I recorded A Character of Quiet in June of 2020 in my home in Brooklyn, New York. My dear friend and producer, Adam Abeshouse, drove down from Westchester with a van full of equipment, and we made the album over the course of two evenings.
My experience of the pandemic was hardly unique in that it dramatically restricted my world. My son came back from London. My husband started working from home. All of my travel and concerts were cancelled. Time seemed to stop.
I felt very lucky to be able to stay in one place with my family but, candidly, lockdown did not make me feel creative or productive. It made me anxious and enervated. Indeed, for two months I think I barely touched the piano. Music did not seem like an adequate response to everything that was happening in the world. Instead I read Wordsworth and Melville and went for walks in Green-wood, the historic cemetery on my doorstep.
It was Adam who talked me back into music. He wondered whether my retreat from music might have led to new places artistically, and he pointed out that I had always wanted to record on my own piano, my favorite instrument. Recording in a concert hall was clearly out of the question in this new normal, but Adam was confident he could create an acoustic space in my room that would have its own integrity.
Once I’d warmed up to the idea of playing again there was the question of what to record. The three Glass etudes and the Schubert B-flat Sonata immediately came to mind. Glass and Schubert are very different composers but they share some unexpected similarities. I love their pared down quality, their economy, their ability to change everything by changing just one note in a chord. Their asceticism suited the moment. But there is a sensual element in both, too, because the human voice is central to Glass and Schubert’s sound worlds. They both create a feeling of a solitary journey, a sense of time being trapped through repeated vision and revision as the music tries to work itself to a conclusion. This all spoke to the way I was feeling.
Though I had performed this music many times, at the point when I began to practice again I had not played any of it for over a year. As the pieces began to take shape for me once more, I found that this period of solitude had, in fact, had an effect. Perhaps I had been parted too long from my better self by the hurrying world, as Wordsworth puts it. The qualities that I now found most essential to the music were the most quiet, the most nuanced, the most private. Those were the qualities that seemed important as I played for myself in my own room while Adam recorded downstairs. I hope that the listener will feel them too.
Simone Dinnerstein July, 2020
When from our better selves we have too long
Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,
Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,
How gracious, how benign, is Solitude;
How potent a mere image of her sway;
Most potent when impressed upon the mind
With an appropriate human centre—hermit,
Deep in the bosom of the wilderness;
Votary (in vast cathedral, where no foot
Is treading, where no other face is seen)
Kneeling at prayers; or watchman on the top
Of lighthouse, beaten by Atlantic waves;
Or as the soul of that great Power is met
Sometimes embodied on a public road,
When, for the night deserted, it assumes
A character of quiet more profound
Than pathless wastes.
from The Prelude by William Wordsworth