Teddy Abrams — Preludes

Teddy Abrams

preludes

On July 25, 2025, Teddy Abrams, the Grammy Award-winning composer, conductor, and multi-instrumentalist dubbed a “Maestro of the People” by the New York Times, announces Preludes via New Amsterdam Records.

Preludes is a contemplative, personal, and playful set of solo piano pieces composed by Abrams with recording and production by Gabriel Kahane and Casey Foubert (Sufjan Stevens, The Shins, Lucius). The trio worked collaboratively in the studio to build the electro-acoustic universes of each piece. Abrams tells us that Kahane and Foubert “identified the personality of each Prelude and found a sound world for every track to match the intrinsic characteristics of the individual works.” The 16 pieces that make up Preludes take inspiration from the canon of classical piano works such as Bach’s Inventions and Bartok’s Mikrokosmos, yet they are imbued with Abrams’s immaculate compositional language and a depth in production uncommon to classical works.

Coming on the tail end of Abrams’s Grammy Award-winning Piano Concerto (2023), Abrams explains: “After the crazy, frenetic, joyful energy of my Piano Concerto, I wanted to create a piano work that explored a completely different energy and soundscape. While the Piano Concerto is overtly populist, referencing American genres like jazz, funk, and Gospel music, the Preludes are meant to be introspective, intimate, and simple enough for pianists of many skill levels to play in both performance and home settings.”

About Preludes
“I wrote these Preludes (like I create all of my music) at the piano. Each one comes from an improvisational exercise that turns into completed work by refining the spontaneously created material, stripling away unnecessary and superfluous elements. The Preludes are a study in personal and compositional restraint!”
“I went through a period during the Covid lockdowns where I would improvise large-scale full works such as movements in sonata form, fugues, and etudes to occupy my time. These fully-composed Preludes resulted from that initial improvisational, raw source.”
Preludes is a work imbued to its core with sonic intricacies and mysteries. Beneath every strike of the hammer lies a world of sonic depth. Hidden reverbs, reversed chords, subtle delays, and shimmering pitch shifts fill the record with wonder and rewards multiple listens. Co-producers Gabriel Kahane and Casey Foubert worked alongside Abrams in meticulous detail to enhance the sonic characteristics of each of the Preludes by treating each one in a unique way. “Our goal was to give every single prelude a special treatment that gets to its essence,” says Abrams.
“When I was thinking about how the Preludes could be presented I decided to call Gabriel Kahane,” explains Abrams. “I love Gabe; we’ve worked together for years and I think he’s one of the smartest, [most] interesting and most intuitive musicians out there, and I really value his advice.” This conversation saw the beginnings of a recording scheme for Preludes which culminated in Abrams “handing over the keys” of the recording project to Kahane. “I thought it would be a lot of fun if I came in a little bit more of the straight-up pianist and then let him engineer the preludes in a way that would make it more than just a normal piano album.”
Kahane immediately called the legendary guitar player, arranger, and engineer, Casey Foubert, and the trio set out to Flora Recording & Playback in Portland, OR. to document the Preludes. “Flora is famous for having lots and lots of keyboard instruments, especially the kind of hand modified keyboard instruments that Gabe and Casey thought would be perfect to play around with an experiment for each prelude.”
The opening notes of the record, ‘Microcosm,’ bring forth a dulcimer sound created by “playing the strings inside the piano, as one would with a hammered dulcimer, with the eraser end of two pencils,” says Foubert, as ambient pads created by “manually time stretching single chords” fill the sonic space and pitch shifted pianos emphasize the contrast between gestures. The piece beautifully oscillates between two sound worlds.
The wobbly, off-kilter waltz of ‘Nearby Parallel Universes’ was created when Kahane asked Abrams to “play this piece on a Steinway concert grand, and then on an upright, without monitoring the previous take. The varying ‘delay’ is actually just the discrepancy in tempi.” The two pianos fall in and out of phase with each other as if looking through a funhouse mirror.
The light hissing pulse that opens the sneaky and clever ‘Combined Species’ was a “happy accident” created by having “a parallel compressor turned up extremely loud to capture all of the intimate details of the piano and of Teddy's performance. The hissing is the noise floor of the compressor.”
Mahler’s Pedal looms over the listener as a low repeated note pulses ominously while lush chords in tight harmonies recontextualize the pedal. Shimmering guitars were added by Foubert.
Gigue opens with a glitched out, bit-crushed cloud as Abrams sprints into action. The lightning fast figures and ecstatic energy of this prelude are enhanced with soft reverb clouds, synth bass, octave pitch-shifting and heavy compression to augment the intensity of the performance which ends with a subtle, skittering figure.
The Persistence of Pitch Memory features an upright piano with a “felt practice mute, mic'd to emphasize the mechanics of the piano and capture Abram's extraordinary touch,” says Foubert. The repeating high note in the piano serves as an anchor while a shifting three note figure colors the harmonic environment.
Preludes ends with Macrocosm, a clear reference to Bach’s Prelude in C, yet colored with a subtle rhythmic delay effect. The piece inches its way from tender softness to emotional yearning as Abrams beautifully unfolds the music. The opening chords of the record can be heard cycling in and out of a resolving chord.
Abrams leaves us with this simple message: “I hope listeners will want to try playing these works for themselves. Too much of classical music, especially contemporary work, is the exclusive domain of “professionals” and I would love for my work to be enjoyed by pianists of all backgrounds, including students and amateurs. I love watching non-professional pianists making their way through their favorite works by Bach and Beethoven. I’d love to contribute to this tradition of offering repertoire that links the worlds of home music with that of the stage.”

Tracklist
1. Microcosm
2. Echo Charlie Hotel Oscar
3. Nearby Parallel Universes
4. The Scream
5. Legendarium
6. Tact
7. Combined Species
8. Mahler's Pedal
9. Found Material
10. Toccata
11. Ballad for Yourself
12. Gigue
13. Pyotr
14. The Persistence of Pitch Memory
15. Spake Schumann
16. Macrocosm
Credits
Written and performed by: Teddy Abrams
Produced by: Gabriel Kahane and Casey Foubert
Engineered by: Cole Halvorson
Mixed by: Casey Foubert
Mastered by: Zach Hanson