A Key Champion of the New

One night last June, at 3 a.m., Gloria Cheng-Cochran’s fax machine stirred to life. On the other end, in another time zone, Pierre Boulez fed paper into his.

Nothing unusual there. Avant-garde composers are always calling up the 42-year-old pianist, a specialist in new music, the harder the better. Esa-Pekka Salonen has done it. Gyorgy Ligeti has done it. So have Witold Lutoslawski and countless others, including Boulez on many occasions. After hearing her audition for his Paris-based Ensemble Intercontemporain in 1987, the French composer became one of her biggest fans, designating her for featured roles in Los Angeles with the Philharmonic, and at the Ojai Festival, in 1989, 1992 and 1996.

This time, however, he wasn’t asking her to learn a difficult new work on short notice. He was, instead, sending her a gift. The pages of a new composition, “courtes derives a partir d’eclat,” written especially for Cheng-Cochran’s upcoming wedding, 10 days away, were rolling out.

The fax didn’t come completely out of the blue, Cheng-Cochran explains. She had slipped a request to the composer the month before for a work to play at her wedding--”he owed me,” she says laughing--but had since stopped thinking about it. Getting up to investigate, she was flabbergasted. “I mean, five minutes later the pages were still pouring out and I thought, ah, this is it! He did it!”

The title of the work, roughly translated as “Short Derivations From Eclat,” is a pun on the titles of pieces (“Eclat” and “Derive I” and “Derive II”) Cheng-Cochran had slaved over for the composer. She describes the piece as a bonbon, though it’s hard to imagine the iconoclastic Boulez writing such a thing. But then it’s hard to imagine him making a pun too.

Cheng-Cochran is making a lot of things happen in contemporary music these days. She commissions pieces from composers well-known and not so well-known. She records. She is a ubiquitous performer. And she’s getting a reputation. When Salonen asked her to play his solo piano work “YTA II,” she asked him, “Is it difficult?” His reply: “Not for you, Gloria.”

On Tuesday, in the final event of the Piano Spheres series, Cheng-Cochran will perform a demanding slew of contemporary pieces for piano, and piano and tape, by Messiaen, Takemitsu, Nono, Jonathan Harvey, Leon Milo and Javier Alvarez, as well as the West Coast public premiere of the Boulez “bonbon.” As husband Connor Freff Cochran notes, even after two decades of living in Southern California, she’s “only intermittently laid-back.”

Friendly and a little ill at ease talking about herself, Cheng-Cochran, born in New Jersey, began studying piano at age 4 with her mother. The standard repertoire was always the basis for her studies, but her subsequent private teacher, Isabelle Sant’Ambrogio, who Cheng-Cochran counts as a profound influence, slipped modern music into the mix.

She attended college at SUNY Stony Brook for a year, working with Gilbert Kalish, then moved on to Stanford where her practical parents insisted she earn a degree in economics. Determined to continue in music, she made her own way to graduate and post-graduate music degrees at UCLA and USC, where her teachers were Aube Tzerko and John Perry.

Along the way, she caught the new music bug. “I would go to new music concerts,” she recalls, sitting in her Monterey Hills condo, “and be totally mystified by them, and I just became intrigued. I thought, ‘What is this?’ I wanted to understand it better.”

Understanding it better is what drives Cheng-Cochran to this day. Her work with the California EAR Unit, as a regular participant in the Green Umbrella Concerts and with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, at festivals in Santa Fe, Tanglewood, Aspen, Brussels and elsewhere, has brought her into close contact with composers--a key for her in developing an understanding and interpretation of a new piece. She particularly enjoys working one on one with composers, “hashing” pieces out with them, as she says.

It doesn’t necessarily go smoothly. Her collaboration with Terry Riley on “The Heaven Ladder, Book 7”--a work commissioned and recorded by her, though as yet unreleased--was one such occasion. Riley, a pianist himself, delivered a sketchy manuscript, devoid of specifics. To fill that void, Cheng-Cochran created what she calls an “edition” of the work--a scheme of articulation, phrasing, pedaling and dynamics--in order to perform it. Playing the work for the composer, she found herself “at loggerheads” with him over that edition. “We really had vastly different [ideas] about the approach that was necessary to bring this music to life.

“So I worked very hard to incorporate his suggestions. In the end, I think I probably arrived at something midway between his ideas and my own. Finally, I recorded it and I sent him the test CD and he’s very pleased with it. He said, ‘You know, it’s surprisingly beautiful what you ended up doing.’ ”

On the printed page, contemporary music can look more like a map of another galaxy than a Chopin etude; just learning the notes to a new piece is a gargantuan task. In late April, she was practicing between 10 and 12 hours a day, preparing for recitals here and in Syracuse and for upcoming Philharmonic concerts both here and in New York City, where she was to play the synthesizer part (written for her) in Salonen’s “LA Variations” and in a New Music Group concert.

She’ll go at a piece every which way, forward and backward, slowly, in her head, silently. For pure “woodshedding”--musician’s argot for arduous note-by-note practice--and to spare the neighbors, she works on a synthesizer with headphones.

Cheng-Cochran says that she practices so hard “because I feel I’m not brilliant. I put in really long hours because I feel I have to cover my bases.” Her goal is complete fluency with the piece at hand. “With Chopin,” she says, “the language is commonly understood. And you can start at a level already where you’re shaping the interpretation right off the bat.

“Learning something where the language is really totally unfamiliar--and from composer to composer it’s so different nowadays--the learning curve is pretty steep with most of this stuff. The note-to-note interactions are very abstract. There’s no way you can start working on your interpretation. That process is much delayed.”

The hard work pays off, though. Her playing has a pronounced ease to it, a fluency that, as one critic has said of her Messiaen recording on Koch, “turns hard rock into graceful sculpture.” Once she’s got the notes, she explains, she attempts to uncover “some kind of visceralness in the music, some kind of kinetic energy. Or, if it’s a perfectly static passage, to try to be utterly in that mode. Embody it. And if it’s any kind of passage that requires direction, to make sure I know where it’s heading and make it go.”

Preferring her home life in L.A. to touring, she gave up formal membership in the EAR Unit because they were on the road so much. Still, her work requires a certain amount of travel. Last month she took part in the first ever live Switched-On Bach concert, with Wendy Carlos in New York. This summer will find her in Finland for two weeks at the Kuhmo Festival.

But with each new piece opening up new horizons within, who needs travel?

“It’s sort of like when I bought my first modern painting,” she says. “I was living in a house at the time which had lace curtains and I decorated it with chintz and flowers and stuff. And I put this modern painting on the wall, and I stayed up till three in the morning that night, ripping down my curtains and taking all the lace out and kind of rearranging my living space to accommodate this new painting.”

For Cheng-Cochran the same holds for new music. “With the good pieces, it just takes me to a new place.” And wonderful things happen at 3 in the morning.

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GLORIA CHENG-COCHRAN, Neighborhood Church, 301 N. Orange Grove Blvd., Pasadena. Date: Tuesday, 8 p.m. Prices: $10-$15 (tickets available at the door only).