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…

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..