My Father’s Death, an Envelope of Cash, a Legacy in Music

The first time a photo of me appeared in The New York Times, my father sent a thumbs-up emoji. So my sister told me a month later at his burial.

She’d sent him an article over Facebook. I didn’t know he saw it, or that he knew about the piano recital the article covered. At the time of his death, we saw each other in person maybe once a year, during the holidays, and talked three times over the phone — his birthday, my birthday, Father’s Day — though there had been times in recent years when I didn’t know his phone number or email address. Both changed unpredictably. Still, our interactions were always warm, if brief. We weren’t estranged but seemed to lack the impulse to stay in touch; I often wondered if that was the one thing we had in common. I found it comforting.

So, when I received a call at home in Brooklyn from my stepmother, telling me he’d died in their living room in New Hampshire, I felt mostly confused, as if there had been some mistake. It was as if he’d decided to move to another planet without telling me. I spent my whole life with him absent in some sense, even if in my childhood, particularly the decade after my parents’ divorce, he was still sporadically present. But now, my access to him was gone.

In the days surrounding his funeral, I felt like a stage manager, helping with logistics and family mediations. I wandered my hometown in Vermont, visiting our old haunts: a waterfall where we fished, the Burger King where my family had gone for special Sunday dinners, our old house, with blueberry bushes that he planted, still there. The day of his burial, I returned to Brooklyn. That night, I cried in the kitchen, partly for my dad, but mostly because I didn’t want that terrible day to end. It would mean moving forward and leaving behind an event that I wasn’t even sure I had experienced.

An inheritance was the last thing on my mind. My dad was financially ambiguous and notoriously frugal, so I thought that if there even was one, it would be weird. I was right. Around Christmas, my stepmother told me that, along with provisions like bottled water, my father had stored and hidden three wads of cash for my two sisters and me as our inheritance.

On New Year’s Day, while in Vermont, I arranged to meet her and my half-brother at a Denny’s on the New Hampshire border, just a few steps from the McDonald’s where I was transferred between parents as a kid. I was handed a manila envelope full of cash. Even if I’d never held that amount of cash before, it was a sum that could disappear easily into a couple months of rent and bills in New York City.

Would that be my father’s legacy?

A few weeks later, I attended a show at Roulette in Brooklyn. While I was sitting alone in the balcony, my usual perch, something happened. The music just hit me. I know that sounds corny, but it’s true. I thought to myself, This is why I’m alive. Music. Alive. It was an epiphany. The ideas collided and a whole project manifested in an instant: I would use my inheritance to commission a program of new piano works about inheritance itself — a project that arrives at the 92nd Street Y, New York, on March 11.

I drafted an email to some of my dearest friends, who also happen to be brilliant composers. Admitting I had very little idea what I was doing, I wrote a message that read in part:

In October my father died. It was unexpected and the circumstances aren’t entirely clear. … We had a close relationship in my childhood which grew more distant, or perhaps just quieter, for a number of reasons, loss of love not among them. … I know [this] is more a favor than a commission. … If you do accept, I trust your instincts [to take] the piece in any direction you choose. … The only thing I ask is that you let me live with these works until I find them a home, together — somewhere.

Everyone said yes, among them Nico Muhly, Missy Mazzoli, Christopher Cerrone, Pamela Z, Ted Hearne, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Timo Andres and John Glover. It was 2020, and I began to dig into the task of finding a presenter just as face coverings began appearing throughout New York. Within a couple weeks, the pandemic had shut down much of the city and any semblance of the performing arts that I knew. All around, there was now a staggering backlog of performances to reschedule, often from much more established artists than me.

I wondered whether I had made a mistake sending that email. Maybe I could’ve used the money after all. Only toward the end of that first Covid summer, as livestreaming seemed to hit its saturation point and my future as a concert pianist seemed especially uncertain, did I start thinking pragmatically about my still-unnamed project.

The first thing I abandoned was the idea that it had to debut in New York. For years, I’d sent unsolicited pitches to Kate Nordstrum, the founder and director of the Minneapolis-based new music presenter Liquid Music, but this project felt different. It was promising that Kate replied to my email saying she wanted to talk, but I‌ remember‌ ‌pacing‌ my bedroom during our call. The project had still seemed somewhat hypothetical to me, but in one phone conversation it was being ushered into reality: She said yes, and thought we should bring in more composers.

I wanted to invite more, too, but had already promised away my entire inheritance to those already onboard. This meant finding more money. I hesitated at first, but finally asked for support from Anthony Creamer, a friend and arts patron in Philadelphia whom I’d never asked for anything. He said yes; and we had a show. I had a presenter, a premiere date of spring 2022, and even a name for the project: Inheritances.

Those additional composers joined, including Devonté Hynes, Laurie Anderson, Angélica Negrón, inti figgis-vizueta and Mary Prescott. In all, the Inheritances program would feature 16 new solo works by 16 composers.

The pieces started trickling in. One of the composers, Scott Wollschleger, wrote to me with a series of questions about my father. “Who was he as a person?” “What about him do you feel is still with you now?” “What was your relationship like and did it evolve over time?” I had always emphasized that I didn’t want these pieces to be about my dad, nor for the program to be necessarily about death. Still, if answering Scott’s questions would give him an entry point, I’d do it. I wrote sprawling responses and reluctantly shared the document with the rest of the composers. Many of them, to my surprise, used it as a catalyst for their own pieces; it triggered their own memories, their own sense of inheritance and place. Several titles come from the depths of that confessional.

More and more works came in, all of them surprising to me in some way. Each composer seemed to stretch for this project — or, as Andres once put it, “let their freak flag fly.” Marcos Balter, in the program note for his piece, “False Memories,” wrote, “You’ll see that the musical idiom I’ve chosen to explore is not my ‘usual,’ per se.”

Often, the composers would share their inspiration with me, and ask that I keep that information between us. Mazzoli’s “Forgiveness Machine,” to be played “mechanical and heartbreaking,” grinds in the extreme registers of the piano. She declined to provide a program note, telling me the piece spoke for itself.

Laurie Anderson’s “Remember, I Created You” used text from an artificial intelligence program she developed, creating an eerily accurate narrative of my entire project. Hynes’s “Morning Piece” enters such a space of stillness that I could barely move while listening to his demo on my headphones, riding the B46 bus home. Cerrone wrote “Area of Refuge,” an understated echo chamber of a piece, in the wake of his own father’s sudden passing, and dedicated it to his memory.

Nico Muhly adapted John Wycliffe’s translation of Proverbs 13:22 — about inheritance between fathers and sons, and the balance between righteousness and sin — weaving a melodic line with that text on a middle staff “not to be sung, but to be played in as cantabile a fashion as possible.” Pamela Z’s “Thank You So Much” has the piano playfully mimicking audio from interviews she found of me speaking about John Cage, but the words could easily have been about my dad, toying with a question I had often asked myself: Did I care to know more about the composers I played than about my own father?

“I had some fun,” she wrote, “with intermingling and blurring the lines between those relationships.”

In Darian Donovan Thomas’s piece, “we don’t need to tend this garden. they’re wildflowers,” designed as a kind of on‌stage therapy session, I would finally speak about my dad for the first and only time in the program. Through a series of instructions, personal questions and tonal shifts, interspersed with family photos, the score probes the psychological terrain of my relationship with my father, and what it felt like to lose him. I feared at first that this all might be too literal for a program that I intended to be largely symbolic, but the result has become a necessary release for me, an emotional climax and an acknowledgment of the person and event that brought this whole program together.

Inheritances became a kind of sacred space, a gathering, a ritual. I might have been Venmo-ing away my inheritance, but these pieces felt like bereavement gifts sent from friends.

I don’t remember much from that Minneapolis premiere, aside from the feeling afterward of fulfillment — a rarity for me. The theater seats remained occupied long after the recital ended. People stayed and talked, to one another and to me. Different pieces touched different people in different ways.

The goal for Inheritances, from the start, had been to provide a vessel through which I could connect to my elusive father, process my grief and reconcile with my past. But I also hoped that writing these pieces would provide a similar vessel for the composers, and ultimately that this shared experience would extend to our listeners. When audiences responded so powerfully, in Minneapolis and then a Los Angeles performance co-presented by Liquid Music and the new-music collective Wild Up, I felt like the long road that had begun with a manila envelope in a Denny’s parking lot over two years earlier had all been worthwhile.

Now Inheritances is having its New York premiere at the 92nd Street Y in a co-presentation with Liquid Music. Many of the composers will hear their works live for the first time, and although I’ve performed in this city for over a decade, it feels like something of a debut: the most personal, and most important, program I’ve ever played. I like to think that my dad would be proud. I’d settle for a thumbs-up emoji.