played that recital, I was really like, “I am dealing with a giant here.” That felt like I was engaging in some sort of long tradition of composer-performer collaboration. That’s when I began thinking that it would be fun to write a book of etudes for you, it would be fun to write a concerto for you.
Where do things stand with the as-yet-unwritten piano concerto?
Hearne: We need someone who would like to commission us to write it. Do you know anyone?
Battles: If you’re out there, we want you. We want to do the concerto.
Hear “Study Buddy” at https://youtu.be/6B_8H-wCVL4