Composer/Choreographic Pianist Eleonor Sandresky

Composer-Pianist Eleonor Sandresky performed A Sleepers Notebook, her work for solo piano and choreography, at DiverseWorks Artspace on Thursday night. The performance was the first in the Foundation for Modern Music’s 2007-2008 concert series.

The dream state is a mysterious state of being, and yet despite this mysteriousness, we often look to it to find clues to understanding ourselves and our behaviors. Freud wrote that our dreamscapes were assemblages of many different elements from our waking life, tossed together so they juxtapose in ways that make us almost not recognize them. It’s all so unclear, and yet powerful, and perhaps that is why the subject of our sleep continues to lend itself so well to artistic interpretation. We are mesmerized by this subconscious that knows so much more than we do, and we’ll never understand it. Sometimes when something like a work of art or a person touches our hearts and not our minds, the understanding becomes irrelevant.

A Sleepers Notebook is an hour long journey into the dream state, and back out, perhaps. Divided into six movements, it begins with a lullaby. Sandresky’s arms circle one over the other and we hear the sound of the notes being played almost as we see the delicate gestures cascade one over the other. We loose sight of the separation between movement and music and the choreographic gesture becomes the sound of the piano. This is something different, uniquely personal, and carrying a sincerity of craft and intention that takes the audience on a voyage into someone else’s slumber.

REM 1, the second movement, moves the listener along with an ostinato that has Ms. Sandresky folding in on herself like an orchid, petals closing then opening. All throughout this music-dance work, what seems like a chance gesture –and what I mean by chance is that it flows naturally and organically from the body of the musician -- captures precisely the accent of the rhythm or the arc of the melody, and with it the emotional thread that spins from the music. It is stunning much in the way great choreography stuns us, when we see something that is so much a part of the music, we feel there can be no other movement to accompany it.

The center of the work explores two dreams, one most definitely a nightmare, and the other more fragmented and subtle. Sometimes Sandresky plays something and nods, and the audience nods with her, because it’s right, so she nods and so do we. This is the kind of interconnectedness generated by her performance. The work ends in silence, with her arms and body reaching upwards, as if she were swimming to the surface of awake-ness. We can’t tell if she wants to wake up, or perhaps exist in the space just before consciousness, where we all feel closer to who we really are.

by Michele Brangwen

Time Out New York / Issue 536 : Jan 5–11, 2006
Album review
Eleanor Sandresky
A Sleeper's Notebook (One Soul)

Pianist-composer Eleanor Sandresky has long been one of New York's busiest musicians, both as a member of the Philip Glass Ensemble and as a cofounder of composers collective Exploding Music and contemporary-classical festival Music at the Anthology (MATA). One unfortunate side effect of the extraordinary effort she has long exerted on behalf of others, however, is a decided dearth of her own music on record.

A Sleeper's Notebook, recently issued on New York–based indie label One Soul, finally begins to redress Sandresky's absence from the catalog. The disc contains but one work, an hour-long piece for "choreographic piano." A live performance of the six-section composition involves movement as intricately plotted as the notes on the page. In video clips on her website (www.esandresky.com), the composer nods, swivels and rocks as she plays, her body language often suggesting that of a dreaming sleeper. Her hands drift and bob like a pair of breeze-borne swallows, gently alighting on the keys one after the other.

Including those videos on the disc would have proved enlightening. But even without them, Sandresky's music succeeds on its own terms. Her language is of a decidedly minimalist stripe, but with ever-varying qualities of touch, register and intensity. From the opening "Lullaby," all gauzy harmonic haze drifting amidst beaconlike notes, to the relentless nightmare machine that chugs away throughout "Dream 2," A Sleeper's Notebook maps in vivid detail a nocturnal terrain in constant flux.—Steve Smith