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."
