This’ll Just Take a Minute

On paper, “Don’t Panic! 60 Seconds for Piano” sounds suspiciously like a shameless plea for attention in a jaded age. Pianist Guy Livingston, an American living in Paris since 1992, spent nearly three years commissioning piano pieces lasting a minute or less, paying scores of composers with a bottle of Jack Daniels for their efforts.

But as it turns out, the project is much more than a novelty. On a CD released last year on the German Wergo label, it sounds true to the pianist’s stated intentions: present new piano music, in heaping, if piecemeal portions; expose music by young and little-known composers.

It’s also a calling card for the pianist. Livingston will perform 60 of the pieces (he has 150 and counting) Monday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Bing Theater.

The performance set will include works by a diverse, international list of composers, including such New York new music downtowners as Annie Gosfield and Elliott Sharp, and such established composers as William Bolcom and Louis Andriessen (who wrote his soft, dreamy line quickly, on the backs of envelopes).

By and large, though, the music is by composers little known in the general musical world.

“You become painfully aware of how many composers are out there, eager for something to do,” Livingston says by phone from Philadelphia, where he was visiting family. “For some of the people, the disc represents their first recorded work. It’s had a lot of impact on their career, especially if they’re just starting out.”

Although Livingston considers at least the first chapter of his project finished, the music just keeps on coming.

“Even now, I get stuff in the mail. It’s great. It’s like getting musical postcards from around the world.”

When the seeds of the project first sprouted, in 1995, Livingston--then in his 20s--was a student at the Royal Conservatory of the Netherlands, after graduating from Yale and the New England Conservatory of Music. He had spent an arduous year learning Charles Ives’ epic “Concord Sonata,” and, he recalled, “I needed a diversion.

“A friend of mine had just written a 30-second opera. I was thinking, ‘What if you could do something like that for the piano? Do some really short things?’

“Once I asked composers to write, I realized I was onto something. People got very excited. Some of them actually wrote me several pieces, and then they would tell their friends, who would call me and say, ‘Hey, can I write a piece?’

“Once I got the idea of doing it as a full evening, I had to buckle down and work to get good pieces, and 60 of them.”

And then there was the matter of paying the piper: Being an impecunious student, Livingston came up with the notion of Jack Daniels, a tip of the hat to his roots as a Tennessee native.

He finalized the set of 60 in 1998, recorded it in 1999, and now Livingston, 34, has performed the basic group in concerts in South America, Europe and New York, where the New York Times called it “quirky enough to appeal to listeners who have doubts about modern musical language.” A critic for the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung wrote that it was “ hard to decide whether to marvel more over Livingston’s breathtaking ability, his high musical intelligence or his theatrical humor.”

Consider William Bolcom’s contribution: “A 60-second Ballet (for Chickens),” in which brevity meets melodic poise and the composer’s signature wit. “The piece is a complete parody of ‘Swan Lake,’” Livingston says, “but it’s so sweetly done, you can’t help but like it.”

The project attracted humor like bees to honey.

“I didn’t necessarily expect [that],” Livingston says, but he grants that in general the new music world is full of the serious and the thorny.

“I think people felt freed up. Ironically, the constraint actually gave them more freedom. They only had a minute, which is outrageously short. Only a few composers have ever done that. You’ve got Webern, a couple of Chopin preludes. Even [Chopin’s] ‘Minute Waltz’ is not a minute long. A lot of people went kind of nuts and wrote something kind of funny or silly.”

The humor extends to the actual identity of the composers. One is a member of the animal kingdom, non-human division--”Piece for Paws,” by Ketzel Cotel. Ketzel is, in fact, the cat of Morris Cotel, chairman of the composition department at Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory, who claims to have dutifully transcribed 21 seconds’ worth of his feline’s prancing on the keys. (The result, to this listener’s ears, is a tidbit of tender abstraction.)

Mention this track to Livingston, and he suddenly seems a bit sheepish about the publicity gimmick factor involved.

“I’m sick to death of that piece,” he says, laughing. “I was going to write my own article about the behind-the-scenes aspects of this project, and call it ‘That Damn Cat.’ I have to thank the cat and the cat’s owner, because they did provide us with a lot of publicity at the very beginning, when I was really looking for composers.”

Even when the pieces aren’t funny, they tend to push the stylistic and technical boundaries of contemporary piano music. Some involve prepared piano and electronics. Some simply create a dizzying, sprinting workout. The flying-fingered exercise of Dan Warburton’s “Speed Study,” which touches on all 88 keys in its short duration, resembles the fiendish player-piano studies of Conlon Nancarrow.

“To some extent,” Livingston explains, “the composers knew me very well and they wrote pieces that they thought would be appropriately virtuosic or theatrical, particularly tailored to the kind of music I often play. So the disc reflects not only their tastes, but also their perception of what I’d be able to do well.”

Livingston is trying hard not to have a career based only on his 60-second inspiration. “Of course, I continue to play Boulez and Ives and other composers who have a lot of heavy and serious things to say, about much more lofty concepts than chickens, like war and peace.”

After the LACMA gig, Livingston will head up to Stanford University to research an ambitious recording project, three CDs documenting the piano music of American composer George Antheil (famed for his “Ballet Mecanique” and his leadership role in the avant-garde of the ‘20s in Paris).

Antheil has become something of an obsession for Livingston, who has written about him and is secretary of a sort of French Antheil fan club.

What about the composer intrigues Livingston?

“Well, he was a nut. There are parallels between his life and some of the things I’ve done. We both grew up in small-town America and then moved, pretty young, to Paris. He then had a brilliant career and became immediately famous by the time he was 23. I’m still working on that part.

“He had a totally wild career and then ended up in Hollywood, writing movie music. I hate to say, it was kind of second-rate. But he was a pianist by training, and that’s really where he shone. What I’m looking at mostly is the music he wrote in his Futurist period, from 1922 to 1929 or so. I’m working from gigantic pieces of paper that are totally indecipherable, but man, it’s great.”

And he’s not through yet with “Don’t Panic.”

“Occasionally, I’ll meet a composer and say, ‘Hey, I wish you’d write me a one-minute piece.’ And there are those bits and pieces that just show up as well.

“I’ll keep collecting them. In 10 years or so, I’ll come out with a new ‘Don’t Panic!’ We’ll see what the difference is, how music has changed.”

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GUY LIVINGSTON’S “DON’T PANIC! 60 SECONDS FOR PIANO,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Bing Theater, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. Dates: Monday, 8 p.m. Prices: $5-$15. Phone: (323) 857-6010.

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Josef Woodard is a regular contributor to Calendar.