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Libby Larsen Interview (2/99)
6. Advice for Younger Composers
RK: What advice would you give to younger composers? (This could lead directly from what we were just discussing in terms of gender issues, or it could be just for younger composers, period.)
LL: The best advice I have to offer is to establish wonderful relationships with great performers. And to nurture those relationships and always work towards and with performance, work with performance.
RK: But you know what a young composer will say... How do you do that? I'm just starting out. I just got out of school. I just had a couple of performances in school with some of the student groups. I'll keep in touch with my colleagues, hopefully their careers will expand, but how do I make new contacts? How do I get to meet the Juilliard Quartet? How do I get to meet the Kronos Quartet? How do I get to meet Dawn Upshaw? What do I do now?
LL: I know how difficult this is. You have to become part of the musical community in which you live and work. It's a matter of developing relationships, and that takes many acts of courage. Each new relationship really is an act of courage. If you admire particular performers, and you'd like to work with them at some point, it may take years, but the ability to develop and maintain good respectful working relationships is really what the art of music is about in the performing world. Don't you think?
RK: I do. I think it's the most difficult thing, however.
LL: It is, it's very frightening and there's no formula for it, but if you believe in your own music, then others will too.
RK: No, there's no formula, and in addition to that, you're looking at all sorts of subsets, and people who clearly see the subsets. The other day, I was speaking to a composer (who shall go nameless) about the academic world. (The university world is separate to a great degree.) She said to me that she and her friends had formed a little community of younger composers and had kind of given up on the university world. And so the issue is not for us to discuss necessarily how to change that, but the fact that that does exist, even. Not only are composers faced with just simply having to get out there, having to meet people, having to be confident in their work, asking someone to listen to their tape, or to look at the score, or to play it. In addition to all that, they're looking at minefields that have to do with subsets and sub-communities; it's almost a tribal culture in a way.
LL: It really is. You just have to be able to hang out in that world. And there are some worlds that you just can't hang out in, no matter how hard you try. It takes time. I think the big mistake for a young composer is to think that (...getting back to the question of when are you successful...) you ought to be successful by the time you're thirty. But we get and give a lot of messages: the BMI Awards, the ASCAP awards. Even within our own very well meaning fields, we create a definition of failure.
RK: Without a doubt. The person I was talking about had a similar discussion with me and she felt that the awards are really misunderstood.
LL: There should just be awards for good work. So why is there an age limit to them? It's a double standard. But the young composer can feel a pressure to succeed defined by prizes and milestones and reinforced by well-meaning people. It's self-imposed, but the pressure is definitely within the field.
RK: Often these competitions are an affirmation. This gets back to what we were talking about before. I played in this quintet for 15 years and we won all sorts of competitions. But the thing we were looking for was a Naumburg Award, which we finally won in 1990. We were only the second brass quintet ever to have won that. That did something: we felt like we had arrived, we felt as if we now had a right to talk to whomever we wanted to talk to, or to try. Was our work any better after the Naumburg? Did we play any better at the Naumburg Concert than we did a year-and-a-half before that? The most important thing is about the internal voice, the inner voice, and what the Naumburg did for our inner voices and our image of ourselves. But what if someone doesn't win these things? Does that mean their inner voice is going to be shaky for a while? There are tremendous questions of confidence. There are tremendous questions for trying to wade through waters, especially in an emerging period.
LL: That's right. I avoided entering any competitions. I didn't even apply for most of the programs we created at the Forum. I didn't want the pressure of the prize undermining my own path to finding music that affirmed my reason for writing it. Although, at the same time, a prize can be affirming.
RK: Well, it can be, but it can be false too; it's a trap. You've got to feel comfortable with what you're doing. You've got to build that somehow. If that means finding some way to make that happen, that may work for some people. You saw it as a tool, and you probably understood that it's double-edged.
LL: Yes, it is double-edged, because you may begin to believe it. And more than that, other people begin to believe that the prize is a measure of your success. And that's really dangerous because expectation can threaten your creative voice. Then you've got some real problems. For a young composer, it's important to feel very comfortable that your own voice is growing, and that you've mastered the techniques to help it grow, and that you're finding the performers who believe in your voice and want to grow with you. That's real success.
RK: Well, it's understanding the process. Someone has to help you see the process and understand your place in it, or the point at which you're in that process.
LL: Yes, we need to re-discover how to teach composing as a process of personal growth as well as technical mastery.
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