Category: In Print

In Conversation with Francie Ostrower



Francie Ostrower
Photo courtesy the author

An interview with the author of Trustees of Culture: Power, Wealth, and Status on Elite Arts Boards

Amanda MacBlane: I wanted to start by asking you if you could give a little bit of background on the field of philanthropy research that you’ve been involved in, particularly what led to this book.

Francie Ostrower: Sure. I think one of the issues in the area of philanthropy research is that sometimes people are either painted as saints or villains and one thing that is really important for me is that in reality there are multiple motives, there are mixed motives, and I really wanted for these different things come through in this book. To go back to what led to this book, what had happened was that I had done research on philanthropy among affluent donors for a book that I wrote previously called Why the Wealthy Give and in that book I was looking at how philanthropy and giving really form a part of the culture of these affluent donors. And one of the things I found out as I was going around speaking with people is that service on boards was enormously important and intimately connected to their giving. Now, of course I had known that people who give also serve on boards, but what surprised me was just how closely they were connected and how often conversations about giving money turned into conversations about serving on boards. Also, it turned out that there was a hierarchy that people saw among boards—certain boards were seen as more prestigious than others. People would make kind of a career of it, too. They would have in mind certain boards that they wanted to serve on in the future. Some people would go to great lengths to get on the boards of particular organizations and it was something that was very important to them both because of, in many cases, their passion for the organization and what it does, but also because there was clearly a class-related prestige associated with serving on boards and some more than others. In fact, some people would speak about how for some boards you could almost rank them by the dollar amount you had to contribute to get on them and for some of these boards, far from having difficulty recruiting members (and some boards do have difficulty), the more prestigious boards have a lot of people vying to give, doing whatever they have to to get onto them. So what I found in that book was the importance of serving on boards in terms of people’s overall philanthropy and the meaning to them and how it influenced their giving. It was very clear that one—and I stress one—motive for giving was to be on the board. And one other thing that I like to add was that it also became very clear that arts organizations were among the most prestigious types of boards to serve on. So one question that that raised that I couldn’t answer in that book was, ok, serving on these boards has some kind of class-related meaning, a kind of prestige for these individuals, and I’ve seen how that affects their giving, but what does that mean in terms of what they actually do once they’re on the board? What’s the affect on the organizations? Does it influence the way they act as trustees? And that led me to go on to this book that we are talking about now, Trustees of Culture. To answer these questions, I focused on 4 boards in 2 different cities, rather than in the former book where I selected individuals who were donors and trustees of all different kinds of organizations. In this case, I selected two opera companies and two museums and went to examine—as I said, I started out with this question—whether and how these class-related meanings influenced what they do on the boards.

Amanda MacBlane: Right and I know that one of the major themes of the book is this tension that exists between the organizational needs and the more status-related benefits of serving on these boards. And while the board’s primary functions tend to be in more of a business or fundraising role and they don’t usually become involved with artistic activities, they do select the professional staff that then does make these decisions. So what exactly is their role in creating an aesthetic image of the institution?

Francie Ostrower: That’s a big question and I guess I would almost like to also preface that by saying that I could do a whole other book to answer this question.

Amanda MacBlane: I’m sure!

Francie Ostrower: Absolutely. But it’s complicated because if you speak with these trustees, they will all say that it is not appropriate for the board to become involved in artistic decision-making. They’ll all say that, but it’s also clearly the case that they hire the professionals and so obviously they are setting certain parameters within which things are going to function. In other words, there are different levels. One level might be particular decisions: what singer are you going to hire for a particular production, for instance. But there is also the issue of the overall range of things that are going to be presented and what’s seen as part of the core mission, and that clearly has artistic implications and there, of course, the board plays a major role. The other thing is that the board would say, of course, that financial matters are very much within their purview, but the boundary line between financial matters and artistic decisions is not always clear. So with respect to the budget, they may have some impact as well. I think, in the case of museums—and I think this is one of the interesting differences between museums and performing arts organizations—is the whole issue of personal collections and contributing collections as a donor. It is an important issue for boards because they are often an important source of where the museum is actually getting very valued artwork.

Amanda MacBlane: Well, we are an organization that represents composers, a smaller, more marginalized community than large art museums and operas. And you mention in the conclusion (which probably also means that it could be an area to study in another book) that this system is not necessarily successful for smaller organizations, particularly ones that are presenting more experimental artwork. Could you maybe explain where some of these discrepancies would come in?

Francie Ostrower: OK, maybe it would be helpful to talk about the question that you had asked in your e-mail to me last week: Why do these boards and organizations seem to be resistant to doing more innovative and experimental work?

Amanda MacBlane: And how does this resistance in elite organizations affect the rest of the art world?

Francie Ostrower: There are two sides to it. These boards all exist in an American system that has really put an emphasis on private support. Arts organizations, for instance, rely on private donations really to a much larger extent than a lot of other kinds of nonprofit organizations. And within all this, the elite—by which I mean affluent people, who also may be elite in terms of their occupational position or maybe they’re in a certain social status—have founded these organizations, contributed to them, and without their donations it is very clear that the organizations in this study certainly would be very different and might not even exist at all. So on the one hand, much of the status and prestige that I’ve spoken about has acted as a very powerful force for attracting donations because there’s kind of an exchange. They are expected to give money to be a part of this system. And wealthy people themselves are very straightforward about this because they themselves are fundraisers and they will use this to try to attract money from others. But, of course, the flip side of this reliance on private money is that if you’re an organization that doesn’t have a tie-in
or an attraction to people who give, you’re not going to get similar resources. Now in the case of these organizations, I think the ways in which people choose the kinds of art to present (there are many, many different reasons), but what I can speak to that came out in this book is where the board has some impact there and I think here there are multiple issues. Let’s talk about opera because that’s really more performing arts. I think the thing that has to be kept in mind is that, in general, these boards are business people, financially oriented people. The people who serve on these boards have great respect for the institution. They like art, but they are all the first to tell you that they’re not there because they are experts on art. Generally, you don’t see people who have great artistic knowledge on these boards if they don’t have wealth. This is a business-oriented board, so when they look at the organization, they’re very, very oriented toward finance, numbers. And many of them will say that they don’t like to do these innovative different kinds of operas because they don’t bring in the same amount of money at the box office. They’ll give a financial reason for it. That’s one reason that’s a barrier—that they lose money on them. The other thing is that, the truth be told, they personally don’t care for more innovative or unusual kinds of things. The third thing is that basically the way that they describe and understand their mission is a conservative one—that they’re there to keep the organization true to its mission and tradition. So all of these things taken together kind of work against bringing in new things. Now, the example that I wanted to give was that in one of the organizations, one of the opera companies, the professional staff member has brought the board around to doing somewhat more innovative things in a very interesting way and I can talk about how that happened.

Amanda MacBlane: That would be great.

Francie Ostrower: It was a very, very interesting strategy for doing it, but let me back up a little. Even in these organizations, this is a very typical kind of tension between the more aesthetically oriented priorities of the professional staff and the business-orientation of the trustees. So this is common at many different kinds of organizations in the arts. Now, what is interesting though is that even though these boards are very financially oriented, they are not interested in just the budget. They want these organizations to represent what they consider the absolute pinnacle of excellence. They want the organizations to be elite. They want them to be prestigious and recognized and that might also be yet another reason that they lean towards presenting things that have already established themselves. So this professional staff member, who very much wanted them to do more kinds of unusual, innovative things, appealed to his board not on artistic grounds that they should be doing more unusual things, but basically appealed to that sense in their minds that the organizations should be recognized by everyone as being the best. And what he did is he said, “If you want to be seen that way, you have to do these kinds of more innovative or unusual things.” So the board did not want to do more innovative operas, but he was very successful because he really understood how much the trustees desired preeminence. He wanted to do more innovative operas and they didn’t. This is a very common disagreement again. The trustees objected to the innovative operas because they didn’t sell as well and again, they didn’t personally like them. But by understanding that the board had this idea for organizational preeminence, he was able to sway some very powerful trustees. He didn’t talk about artistic merits. He said that to be a great opera company and to attract great singers, they had to do some innovative pieces, even though they are costly. And it was interesting because one of the board members was talking about that and he said that he used to oppose operas that he said “only the avant people like,” but the administrator convinced him that “we wouldn’t be a number one opera company if that’s what we did—just do the old war horses and people look at you like that. You have to do these ‘avant’ things, although they’re expensive, as a part of expanding the art and showing you can do things.” So it was very interesting, and he did bring around some of these people. Another trustee, actually on the same board—and now this is a trustee who was a little bit unusual in that he was one who was on the professional staff side and wanted to do more innovative works and was also quite knowledgeable about music—also said, “Well, you know, the trustees as they serve become more knowledgeable about the art form.” And he thought that that had made them more open, too. But I think that that’s kind of a lesser point, that the major thing is how important the role of professional staff can be and how important it is that the people who work with these boards understand the point of view of the board, which may really be a different than their own. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they agree with it, that’s not what I mean, but that they understand it so that when they try to do something or talk to the board, they can do it from that kind of framework. And in this case, the person succeeded exactly because he understood their desire for organizational preeminence and in this case, when trustees are enhancing the prestige of the organization, they’re also enhancing the board’s prestige. So there is an example of how that happens. Again, how far could that go? Would these kinds of boards, although they may do some of those kinds of things, would they go to a drastically different kind of program? No, probably not.

Amanda MacBlane: I doubt it.

Francie Ostrower: I don’t think they would. So, again, it is that kind of balance. How far would they go before they say, “No, this isn’t really for us?” So one of the issues that you get to is that at the same time they’re supporting these organizations and in some ways using all kinds of resources to help them, on the other hand, they also do come with particular understanding, definition, and boundaries considering art outside of which it’s not clear how far the organization could go before they would lose support.

Amanda MacBlane: Right.

Francie Ostrower: They certainly may say, “Well, that’s fine for another organization to do, but not us.”

Amanda MacBlane: I didn’t even realize how important it is for the professional staff to think about the organization the way that the board is thinking in order to interact and communicate with them in a way that actually allows things to get accomplished.

Francie Ostrower: Well, I think it’s critical. And I’ll give you two other kinds of examples. One’s an example of what happened when a professional got into a disagreement with the board and didn’t understand their point of view and then another when they did. One of the things that the trustees really believe is their role—as something that they can do and others can’t do—is in the fundraising area. They really think that they are best equipped to raise money from other people such as themselves. They say they know what other wealthy people want and they say that wealthy people are going to give a little more willingly or readily when they’re asked by someone who is a peer. Now, in one case, an administrator did not understand their point of view of giving and raising money as a central board role and their particular view of their own qualifications here. He wound up engendering a conflict with his board that he could not hope to win. Here’s what happened: The board had planned a fundraising gala, organized around the opening, and the
professional staff chose the opera that was going to be performed. Now the trustees objected to the chosen opera because they said the opera was too long and it would interfere with the evening’s social purpose. They complained that, “It would’ve started at one in the morning and for an opening night performance, people don’t want it to be an overnight.” Now in this case, the board prevailed and a shorter and more popular piece was selected. One trustee said that, “the professional just didn’t understand the social raising of money.” The trustees did not define the opening night as an artistic occasion; they defined it as a social and a fundraising occasion and therefore falling in their domain. Now, although they deferred to the professional’s artistic authority at other times, in this case, they challenged his decision, so not only was the administrator unsuccessful, but he also reinforced thoughts the trustees had about his financial acumen and left the board feeling more justified about intervening in financial management, which is of course something that was not something that was desired by the staff. On the other hand, at a different organization, there was a debate that came out about very frequent social events that were being held. These were social events being held within the organization and again a debate broke out. These events were exhausting the staff who said that they also felt that the events were distorting the organization’s mission. But in this case the staff prevailed and the number of events was reduced, and one of the trustees there said, “Well, social events are very important, but there has to be a balance.” So in this case, staff succeeded essentially by arguing that the elite social agenda, the trustee social agenda, did not support the organization’s interest, but was actually threatening its very character. So, I think that those just offer examples of how understanding the boards perspective is absolutely critical for any professional or for anybody who really needs to work with or through arts organizations because the board does have that ultimate authority.

Amanda MacBlane: Right. Because obviously after reading this book, you really made the point that these boards and these elites are necessary for the organization to exist and this leads me to the last little thing I wanted to talk about. These people are incredibly essential to the functioning of the organization, but the insularity of the fundraising activities of the board also seems to alienate them from the larger community. I don’t feel that these organizations, particularly these elite institutions, exist for the larger community and I’ve always found kind of a disconnect between their outreach programs and ideas about involving the community and the aura of exclusivity in which they seem to be wrapped. Do you sense this disconnect as well?

Francie Ostrower: Well, I think this is a very, very important area and is very important for them because—something that we haven’t spoken about too much but is, in a way, the book’s thesis—is that there are these kind of important but conflicting influences at work on these boards. One between these class-influences, which often do push to more insularity and traditionalism, and the other rooted in the kind of organizational influences. I think that these organizations that I’ve studied and certainly the older ones have changed. At one of them, it used to be that at the end of the year they’d tally things up and if there was a gap between what they had earned and what they had spent, the board would just give the difference. But the days are long gone when a small group of wealthy people can support these organizations and trustees know it. And in fact, in a sense, they’ve contributed to it because their own interest of having what they consider an organization of excellence—they associate excellence with size. So they have supported and even encouraged the kind of organizational growth that really has made it impossible for any small group to support them. The reason I bring that up here is that, in fact, these organizations have to have a wider range of financial support just to exist, and they don’t exist in a vacuum. The societies they’re in have changed as well and, therefore, there’s a lot of recognition that they need to do other kinds of things to bring in new audiences, to not be so insular. I think the example of supertitles is a great example because again the very point of supertitles is to make opera more accessible. And so, trustees said, we have to do it because we have to bring in more audiences and because they care about the art form and they felt that this was important to having it continue. So, what happens though, is that the boards become more open in terms of the organization and its services. There is kind of a stereotype of the elite arts boards and certainly historically, they just want to keep the arts organizations to themselves and they don’t want to let anybody else in it, but, in fact, that wasn’t really the case with these boards. They supported and were very open about having the organization be more open, but when it comes to the board, it’s very different. That stays exclusive and they kind of have their relationship to the organization separately. You know, a museum can have an exhibit, a lot of people come, but they see the exhibit when it is closed to the public. They’re on the board with others such as themselves. But when you do have a board like that, clearly, one of the roles of a board is to kind of connect an organization to important constituencies and clearly these boards connect these organizations to people with many resources. In some cases can be helpful in other arenas as well, with businesses, government. But when it comes to other parts of the community that it may be very important for the organizations to connect to, it’s obviously harder because the board doesn’t have those connections. Diversity—the whole issue about diversity is a good example. All these boards say, “we want diversity, we care about diversity,” and yet it is very, very hard for them to do this in part because of their insularity. Here, again, I would say is a place where staff can be very important. Let’s look at something like education or outreach programs. If you talk to the trustees, they all support education programs. They think they’re important but it’s not the area that most of them personally will find the most compelling or interesting to become very involved in. There are major exceptions to that but on a museum board, for example, the acquisitions committee for many trustees is going to be more appealing than the education one because it’s more distant from where they are. So I do think that this is an issue and the other issue is that the status that we’ve been talking about, which in some ways can be very powerful, used in a powerful way to the benefit of the organization can also get out of whack, out of balance. It’s one thing for status to be used as a tool or to be used as one motive, but if it becomes nothing more than kind of a vehicle for status it can really hurt the governance function. So I think that if I were to step back and to look at it, what I would say is, if you were to have a board such as this, which in one sense, to trustees, seems diverse because they have some people from this kind of business and some people from that kind of business, but certainly, from another perspective, it is very homogenous, certainly in terms of class. It also means that there’s going to be more of a priority on and there’s going to more attention given to things that are closer to their way of life and that can keep boards from identifying potential problems that come up or responding. It may be that external prompting or even a crisis has to happen before certain things get their attention or they are willing to change. Again, I think that they do give their organizations valuable elite connections, but their homogeneity
also limits their ability to connect the institution with other segments of the community.

In Conversation with Arthur Berger



Arthur Berger, composer and critic, b. 1912
Photo by Robert Bachrach, courtesy C.F. Peters Corporation

An interview with the author of Reflections of an American Composer

Daniel Felsenfeld: What is your opinion of the current reigning music critics in such places as The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and The New Yorker magazine?

Arthur Berger: I think the standards maintained by the music critics on the publications you mention are quite high. There is much more coverage of new music now—indeed, more intelligent and knowledgeable coverage than there was in my time as a critic—though I think the statement is subject to some qualification. I have the impression that for some time now the coverage of contemporary music has not been as broad in The Boston Globe as it was before. For example, during the past few months there were three exemplary concerts of reputable contemporary music groups that were not reviewed. And the music column in The New Yorker in my time as reviewer appeared weekly and is now far too irregular, though it is excellent when it does appear.

Daniel Felsenfeld: In your book you were not in the least doom-saying about the contemporary musical scene. Do you think that concert music has a good healthy future, especially here in America?

Arthur Berger: My book was not really about the contemporary scene and I’m not a soothsayer who can foretell the future. However, though one may be grateful for the attention given both new and old music in today’s concerts, there is still a tendency to serve up the chestnuts where older music is concerned and to program new music for the publicity value of a first performance so that the opportunity to hear this music again and again—s so necessary, as everyone knows, to its proper apprehension—is not vouchsafed by either performers or presenters.

Daniel Felsenfeld: What do you think of the “Europeanization” of many of the larger institutions—Tanglewood, for example, or the major orchestras?

Arthur Berger: This is one area where things have definitely not improved. They’re pretty much the same as they were in my day. I don’t see why Carnegie Hall has to turn to Europeans like Boulez to occupy a distinguished role on its roster, and why the management and boards of our major symphonies spend so much effort shopping abroad when a new conductor is needed despite the fact that America has produced such fine conductors from Levine, Bernstein, and Thomas onwards.

Daniel Felsenfeld: Is there finally an “American” sound to so-called classical music?

Arthur Berger: I don’t know what relation it has to the present globalization since it predates it quite a bit, but internationalism in music has been dominant in the world for some time owing to the prevalence of neo-classicism and serialism and there is still a strong vestige of it in America. To be sure, composers like Copland, Thomson, and Cowell demonstrated in the thirties and forties that we could have an American music and that was good. It gave us the confidence that our music had “come of age.” But it’s not important now. It may be that when we acquire some distance we will hear the “American” sound in the most complex serial music, namely, a certain emphasis on the single note or phrase in contrast to the free-flowing European model—a rhythmic approach that reflects our dealing with music from the ground up in contrast to the European for whom tradition is so natural that he finds himself in midstream without even trying.

Daniel Felsenfeld: What are you composing these days?

Arthur Berger: At the age of 90, unlike Carter, I feel I can slow down a bit and turn to other things, like the book I have just completed. I was never a prolific composer and so slowing down is like almost coming to a standstill. Last summer I did a setting of a Ronsard Ode in 5 parts for mezzo-soprano with accompaniment of flute, cello, and piano, freely based on a setting I had made some years earlier for voice and piano. It was for Dinosaur Annex. But otherwise no one is rushing to my door with commissions and I have works lying on a shelf gathering dust. So at the moment there is no incentive.

In Conversation with Electra Slonimsky Yourke



Father and daughter, 1987
Photo by Betty Freeman

An interview with the editor of Nicolas Slonimsky: Perfect Pitch, An Autobiography—New Expanded Edition

Molly Sheridan: Well, I started reading this book and I couldn’t stop. I mean, even all the reviews of the book mention how funny your father was, but seriously, parts of it had me laughing out loud.

Electra Slonimsky Yourke: Yes, it’s sort of wry and it really reads well. I must say even after having worked on it this much it’s still fun to read. The letters, all of them if you were to see them, are full of these stories. It’s sort of interesting because he was not an observer of life. He was not very observant of people unless they had some notable thing about them that interested him and yet these letters are very lively and give a really good picture of what he got out of his travels.

Molly Sheridan: So, since you’re his daughter obviously you had a special relationship with him already, and then you started working on this book…

Electra Slonimsky Yourke: Right, well, I’m the only child and he, as anybody reading this would realize, is not exactly your classic father-figure type and so my relationship with him even when I was small was not the usual father/daughter, “here let me pass on my wisdom to you,” or “why don’t you do this and do that,” because that was not his personality. It was much more of a peer relationship. We lived in Boston and I came to New York to go to college and I stayed here. He came down pretty regularly for one thing or another, and the places that he went and the people that he knew and the dinners and so forth that we had, I was always tagging along and I knew all of the people who were his friends and I was just sort of part of the crowd even though obviously I was a lot younger and not a musician and not in the business. But I was a college student and then I was a journalist. It was a peer relationship and his work and his world were open to me and continued that way. I met some of the notables myself and so that was part of my life, but I was not even aware that he was writing an autobiography. When my mother died he moved to Los Angeles from Boston. He was 70. Roy Harris was at UCLA and Roy—who was always getting him to come and do things at the places where he was domiciled at the moment—got him to come out and be an instructor at UCLA. That was really a good thing because he was completely broken up by my mother’s death. He really didn’t know what to do. So he moved out there and he started a completely new life in a completely new city, which was in a way not completely atypical. You can see from the book that wherever he went he adapted, learned the geography that he needed very quickly and because he was gregarious and knowledgeable, there were always some musical people, so he could create a life. And indeed he did that in Los Angeles where he was sort of a minor local, I wouldn’t say celebrity, but character and people would call him up for interviews and to give lectures and socialize. I had my own career here and I didn’t really know specifically what he was working on. Then it turned out that he had written this autobiography under contract. It sat at the publisher’s and had to be retrieved and edited. Ultimately it ended up with another publisher, but that’s neither here nor there…So I looked at the manuscript when it was being pared down for publication by Oxford University Press because there were problems with it. It was very ungainly at first and it had a lot of schtick in it frankly, and it had to be cooked down a bit. So his then-assistant and I spent what we still refer to as the week from hell with him getting some stuff taken out that just wasn’t of interest and shaking it down and then that was published. It did very well and they even sent him on a book tour. I went with him part of the time and he did a lot of television interviews and lectures. But it really wasn’t until this second time around with it when I worked much more intensively with the text and found some stuff that he had been cut earlier—I mean there were five versions of the manuscript and cartons of revisions and they were unpaginated, so a few pages would be rewritten and just put on top. It was really a puzzle. In doing all that and reassembling it, there were a couple of things that struck me – the sustained ease and humor and perspective of the writing which I don’t think I really appreciated before. You can go back and read the same thing over and over and it’s just as engaging the fifth time as it is the first time, so that I appreciated anew. Also, he never talked with me, understandably, about the technical aspects of music. That was something that I had not experienced through all of those years. He had all this in his grasp, he knew it all, and that’s why he was a notable conductor and could scan a score and know what was there—he knew all of the structures and all the musical content. But it didn’t interest him very much. So he put it to use when he was conducting, or you will see a few portions in the book where he does a true musical analysis of a piece of work, but I was not aware that all of that was available to him mentally when he was listening to a piece of music. I didn’t know how complicated it was. As a matter of fact, listening to music was not something that he did recreationally. He went to concerts, sometimes unwillingly if it was a program that he was familiar with. He wasn’t interested in repetition, he wasn’t interested in the standard repertoire because he knew it. His interest was stimulated by something that was new and something that was different. As a matter of fact when I was a kid my parents had a subscription to the Boston Symphony. It was sort of the occasion that they did, and they had seats right in the middle of Symphony Hall and almost every Saturday there was a fight because my father didn’t want to go. And I didn’t want to go in his place because that was my chance to have my friends over when nobody was home.

Molly Sheridan: And I take it then that you never got forced into the usual piano lessons if your father never wanted to hear anything more than once?

Electra Slonimsky Yourke: I was, actually, and I displayed an extraordinary lack of talent and interest and then ultimately resistance. I still remember saying to myself at one point, what could they do to me if I refused to have these lessons any more? I must have been big enough to have asked myself how bad could it be? And nothing happened. What were they going to do, beat me? So I simply have no musical ability or talent and it’s just as well. It would have been unhealthy if I had been musical at all. So this has all been a very long way of saying that he liked the new, he understood the new, like Ives, immediately. That was what interested him. He did not listen to music recreationally, though he had lots of records. He knew how to work a record player but not much else. He was not solemn about all of this; he acquired this deep knowledge at a very early age. All of this stuff was there and he never displayed it because it just didn’t interest him that much. It’s like somebody who speaks a lot of languages learned at an early age and people say, ‘Oh, isn’t that wonderful,’ and they say, ‘Who cares?’ So this tremendous technical knowledge that my father had was something that was new to me to understand.

Molly Sheridan: Well, now that you’ve worked so much on this biography, I’m curious where you see this book fitting in with his other writing.

Electra Slonimsky Yourke: All his other writings are extremely structured. He was at his best within a tight form and fitting what he knew and what he intuited into a form, like a dictionary entry. Music Since 1900—I don’t know if you’re familiar with that book—is done in chronological order and it’s not just the musical
highlights of music since 1900, but it’s an attempt to find the earliest possible moment when a certain musical development manifested itself. It’s a little bit like people who want to find the first use of a word, and so there are obscure things in there, but it had a structure. It was chronological and he was looking for specific things. Plus all of the entries are in one sentence, including some very long entries, so that was the gimmick. Above all, he did show off a lot. It was unique in that it pulled up things that were not previously identified. Not that he was a scholarly researcher, he really wasn’t. Yes, he spent a lot of time in the library looking for first performances of things, but that was what he was interested in. It was a matter of having a formula, of getting all the information. Lexicon of Musical Invective, which is a perennial, consists of bad reviews of composers since Beethoven, and people just love that, including non-musicians. It’s a great balm to think that Beethoven didn’t fare too well either, and he dug those reviews out of the old archives—he just loved that. It perfectly suited his personality because, of course, he had been the conductor of many of these early works of Ives, and Cowell and Ruggles and Varèse, and they had all been roasted in the newspapers by the music critics, whereupon his career as a conductor was brought to an end. He could just say, ‘Well, you see, this is what happens to all the greats.’ He liked pointing out philistinism. In the ’40s, he wrote a book on Latin American music—it was the first one apparently that had been written because nobody paid attention to Latin America. There, he had all the countries and the composers and it was all structured that way. He did the same thing with his composing—he did a little bit of rather fair composing. They’re all very small pieces. He’s got a collection called “Minitudes,” some of which are no more than a minute or two long—it’s published by Schirmer Music—and they’re all around an idea, a musical motif or idea and that constitutes a structure. Even the Thesaurus—it was first published in the late ’40s and it sold three copies a year or something but it came to be understood to be a source book for composers and arrangers—scales developed mathematically. He had a very strong mathematical bent and he figured out how to lay out a series of scales in melodic patterns. It’s used as practice material or for improvisation and as a compositional aide. Coltrane, in particular, was said to have used it. I pulled out a biography of Coltrane to find out if this was true or if it was just some kind of family story, but sure enough I looked up Slonimsky in the index and there’s a whole thing about the Thesaurus and his use of it and how he talked it up to a lot of the people around him. It now sells 700 or 800 copies a year, which for a book like that is unusual, so it continues to be useful apparently to musicians from all schools, classical and jazz and theoreticians. But I think I’ve gone far afield. I’m working on editing his other writings. I have a contract for four volumes of his uncollected works, writings that have not been in books. One volume is on Russian and Soviet composers and it’s just … you have to say it’s just brilliant because it’s not only clear, it’s marvelously written with a wonderful use of words. It’s expressive and also analytic, so it’s informative and also very rich to read. And funny of course, as well. Am I going on too long?

Molly Sheridan: No, no, not at all. I know you mentioned it briefly at the beginning of the interview but I’m really fascinated by how you grew up in this household. I’m guessing what we consider to be some of the musical giants were in and out of your life and over for family dinners and things. What was your perception of that then and now looking back with a little perspective and knowing who they were at the time?

Electra Slonimsky Yourke: I have a very bad memory for childhood, but at the time these were the people who were around and they were kind of interesting and my recollection always is that musicians or composers are a pretty lively group and so I have a very positive impression of musicians. Now that may have been selective. It may be that my father liked the lively ones and the lively ones liked him. But these were not people who were at the house all the time. I don’t want to pretend that the greats were around every night. Ives, as you know, was a very remote person. I think I met him a couple of times but he was very remote and not well, although my father visited him in Connecticut regularly. Henry Cowell was a wonderful man and I remember going to concerts with my father and him in New York, climbing up into lofts and down into cellars to hear various kinds of music. He was a lovely man. Also, Varèse. He lived right over here on Sullivan Street and we used to have dinner with Varèse and Louise at Monte’s on Macdougal St. So Varèse is sort of a presence and I remember him well. He was very imposing. But back in Boston the person who was around a lot was Lukas Foss, who was the pianist of the Boston Symphony when I was growing up. He was sort of a regular and Harold Shapero, and Irving Fine. What they liked to do first of all was tell Koussevitzky stories and they liked to test each other’s perfect pitch. They would sit down and play some incredibly complex combination of notes that would give all kinds of misleading overtones and things—it was like musicological arm wrestling. And there was a lot of laughing. Oh, and Roy Harris was around a lot, although my mother didn’t like him at all. I didn’t know who they all were and indeed they have gone into legend but they weren’t necessarily legendary at that time. My father had associated with all of the truly legendary people, particularly in his Paris days— Stravinsky and so forth. He was proud of his re-barring of The Right of Spring in order to help Koussevitzky conduct it, because that acquired a status of its own. Leonard Bernstein was a great admirer of my father, wrote wonderful things to him and for him, including things about this book. It’s on the back cover. Bernstein studied with my father’s Aunt Isabelle [Vengerova] so there was a tie there. My father was also an exceptional pianist but he never played professionally or seriously because again that wasn’t intellectually interesting. When he had to prepare something on the piano he would put Time magazine on the music stand and practice, and that was the extent of it. He was a person of great intellectual curiosity about certain things and he just couldn’t do the same thing over and over again.

Molly Sheridan: I guess to finish up then, you were saying that there’s lot of work you’re still doing with this stuff and you have a full time job on top of that, so what is motivating you. I mean, this man is your father, but still…

Electra Slonimsky Yourke: Once I left for college I really didn’t know what he was doing most of the time but we had a quite good relationship. I was very much a part of his circle in Los Angeles, and when he came here to New York, he was part of my circle. I met many people through him of all ages, regardless of his age, who continue to be among my closest friends. Toward the last part of his life, I managed his business affairs, so to speak. I mean, I negotiated all his contracts and that sort of thing, so I became involved in the business side of it and got to know all the publishers. He gave his materials to the Library of Congress, really a way of cleaning your closets. I had no idea how much there was. Once I went through it … well this is all good stuff. So compiling these volumes seems to extend his life—which he did pretty well himself (laughs). But he continues to be, I hope, a presence in the world of music. These writings are ephemeral. They appeared one week and then they were gone, never seen again
. I know they have value and so I thought, well, I’ll do a collection. Then, in the course of that, I saw there was more and more and more. Publishers are interested in it—I have not had a problem getting publishers and I have the publishing contacts because his reputation continues. If I say Nicolas Slonimsky to a publisher, they know who he is. But I think that when this four-volume thing is done—well, actually, there’s one other collection that’s possible—and I think that maybe then we will have distilled everything. His letters are absolutely marvelous. That’s only a selection that is included in the new edition of Perfect Pitch. They should be published independently but they have to be annotated. So, if out there in your readership there’s somebody interested in doing that, I think it’s a real source archive. When he was traveling, he wrote them every day, long letters. It’s a resource for people who are writing on other subjects—cultural history, regional history, musical history, biographies of people. It’s a great PhD thesis for somebody. So perhaps the Slonimsky Preservation Project will be almost done when these four volumes are out. And two of them need to be completed by Monday.

Molly Sheridan: So you’ve got a weekend ahead of you then!

In Conversation with John J. Volanski



John Volanski
Photo courtesy of the author

An interview with the authr of Sound Recording Advice
Available for purchase at http://www.soundrecordingadvice.com.

Molly Sheridan: Composers have their own recording needs and especially with the industry being less and less able to support these discs, I thought this book would be really interesting.

John Volanski: Well, I would think that a lot of composers could use a home studio as a composing tool.

Molly Sheridan: This book is a very practical instructional tool. What motivated you to sit down and organize this knowledge for the amateur?

John Volanski: Well, originally it started out as a series of articles that I was going to write for Electronic Musician, and I wrote some of those and then I put the project on the shelf and it sat there for a couple of years. Then the opportunity came up where I had the opportunity to leave my job with some stock under my wing so I thought this would be a great opportunity to sit down and at least finish what I had started writing. It turned out to be a lot more work that I thought it was going to be because every time I got to a point where I would stop and look at what I had written, I’d think, ‘Well, now I have to tell them about power and acoustics and how to mix and how to set up a gain structure,’ and on and on. Eventually I finished it but it was a lot more work that I first thought. I found that I was answering the same questions over and over again to a lot of my friends who were setting up their own home studios and so I thought well this would be a good thing to have to point them to so they could just read that and all my answers would be right there.

Molly Sheridan: What is your background in all this that you became so knowledgeable that people were coming to you for advice?

John Volanski: Originally I started out just playing around with analogue tape decks, reel-to-reels, and I got interested in that when I was a kid. Then when I went to college I studied electrical engineering and I also took audio engineering courses as a minor and got more and more interested in it. Did a lot of playing around with equipment while I was there in the music labs, things like that. And then when I got out I bought some equipment for myself and built my own mixer, bought a used analog reel-to-reel and an old monophonic synthesizer, and just started playing around and eventually figured it out. But there’s a lot of extra reading I did on the side, books and different magazines like Keyboard Magazine, Electronic Musician, things of that nature.

Molly Sheridan: Is there anything new that even you learned while writing this book?

John Volanski: That’s a good question. I think most of the stuff I knew, it was just getting it out and onto paper. One of the things that was an interesting task was trying to put together complete recording systems that I could recommend to people at different budget levels. Like if you only have $500, what can you do? What if you only have $2500? And so that was harder than I thought it was going to be because you kind of have one hand tied behind your back. You have to cover all the bases. You need a microphone, you need a recorder, you need some way to mix it, and a different recorder to mix it down to cassette or CD, headphones…it goes on and on, so that was an interesting exercise for me.

Molly Sheridan: Yeah, I was really surprised how much of it wasn’t necessarily computer based. In my limited experience with recording, it’s always involved ProTools, so the fact that there still are technically efficient ways to do this without involving a PC was very surprising to me?

John Volanski: That’s true. You know ProTools is the latest and greatest and everyone wants to jump on that bandwagon, but for the last 20 or 30 years people have been making perfectly good recordings not using ProTools so all that equipment is out there and a lot of it is on the used market right now and it represents a good deal for people to seek out and buy. Some of the older equipment can be kind of a maintenance headache but if you know what you’re doing with that kind of stuff you can turn out very high quality recordings. There are a lot of sites and in my book I must give 20 or 30 of them where you can get used equipment. There are a ton of them out there.

Molly Sheridan: Yeah, I would guess so since it seems like it almost becomes an addiction and having the new technology gets to be important.

John Volanski: It’s called “new gear lust.” They’ve given it a name, that’s how bad it is.

Molly Sheridan: I’m curious what your first studio looked like when you felt that you were completely operational. What kind of equipment was in it?

John Volanski: Well, let’s see. That’s a good question. When I started out I had 4-track reel-to-reel, a 16-channel mixer that I bought components for and put together, and I used another 2-channel reel-to-reel for my mastering deck and I also used that deck as an echo device kind of like the old tape based echoes. Now a days it’s all digital reverb, digital echo. That’s pretty easy to do, but back then those things were like $10,000 a piece and so there was no way I could afford that. So with that and an old Korg synthesizer that I bought, that’s how I started. And you know some of those recordings that I did back then are pretty lame. I think when I got to the point where I was turning out reasonably higher quality recordings was when I bought an 8-track reel-to-reel and I bought a 16-channel mixer—and it was very clean, the audio path was, no hiss or anything—and I bought a digital effects box, the Yamaha SPX90 was like the first Swiss army knife of multi-effectors, so once I had those and a good condenser mic, then I could start to turn out good recordings, but now a days people can buy those exact units on the used market for, geez, they could probably get that reel-to-reel for $300 or $400 now and when I bought it, it was like $1200. So yeah it’s really changed and the stuff you can buy now, the quality is two or three times what it was and the price is two or three times less.

Molly Sheridan: What do you think, as you look back, were some of the big lessons that you learned or hard lessons through recording disasters that still stick in your mind, that maybe even as you wrote this book you felt a need to address?

John Volanski: Having proper power and grounding is a biggie in that when I first started, the house that I had didn’t have a third wire ground in it. When I’d have ground loops or hum and things of that nature it was hard to get rid of. So getting the proper power and grounding in was one thing. Learning about how sound behaves in a small room because most everyone who is going to have a home studio is going to do it in a bedroom or a garage or something and usually the sound behaves not to your advantage in a small room like that. Not only when you record it but when you listen to it with the monitor that you have it’s going to color the sound quite a bit and it can lead you to make mistakes when you go to mix it down, because you think you’re hearing one thing which you are but when you listen to it in a different space the
way the sound is colored doesn’t appear. Another thing that I leaned is probably putting a lot of emphasis on buying at least one good microphone rather than three or four average microphones. If I were to recommend to someone just starting out what they should do, I’d definitly go with a high quality condenser microphone and the reason is because if you don’t capture the high quality sound right at the beginning anything that you do downstream like adding compression or echo or reverb or equalization, it’s not going to matter because you didn’t start out with a good clean pristine signal. So getting the signal to be the best possible at the beginning makes a big difference. Another thing I learned that took me awhile was proper gain staging and what that means is that any act of electronic stages down the line that can adjust the volume can have a big effect on the signal to noise ratio and the dynamic range of the final audio so if you don’t optimize the gain at each one of those stages and learn how to do that you’re probably going to compromise the overall signal quality and you’re going to end up either with a recording that’s not very loud that has a lot of hiss in it or one that’s too loud that has some distortion and clipping, so in fact in the book I give a lot of sites online and also a tutorial on how to set gain staging because that’s very important and one thing I didn’t know about when I first started. Those are probably some of the main ones.

Molly Sheridan: For someone who sees this book and thinks, ‘Yeah, I’m going to start my own home studio,’ is there any good way to gauge or test this out? How do you know if you’re just fascinated with the technology or if you’re really ready to invest in something like this?

John Volanski: That’s a good question because it is for most people a bit of an outlay of cash. I think what I would do is go to the local audio equipment dealer and see if you can rent probably something like an 8 or a 16-track digital recording system, a stand alone system that has a CD recorder, mixer, all built into it, and get a microphone and play guitar or violin or whatever and start laying down some tracks and see how you feel. If you’re just renting a system for a couple of weeks I think by that time you’re going to get the feel that, ‘Hey this really holds some intrigue for me,’ or ‘Geez, what am I doing this for?’ I think that strategy also works if you’re trying to decide what piece of equipment to buy—should I buy a 16-track reel-to-reel or a 16-channel digital recorder or should I just buy a new hard drive and some software for my computer. If you rent the equipment, sometimes you can make a better choice without jumping into the deep end.

Molly Sheridan: With how technology has progressed today, how close can you get in a home studio to what you would get if you used your neighborhood recording studio?

John Volanski: Actually quality wise I think you can get within 98% or 99%. In fact some of the stuff you hear that people put out is actually done in their home studios. A lot of the big stars have some pretty impressive home studios and I think what’s really going to make the difference is whether you have the audio engineering chops or not. Given that you’re a good musician, are you going to be able to capture a good quality recording, and a lot of that has to do with whether you understand acoustic principals and some of stuff that goes on behind the scenes with audio engineering. I’ve tried to give people a basic understanding of that in the book because I think it’s critical to have some of that knowledge if you’re going to be recording—like knowing what techniques you use to take a single monophonic sound like a violin and make it sound like two or three violins, how to make a violin sound like it’s up close or way in the background, those kinds of things. If you don’t know how to do that, you’re going to be at a disadvantage compared to going to a professional studio where the audio engineer will know how to do that and be able to do that for you.

Molly Sheridan: Are these things that you need an audio engineering degree to be able to grasp, or is it something you can read a couple books and practice a little bit and figure out for yourself?

John Volanski: I don’t think you need an audio engineering degree. I would think that a lot of the people who are out there and are mixing songs do not have audio engineering degrees. They may have some schooling in it but I’ll bet a lot of them just started out as apprentices watching somebody in the studio twiddling the knobs and telling them if you do this you’re going to get this result, and if you do that you’re going to get a different kind of result. It’s just a matter of getting your leg up on the technology and figuring out what things do. I think you can get a lot of that just from reading. Of course you need to put into action what you read. You can read all the books you want but if you never get into the studio and try out some of those things and experiment then it’s not going to do you any good. That’s one thing that a home studio is good for—experimentation because if you try to do that in a professional studio it’s going to cost you a lot of money because you’ve got an engineer standing there tapping his foot waiting for you to play around. You’re paying for that.

Molly Sheridan: The clock is always ticking! I guess to finish up then, I’m curious now, when people say, ‘Hey, John, I’m thinking of starting my own home studio,’ what do you think? Is there anything new that you tell them now that you’ve been through the process of writing this book?

John Volanski: I say, ‘Hey, go for it.’ I have a lot of friends who are doing just that. Right now they’re trying to figure out which multi-track to buy and what effects boxes and stuff and they’re very excited about it. And so am I. I like to help them figure that out. I get email all the time from people asking me what I think they should buy and the great thing is that technology is marching along at such a pace that we’re getting the price/performance ratio on a lot of this stuff is just taking off. It’s amazing the quality you can get for the money. I just got a flier the other day from Musician’s Friend, and they have a multi-track recorder with the mixer and effects built in and this thing is $299. It’s unbelievable and completely breaks the price barrier for multi-track digital recording. That’s the way things are going and it really only benefits the musicians and the people who are willing to take the step and create their own studio. </p

In Conversation with Margaret Fisher



An interview with the author of Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas: The BBC Experiments, 1931-1933

Molly Sheridan: Let’s first talk about what got you into writing an entire book on these two very specific Pound works?

Margaret Fisher: Robert Hughes, who is also my husband, got me started on this and you’ll see in the acknowledgements that the book is first and foremost grateful to him. Here’s an interesting detail that musicians would enjoy. Bob is a student of Lou Harrison‘s and Lou acquired from Henry Cowell a really heavy, enormous table where you could set up a very formal dinner. Lou gave Bob this beautiful table and in fact when we were first dating Bob would cook these Louis XIV dinners and we would sit at each end. But the poor table has simply held all of these Ezra Pound documents and manuscripts since about 1989 and we haven’t been able to access anything but a top layer for years. Bob’s been working on Pound’s music since the ’60s when he first tried to get Pound’s Le Testament produced. He finally did in 1971. It took quite a long time, and he thought that his work was done, but then when we were in Venice on a Fulbright, Pound’s companion, Olga Rudge, was going to show Bob some early music related to the production he had done. It was an earlier concert version that had been arranged with simpler meters and when she opened the suitcase there was the Cavalcanti opera, the second opera. I was there with him so I was sort of in on the beginning but I wasn’t involved until after he had put the opera together and realized he had a complete opera rather than half an opera as everyone had thought. After he premiered the opera he began to write about it and now he’s just about finished. His study is about the music and how Pound learned to compose—what his techniques and processes where, who helped him, and the one question that was a sort of extra-musical question, why wasn’t the second opera performed at the BBC as planned, because it was requested by Pound’s producer, in essence like a commission. When the BBC produced his first opera they paid him an honorarium and it was the same amount that they paid as commissions to their composers through their music program, but Pound was produced through the drama program. So the drama program asked him to do another opera and my task was to determine why it wasn’t performed. The big revelation in researching this was Archie Harding, the producer who was a consummate artist engineer and political activist. If he had been a run of the mill producer I probably would have settled with the explanation that the opera was postponed indefinitely and then WWII happened, but this man was so extraordinary…but he had not left any memoirs. The histories of the BBC talk about him but it’s just a small part of the enormous history of radio in Britain so I pursued Harding to find out more and an interesting story evolved—just the fact that Pound learned about radio from Harding, one of the most prominent experimentalists and artist/engineers in the field. And my background had been in art and technology, so I took the project and ran. What I’ve written in this book is kind of the other half of Bob’s story—how the music was actually composed and an analysis of the music and Pound’s particular emphasis given that he was self-trained—How did he work around that or take advantage of that? What were the obstacles that he had to deal with that he knew where limiting factors in his composition?

Molly Sheridan: Why don’t you talk more about his music then. I’m sure our readers are going to be very interested in that aspect of his work and I’m sure there’s a lot of material, but if you could just outline some of that…

Margaret Fisher:Well, I’ll leave some of that for Bob’s publication. I don’t want to pull the rug out from under him but I can talk about Pound’s overall output because most people aren’t even aware of even the two operas which are the more prominent pieces that have been performed in public. Pound started composing to learn more about putting words to music and the Canadian composer/scholar Murray Schafer has written a book on Pound’s music criticism and presents his efforts to understand rhythm as a rigorous discipline in the face of verse libre without the metrical constraints of traditional poetry. Pound was really seeking a way for his poetic voice to stand out from the others and rhythm was going to be this avenue. That took him into composing but before he even began he spent three years as a music critic in London. He would generally review the intimate chamber and vocal concerts. I like to thing of Pound, who was so flamboyant in that early period in London, this is 1917 to 1920, and he would wear a velvet jacket and carry a walking cane and look kind of like a wild avant-gardist coming into this. I imagine these subdued salon circles to hear these afternoon concerts and he reviewed about three a week and really stayed with this intimate vocal music, to train his ear—what was important about rhythm, about words, about setting words. When he left London in 1920 he had already begun composing his opera based on Villon, and because he was such an amateur composer, a pianist named Agnes Bedford helped him. She was a vocal coach as well and was very receptive. She allowed herself to just transcribe Pound’s ideas into musical notation and did not offer a lot of guidance because he had such strong ideas about what he wanted to do. This is something that Bob brings out in his study too. A lot of people think that first Bedford and then later George Antheil helped Pound with his notation but that they also helped shape the music, and by going through the many early drafts that are in Pound’s handwriting Bob can show that the unusual orchestration, the selection of instruments, the use of bones as percussion and the use of nose flute, these were all Pound’s ideas, so the performing forces where his ideas, the shape of how the music would culminate in a big orgiastic dance in Testiment was Pound’s idea and then Bedford and Antheil helped him notate the work. Pound had meanwhile been writing very consistently his ideas about rhythm and music and he even touched on issues such as the use of the bar line and metronome—how rigorous should a composer be, the question of tempo rubato, and so forth—and I think it was with his work with Antheil whom he met in Paris in 1923, that he began to revive his ideas and try new things so that suddenly the notation of the opera which was intended to bring forward the speech rhythms of Villon they got into these micro-rhythms, one could almost say absurd meters. They’re listed in the book, 11/16ths going into 22/16ths into 3/8ths into 2/4. Stravinsky had mixed meters but these were different and the BBC conductor who conducted the program explained the difficulty that while you’re playing one bar in one meter you’re going to be changing every single bar and it was just impossible to anticipate the next bar and adjust to that new meter. There was a kind of built in frustration in trying to be in two place
s at one time. So Antheil’s influence led them into…well, one of the pieces that’s a perfect example is “The Mother’s Prayer,” Villon’s mother sings a prayer and it’s written almost as plain chant on very few notes. She hammers out her sort of proselytizing prayer to the virgin because she wants all the people in the bar to be brought over to a more moral point of view and it’s like a futurist plain chant. She hammers out every single note with quite a strong dynamic. Each bar is a line of poetry and the poetry is written in 11 syllables, so configurations of 11 are often the top number in the meter and then they considered the note values that they wanted to figure out the rest of the meter, but what this did with the bar was it meant that everything was predetermined. There was no room for the performer to elongate or interpret and later Pound came back to the idea that the bar line should be the governing container and that perhaps the performer could move and adjust a little bit within the bar line. So I think originally what I set out to talk about was how Pound’s ideas about music were influenced and they changed and he allowed himself to experiment with different ideas and come back to early ideas. This kind of investigation of tempo and what was governing the movement of the music—was it the note duration, was it the bar tempo—this was crucial to his ideas about putting words to music.

Molly Sheridan: It seems like he was very much independent in this quest. He picked up support from those around him but he really had little formal training…

Margaret Fisher: Correct, his mother played piano and his father was an amateur violinist.

Molly Sheridan: So there was a very interesting mind at work here…

Margaret Fisher: Well, he was capable of reading music so he must have learned that at home. There’s no documentation of actual music lessons that we’ve seen, and some of his earliest research in the 1910s was in the archives of the large libraries in Europe—Milan, Paris, Britain, and even in Spain—and he would look up the troubadour documents. He was looking for music even at that early time so he had to then train himself in reading some of the medieval notation. His first activity was going into the archives and looking at the documents and transcribing them both as neume notation and also modern notation.

Molly Sheridan: Was he very much involved in the music community of that time or was he kind of on the border?

Margaret Fisher: In London he made a terrific friendship with Arnold Dolmetsch, and Dolmetsch’s career was devoted to recovering the music of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries and he was building clavichords and all of the other early instruments, so Dolmetsch was almost single-handedly responsible for the new interest in medieval music in London and it was a very small circle of people, people like Thomas Campion were not performed very often. So Dolmetsch set out to reestablish interest in those composers and revive performance in the Baroque style. Pound made this friendship and it was perfect because Pound’s field was the troubadours and the poetry and the Provencal language and so he had a lot of information for Dolmetsch, particularly this issue of barring. Dolmetsch published a book called The Interpretation of Music in the 17th and 18th Centuries and in the book he brought forward direct quotations from the music theorists of the early times and the arguments that, for example, even if you had 8th notes written on the page, it didn’t necessarily mean they were played as even 8th notes, they may have been played as dotted figures. Just the fact that Pound knew this makes him a more informed composer than we suspect from his amateur status. It kind of complicates the question of his insistence on non-interpretation. Did he put in all the dotted figures that he intended? Did he have the skill later, especially later in the second opera when he was composing without anyone else’s help, to notate exactly what he wanted or did he expect that the performers were going to fill in since it was in the style of medieval music?

Molly Sheridan: To kind of switch gears a little bit I’m really curious about the whole “composition as criticism” argument that comes up in the first chapter of the book. Can you talk a bit about your interpretation of those words?

Margaret Fisher:Well, I can, although part of my understanding is that I don’t understand fully the difference between setting words to music as a form of criticism and new composition. It seems to me that they overlap and maybe all that the fourth category implies is that there are no words in the music so the criticism is going to be harder to ferret out. In his body of work there are the two operas that are complete, and there’s a third that he claimed was half finished but I’ve only found two songs and I’m working on those now. He composed violin music so there are a number of those. Some are original and some are transcriptions or arrangements of early work from the 12th and 15th centuries, I believe. So when Pound composed violin music he might take a poem and take the rhythm of the words of the poem but put it solely in an instrumental voice, so that you could hear the rhythm alone and not be thinking about the sentiment of the words, in order to see if the sentiment came through in the movement or the melodic line. This was true in a violin piece he called Al Poco Giorno, which was also a poem by Dante. It goes exactly to the rhythm of the words and it was easy to trace because the title was the same. There’s another work, Frottola, that we don’t know if it goes to a poem, that’s why I say the categories are confusing. We don’t know if Pound actually composed it strictly for rhythmic interest or if he was doing a one-to-one correspondence with words but then leaving the words out. So the idea that the new composition would act as criticism in Pound’s rendition is a little different than perhaps a composer today who might be referencing other compositions, other debates in music, and working those debates out in their music or working on a style and their composition could be considered a commentary on a style. Pound’s commentary had a lot of literary intent. In the second opera particularly when he was more facile with his composing chops he was able to bring out different voices within a single poem and make critical comments using various musical devices. And there’s a lot of specific discussion of that in the book.

Molly Sheridan: So is it safe to surmise that he was interested in radio operas because they remove visual distractions? I know somewhere you say that removing the distractions of movement and costumes would really allow a listener to focus on details…

Margaret Fisher: It was an opportunity to do that. He didn’t envision that certainly when he started Testament in 1920. Radio wasn’t public until 1922 and then barely so, but at first I believe he envisioned his opera as being a rather full scale even like a medieval processional or entertainment in the court, that it would have the full dimension of costume. He wrote out stage instructions for Testament and they very much support the notion that the Noh theater was on his mind when he was thinking of the staging because the people who are not singing are absolutely still, the gestures are regulated, the wigs
are extravagant. And then as circumstance happened the first full production of the opera ended up being for radio.

Molly Sheridan: So to come back to our discussion at the start of this conversation, why was Pound selected to do these radio operas in the first place and why was the second one never staged?

Margaret Fisher:The invitation from the BBC went to Pound because they were just looking for a translation of Villon for a New Year’s broadcast. They waited until the last moment and T.S. Elliot turned Harding down, but recommended Pound. Pound turned the translation around in about a week and Harding, realizing that he had a literary prize on his hands, tempted Pound by telling him that radio was the voice of the future and that it was going to liberate poetry by removing poetry from the confines of the printed page. Pound wrote back and said, ‘By the way I have an opera.’ So it wasn’t that the BBC knew of Pound as a composer, nobody did really, but he sent violinist Olga Rudge to London to play a few selections for Harding who was delighted and decided he would take on the project. Even before the initial broadcast in October of ’31, Harding was so excited about the project he asked Pound to write something else specifically for radio. There is no document that says exactly why the second one never happened, but the circumstances are so interesting that speculation is encouraged. The first opera alienated the music department and funds were being taken away from music and dramatic productions because of the tightening economy. Harding was getting into his own political hot water and had been sent to Manchester, so a lot of factors played into it.

Molly Sheridan: Why did the production alienate the BBC musicians?

Margaret Fisher:Well, the production was put on by the drama department, not the music department, and anyway, the music department was not about to touch Pound who had written only one piece of music in his whole life. They wouldn’t have anything to do with this experimental production. Opera itself was not produced at the BBC—they would go out on location and broadcast live from the different houses—so to be spending money on an opera production was usual and the budget was quite high. But back to the question of the second opera, the surprise was to find a letter in which Bedford in the ’40s wrote to Pound at St. Elizabeth’s in Washington and said that Harding was thinking of doing the Cavalcanti as a kind of anniversary performance but at the point Pound didn’t know where the music was. Personally another surprise was the power of the Villon and the Cavalcanti poems in their original language. I thought I would not have to really analyze them. I wasn’t trained to analyze poetry and so I chose the ones that seemed to be the hot spots where it was obvious that Pound was making commentary with his music and I thought I would see first how he did it in a poem that offered the reasons a little more easily than others. It was great because by selecting and working intensely on a few poems I didn’t diminish their power over me, and that was a real added bonus to the whole project which wasn’t a poetry project for me but it certainly was a poetry project for Pound.

In Conversation with Yuval Taylor



An interview with the editor of The Future of Jazz

Molly Sheridan: One premise of the book is that it questions whether jazz’s past has now become more important than its future, or whether jazz has any future at all. After editing this book, what’s your feeling?

Yuval Taylor: Frankly, I was dismayed by Greg Tate and Peter Watrous’s pessimism about jazz’s future. Greg feels that it has to be tied with “hip-hop musicality and technology,” which to me seems like the wrong direction. Peter was even more pessimistic, envisioning jazz drifting into a coma. Stuart Nicholson, like Greg, foresees a jazz also informed by a more contemporary dance beat. My own vision is closer, I think, to Ben Ratliff or Jim Macnie’s. When I hear the jazz coming from young players like Jason Moran and Medeski Martin & Wood—or older players like Wayne Shorter—I hear something brand new in the air, I hear a continuation of jazz’s evolution. What makes me hopeful about jazz’s future is, well, jazz’s past. So many directions that may have once seemed dead ends are now opening up brand new vistas. In the eighties, jazz-rock seemed like a real dead end, and indeed it was for many of its practitioners. Yet Greg Tate’s group, Burnt Sugar, is picking up on its impulse and taking it somewhere new and, judging from their live performances, incredibly exciting. On the other end of the spectrum, the writing in this book, in particular the chapter on the jazz revival, opened my eyes to some of the positive things coming out of Jazz @ Lincoln Center, where Wynton Marsalis is taking a long dead art form (swing) and making it new. The fact that he is, in my opinion, largely unsuccessful, doesn’t mean it can’t be done well. Innovations in jazz always build on what has gone before, and whether that’s western swing or free jazz, the innovations won’t end just because these are “old” forms.

Molly Sheridan: Can you talk a little bit about the process of putting this book together and the personalities involved? I read that it was done entirely over e-mail….

Yuval Taylor: That’s right. I don’t think, however, that e-mail made this book become, as one reviewer put it, a “blog.” Such a book could have easily been written with envelopes and postage stamps, or faxes, without changing it in any material way. Here’s how it was done. I chose ten topics and asked the writers to name their first, second, and third choices. I then assigned the topics and asked for all the essays by a certain date. Every ten days or so thereafter I would send one essay to all the participants and ask for their responses. A couple of the participants were very late: one of them sent a terrific essay, and then refused to respond to any others until I really put the screws on; another hardly gave me anything at all until the book was about to be finalized. This was, of course, frustrating. A couple of other participants sort of over-participated and I had to cut some of their responses. Some tiffs developed too, most of which I edited out as inappropriate and irrelevant. But on the whole the project went relatively smoothly.

Molly Sheridan: How contentious did things get between the various authors of this book?

Yuval Taylor: Well, at one point one author unfairly accused Peter Watrous of racism; and another e-mail to Peter was equally insulting. In other words, very contentious, especially around Peter’s comments. I stuck up for Peter, who didn’t need me to: he did a good job of defending himself.

Molly Sheridan: Let’s talk specifically now about some of the issues raised in the improvisation and composition chapter which we’ve excerpted here. I thought the discussion of how jazz’s evolution was linked to technology, specifically recording, was very interesting. What’s your impression how it effects jazz today and how it will in the future?

Yuval Taylor: Here’s my two cents: classical music is a written art form; rock is (or has become) a recorded art form; jazz is a live art form. Of course, this is essentialist thinking, but I do think it gets to the heart of the music. The major appeal of classical music lies in harmony, in the play of resolutions and dissonances. The major appeal of rock music, at least after 1965, lies in the manipulation of electronic sound. And the major appeal of jazz will always lie in improvisation, which really has very little to do with the recording process. Improvisation is done on the spur of the moment, live. And despite the blurring of the lines that John discusses in his essay, you can usually hear the difference between a written-out solo and one that’s improvised on the spot. I don’t think the future of jazz will really be very related to advances (or, in the case of digital sound, setbacks) in recording technology.

Molly Sheridan: I was also struck by the range of the various writers’ opinions on improvisation vs. composition—its importance, its sophistication. Where do you come down on the issue? Do you think your average music listener grasps the degree to which traditional jazz improvisation is not just “noodling around”?

Yuval Taylor: Two different questions. As for the first, listen to the difference between the Original Dixieland Jazz Band‘s 1917 recordings (no improvisation) and the real first jazz records, Mamie Smith’s Jazz Hounds‘ 1920 recordings (collective improvisation galore). The difference is crystal clear. While I love many, if not most, jazz compositions, and it’s an area that I’m extremely enthusiastic about (I can’t get enough of Ellington), a great composition doesn’t make it jazz—you need real, identifiable improvisation in there too. On the other hand, “noodling around” is exactly what I think when I hear a five-minute jazz solo based on a blues riff. Sophisticated composition has been a touchstone of the best jazz since the very beginning (even Mamie Smith’s Jazz Hounds, while crude improvisers, played some pretty sophisticated songs). “Noodling around” is a word I also apply to a kind of “non-collective” improvisation which I myself have heard quite enough of. I’m pleased to see in today’s best jazz groups the kind of collective interplay that has been missing in a lot of late mainstream bop ensembles—you know, the kind of gig where one person solos while the rest go through the motions. Contrast that to Wayne Shorter’s new quartet. You have to get the balance right, and both composition and improvisation should be at least somewhat sophisticated (without losing emotional intensity thereby). As for the average jazz listener, I don’t think such a being exists. There are all kinds of jazz listeners, including some who get off on a ten minute-long Jerry Garcia solo. None of them are really average, are they?

Molly Sheridan: Quite right. Now, there’s a mention of how jazz developed out of the African American social structure and how that has influenced its performance, adding a kind of spiritual quality to its performance in some cases. Do you think that sets it apart
from other musics in some way or connects it? How does that match up with more traditional composed music of say a symphonic tradition?

Yuval Taylor: I’m not sure this is really in the book. All music developed out of a social structure, and I honestly don’t think jazz is any more spiritual than, on the one hand, Bach, and on the other, Indian classical music. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that jazz is a far less spiritual music than those two examples. Don’t forget its origins in whorehouses and barrelhouses, gin joints, and strip shows. And I’ll add that if jazz tries to get too spiritual, it loses some of its earthy appeal.

Molly Sheridan: Well, there is a graph discussing how jazz is a profoundly social music and that “many jazz musicians speak of their music in metaphysical or spiritual terms, or justify the music in terms of personal and collective survival.” I guess what I was curious about there was exactly the connections you pointed out—that Indian music and Bach can be just as spiritual, but in a different way. Perhaps it depends on the temperament of the listener. But that moves me to an extension of this topic. As global communication improves and people gain emotionally and intellectually from all sort of new musics, what do you think jazz will offer specifically that other music may not?

Yuval Taylor: I think John’s comment doesn’t imply that jazz is really a spiritual movement but that jazz musicians speak of their music in spiritual terms. That’s the case with any deeply involving vocation, isn’t it? As for what jazz will offer that other musics may not: in no other music can the audience say they were there at its inception. Since jazz is created on the spot more than any other music, the audience at a jazz show can watch, listen, and even, in some sense, participate in its very creation. That’s what the best jazz can offer: the feeling of being “in the moment.” Of course, this has nothing to do with “global communication,” which actually works against this feeling—you can’t feel “in the moment” listening to music on the Internet.

Molly Sheridan: Of the performers out there now, who do you feel is creating the work that will have the most lasting impact on how jazz develops in the future?

Yuval Taylor: One of the reasons it’s so hard to answer that is that many of the artists who have had the most lasting impact on jazz in the past were once the most marginal artists of all, e.g. Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman. So, honestly, I can’t tell if Henry Threadgill or Wynton Marsalis will have a more lasting impact. My wild guess would be, in no real order at all: Henry Threadgill, Wayne Shorter, Ornette Coleman, Greg Osby, Steve Coleman, John Medeski, Marc Ribot, Ken Vandermark, John Zorn, Wynton Marsalis, and, perhaps, a man who is not a jazz performer at all, Manfred Eicher. All of these have introduced something new to the jazz stew, and many of them have established some kind of movement, collective, or group of followers.

In Conversation with Tara Browner



An interview with the author of Heartbeat of the People

Molly Sheridan: How do you feel that Native American music fits with the larger group of Americans writing music today?

Tara Browner: Early on when music started being studied through musicology as a field, American Indian music was sort of consigned to ethnomusicology and ethnomusicology began to be considered the study of music throughout the world. It’s strange. Indian music became sort of a foreign thing in its own land. At different times it was justified in a number of textbooks. I think it’s Charles Hamm who says something about how Indian music doesn’t connect up musically with any other styles of American music so he’s not going to talk about it. They come up with this crap and one of my crusades as an academic actually has been to really bring American Indian music into the fold of American music. It’s the first American music. People say that about jazz all the time and it’s not true. I think that it’s very important. And then also, it’s funny, a lot of non-Indian people think that maybe Indians don’t want to be part of American music. They don’t understand that Indians are not only actually a fairly conservative bunch of folks, but third in the armed forces at a higher rate than any other ethnic group and are actually intensely patriotic. What people don’t get is that we don’t have a lot of choice in the matter. We’re not hyphenated in the way anybody else is—we don’t have any place else to go. This is our land and we might as well deal with the way things are and in a way being America to Indians means being part of the land much more than being part of the over-arching American/McDonald’s culture.

Molly Sheridan: Then this will be an opportunity to expose our readers to this issue and the link they may not even realize. In fact I was really surprised when I read in your book about the microtonal intervals the native singers use. What do you think are some of the aspects of Native American music that might surprise outsiders?

Tara Browner: Being out here in LA and being exposed to a lot of film music, I think that most composers don’t realize their idea, their mental image of American music is probably based much more on sort of the Hollywood model, the [sings] duh-de-de-da, than on the reality of what native music is. I have done some research and I have friends and people who have inquired into the source of that Hollywood Indian style and from what we can tell, it’s actually what I refer to as a simulated music. There are a number of different source points. One of them is actually in the old Scottish snap. I don’t know if you’ve heard this but when the British were trying to create a pastoral musical tradition, they came up with an idealized music that they thought represented the most primitive people that they knew of, the Scots, and so what happened is this [sings] da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, this whole rhythmic patter of de-da, de-da, de-da, just became literally the primitive pattern. It’s just an amazing thing. It includes a little of the Scot snap, and a little bit of pentatonic music and then it hits a point right at the early part of this century where a lot of the Russian primitivist school feeds into it, and then quite a few of those composers came over here during the war and did an awful lot of film score music and those people took their idea of what was primitive and just slapped it on to Indians in movies. And it’s amazing because I listen to movies and there are very specific motifs. You’re sitting there and you’re watching this black and white movie and you know the Indians are coming because you hear this duun-duun-duun and those kinds of sounds. This is still with us in things like the tomahawk chop, for example, that gets done at the Atlanta Braves games. So getting back to composers, I think that in talking to many, many composers, because I do interact with them here at UCLA and in other places—I actually have a PhD in historical musicology not ethnomusicology—many of them just assume that native music sounds like the stuff they hear at the movies. So I think they would be surprised by the diversity of musical styles in native North America. It’s just tremendous. The different timbres and textures in the music, the fact that the music is oftentimes associated with dance or ritual in some way. There isn’t a big tradition of music just for music’s sake. Another thing that’s happened is that to a certain extent the American Indian flute has become the new pastoral instrument and that’s a strange thing too because people have created this flute spirituality where it wasn’t before. The flute was an instrument that was used mostly by men in courting women. It was actually an instrument with a lot of power because if a man played it right he could make a girl fall in love with him. But it doesn’t have that much to do with nature scenes and things like that. Nevertheless, it’s used to sort of invoke the spiritual and the sacred where it doesn’t really mean that.

Molly Sheridan: I was really struck to when you were writing about how people think that pow-wows should be historically accurate when actually this is a living art form. Today, what is the typical training for a musician who works in native music?

Tara Browner: Well, you know, for the most part people learn it by doing. It’s primarily young men. You do get young women who sing at drums, but that does tend to be more of a northern style thing. But what happens is you go and you listen to the stuff and you have people in your family that sing and you sort of wander around as a little kid learning the songs and humming with them. You sit and someone will give you a stick as a kid and you’ll learn to beat it in time. And then gradually young people will go and listen to the drum group and then eventually they’ll be invited to just sit and they’ll start to play it. What I’m giving you here is the sort of traditional reservation style of learning it. And you just grow into it, quite literally you grow up through it. One thing that I have noticed is that men who start singing at a later age—you know sometimes you get urban Indian guys who start singing when they’re in their 20s—they never really get the sound right. I think it’s something that you have to start fairly young, kind of pre-teens, and work your voice, especially with men through the vocal change, because if you try to start singing it after that, it just doesn’t seem to quite work. The other thing is that almost all singers are also dancers, and that I think gives them much more of a sense of what’s going on with the music. The thing about pow-wow music—and I think it’s hard to convey this in the book and in western transcription—but pow-wow music actually has a kind of a swing to it and you always know if somebody learned it from tapes or a bunch of guys who really didn’t know what they were doing got together and tried to create a drum group and play because they never quite have that swing.

Molly Sheridan: Is the idea that it is primarily a percussion and vocal music accurate then?

Tara Browner: Ummm….Yes.

Molly Sheridan: What about composition? Is that again mainly an improvisation, created at the moment kind of music?

Tara Browner: No, no, it’
s not an improvisation created music. You have to differentiate here because people do not write songs down in western notation. There are a couple of different ways that this can come about. Either a person will sit and work out a text in their head and then set it to music, often going to a friend of theirs. People have different talents, and so if you’re in the drum group and you’re the person who is really good with the words, you’d do that. Then you will sit down with somebody and say, these are sort of the words I want, and that person often will start to hum along the basics of a tune with it, the building blocks, and then together they will create a song. And for people who do it, it’s called making a song. The other thing that can happen is people will sometimes come up with a melody first. They’ll be thinking of things and maybe something a little bit catchy will come in, a fragment of something, and they’ll create a melody. Then they’ll try to work words and vocables and things into it. There is a kind of a pre-existing form template. Let me give you an example. In basic jazz, you have the head and then all the different people sort of solo on it and improvise. This is a situation where you’d sort of have the head and then you’d go do that over and over and over again, so once the song is set and once the group has practiced that, nobody improvises onto that.

Molly Sheridan: I know you write about how you were trained and played percussion classically, but your introduction to pow-wow culture, that happened later in your life?

Tara Browner: Well, you know, I went as a kid with my grandfather, so I did have some exposure to pow-wows and dancing and things like that, but I didn’t get serious about dancing really until I was in my mid-20s.

Molly Sheridan: I was curious though, to your western trained ears what most struck you when you first had more of an involvement with the making of the music and the dance?

Tara Browner: You know there are two different pow-wow styles—sort of northern and southern—and I think that the first thing that really struck me was the intensity of sound that northern singers make—the men, the ones who are really good. People will describe it as a falsetto and it’s not, because a falsetto is a head voice and what this is is taking the chest voice and pushing it to its absolute upper limits which gives it a tremendous amount of projection. I mean remember that these musical styles were developed before microphones. People will mic it now but at the time this was a way to really project out the sound. So the very first thing that struck me was the way that the men were creating the sound. My mother is a professional singer and she was just horrified at that. She would say, ‘They’re going to get nodes on their vocal chords.’ And I really did like sort of the rhythmic aspect of it. But at the same time, you know, people will ask me sometimes, “Why don’t you play with an all-women drum group?” And I have been invited to sit down with men at some drums—some allow women and some don’t—but I’ve always turned it down, because I don’t feel really a need to sort of prove myself as a musician in this particular tradition. I don’t. I like the dancing and I like the social aspects of the dancing. I like feeling the music. I used to play in drum corps, so I don’t have any insecurities about my chops compared to these guys, it’s just not that way. I really enjoy dancing. I enjoy putting together my regalia and accessorizing. I like sitting with my friends. We put up our canopy and we have our lawn chairs and these coolers with wheels on them—you have your pow-wow equipment. And I just like the social aspect of it a lot.

Molly Sheridan: You say that across America there’s a pow-wow within driving distance every weekend. Is that something that an interested outsider is welcome to come to?

Tara Browner: Oh, sure. The thing with pow-wows is that there are only a few things that non-Indians should worry about. A lot of the dances, like the inter-tribal dances, are open to everybody and the MC will say that. I make my students at UCLA get out and dance. There are some dances that are strictly competition or strictly for people who are wearing regalia. The regalia also has templates. So right now I’m dancing what’s called Southern Cloth and when you’re out there dancing in your regalia with the music that goes to that you don’t want someone coming out and doing the boogie-woogie from the audience. But probably about half the dances are open to non-Indians.

Molly Sheridan: How would you go about locating something like that?

Tara Browner: Well, I used to say get news from Indian country but now there are Web sites. There’s, like, powwows.com. They are very easy to find through a Google search. It’s just been amazing because I have found little pow-wows that I wouldn’t necessarily have known about. When you’re an Indian, and you move someplace new, like I moved to Los Angeles, you move here and then you go to a few pow-wows and you meet people and you set up sort of your pow-wow family. Those people are connected out in the community and they tend to know where the pow-wows are.

Molly Sheridan: Since you come from the academic side of this as well, what do you think is needed in terms of scholarship in this area? Do you have any hopes for how that will develop or is it even needed?

Tara Browner: Well, I’ll tell you, people who actually dance and people who sing and things like that, for the most part they know what they’re doing, although it’s always interesting to talk to people who dance in one tradition who are interested in another one. But what I see needed and actually what I’m working on right now—I just got an approval for an edition in the Music in American Life series—is really treating the music with a serious kind of respect. I got into a major argument with a non-Indian scholar who wrote a book that had no transcriptions at all. In fact the book was very difficult for me to deal with because he described, for example, gourd dancing and he got so weird and poetic that I couldn’t follow the action. And then I thought about it and I thought well, I do gourd dancing and I couldn’t follow it, ergo nobody’s going to be able to follow this. So what I think is needed is an academic respect for this stuff. I think that native music should not be treated specially or differently. At the same time, there needs to be a certain amount of respect given to the people who perform it because I have sat down with some of these guys and they can play a beat in a triple pattern and they can sing duple along with it. Now I can sit and I can play two against three with my hands or I can do five against four—I’ve done a bunch of Elliott Carter things—but I cannot play in three and sing in duple meter. Some of these people have tremendous musical skills and I think that’s unrecognized. But I’m working right now on a big transcription of a pow-wow, sitting down and transcribing a whole series of songs as they happened. I’ve already done the recordings of them, and I think what’s important is when transcribing it not to exoticize the music. Western notation works quite well.

Molly Sheridan: Yeah, I was going to ask you about that

Tara Browner: Here is what you lose with western notation. You lose a little bit of the tonal intricacies. It’s hard to deal with some of the microtones that are going on and some of the ornamentation and you really can’t get the timbre across, but to me western notation is a tremendous vehicle for dealing with rhythm. That’s the strength of it. And that’s one of reasons that I’m interested in creating really, really accurate transcriptions that people can follow. There have been a variety of different kinds and they tend to be either way too sketchy, the “idealized” version, or they look like Frank Zappa‘s Black Page. I’ve seen some like that too. There’s one guy, I won’t give you his name, I really like him a lot, but when he transcribes what should be a quarter note and the singer’s singing [makes vibrato sound] he will actually transcribe the beats in the voice as 32nds, so that’s overly complex. I would like realistic kinds of transcription. To me it’s an important thing, not treating it differently from other music, not exoticizing it, respecting the musicians who are creating it, and respecting them enough that you are working in tandem with them—you don’t want to worship them because they are spiritual and in touch with the earth and you don’t want to think less of them because they are part of an oral tradition, that they don’t write everything down. So you have to come between these different points and accept the music as it’s offered.

Molly Sheridan: What is a good source of examples or transcriptions that have been done for someone who is interested in this music but…

Tara Browner: Well, this is interesting. Victoria Lindsay Levine has just come out with a volume in the series Music in the United States of America. Her volume is “Writing American Indian Music: Historic Transcriptions, Notations, and Arrangements.” And it’s a history of literally the transcription of American Indian music. It’s got everything from the really crappy stuff, it’s got one by me, so you can really see the kinds of things that people do. It’s just a wonderful thing that she’s done.

Molly Sheridan: Because it is an oral tradition and it isn’t written down, but passed down, how much historical material do you think has been held on to and how much has it changed. Do you make that distinction really?

Tara Browner: Well, yes. I know exactly what you’re talking about. One of the interesting things about dealing with American Indian music as compared to dealing with other oral traditions is that Indians were the first kind of lab rats for fieldwork recording back in the 1880s. There are probably more cylinder recordings and actual recordings through the ’30s and ’40s, and old, old stuff of Indians, more than any other group. In fact, the very first field recording was done in 1888 or 1889 by Jesse Walter Fewkes. So unlike a lot of people who say this hasn’t changed, I can prove it has because these recordings are accessible. What they show pretty clearly is that the musical styles are stable. I think the biggest change that is happening in American Indian music right now is that enough musicians have grown up listening to non-Indian music that the pitches used are really moving more into a sort of diatonic system especially with the younger musicians. What the difference is …it wasn’t so much that the pitch was variable within a song, the intervals would be the same, but a song might start on F### or something. Things that you don’t find on the piano, but then it would be in tune with itself. Now what’s happening is there’s so much of a saturation of music that is produced on keyboards and instruments that have a fixed pitch, especially electronic instruments that are not going to change much, so native musicians are just kind of being pulled into that. So that’s one thing that’s happening, a certain kind of pitch stability. And I think that in general there’s less variation on sort of vocal timbre and texture than there used to be. There’s also a little bit of a change in what the audience wants. These are people who listen to the radio and watch TV so the idea, the concept of what’s a really good sound has changed a little bit. It used to be more heterophonic. It really used to be a little bit messier. I call them dirty notes. You’d have two singers that would sing slightly off from one another and you’d get these great beats. When that’s done an interesting thing can happen. You get these overtones that are so strong that it sounds like there is another voice a couple octaves up, this sort of wailing voice, and it’s not the woman’s part, it’s a whole separate thing that happens. People have talked about that as being kind of a spirit voice. That the spirit voice is disappearing as people’s sound concept becomes more western. The place where you get the most authentic old-style music is really mostly on western reservations, places that are a little more isolated. Not southern music. From everything that I could tell going back and listening to recordings, Oklahoma music in general has always been a little bit more monophonic and the vocal style is sort of the manly-man low voice. I’ve heard recordings from Pawnee singers that sound operatic, and that’s from the 1900s. So the southern style is a little bit different, it was more purely monophonic and the voice isn’t pushed as much. What southern singers do that’s interesting is they put in a series of vocal accents and what it ends up creating is…you’ve got the drum beat, the singers, and then these vocal accent lines actually create this separate counter rhythm that sits above the singing. They create kind of a polyrhythm up there with these accents that you don’t get with northern music. That’s something I haven’t written much about but it’s going to be a big part of this musical edition that I’m doing. I’m going to create just an entirely separate line, just one line above the southern stuff because to notate these attack points that they do.

Molly Sheridan: On a side note, I noticed that you used the word Indian freely throughout the book and I know in my mid-western grade school that was pounded out of my vocabulary, that it was politically incorrect, so I was really curious about that…

Tara Browner: When I was going to the University of Michigan I used to go out and do things in the public schools. Actually I’ve done some of that here, too. I put on my regalia and go out. I used the word Indian and I had this third grade teacher pull me aside and say, ‘How dare you use that word?’ and I said, ‘I am an Indian. What are you saying to me?’ Here’s the deal. In private conversations among each other we refer to ourselves as Indians. That’s just the way it is. Native American tends to be more of an academic, politically correct kind of verbiage and I have no problems with it. Here at UCLA we have American Indian studies, other places have Native American studies. I think for a while Native American kind of moved up there to the top and now people are moving back to American Indian or Indian because it’s just easier. It’s like the difference between African-American and black, it’s pretty complex but I just got a to point, I think I explained it in the book, where I decided I’m just going to use everything.

In Conversation with Bernard Gendron



An interview with the author of Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde

Molly Sheridan: Let’s talk a little bit about what drew you to this topic. What was so interesting to you about researching the worlds of popular culture and the avant-garde?

Bernard Gendron: For me it involved a certain recycling of my interests, because I used to write about the philosophy of science and the philosophy of technology. It was really that, aesthetically speaking, I’ve always liked popular music. I’ve always thought that at least some of it was aesthetically very good, but of course I was surrounded, being in a university, with lots of people who thought it was pretty low or good entertainment but for dancing, etc. So really it’s aesthetics that drove me onward. But the factor along with it that interested me a lot is how in the past century popular music, or at least certain kinds of popular music, really grew in respect or, I wouldn’t say prestige, but that more and more of it was taken seriously as music. I wanted to see how this happened, how something that was once simply seen as vulgar—a nice entertainment on the side even for the people who were more sophisticated—how it came to be regarded as itself a kind of art music. That’s really my main interest. You might call it the cultural triumph of popular music. The other thing that interested me—to my surprise because I’d always thought there’d been a lot of hostility between high culture and mass culture—but I was struck by the fact that since the mid-19th century, there have been recurrent engagements between high culture and popular music, very friendly engagements as in the case of the artistic cabarets of the late-19th century in Paris where on the same stage you had poets, you had paintings hung on the walls, and you had popular singers. So my book actually traces high moments in those interactions between so-called high and so-called low, but my objective is to see how the low in that process gradually acquired a certain kind of cultural status.

Molly Sheridan: What do you think was gained by those interactions?

Bernard Gendron: Well, I think popular music gained a lot. I don’t know how much high culture gained or lost. In these interactions there were advantages on both sides. In the late 19th century and the early 20th century in the so-called modernist period, generally the modernist painters of the later-19th century and the modernist poets had a very small audience. They were shut out from mainstream academic and high culture. And so they actually gained; they widened their audience in effect. Interchanges of popular music really replenished the high arts every once in awhile. I mean, the appropriation of jazz in the 1920s by people like [Darius] Milhaud clearly helped. It’s like you go shopping for materials to replenish your work. Popular culture has always been a source of materials. It could be popular music, it could be jazz, it could be rock, etc., so that was the case for high culture. For low culture it was simply a gain in, I guess I’ll use the term cultural capital, because popular culture always did well economically but people who are in the field also want a certain kind of prestige, a respect. It helps actually to acquire a certain prestige, like Bob Dylan had certain prestige that ultimately helped sales. It’s had to find someone who doesn’t want his or her work get a certain kind of aesthetic respect, so popular music in a way won because it not only continued of course to sell, but now it became an object of academic interest. Musicians, especially jazz musicians, could get positions in conservatories and the like. So when you get cultural prestige it’s a kind of power over and above economic power.

Molly Sheridan: Do you think anything was lost? I guess I’m really curious how you would answer someone who felt that this pulled the avant-garde culture down, corrupting it somehow.

Bernard Gendron: It was always a controversy amongst people in high culture, but the people most on the edge were always the ones more friendly to mass culture. That’s very interesting. If you look at the past century, those who were more mainstream musicians, artists, and so on, despised mass culture as well as did many of the critics. But the ones who where most adventurous oftentimes were really those who where most friendly toward mass culture even when they didn’t quite appropriate it. But it’s an interesting question. I mean, I think that in the sphere of music that’s a very relevant question because it appears to me that high culture music—and I mean particularly contemporary art music—has really seen its audience shrink. There’s no question about that. What happened was that what would have been a potential audience for this music, for those people it became very aesthetically fashionable to, say, like hip-hop. I mean this is among people who are university professors and the like. In other words, if you still accept the distinction between highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow, in the 1940s and ’50s you could identify highbrows in terms of the music they consumed. You can’t do that anymore.

Molly Sheridan: What do you think the role is now for contemporary art music, as you call it? You talk in your book about how the modern art world left the highbrow and became involved more with the New York punk scene and what came after. But the serious music side seems to be left at the highbrow end, left behind almost while the other arts moved on, or in a different direction at least.

Bernard Gendron: Yes, exactly. Well you had of course a lot of people like John Zorn and people like that who really operated on the boundaries, Glenn Branca in the early 1980s, Peter Gordon, you had people who have actually benefited from the association with popular music. You have Elliott Sharp. And these are people who are highly respected by rock musicians. Also, there is a two-way stream here because with the increasing popularity of electronic music there’s more and more a return to listening to some of the great pioneers—Stockhausen obviously and Feldman and people like that. I know a lot of people who have been traditionally completely caught up with popular music who are now turning to these people. I think there was a lot of innovation, especially with technology. Pop music has always been technologically oriented so they are very quick to pick up, for example the electric guitar and even the synthesizer in the 1970s. But the point is that many of these people now are learning from some of the great innovators of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. But it’s true that there certainly is an audience problem for art music, there’s just no question that there is that problem.

Molly Sheridan: On a cultural level, after looking all these different interactions, how they’ve inspired different people, what would you urge someone who is a composer in this contemporary classical world to do? Would you suggest they seek out certain arts or artists or explore certain trains of thought?

Bernard Gendron: Well, I happen to be a fan myself of contemporary art music. I think that the
music field now is so fragmented. I mean there’s an uncertainty, an ennui even, in the pop music field. It’s as if now you have—and this is where I agree with John Seabrooks who wrote Nobrow. He tried to claim that there’s no real hierarchy anymore, it’s just a flattened plain with different niche markets. There is some truth to that. Today, it’s not as if you have a dominant popular culture with a dominate music style. Pop music is completely fragmented now and full of uncertainty so I would just recommend that people keep experimenting in the music that they’re comfortable with because it’s true that now you don’t have the clear hierarchy of high and low, now you have simply a number of niche markets. The work being done by people trained in composition and so on is really exciting work. I would never suggest, for example, that people appropriate other existing musical forms. In a way that’s dated. The thrill is gone as far as cutting across the boundaries like that. I’m not a sociologist so I can’t predict where so-called high cultural music will go but it’s certainly a vital force even though the audience is smaller.

Molly Sheridan: I’m always curious when someone does this amount of research, looking at what some of the surprise discoveries were or if there were changes in your own philosophies that you didn’t even expect. Obviously you started out with a certain idea…

Bernard Gendron: Yes, I started out with a certain idea and I think pretty much I got what I expected. Maybe it’s because I imposed my own template. I mean I discovered a lot of small interesting things. The big surprise to me was to find out how long ago the interchanges between high and low culture existed. If you look at the history of this country in particular there was always a great deal of antipathy at the high cultural level towards mass culture. American music was not as firmly established as say European music that had all the prestige. And here also mass culture was so powerful. So if you look at the history of early jazz, for example, there was much more animosity towards early jazz in this country than there was in Europe. But what surprised me most is that so many people used to talk about modernism, for example, as if it was a period where high and low were altogether hostile to each other and they sometimes described postmodernism as a period where they became really, really friendly. What really struck me is how early the interchanges between high and low began to take place and how early European high culture in particular was friendly toward and took from the popular cultural forms of the day. You can see this in impressionism. I’m not saying something that will bowl people over, but really from the very beginning of what we would call modernism—which in France I would date that around the mid-19th century—there was an interchange from the get go. I think it varies from country to country. In France I would peg myself to literature more than music, say with Baudelaire, indeed where there is no longer any kind of eternal beauty, but beauty’s always shifting and we have to live with these constant shifts in aesthetic criteria. Musically, I guess it would be with Debussy towards later part of the 19th century.

Molly Sheridan: Yes, I thought that was interesting how there are different time frames for the different arts even if they are influenced by what might be a similar movement. That can vary wildly.

Bernard Gendron: Yes, exactly.

Molly Sheridan: So, you’ve finished this book and you are about to go on sabbatical, but any plans for your next project floating around yet?

Bernard Gendron: Well, I have a couple little projects. I think it’s very tempting for an author to, you know, you have this sort of yawning chasm that emerges at the end of a book and you say what am I to do next. So I’ve tried to simply focus on some smaller topics, but I’m very interested in the history of what you might call cultural capital, a term that was introduced by Bourdieu, a kind of capital that you accrue that has more to do with your cultural prestige than with the money you’re getting. I’m working on a project I’m facetiously calling Why Jazz Lost to Rock ‘n’ Roll, talking about how by the 1980s and ’90s, it was much more hip to like various kinds of rock music than to like jazz. Jazz has prestige, right? It’s at Lincoln Center, but it lacks other kinds of cultural capital. It’s not a hip music. So I may not answer the why question, but more how jazz lost…let’s call it the hip audience. I really focus on the ’60s, particularly when college students, who had been a large part of the constituency for jazz, began to turn toward rock music. So I’m going to study the crisis of jazz in the ’60s primarily but I’m going to look backward and forward, because jazz in the ’60s is really exciting. It was going through an economic crisis and you have the jazz avant-garde who where really going off the deep end. And then at the same time you had the rapprochement of jazz and rock, which was to lead to jazz-rock fusion, emblematized by Miles Davis‘s Bitches Brew album, so you have all these forces at work. Another topic that interests me, although it’s a little more long term, is the circulation of African popular music in North America. In the early ’80s, there was actually an audience and all sorts of African acts where coming to this country and this is what ultimately led to what we call the world music market that’s now of course pretty well established. So that’s another phenomenon that interests me quite a bit.

Molly Sheridan: So even though you are a professor of philosophy it seems that music is your passion?

Bernard Gendron: Philosophy’s a field that allows you to sort of recycle yourself. But I tell my philosophy colleagues that what I’m really interested in is aesthetics, and I’m interested in the sort of values that are in place. So if I’m looking at why jazz lost to rock ‘n’ roll, I’m interested in how aesthetic values have shifted so that for the people we might call the elite purchasers, certain kinds of music acquired greater status than jazz. So I’m very historical about aesthetics. I don’t believe that there are these eternal aesthetics. I think at these given times there are dominant aesthetics and at certain times there are some major transformations. They’re not necessarily convinced when I tell them this, but that’s what I tell them.

In Conversation with Steve Reich



Steve Reich

An interview with the author on the publication of his Writings on Music 1965-2000

Molly Sheridan: Because we’re doing this issue on dance, I would like to speak a little bit about your feelings on dance. I was interested to read in one of the excerpts we’ve used here on NewMusicBox about how you had really never anticipated seeing your work with dancers. Have you felt any inspiration since then to write work specifically for dance?

Steve Reich: Well, I’m actually going to do it, but have I put any thought into it? No, absolutely not. No, I mean I just happen to be who I am. [laughs] My music has a very strong rhythmic profile, as everybody knows, and dancers picked up on that very early on so I’m frequently choreographed. I’m delighted about that because I’ve always enjoyed watching dance. I haven’t seen by any means all the pieces that have been done to my music but I certainly have seen those by de Keersmaeker, Kylian, and others. So it isn’t something that I’ve ever done specifically. A sextet was written with Laura Dean in mind but it was also an instrumental piece and, to be honest, I would have written what I wrote anyway but she was part of the commission. I’m going to write, I guess in September, a piece for de Keersmaeker, just a short five-minute piece that will be part of a long piece, with lots of little chunks by different composers whose names I don’t really have at the tip of my tongue, and that will be done specifically for dance. She’s going to send me a tape of something that she’s pre-choreographed so I’m supposed to look at that. But again I’ll look at it and it may give me some ideas and then again I may just go ahead and do what I would do anyway.

Molly Sheridan: You mention in your book that dancers understand your music. Do they understand it in a way that other people don’t?

Steve Reich: Well, no I’m not saying that. I’m saying that the music is very rhythmic… I mean Stravinsky was very frequently choreographed. Well, why? Well, it’s very obvious why. It’s because his music was very rhythmic and it lent itself to dance. You know, Arvo Pärt is a wonderful composer but he doesn’t lend himself to dance because he isn’t very rhythmic. It’s really no more complicated than that.

Molly Sheridan: So this book covers 30 years of your thinking about music and commenting on it. For other composers who read this book today, what do you hope that they are able to take away from it?

Steve Reich: Well, I’m assuming that anybody who reads the book is reading it because they’re interested in my music which I say right in front, very first thing. If you’re interested in a composer’s music then you might be interested in how they think about the music and about other music. I mean, I read Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music. I was a great Stravinsky lover and the book just sort of clarified things and gave me some sort of feeling for who he was or at least who he was at that time and, you know, it wasn’t an essential ingredient but it certainly was a clarifying and intensifying ingredient in just understanding who Stravinsky was as a human being and as a composer. So if someone is interested in what I’m doing they can follow these writings which vary as much as the music varies. I suppose if someone heard Piano Phase and then they heard Desert Music they might not think it was the same composer and I wouldn’t blame them. I think that’s reflected in the writings. “Music as a Gradual Process” is a very terse, just a very good essay that fits hand in glove with those early pieces, but of course it has very little to say about a lot of the later work. So yes, I think that any composer who looks at it may also get some of the very specific musical ideas—for instance the approach to non-western music in terms of the structure rather than its sound, what is phasing, what is rhythmic substitution. And later on the use of the voice both as a vocalise and in the conventional singing of words, the reappraisment of medieval techniques in light of today’s music, specifically things like augmentation. In a technical sense, in a shop talk sense, for some composers this isn’t what they should do but so that they can say, “Um-hmm, well, you know this is something to chew on and I’ll either spit it out or I’ll digest it,” and it will come out as something different.

Molly Sheridan: I’m curious too because this book covers a period of developing thought for you, is there anything in it that you don’t believe anymore or that you’ve revised in your own mind?

Steve Reich: Well, not really. I mean it’s a funny question. I don’t believe in manifestos. I think people who get into manifestos are always blockheads, and yes that includes some very famous manifestos. I mean basically I think what they do is they set themselves up as tin pot gods and then they proceed to march in lockstep with their thoughts the rest of their lives. And that’s a very poor way of proceeding in music and a very poor way of proceeding in life. The early essays no longer describe what I’m doing nor do I feel the way I felt when I wrote them. Do I believe them? Well I believe in them. I think that the early writings are a very good reflection of me in my late 20s and early 30s and of the music that I wrote at that time. Yes, I believe in everything in the book in the sense that I thought “Yes, this is worth publishing,” but I don’t hold the same positions throughout my life and the book shows that. And that’s part of what the book is about.

Molly Sheridan: I was also curious, when we did our issue on minimalism, we received a lot of great feedback but we also heard from those who, I think one comment was from someone who felt minimalism isn’t even music. I think that was the most extreme. So I just have to ask, do think this book has the power to convert?

Steve Reich: Not at all. [Laughs] I think everybody believes what they believe. As I said, people are going to read this book because they’re interested in my music. Those people who feel the way you’ve just described, you know, that think this isn’t even music, then obviously they’re just going to pass it by or thumb through it and make some snide remark and that will be the end of it. I’m just offering it out there to those who are interested and those who reject me prima facia, well, you know, let’s hope time passes and others replace them.

Molly Sheridan: Final question then. We were talking about how this book might influence other composers and I know you started to mention some of the texts that have influenced you. I just want you to talk a little bit more about that…

Steve Reich: Well, again as I say, there are two levels to the book. One level, in terms of other composers, is a technical level. As Writings goes, it’s a relatively good chunk of that. There are a lot of score excerpts, there’s some analysis of Af
rican music, there’s some analysis of Hebrew chant. One of the articles that strikes me as very chock full of information and interesting thinking is “Music and Language” which also gets back into quoting a lot of Bartók and Janáèek and African musicologists talking about African languages. Also, the relationship between electronics and live music, all of these thoughts that I think, I don’t expect anyone, as a matter of fact I think I’d be disappointed if someone picked up and started to do something that I’ve done, but I do think it’s worthy of consideration. It’s unpredictable what the thoughts of one composer will produce in the mind of another, and that’s what’s genuinely interesting. You teach a student to, let’s say, write a canon, we all learn that in school. Now what results from that? We’ve got canons back in 13th century, we’ve got canons in Bach, we’ve got canons in Bartók, and we’ve got the Webern symphony, and we’ve got my work. The same idea generates vastly different kinds of music and I think that’s really interesting. I hope that my book can make some small contribution in that direction.

Molly Sheridan: Are there any books by composers that you keep on your shelves?

Steve Reich: Well the Stravinsky Poetics are still there, and the writings of Bela Bartók are still there, and I would say that they are at the top of my list. I have read Ives‘s Essays Before a Sonata, which are more sort of ruminations and ejaculations [laughs] but I mean I’m a great admirer of Charles Ives so I’ve read that too. And I’ve read some of Schoenberg‘s work and I almost ripped the book up.

Molly Sheridan: But it got you thinking…

Steve Reich: Well, it got me aware of who he was, or who he appears to be in the articles which is rather…Well, I find him extremely unattractive in a human sense and again I admire some of his early pieces but once the theory got set and Opus 23, I’m definitly not in the fan club anymore. But yes, I don’t know if Webern has any writings but I read the big book that, the Moldenhauder book about him years ago. And of course I read Morty Feldman‘s essays, and they are delightful. And I also read The Boulez-Cage Correspondence; that’s a very interesting book. So those all are sitting on my shelf.

In Conversation with William Bauer



Molly Sheridan: Why don’t we start by talking a little bit about what first drew you to this kind of scholarship on Betty Carter?

William Bauer: I went to hear her perform in 1978 and she just blew me away. She was such a consummate performer and she brought all the elements of musical performance together–the way she moved on stage, the way she commanded the audience’s attention, the way she commanded her trio’s attention. She was really a complete musician and that left a deep impression on me. Then a few years later I got a recording of hers from 1970, her first record on her own label, and the sound of it just kind of stayed in my ears. So when I started my doctoral work and I was thinking about a topic for my Ph.D dissertation, writing about her came to mind. I did a paper about one of the songs that she did on the 1970 recording and compared her approach to the approach Billie Holiday uses, that was on a song called “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was,” and that was kind of the prototype for the dissertation. It brought in elements of the phonetic analysis I use. And also as I started preparing for my interview with Betty, it became clear to me that this was a remarkable person and a remarkable musician whose work had largely been neglected. She has only 20 commercial recordings to her name out of a 50-year career, and I was stunned to discover that. And there are other reasons. It turns out that Betty was partly responsible for that but I felt that she was under-recognized. When I was able to get a book contract for the research that I’d done I was really thrilled because it was giving me an opportunity to get the word out about her and her work.

Molly Sheridan: Yeah, I noticed that you did one-on-one interviews with her. What was your personal impression of her?

William Bauer: Tough lady, oh yeah. Tough, but also very warm at the same time, a bundle of energy, strong opinions, passionate, and also reserved on a certain level. So just very complex, you know, very rich and not easy to read.

Molly Sheridan: What were some of her strong opinions?

William Bauer: Well, I mean pretty much all of her opinions were strong, but just to give you an example, we were talking about Miles Davis and I mentioned something about his turning his back to the audience and how I thought that was sort of a gesture of disregard–that he didn’t want to stoop to being an entertainer. And she really rose to his defense and said that he wasn’t doing that he was just turning to interact with his other musicians, and I just thought that was interesting because she’s actually attacked Miles on other issues–his use of fusion and rock elements in his music. She’s gone on the record saying that he sold out and that he didn’t need to do that. Linda Prince wrote an article [for Down Beat] called “Bebopper Breathes Fire,” which really kind of captures this image of Betty reacting to Miles and so much else that was going on at the time. The thing is, she had a really tough time from the mid-’60s to the mid-’70s, so if you read interviews with her from that time you see them growing increasingly vitriolic and bitter about her lost opportunities. I think that the tone of the interviews is understandable given her life circumstances. Then after 1987 when she signed with Verve and ’89 when she won the Grammy award, the whole tone of her interviews is quite different and so I think a researcher has to keep that element in mind. You can’t just look at a life monolithically and not take into account the life circumstances that influence where an artist is in that life.

Molly Sheridan: Right. Do you think it was more society and the environment that she was working in that caused a lot of that or was it her personally?

William Bauer: What I try to get across in the book by laying out the whole picture is to make it clear that it was both at work at the same time, that really in all of our lives we have historical circumstances that we’re facing and then we have our own character that we bring to those circumstances. So here was Betty, a woman who was extremely willful and really defiant in many areas of her life, going right back to her relationship with her mother and unwilling to compromise about so much because she so strongly believed in her vision of what was to be. And then of course encountering this music industry that’s dominated by white men who expect a woman to basically go along with what they tell her to do because they know what’s best. They were also interested in marketing the music and selling it and making money from it, and so many artists are seduced by that because that’s how they make money too, but Betty was unwilling to be drawn into that whole discussion because she had made a decision that her dedication to the bebop ideal was paramount. And I believe that’s why she’s so deeply respected by the musicians.

Molly Sheridan: I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about her as a composer, and what place you think her original compositions will have in her legacy?

William Bauer: Hmm, that’s a very good question. I would say that one thing that needs to be taken into account is that we look at composition as a particular kind of activity, as somebody sitting down with manuscript paper and notating music that they’re hearing in their imaginations. And I think there’s a cultural bias there. That plays out in the jazz world, for example, because people like Ellington and Mingus and Monk, I think are viewed in a special light because they held positions as composers as well as improvisers. So one thing I guess I’m hoping to do in the book as well, although this is really subliminal almost, is to get people to think about what it means to be a composer in an African American sense of the word and to expand the definition of that term to include arranging, because some of Betty Carter’s arrangements are so far afield from the original raw materials that she’s working with that she’s working in quite a compositional way. I think this can also be looked at in light of the western tradition because you have Josquin Des Pres, for example, writing masses based on chant melodies, and in some ways you can look at those as arrangements–he’s taking a chant and creating an arrangements so that people can hear the chant tune in a particular way–but he’s bringing so much of himself to it that a shift has taken place away from the chant and towards Josquin himself. I would say the same happened with Betty. The problem is that she was doing this with pop tunes that people kind of wanted to hum along with. So here again she’s challenging people’s preconceptions and making it hard for them, you know. You have to work to follow her were she’s going to go. So in answer to you question, I think that her legacy is going to become clearer to us over time. I think as we move away from the old kind of crooner mentality about singers, perhaps we’ll be able to listen to what she’s done and not compare it so much to the original tune. Instead we’ll just hear her arrangements/improvisations as part of her creative legacy. That b
eing said I think that her compositions are very interesting and if I could have I would have gone even more deeply into that in the book. But I felt that what I really wanted to do is look at specific tunes as she evolved her concept of them over time. So for example the 1972 album that she did on her own label, The Betty Carter Album, has a lot of original material that she worked on with the help of Danny Mixon and there were just some really interesting songs, really interesting ways of thinking about her musical materials. And then the 1979 album, The Audience with Betty Carter, also has just wonderful re-shapings of ideas and approaches to the vocal art moving from recitative sort of singing to arioso into full fledged tunes. There’s one composition of hers that I don’t transcribe but I discuss in great depth, it’s called “Dropping Things,” and I think this tune gives you some window into the incredible musical imagination that she had and the incredible means that she had musically, because she’s working with a kind of modal concept, she’s not working in a straight ahead meter, and she’s also doing something with the musicians. The tune is sort of an A-A-B-A tune, but it’s not a 32-bar form, and the second time that she sings the A section, the bass player and the drummer kind of go crazy underneath her. They’re doing something totally different tempo-wise than what she and pianist are doing. And she described this rhythmic thing that she was experimenting with at the time as the wave. While I never really had the chance to ask her about this particular moment, I have a sense that that was one example of what she was trying to do. And she was able to have this disjunction, this rhythmic disjunction, because of the tune’s modal characteristic. It freed the musicians up. And most singers would just flip out if the bass player and drummer tried anything like that underneath her, but here’s Betty just riding the crest of the wave. (laughs) I love it.

Molly Sheridan: Do you think a lot of this was just her innate talent or did she have a mentor or work closely with the musicians themselves, because she didn’t have a lot of formal training. Is seems like she was working mainly off her experience as a performer?

William Bauer: Well, there again I think you have to look at the jazz world as being different than the European classical world. During the time that Betty was growing up, getting formal training in jazz was non-existent, and so she did have remarkable mentoring. She was able to hang out with a lot of the bebop players coming out in the Detroit scene, people like Barry Harris, who I think even then was beginning to get a reputation for being something of a professor and of course now he has a huge reputation in that area, just sharing his wisdom and his insight about jazz. Tommy Flanagan was there, players that we don’t even know about now like Leon Rice and Ted Sheely. So there was a sense of being part of a learning community and yet it was unspoken. There wasn’t a huge direct emphasis placed on that so it happened very organically. And then when she got into Lionel Hampton‘s band, she was the seat partner of Bobby Platter. Bobby was a great alto player and an arranger and composer himself. He taught Betty a lot about arranging–he taught her how to write out parts, he taught her how to score things without having to play them on a piano. She had received some piano training earlier. She didn’t get very far in terms of her proficiency, but she could play chords, she could comp for herself in a basic kind of way. So I would say that she had some innate skills but she was a worker. She worked incredibly hard at learning about music theory and arranging and composing, and she put all of those pieces together in her own inimitable way.

Molly Sheridan: This month, we’re asking several women jazz composers if they feel that their gender has influenced their music in any way. How do you think she might have answered that question?

William Bauer: Betty would probably say it has nothing to do with it. I think Betty wanted to operate in the world as though gender didn’t matter and as though race didn’t matter, that none of those factors should limit anyone’s opportunities, and that none of those factors should be used to determine the merits of somebody’s work. So I don’t think she would want her work to be heard as an expression of her womanhood. That’s my gut sense. She certainly didn’t think of herself as a feminist when feminism came in early on. But I think as the message of feminism sank in she started to realize that she had been doing feminism all her life. Later on in an interview with Graham Locke, she refers to her aggressiveness and she puts it in the context of a woman being allowed to be aggressive now. That she feels maybe more permission from society to be who she is. That being said, I think there are elements in her lyrics that probably reveal elements of her experience as a woman in the world. And I’m trying to think of a particular example, maybe her song “Thirty Years,” which looks at divorce, or an impending divorce, from the perspective of the woman who’s about to be left. It would be hard for me to imagine a man writing those lyrics.

Molly Sheridan: As you were doing the research for this book, I’m sure that you came across a lot of the history of women’s roles in jazz in general. Do you think there’s been enough documentation of their role in this world in terms of putting it down for posterity?

William Bauer: Hmm. That’s an interesting question. I guess I would have to skirt the question just by virtue of the fact that it seems to be kind of judging in a way and I generally try not to take that approach to history. What I would rather do is kind of turn the question around and say ‘Why hasn’t there been more documentation of women’s activity in jazz?’ Because then when we start to get to the question of why, then we can look to the future and see if we can’t improve the circumstances if they need to be improved. So there are definite reasons why women’s roles have not been very well documented and I think those reasons need to be brought out, but I also think that the sheer fact of women’s neglect in jazz history is a critical statement that needs to be acknowledged and addressed.

Molly Sheridan: Why do you feel women have been neglected?

William Bauer: Whew! Well that’s really a topic for a whole other interview by itself. That’s a huge, huge question. I don’t know if it comes across in the book. I just did a book signing in Detroit and Linda Yohn, who is the radio announcer for WEMU, said that she really appreciated the passages in which I wrote about Betty Carter’s apparel. She said, ‘I’m sure all the women who read your book will really appreciate that too.’ And I said to her that I really wanted as much as possible to try and enter into Betty Carter’s frame of reference and clearly her dress was very important to her, so for me to neglect writing about that I think would have been a serious omission as a scholar. So, I guess maybe that’s an indirect answer to you question. I think that it’s often hard for men to enter into women’s perspectives. And because men have typically been empowered by the institutions they’ve designed to write the histories, that pers
pective has not found a voice. But I think that as more and more women get involved in writing the histories, they’ll be able to reflect that perspective more effectively. I would like to think that as men become more enlightened about that perspective they too will be able to enter that frame of reference and view history and their lives from it.