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Road trips always make me think. Tomorrow morning I'm on my way back to Pittsburgh, for the beginning of my second season with the opera there. In thinking about the movement of harp and bags a couple of hundred miles and four tolls out of Brooklyn, it also makes me contemplate what's on the horizon, what new repertoire to learn, what gigs to go after, and what's happened in the last three weeks in the relative stability of the same bed in New York. Recently, I've been thinking a lot about what it means to play 'new' music, and the various pros and cons that come along with it.

Our most recent show, at the Tank in midtown, (thanks to all who came out on a rainy, nasty night! Playing is much more fun when there are bodies and minds to play to!) had three new works on it, which is a lot of music to premier at the same time. On the other half of the program were pieces that we've played before, including a solo harp piece entitled "Polvere et Ombra" by Suzanne Farrin. It's been an enlightening experience to work on this piece, as I've had a lot of direct access to Suzanne herself.

As a performer, access to a composer is invaluable. If the composer is still alive, I feel like it's our duty as musicians to replicate the intent of the composer as closely as possible. This doesn't eradicate the idea of expression or musicality, but serves as a way to break through a score with clarity. Imagine, the composer, dedicated, by whatever process, to imperfectly, inevitably, transfer sound onto paper. From paper to the brain of the performer, to the fingers of the performer, a piece must make leaps away from the original intent of the composer. To have both a verbal and auditory aid in learning a piece, in the form of composer, hopefully makes this loss much smaller.

I've been around Suzanne twice, now, when she has given talks about this particular piece. Each time, something new about the discussion of her compositional process has made my reading of the piece much deeper. It's up for debate whether this makes any difference in my performance, but I would hope that some of it came through.

I was reminded about the idea of process and compositional intent this morning, in reading the Sunday paper (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/movies/13kehr.html?ref=arts). What most struck me about this article was the idea of Von Trier's improvisatory process even at the point when he is ready to interact with actors. Because of the way I work, it's much more comforting to have a composer who has thought through the piece on the paper fully before the process with the performer begins.