Teddy Abrams
Teddy Abrams Releases “Preludes”
Teddy Abrams, the Grammy Award-winning composer, conductor, and multi-instrumentalist dubbed a “Maestro of the People” by the New York Times, has released Preludes via New Amsterdam Records.
Preludes is a contemplative, personal, and playful set of solo piano pieces composed by Abrams with recording and production by Gabriel Kahane and Casey Foubert (Sufjan Stevens, The Shins, Lucius). The trio worked collaboratively in the studio to build the electro-acoustic universes of each piece. Abrams tells us that Kahane and Foubert “identified the personality of each Prelude and found a sound world for every track to match the intrinsic characteristics of the individual works.” The 16 pieces that make up Preludes take inspiration from the canon of classical piano works such as Bach’s Inventions and Bartok’s Mikrokosmos, yet they are imbued with Abrams’s immaculate compositional language and a depth in production uncommon to classical works.
Coming on the tail end of Abrams’s Grammy Award-winning Piano Concerto (2023), Abrams explains: “After the crazy, frenetic, joyful energy of my Piano Concerto, I wanted to create a piano work that explored a completely different energy and soundscape. While the Piano Concerto is overtly populist, referencing American genres like jazz, funk, and Gospel music, the Preludes are meant to be introspective, intimate, and simple enough for pianists of many skill levels to play in both performance and home settings.”
“I wrote these Preludes (like I create all of my music) at the piano. Each one comes from an improvisational exercise that turns into completed work by refining the spontaneously created material, stripling away unnecessary and superfluous elements. The Preludes are a study in personal and compositional restraint,” says Abrams. “I went through a period during the Covid lockdowns where I would improvise large-scale full works such as movements in sonata form, fugues, and etudes to occupy my time. These fully-composed Preludes resulted from that initial improvisational, raw source.”
Preludes is a work imbued to its core with sonic intricacies and mysteries. Beneath every strike of the hammer lies a world of sonic depth. Hidden reverbs, reversed chords, subtle delays, and shimmering pitch shifts fill the record with wonder and rewards multiple listens. Co-producers Gabriel Kahane and Casey Foubert worked alongside Abrams in meticulous detail to enhance the sonic characteristics of each of the Preludes by treating each one in a unique way. “Our goal was to give every single prelude a special treatment that gets to its essence,” says Abrams.