A manila envelope stuffed with $100 bills passed quietly in a Denny’s parking lot isn’t the usual way that new music commissions get funded. But Adam Tendler has never been particularly concerned with concert hall niceties.
The Grammy-nominated pianist made his Bay Area debut at Oakland’s Piedmont Piano Company in 2005 as part of his DIY 88×50 Tour, which took him to all 50 states. He’s been a regular presence here ever since, including performances at the Center For New Music and a glorious Grace Cathedral recital during Pride Week in 2019.
But he’s never presented a program like “Inheritances,” which makes its Bay Area premiere this Wednesday, July 17 at Brava Theatre.
The 65-minute suite, co-presented by new music purveyors Other Minds, features 16 pieces Tendler commissioned with that wad of cash, money unexpectedly left to him by his father. Every composer he reached out to quickly agreed to contribute a piece, says the pianist. And despite Tendler’s initial intention that the music not reference his fraught paternal relationship, “Inheritances” touches on it again and again.
“I actually asked them not to write about my father, but they would buck my authority and ask me about him,” Tendler says with a chuckle on a recent phone call from his home in New York City. “Scott Wollschleger sent me a bunch of questions about him, and I ended up sending what I wrote [to him] to all the composers. They took this very personal document, and that seemed to give them permission to make it as personal as they needed it to be.”
Tendler wove the pieces together into a multimedia production featuring new works by an intriguing array of composers, including Laurie Anderson, Devonté Hynes, Nico Muhly, inti figgis-vizueta, Angélica Negrón, Missy Mazzoli, Darian Donovan Thomas, Mary Prescott, and Timo Andres. “Inheritances” premiered at Minneapolis’s Parkway Theater in the early spring of 2022, and with each new presentation, “it’s evolved, and weirdly the more personal it’s become for me the more broad it’s become,” he says. A panel discussion with Tendler and San Francisco sound sculptor Pamela Z, who also received an “Inheritances” commission, follows Wednesday’s performance.
Tendler doesn’t give a precise figure for his windfall, except to say that “it wasn’t a lot of money. But it’s the most money I’ve ever had in the front seat of my Jeep.”
But it’s the music, he says, that gave meaning to the gift. “These composers really did me a favor,” he says, because the commissions “transcend my entire inheritance. I didn’t know what I was going to do with the music when I sent out the emails. I said, just let me have the piece until I figure it out.”
With all the music in hand, he started shaping the program, creating what he calls “an intensity arc.”
“The pieces really talk to each other in a certain way. I’d get a piece and think, ‘This has to go here,’” he says. Laurie Anderson, he found, had to be at the beginning. He saved other, more provocative pieces for later: “There are certain things that the audience is more receptive to if they’ve been more worn down. ‘Hushing’ [by inti figgis-vizueta] is a shocking piece, the only one with video … It works as a gate to the second act, because by then people are okay with being challenged.”
Turning disappointment into catharsis
Tendler has certainly received far more conventional support and recognition for his work, like the Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists and the Yvar Mikhashoff Prize. Still, his father hadn’t paid much attention to his musical career, and Tendler didn’t expect any kind of bequest after his death in October 2019. While he was mostly okay with their disengaged relationship, the disparate intensity between his musical passion and weak filial bonds “was something that haunted me for a long time,” Tendler says.
“Here I know what John Cage would bring to a dinner party, but I call my dad maybe once a year. That bothered me, and I never moved to fix it,” says the pianist. “When he passed away there was disappointment.”
Feeling unmoored by the loss and seeing a therapist “to try to sort out my feelings,” Tendler got a call from his stepmother informing him about the cash his father had stashed away for him. They arranged the Denny’s handoff, and a couple of weeks later he was seeing a String Orchestra of Brooklyn performance at Roulette when the group’s interpretation of Jacob Cooper’s “Stabat Mater Dolorosa” sparked an epiphany.
“Every day I was thinking of what to do with the money,” Tendler said. “I mean, credit card bills come in. Things happen all the time that create different demands. But sitting alone in the Roulette balcony being so moved by ‘Stabat Mater Dolorosa,’ I thought, ‘Hey! I do this for people. At my best moments I create these cathartic experience for listeners.’”
Tormented by the thought that he was becoming the worst image he had of his father (“Therapy didn’t seem to be working”), he saw that the money offered an opportunity to fulfill a generative role he’d longed for. “In my life as a musician I’d often felt remiss, disappointed and frustrated that, considering how much contemporary music I play, I don’t commission much,” Tendler says. “I’m always baffled by other artists. How do you do it? Where are you finding this money? I’ve never had that kind of institutional support.”
In that sense, “Inheritances” also speaks to the increasingly fragile state of arts funding. Tendler might be one of the most visible and renowned pianists in contemporary music, but he’s navigating the same resource-parched landscape that drives artists to seek revenue-stream mirages. After the sweet taste of sending his colleagues money, Tendler has been searching for another boodle of cash.
“Last year I auditioned for Wheel of Fortune, which my friends said was a very Adam thing to do,” he said. “[But] it would really help me fund some projects. That’s the state of the arts right now, and it’s hard to shake that fantasy, of what I could do if I could get a hunk of money.
“The inheritance wasn’t Wheel of Fortune money,” he clarifies. “But being able to Venmo some composers I love was amazing.”
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“Adam Tendler: Inheritances” makes its Bay Area debut at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, July 17, at Brava Theater in San Francisco. Tickets (starting at $23) and more info here.
wednesday is July 17
We heard an amazing interview with Adam on Sarah Cahill’s program last night on KALW. We had already purchased tickets to see this show, and I am very much looking forward to it. Should be a great event