Thomas Kotcheff and Bryan Curt Kostors didn’t set out to reinvent Cage and Feldman so much as they wanted to uncover what was already humming beneath the surface. Their new album, Between Systems, takes early piano works from the 1950s and processes them through modular synths and live electronics, but the result never feels like augmentation. Instead, it’s more like watching someone carefully peel back layers to reveal colors that were waiting there all along. Kotcheff’s approach to interpretation itself feels worth examining, the way he questions whether fidelity to a score means reproducing it exactly or embodying what it actually asks of a performer. There’s something generous in the way he describes their process, always collaborative, always curious, like two people following a trail they’re discovering together.
Between Systems is OUT NOW.
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What strikes me about Between Systems is how naturally the electronics feel integrated with these mid-century piano works. Can you walk me through that first moment when you and Bryan realized this approach could actually work? Was there a specific sound or gesture that made you think, “Yes, this is it”?
Bryan and I began our process with hours of improvisation. When we started this project in 2021, the first two pieces we performed were original works we wrote together. What we quickly noticed was that the electronics didn’t compete with the piano but added a dimension that gave the instrument new depth and expression. A held piano cluster could bloom into a sustained, slightly detuned halo, with the decay and after-ring seamlessly belonging to the same sound world. For us, the acoustic overtones and electronic processing felt seamlessly fused, with neither ever overshadowing the other. We realized we weren’t adding decoration to the piano, but uncovering the latent colors within it. After that first performance, almost without discussion, we both knew we had to perform John Cage’s “In a Landscape”. The colors we had uncovered felt beautifully aligned with that piece, and from there, the album began to take shape.
The Feldman pieces you chose are all from this early indeterminate period, 1951-53. What was it about the “musical spaciousness” of these particular scores that invited your interventions? I’d love to hear you describe what you actually see on the page versus what you heard as possible.
What Bryan and I loved about the seven Feldman works we selected for the album was how each piece contains its own distinct universe, each exploring a different facet of the piano. We worked carefully to ensure that every interpretation brought something uniquely its own to the surface. For example, in “Nature Piece 4,” Bryan performs on the Lyra-8 synthesizer to breathe life into the sustained tones—the only movement in the set that features long, resonant notes—so that they seemed to shimmer and expand beyond the instrument.
Another aspect of the five Nature Pieces that drew Bryan and me in was their openings: each begins with one to three bars of rest. We spent a lot of time discussing what that silence might mean for performance. Should we simply begin the recording earlier? Should we introduce a layer of white noise so the listener senses the piece has already started? From the very first measure, the score invites interpretation and sparks deep discussion.
Because Feldman composes with such an economy of material, he asks both performer and listener to examine every detail more closely: the micro-resonances, the subtle harmonics, the relationship between two chords, or the way a sound inhabits time. It’s precisely because his music demands such concentrated attention that we felt compelled to explore it more deeply. And now, having created these interpretations, it’s difficult for either of us to imagine hearing the pieces any other way.
“Nature Piece 2” has this fascinating hidden feature where all the notes are grace notes before the beat, invisible to the listener but felt by you as the performer. How did bringing that hidden element into audible time change your relationship to the piece? Did it reveal something about Feldman’s thinking that you hadn’t considered before?
You know, I still wonder about the grace notes and what Feldman truly intended with them. They also appear in “Intermission 5” on our album, where you’ll have a long stretch of silence followed by a grace note with no downbeat. In that context, meter becomes irrelevant—so what does it even mean to play a grace note before a beat that doesn’t exist?
Yes, in “Nature Piece 2,” Bryan and I chose to bring the meter to life so that the grace notes functioned as actual grace notes. To me, that felt like revealing something deeply internal, almost private, about the performer’s relationship to the piece. It’s like exposing what’s happening in our minds and bodies as we play: the silent counting, the anticipation, the perfectly placed motion ahead of a beat that only we perceive. In that sense, I feel our interpretation uncovers a kind of truth in the piece, our truth as performers.
I have to ask about “Nature Piece 5,” because the idea of finding a four-on-the-floor pulse in 7/8 virtuosic piano leaps is kind of wild. What made you hear that underlying pulse? Was it always there for you, or did it emerge through the process of working with Bryan?
This movement is incredibly difficult—one of the hardest single pages of music I’ve ever performed. After hours of practice, I realized that counting much of it in 4/4 instead of 7/8 made the rhythms far easier to internalize. The music itself still sounded the same, but for me as the performer, the groupings felt completely different. In that sense, the four-on-the-floor quality actually began in my head. When Bryan and I started working together, I was still set on the electronics being in 7/8, but it was Bryan’s vision to bring the pulse I was feeling internally into the electronics themselves.
You’re performing these works while they’re being processed in real time, which means you’re responding to sounds that don’t exist yet in the score. How does that change your physical relationship to the piano? Are there moments where the electronics surprise you, even now after living with these arrangements?
Yes, all the time! The Eurorack modular synth has chance elements built in, constantly reacting to and generating material from my performance. Bringing Cage’s spirit of indeterminacy into the electronic processing was Bryan’s idea, and it’s one of my favorite aspects of the album. In both our recording sessions and live concerts, Bryan and I are always responding in real time—he’s literally turning knobs to shape the Eurorack’s parameters while I’m listening closely and making choices about how the music should unfold and dialogue with it. Now that I’ve lived with these recordings for over a year, what strikes me most is this live quality. Every take with the Eurorack carried an element of the unknown, and that bubbling unpredictability is still crystal clear to me whenever I listen back.
The classical music world can be pretty protective about fidelity to scores, especially with composers like Cage and Feldman, who were very specific about certain things. Have you encountered resistance to this approach? How do you think about honoring the composers’ intentions while also claiming interpretive freedom?
Bryan and I have been amazed by how openly this album has been embraced so far by our colleagues. I think that response comes from the fact that we both deeply love and respect these pieces, and we approached them with a real understanding of their material and history. Our goal was never to create a mashup between ourselves and Cage or Feldman, but rather to share what we heard in their music—something that felt worth bringing into the light. In many ways, that’s what every performer does: they encounter something within a work, internalize it, and then offer it back to others.
I often think about questions of interpretation, like tempo choices. If a piece is marked at a speed that is physically unplayable for a particular performer, should that person be discouraged from attempting it? Or should they be encouraged to embody the work in their own way? And if they do so, are they still fulfilling the composer’s intentions? I don’t believe there are definitive answers—but these are the questions I love exploring in my practice.
What does your collaborative process with Bryan actually look like? Are you in the room together making decisions in real time, or is it more iterative, passing materials back and forth?
Both! We began this project entirely in the room together. Many of the first discoveries happened through immediate feedback and discussion: I would play a passage, Bryan would process it, and we’d both react, tweak, and refine. Sometimes I’d loop a section while Bryan carefully dialed in a synth color to match, other times we’d brainstorm textures we wanted to layer with the piano, and Bryan would build a sound before we rehearsed it. After recording the piano and most of the synths live together, the process shifted to Bryan’s studio, and our collaboration became more remote. He would add layers or additional processing, send versions back to me, and we’d start the dialogue again—reacting, suggesting new ideas, and shaping the track further. What I love is how these two modes feed each other: real-time choices inform the meticulous studio work, and those studio experiments, in turn, reshape our live performances.
You’re both composers as well as performers. How does that shared compositional sensibility shape the work? Do you find yourselves thinking about these pieces as composers analyzing structure, or as performers responding to sound?
For the entirety of my friendship with Bryan, we’ve shared a mutual love of art, film, and music across all genres. Back when we were graduate students at the University of Southern California, our Friday nights often meant trips to the arthouse cinema to catch the latest avant-garde independent film. Our aesthetics always seemed naturally aligned, and when we began this project, we simply built a playlist of tracks, sounds, and artists we loved—anything that felt like it could live within the album’s aesthetic universe. After that, we never really had to define the aesthetic again. Our visions were already in sync, and the process became one of building forward rather than circling back.
Bryan and I both view ourselves as performers on this album, and the way we approached each piece wasn’t so different from how I would approach interpreting any solo piano work alone. The difference was that together we felt we were extending the line further, following the trail deeper than we had previously gone before. A good example is John Cage’s “In a Landscape” (track 7 on the album). As a solo pianist, one of the central considerations in this piece is the use of pedal and how fully to let the sound ring out as the score suggests. Many pianists make subtle adjustments to the pedal at key moments, shaping the resonance as the music unfolds. With Bryan, our interpretation expanded this aspect: what might resonance look like electronically? How could we draw it out, layer it, and let it evolve through the electronics as part of the performance? And just as I shape resonance with the pedal, Bryan responds live in performance, manipulating the electronic resonance as we play together.
This album really does expand what “classical interpretation” can mean. Now that you’ve done it, has it changed how you think about approaching other repertoire? Are there other composers or periods you’re curious about exploring through this lens?
Yes! The nine Cage and Feldman works that made it onto the album were actually whittled down from a much larger list of repertoire Bryan and I had wanted to record. That list included other American experimentalist composers (especially ones where timbre and duration were a prime consideration in their aesthetic), a couple of works by Bach, and we even started to work on and record a few pieces by Philip Glass as well. With Glass, the blend of synthesizers and acoustic instruments is already embedded in his musical language, so it felt like a natural fit. In the end, the Glass pieces didn’t align as seamlessly with the Cage and Feldman selections to form a cohesive album. That said, we love the material we recorded and plan to release it as a follow-up EP or single in 2026.
You mention falling in love with the possibilities as you experimented more. What specific moment or discovery made you realize this project was going to be something special? When did it stop being an interesting experiment and become something you felt you had to share?
When Bryan and I work together, it feels more like play than work. Everything is reactionary, exploratory, and rooted in a “yes, and” approach. Long before we ever said, “let’s make an album,” we were simply writing pieces for each other and improvising for the joy of making music. In one of those early sessions in 2021, Bryan pulled out the Meris Hedra pitch shifter pedal, and I had a true aha moment. At first, it was just ridiculously fun to play with (so much fun, I bought one for myself and still use it in my home studio), but then we immediately thought: what if we played atonal music through a pedal that pitch-shifts on top of it? It was like doubling—or even tripling—down on atonality by layering more of it. We both knew instantly how special it was. We kept that sound, and you can hear it right from the very first track of the album: Morton Feldman’s Nature Piece 1.
And as always, to close… What are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
Some of my favorite sounds in the world are the ones tied to memory. A saved voicemail from a loved one can instantly transport me back to the time and place when it was first left. I think sound has this ability to act as memory itself. It’s not just something we hear, but something we carry inside us, a key that opens doors to memories we might otherwise forget.
Foxy Digitalis depends on our awesome readers to keep things rolling. Pledge your support today via our Patreon or subscribe to The Jewel Garden. You can also make a one-time donation via Ko-fi.
