Simon Silber: Works for Solo Piano

Simon Silber has a huge ego, a pushy father, a house full of pianos, a closet full of tuxedos—in short, all the trappings of musical genius except genius itself. He seeks inspiration by walking around town with his eyes shut, or by transcribing the pattern of crows perched on his backyard power lines. His singular contributions to modern music—an hourlong performance of the “Minute Waltz,” an etude composed on a telephone keypad, a “chord-a-day” diary, among many others—may not please the ear, but they delight the fancy. As recounted by his biographer-cum-friend-cum-enemy, Norm Fayrewether, Silber’s life story becomes the tragicomic personification of thwarted potential. Norm, himself a frustrated artist (if writing aphorisms can be called an art), mingles biography with autobiography, treating us to an uproarious exploration of the nether realm between brilliance and the desire for it. Norm’s fraught relationship with Silber also sheds piercing light on the volatile bonds between artist and subject, mentor and protégé, truth and self-promotion.
Simon Silber evokes classics of unreliable narration from Nabokov’s Pale Fire to Steven Millhauser’s Edwin Mullhouse, but it charts a path all its own with artful lampoons of the classical music scene, antic turns of phrase, and an infectious reverence for the mundane.