ANTON BATAGOV_THE WELL-MEDITATED CLAVIER Book 2

THE WELL-MEDITATED CLAVIER book 2

Written in summer 2023 – spring 2025
Recorded in July 2025
Piano: 1880 Steinway C

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In 2020 I wrote a cycle of piano pieces called The Well-Meditated Clavier. The album was released in 2023. Here is what my program notes looked like.

This album has no concept or idea that precedes the music. Nine pieces: Formula 1, Formula 2, and so on, up to Formula 9. The ancient formulas for working with material – chaconne, passacaglia, canon, counterpoint, rondo – perfectly correspond to 'minimalist' thinking. With their help, we discover endless configurations of sounds within simple melodic and harmonic patterns. These sounds produced by the piano become an object for meditation.

And now seven more 'formulas' have been made: The Well-Meditated Clavier, Book 2. Formulas 10 through 16.

In Bach's time (and before), composers did not bother to invent concepts. They simply practiced their craft. Everyone was doing the same thing over and over again. Forms and titles were standard, too. Unlike in the 20th and 21st centuries, they had no intention to invent something that no one had ever done before, and therefore did not view a composition that had some similarities to anything written by colleagues or even by yourself as failure.

When I was young, the 'avant-garde' coordinate system seemed normal to me (I even liked it) – which is understandable, because you have to go through this to realize how well everything was long time ago before a certain type of music declared itself 'contemporary' and steered away from the path it had been following for thousands of years. Inside that uniformity, every detail was full of life. And there was no fuss. Now, when modernism has successfully destroyed everything that came before it, and post- and metamodernism have left no chance for perception without sarcasm, we can safely turn off our navigation and sit down at the piano.

I recorded the first book of Clavier on a 1909 Steinway (thanks to Melodiya producer С arina Abramyan). For the second book I chose an 1880 Steinway (thanks to concert and recording managers Irena Gobernik and Leo Vayn). In those days, pianos could sing and breathe. Each such instrument is a time machine. On this machine, we can travel to a place where we are no longer present. Airplanes do not fly there. We don't have to select all images with traffic lights to prove that "I am not a robot". From there, we hear the 'future' with different ears.