Constancy (2020)

Composer note
Each day I recall generous spirits whose examples as artists and as people brought understanding to everyone who met them. In caring moments, countless artists, teachers, and colleagues go the extra distance to understand what it is that music witnesses. How lucky we are that such people exist; let us all hope to follow their example.

I remember so clearly the sound of my parents' unconscious singing and the richness of generations that it contained. My parents seemed to have their own life-song. It was made up of songs of the old country their parents had sung to them, echoes of playground games, pop songs of their dating years, and all the classical, jazz, theater, and world music that they loved and explored. Sometimes the sources were clear, but when they sang quietly to themselves, there was a familiar yet original trail of notes that reflected their innermost feelings.

My father was a tremendous self-taught musician who improvised many hours a day on the piano. Sometimes he started by playing an old Jewish or Tin Pan Alley song, but that was only the beginning of his daily spirit journey. Following him, I began to create my own life-song. The song is long, always evolving, and goes back to the earliest times of my life.

The musical germ for Constancy dates from when I was about seven or eight. My parents had an old upright piano, a lovely but fragile instrument. Most piano technicians didn’t want to deal with its erratic problems. And then Per Matson came into our lives. He became devoted to my parents and our venerable instrument. He’d come around every few weeks to touch up the tuning and contrive some repair to its obsolete parts. He took his time. He tuned the piano using an old method. He played a fifth, then a fourth, then back to a fifth again while listening and adjusting the notes to the open interval. It took hours. It was meditative.

The sound of those fourths and fifths still vividly evokes the atmosphere of my parents’ house. These intervals became the starting place for this section of my life-song. It has a familiar shape, but it’s never quite the same. It reflects upon the past, gives a grateful nod to all that has occurred since, and imagines what’s to come.

— Michael Tilson Thomas