An Interview with Geoffrey Burleson

By Laura King for NO EXIT

Through Europe and North America, pianist Geoffrey Burleson has performed to wide acclaim, while equally active as a recitalist, concerto soloist, chamber musician, and jazz performer. The New York Times has cheered his solo performances as “vibrant and compelling,” and the Boston Globe refers to Geoffrey as “a remarkable pianist” and “a first-class instrumental presence” whose performances are “outright thrilling.” Geoffrey teaches piano at Princeton University and is Professor of Music and Director of Piano Studies at Hunter College-City University of New York. A graduate of the Peabody Conservatory, New England Conservatory, and Stony Brook University (D.M.A.), his principal teachers include Gilbert Kalish, Leonard Shure, Veronica Jochum, Lillian Freundlich, and Tinka Knopf.

No Exit caught up with Geoffrey recently, curious to learn about his early years, teachers, muses, creative meanderings, and his bowl-you-over musicality. What fun…!

Q1. We want to get to know you, Geoffrey! Share your musical journey with us, including your early passions, and tell us how your family and teachers helped cultivate the breadth and depth of your considerable skills.

I grew up in the vivid and often surreal landscapes of New Mexico, where my family moved because I’m the progeny of two physicists, and my dad, George Burleson, had secured a position at New Mexico State University, with a research contract at Los Alamos. Dad was certainly an influence on my musical tastes, possessing as he did a huge classical record collection. Not only did he turn me on to Alban Berg, but we all went to see the American premiere of the complete Lulu, with its reconstructed 3rd act, at the Santa Fe Opera when I was 15. As an adolescent with adventurous tastes, this was life changing.

I also had a brilliant piano teacher in New Mexico, Audrey Brown, who instilled in me not only a wide array of technical resources but opened my mind and ears to such a wide range of music. I learned and competed with “usual suspects” with Mrs. Brown, such as Rachmaninoff’s Second Concerto, Prokofiev’s Third Concerto, and so forth, but at the beginning of my senior year, she also gifted me a score of Mario Davidovsky’s Synchronisms No.6 for piano and electronic sounds, which had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1971. She was keenly aware of my rangy tastes in jazz, prog rock, and cutting-edge music in general, and I ended up opening my senior recital in high school with Synchronisms No. 6. When I met and got to know Mario Davidovsky years later, he said that I had probably given the New Mexico premiere of the piece.

Q. The UK Wire shouted you out as “an immense talent, capable of everything from Rachmaninoff showboating to rollicking jazz to ambient tonal clusters.” Tell us how you acquired experience with so many different types of music—what challenges and thrills does each genre provide you? Do you have a fav?

The UK Wire is very generous, but I have always had a voracious appetite for music from a copious quantity of genres and have always loved discovering new genres and subgenres of music that were previously off my radar.Although I began taking classical piano lessons when I was 6, I was as well always an improviser and keenly obsessed with jazz. Although I was a classical piano major at Peabody, I also took jazz lessons there with the brilliant Nina Sheldon, and started playing with various groups in Boston, and later New York. With the now defunct, but once happening Phantom Arts Ensemble in Boston, I created a bunch of Eric Dolphy and Frank Zappa arrangements that we played in an “Iconclasts” concert, and I also started including jazz and my own compositions on my otherwise classical/new music solo recitals. I’ve also been a member of the David Sanford Big Band for well over two decades, and recently recorded David’s piano concerto “Long Time Coming” with the ensemble. I’m also very proud of my long-time trio IMPetus, with vocalist Maria Tegzes and guitarist Dave “Knife” Fabris. We call ourselves a “chamber punk” trio, and often will perform our own originals, Ravel, Shostakovich, Max Roach, Tom Waits, Kurt Weill, Charles Ives, and Trent Reznor on the same concert. I can’t say that I have a fav genre—they all nourish me!

Q. We’d love to hear about your collaborations with visual artists and art/film scholars…can you provide us with some details? What do you enjoy most about these multidisciplinary partnerships?

I was into photography from back in the day, originally shooting with a Minolta SRT-101 on film in the way pre-digital age. Growing up in the desert surely played a part in this. I’ve always loved collaborating with other artists, and particularly just being inspired by other (non-music) genres of art. I’ve spearheaded a couple of quasi-happenings in New England and at Hunter College in Manhattan, where I teach. The latter happening was very much centered on John Cage, in conjunction with a course I was giving entitled “Music to My Eyes”, exploring 20th and 21st century movements for which visual art and music were central, including expressionism, futurism, Die Blaue Reiter, Dada, the Bauhaus, minimalism, etc. My co-instructor was Joachim Pissarro, Camille Pissarro’s great-grandson. During that happening, my biggest YouTube “hit” was recorded, wherein I was conducting a performance of John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 4 and speaking about it. It currently has over 140,000 views and is easily findable.

Q. Beginning with Sonata No. 2, “The Airplane” (1921) George Antheil and ending with Lockdown Fantasies 4 & 5, for piano & electronics (2021) Neil Rolnick, your program for the upcoming No Exit Presents concert includes eight works. Describe them briefly please, and what the audience can expect!

George Antheil’s Airplane Sonata is a raucous, boisterous piece of machine-age ragtime, which also includes some beautiful, ethereal music as well, evoking the quiet euphoria of flight. Antheil was a true eccentric and enfant terrible, who famously wrote Ballet mécanique, a concerto for player-piano with a live orchestra of multiple pianists and percussionists playing everything from conventional instruments to ambulance sirens.Robert Paterson’s Variations and Fantasies on an Accordion Theme is an ingenious and vibrant set; endlessly inventive and polystylistic, from jazz to spectral to what almost sounds like a parody of Webern. I’m playing two brilliant “mirror” pieces, Gerald Strang’s Mirrorrorrim and Vincent Persichetti’s Sonata No. 12 “Mirror”, in which everything one hand played is simultaneously mirrored by the other hand (i.e., if I’m playing a chord or figure that rises via specific intervals or spaces between notes in one hand, I’ll be playing the same figure in the other hand at the same time that descends). Both pieces contain a wealth of variety within this seemingly restrictive but fascinating technique; Persichetti’s sonata is extremely virtuosic and cathartic in its final movement. Mary Kouyoumdjian’s Aghavni (Doves) is based on a tripartite poem by Brenda Najimian Magarity, following the lives of a group of women before and during the Armenian Genocide, closing with a retrospective look at those women and what they lost from a “present day” perspective. It is deeply moving, harrowing, and ultimately projects resilience and transcendence amidst loss. My arrangement and improvisation on Frank Zappa’s Bebop Tango is meant to be a celebration of this composer’s love of virtuosity, collision and juxtaposition of genres, humor, avant-garde music, and jazz. Finally, Neil Rolnick’s Lockdown Fantasies, for piano and live electronics (I coordinate effects with a multipedal board while negotiating lots of difficult piano writing!) is a very moving and transportive piece he wrote for me during the pandemic; it explores numerous dimensions, styles, and sound worlds, reflecting loss, renewal, and an indomitable spirit.