An inheritance was the last thing on my mind. My dad was financially ambiguous and notoriously frugal, so I thought that if there even was one, it would be weird. I was right. Around Christmas, my stepmother told me that, along with provisions like bottled water, my father had stored and hidden three wads of cash for my two sisters and me as our inheritance.
On New Year’s Day, while in Vermont, I arranged to meet her and my half-brother at a Denny’s on the New Hampshire border, just a few steps from the McDonald’s where I was transferred between parents as a kid. I was handed a manila envelope full of cash. Even if I’d never held that amount of cash before, it was a sum that could disappear easily into a couple months of rent and bills in New York City.
More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This Spring
- Musical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.
- Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.
- Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.
- Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.
Would that be my father’s legacy?
A few weeks later, I attended a show at Roulette in Brooklyn. While I was sitting alone in the balcony, my usual perch, something happened. The music just hit me. I know that sounds corny, but it’s true. I thought to myself, This is why I’m alive. Music. Alive. It was an epiphany. The ideas collided and a whole project manifested in an instant: I would use my inheritance to commission a program of new piano works about inheritance itself — a project that arrives at the 92nd Street Y, New York, on March 11.
I drafted an email to some of my dearest friends, who also happen to be brilliant composers. Admitting I had very little idea what I was doing, I wrote a message that read in part:
In October my father died. It was unexpected and the circumstances aren’t entirely clear. … We had a close relationship in my childhood which grew more distant, or perhaps just quieter, for a number of reasons, loss of love not among them. … I know [this] is more a favor than a commission. … If you do accept, I trust your instincts [to take] the piece in any direction you choose. … The only thing I ask is that you let me live with these works until I find them a home, together — somewhere.
Everyone said yes, among them Nico Muhly, Missy Mazzoli, Christopher Cerrone, Pamela Z, Ted Hearne, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Timo Andres and John Glover. It was 2020, and I began to dig into the task of finding a presenter just as face coverings began appearing throughout New York. Within a couple weeks, the pandemic had shut down much of the city and any semblance of the performing arts that I knew. All around, there was now a staggering backlog of performances to reschedule, often from much more established artists than me.
