JAVS Spring 2013

NS : you know what’s interesting is that I think that is totally true in Xenakis’s music, though I’m not sure it’s true in Nico’s music, because you never want things to sound . . .

different itinerary through the hardness of it.

NS : My itinerary through that hardness is that there are weird vestiges of my initial climb or slog through it, so there are slides I did that I don’t have to be doing, but I like showing my work, you know what I mean? And sometimes I show my work through that piece, and I think there is definitely a version of that piece—if I were to approach it now, and not when I was twenty-one, like I wonder what . . . NM : you know it’s interesting—I’ve always won dered that if some point we re-record it—should we make a tenth anniversary recording of Keep in Touch ? [ Laughs. ] [ Waiter comes by .] (Oh what is happening? you’re spoiling us with that uni. Where was that caught? Is that Santa Barbara? That is so good. This is gor geous.)

NM : Hard.

NS : Hard. Although there are times in your music where I feel like feeling labor is good, but mostly those things are because I have to like, move up a ninth slowly. But a lot of your music, there are moments where things should feel facile. And actu ally, to watch you play piano is very demonstrative, and to watch you interact with other human beings is very demonstrative—I think a lot of your gestures come from you. NM : Make it look easy is almost the thing. It’s not always, “Make it look easy,” it’s something a little more complicated than that. It’s like knowing how to chop an onion, just knowing how to do it. And then when you’re actually doing it, it’s crazy—it’s crazy that it’s happening, but, you know, it’s a skill that you want to be able to do in a “let’s not show off way.” NS : That is actually the crazy thing about learning hard music that you then have under your fingers. I was playing Daníel Bjarnasson’s piece the other day, and I was like, “Okay, what I’m doing is nuts,” but I don’t even think about it—I don’t think about what this run is anymore. And Keep in Touch is the same thing—there’s some real passagework in there that I don’t, like, think about anymore.

NS : (Take its portrait!)

NM : And that’s great; that’s what you want.

AO : It becomes internalized.

NM : Right, and it doesn’t matter that it’s hard or easy or whatever. And interestingly, as the pieces that Nadia has played are done by other people, like when I hear other people do Keep in Touch , which is so crazy, it’s, you know, sometimes they have a total ly different relationship to the difficulty of it, and sometimes that ends up with a much more like, labored passagework, but also, what’s the word? A

Nadia Sirota with a plate of uni

J OuRNAL OF THE AMERICAN VIOLA SOCIETy 20