Dan Tepfer

The Pythagorean Tetractys, or how multiplying by 2 & 3 gets you all the notes you need, with stops at the Pythagorean Comma and Equal Temperament along the way. Like my previous post, a deep rabbit hole, but — to me at least — a very rewarding one.

(Originally posted as part of #100daysofpractice 2023)

I sometimes disappear down a rabbit hole, and this one was deep. I wrote a program that generates a map of tonal harmony as I see it in my mind when I do free improvisation in a key, as on my album Inventions / Reinventions. Come for the pretty colors, stay for the nerdy explanations of secondary dominants. I coded all this from scratch, including the surface forming the landscape and its ripples, the diatonic chord spellings, the hierarchical positioning of the chords in space, the voice-leading in the chord player, the way the camera selects chords… These programming journeys can become all-consuming for me. Glad I got this one out of me.

(Originally posted as part of #100daysofpractice 2023)

My first project of the 2020/21 pandemic was something I called #BachUpsideDown, an exploration of the sound of Bach’s music in chromatic inversion. During the early months of lockdown, I recorded myself performing the Goldberg Variations as written, and after each variation, I triggered a program I’d written on my computer that played back the notes I’d just performed upside-down. I fell in love with the strange and wonderful sound that results from this process, and decided to make a score so that other musicians could perform the music without the need for special technology. What follows is my introduction to the print edition, which is available for purchase here. You’ll find the YouTube playlist with all 30 variations here, and a May 2020 New York Times feature by Anthony Tommasini here.

Introduction to the print edition

What follows is the entirety of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, published in 1741 under the title Aria mit verschiedenen Veränderungen, but with a transformation: every note of the original text has been chromatically inverted about the E/F axis. In addition, the ornaments that appear in the original as symbols have been written out. 

What does this mean? Inversion is an age-old musical process in which musical material is turned upside-down, similarly to the reflected text on the title page of this edition. It does not mean that the music is played backwards, which is a different process called retrograde. With inversion, the arrow of time still points forward, but any motion upwards is reflected to a motion downwards, and vice-versa. 

Ever since Five Pedals Deep, my trio record with Thomas Morgan and Ted Poor, came out in 2010, I’ve gotten a steady trickle of emails asking about a particular tune on it called Back Attya.

If you listen to it without knowing what it is, there’s something about the harmonic movement that might feel surprising. You can feel intuitively that it has a really solid structure, but at the same time, the chords don’t seem to move in a way that you would expect. There’s a reason for that: Back Attya, as the name cryptically suggests (ATTYA being an acronym), is an inversion of All The Things You Are, by Jerome Kern. Continue reading →

The question, when performing, is:

“Am I putting up with anything right now? Is there something that I’m unhappy with that I haven’t addressed?”

For example, awkward posture, which looks uncomfortable, will make the audience uncomfortable too, because it shows the performer to be someone who is putting up with something rather than doing something about it. We want to see someone who is at peace, from head to toe.

The Natural Machines album is out today, Saturday October 27th. I’m bringing the project to Le Poisson Rouge in New York on October 30th. The fine folks there asked me some smart questions ahead of the gig. Thanks to John Ruscher for asking me to do this interview. Continue reading →

I’ve got a little time off from touring so I’m cleaning house. While sorting through old papers I came across the interview below. Most of these answers still ring true to me today. It’s fun to hear from past iterations of oneself, sometimes.

Dan Tepfer interviewed by Gary Heimbauer
Jazz Inside Magazine, January 2010

Jazz Inside: Can you talk about how your unique childhood/young adulthood might have influenced your voice as a musician? You were born in Paris, France to American parents, got a degree in astrophysics in Edinburgh, Scotland and then moved here.

Dan Tepfer: I grew up in a way that doesn’t really give me any choice but to see the outside view, to see music as a pluralist art form. My grandfather was a jazz pianist on the West Coast. As a matter of fact, Nancy King, Ralph Towner and Glen Moore credit him with getting them into jazz. My mom is an opera singer. So I grew up hearing a lot of music, mainly jazz and classical, from before I was even born. I studied classical piano at one of the Paris conservatories through my childhood and teens, but somehow I always mainly considered myself an improviser. Continue reading →

When I got back home to Brooklyn from tour a couple days ago, one of the things I did was buy Logic Pro X, a big update to a music production app I’ve used for a long time. To get a handle on it, I decided to make a track for a friend of mine. Earlier in the day I’d come across Bob Dylan’s All I Really Want To Do again, which, I was reminded, has got to be one of the most wonderfully simple and profound songs there is, and I thought it would do just fine.

I started hunting around the program for sounds. One of the big additions to Logic is that it now comes with a huge sample library. I focused on the orchestral samples, because I’ve never seriously tried to make a computer sound like a real orchestra before. The music I’ve made so far with sequencers, like my recent score for the film Movement & Location, is what we’d call electronic music: it purposely sounds machine-generated. There are people out there, particularly film composers, who are great at drawing acoustic-sounding music out of a computer, but it’s not a skill I’ve worked on before.

Logic now also has an advanced arpeggiator, which is something that was (amazingly) lacking in the old version — there were workarounds, but they weren’t pretty. In this context, arpeggiation means making melodies out of the notes in a chord by playing them sequentially instead of playing them all at once. Combine arpeggiation and some string samples, hold down a chord, and you might get something like this:

Continue reading →