Sitting at the Yamaha grand piano in his Brooklyn apartment, surrounded by two laptops, an iPad, a monitor, a video camera and studio lights, Dan Tepfer plays the first of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations. The piano is a Disklavier, which can record and play back. When he finishes, Tepfer taps a button on his iPad, triggering the piano to play back what he’s just recorded with the notes inverted, as if the score were turned upside down.
Tepfer says the project, called “#BachUpsideDown,” was a result of his live performances grinding to a halt last year. “As soon as the pandemic hit, I asked myself, what can I do?” he says. “What can I do that’s going to be meaningful musically right now, when the bottom has dropped out? And the first thing that came to mind was this #BachUpsideDown project, because it was something I knew I could do from home easily.”
It helped that the 39-year-old musician could also write code to program his piano to invert the familiar Bach work. “When you describe what he’s doing, it sounds like a gimmick,” says New York Times chief music critic Anthony Tommasini. “But then when I actually heard them, I thought, oh no no no: it’s beyond gimmick. It’s really interesting. Ultimately, I think the point of the upside down stuff is to make us hear better, or in a new way, Bach’s ‘Goldberg’ Variations.”
