Pianist Brianna Matzke’s Tremors are at the Heart of The Response Project’s Newest Exhibit

This story is featured in CityBeat's May 1 print edition.

The body is the conduit for creating all art, but Brianna Matzke is taking it one step further for TREMOR , the latest installment of The Response Project.

This unique commissioning initiative seeks responses from composers and artists to a certain idea or piece of existing art, weaving them all together for a special, one-night-only performance. Past Response Projects have seen artists from a variety of creative disciplines make new work in response to Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited album, a 2015 Late Show exchange between Killer Mike and Stephen Colbert, and even a pandemic presentation, The Oliveros Response Project in 2021. TREMOR is no different, presented with concert:nova and in collaboration with artists from Visionaries + Voices and Britni Bicknaver, all asked to respond to Matzke’s essential tremor.

“I shake every day, all day, and so the only way I know how to play piano is with these hands that shake,” said Matzke. “So my most authentic artistry is shaking hands. It’s at the heart of my authentic expression at the piano and if my hands suddenly one day stopped shaking, it wouldn’t be my artistry anymore.”

A professional pianist and professor of music at Wilmington College, Matzke has been playing the piano since her childhood. She studied piano performance at the University of Kansas and received her Doctor of Musical Arts in piano performance from the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music in 2014. The piano is integral to her profession, and her person.

So when she first began to notice her hands shaking in her mid-twenties in grad school, she chalked it up to stress, or fatigue, or anxiety or too much caffeine. But her colleagues and fellow students also noticed her shaking hands. And, eventually, the shaking became too pronounced to overlook.

“The moment that I knew I was going to get the diagnosis [was] this spiral test where they ask you to draw a spiral,” said Matzke. “The doctor just put a blank sheet of paper in front of us. He was sitting across from me and he just very calmly drew a spiral with his pen. It was so smooth and a perfect draw and I knew, watching him draw that, that I was not going to be able to draw a spiral like that. He handed me the pen and I drew it and it was all shaky because that’s what it looks like when I draw. I knew, based on what I saw on the internet, that my spiral was an essential tremor spiral.”

Matzke was officially diagnosed with essential tremor in early 2020, and all that it has entailed and unveiled for Matzke about herself and her art in the ensuing years is at the heart of TREMOR .

“After that diagnosis, I already knew I wanted to use music to process what was happening to me,” she said.

Matzke isn’t alone in her experience in the classical music world. Beethoven suffered severe tinnitus, composing his Ninth Symphony in a state of progressive hearing loss. Ravel of “Boléro” fame suffered from brain disease. The renowned 20th-century pianist and conductor Leon Fleisher was diagnosed with focal dystonia, a neurological disorder that affected his right hand and ability to perform. Fleisher moved his focus to performing only with his left hand and later commissioning music composed for the left hand.

And of course there are the five composers whose work Matzke will perform: Hanna Benn, Matthew Evan Taylor, Adeliia Faizullina, Forrest Pierce and Molly Joyce, all of whom resonated in unique ways with TREMOR ’s central theme of disability and beauty.

“A lot of scholars have pointed out instances of composers going back to Beethoven or Schumann [having disabilities] and how that informed their work and how it wasn’t labeled like that,” said Joyce.

A graduate of Juilliard and The Royal Conservatoire in the Hague, with a master's in composition from Yale, Joyce also holds an advanced certificate and master of arts in disability studies from CUNY School of Professional Studies.

“A lot of my work focuses on disability as a creative source and stems from a disability I acquired about 25 years ago in a car accident, and it informs a lot of my work,” said Joyce, whose left hand was impaired in that accident.

Joyce composes for a variety of instruments and artists, as well as performing her own works. “Affection,” her solo piano composition for TREMOR , is about holding grace for a disorder or disability, rather than resenting it, and allowing those affections to move one in a progressive direction.

“For this piece, the idea starts with a simple, straightforward melody, very, very simple, but beautiful,” said Matzke. “A tremor is introduced into the melody and it becomes more unpredictable. [Simultaneously] low notes are introduced … that build in strength and the tremor becomes more regular, so by the end of the piece, it just feels like strength through the tremor.”

Among the other composers contributing commissioned pieces for TREMOR is Forrest Pierce, a professor of music theory and composition at the University of Kansas. They met while Matzke was a student and they stayed in touch over the years. A few conversations in 2022 about Pierce’s work and Matzke’s tremor led to the inspiration for “something, shimmering,” his composition for TREMOR .

“My main goal was to find a way to capture the beauty of [a] shimmering cottonwood leaf, but to also find ways in which Brianna’s particular experience of this tremor would be amplified, embodied, expressed, articulated, through the piano technique that was being asked for,” said Pierce.

“something, shimmering” requires a prepared piano, which is altered with various implements to produce different sounds. Here, those implements include the suction-cupped ends of children’s toothbrushes and car windshield squeegees. To perform the piece — and evoke that namesake shimmering — Matzke wears a mesh glove fitted with ten silver-plated earrings in the shape of cottonwood leaves on her right hand.

“I’m trying to interweave my own physical experience, which involves a lot of internal noise in my own body, so I’m trying to communicate as the composer, with Brianna’s body, by including my persistent tinnitus that I have ringing in my ears, the popping of my spine and neck, the tension that’s in my brain stem, and all of these other things so there’s a kind of hybriding of kinesthetic experience in the piece,” said Pierce. “All in the service of the larger incantatory intention of the piece.”

Work created by artists with developmental disabilities from Visionaries & Voices will be featured in an exhibition at The Well in Camp Washington through May 6, in a visual art complement to the concert on May 5. These artists include Nick Kraft, Rosalind Bush, Milo Gleich, Vince Cole and Linda Kunick. Bicknaver also contributes a sonic work to the lineup.

“I just want people to feel seen,” said Matzke. “I want us to feel kinship with one another at these events, and that kinship can only come through being vulnerable and authentic. I’m trying to present myself as vulnerable and authentic so hopefully that helps people see each other that way, too. I want to bring visibility to disability, artists with disability, lived experience of disability, I want to raise awareness of essential tremor. I hope people can come experience something interesting and beautiful — they can walk away and feel like they know how to make the world a little bit nicer.”

TREMOR debuts May 5 at the American Sign Museum in Camp Washington. More info: concertnova.com/concerts-events/s17/tremor-exhibit .