DAN TEPFER
A concert being presented at The Bickford Theatre at The Morris Museum in Morris Township, Feb. 4 at 3 p.m., will have a strong visual component. Pianist Dan Tepfer’s “Natural Machines” show, co-presented by Music in the Somerset Hills, will use computer technology to provide visual projections that will complement the music that Tepfer is playing.
The video below provides a good explanation of the process, and allows you to see it in action.
Tepfer explained, in a press release, that the show “is a project where I explore the intersection, in music, between natural and mechanical processes. I improvise at the piano, and programs I’ve written on my computer interact with me in real-time as I’m playing, both musically and visually … The visualizations I’ve made are intended to reveal the underlying musical structure of each piece. They’re generated in real time as I play. Everything on the screen is a direct representation of some aspect of the music: pitch, dynamics, rhythm, harmony.”
Tickets will include access to the museum’s exhibits, and there will be a special curator-led demonstration, at 2 p.m., in the museum’s Guinness Gallery, which is devoted to mechanical musical instruments and automata.
Tepfer, who works in the worlds of jazz and classical music, has been a prolific recording artist over the last 20 years. He was a frequent collaborator of the jazz saxophonist and composer Lee Konitz, who died in 2020.
For information and tickets, visit morrismuseum.org/live-arts.
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