He’s debonair, but never doctrinaire. Composer Dan Tepfer modestly describes himself as “…someone with broad interests,” in fact merging a complex range of passions that may address the oft-held opinion that only truly great musicians can count higher than four, and the notion that jazz musicians are just making it all up as they go.
The New York Times described him as “…a deeply rational improviser drawn to the unknown” who is “…drawn to the deeper currents of melody.” He also code-geeks out over algorithms. He reminds us early on in our phone conversation that frequencies that sound good together are determined by whole number ratios (why, of course, everyone knows that!).
And lately, looking back as well as forward, the Paris-born Brooklyn transplant, a classically trained composer and pianist who digs Coltrane, has become smitten with the clavichord.
“Bach grounds me in classical music,” he explained as we chatted by phone earlier this week. “And Bach imagined his music and composed on a clavichord, which was used as a practice instrument, played at home. It’s not a performance instrument because it’s so quiet. It was never loud enough to be heard in a concert hall of Bach’s day. So the clavichord is part of my journey, deepening my understanding of Bach.”
At Tepfer’s upcoming “Baroque: Emergence” concert as part of Camerata Pacifica at The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens next week, in duet with flutist Emi Ferguson, he’ll play a rare clavichord borrowed from the collection of master instrument-builder and restorer Curtis Berak.
Berak also maintains 15 or so harpsichords, along with a few well-aged hurdy-gurdies, in his basement workshop near Skid Row in DTLA. A few of his nine lives ago, the hurdy-gurdy man was a visual artist, painting abstracts. He listened to Baroque music while he painted and today applies those painting skills to the historic instruments he builds from scratch, adding period-specific 14th-century-style flourishes.
Placing tech and things mechanical within the music of the spheres seems second-nature to Tepfer. Witness his “Natural Machines” which conducts a dynamic dialogue between a computer-based composition with LED light show, conversing with Tepfer’s inspired improv. Tepfer recently acquired a clavichord of his own which he describes as “…perfect for living in Brooklyn, since my neighbors can’t hear it. If the fridge is running, it’s almost inaudible.”
Of course, Tepfer’s upcoming Pasadena performance will be well-mic’ed.
On the bill for Tepfer next week: Bach’s “Inventions,” short, two-part contrapuntal pieces Bach wrote for the musical education of young pupils, beginning with his eldest son Wilhelm Friedemann at the age of nine years, two months in 1720. The groups of pieces are arranged in order of ascending key, covering eight major and minor keys. Each part begins with C major, with each piece arranged on an ascending chromatic scale until it reaches B minor, without duplication of the same keys, and Tepfer’s groundbreaking treatment pairs the original music with his own inventions in the nine missing keys. Hardly a coincidence, Tepfer’s recording of Bach’s “Inventions/Reinventions” spent two weeks in the #1 spot on the Billboard classic charts in 2023.
Although Bach structured the deceptively tricky Inventions for amateurs, Tepfer says he finds Bach’s music “…limitless, and endlessly challenging.”
On the most basic level, these works serve as exercises for practicing independent hand skills. The goal in mastering these pieces is to ultimately perfect a “cantabile” style where the playing is as seamless and smooth as flawless singing.
What’s especially refreshing about Tepfer’s approach to the precision and clarity required to play Bach is his attitude about improvisation, which also explains why he finds no antagonism between his twinned interests in classic music and jazz.
Improvisation is not, he explains, the random riffing that non-musicians may imagine, stating “Improvisation does not mean irrationality. Improv can have strict rules. To improvise successfully requires knowledge, structure and discipline.”
He adds, “Bach was well-known in life lifetime as an improviser…it was at the core of his being.”
This understanding is integral to Tepfer’s statement that he wants to “isolate the message from the medium,” and that he’s more attracted to content than form. “Style is not that important to me,” he says. “Good things happen at the intersection of the intuitive or spiritual with the structure of the rational. This is one important way that a performer is able to make the performance not all about themselves, but about larger, transcendent ideas.”
Mozart stated that he was a mere transcriber, because the Almighty had already conceived the music which he brought to Salzburg and beyond. Robert Johnson famously sold his soul to the crossroads Devil in exchange for supernatural blues chops. Bob Dylan maintains that he channeled rather than composed the early masterworks which cemented his legacy as now re-told in A Complete Unknown, although the film makes no such reference as to the mysterious provenance of those incendiary generational anthems.
Along the same lines, Tepfer may seem as much a vessel or vehicle as a creator, merging the digital with starlight, or as he says, algorithms with the rhythms of the heart. He comments that during COVID, he streamed live performances for 100 consecutive Mondays and says “We’re so separated. Live music, even at a distance, has never been more important, because it brings people together.”
About Camerata Pacifica
International chamber music collective Camerata Pacifica has been hailed as “innovative and intrepid” (The Daily Telegraph), “visceral and powerful” (The Economist). In addition to its busy performance schedule, Camerata Pacifica is committed to serving the community. In 2021, Camerata Pacifica, in collaboration with UCLA Health, developed The Nightingale Channel, a landmark resource for hospitals providing programming drawn from the ensemble’s extensive video library of its performances delivered via iPads to patient bedsides and care teams. Based on the well-documented positive effects of music in healing, The Nightingale Channel has been adopted by UCLA Health, UC Davis Health, Keck Medicine at USC, Loma Linda University Medical Center, City of Hope National Medical Center, and Augusta University Health, and is being introduced to other hospitals across the country.
DEETS
- Camerata Pacifica Presents “Baroque: Emergence”
- Emi Ferguson, curator/traverso flute
- Dan Tepfer, keyboard
- Program:
- BONPORTI / Selections from Inventione Opus X
- J.S.BACH/ Emi Ferguson, Partitia Recomposed
- J.S.BACH/ Dan Tepfer, Inventions/Reinventions
- Tuesday, January 14, 7:30 PM
- The Huntington’s Rothenberg Hall, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino 91108
- TICKETS here
