American Rage: The Piano Version

Conrad Tao

American Rage on Spotify

​"Sometimes the only way to express compassion in its overwhelming fullness is to scream, to make a ruckus, to be rageful. It is scary to take a side, to declare one’s faith in our capacity for solidarity, to commit to building a different world. Compassion is relentless effort in the face of that fear, compassion is humility, compassion is listening as practice—listening as a deepening that enriches one’s empathy." – Conrad Tao
​

​"Julia Wolfe, the youngest of the composers represented here...She had a ringside seat for the defining moment of America’s entry into the 21st century, living but a few blocks from Manhattan’s World Trade Center, and she wrote the seven-minute piano piece “Compassion” as a reaction to that event. It’s the emotional core of “American Rage,” an angry ballad that grounds a series of emotional outbursts to a searching minimalist sequence, before ebbing, during its final minute, into a sense of quiet resignation. Tao’s performance is crisp and passionate, with the virtuosity necessary to navigate the work but without any unneeded affect." (BA Nillson)

​To the Sweet Side of My Soul,

I am weary of your sweetness.  I’m fuming and furious. 

People like you tell me to let the fury go.  They say that fury is unkind and that it obstructs clear vision. 

But isn’t there a place for fuming and fury in the spiritual life?  Isn't fury a place where the pain in the heart meets the hungers of the world.  Can't it be a catalyst for compassion and for deep listening.

O sweet side, yes, listen to me !!

Yes, I am weary of your sweet spirituality.  I need spirituality with more of an edge to it.  
​
Your Fuming and Furious Soulmate

Fuming
​

Pianist Conrad Tao is fuming. His album American Rage pounds its fists in rebellion, points its fingers in accusatory fury and proposes only flashes of elegiac serenity and hope. Pent up anger bursts out of Frederic Rzewski's Which Side Are You On, an explosive twist on an old labor song which still resonates vividly, as it did during this summer's mine worker protests in Kentucky. Julia Wolfe's Compassion, written after 9/11, howls in anguished stacks of pounded block chords, while Aaron Copland's war time Piano Sonata offers a bleak canvas of loss and promise. Sometimes, Tao says, you just need to "make a ruckus."  (Tom Huizenga, NPR)

A deeply personal statement from an American artist of an immigrant background at a time of tremendous political discord.  (Anthony Tommasini, NY Times)