Bert Williams' Lime Kiln Field Day - Silent movie accompaniment! - Wed. Feb 25 7:30pm Amherst MA

Really, I've always wanted to accompany for a silent movie. It seems like one of the most fun things you could do from behind a piano. So I was tickled when an opportunity came along to accompany a silent film for the Massachusetts Multicultural Film Festival.

Then I began to learn more about the film, Lime Kiln Field Day. It's really quite a historic film. It was made in 1913 and then never released until the New York Museum of Modern Art unearthed it last fall. Created by legendary comedian Bert Williams, it is the first feature-length film with an all-black cast. It is a love story with many funny moments and a really terrific big dance number. Besides being just plain entertaining, the film is also a rarity in that it shows black characters not in the roles of servants or criminals, but as heroes of their own story, including a love story shown in a warm and positive way.

I'm planning a score for the film based on the works of black composers of the period: Scott Joplin, Will Marion Cook, and Samuel Coleridge Taylor. I will also play some pieces that the New York MOMA sent along which were probably used in a stage adaptation of Lime Kiln Field Day by Bert Williams' troupe. Two are songs by J. Leubrie Hill, who appears in the film.

I'm so happy and humbled to be part of this performance.

More about the performance, from the film festival brochure:
wednesday 25 february
Bert Williams’ LIME KILN CLUB
FIELD DAY Project
(dir Edwin Middleton, T. Hunter Hayes, & Sam
Corker, Jr., USA, 1913, 53 min, silent)

Legendary Caribbean American musical theater
performer and recording artist Bert Williams
(1874-1922) stars in this never-released film, its
footage lost for a century. Discovered in the MoMA
archives, this restoration of daily rushes and multiple
takes represents the earliest known surviving feature
film with a predominately black cast. A comedy of
three young men vying for one woman’s affection.
New England premiere. Introduction by Demetria
Shabazz, UMass. Curatorial and Restoration Talk by
Ron Magliozzi, Museum of Modern Art.

Live piano accompaniment by Heather Reichgott.

7:30pm UMass Amherst
137 Isenberg School of Management
 (click for map. Easiest parking is probably the lot across from the Fine Arts Center, near the corner of Stockbridge Rd and Clark Hill Rd.)

More about Bert Williams' Lime Kiln Field Day:
Article on New York Museum of Modern Art website
New York Times article

Prophet bird

Music that wasn't written for church, but it really worked.

Schumann's "Prophet Bird," from Waldszenen, is clearly birdsong. But it isn't just pretty and cheerful birdsong. It has an edge to it. The swooping birdsong calls emphasize a dissonant note at the start of each, then the dissonance resolves in a sudden upward rush of notes almost too quick to catch. Then there is a silence: from dissonance to brief resolution to nothingness. It's haunting music. Unsettling.

The end is a non-ending, just a restatement of the first couple of measures. Maybe the bird abruptly flies away. Maybe the end is in the future.

It's half hope, and half warning. As all the real prophecies are. Good Advent music.

Here is Myra Hess, playing with great genius.

Beethoven Op. 10 no. 3 Rondo (live in Seattle)

Preludes, Problems & Prayers keeps people warm

There is now a stack of CDs at Memorial Baptist Church on Fairfield Ave. in Hartford. If you purchase one from the church, you will support the new furnace fund :)

Preludes, Problems & Prayers is released!

I'm happy to announce the release of Preludes, Problems & Prayers!

Funded by a Kickstarter campaign last April, this is a collection of music by established and emerging composers. I corresponded with the five living composers and received their feedback on practice recordings, then recorded the CD at Northfire Recording Studio in Amherst. I've loved living with this music for the last several months. I have not loved trying to be my own graphic designer, but that's another story. Now I can share this music with you!

The pieces are
Reel - Homage to Henry Cowell by Lou Harrison
Secret & Glass Gardens by Jennifer Higdon
selections from Twenty-four Preludes by Steven O'Brien
Op. 21 no. 2 by Pavel Konyukhov
selections from Problems for Piano by Jake Bellissimo
Semplice and Sky of the Eternal by Gwyneth Walker

Over on the "Store" sidebar to your right you can hear short clips of the tracks. Or go to CDBaby here: http://cdbaby.com/heatherwreichgott2
We're working on distribution to Amazon, iTunes and other places too.

In pursuit of rapid calm

Many of the pieces I'm working on need to go faster. It's a little tedious having a number of pieces in that stage at once.

But it puts me in mind of a wonderful phenomenon when playing something that's both fast and well prepared. For a long time during practice, increasing tempo is just a struggle, a fight against the metronome. I alternate fast and slow repetitions because I find it more efficient than faster and faster, and to mitigate the struggle a bit, but only a bit... Then once in a while a couple of repetitions come out not only fast but surreally easy.

When that happens, everything just feels calm and relaxed, like I'm not pushing the music anymore but instead it's cooking along under its own power. I can then enjoy the ride and pay attention to the bigger picture. I might be making rapid movements but it doesn't really feel fast. It feels calm. It's magic. Then of course the next repetition goes crashingly wrong.

So it's time for a lot more practice...