Meyer

Edgar Meyer’s first great musical inspiration was his father. As a boy, the younger Meyer used to listen to his father play the bass and the violin. “Frankly,” Meyer has said, “if you’d heard him play the violin, which was not very good, and heard him play the bass, which was pretty good, you’d want to be a bass player.” Since the age of five, that’s precisely what Meyer has been. He has also gained renown as a composer and a multi-instrumentalist; on a recent CD he plays a total of 277 strings on instruments ranging from dobro to viola da gamba.

For Meyer, the process of composing a piece begins with a sheet of paper and a few ideas. “I sit down and brainstorm with myself,” he explains in a recent Sound Insights podcast from Carnegie Hall. “I get a piece of music paper out, and most of what I write down is actually in words.” And he considers the particular traits of the musician who will perform the piece. On April 20, he joins pianist Emanuel Ax in Zankel Hall for a program that ranges from canons by Bach and Haydn to the New York premieres of pieces by fellow composer-performers Bright Sheng and Chris Thile, as well as Meyer himself.

Ax

In writing for Ax, Meyer knew that the pianist offered more than simply technical prowess—he has a fluidity well suited to Meyer’s own compositional style. “Among the images I have in my mind’s eye of Manny [Ax] is his way of making music in the moment. He is very responsive: he reacts to everything he hears.” That responsiveness inspired Meyer to seek a musical structure that could accommodate a certain degree of spontaneity.

He also sought to achieve a balance often lacking in contemporary music. “I try to give listeners something that they will understand and to include other components that are not immediately understandable. I feel that’s a way to reach people. Obviously, if a piece is completely incomprehensible, it’s meaningless, and if it’s completely familiar, that’s boring.”

Because Meyer’s father only learned to read music later in life, he wanted his son to develop the skills he had lacked. “From age five,” Meyer has said, “it was about reading and using the bow. He’d play duets with me every day and make sure that I could hold my own place and didn’t have to wonder about when to come in, the way he did.”

Edgar Meyer still loves to play duets. And now he knows just when to come in.