Out of a left hand ostinato, pulsing like a slowing heart rate, clustered right hand chords emerge into bunched shapes like clouds shapeshifting, making their way across a summer sky.
This is what listeners hear on “Sun Surrounds (us),” the second track on Jeff Beal’s “New York Études,” an album of 10 solo piano works, which the Emmy Award-winning composer will be performing in full at Stissing Center on Sunday, June 29.
Beal is a composer, trumpet player, and pianist, steeped in the jazz tradition. He is also known for his film and TV scores. Any “House of Cards” fan has heard his music: the foreboding main theme or the swelling and sweeping “I’ve Known Everything.” He’s written music for films such as “Pollock” (2000), and other series such as “Monk” (2002), which won him the first of his five Emmys.
But the “New York Études” — an étude being a short piece designed as a musical exercise — are not a big-screen affair. Each introspective piece barely rises above a whisper. They waft like muted mantras, demonstrating that sometimes the most quiet meditations can be the most affecting.
“I love the way the [piano] speaks when it’s quiet,” Beal told the Herald.
Beal, 62, grew up in the Bay Area and studied at Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y. He moved to New York City in 2021, and while the album is in many ways an ode to his new home, it is not a tribute to the clattering A Train or bustling Grand Central Terminal. Rather, it’s the kind of New York seen through rain-streaked street lights at night; the biophony of the city as a sleeping giant.
But more than a soundtrack to the Big Apple, Beal’s études take place in a much more dense jungle; a place far more complicated, full of well-worn ruts, dead ends, shadowy alleyways, and roundabouts: the mind. The album artwork is evocative of a sliver of brain matter seen through a microscope.
Beal was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2007, and took to improvising at the piano as a way to counter the autoimmune disease’s damaging effect on the brain’s nerve fibers and gradual erosion of memory, motor skill, and cognition.
“What I learned about my own journey was that there’s areas of damage, but the brain has the ability to rewire around those areas,” Beal said.
For Beal, this daily piano practice and improvisation, from which the album was born, was a meditative forcefield against the disease. “When I was learning and memorizing these [pieces] my favorite thing to do would be just to play the whole set in the morning, just like a meditation.”
Since his diagnosis, Beal has experienced no significant gray matter loss, and while he notes feeling more easily fatigued, he has not suffered the disease’s more extreme symptoms. “To me, it’s real tangible evidence of the brain actually making new pathways,” he said of music’s ability to help him.
Technical brilliance is a treat to see, but arguably more inspiring is to hear something, as Beal describes his album, “simple, but not simpleminded.” At Stissing Center, audiences will hear no dazzlingly fast runs, blistering tempos, or overly complex counterpoint. Rather, they will hear the intimate stage used as a blank white canvas, onto which the overtones of the patiently reverberating piano will seep like spreading stains of watercolor.
The first track on the album, “Riverside Revelations,” is as hushed as a Chopin nocturne, but dotted with a melody that meanders in and out of tonality, injecting a dose of discord into its DNA.
The fourth track, “Invocation (for Joan),” even with its ascending, weighty harmonies, contains an aching push and pull, one that crescendos only subtly, and never boils over.
In “Sun Surrounds (us),” the dense cluster chords create a hazy shroud of overtones, with only hints of a melody offered in the right hand, endowing the piece with a fleeting quality, never quite resolving to a concrete key center.
“I have an aesthetic in my music which I call beautiful dissonance,” Beal said. “It doesn’t mean I have to rationalize it harmonically, but on some visceral level it has to just speak to me.”
The “New York Études” have been years in the making, starting out as a way to musically reckon with his diagnosis. Since then, the improvisations were solidified and committed to paper. With the scores available for any budding pianist to learn, the études are not just an exercise in pianism, but an exercise in brain plasticity.
It comes as no surprise that Beal has taken up meditation this year. “Can you just sit for 10 minutes, can you just sit still and be completely a vessel, just an open book that’s just receiving and not generating an agenda?” asked Beal.
Audiences are invited to join Beal in this meditation, sitting with the mystery of the music and, armed with knowledge of Beal’s incredible story of healing through sound, the mystery of the mind.
Jeff Beal will play at Stissing Center at 3 p.m. on Sunday, June 29. Tickets start at $45.