Big Ideas at the Ragdale Piano

By Jennifer Fitzgerald, composer

I applied to Ragdale assuming that by the time December 1 rolled around, I would feel crushed and ready to escape to the colony – pressed by teaching, due dates, an apartment that always needs dusting, travel, bills… But I got sick and had to have a surgery, so I postponed most of my teaching to later in the year. Due dates, dust and other dalliances didn’t go away, but I seemed to generally have time. I spent a lot of the time in bed, reading, napping and a fair amount of time struggling to do work. Composing was a chore. I propped myself up in my office chair and joylessly dotted my manuscript paper with notes, trying to continue to meet deadlines. The surgery left my left arm tired and I found it difficult to play piano.

I wasn’t sure whether a change of scene was what I needed. I was already spending all of my spare energy writing. But with two commissions hanging over my head, it was worth the three-hour drive from my Wisconsin home. My boyfriend and I unloaded the car, he went home and I slept a night in the composer’s loft, woke up, ate breakfast, drank coffee…and then I sat down at the Yamaha 6’1.”

My piano at home is a tortured instrument. It’s an old upright that had been in a public grade school for years. I’ve never had it tuned. It’s been through a couple of moves and it didn’t thank me for the last one. We moved onto the third floor of an old Victorian, complete with steep narrow staircases. Our movers didn’t stand a chance. The piano sat in the damp basement for a month until we could get piano movers to hoist it up to the apartment. My piano had to be partially amputated (as did the staircase.) A few months later I decided to stick screws in between the strings of the piano (called “preparing” the piano) to make the piano ring like bells. This usually works fine on a grand piano, but on an upright, the screws started to sink into the nether-regions of the innards, never to be seen again and always to be heard. My piano is nearly flat and jangles with screws. My dog likes it though. She sings along.

I sat down at the freshly-tuned piano in my Ragdale loft and began to play, stiff from surgery and a seven-month playing interruption. I swept the memory of deadlines out into the snow and began to write a set of miniature piano pieces. These were pieces unlike anything I’d written in a long time. Spare, spacious and aphoristic, they suggested to me ideas much larger than their brevity – I was writing music about breathing, about conserving energy, about fear and about the joy of touching a piano. I was writing my physique and I was writing about my limitations. Sickness and surgery forced me to think about my body for seven months. The piano and space, and yes, the seeming endlessness of time at Ragdale gave voice to these seven months and returned joy into composing for me. The composer’s loft reminded me of the music that I want to write year-round, even in my cluttered office with my honky-tonk piano – music that is intense, unembarrassed and uncompromising, music that is big, even if it is little.