For his performance in Washington DC (Miracle Theater, 6/26), Joep Beving exposed the innards of his piano, so you could see the music “play” through the delicately dancing hammers, shimmering more beautifully than a thousand AI-created worlds. He explained this was to get a more unfettered feel for the sounds themselves. But it also seemed like there was an unspoken emotional directness to it as well…
![Joep Beving piano](/Photos/2024/2406-MU-Joep_Beving/2406-MU-Joep_Beving-Piano.jpg)
I'm still not sure if you’d consider this Dutch native a “serious” composer in the “Canonical” Classical Music sense. (I discovered him last year via a Brit-centric crowd-sourced Best-Music-of-2023 Spotify playlist, alongside DC Fontaines and the Idles. But I met more than a few classical musicians in the audience who spoke about how they were moved by his work, as was I. Beving studied piano as a teenager, but alrgerly gave it up for decades. He didn't puruse the piano again until his late 30s, when he began writing these startling compositions.
So to be safe, I tipped the piano player cuz being in the Canon, or even Canbon-adjacent, will only get you so many drinks, even on Capitol Hill..
![Pianist Joep Beving at the Miracle Theater, Washington DC](/Photos/2024/2406-MU-Joep_Beving/2406-MU-Joep_Beving-Stage.jpg)