Category: Cover

John Harbison interviewed by Alexandra Gardner
American Academy of Arts and Letters
October 3, 2011—4:00 p.m.

Transcribed by Julia Lu
Videography by Stephen Taylor
Condensed and edited by Alexandra Gardner

Composer John Harbison says that he is trying to “defeat the idea of style.” That is, he tries to approach every new composition with completely fresh ears and eyes, working with totally new musical material and strategies well apart from anything that preceded it. While the idea of constant musical reinvention may seem daunting, it obviously serves Harbison well, given his ongoing success in music spanning operas, symphonies and choral works, to wind quintets and pieces for solo piano.

Jazz inflections can be heard in much of the music, stemming from his early years as an active jazz pianist. At that time Harbison was also playing viola and conducting, and for a time he traveled down somewhat parallel pathways in jazz and classical music. Eventually the classical side won out as he became increasingly steeped in choral conducting—first with the Cantata Singers, and then as the principal guest conductor for Emmanuel Music in Boston. These experiences played a crucial role in shaping his compositions and his life as a composer, and in fact he considers the Bach cantatas a primary inspiration for his work.

Harbison has a clear view of both the forest and the trees—he seems to find equal delight in the nuts and bolts of composition, as well as in tackling broad-reaching, sometimes archetypal themes in his music. Again the Bach cantatas come into play as he talks about both the importance of line and narrative in many of his works, and of the importance of the listener’s experience and the sense of community that can be created through musical performance. The phrase “good musical citizen” is an apt description for the composer—whether teaching at Tanglewood or MIT, premiering a new composition, or running and performing in the Token Creek Chamber Music Festival on his family farm in Wisconsin, he is eager to share musical knowledge and insight with those around him.

His good-natured conversation reveals a smart, funny, and generous person, as well as a dedicated teacher. As he says to his students, “It’s about everything that you do; it’s about your taking in what’s out there in the world. It’s about getting out and walking in the woods. It’s a highly intricate ensemble of things that go into what you want to do as a composer.” Harbison possesses a deep understanding of music, but the richness of his music is also a byproduct of his broad interests beyond music—such as poetry and history—as well as his untiring curiosity about and appreciation for the world in which we live

***

Alexandra Gardner: Although I knew that you’ve been involved in jazz music in the past as a pianist, I had no idea that jazz was essentially your first love, and the beginning of your life in music. How did that come about, and when did classical music enter the scene for you?

John Harbison: I was originally just learning instruments and improvising, and I had a pretty big resistance to actually learning pieces.  I just would go to the piano and make up pieces.  I would have little fragments that I would play over and over, which my parents found pretty annoying, and so they suggested that maybe I should take up a string instrument. So they got a teacher for me—I remember her very well.  She was a woman from New York, and I still kind of remember her perfume, which was very powerful—it was almost overwhelming. I associate it with playing wrong notes.

From going to concerts I was interested in viola, because it seemed like it was kind of in the middle of everything.  It’s a good spot.  But I began by studying violin because they said I had to get large hands to be able to play the viola.  So I just did violin very provisionally, and I waited until I was given the green light to switch to the viola.  In the meantime, I began to hear some jazz on the radio.  I was pretty young.  At about the age of 11, my closest friend at the time, Tom Arden, and I discovered that we’d been listening to the same jazz.  We had been teaching ourselves to play based on what we were hearing, and we were hearing really old traditional players like Louis Armstrong.  So we put together a band in junior high school.  I think it was sixth grade.  We tried to teach the other players the music.  They weren’t too interested, but we got the necessary instruments, and we played for quite a long time in that band.  It was a Dixieland group, playing really loud, extremely powerful stuff.  Both Tom and I got quite good at jazz.

In high school I played piano as a sub on weekends, like at Princeton University reunions. I played maybe for a few hours with some of the great jazz players of the time, and  I had a few unsolicited pretty hard lessons.  I was in a band one afternoon when the piano player had dropped out, and they somehow knew that they could call me up. I was maybe 15, and Buck Clayton was playing trumpet and Vic Dickensen was playing trombone. It was a great Basie assignment. Buck Clayton came back after I’d played behind his solo and said, “Real nice chords kid.”  And I said, “Thank you.” He said, “You know what the problem is, they’re not in the tune.”  I thought, what does he mean by that?  You know, I was playing what I thought were very sophisticated kind of alteration things, showing off a little bit.  But that was useless to him because what he was thinking, as really all great jazz players are, is they’re not just playing chords, they’re playing that tune.  And the inflections of the chords in that tune are what they want the rhythm section to be putting out.  So obviously, I never forgot that.  People who talk about jazz come back to that point over and over.  I mean, Monk always said, “You don’t play changes.  You play the tune.”  In fact, you play the words.  So that was a very strong guide point from playing with the players at that level.

Then we graduated.  I played with a lot of college groups and really did some quite interesting jazz stuff.  I was also at the same time interested in concert music. I played the viola finally—I was allowed to switch.  I spent a whole summer learning the viola; my teacher just said show up every morning at ten, and we would read a Haydn quartet.  And he and his wife, who was a violinist, and my friend John Sessions—who was the son of the composer Roger Sessions, sort of beginning my connection—would play these Haydn quartets every day for about two or three months.  By the end of which, I played a lot of Haydn quartets, and I could pretty much play the viola.  Or at least understand the clef and all that.  So that was going on at the same time, and I was a little bit split between where I was going to wind up at that point.  In college, I did a lot of jazz work because I was earning a pretty good amount of cash.  I was in a couple of bands, one of which played things like Dartmouth Winter Carnival and a lot of big college festivals that, you know, you go for the whole weekend and sleep on some floor, and play about six or seven times.  It was pretty close to a professional commitment in terms of the way we thought of ourselves.

We entered a big intercollegiate contest, which is one of the things that jazz players liked to do in those days.  Our band went in and we didn’t win, but our bass player won the best player award and was sent to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, which was in those days a big deal.  He got off the plane and was met by his band mates, who were a bass player and a drummer, at which point I think it was realized that some kind of problem had ensued.  Bass, bass, and drums would be nowadays a pretty progressive kind of combo, but I think in those days….

By that time, I was really weighing applying to the Lenox School of Jazz, which was starting up for its first year.  But I also thought, well, our band had played this contest, and maybe we weren’t at the top rung.  So instead I applied as a conductor to Tanglewood because I had been conducting an orchestra at Harvard College called the Bach Society Orchestra.  I was I think a junior in college, so it was a crucial decision point.  Then the word came from Fort Lauderdale, that I was the one who was supposed to be down there—I had won this performer award.  But by that time, I was at Tanglewood in the conducting program.  So I just kind of assumed that a rather large-scale decision had kind of been made for me.

I kept playing jazz for a while—I played with some really good people for a few more years.  Eventually I decided that I was going to drop out, but I’ve stayed in touch with a lot of jazz people. One in particular, the guy I formed the band with in junior high, we’re now back playing together in a band every summer.  So I have actually tried to recover as much of my jazz connection as I could at this point, having only very sporadically kept in touch with it all those years.  I imagine that my goal is to play as well as I played the year I didn’t go to the Lenox School, which is of course unmeasurable but still interesting.  I think my playing now has incorporated a lot of issues that I wouldn’t have been thinking about back then, particularly about constructing a solo. I’m getting a lot out of the jazz playing right now in terms of line and just the excitement of a very free form, high initiative kind of band that plays hard, that is not polite sounding.  I’m still addicted to this sort of Charlie Mingus or Monk ethic of, you know, you just take a real shot. For me, that’s why it’s still worth doing jazz. It’s something that in concert music there’s not much space for, that kind of improvisational thinking.

I’ve been taking advantage of the jazz playing to explore certain composers I’ve always been interested in as tune writers: Vernon Duke, and Jimmy Van Heusen, Arlen, a huge series of really great composers.

AG: People that you hadn’t had a chance to explore.

JH: Well, when I was a real jazz player in high school, I wasn’t aware of who wrote anything. I probably had in my head about three or four hundred tunes that I could play if they were called, but I didn’t know who wrote them.  It was of great interest later on when I was really not playing jazz much, just finding out how these voices really cohered.  I would have known in my ear 30 or 40 Irving Berlin songs without knowing they were his songs.  So that’s been an interesting thing for me, to reassemble that repertoire that I used to play in terms of who wrote it.  Finding out that, say, a Jimmy Van Heusen song is a very particular thing with certain kinds of strategies and certain very clear compositional points of view. It was really interesting to me to find how strongly profiled all of those writers of that era were in terms of how they approached their craft and, of course, it’s much more than a craft for most of them.  I’ve always been very admiring of what those writers did.  They did it all, the ones I’m interested in—did it all in a very short timeframe of less than 30 years.  And, they were apparently very generous with each other because there was so much room for them all, commercially.  There was a sense of a very functional culture, which I think we in concert music can look at with some profit, and some amazement, because there’s no genre within concert music that is as receptive to what I would call truly innovative explorative writing of the kind that so many of those composers did.

I remember 30 or 40 years ago when I used to say to my concert music friends that I thought Jerome Kern was a songwriter that we needed to think of in terms of Schubert and Schumann and people like that.  They all were very dismissive, but I would only say that maybe they hadn’t spent as much time thinking about his collective work as a set of coherent, highly articulate pieces, which is really what they are. The more I think about jazz now and play it again, I feel like the claims for its importance in American music can’t be exaggerated.  I mean, it’s just a huge thing, a very highly self-contained and complete language, and ideally it takes a couple of lifetimes of work to absorb it.

AG: So how does that color your view of the concert music world, given that it’s not as receptive to that sort of experimentation?

JH: Concert music has some areas where that kind of high refinement of a certain genre can work. I’ve noticed certain composers who craft their lives in terms of trying to bear down on something very specific.  Dave Rakowski writes 100 piano etudes—something like that makes a lot of sense to me in terms of what I learned about pop song writers and theater song writers.  They had one specific occasion for which they wanted to write over and over, and they simply brought their skills right down on that.  The great jazz arrangers of the big band era are also interesting to me in that way.  They developed a very wide range of sonorities, lots of very fresh ideas, but all dedicated to a quite self-enclosed culture, which had an economic logic to it of some sort.  Not much, because most of those bands were hardly making any money, but they at least had audiences, and they had a sense of purpose.  I think that’s one of the things that we have always to try to be looking for in concert music: Where can we make an enclave that seems to have a sense of purpose?

AG: Do you have a vision of what that would look like?

JH: Well, I think that’s a very important thing.  The composer has to find some sort of community that they can write for and be listened to in some reiterative way. My solution to that quite accidentally has been a very arcane one—essentially for 40 years I functioned as a church musician. This would be at Emmanuel Music in Boston, where I was the leader; I was actually for many years called the principal guest conductor.  The head of the ensemble, Craig Smith, was my very close friend, and I had actually been in that field a few years before him, conducting a group called Cantata Singers. We did some quite recent choral music as well, but pretty much, we did Bach cantatas.  So I was regularly performing music mostly at both ends of the repertoire scale—like before 1750 and since 1950. When I began to write for the choir, which I began to do quite extensively after I’d been there a long time, there was an ongoing audience connection because I was connecting—or re-encountering them—many, many months and years in a row.  So that became both a laboratory for me to work with the choir, but then with the audience also. There were many members who had been steeped in Bach cantatas and had heard, week after week, a literature that is very community oriented in its origins.  The idea was to bring together, in the case of Bach’s original situation, a couple thousand people every week who had studied a certain text, who were interested in a certain story and then would hear a composer’s rendering of this material.  They were essentially pre-warned what the subject matter was going to be, because they’re following a church day, which is going to be focused on certain subject matter.  So what I learned from this experience I think was the value of a set of exchanges with certain listeners who had drawn a number of impressions from other encounters of what to expect, and what not to expect.

Emmanuel Music itself was a kind of community in that it was also a group of players and singers with whom I functioned at many other levels.  Recently, there was a recording of a very early opera of mine from the early ’70s, and I would say that two-thirds of the cast members are Emmanuel choir singers. Craig Smith, my friend the music director of Emmanuel, was the conductor of many, many first performances of my pieces.  So it was a church music community, but also a very flexible performing instrument.  Eventually some of the Emmanuel performers are people that I wrote for, for very different circumstances.  For Sanford Sylvan, Jim Maddalena, and Lorraine Hunt, I wrote pieces that were based on our experience together at Emmanuel.  So I think that’s what I would mean by community, but it can take all kinds of shapes.  I have a couple of recent Tanglewood fellows who studied with me in the last few years who have made performance ensembles in which they perform and lead and do all the real entrepreneurial work and so forth.  I think that’s another way to generate some sort of a sense of community.  That people are performing together and working on some sort of goal that they believe in. I think it’s pretty necessary because the larger institutions are much more changeable; less likely to be there from year to year in terms of a given composer’s interests.  So I think it is part of what we need to do.

At Emmanuel, I also wound up, for three years after Craig Smith died, as the full-time music director.  That was an experience of the community at a much more fundamental level, and I think it was valuable for me; a kind of summation of what a kind of collaborative musical enterprise is really about because one of the things that we were doing in that period was trying to secure the future and find the right new conductor, find a way to move on without a founder who had been there for 40 years.  Which means trying to analyze what holds it together:  What are the people after?  Why is it a place that people want to come and work for, in many cases, way below what the market should bear, over many, many years?  That’s an interesting set of questions.  And we had to face a lot of them.  And we had to go through a lot of division and strife and hardship to try to sort out answers.

AG: So you created for yourself a really strong, large community and that experience as a church musician begins to explain the use of narrative in your work.  Whether it’s using a religious text or some other storyline, your music seems to always convey a strong sense of narrative, and also a sense of ritual.

JH: Oh, absolutely. I believe that’s part of what is so amazing about those Bach cantatas, which were the only body of music that I ever felt I had to study complete. As a young guy when I was in my late 20s, I auditioned for this job as conductor of this group called Cantata Singers in Boston. I got the job, and I thought, “What is my requirement for doing this job?  Well, I’d better look at every Bach cantata.”  So I spent a whole summer—I was living in Madison, Wisconsin—and I went into the library every day. I took down a volume of the complete Bach works—and the cantatas are the first 20 volumes—and I read through them from like morning to night.  I’ve never read through all the Beethoven quartets that way, but this is the one thing I actually really studied.  One of the things that struck me as I got to the end of that was this thing about narrative, and about the way the same archetypal story is told and retold with amazing musical invention, but also with this sense that some elements of it are foreknown.  That is, the point of view is foreknown.  So what happens in Bach and in Stravinsky and certain composers I really have great admiration for is that you find available for them a certain kind of elevation, and a certain kind of almost trance state which comes from the listener having bought into a bunch of very almost earthy, early premises that are holding the pieces up.  That is for me in great part why the cantatas have remained always in my head.  It was actually around the same time that I went through those cantatas that I had the experience in Santa Fe of being out there when all the Stravinsky operas were done.  Taking them all in, in sequence like that, there was something about that whole aesthetic that was tremendously impressive—that whatever the subject matter was on the surface, what he’s after is always in some ways the same kind of thing.  He wants to have people investing in this collective sense of celebration, of some sort of known set of values, or ideas, or whatever.  That seemed to be something that happened in certain Bach cantatas in a very strong way.  Because you knew, for instance, in a Bach cantata that most of the time, out of these very dire straits, some sort of hopeful elevation would occur.  That seems to me the essence of ritual.  It’s one of the reasons I’ve remained so interested in these pieces, and I’ve had the real privilege of performing certain cantatas many, many times.  It’s a repertoire that very few people get a chance to do even once or twice, and at Emmanuel, certain pieces are kind of repertoire pieces.  We do them a lot.

AG: Would you say that your interest in the cantatas affects your choice of text for other works?

JH: Yeah.  Sometimes I’ve explicitly looked for Bach cantata texts.  There’s a piece of mine called Simple Daylight which is for soprano and piano. My idea was that I would shape a bunch of poems by a poet I know—one esteemed very highly, Michael Fried—into a sequence which would be very like a Bach cantata sequence. Actually I did the same thing again, also with his texts and Martin Luther’s, in a piece called Chorale Cantata where again, I had this idea that I could have things that stood for the kind of chorus collective statement.  Then there could be the individual uncertainty and self-questioning and so forth.  Then there could be a kind of light that breaks through and then some kind of enlightenment.  That pattern certainly interested me on various occasions.  And I got interested very recently in how much quality difference there is in the Bach cantatas in terms of the way that the librettists manage those structures.  The very good texts are very helpful to Bach in terms of what he’s trying to do.  This guy’s a week-to-week composer—if he has to, he can do a menu from a restaurant.  But it makes a huge difference to him if the texts are really good.  And when he gets a really good one, something really happens.  Which is why I’ve always been advising students I’m teaching that the texts that they take, they need to get haunted by them.  Looking for them is not as good as noticing what’s sort of sticking to you.

AG: That’s good advice for how to choose a text.

JH: Yeah, I think it really is important to let it grab you.  More and more, I’ve become interested in a certain moment in Bach’s life in Weimar where there happened to be a guy who wrote very well—better than anybody he ever had again.  The character of those pieces is just different.  There’s something about what Bach discovers in the sound of the pieces, and in the uniqueness of the inspiration, that is entirely I think about responding to the poems.  So we composers, we need that kind of help.  We definitely should be always alert for it. I’ve found that lately, in working with the Bach cantatas, that I’m more respectful for where the words are coming from.

AG: All of your works are so very different from each other, and there’s a quote from an interview with you from years ago in which you said that your main interest was to make each work different from the others—to reinvent traditions and to create fresh new designs.  Do you approach each new piece in a completely different manner?

JH: I’m trying to.  And I’m trying to defeat the idea of style. I think the composers that I’m interested in also were more interested in finding the character of the piece, or the peculiar circumstances of the piece, and defeating the idea of the style.  Bach does it in a peculiar manner really because he’s someone who developed so many resources for how he could write that in his case, it’s really just a lavish kind of equipment.  If you track him from one week to the next, right in those two years when he’s writing a piece a week, the astonishing thing is that he’s not working off the previous week at all.  You walk away completely thrown by how unreliant he is on where he’s just been, which is staggering to me, particularly because the timeframe is so small.  If you were to say, well, Wagner writes Tristan and then he writes Meistersinger, and his vocabulary is so wildly different. I mean, it’s incredible self-discipline that he makes the sound of those pieces so different, but you’re also talking about six year gulfs there.  For Bach, it’s like six days.  So I think that trying to re-attack is really important.  I try to set up situations where I kind of have to do that.  Like when I wrote this piece for the Vatican, and they looked over a bunch of my motets in this little committee, and they sent me a commentary sheet.  The pieces where I use triads are all identified as something they like.  That’s the way they were in the 14^th century too, so I thought the premise for the piece then ought to be that there’s nothing in the piece but triads.  That became a really interesting premise because if you then try to write seemingly linear textures, actually they’re up and down.  They’re constantly registering triads. It becomes an interesting set of problems, to not make the listener or even the analyst aware of this, but if you are crazy enough to actually look at it moment to moment, you notice that’s what happening.  That seemed like a great opportunity to clear the air, and to be doing something completely unlike whatever I’ve been doing.  So I look for chances like that.  I did a piece years ago called The Most Often Used Chords, and a couple of my friends in California said, “That didn’t sound like anything you would write.”  I said, “Well, I’m really happy to hear that because given the a priori sort of games that I laid out, movement to movement, there wasn’t much of any way for it to sound like things I’d written before.”  There are a number of peculiar things that go on in that piece, based on not exactly musical principles, like almost statistical; say certain chords will be around a certain percentage of the time.  To me it was what music would be like if a bunch of really goofy theorists thought you should do things according to the way you could actually describe them. I think it’s fun to find places where you have to do it in a way that you don’t really know how to do it.

AG: It’s wonderful that you are able to do that, given that you tend to write one enormous, progressive piece after another—a huge orchestra piece, and then an opera—very large forms. You’re not really a soprano and piano kind of guy.

JH: No, I tend to write a lot of big pieces.  The key thing for those big pieces is to space them out and get enough time in between. Having had this amazing experience in Boston with the orchestra playing all of my symphonies—I heard three of them last year, in a really short time—I was thinking I was very fortunate that there were a lot of years between each one, because I had pretty much shaken loose most of what I’d been hanging around with.  By the time I started the second, the first was not available, and the third didn’t seem to be hanging much in the second.  The hardest was the fourth because the fourth came after two very large pieces, and they were big efforts, and they kind of wanted to cling a certain amount.  I had difficulty with that feeling, as if I couldn’t shake off as much as I wished I could.

AG: You obviously find great joy in the nuts and bolts details of the compositional process, in addition to being absorbed in very universal, archetypal thematic material.

JH: It’s funny, one reason I don’t conduct my pieces when they’re new anymore is that the nuts and bolts things are too interesting at that point. Later on, you know, I was able to do much better because I didn’t care about that stuff anymore.  Your engagement with elements of the piece changes so much.  It’s a very strange evolution, but I have to watch out for that. I watch out for it by not conducting stuff when it’s new, because I know that I’ll be off on a bender somewhere.

AG: You said a long time ago—and it’s a very interesting statement—that you have to be careful that your music doesn’t look easier than it is.

JH: Yeah.

AG: Do you still think that?

JH: Yeah, I worry about that.

AG: How so?

JH: It’s a strategic issue, but you know, if a player looks at a piece right away, and graphically they take an impression that they can absorb it immediately, that’s not good for you.  Right?  And I’ve discovered it’s not good for a quartet to look at one of my pieces and say, “There’s gonna be no problem.”

AG: How do you overcome that?

JH: Well, normally I’m unsuccessful in overcoming that. I at least try to make sure that the things that I know are hard about the piece are pointed out in some way—either something in the way that the piece is described verbally, or something to just say really you may have to work on this piece. I’ve had a few unpleasant surprises where groups have showed up, and they’ve said, “Oh my God, we didn’t realize this piece was so hard.  So sorry for what you’re about to hear.” I’d love to know how to guard against that, but  I’ve really never discovered the absolute way to do it.  I know some people say you just write something that looks impenetrable, but I think our job as composers is in a way the reverse: to do something that’s quite unusual but doesn’t look crazy at all, but then when they play it, they realize they’re doing something much more involved than they thought.  But one has to be a little wary of performers who go too much on their ocular overview and are not seeing anything too scary.

In the chamber music world—where rehearsal is really possible, in principle—it is important to send the message that the visual picture may not be the whole story. I now sometimes just say that.  The orchestral world is different, because it is so bounded by strictures of time that there’s not going to be much stretch anyway.  The orchestra is just going to do the best it can with a very finite chunk of time.  So in a sense almost anything that you present to an orchestra, given the number of minutes they have, is going be some sort of challenge. I think with chamber music, what I’ve tried to do is just say—particularly if I know the players—don’t think it’s quite as transparent as it looks, because I do love the idea of delivering something that is not too gnarled in appearance. Sometimes that means work you do by yourself to present something that might be fairly unusual, in which you’ve reduced the complexities visually or found ways to render a rhythm that is not the most clotted thing that you could put down.  I’ve been very struck listening to the late music of Milton Babbitt and looking at his scores, since I knew his music when he was in his middle years.  It sounds on the surface very much like it always did, but it looks on the page about 75 percent easier. I think one of the things he must have decided is, “I can get these rhythmic effects without having to send everybody down to their calculators and, you know, spending hours counting with themselves.” I think there are ways to suggest all kinds of density that don’t have to put the performer back to school.  As a coach at Tanglewood, I’ve sometimes felt a little upset about the hours of preparation I’ve put in on some scores, trying to make sure that when the players get there that I can do these rhythms.  And the composer then comes in and wants something much more extemporaneous and casual in sound than what the picture suggests.

That’s a really interesting question; we ask as composers for a lot of solitary long-distance runner time from players.  And I think one of the things we always have to calculate is when they come out at the other end, are they going to feel after those many hours where they played the same line of music 400 times, that the reward is there for having gotten it.  It’s just a very delicate balance. Some of us who also perform, we stay close to the world of those problems.  Because as a performer, I still get some scores, and I sit there for hours and hours and hours thinking, “I’ve got to figure this out!”

AG: Well, I think that also a lot of the challenge with music that may appear simple at first glance comes when it’s time for the ensemble to put it all together.  The individual parts may be completely manageable in and of themselves, but the work places virtuosic demands on the ensemble as a whole.

JH: I think it’s good that we need to still be writing music that requires the performer to understand it and live with it, and that is done differently when people know how it goes.  All of us are expecting, for instance, that our college students—the advanced ones—can play the notes of a Haydn quartet.  But it takes them a long time to play the music of the Haydn quartet, and to play the stresses and everything in the right natural place. The hierarchy of events, the pacing, all those things are very difficult.  And that’s probably what I would wish that we would be able to assert about the music that we’re writing now, too.  That eventually it needs the comprehensive issues solved just the way difficult classical music needs it.  I think we ought to all go to hear the All-State or the high school orchestra reading the Brahms Third.  To hear that their balances are not too good and a lot of the notes are hard, and some of the places are rather lumpy and not particularly soft, to get a better sense of what we’re hearing when we’re hearing a new orchestra piece.  Because we’re hearing something rather similar to that, in that we’re hearing something at a very early stage of its eventual evolution.

AG: Exactly. I wanted to ask about your perspective on this, given that you do write so many large works that can be difficult to program. Many of your compositions have been recorded, which is another way for large works to have long lives, and preparing a new work for recording is certainly a good way to learn a piece in a very deep way.

JH: Yeah, in this area, I’d have to say I’ve been incredibly lucky because a couple of conductors have conducted a lot of my pieces and have come back to them—particularly James Levine, but also David Zinman and David Miller. And they’re played better for no particular reason other than it is another group, and it can be another venue, and it can be another time.  The very fact that they’ve been around longer is somehow very helpful. Of course, if the same orchestra plays something twice in two years, the way they do big standard pieces, the effect is so different it’s startling.  That happened to me a long time ago in San Francisco, where Mr. Blomstedt brought a piece back the next year.  I looked at the program, and I thought this is too difficult, they’ll never be able to play it; they’ve got such hard music.  But they played the piece the way they play pieces that they have met, and the upgrade was far more exaggeratedly good than I could have thought.  I’d always guessed it would make a big difference, but this kind of difference was just—you couldn’t predict it.  It made me wonder about the whole world of orchestral performance. That is, we lavish a lot of care on these pieces, and it really does take a lot to understand whether they deserve it or not, because we don’t hear them go out of the sketch level for a while.  It’s not the fault of the conductor, or the orchestra, if it’s still in the sketch level.  It’s only that the amount of time to absorb it is so small. What Beethoven’s Eroica has now—it’s not that it’s easy to play.  It’s really hard, but it’s that it’s been around a long enough time, and has been absorbed in a number of places and most specifically by good orchestras on enough occasions, that it starts well up the track. We’re not starting right at the first square at all with that piece.

But the audience doesn’t have much stake in Beethoven’s Eroica.  I’m always trying to convince audiences that the interest of a new orchestra piece is that their ears matter there.  If they’re there for the 9,000th performance of the Eroica, it doesn’t matter what they think.  Like it, not like it, it’s completely immaterial.  But it’s very material what they think, what they react to or how they react, with a new piece. For some listeners when you really secure that message, it makes it exciting to be at a concert.  Part of the kick of going up to Albany, where the audience hears a much higher diet of new music than from just about any orchestra in the country, is that the audience is there to hear the new piece.  They’re there to meet composers, and they’re there because they’re ground floor people.  They love the idea that their attendance is making a difference. And you get such a feeling of exhilaration being in that audience because all of those people who are there are invested.  They feel like, “We’re the people who decide whether this stuff will ever go anywhere.” They’re as important to that event as anybody on stage, and that is probably almost like a re-creation of a time when pieces that are now standard were new.  People showed up to hear Beethoven Three, thinking, “What’s he got for us this time?”  And that’s the Albany feeling.  It comes about by years of persistence—of saying the real central purpose of this orchestra is that we play new things.  That’s why any time I get a call to come up to Albany, I’m there like a shot because it’s just the experience of being there.  It’s like an audience that is alive to the weight of their own presence.  They have to be there; it doesn’t matter without them.  That’s pretty exciting, and hats off to the series of managements up there and conductors who have kept a long tradition going.  It’s David, but it’s people before him, and hopefully people after him.

AG: Are there particular things you feel that younger composers should be thinking about and/or working on?

JH: I had this idea, which really came from an account of Luigi Dallapiccola teaching, and it has resulted in my instituting at Tanglewood every summer what I call the “Luigi Dallapiccola Reading Project.”  It has to do with how musicians are educated.  Dallapiccola, when he was presented with some work at a lesson, if he liked what was there, he would go out on the veranda with the student and smoke.  This was the ‘60s or the ‘70s in Italy…you can imagine. If he wasn’t too happy with it, he would go to his edition of the Divine Comedy, which is all in separate cantos, and he would pull out a canto, give it to the composer and say, “I want you to read this for next week, and we’ll talk about it.”  Now, what was he driving at?  Well, my sense of it is that he was feeling behind the music some lack of a life, or let’s just say, a wider support fabric that went beyond music, which of course was very important to him and very important to his own work.  I’ve sometimes had this feeling too, that maybe composers need to think a lot about what goes into their music besides what they know about music. I’ve started giving them round robin reading, that they just pass to each other every week.  This year we learned and recited Italian poems. The whole idea of it is just to say that it’s about everything that you do; it’s about your taking in what’s out there in the world.  It’s about getting out and walking in the woods.  It’s a highly intricate ensemble of things that go into what you want to do as a composer.  And sometimes, during the incubation of graduate schools particularly, it’s possible to lose sight of that because it becomes all about what your teachers think about what you’re doing, and what sort of musical environment you are creating for yourself.  So thanks to Luigi’s example—though we don’t do the smoking on the balcony because nobody smokes—we are doing the reading, and we’re doing it independent of looking at any music because we think he was right, that this is probably a very important ingredient.

Interview held at the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University
Transcribed by Julia Lu
Video and text produced and edited by Molly Sheridan

*

Much is made in the music press of violinist Hilary Hahn’s stunning technique, impeccable poise, and unshakable intonation. In that picture of perfection, however, one of her most striking character traits—her seemingly insatiable curiosity—can get a bit lost. Still, though she doesn’t flaunt her boundary pushing with unusual concert dress or radical interpretive choices, she resolutely pursues her own interests with care and focus.

Though she readily acknowledges that she takes the music she performs very seriously, she certainly hasn’t put herself up on that same pedestal. Her website is filled with friendly posts about life on the road, and her YouTube channel is stocked with insightful commentary recorded in hotel rooms and casual interviews with colleagues. Her violin case even keeps up a sassy Twitter account. All of it, Hahn says, allows her to blow off steam and have fun when she’s out on the road, but it also quietly demystifies the work she does for her audience.

That’s particularly important since Hahn is not one to pull repertoire punches. She presents work ranging from Tchaikovsky to Jennifer Higdon, and then records and releases them on the same CD, trusting her audience to follow her exploratory inclinations as she moves through styles and eras of composition. Whether presenting a warhorse or a premiere, however, Hahn seeks to clear away preconceptions and allow the music room enough to reach ears on neutral ground.

This season, iconic American Charles Ives is standing with her in the spotlight. Deutsche Grammophon has just released Charles Ives: Four Sonatas, the recording she made with long-time collaborator, pianist Valentina Lisitsa. In addition, Hahn also begins touring a portion of the solo pieces she has commissioned as part of her In 27 Pieces: The Hilary Hahn Encores project. Hahn speaks with particular excitement about the opportunities for discovery in each new piece—whether new to her or new to the world.

“I didn’t realize that in working on so many new pieces, each by a different composer, I would have to be learning each composer’s musical language,” Hahn explains, specifically in reference to the encore project. “It’s not just learning a bunch of short pieces. It’s actually learning this epic dictionary of music writing today. So that’s been a much bigger, much more enriching process than I expected, but that I’ve really been enjoying.”

***

Molly Sheridan: As a violinist at the top of your profession, I would imagine that you have a lot of opportunities to do a wide variety of projects and you can’t say yes to all of them. At this point in your career, what is shaping the repertoire choices that you make? Do you have some guiding principles or an internal mission statement of sorts shaping that right now?

Hilary Hahn: There’s always a balancing act with repertoire because there is there is so much that I could choose to learn, or choose to revisit. I don’t like to specialize so much, because I feel that I start to fall into a rut, just in my own interpretation patterns and things like that. But if I’m doing things from all different eras and styles, then it gives me new ideas.

Part of the concert season is determined by things that I have planned. So, maybe I have a recording to make and I need to play some of that repertoire, or there’s a project that is coming to fruition and those things are good to focus on in that season. But I do need to break it up; I like the variety. And if I’m looking for something that I want to learn, I try to think, where do I have gaps? What basic areas have I not learned music from?—whether it’s a time period, or a style, or a country, or anything. Then I listen to a whole bunch of music from that missing section, and I try to find something that really speaks to me and educates me more in that direction.

MS: Have you always followed your curiosity in that way? When looking through the projects you’ve been involved in, it strikes me that you seem to like a degree of experimentation, yet not to an out-of-character extreme.

HH: I think that started in my student days because my teachers were always having me work on a lot of different things at once. So I just oriented that way, and I’m used to that. I remember in my lessons with Jascha Brodsky, he had all these little things he wanted me to do every day. He’s like, “Oh, sweetheart, just do this like ten minutes a day. Oh, just spend an hour doing this.” And if I added it all up, it came to like eight or nine hours of things to do a day. Of course, I didn’t practice eight or nine hours a day, but I was always trying to keep up with everything that I was supposed to be juggling, which was great practice for being on the road. I think that sort of learning in a context of contrasts really geared me towards what I’m doing now.

I see music as one big thing, and to me, within classical music, the range of things that I get to do doesn’t seem so drastic. I really like the new part of things. I like the creativity of interpretation, the creativity of programming, of getting to know these composers that I get to work with who are writing new things. It’s just this great, interconnected world.

MS: I want to dig into your work with living composers, of course, but let’s speak a bit about your Ives recording first. One of the places your score hunting has taken you is to his four sonatas for violin and piano. If you can think back to before you invested all the recording time, and the performance time before that, and recall what initially attracted you to these works, I’m curious to hear your initial impressions. What spoke to you about these scores? What caught your ear and your interest?

HH: Ives was actually one of the big gaps in my repertoire. I’d never played anything by Ives before, and I was not so familiar with his work. I was looking for recital repertoire that I could play, that was new to me but already established repertoire. I wasn’t looking to do something that no one knew, but I was also looking to find something that I was completely unfamiliar with. So I looked through a whole bunch of recital repertoire, listened to a lot of stuff, and I came to Ives. I started with one sonata, and I really got drawn into the music.

It was really complicated at first to figure out how to put all of this together. I thought I knew the piece; I learned the violin part. I got into rehearsal, and the first time we tried we couldn’t even play it through. We had to stop, because we got completely lost. I can’t speak for [pianist] Valentina [Lisitsa], but I thought, “Oh, it’s going to sound this way because this is how the violin part sounds.” And what you imagine, and what you hear when other people have played it, is not how it feels when you get on stage, and it’s certainly not how it feels in the first rehearsal. It was like working on a piece that I’d never heard before. That’s one thing I really like about Ives. There’s room in his work to interpret things in new ways, even new to yourself, and to really build on the things that you’ve learned from the last concert. So it really stays alive quite actively on tour, even over years of performing. Once we got through that first sonata, and actually got past the logistics of the writing and got into the momentum of the performance, then it really started to show its character to me. So, throughout that whole first tour, it just developed, developed, and developed. Then we thought, well, it would be interesting to dive deeper into the Ives sonata repertoire, so let’s do three sonatas in the next program. The Ives Sonatas aren’t all very long, and that’s why you can do three in one program and still have room for some other stuff, too. So it wound up being perfect repertoire to just have, actually. I mean, the sonatas are all different lengths. The shortest you can play in almost any context because of its length, and because the melodies that people recognize in that sonata are very much in the forefront. In the others, they are more classical or romantic at times, and the melodies are hidden deeper. So within Ives’s language, there’s a huge amount of variety in these pieces.

MS: At this stage in your professional life, what’s your process normally for learning new pieces of repertoire?

HH: I practice my part. I listen, if there’s a recording. But lately I’ve been doing a lot of repertoire that doesn’t necessarily have recordings, or it doesn’t have a wide range of recordings to listen to. I look at the score, and if it’s an orchestral piece, I play all of the individual lines, but I’m not a good enough pianist to try to figure out a piano score. If I have a few hours for a few pages, I can kind of do it, but that’s not the same thing. And trying to play a piano score on violin just doesn’t quite work, so I need a little bit more time with the pianist. With orchestra, you hardly have any time together, so I have to patch together preparation elsewhere. When I get together with a pianist, it’s a lot of staring at the score and figuring out where things line up if it’s something rhythmically complex like Ives. For things that aren’t so complex, that seem straightforward, there’s a lot of playing it through to get the feel of the phrasing options. Just to try to see which pacing works, and to really just get it into my system. Sometimes the things that seem really simple are just so easy to get lost in. So that’s an important part of the learning process as well.

MS: At NewMusicBox, we often explore the composer’s experience of the commissioning and creative process. But as a player who has invested a great deal in new work, in your view, what makes for a successful commissioning experience? And on a personal level, where do you like to get involved in the creative process?

HH: For me, it’s really important with a new piece to play it and tour it in as many places as possible. That is kind of a given for me. Of course, there aren’t opportunities equally for each piece. With a concerto, for example, the orchestra has to program you. You can’t just think, “Okay, you know, I want to do this piece on this program. There it is.” Can’t do that. You have to talk with them, find the right match, find the conductor who wants to do it, and the place in the season for the orchestra to program it. So I think it’s trickier with an orchestral piece. There’s also a little bit of planning with the orchestra, sort of the long-term trajectory of what repertoire I’m going to play with them, what kind of focus it’s going to have. I’ve been really lucky with the concertos that I’ve commissioned that people have been very interested in presenting them. I try to play them long term. I don’t try to play them every season for an extremely long time, but I play them for two or three seasons in as many different kinds of places as possible before I put it down. Then I can focus on the next project and come back to it later. So for example, Edgar Meyer’s Violin Concerto, which he wrote for me over ten years ago—I played that for a few seasons, and then put it down. Now the piano reduction and violin part have been published in their final form, so it’s a good occasion to start playing it again. I’m playing it in Paris this season, and I’m playing it in Alabama, and you know, it’s kind of a big difference between those two places. So it just keeps the pieces alive for me. Jennifer Higdon’s Violin Concerto I played a whole bunch. People keep asking me to play it. So it just naturally stays in my active repertoire.

With the Encores project, I’m actually programming the premieres for the first few seasons I’m playing the pieces. They’re going to be in the program so that people can focus on them, but they’re meant also as encores, of course. So I can play them into the future, randomly, whenever I feel like it.

So I really look at longevity when I’m working on a commissioning project. I try to schedule enough time with it, but it’s never the only thing I’m doing that season. So it stays fresh for me.

MS: It strikes me that you start your answer from when the piece is more or less “finished” from the composer’s perspective. There’s a whole stage of development for you that happens after the composer’s work is done. Do you involve yourself at all before that point, or is it more like a relay and you take off only once the finished score is handed over to you? I remember Edgar Meyer telling me about faxing you pages of his score as he finished them.

HH: It really depends on the composer. I’m seeing that very clearly with the Encores project. Right now I’m working on 13 pieces to premiere this season, and some composers really want input before they consider their writing done. Other composers know every note they’re writing, and they want it exactly that way. If there’s a problem they’ll work on it, but if there’s not really a problem, they need to have that continuity in their own minds to get to the point where they turn the piece over to me.

With some composers, what they write sits really naturally. Some I can tell where they’re going with it, but they’re trying something more experimental and there may be different ways to make it happen with the same impression. In those cases, I try to be in touch with the composers and talk about some ideas I might have, or just some impressions I have to see where the flexibility is for them, and what their goal actually was in writing it. I try not to say that anything is impossible because I want the composer to be able to write exactly what they have in mind. I think a lot of techniques need to be developed in order to play things that are considered impossible. There’s usually some way to make it work, so I try not to rule anything out. I just mention to the composer, well, this is maybe going to be a big challenge in this piece in general, so is that an intention, or is that just something that happened. It depends on the situation.

With Edgar [Meyer], I had had a couple of meetings with him, and I just didn’t have the score yet, but I needed to start learning it. The concert was coming up, and I asked him to just send me what he had. As I would learn what he sent, then I would ask him to send me more. That was actually a good process. But it was before e-mail, so I got everything on these curling, fading fax pages that if I erased on them, the ink would erase. So it was really hard to mark it up, and I was glad to finally get an actual piece of real paper with real ink on it. But it was a very memorable experience.

MS: The last lines were always all crunched up and creased at the bottom?

HH: Yeah. And it would be slid under my door at the hotel, and I could always tell when a new bit had arrived—schweeee-schweeee [mimics paper feeding]—and there it was.

MS: As you are probably aware, there’s a stereotype that the traditional subscriber audience is not interested in anything new—they don’t even want new old music, let alone new new music. From your position on the stage, however, I’ve got to believe that you get a strong impression of how the audience is really reacting to new work, and also maybe that’s something that you take into account as you’re deciding what to play. So how would you characterize what’s happening out there?

HH: It’s really hard for me to make a general statement, because I think each audience is different, and the presenters know their audiences. On the one hand, it’s easy to say, “Oh this is how it is.” But on the other hand, it’s usually much more complicated than that. Often what an audience will go for has to do with how they’re introduced to that repertoire. It’s very easy when trying to prepare an audience to actually make them feel like we’re all bracing for an impact. I think it’s just really important to allow listeners to have a blank slate. So what I’ve spent a lot of time doing with some of the repertoire that’s maybe not got the best reputation, but that is really fantastic repertoire, is I just try to erase the preconceptions so that people can hear the piece fresh. Then I find people are really open to it. So it’s not so much the repertoire, I think it’s the approach to introducing the repertoire. Some people really like pre-concert lectures, and some people really don’t get them. They don’t enjoy them. They don’t know why they have to listen to this. In that case, I think it’s good that people have a choice how they want to be introduced to the music.

When I’m programming, I think people expect me to do a range of things. They know me by now, so I don’t think anyone is terribly surprised when I show up with some piece of repertoire that’s older but not so well known, or I show up with something new, or I show up with some big standard piece that everyone loves to hear. I think if you program for your personality, and you allow the audience to hear things fresh, then I think that’s the best circumstance, and that’s all you can really aim for.

MS: Is that how you go about clearing that blank slate for listeners? I’m curious how you help generate that for an audience, as opposed to the “Hold onto your hats, folks!” style that you mentioned.

HH: I have to do a lot of legwork in advance. I try to make sure when I’m talking about what I’m going to be playing that I present it in a way that is contrary to peoples’ negative expectations. Like with the Schoenberg Violin Concerto: people were expecting a certain thing, so I really had to kind of go way off in the other direction in order to neutralize the impression that people had. I believe everything that I said—it’s not like I made things up in order to persuade people—but I did have to do a lot of work to neutralize the expectations. I think when you set someone up to absolutely love something, then that’s also maybe a misleading expectation, because on first hearing, they may not be completely taken with it. It might intrigue them, and that would be a positive step if they had a neutral approach in the first place. It would be a negative impression if they expected to be amazed and they weren’t. So, that’s why I think the neutrality is really important.

I think things just become popular to think, and it’s just how people perceive composers, pieces, and genres within music. I really think that there are these trends, and once a trend starts, you have to kind of allow it to live and acknowledge it, but then try to smooth it out a little bit. Because all music changes over the years for listeners—the context changes, the impression changes. It’s relevant in different ways, so the relevance changes. Nothing is the same for any really long period of time. And every person in the hall hears something differently.

There’s a real tendency when trying to introduce people to classical music to say, “This is what you should listen to,” and “Here’s what you’re going to really like,” and “This is where you go from there.” When really, I often hear my friends who are not musicians saying things that really surprise me. Like, they don’t really like Appalachian Spring, but they really liked Jennifer Higdon’s Violin Concerto. I had a friend a long time ago who sang in choirs and stuff, and she really couldn’t stand any Bach but she loved Schoenberg. So even the assumptions of what people should like don’t really apply all the time. But when people feel like what they’re saying they like goes counter to what they’re being told they should like, they feel maybe they’re not hearing it right. We have to get rid of this idea that this is how you should listen. This is how you should hear this. This is what you should like. This is what people don’t like because everyone has their own experience.

MS: Taking all of these experiences that you have had with composers and presenting and interpreting new work, I’m curious how that then influenced the 27 Encores project. How did that shape the list of composers you asked to be involved and the kind of statement you’re making with the collection?

HH: The 27 Encores project actually came from many different directions. For years, record companies were doing a lot of encore albums, themed albums and composer-oriented albums, all the Kreislers, all the Heifetz encores. Those are great pieces, but I started thinking, “Why is the focus on these older encores?” I knew that people were writing contemporary encore pieces, but they just were not getting the recognition that they should. So at first I just thought I’d do a commissioned encores thing as a counter to all of these traditional encore collections. But then, when I actually started listening to composers’ music with the purpose of putting this project together, I realized that it was a lot bigger than that for me. It was really that I wanted to be able to work with a lot of different composers on this one project. Because usually when I work with a composer, it is a few years on one piece and I really dedicate myself to getting that piece out. I also wanted a chance to get to know more composers, get to work with them, get to see what they wanted to write, and do a project that maybe was a little different from what they were doing. In the course of that, I started thinking that if these are short pieces, then they could actually be played in a lot of different contexts, so that gives this commissioning project a really big reach, and a lot of different people could play them. Whereas with a concerto, when someone takes on a concerto that has been premiered and played, but not premiered and played by them, they have to go and schedule it with an orchestra. But if someone hears one of these pieces and they like it, they can just play it whenever they want—in a recital, or if they’re a student, they can work on it and get to know some contemporary music. So there were all these different facets that appealed to me.

I listened to a whole bunch of music and gathered a bunch of composers’ names whose music really appealed to me for this project. And I thought, I’ll be lucky if two-thirds of them say yes. I started calling them, cold calling, and they almost all said yes. I was surprised because I thought the short form wouldn’t be something that a composer would necessarily want to sink their teeth into. But it turned out that it was something that was kind of a challenge for a lot of them and that they could fit in between other commissions. So far they seem to have enjoyed working on it.

I didn’t realize that in working on so many new pieces, each by a different composer, I would have to be learning each composer’s musical language. It’s not just learning a bunch of short pieces. It’s actually learning this epic dictionary of music writing today. So that’s been a much bigger, much more enriching process than I expected, but that I’ve really been enjoying.

MS: Hearing you talk about the distribution aspect of this project and the goal of allowing other musicians to pick these encores up quickly and easily reminds me of how adamant you are about recording the work you commission. That’s historically a big issue for composers, who often struggle to get concert recordings even for their own private use to study or promote their own work. But why is that piece of the process so important to you?

HH: It’s important to record the pieces because there are only so many people who can come to a concert. Especially when something is new, it’s good to have a chance to hear it again and again. It allows the music to get out to a different audience. In the case of concertos in particular, it gives an orchestra conductor, maybe another soloist, a chance to hear how it all sounds put together. And since in concerti you have so little preparation time with the orchestra—the week of the concert—I think it’s really helpful to have a resource that people can refer to. So I see the recordings as sort of study resources for future performers of the music, but mainly as a way to get the music out to as broad an audience as possible and create literally a record of this work.

MS: What do you prefer? Do you like the control of a recording situation, or do you like the sort of chance aspect of live performance as far as giving a piece to your audience. It can be two very different experiences.

HH: I don’t really feel like a recording session is controlled. [laughs] I feel like it’s very scary which doesn’t feel very controlled. Whatever session you’re in, you only have that session to do what you’re trying to do. Even if you have several sessions for a piece, by the next session, you’re on to some other part of it, some other goal within the recording. So there’s a lot of pressure. It’s very intense; no matter how prepared you are, there’s always an element of sort of flying by the seat of your pants and hoping that everything comes together, because it’s rarely just you in the recording session. So you’re hoping everything comes together, and that there isn’t someone deciding to do a massive carpet cleaning downstairs with an industrial machine parked on the street—which happened in my first recording—or hoping that someone doesn’t drop a pencil during a great take.

What I like about recording is the amount that you get into the piece with the multiple takes, every take really mattering, and the intensity of the outcome on top of you. It’s like a super concentrated practice session and you hear what it sounds like for almost the first time. There’s a lot you hear on a recording made with really good mics that are right next to you that you never hear, even if you self-record, even if you get concert recordings back and you listen to them after the fact. So I find recordings actually really helpful for getting into the piece.

With concerts, often you don’t have that kind of depth of intensity and exploration because you’re playing it one time through. With an orchestra, you have maybe two rehearsals and then the concert, so you really can’t get into the interpretive details of the whole set of instruments very often, but you have the excitement of a concert and you have the flow of the concert. It just takes on its own character with an audience there. The audience adds something that you just can’t get otherwise. So I don’t know. I appreciate both together. If I had to pick one, I would pick performing because that’s why I became a musician. My first performance, I really loved it—it was so scary, but I loved it. So that’s what really keeps me going, and recording is just kind of a treat. It’s like an offshoot of performing.

MS: You’ve mentioned how it’s not until the performance that you fully understand a piece of music. So I’m curious, and especially when we’re talking about a new work that no one’s ever heard before, how that then further impacts that post-premiere growing process.

HH: You do not know a piece until you get it on stage. Even if you’ve heard it a lot, you don’t know what it is for you. But if you’ve never heard it before, you think you’ve got it, and then you get on stage and it takes on a whole different shape. Things jump out at you that you never even noticed before—the pacing of the interpretation either falls flat on its face or surprises you with something, and it then picks up this life that you never saw in it. So I need generally one or two performances to really get a feel for what I want to do with the piece, because there’s no way to replicate a concert in a practice setting, or a rehearsal setting. You just don’t have the energy of the audience. I think when you’re performing, you subconsciously pick up on what the audience is reacting to and that’s why it changes. Even if you have a couple of people in the room listening to you playing something through, it makes a difference. But if you get in front of hundreds of people, or thousands of people, it magnifies. Things pass much quicker than you expect, or certain things drag out. So, that really is illuminating. I try having a finished interpretation at every concert, but if I just stick to that, I’m going to miss out. So it’s really important to me to stay open to these things that come up in the moment, reveal themselves. That shows me where I really want to go with the next performance.

MS: You’ve put a lot of time into your online persona—everything from your website journal entries to your YouTube videos to your violin case’s sassy Twitter feed. What do you get out of that audience connection? That’s not something that every superstar violinist decides to engage in, but you have this really rich life with your audience in this off-stage context.

HH: I always feel like I’m not doing enough—like people are saying, “When is the next this?” and “When is the next that?” and “Oh, it’s been so long since you posted something.” So I don’t feel like I’m all that active compared to what people expect. I’m not blogging every day or anything. I really like traveling, but there’s this limbo, and I like to fill the limbo by writing. Whether I write personal letters or postcards, or whether I write for my website, or come up with ideas for things I want to do creatively within my career umbrella, I always use that time to do something creative. I think that’s where a lot of this comes from.

Then I have a lot of time when I’m really super focused. I’m working like crazy and planning things and working on future projects, all the different elements behind the scenes. It’s really like I’m working three jobs because I’m doing the performing, I’m doing communication with the audience, and I’m doing the administrative stuff behind the scenes. There’s also the social, not networking, but maintaining connections with people because you find them interesting, because you’re working on something together and you want to make sure that you’re on the same page. That takes a lot of care. There’s a lot that goes on that’s not actually playing, and it’s sometimes just so intense I just want to do something to blow off steam. So that’s where the YouTube videos come in. When I interview people, I find it takes my mind off what’s in my own head. I learn these interesting things about people that I’m working with that I would never find out otherwise because people say different things in an interview than they do in a conversation. Especially if it’s for a general audience. They don’t assume that you know what they’re talking about. It’s really nice to have the connection with musicians because there is this level of shared knowledge that doesn’t need explaining, but at the same time, you think you’re talking about the same thing, but often you’re not talking about the same thing. So interviews are really fascinating for me that way. I really enjoy doing them.

So it’s a whole bunch of things that I do for different reasons, but it’s mostly an outlet. I really try to provide a resource with the stuff that I do online—with my website in particular, but also the YouTube interviews—because there are a lot of people who don’t get to meet musicians and want to become musicians themselves, or they really love classical music and they want to feel more involved behind the scenes. They’re just curious, so I think it’s good to allow people to see what it is actually like.

MS: You mentioned your creative project planning and your career umbrella. You have defined yourself with some interesting calling cards, like how you juxtapose concerti on recordings, with your commissioning, these sorts of projects. Do you have broader goals when it comes to outlining the things that you want to accomplish? Is there an overarching vision that bridges all your activities?

HH: I’m sure I do, but I’m not sure what it is. I guess my overarching bridge between all these things is just what I’m interested in. There’s a time when you build a career, and you build your repertoire, and now I feel like I’ve built the foundation. So if something pops up that interests me, I can go in that direction a little bit. If there’s a colleague I’ve really been wanting to work with, but I haven’t found a good project to work with them on, then we can look for something together. This commissioning project with the encores, that’s something I started thinking about probably eight or nine years ago, but the timing wasn’t quite right until recently. And then it was like, this has to happen now because I’m tired of it looming but not actually materializing. So I just made up my mind—I’m going to make it happen whatever it takes. So it’s a combination of things I’m interested in, things that have been brewing for a while, stuff I’ve always wanted to do but never had the opportunity to, and then things that I find really grounding. I like the consistency of recital tours and orchestral appearances every season, and I am always sort of in the loop of a recording. I’m always working on repertoire for orchestral performances. I’m always thinking about the recital program I’m going to do a couple years from now. So there are a lot of irons in the fire, but I like that. And a lot of that is familiar so when I do something that’s unusual for me, it’s not completely overwhelming, and I can relate it to the stuff that I do that’s consistent and familiar.

MS: From your course work at Curtis, it seems like your curiosity reaches beyond music, too—you explored subjects that you could have just not bothered with, literature and languages in particular. Does this all then come together on some level?

HH: It’s important to me to dabble in other things besides music, even though my career is very music focused, just because it gives me perspective. I don’t want to get so completely caught up in the whirlwind of the music stuff that I forget why I enjoy the music. So it’s really important to me to step back sometimes. And that way I know if something happens, like if I get injured or if the music world changes a lot—you can never predict what the next 20, 30 years are going to bring—then I know I have other things that I’m interested in doing. It’s not this or nothing—that’s an incredible amount of pressure. I am very invested in the music stuff already, so I don’t need that extra pressure on top of it.

I’ve always been interested in creative things, and I’ve always loved to read. With the stuff that I do online, the stuff that I do behind the scenes, and the repertoire and performances I do, the people that I am fortunate to get to know, all that really enriches me as a musician. I know that I have a long way to go within music, and I know I’m nowhere near that with anything else, but it just keeps things fun for me. There are a lot of hours every day that go into the career and the preparation for concerts and I enjoy all these different aspects of it. But I find it helpful to have other things that I do that help me do those things better.

MS: Is there music that you play just for yourself, when you’re alone in the off hours?

HH: When I’m alone, I watch a movie. I just get my brain somewhere else completely. Or I read a book or I write something. Sometimes I’ll play something non-classical just because it doesn’t matter how I play it because that’s not what I do. It’s just a very low stakes warm up; I just improvise something. I’m not really great at improvising because I haven’t had a chance to do a lot of it live, but I find that every time I do it, I get a little bit better. If I just try to do a little improvising, it freshens me up for thinking about the interpretation that I’m working on. It kind of gets me out of one mindset and I can apply that creativity to what I’m working on. I find it really helpful if I’ve been working on the same stuff over and over again, day after day, and I’m getting a little like, “OK, here we go again.” It can never be, “Here I go again.” It has to be, “OK, what am I going to find in here? What do I want to bring out? What do I want to show?” But you know, for the most part, it’s really hard for me to be casual about music. If I’m practicing or playing, I just click into that really focused mode.

MS: You have Grammys on the shelf and Tonight Show appearances under your belt, but I’m always curious what signifies success internally for an artist and what mile markers they are using. What matters the most?

HH: I do a lot of my work alone, and I don’t always see what the impact might be, or what people’s reactions might be. When it really hits is when someone tells me the significance that something I did played in their life. One person told me that they were playing a CD I made for their baby in the womb, and then I met the baby a couple of years later, and then the baby wound up taking violin lessons a few years later, and that’s when you really see how you interact in people’s lives through the work that you do.

I’m really glad that this career is one I can feel positive about, even on the bad days. Even when I don’t feel like I did my best but I tried, I know I haven’t really done any harm. The worst thing that can happen is someone doesn’t enjoy the performance, but maybe that spurs them to check out another performer and then they find someone they really like. So it’s never a total loss, even if you’d don’t enjoy a performance. If I mess up, the worst that happens is I stop and try again—nothing really awful comes of it.

I’ve been compiling sort of a program book insert for this season’s recitals about the encores. Each composer wrote a little bit, and then I have pictures of them and stuff like that. I’ve almost finished it, and I was just looking at it and seeing the names of the composers, the names of the pieces, and what they wrote about the pieces. This has been developing in little ways over time, but suddenly it was actually really concrete. So that, the little moments like that where you realize, wow, there’s actually something that’s happening that I had something to do with, and it’s really important to me, and maybe it’s going to be important to someone else. Those are really satisfying moments.

A conversation with Frank J. Oteri
September 7, 2011—3:00 p.m.
Audio and video recorded and edited by Molly Sheridan
Transcribed by Julia Lu
Edited by Frank J. Oteri, Molly Sheridan, and John Lydon

Some of Eve Beglarian’s pre-compositional strategies—whether it’s compiling a 21st-century web-based analog to a Medieval Book of Days or paddling down the Mississippi River—seem worlds away from the erudite combinatorial manipulations she learned during her training at Columbia and Princeton. But for her, all of these experiences have helped her to channel her inner muse. She gleefully proclaims that she will exploit the resources of any compositional method if it takes her music where it needs to go and, as a result, she has created some of the most stylistically diverse music of our poly-stylistic era. Indeed it’s hard to imagine that the crystalline processes of pieces like Spherical Music and The Garden of Cyrus, the extremely sensitive Stanley Kunitz setting Robin Redbreast, and the often in-your-face hip-hop and indie rock-inflected music for Twisted Tutu, the 1990s duo she formed with Kathleen Supové, are all the work of the same person.

Beglarian’s omnivorous eclecticism has its roots in something that is arguably even more telling about her as a creator—it all emanates from a profound love both for language and for sound in and of itself. Her aesthetic was shaped in part by her 15-year stint as a producer of audiobooks for the likes of Stephen King and Anne Rice. From this kind of production work, she also became comfortable working with technology and receptive to collaboration.

The deepest impact this had on her own creative output is that she began to treat language as sound, but also sound as language. It’s a duality that at first might seem difficult to reconcile. For most composers there’s a pretty clear line of demarcation between vocal and non-vocal music (in most cases, music with or without a text). In fact, many composers are more comfortable writing exclusively one or the other, and even those who regularly write both treat them as separate idioms. For Beglarian, some form of verbal narrative is inevitably what triggers her inspiration, whether or not it shows up directly in the resultant musical composition. But even a Beglarian piece with no text is never completely abstract. However, her works involving text also operate on a variety of levels to the point of not being completely literal.

A work like Wonder Counselor for organ and a pre-recorded soundtrack, for example, has a visceral and sometimes shocking impact on first listening because she incorporates, among other things, the sound of a woman experiencing an orgasm. Yet she decided to use that particular sound, not to convey a sexual meaning, but rather to illustrate spiritual awe at the miracle of nature:

I’m quoting Proverbs which says that there are four things that are too wonderful to believe: the way of a ship on a high sea, the way of a serpent on a rock, the way of an eagle in the air, and the way of a man with a woman. […] I totally fell in love with the notion of God as your wonder counselor, dressed in a Boy Scout uniform, taking you around and saying, “Look at that tree. Isn’t that amazing? Look at that, the way the light hits the mountains. Isn’t that incredible?” That’s a wonder counselor, right? So the whole piece is about this sense of wonder.

After spending a couple of hours talking with Beglarian, she struck me as something of a wonder counselor herself and I left completely in awe of her creative process.

—FJO

***

Frank J. Oteri: So much has already been said over the years about how your music has broken down stylistic barriers and how you create works in which all these seemingly unrelated musics coexist, so I don’t want to begin there. I want to begin with a different phenomenon that I hear in your music—a dichotomy between a fascination and care for language on the one hand and a real infatuation with sound, which is a very abstract thing that’s very hard to define and which often exists beyond our ability to verbalize it. Those two things seem to be polar opposites, yet they co-exist in your music.

Eve Beglarian: That’s a very nice dichotomy. I like that a lot. Yes, absolutely. I remember trying to articulate to somebody what it is I do and talking about the idea that it’s all about falling in love with something. I don’t really think of myself as someone who makes something up out of whole cloth. I always feel like I’m responding to something that I fell in love with. And I can fall in love with a sound, and I can fall in love with texts. But those are very different kinds of love relationships. One of them is really verbal and really talk-y, and the other is not. So I think that they really do require different things of me as the responder.

When I start working with texts, I’m really working in response to a text that I’ve fallen for. I feel like my job is to make that text available to others in a way that it might not be if I didn’t do whatever I’m doing. Of course the tools I’m using are musical tools, and so I’m making a musical environment in which this text becomes foreground. Whether it’s spoken or sung, it doesn’t really matter. When I’m working with sound, often it will be that I’ll find a sound in the world that I’ve fallen in love with, and I will explore that. But the tools I have to do that with are much more likely to be electronic tools. I’m much more likely to be sitting at the computer doing some sort of sculptural work on sound files. So the techniques I’m using are different.

FJO: In terms of where that initial spark of inspiration comes from, does it begin with language? Does it come from a text? Is there always some kind of verbal association?

EB: I think lately, yeah. Whether or not the text may appear in the piece, there’s generally a narrative idea at the very least. There may be a whole poem or a whole text, but generally I think there’s a narrative idea going on. That’s where I find the thing to bang up against. In that way, I sometimes think I’m not like a real composer. A real composer is really interested in musical techniques, how you put notes together and how you put rhythms together. Whereas for me, I’ll take whatever musical techniques are handy if they’ll do the job for me of telling the story I want to tell. I’m not in love with the techniques themselves. It’s the same, actually, with electronics. I’m not one of these people obsessed with the latest toy, or with toys that nobody else has. I’m perfectly happy to use commercial software, the standard stuff, if I can make it do what I want it to do.

FJO: I’m wondering how your background with doing audio books helped to shape your identity as a composer.

EB: I was an audio book producer for about 15 years. I retired sometime around the millennium. The neat thing about that was I was sort of in on the ground floor of the industry of audio books, which are now, of course, a completely mainstream thing. But in the early days, it was this really fly-by-night undertaking. Then all the major publishers started having audio book divisions. I was a freelancer. I never worked for one particular company, but I did end up working with certain authors over and over again. Among them were Anne Rice, who wrote vampire novels before vampires got popular again, and Stephen King. It was really fun actually, and in certain ways it’s had a huge influence on my work. Part of it was that I was able to buy ProTools in 1993, so I was really an early adopter of the stuff that’s now standard for anyone doing audio at all.

That was a really exciting time, because it was also right at the beginning of the internet and there were newsgroups associated with the early adopters of Pro Tools that cut across all commercial, non-commercial, and experimental lines. It was sort of whoever had bought this gear, and we were talking together all the time, trying to make it work. Then, of course, I was functioning as a director, a very specific kind of director because it was only the spoken part. But editing voices, directing actors, these kinds of activities really got me interested in the sound and the rhythm of spoken language. And definitely, you can see how that’s had an impact on my work.

FJO: Perhaps, in fact, it is why language and sound mesh together in your work the way they do. No matter what you do, once you give something a verbal meaning, it has a specific association that it otherwise won’t have if it’s just an abstracted sound. But language can also be abstracted through nuance; different people can interpret the same words in completely different ways.

EB: It’s an interesting thing because when you add music to a spoken text, you change how that text is heard. So just as if you add a story to a piece of music, you change how we hear the music, similarly, as you add music to a text, we hear different things in the text. It’s like a performance by an actor. I think of a musical setting as functioning the way an actor does in terms of an interpretation of the text. You can really transform it in very substantial ways that become incontrovertible. No matter who sings the song, there’s a certain interpretation of the song that’s built into the musical setting I’ve given it that the singer will communicate, whether they understand it or not. It’s really built into the structure of the music.

FJO: That’s something I’d like to probe a bit further, because a lot of your pieces use pre-existing text and then the music is developed around it. But then I came across Making Hey, a piece you created as a tribute to J.K. Randall, which sort of reverses your usual process. You took an early instrumental piece, messed with it a bit, and then you threw a hysterical text from an email spam on top of it. And by doing that, you hear the music in a completely different way than if it wasn’t there.

EB: Yes, for sure. But you also, by the performance, interpret this dictionary spam as having some story in it that you perhaps wouldn’t if you just read the text without the music. So it goes in both directions. But yeah, the new Making Hey is transformed by the addition of the text for sure.

FJO: So are there other pieces in which the music came before the text?

EB: Well there’s a recent piece, commissioned by the violinist Mary Rowell, where the title came after I made the piece—I’m Worried Now, But I Won’t Be Worried Long, which is a line from Charley Patton actually. I loved the title and I think the title is really right for the piece. But I actually tried a few different titles before I decided that that was the right title for the piece, and I think it’s actually a different piece than it would be if it had a different title.

FJO: What does that mean?

EB: I think that the performer plays the piece differently with the idea contained in I’m Worried Now, But I Won’t Be Worried Long. A very interesting thing happened with that. The violinist Ana Milosavljevic played the piece, and her partner, Take Ueyama, who is a choreographer, decided he wanted to use this piece for a dance performance. In the dance performance, the character commits suicide. But he didn’t know that the Charley Patton line in fact means I’m worried now, but I won’t be worried long because I’m going to be dead. That’s the point. So this is what I mean. Embedded somehow in the piece of music is the idea that I won’t be worried long because I won’t be here. It is somehow in the piece in a way that it wouldn’t have been if I hadn’t called it that.

FJO: But the music you composed—the notes, as it were—all existed before that title. You said when we began talking that for you now there’s always a verbal association or a narrative that begins the piece, but that obviously wasn’t the verbal association this time around or even the narrative that began the piece. So was it considerably different?

EB: Well, I have to think about it. That piece in particular has a very strange network of associations. It starts with a recording I made in 1996 in Beijing at the brand new conservatory that had just been built. None of the pipes were connected correctly. I went into the ladies room, and there was this incredible symphony of water drops; everything was dripping. It was bizarre. And I was like, I have to record this. I was always like, I’ve got to make something with this, because it’s this beautiful rhythm with different sonic qualities and so on. So, the Beijing bathroom! Then I got really interested in this Armenian song, which is translated as “Apricot Tree,” which was leftover from the piece for Maya [Beiser] I was working on. So that somehow became embedded as part of the material I was working with. What this traditional Armenian song has to do with Beijing leaky faucets, I can’t tell you. I have no idea. And then, the final element was the Charley Patton. But it’s not like I can consciously connect the dots for you and explain at all why they all belong together, and where the death is as a thematic element. I don’t know. I have no idea.

FJO: That you don’t know and don’t go into a project with an overarching plan ahead of time is 180 degrees away from the way many other composers work, which is perhaps what you were alluding to earlier when you said that you were not all that interested in specific techniques for putting notes and rhythms together. You just don’t seem to think that way.

EB: Well, I have a newish piece called I’m Really A Very Simple Person, and that started with this little riff—it does C-G-D-G in all the different combinations of eighth notes and quarter notes that can happen. It takes 19 bars to loop through all the different possibilities. So on one level, it sounds totally relaxed and playful and easy, like there’s nothing to it. But I am doing some sort of combinatorial mathematics to get all the different possible combinations. I do like things like that. I mean you know, I did go to Princeton after all, and systematic, pre-compositional etcetera is always nice if it’s useful. I think that’s what I mean. I don’t fall in love with systematic stuff, but it does tickle me when I can incorporate it without doing violence to the ideas I’ve got going.

FJO: I’m about to go out on a limb here. I’d love to hear how you came to put a recording of an orgasm into your solo organ piece Wonder Counselor. To my ears this is also adding an element of language which makes the piece much less abstract. Admittedly it’s not language per se, but it has a specific syntactic and associative meaning for all people in ways that, say, a G major chord doesn’t. You could do a musical analysis and say a G major chord is here for all sorts of reasons, but it doesn’t really mean anything on its own, whereas the sound of an orgasm does. As a result, you’ve taken a purely instrumental piece and given it a whole new narrative dimension that it otherwise probably wouldn’t have.

EB: The reason the orgasm is there is because I’m quoting Proverbs which says that there are four things that are too wonderful to believe: the way of a ship on a high sea, the way of a serpent on a rock, the way of an eagle in the air, and the way of a man with a woman. I had already decided that the title of the piece ought to be Wonder Counselor. I had found that in the Jerusalem Bible translation of that famous thing in Isaiah: “They shall call him wonderful, counselor.” But the way the Jerusalem Bible translates it is as “wonder counselor” instead of “wonderful” comma “counselor.” I totally fell in love with the notion of God as your wonder counselor, dressed in a Boy Scout uniform, taking you around and saying, “Look at that tree. Isn’t that amazing? Look at that, the way the light hits the mountains. Isn’t that incredible?” That’s a wonder counselor, right? So the whole piece is about this sense of wonder. Then, when I found this quote in Proverbs about the four wonderful things, I felt like those four wonderful things need to be in the piece. So for me, it wasn’t exactly that the orgasm has this particular syntactic significance the way you’re describing it. It’s one of the four wonderful things. And wonder counselor is the core idea that I’m really trying to embody in the music.

FJO: But it’s still sort of shocking, in a way. I’m curious about what the reception was to your having done that. This piece was written for the American Guild of Organists which is not the sort of organization that I would immediately associate with a piece that does something like that.

EB: Well, it created a little bit of excitement when I first turned it in. Actually it was a beautiful thing. It was one of the premieres I will cherish my whole life honestly, because it was really kind of a trip. At first I got a call saying, “Could you please just have three wonderful things and not four of them?” And I was like, “You know, I’m really sorry, but it’s in Proverbs, and so it’s in the piece. And I’ll take out all the wonderful things if you like, and not have the serpent on the rock, the eagle in the air, and the ship on the high seas.”—All those sounds are framing the beginning and end of the piece. And then the middle of the piece is all a set of variations on this 13th century Res est admirabilis, which means it’s a wondrous thing. So wonderful is sort of everywhere there—”We can do the piece without the four wonderful things. It’ll work. But you can’t have three. Sorry. I won’t accept that.” And so there was a bit of back and forth, and finally, the organist, Kyler Brown, went to the rector at the church where this piece was going to be premiered during communion. It’s a very High Anglican church that Schoenberg wrote an organ piece for, and Virgil Thomson went to this church. It’s St. Mary the Virgin in Midtown. They call it Smoky Mary’s because they use so much incense there that the place is just redolent. So the organist went to the rector and asked his permission, and played him the piece. And the rector said, “I don’t have any problem with this at all. We can play this piece during communion. No problem.” And I was so touched, and so honored that he understood that I wasn’t playing some adolescent game. I meant it utterly seriously, as these are four wonderful things. I mean, they are, aren’t they?

FJO: That’s a wonderful back story and it’s going to make me hear this piece in a completely different way yet again. So maybe you’ve totally refuted my hypothesis about syntax. But it also points out something important about how language works: We give it meaning through agreement. Once we no longer agree on those meanings, or once different people hear it in different contexts, the meaning changes. This makes me wonder, in terms of text setting, how sacred in your mind the original intent of that text is to what you are doing with it musically?

EB: Wow, I’m really sort of suddenly thinking about Clarence Thomas, and Original Intent, and what the Framers meant. Honestly, I have a hard time knowing that we can know whether we can know. I mean, the writer of Proverbs, when he spoke of the four wonderful things, he or she, do we know what was meant by that? I don’t know. And isn’t that what fundamentalists worry about all the time? Not to get into it all, but the fact is that text happens to be a biblical text, so there’s a whole long history of people killing each other over what that sentence means. In a way, as the composer when you deal with a text, you get to decide. You’re making an utterance that supports a way of hearing the text, or perhaps several ways of hearing the text. You get to do that because you’re the composer. It’s sort of like what I was saying earlier that when I make a decision about how it is, then the performer in a way can’t push that too far off the track of what I’ve done. Certain things are written into how the piece goes that the performers are going to have to do, whether they like it or not.

FJO: Even if it’s a subtle thing like a title of a piece, even if you don’t spell out anything other than giving the performer that title, it yields a certain result.

EB: It seems to.

FJO: Fascinating. But along the same lines, just like you can’t know what the original author intended and it’s open to interpretation, anybody who’s going to be hearing your piece isn’t going to necessarily know what went into it—and maybe they don’t need to know. But when I recently wrote a set of program notes for the Tanglewood performance of your piece Robin Redbreast and learned its backstory from you, I know that it made it even more poignant for me. I imagine this is probably why you include some backstories for pieces on your website. It was wonderful going onto your site and reading about all the anecdotal details that went into the composition of The Continuous Life. It’s so nice that you opened your life up at that level of detail so others can understand what all went into this piece. But most people who are hearing it, unless they’re lucky enough to have come across your site and are patient enough to have read everything you put up there—it’s quite a bit of material—probably won’t get the story from just hearing the music.

EB: I would claim that when you as the composer put your heart in something, your heart is there. And that’s going to be experienced by the listener, even if the listener doesn’t know the actual step-by-step, that in fact I was living in a house with a “For Sale” sign in front of it. The fact that that’s the story of where I was when I was writing Robin Redbreast isn’t necessary because, God willing, my heart has been put into that piece in such a way that the listener will hear that and hear that searing ending of that text. Something will happen to the listener; it doesn’t need to be the same thing. It doesn’t need to be even parallel to my experience at all. That’s what’s so great about music. You feel all these complicated emotions, and you are responding to the things that the composer put in the music, but it doesn’t have to be a one-to-one relationship at all. We all hear different things, and when we come back to pieces we know well, we hear them differently. That’s what’s so cool about music.

I grew up in a musical family, so I was surrounded by music all the time and I went to many, many concerts, and sort of knew the standard rep just as part of osmosis. One of the ways I knew I wanted to be a composer—I was maybe 17—was at this performance of the Brahms sextets being performed by Heifetz and Piatagorsky and their students. I don’t know that I had ever heard the Brahms sextets until that night. I was blown away. And I remember sitting there at intermission speechless and overwhelmed. Some lady sitting next to me and my mother started chatting about re-covering her couch or something, and I was like, “Wow! She just didn’t have that experience at all. We were in the same room sitting next to each other, listening to the same performance, and the experience that I had was not shared by her. How awful.” But it also made me think, “OK, this is where I need to be.” I guess I’m coming back to the idea that I think that what makes me an artist isn’t that I’m out there banging out the notes. No. It’s that I’m taking stuff in. I’m feeling stuff, and I’m translating that so that you can feel it. Or somebody else can feel it. That’s what my creativity is about.

FJO: You grew up in a musical environment, but you initially went in a different direction. You studied biochemistry. What was that about?

EB: What biochemistry was about was neurobiology and about understanding how the brain works. The last 30 years have been a really, really fascinating time for that field. If I could have bifurcated myself into two people, it would have been pretty interesting to be doing biochemistry and neurobiology these last 30 years for sure. Maybe in a way, it was another way of looking at what that experience of the Brahms sextets was, but in a much more deconstructive way.

FJO: Finding out through scientific analysis why that woman in the audience didn’t feel what you felt?

EB: What process is going on in the brain? When that happens to you, when you feel that, what exactly is really going on? I mean, in an ineffable experience.

FJO: You were surrounded by music. Your father was a composer and you grew up in an academic milieu, and then you went on to study music. But you still hadn’t found your voice in all of that. It’s fascinating to hear you talk about hearing a piece by Brahms as a major epiphany for you as an artist before you decided that you were going to pursue music for the rest of your life, because Brahms isn’t exactly your voice.

EB: You don’t hear Brahms in my music? What do you mean?

FJO: Who knows? This might be another example of the power of language and verbal association. Maybe now I’m going to listen to your music and hear Brahms in it. But I don’t hear Brahms yet. I hear early music, and I hear all the various pop music stuff that was happening in the ‘80s that got filtered into your mature music. I never heard any of the Princeton stuff except the reworked J.K. Randall piece. I never heard the original of that. I’m interested in how your sound evolved and where it went, how you felt you found yourself in this once you decided that this was what you wanted to do, after hearing Brahms and having that epiphany.

EB: Well, what I loved about Princeton was that there was this really excellent set of tools that you could learn so that you’d have something to bang up against. I think it’s very important to have something to bang up against, so that you’re not just sitting at the piano noodling away, writing pretty stuff, because in the absence of something to bang up against, it’s really easy to do that. And it’s not likely to be terribly interesting. So for me, having this really rigorous, mathematically sophisticated twelve-tone theory was really fun. I loved it. It was a wonderful, wonderful training. It’s the same as 16th-century counterpoint, or writing fugues, or whatever. Any of those things are really great to bang up against, in my opinion, because then you have techniques. You have skill because you fought with something that doesn’t make your life easy. And that makes you better at your job when that happens. For me, what that was about was spending enough time first doing it sort of by the book, and then fighting with it. I went and read Simple Composition by Wuorinen.

I made this [big] piece in the mid-’80s, of which Spherical Music is one piece. The whole piece is called Garden of Cyrus, and recently Dither has started playing a version of the last movement of it that I totally love. It’s like the apotheosis of what this piece needs to be. These are all strictly twelve-tone pieces, I mean they’re serial in every domain: notes and rhythms and everything. But I’ve manipulated the way they’re serial to make them accessible, or what I thought was as accessible as I could make them under the circumstances. I’m using a twelve-tone set, but basically every six notes is a diatonic collection. So you’re practically going through the circle of fifths. I very often take six notes at a time, rather than twelve, and then drop one, add one, so you get modulation. It’s all pretty tidy. It wasn’t brain surgery to make this twelve-tone set sound diatonic. But it also makes you do unexpected things that I wouldn’t have done had I not been grappling with this cranky making system. There are five movements to this piece, and it was an all-electronic piece. It was really what should have been my master’s thesis. Of course, my master’s thesis was a completely incompetent orchestra piece that no one will ever play, or ever should. But that’s because Columbia didn’t have the wit to see that this was what I should be doing, and at the time, it had to be an orchestra piece. But it was really fun and really hard. After that I got much less doctrinaire about the whole thing. I could leave it aside. I didn’t have to worry about it anymore. It wasn’t exactly that I had killed the father, or whatever those Freudian things are. It was more like I dressed up the father to become the dad I always wanted. And once I did that, I didn’t need to do it anymore.

FJO: So you eventually abandoned the twelve-tone approach. There are all these stories about George Rochberg and David Del Tredici abandoning twelve-tone music and going in a different direction with their music and becoming outcasts in certain circles. You were a generation later than them, but even then the academic milieu was not terribly interested in music that folks were doing who were outside of that milieu.

EB: They still aren’t.

FJO: But whenever anyone talks about uptown versus downtown to younger composers, they say that distinction doesn’t exist.

EB: Oh, it certainly does. OK, the fact is, in a way, downtown won. What we think of as the new music scene is the inheritance of downtown which got invaded by all us Ivy League types who had been trained to be uptown people, but who turned our backs on uptown. I mean, face it, that’s what happened, as far as I can see. All this fabulous activity that’s going on in New York now is the inheritance of that shift that my generation sort of took from saying, “There’s got to be more.” I mean, I was definitely part of what was the uptown scene. In my case, it was a little more complex than a stylistic problem, because there’s also the female problem. It’s really hard to know which of those trumps the other, but some combination of those was operating to the point where I was producing concerts, producing records, everybody knew me, I was completely part of that scene, I was on the board of three or four different new music organizations, and not one of them was playing my music. So at a certain point I’m like, I guess I don’t belong here. It was really heartbreaking, because I’d gone to school with these people. They were my friends. But I’d been out of school almost eight, nine years. It was time for something to happen. So I came downtown, and within days, I mean literally, people were programming my music. People were asking me to do stuff.

FJO: When you say came downtown, what does that mean?

EB: Well, it means literally I moved downtown actually, which is kind of funny because I don’t think that would have strictly been necessary. But I started hanging out with a different group of people. David First was one of the first people; he was programming concerts in those days. There were all sorts of people around who were organizing concerts in those days in downtown spaces—Kitty Brazelton, Mary Jane Leach. Almost immediately I was invited by those people, once they knew about me, and stuff just sort of snowballed.

FJO: Now was this around the same time you got involved with performance of your own music. Did this effect the kind of music you wound up writing?

EB: They do sort of go hand in hand, and I think that had a tremendous impact. Part of coming downtown was that I started performing my own music. I had never really thought of that before then, the sort of club scene and putting together informal concerts oneself which was predicated in a way on being a performer. It was also part of my blossoming. I think that becoming a performer was a really important part of my process of coming to maturity as a composer. It made me a way better composer for sure.

FJO: It also seems to have made you more open to the idea of malleability, to not be fixed on an idea of what something is. Once you’re involved with the performance of something, you see that it can go in many different directions.

EB: Yes, and I think, actually, it’s gotten to be ridiculous. Most of the pieces I’m writing now I write for one instrumentation, but I have no difficulty with the idea of them being for many different kinds of instrumentation. I’m constantly having to rearrange them for different performances because I’m open to that. The pieces change depending on the instrumentation, but there’s a core to what the piece is; it can be realized in multiple different ways. I’m completely down with that.

FJO: Now, the other thing that was such a different world, and I think it’s sort of a hallmark of what you’ve done over these years, is you’ve been more open to the collaborative process than a lot of other composers. I’m thinking early on, Twisted Tutu was really a duo where you and Kathleen Supové had equal billing, even though you wrote most of the music, but you performed music by other people as well. And then with Hildegurls there were four composers involved, plus a director, plus actually a fifth composer: Hildegard von Bingen. So it was not just about you. That sort of harkens back to something you said very early on—and I thought it was very interesting—that you don’t necessarily see yourself as somebody who says, “This is my work so pay attention to it.” Instead you say, “I like this. Check it out. I’m in love with this. You might be, too.”

EB: I really love collaborating across genres, and also with other composers, because everybody’s ears are so different and everybody’s ideas are so different. You know, it’s a really fun thing to do. It’s scary at first because it’s like, are you gonna get naked with this person? But it’s worthwhile. Lately I’m working with Mary Rowell a lot on The River Project stuff. It’s not something I do all the time, but it is something I like to do. And it’s different doing it with another musician than it is to do it, say, with a director or a choreographer. Because then there’s this built-in distinction, even though most of the choreographers I’ve worked with want to hear how I’m seeing the dance, or what I’m making of the dance, or whatever. But there’s still a sense that this is that person’s expertise, and this is my expertise. Whereas breaking down that boundary so that everything’s up for grabs is a really surprising and interesting way to make work.

FJO: Now, I want to talk more about The River Project, but before we do, we haven’t touched on the Book of Days at all. We were talking before about how music gets perceived and how composers present their work. When most composers list their works, they either list them chronologically or by category—you know, these are my chamber pieces, vocal pieces, etc. But you also group some of your pieces into this thing you call a Book of Days, which includes a lot of different kinds of pieces which are assigned to different days in the calendar year. How does a piece get to be in Book of Days? Why are certain pieces not in it? What’s the purpose of the frame? Ideally, I imagine you want to have 365 pieces in this, but maybe not, because you’re not necessarily concerned with completing systems.

EB: For me, the inspiration for the Book of Days was the recovery movement. They have these One Day at a Time books. You know, something to read each day, a little meditation that you do each morning. That is an outgrowth of medieval times, where each day you read a little chunk and meditated on it. So for me, a Book of Days piece needs to be a piece that wants to be mulled over a bit. So there is that element of it. There are certain pieces I’ve written that don’t feel like “mulling over” pieces in quite that way.

The other thing is that when I conceived of the idea of the Book of Days, I was working on a lot of big, long projects—a bunch of theater pieces and dance pieces and stuff like that—where very often you end up making something that doesn’t end up in the finished piece for one reason or another. So the idea that there would be a place where some of those things could live, that they wouldn’t be orphaned for life and would have a home, seemed to me to be a sort of neat thing.

I love that it’s not chronological. So as you go around the year, if you listen to each of the Book of Days pieces, you’re not actually listening chronologically to my work. I mean, there’s stuff in January that’s brand new, and there’s stuff in December that’s really old and vice versa. It’s all mixed up. So there’s this snapshot aspect of my life as an artist that I really enjoy. To me it’s really neat that I can go to the site and find equally easily a piece from 1985 and a piece from last month. At a certain point, I am going to worry if I’m not making progress. I have more Book of Days pieces than are actually on the website right now because I also got behind in terms of the web part of putting them up there. I do feel like I would very much like to end up with 365 pieces, and that that would exist as something you could set your browser to if you wanted to, so that each morning you would listen to this little piece. Or watch, if there was visual component to each of them, and that it would be some sort of a quotidian meditation for you as a listener.

FJO: What happens if you put something up for each of the days and decide that there’s another piece that belongs in there after you’re done with it. Would you kick one out?

EB: At the rate I’m going, it’s more likely that I’ll be gone before I’m finished than that I’ll finish and start kicking out pieces or replacing them saying, “You get demoted. You’re not part of the Book of Days.” We’ll see, but if I get to that point, and I’m worried about it, I’m going to call you up and ask your advice about which ones to get rid of.

FJO: Well, I would say add leap days! But this actually ties into something I wondered about when you had told me that The River Project has made you rethink the way you write pieces. Maybe a little backstory about The River Project, for those who haven’t read The New York Times article.

EB: Around the time of the election of Obama and the economic meltdown, I decided what I wanted to do was travel down the Mississippi River really slowly, human powered. I ended up paddling and biking down the river, from the headwaters in Minnesota, all the way down to New Orleans, in the fall of 2009. Part of it was that the election made me think that America is in fact my country, and I do live here, and it belongs to me. Part of it was the economic meltdown. I could stay in New York and bite my fingernails about how I was going to get through the next year, or I could do something interesting with that uncertainty. Also, I thought about the WPA and the CCC and all those things that were funded by the federal government for artists the last time there was a serious depression. I knew that even Obama was not likely to fund those kinds of projects. So I wanted to do a one-person WPA, sort of.

A lot of this came out of my response to Katrina. Spike Lee’s documentary includes an interview with this guy who wrote a book called Rising Tide about the 1927 flood. That flood had a huge impact on American culture because the destruction of the delta and so on meant that the blues traveled, because the African American folks who were living in the delta moved north to the cities. So the blues, which was a local thing going on in Mississippi, moved to all these different urban places and turned into the blues as we know it. Also, of course, rock and roll and everything else. American popular music would be a completely different thing without that flood. It’s really weird to think about. In a certain way, I would say that jazz would also be entirely different. Because if you think about it, there’s this local New Orleans-style jazz, which is quite different from what jazz turned into. In fact, the local New Orleans-style jazz is still there, just as the traditional blues is still there in Mississippi also. So this idea of the local changing as it goes to different places seems really, really powerful, and really, really instructive for what happened in American music. So I just wanted to sort of look around.

Also, I’ve been a composer in New York City for something like 30 years now. That’s a long time to be doing one thing. Even though I’m self-employed and I never have the same 1099s each year, in a certain way there’s this incredible stability to my unstable life. The flourishing that I see going on in the New York scene is totally thrilling, but there’s also the danger of a big city. There’s a certain kind of provincialism that happens in a big city that can happen nowhere else. When you’re in a big city, you really can believe that it’s where everything is happening. And you’re not far from wrong, so nothing corrects you. Everybody who lives in Kansas City knows they’re not in the center of the universe. They’re fully aware of that, and as a friend of mine from Kansas City pointed out, people in Kansas City know an awful lot about what’s going on in New York. But those of us in New York generally don’t know shit about what’s going on anywhere but here. And the more rich and fruitful and fabulous New York is, the more provincial it becomes, because this world seems that much bigger.

It’s this really weird, ironic thing. I love New York, and I love the New York scene and the next generations that are coming up, and the way that they have made sense of uptown versus downtown and Ivy League versus clubbers or whatever. It’s all great. But it is not the whole world.

So I went paddling down the Mississippi River and didn’t write any music for five months while I was doing the journey. I went with a tape recorder, very little agenda, and absolutely no schedule. I’ll get to New Orleans when I get to New Orleans. Different people joined me for different legs of the journey, so I wasn’t actually traveling alone most of the time. There was someone in the car, someone paddling, and if there were more people, someone would get on the bike. We would trade off, so I would paddle one day, and drive the next. The driver then could explore the towns along the river; if you were on the river every day, you really wouldn’t meet anybody. You’d be on the river having that experience, which was totally cool, but part of what I was interested in doing was exploring the country. I mean, it’s the spine of the country and I wanted to know what it was. And it’s richer and more full of things that I knew nothing about than I could possibly have imagined.

FJO: So to bring it back to music, and your music specifically—you’re back, you’ve had this journey, you recorded sounds, but now it has affected you indelibly as a composer. It has changed the way you think about music.

EB: I think what I’m finding is that I’m more stylistically dispersed than I was before. Rather than making me more coherent, it’s made me even less coherent. And I’m sort of welcoming that. One of the things that’s grown out of The River Project is a band called Brim that’s starting as a core duo between myself and the violinist Mary Rowell. We’re doing a first tour this fall. We’re not playing at the usual places that one would play, but really playing in informal and community-based places. The music we’ll be playing sometimes is music that can enlist the listeners as performers without being lame—at least I hope. Another strand is chamber music for new music groups. A third strand is an installation piece that I started, which is about the Sirens of ancient Greek myth, which has sort of taken on its own life and is becoming the groundwork for several pieces which are really pretty extreme and out there. That started from a recording I made of a warning siren in Plaquemine, Louisiana. I sort of sliced and diced that warning siren and then had the computer transcribe it, which it does quite badly, and then I got eight women to sing the transcriptions, which are sort of failed transcriptions of the siren. So there’s this whole thing about translation, and it’s really pretty complex and strange. It became part of an installation I did in Sheffield this summer. But sort of like a visual artist, I’m thinking of that as the source for multiple pieces. The idea of working in series the way Mark Rothko worked in series seems to me to be something really under-utilized by composers that may be something really rich and really interesting for me to explore. I’m very excited about the idea of having a core of material that then gets reworked in different ways for different purposes for different pieces and yet some of this core material is there tying them all together.

FJO: It’s funny to hear you talk about working in different styles for different pieces, not only because so much of your music has been about different styles co-existing in one piece but also because we seem to now be living in a world that is perhaps beyond divisions between musical genres, or at least the boundaries are far more porous. In the earlier part of our conversation, we really came to a point where the dichotomy between abstract music and narrative-based music wasn’t so clear either. So I’m not sure I comprehend how you can go back to compartmentalizing?

EB: Part of the reason that the genre distinctions have broken down, in my opinion, is because there’s no such thing as commercial music anymore. Nobody can make 80 trillion dollars except Lady Gaga. Therefore you might as well do what interests you. You can’t really sell out. So given that the genre distinctions aren’t really real, the fact is there still is a distinction between audiences. Who shows up to LPR is a different group of people than who shows up to Weill Recital Hall, which is a different group of people than who shows up to the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, which is a different group of people than show up to the community center in Little Falls or Bemidji. So while we don’t have genre distinctions, we do still have different communities. In fact those communities are more dispersed than ever in a funny way. The internet has not brought us together. That’s true in political terms, and I think it’s true in cultural terms as well. It’s very hard to reach different communities other than the usual suspects, whoever your usual suspects may be, to step outside of that box that you’re in and I’m in and each other person is in. We’re all in our own little echoing box. To really get into a different echoing box takes a huge amount of effort, and good will, and trial and error. I’m really interested to see if I can do that, and what it will mean to me and to others.

Transcribed by Julia Lu
Condensed and edited by Molly Sheridan
Video presentation by Molly Sheridan
Photos by David Bartolomi (homepage) and Steve J Sherman (video poster)

*

Pianist and composer Fred Hersch has a gift for storytelling. In life, as in his music, he is at ease sharing his thoughts and experiences, forthcoming and at times even bracingly honest. After an intensive review of Hersch’s recorded catalog, I had begun to think of his music as “beauty with a backbone,” and after an hour in his company, I came to view the man on much the same terms: Embracing, but certainly no pushover.

Though his formal education includes study at the New England Conservatory, he readily points out how the on-the-bandstand schooling he received in jazz clubs like Bradley’s in New York prepared him to be the musician is today. In the course of our conversation, we spoke about this journey and all that has come in its wake, but returned again and again to the idea of taking chances, trying things out, seeing what happens if—Hersch seemingly unbowed by the anxieties such open-ended performance situations bring into play. Later, he came at it head-on. “I think there has to be a certain element of danger in jazz, or it isn’t really jazz,” he explained. Later, he illustrated the idea further: “There’s nothing better than feeling like you played a great set or a great concert, knowing that the next night or the next time you play the chalkboard gets erased, and you start again.”

As one of the first notable jazz musicians in New York to be open about his HIV-positive status (he was diagnosed in 1986) and his homosexuality, a great deal of media attention has focused on his health and advocacy work. Though it’s a pleasure to be able to report that after facing a number of health challenges in 2008 Hersch is once again on steady ground, in the time we spent together we focused mainly on his music, particularly his approach to composition. Still, the threads of life tend to twist together, and Hersch revealed himself to be still searching, still learning, still playing—frank and direct about his music and his mortality.

“I enjoy playing simple material, really playing spontaneously and with as much heart as I can muster. I think that’s served me in a lot of ways,” he says, obviously fulfilled by the musical path he has taken. “I’m very, very lucky to be in this place, and physically even more so. So I’m a pretty happy camper.”

***

Molly Sheridan: When you think back to the very beginnings of your career—the early years in Cincinnati, then at the New England Conservatory, and then those first months in New York, getting established and meeting people—what sort of career were you envisioning for yourself back then as compared to what ultimately has ended up happening?

Fred Hersch: I started at Grinnell College in Iowa, and I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I’d been a pianist since the age of four or five. I was not a practicer: I knew that learning all the Chopin Etudes was not in my future; I just didn’t want it badly enough. I wrote music, and I improvised music, but nobody ever suggested, “Hey, you know, there are careers as a composer.” I thought you either had to be a concert pianist or a conductor. So I didn’t really put that together. Then I went to Grinnell and, actually, one of the things that got me into jazz was playing chamber music there. I played with a piano-violin-cello trio, and I found that rehearsing with people was really fun. It wasn’t sitting in your practice room and working on some difficult passage all the time. Of course, you do that, but then you get together and you kind of hash out how you want to interpret a piece. That was 1973, the year of the so-called energy crisis where gas prices went through the roof during the Carter years. They declared a six-week winter recess because they couldn’t afford to heat the school, basically. I came back [home to Cincinnati], and I met some of the older musicians. Sat in and got my butt kicked, and started to listen and learn tunes, but this was all by ear. There was no formal training going on. I went briefly to conservatory to keep my parents happy that I was still in school, but you know, I was staying out till all hours, playing in jazz clubs. After about a year and a half of that, I realized, if I don’t leave here, I’m never going to leave here. So I went to the New England Conservatory, and that was at the time that Gunther Schuller was in his last two years of running the place. So it was a very special time. They were one of only five or six schools in the country that had even really acknowledged jazz at that time. Of course, now every community college has a jazz studies program. There was a great jazz pianist there, Jaki Byard, and basically I got in a car and I went up there, and I tracked him down and played a few tunes for him. He said, “You’re in.” So there I was.

At NEC, I really broadened my horizons. I learned a lot about 20th-century music, about older jazz styles, about even Renaissance music, Indian music. The great thing about a school like New England Conservatory—and that’s where I teach now—is the belief in artist-faculty. That if you take a theory class, you’re taking a theory class with a composer. You’re not taking a theory class with somebody who got a doctorate in theory and is teaching theory. So you know, words tend to carry more weight if you’re dealing with a teacher in a classroom situation who’s actually using this stuff in a creative way. I was there for two years, I graduated, and a week later I was living on East 11th Street. That was 1977, and the scene was very, very different. I mean, this was pre-institutionalization of jazz, pre-jazz education boom, pre-Wynton Marsalis, Lincoln Center, that whole ideology. Everybody was just of kind of hanging out, you know.

Bradley’s was the club that everybody hung out in. I started playing there often and met all kinds of amazing people from Tommy Flanagan and Jimmy Rowles, to Joni Mitchell to Charlie Haden. You name it. Everybody came through there. It was like everybody’s living room. And it was fun. We misbehaved and frequently didn’t get out of there ’til dawn.

I played after-hours jobs. I played all kinds of stupid gigs. The Catskills, weddings and parties, restaurants—I paid dues, basically. But I started to get notoriety and started working with name bands, notably Joe Henderson, Art Farmer, Stan Getz, the great bass player Sam Jones who taught me a lot. So my dream of coming to New York and playing with the greatest jazz players in the world, I kind of did that. And I began to write tunes, just tunes. Art Farmer said, “You know, I think you should write.” So I started writing tunes, and he recorded a couple, and then I started writing more tunes, and so on and so forth. But I didn’t really think of myself yet as a composer-y composer. The only compositional training I’ve had was from third grade through seventh grade. I went to private theory and composition lessons: counterpoint, penmanship and notation, score analysis, writing in different styles, ear training. So I basically went through what a college freshman at a conservatory would go through while I was in elementary school. That’s the toolkit that I’ve used pretty much for everything I do.

Private Stash Curated by Fred Hersch A look at the varied influences that have helped shape jazz musician Fred Hersch’s life and work to date. The exhibition is a highly personal immersion into the music, artwork, and life experiences that have come together to inspire him. The objects include pieces from Hersch’s collection of whimsical folk art as well as fine art made by colleagues from his numerous residencies at the MacDowell Colony. Music on paper will include his original “scribble” sketches through various stages to the final pencil versions. iPods will allow visitors to hear Hersch’s compositions along with selections of music that have inspired him in significant ways. A number of compositions will be presented in this side-by-side see/hear fashion, including pieces from his new multimedia work My Coma Dreams, which will be shown on a video loop. On view September 8 – October 29, 2011 Apexart 291 Church Street New York, NY 212.431.5270

The idea of doing larger pieces and of writing through-composed, what I call concert music, music for non-improvising musicians, that didn’t really come until the 2000s. So I’ve written a body of works that are playable by non-jazz pianists, and I created a large-scale setting of Leaves of Grass for two voices and eight instruments. That was big. And I continued to write tunes and lead bands. Then this latest project, My Coma Dreams is basically a Leaves of Grass on steroids. It’s 11 musicians, an actor who also sings, theatrical lighting, a huge 24′ by 48′ video screen, a projection of animation and computer-generated imagery. It tells the story of eight dreams that I recall from coming out of a two-month coma in the summer of 2008. The librettist, Herschel Garfein, who’s also a very wonderful composer, was also the director of the piece. He came up with an ingenious narrative where basically from the time that I entered the hospital in June to the time that I come out in August, the actor is portraying me, my partner Scott, other people, and telling the timeline of what I went through medically. Then the music is basically reflecting the dreams.

So it’s really been quite a gradual evolution. Then, of course, there’s my tune writing. I have quite a body of tunes, probably pushing a hundred. I’ve written tunes in all kinds of genres, some that are specifically solo pieces, others that I can play with a trio, quintet, duo. That’s great release for me, from these larger, through-composed projects. But I’m not the kind of composer who can just crank it out. I use a pencil; I’m just now thinking of learning Sibelius. I have to have a copyist, basically, and I would say that my writing is not slick. I’m not a slick orchestrator. I didn’t really study it. I just go for honesty and things that I think sound well. I tend not to write what I call “science project” kind of pieces, you know.

The first time I went to the MacDowell Colony in 2000, I was around some composers from Brandeis and we were sort of comparing notes after dinner one night, looking at their scores—all this incredible detail and crazy rhythmic groupings and lots of foreign words. Since I started out composing for jazz musicians, I generally trust that whomever I give music to is going to do the right thing. They’re going to think about it. I give a vague metronome marking, a feeling, a few indications here or there, and let them play it for themselves. I don’t micro-manage my notation. I think it’s important that music be able to be, I guess the word would be “hearable.” There’s a lot of contemporary composition that seems to be written by composers to have other composers analyze them in theory departments in other music schools. I’m definitely not that. I mean, I could show you the logic of how I put something together, but to me, the most important thing is that you hear it. And I’m not afraid of melody at all. I’m pretty relentlessly tonal. It’s just kind of evolved in a natural way.

MS: You mentioned writing for jazz musicians and how that leads you to trust and leave some room for them when it comes to interpretation. I am always curious when people who are active jazz performers talk about their compositional process, how improvisation and their experience with that kind of playing then impacts their written-out work.

FH: My philosophy is that a good jazz tune is not overwritten. It leaves room for the player, whether it’s to interpret the melody or do something interesting with the chord changes or the harmony. A lot of young jazz musicians are writing very, very complex music, and some of it is just complex. I think it’s born of the fact that they have Sibelius and therefore sequencers and can do all this stuff on the computer. I’m more or less limited by what I can do with my two hands. So in a way, that kind of keeps me in a certain realm. Jazz musicians, you hand them a melody and a direction, say OK, this is really a very linear piece, or this piece is sparse, or wistful. And generally they’ll interpret it their own way. The musicians that I play with are at such a high level that very rarely do I have to do much. If I’m writing for a trumpet and tenor sax, which is the standard jazz quintet, I’ll just write B-flat 1 part, B-flat 2 part and I’ll see who sounds best at what octave, you know. Somebody take it up an octave, down an octave, or switch at a certain place. I kind of wait and let the musicians help me put it together. That’s really what rehearsal’s about.

MS: What’s the composing process on the front end, before you get to rehearsal? Does it stay the same? If you look at Leaves of Grass, which involved a lot of people, versus a solo piano work that you wrote for yourself to perform, do you still have a process that you tend to follow each time?

FH: During one of my residencies, I think it was in 2003, I went up to MacDowell and the project that I thought I was going to be working on didn’t pan out. I was left with five or six weeks in the middle of the winter with nothing particular to do, and I was just really kind of down on myself and taking lots of naps and reading lots of novels. What snapped me out of it was that I devised a system where I take an index card, and I cut it into 12 pieces—for the 12 notes of the chromatic scale. Then, I put them in a hat and I shake it out and I pull out, say, an A. Then I set a kitchen timer for 45 minutes. So A could be a-minor or a-major, the note A, just the feeling of A-ness, whatever you want to call that. And a lot of my more successful tunes in the last number of years have been written in that way. With less than 45 minutes, you basically have to grab something and go with it. You’re not just sitting around waiting for a great idea, and you write two bars and throw it in the trash. This forces you to actually finish something. I mean, you can always tweak it later, but the idea is to get it done. That’s the rule of the game.

Also at that residency, by the end of it, I was so annoyed that I hadn’t done anything significant that I ended up writing a huge set of variations on the famous chorale by Bach from Wachet Auf—24 variations and I did it in like a week, just in a kind of heat. For a jazz musician, variation sets are among the easiest forms because that’s what we’re doing anyway. I mean, pretty much every chorus is a variation, different harmony, different texture. One of my wiser writer friends who’s been [to MacDowell] many times said, “See, that first five weeks wasn’t wasted.” You know, sometimes you have to just not do anything until you get kind of disgusted with yourself, and then you just do something.

So I don’t really have any particular process, but when I write tunes, I try to make them about something. It could be a word. It could be a key-related thing. It could be a rhythm, a melodic fragment. But I think the best jazz tunes don’t have too much stuff in them. You know, if you look at Monk or Wayne Shorter, or any of the great tune writers, they’re tightly structured, but you have all these wonderful little bits and motifs to play off of, so you can really be yourself within their music. That’s what’s important and I think a lot of players that I’ve played with have been fooled. I send them the music ahead of time, and it doesn’t look like much on the page, but you really kind of have to live with it for a while. It’s simple, but not easy.

That’s something I’ll always continue to do is to write tunes in between these kind of larger projects. I don’t know what the next large project will be. I never thought I would write a piano-violin-cello trio or some of the other things I’ve written. The opportunity came, and I said, “OK, I’ve never done this. Let’s try it.” Maybe I’ll do it again, maybe I won’t. I do like to try things and just see what happens.

MS: Is it difficult for you, since you’re a performer of your own work, to let another pianist take over and for you to just sit back in the audience?

FH: I’ve had other people record my stuff. I’ve heard them play it live. In one case, I heard one young pianist play a tune of mine that’s very dear to me, and he did a completely different spin on it. It was absolutely not the way I played it, or would play it, but he made a case for it. And I said, “You know, good for you.” He was very thoughtful. Then I had another pianist who recorded the same thing and messed up the melody on the bridge—and this is somebody I know, I could have sent him a lead sheet—but he did it as this kind of up-tempo, happy samba, when it’s this beautiful, lyrical ballad called Valentine. It’s like my version of Schumann’s Traumerei, a very simple expression of love, and it turned into this jaunty, jolly samba with the melody played wrong. Of course, the young pianist immediately sent me a copy and wanted my reaction or wanted to know if I could say something nice for his press kit. I kind of didn’t return his email. What am I going to say? He’s already done it. There’s no point in saying, “You screwed it up.” That is a hazard sometimes.

I’ve had people who played my through-composed music who really didn’t pay much attention to what I wrote on the page, but you talk to any composer and they’re going to tell you that. Metronome markings are a very fluid thing. One person’s forte is another person’s fortissimo. I’ve been lucky that most of the people that play my concert music, either they’re nice and they say, “I’d love to play it for you. Maybe you can coach me, or tell me if I’m heading in the right direction,” or they just have good taste and they basically get it. Edition Peters publishes my stuff, and once it’s out there, people are going to play it the way they play it. Hopefully they’ll listen to a recording, but maybe they won’t.

MS: Do you think people take more liberties with your work because they think, “Oh, Fred is a jazz musician—he won’t mind,” whereas when they approach a work on the more strictly contemporary classical side, they go back to the “what the composer wants, the composer gets” attitude?

FH: I think everyone is that way. I’ve certainly seen so many scores that are micro-managed within an inch of their lives. When I was at New England in the mid-’70s, I discovered a lot of that academic, post-serial kind of music, and I just decided it really wasn’t for me. I’m not talking about Schoenberg, who I adore, or Webern. I’m talking about some of the people who are doing that, or have been doing that, for the last 30 or 40 years. At a certain level, I’d almost rather hear really great, open improvisers just make something up, because then at least I know they’re hearing it. It’s not music that exists on the page.

I always value melody. Most everything I write comes from four voices. I grew up with the LaSalle Quartet next door, so I listened to lots of string quartets. That’s how my mind works. And the piano, of course, is the one instrument that can do that. Lots of moving voices and moving parts, and it’s almost like a drum set with pitches. It can be an orchestra, a big band, a singer, a horn player—a piano can do so much. So I try to exploit the resources of the piano as best I can. Fifty years into playing the piano, I still enjoy it, and I still think there are things I can still get better at.

MS: It strikes me that for any pianist, but maybe especially for a performer like you, that the feel and the reaction that you get from the instrument itself on a physical level is very important to this process. But you’re not taking your own instrument with you from place to place, right? So what do you like in a piano, what do you listen for when you get into a new venue?

FH: Well, once again, this is just good dumb luck, but when I started to really get into jazz and delve into the history, the first person I really noticed was Duke Ellington as a pianist. I listened to Ellington albums from the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, ’50s—some were mono and some were done live, and some were studio recordings and stereo—and he always had the same sound. Ahmad Jamal was another one—just a fantastically beautiful sound. I realized that, within limits—assuming you’re playing a well-regulated, decent piano—the sound is in my body and in my ear. So, my mechanism just automatically adjusts to get that sound. I think, without being immodest, one of the things I’m known for is my sound, and it’s very specific the way I achieve it. I mean, I teach it to people—it’s not brain surgery—but it’s something that I value. It’s the actor’s voice; it’s the singer’s voice. I want people to say, “Oh, I flipped on the radio it was the middle of a piano solo, and it was you.” And not just because of the content, but because of the actual sound.

So that’s an important resource. Not just speed and dexterity and all that other stuff, which is important too, but can you really sing a melody on the piano, can you really play something that’s involving your whole body. So sound is really, really important.

MS: Related to that, we keep touching on recordings, and you’re prolific as a recording artist. What is your relationship to that version of a piece versus the live performance? Particularly in jazz, where a great deal of aesthetic weight is given to the energy created in the room, how do the recording and live performance relate to one another?

FH: Well, I’m a big fan of live recording. Some of the recordings were not even intended, and then at the end of the gig, somebody handed me a pair of CDs and said, “Here you go.”

There’s a zone you get in when you play live that’s hard to achieve in the studio, chiefly because you can start over. I’m very well read and influenced by Glenn Gould, who made the opposite decision. He said that he kind of felt like a trained monkey up there, and that if you made a mistake, it was somehow uncomfortable or he was betraying the composer. I think the energy of the live audience is part of jazz. I like doing studio albums, too, and I’ve done a number of them, but if I had a choice, I’d rather do live albums. It’s risky either way. I mean, you can’t will yourself into being great on a particular day at a particular time. You just have to use your experience and be open to what might happen. Surround yourself with the best sound people you can get, and the best musicians and the best piano and try to let it go and don’t think, “Oh, I’m trying to make history here,” because as soon as you do that, you’re sunk. Just a step at a time: “I played this phrase, it leads to that phrase, and pretty soon I’ve got a chorus,” instead of thinking, “I want to be at this place in 64 bars.” I can’t think of that. It’s got to unfold for me in an organic way. If it doesn’t, then I’m not usually very happy.

MS: I was really struck when I read the liner notes for your latest solo album, and you noted that the recording was simply the last set of a week’s worth of performances at the Vanguard, that you didn’t want the record to be a “best of” cut-up reel but a document of this singular “in the zone” performance. Can you talk about that a little bit more, what that experience is like when you’re alone at the piano in a club?

FH: I close my eyes virtually all the time when I play. If I’m with a trio or a band, and I have to give a cue, then I look up, or sometimes when I get a little too self-conscious, I’ll look at the drummer for a minute or two or make a little eye contact. But generally when I’m at the piano, my eyes are closed. It helps me hear the space around the music, like you do when you listen to a recording. When I’m in the zone, I feel like everything is working and my hands are almost playing themselves. I’m not trying to do anything; it’s just happening. My piano teacher of some 30 years, Sophia Rosoff, talks about emotional rhythm. I know I’m really in the zone when I can play, say a ballad or something out of tempo, and it’s just laying in there just right.

We recorded 12 sets [at the Vanguard], that’s the twelfth set straight down. I’m sure in a year or two I’ll do a Volume Two and pick through the other 11, but I wanted to make that statement. There are a few flubs: my finger didn’t go to the right place, or I missed a bit of the melody somewhere. I really don’t sweat that. After all I’ve been through with my health, the fact that I can play at this level is miraculous. So I tend to be a little easy on myself. I’m not a heavy perfectionist. To me, I’d always rather pick a take that has the real emotional juice or really says something or is more memorable, even if it has a flaw. It’s great when it doesn’t, but it doesn’t define what I do. And if I am worried about making mistakes, then I’m not doing my job, which is creating the music.

MS: Can you speak a little bit more about Sophia Rosoff and the impact that her teaching has had on you?

FH: Well, she got me acquainted with the idea of physicality at the piano in a different way. A lot of piano pedagogy is sort of taught from the fingers, and then you go back. Her whole thing is that you lean forward and your elbows and arms move, and the fingers are the last things you worry about. If your hand is in the right position, then you can just use flexion/extension and you get all the notes. She’s also an incredible diagnostician, and that’s something that I think I’ve become very good at. I hear a pianist for the first time in a lesson situation, and I immediately go for the physical. They might not be aware that they’re tapping their foot, or that they’re off balance, or that they’re leaning back, or that they’re pushing so hard that they’re slamming down on the bottom of the key bed and making a crappy sound. So what I try to do is create for them a piano embouchure, if you will, that allows the pianist and the piano to be friendly with each other and connected.

Sophia’s also taught me a lot about creative practicing. For me, it’s not the amount of hours I do or don’t spend at the piano, it’s how I spend them and the attitude that I bring when I sit down. Those are the things that are the most important to me.

MS: My suspicion is that when you’re teaching in a jazz context, your strategy and approach is quite different from teaching someone Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, just to pull an example. True, not true?

FH: I think it’s a question of breaking things down. Difficulty on any instrument can be broken down, but particularly for a jazz musician. Is the problem that they’re not hearing things, or they’re not hearing what they’re playing? Is it a matter of rhythm—not just jazz rhythm, but rhythm in general? I try to isolate things. It’s like taking somebody and unscrewing them, dumping out the parts, and then screwing them back together. It’s not something that can be done in a lesson. I get a lot of requests, but I generally don’t do that anymore. But I can usually tell in about 15 minutes, once I start showing them things, whether or not they have the gift or not.

I do believe that good piano playing is good piano playing. I know that there are some prominent classical piano players who scoff at jazz, but I would say, “Come to one of my solo concerts. See what you think.” I mean, it’s not that far off what they’re doing, except I’m doing it in the moment. Certainly the influence of European classical music is there, as is Brazilian music, American popular song, jazz composers, and my personal background, what I listened to in my formative years.

Teaching is very rewarding, and because I learned in the aural tradition from older musicians, I think it’s particularly important that I try to maybe save somebody a few steps, give something back. But teaching is hard; not everybody who plays well is a good teacher. In the 30 years that I’ve studied with Sophia Rosoff, I’ve never seen her sit down on a bench with two hands and play anything. Now she sits across the room; she doesn’t even go near the piano. It’s not necessary to sit down and demonstrate. Better to have the student try to figure it out for themselves. That’s what I did. I just completely figured it out for myself and, as I said, dumb luck or circumstance. Maybe that’s the reason that I sound like me—because nobody interfered. I didn’t take jazz piano lessons, and so what I play is mine.

MS: I want to talk a bit about 2008 and the coma that lead to the creation of your piece My Coma Dreams. Since you’ve spoken very frequently about your health and the many challenges that year in particular threw at you, however, I wanted to focus on the aftermath. You tell a great story about coming home from the hospital and getting on the phone to arrange to play a gig at Smalls, and that has really stuck with me. We hear about people having brushes with death who then revamp their entire lives once they’re back on their feet—they take it as a wake-up call to quit their jobs, go to Europe. Did you have any moment where you thought about not returning to playing jazz?

FH: Well, 2008, to be brief, was basically three illnesses. The first part of 2008 was AIDS-related dementia, and I really was a nut case. Psychotic, paranoid, delusional, you name it. Then around March or April, I kind of recovered. Then in June, I got this wicked pneumonia. It went undiagnosed for too long, and by the time I got into the hospital, I was in septic shock. My organs were failing, and I was basically almost not breathing. So it was touch and go for 72 hours, then a two-month coma, one month in rehab. I came home in early September, and then around the second week of October I started vomiting blood and I was not able to eat or drink. My partner Scott dragged me to the hospital and unlike the time in June, my primary doctor was there. He saved me from being intubated again and put me on a mask. They diagnosed another pneumonia and, fortunately, I came out in a week. It set me back with my physical therapy because whenever you’re in the hospital, you lose weight and motor function goes.

So I got out of the hospital from this “little pneumonia,” we’ll call it, on a Saturday. It was one of those beautiful October Saturdays, and I had all this energy because I had been lying in bed for a week. So I dragged Scott all around the Village. We walked around window-shopping, and we came back here and he decided to take a nap. He was completely wiped. I went on the computer and was nosing around and seeing who was playing in town, and I came upon the Smalls website and it said Monday, 7:30 TBD. They do a one-set gig at 7:30. So I call up the owner, and I said, how would you feel if I brought a trio and played a set? It’s probably not going to be my best playing, but I really want to do this. So within an hour, I had a trio, and I had a gig. Scott woke up from his nap and thought I was absolutely crazy. I played the gig, and it was certainly the most emotional gig of my life. Not only was there a line down the block, but it was just like a love fest in there. It was really amazing.

I’m a tennis nut, and the thing that I thought of was Monica Seles, who was stabbed on the court by a German Steffi Graf fanatic. It took Seles two-and-a-half-years to come back, and in the meantime she became a food addict. I think she won some tournaments, but she never really got her mojo back. I thought, you know, I’m not going to wait. I’m just going. I remember doing a couple of road gigs in November and December and traveling with 24 cans of liquid food and a pump. I was just not going to wait, even though the fine motor coordination really didn’t come back until the spring. Even now, there are a couple of little things that I can’t do technically that I could do before. But not that anybody would notice.

MS: Did you need to have special physical therapy as a pianist to deal with that side of it?

FH: Not specific on my hands, no, but I had an awesome physical therapist. At first, I would try to raise my arm and I would try to do it with my neck. These muscles weren’t telling this muscle to do that. It was a lot of retraining. I also had an amazing swallow therapist. Not everybody comes back from a paralyzed vocal chord and is able to swallow. Swallow therapy is one of the weirdest things in the world because who thinks about swallowing? Now, every time I swallow something, I think about it. I’m completely aware of the mechanics, and I’m incredibly grateful. So I had to have a surgery that moved my paralyzed vocal chord next to the working one so that they kind of vibrate together and make a seal so that the liquid or the food can go down your esophagus. Otherwise, it would go into your lungs, and then you’d get pneumonia again. So I didn’t eat or drink for eight months, and that was really the hardest part of it. Food is such a social thing—Let’s have coffee! What do you want to do for dinner?—besides the fact that it’s fun and pleasurable and delicious. So I’m really grateful.

I’m in better clinical shape now than I’ve been in 10, 15 years, and I’ve a great appetite. My weight is stable, and all my critical markers are great. For somebody who was diagnosed [as HIV-positive] before I was 30—and I’m now 55—I never thought I’d be 40. No way. Now I’m thinking, OK, 60 is not going to be a problem. Gee, do I have enough money to slow down if I get older? Before it was like, who needs to save? I’m going to be dead.

MS: You didn’t think you were going to need a 401(k), did you?

FH: No. So, these are good problems to have.

MS: Going back to the social aspect of things, that was also a big part of why you got into playing jazz in the first place, right?

FH: Yeah, one of the things that drew me to jazz was that it’s music played with people and in front of people, generally speaking. It demands being in tune with the people you’re playing with, their contributions, their styles, their sense of rhythm. Once again, it’s not like practicing Chopin Etudes. The social milieu around jazz, particularly in the ’70s and ’80s, was really, really interesting. It was a lot of fun, and I think now it’s not quite as much fun. There are fewer clubs and they’re less friendly and more expensive. More young musicians are trying to make careers than there are careers.

Another thing that drew me to it was the characters. There were some real characters I’ve been privileged to hang out with—all kinds of people with larger-than-life personalities. Now everything can be a little squeaky clean. On the one hand, it’s nice to be playing in better concert halls instead of smoky clubs. There’s a lot to be said for that. It’s more money, it’s more respectful, but the best jazz I think does happen in the clubs. That’s where you feel like you can stretch out. You can just sort of let it go and try things.

I think there has to be a certain element of danger in jazz, or it isn’t really jazz. When it’s all packaged and put together and presented, then it’s like I could stay home or I could go to a classical piano recital and probably hear something better.

Some of the younger players that I work with, they may write a complex jazz tune, and they will feel like they have to adhere to every little detail—in the improvisation, in the chord changes. And I say, “Look, I’m not sitting here with the score. Nobody knows anything.” They know whether you’re comfortable, whether you can play, whether you’re moving them, or taking them somewhere. It’s not about playing Schubert where everybody knows what’s going to go down. It’s an odd phrase, but you do have to sell it. You have to sell your interpretation of a standard, or you have to sell a tune you wrote, meaning that’s your job. Something’s got to happen. I learned a lot about that working with a huge range of vocalists. How they do that—the good ones. I’ve worked with some terrible ones, too, but we try not to dwell on that.

MS: Considering this piece and also Leaves of Grass, I’m curious about your relationship with words. You touched on working with singers, but as a composer dealing with that kind of literalness and the nature of the English language and melding that with your music, how do those elements work together for you?

FH: Leaves of Grass, to me, was all about the words of Whitman and using the voices and the ensemble to bring them to life in a different way. The improvisation parts were secondary. I distilled this 400-page book down to a very small libretto, parts of poems and titles and just kind of went with my gut. There’s no rhyme scheme in Whitman, but there’s rhythm, there’s internal rhythm for sure.

With My Coma Dreams, I was very adamant at the beginning that I did not want this to be Son of Leaves of Grass. So there’s only one song. It’s kind of a doozy. I wrote it for Michael Winther, the actor who plays all the different parts, and I kind of tailored it to his voice. I do like setting text. I found that I have a knack for it. When I learn standards, I always learn the words. I’m very interested in how words and music come together. So Herschel handed me the words for this song and when I went to MacDowell to work on the piece, I decided that was the first thing that I was going to tackle. Even though it was about a nine-minute song, it came in about two, two-and-a-half days. The material for the whole piece came in three weeks. Then there was orchestration and all that other stuff, but the basic guts of the thing came very quickly. That’s how I tend to work. I tend to get concentrated and then blast. I’m not a “get up and write from 9 to 12, and then read my paper and have my coffee” composer, you know. I’m a spurt writer.

MS: How much volume do you tend to produce, in that case?

FH: Some years more than others. Obviously this year was a big one. I hope to generate enough tunes for a new album of some sort. There’s this thing for this orchestra in Poland, which I’m struggling with for the moment, but I’m sure it will come together. Now I’ve become a sort of commissioned composer, and that’s a very different sort of world. Part of me feels like, “Oh, I didn’t get my master’s a Yale or my doctorate at Columbia in composition, and I don’t know what I’m doing.” But I’ve been twice at MacDowell with Meredith Monk, and she and I have gotten chummy. I was kind of complaining about, “Oh, I’m not being productive, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” She said, “Look, in one day, I’m happy if I get a phrase I really like.” And that’s always stuck with me. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel all the time. You don’t have to think about how many minutes of music you wrote today. So you have a four-week residency and you screw off for two weeks, and then the next two weeks, you really get into something. Those first two weeks aren’t wasted. You need to do that to get to the other thing, whether you just get annoyed with yourself that you’re not doing anything, or you see the finish line.

That’s why I love residencies. I’ve been at MacDowell seven times and I’ve done so much good work there—Leaves of Grass, My Coma Dreams, the Bach variations. A lot of larger things that I’ve done have taken place there. I’m a big fan. It’s very low key. At the dinner table, the guy next to you won the Pulitzer Prize for whatever, and you say pass the potatoes and, by the way, what are you reading? I mean, there’s pompous asses, now and then, which are inevitable—people who are just self-centered, or just alpha dogs—but in general, I’ve learned a lot from various visual artists, photographers, poets, writers. Some of whom I’ve collaborated with and who’ve become lifetime friends. So, it’s a very important part of my life. I’ll probably go back next spring.

MS: I’ve heard you talk about the fact that your picture is on the wall at the Village Vanguard, and there was an obvious, not just pride, but you communicated this deep sense of satisfaction with that mile marker. So to wrap things up here, I was curious if you would talk about your personal definition of success and the moments when you most felt that sense of accomplishment.

FH: There’s nothing better than feeling like you played a great set or a great concert, knowing that the next night or the next time you play the chalkboard gets erased, and you start again. If you get attached to the memory of that great concert you played, you’re not going to be able to play the next one. You have to kind of say, “Oh, that was great. Now I’m going to start fresh.”

Having my picture on the wall of the Vanguard is particularly sweet. I’ve played there many years as a sideman in the ’70s, ’80s, up to mid-’90s, before I was deemed a leader. Instead of hiring big name sidemen, I brought in the people that I was playing with who were not well known at the time. We packed the place, and the owner, Lorraine Gordon, was quite surprised and happy. Now I play there at least twice a year. It’s sort of my home club. The photograph that’s on the wall was taken during the first time I played solo there. I was the first pianist to play solo in the history of the Vanguard for a week. It was taken during a rehearsal, so he got a kind of interesting angle. The photos on the walls are of great musicians, but they’re also really great photographs. Lorraine Gordon’s got a really good eye. So I sort of campaigned behind the scenes. I had the photographer give her a print, and finally she came around to it. I’m thrilled also by where she put it, because it’s on the right wall as you enter. There’s a big tuba, at the end of the tuba, there’s a picture of the back stairway with Bill Evans, Scott LaFaro, and Paul Motian from the early ’60s. Then there’s me at the piano, then there’s John Coltrane and somebody else. Not that I in any way consider I’m the equal to John Coltrane, but I think the fact that I’m part of the history there now, because of the solo gig and because of the frequency with which I play the club and because we all like each other down there. I think it is sort of like the Carnegie Hall of jazz clubs and I still kind of get a kick out of it. But given a choice, I’d rather play a great set of music. The picture in the long run is just sort of icing on the cake, and a bit of recognition.

It’s nice to be recognized, but I don’t live for awards or critic polls because you can make yourself nuts. The gigs and the music and continuing to challenge myself, that’s really what it’s about. The other goodies, when they come, that’s great but that’s not really why I do it. I have to remind people, sometimes people that I work with, but young people too, that you’re playing music. The word play—it’s playful. You’re not carving music with a chisel; you’re playing. It’s supposed to be interactive and, god forbid, fun. A little humor now and then, playing stuff that just feels good, that’s all part of it.

I enjoy playing simple material, really playing spontaneously and with as much heart as I can muster. I think that’s served me in a lot of ways. As I said, I’m not a trained composer. I just use my instincts. I think, “This sounds good.” or “Gee, I could take this from there and do something with it here.” I’m a very lucky person; I get to do pretty much what I want. I’ve reached the time in my life where I can actually say no, which I think is the biggest gift of all—to just say, you know, that doesn’t really feel right. I’m very, very lucky to be in this place, and physically even more so. So I’m a pretty happy camper.

Transcribed by Julia Lu
Condensed and edited by Alexandra Gardner, Frank J. Oteri, and Molly Sheridan
Audio/video presentation and photography by Molly Sheridan and Alexandra Gardner

***

Pierre Jalbert (pronounced “JAL-burt”) will tell you himself that he has taken a somewhat traditional path as a composer. “I started playing piano when I was really young. I started to compose pretty early on… Copland was a big influence. We were playing his pieces in orchestra and youth orchestra and band, and he was the only living concert composer that I knew of that was making a living writing concert music.” And so with the inspiration of Aaron Copland in mind, the New England native entered into the world of music degrees, piano performance, and composition. After completing undergraduate studies at Oberlin, he went on to earn a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied with another composer hero, George Crumb. He now teaches at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music in Houston, Texas.

Along the way he picked up numerous awards and accolades, including the 2001 Rome Prize and the BBC Masterprize for his orchestral work In Aeternam. He cites his three-year residence with the California Symphony as his most life-changing musical opportunity, in that it gave him the chance to do in-depth work with an orchestra and its conductor in a way that is rarely possible with such a large group. “It wasn’t something where you just write the piece, and then they play it,” Jabert explains. “They actually would read through my work-in-progress as part of the program. So it’s kind of like in the theater world where you have run-throughs of things as works-in-progress.” That experience helped pave the way for future orchestral commissions and performances, most recently a work for the Houston Symphony commemorating the tenth anniversary of 9/11 which is slated for premiere in September.

Whether it is an orchestral work or a composition for chamber ensemble, Jalbert professes his affection for forms both large and small, and especially enjoys the back-and-forth of creating a large work immediately followed by a small one. His music is vibrant, lushly scored, and tautly constructed with thoughtfulness and precision. His Catholic upbringing and exposure to liturgical music gave him an appreciation for the sense of “suspended time” it creates, and his compositions often contrast this type of slow music with highly syncopated, bustling material that propels the work forward. In addition to the impact of spirituality on his writing, Jalbert has found inspiration in literature, as in his early Songs of Gibran for mezzo-soprano and ensemble, and from visual sources such as the stained-glass windows built by Louis Tiffany referenced in Les espaces infinis for the Albany Symphony, and the computer-animated films of visual artist Jean Detheux, with whom he has collaborated on several projects.

In his office at Rice University, Jalbert speaks about his working process, being a composer in Texas, and his collaborations with various orchestras and ensembles.

***

Alexandra Gardner: Looking at the catalogue of works on your website, I see you’ve written a lot of orchestra music since the year 2000, and also a huge amount of chamber music that dates from much earlier than that. I’m wondering whether either serves as a primary sound palette for you?

Pierre Jalbert: Well, what I really like to do is go back and forth between writing an orchestra piece and thinking in that vein (which is, to me, a completely different way of thinking than chamber music), but then as a contrast, going to chamber music and getting back into more soloistic kinds of textures and things. So I really like the duality of going back and forth between doing those two things. There are a couple of things that got me started in orchestral music. One was the New York Youth Symphony commission, back when I was a student at Penn, and the American Composers Orchestra commission a few years after that. And then there was the Young American Composer in Residence program at the California Symphony with Barry Jekowsky. It was sort of a transformational kind of thing because it was a three-year program, and I really got to work closely with a conductor and work closely with an orchestra as a piece developed. So it wasn’t something where you just write the piece, and then they play it. They actually would read through my work-in-progress as part of the program. So it’s kind of like in the theater world where you have run-throughs of things as works-in-progress. I wish there was more of that in the orchestral world. That really got me heavily into writing orchestral music and I’ve tried to keep at it ever since.

AG: What would you describe as the difference in mindset between composing for orchestra versus composing for chamber ensemble?

PJ: The orchestra is just a different beast. I think of it as an instrument in itself. Every time I start an orchestra piece, I feel like I’m starting over almost because there are so many infinite possibilities; whereas, with chamber music, I guess in some ways I think a little bit more about the specific performers and their instruments in a more soloistic context. It’s just, for me, a completely different mindset. It’s hard to describe. I mean, there are certain practical limitations too, obviously. When I write chamber music, I almost feel like the sky’s the limit because, depending on the group I’m writing for, if I know they have unlimited rehearsal time (you know, that’s theoretical, obviously they don’t have unlimited rehearsal time), I know they’re going to put in the time that it takes to bring off whatever I write. I might try some things that I might not necessarily try with the orchestra. Although even with the orchestra, I always try to take risks and try things that I may not have tried before, but that I am certain can be put together quickly—that it won’t take 20 minutes of explanation in rehearsal as to how to do this. It has to be something that can sort of be self-explanatory, and be put together rather quickly.

AG: It’s interesting—a lot of composers say the opposite; that with an orchestra you can do anything. But it sounds like for you it is chamber music that allows for endless possibilities.

PJ: Well, I mean that in the sense that for me in terms of the way you write it, and the ensemble, you know, even if you write something fiendishly difficult or completely aleatoric and whatever, they’re going to spend the requisite amount of time talking about it, and being able to put it together. It’s just easier to do that with three people than with 80 people. Certainly in terms of color, the orchestra has this gigantic palette, but just from a practical standpoint, they’re going to start rehearsing on Wednesday and perform it on Saturday. You have to factor that in, and of course there are ways of doing that without sacrificing anything in terms of creativity. But yeah, for me, it’s just a different way of thinking, that’s all. If they had 26 rehearsals, then I’d probably do something a little bit different.

I’m currently working on a piece for the Houston Symphony for the fall, which is a 9/11 piece, actually, for the tenth anniversary which was really a challenging piece to try to get my head around at first. So I’ve been finishing up this piece for the Houston Symphony for September, and now I’ll be writing a chamber piece for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, for clarinet, violin, and piano for November. They’re going to do the premiere in New York and also at Wigmore Hall in London, so I’m really excited about that.

AG: So is that an easy switch for you, to finish the work for the Houston Symphony and then start a chamber music piece?

PJ: It’s easier than trying to go right into another orchestra piece.

AG: Really?

PJ: I really need time between stuff. I think it actually helps because it’s just a different way of thinking, and I won’t get the same ideas as I got with the orchestra piece, because it’s just not that kind of instrument.

AG: Do your compositions arrive fully formed in your mind, or is composing more of an organic process of discovery for you?

PJ: It’s very much a process. And I’m not a fast composer. It usually takes me a lot of time sitting and thinking, going to the keyboard, going back to the desk. Sitting, thinking, and working out the strain, you know, the overall structure and the details within that structure. It takes me a long time to get started. And I suspect that’s the way it is for a lot of composers; the first few weeks of the piece can be agony, you know. But once you have something, and you can run with it, it’s sort of like the snowball going down the hill effect. Once I’m in the middle to the end of the process, it becomes exciting. It becomes a lot more fun because things are really starting to click. But until you get there, you feel like, at least I feel like, “Will I ever make it? Is this piece ever going to get finished?”

AG: You said that working with the California Symphony and other early experiences writing orchestral music and being able to spend more time with orchestras than you might otherwise have had were very significant to your growth as a composer. Are there other experiences, musical or otherwise, that you feel have impacted your music?

PJ: Well, I wrote a string quartet fairly early on in the mid-’90s for a group called the Maia Quartet. They were friends—I went to school with the violist. That was my first really big piece in terms of length and scope, and I’ve written quite a few string quartets since then. But I think that sort of got me into that world—that way of thinking. Again, it’s another different way of thinking for the string quartet than I think about other sorts of chamber music groups. And so I think that led to writing other quartets.

AG: The biography on your website states that spirituality is a big part of your work.

PJ: Well, I mean, having grown up hearing liturgical music. I didn’t hear a lot of Gregorian chant growing up, but every once in a while I did. And you know, especially the year I spent in Rome, visiting some different monasteries and hearing this music in a really reverberantly rich space, musically had an impact. And, you know, it’s imbued with this sort of spiritual meaning, too. So even if you don’t understand the words (it’s always in Latin) there just seems to be a meaning behind the music that always had a big impact for me.

AG: Overall, your music has a very rich, full quality, as well as a wonderful rhythmic sensibility–you can always find a pulse that weaves its way through a composition. Are there particular techniques that you employ in your music that you feel are very specific to you? That you feel communicate your personal stylistic touch?

PJ: Well, there are a couple of things. I think syncopation plays a big role, and I think that comes from a lot of places. I mean, it comes from having played some jazz, having played some popular music growing up. Having played and listened to a lot of Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Copland, you know. So I think it comes from all of those areas. And I tend in a lot of my fast music to use a lot of mixed meters, building on that idea of throwing things off a little bit. At least in my larger works, there’s always that contrast between the lyrical aspects of the music versus the more pulse-oriented, syncopated, faster, aggressive, rhythmic kind of music. And in the slower music, I think in a lot of it, there’s a sort of sense—at least I’d like to think so—of suspended time. And I think part of that may be that I have quoted Gregorian chant. I think in chant there’s that sense that time is almost meaningless. It almost stands still, and there’s just a sense of contemplation. And the contrast between those two things seems to be a recurring motif in many of my pieces.

AG: So given that, what does a day in the life of Pierre Jalbert composing look like, if we were peeking in the window to your studio?

PJ: Depends on where I am in the piece. If it’s at the beginning, I’m pacing back and forth between the desk and the piano. And a lot of sitting and nothing coming. During the school year, I do try to carve out time to compose every day. So I come into my office just about every day of the week. And when I’m not teaching, I’m working in my office. Pencil and paper, old school, trying to jot down ideas. And that just continues up until the end of the score. And I’d say I spend—at least at the beginning of the process—probably 80 percent of my time just sitting in silence. As the piece progresses, it’s a lot more of going to the piano. Checking out things. Making sure I’m hearing things right. And then at the end, I have my own sort of shorthand. So if I’m writing a large orchestra piece, I’m not writing out from the very beginning, on staves and large score paper. I’m sort of jotting down what I think the orchestration should be. It’s a lot of jotting down of rhythms and contours and figuring out what exactly those notes are, hearing them and then making sure I’m right about what those notes are. And then it’s coming up and writing out by hand the final score. Well, not the final score, but the final manuscript, and then sending it away to my copyist who lives in Maine. Then it’s a lot of back and forth via the computer. Proofing of the final score.

AG: So your shorthand helps you remember things—you can go back to that later and—

PJ: —Know exactly where I am. I think a big reason I do that is because I can fit so much on a page. I’ll use a piece of 11 by 17 paper, and I can fit quite a lot of music doing it that way, so I can see it all at once rather than writing it on 40 pages. it makes it a little easier for me to keep the whole piece in mind. And that’s another thing I really strive to do, and I try to get my students to do, is towards the beginning of the process, to sketch out a structure within which you’re going to work. It may change as the piece goes along, but you can always keep that initial idea of the piece in your mind as you’re working. So you know where you are in the piece, and you’re not just poking around blind as to where something is going to go. Again, lots of things change as you move through the process. But if you can sort of keep that vision of the piece in your mind from early on in the process, it tends to make the process go a little quicker.

AG: So you write away from the piano, and then later go to the piano to check what you’ve written.

PJ: Some things come from sitting at the piano and improvising. I’ll do some of that too, especially if I’m not writing a piece that includes the piano. I find some things will come from improvising at the piano, but since I’m a pianist I automatically will do pianistic things. And that is not always going to translate to another instrument. So when I’m thinking about other instruments, I really try to imagine a) what the performer looks like on stage playing the instrument, and b) physically what it’s like to be playing this piece that I’m working on and how it sounds in that space, wherever it is. You know, I try to sort of imagine myself as an audience member and O.K., there are people playing something on stage. What is that, and how does it come off?

AG: Of course you can probably imagine what the performers look like on stage even more easily if they are performers you have previously worked with and that also can affect the music you wind up writing for them.

PJ: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve developed relationships with certain groups and conductors who have done multiple pieces of mine. That’s always a special kind of relationship and the interaction I think makes so much difference in the way the piece turns out. When somebody really knows your style or the way you’re expressing things, and has done some of your music before, it’s amazing how things come together so much more quickly and just seem natural. And it makes things that much more conducive to the creative process, because you really feel comfortable, you know, working with someone like that. And they sort of naturally come to your music and read into the music beyond the notes right away. And that’s a huge thing.

And you know, it’s funny, my older son is a clarinetist and he’s gotten pretty serious about it. He’s in high school now. My younger son is a violinist. Of course, my wife and I both play piano, so if I ever want to try things out, here you go. Let’s see if you can play this. So it’s really a lot of fun now that the kids are getting older, to be able to play with them, to accompany them and really make music together. It’s really rewarding and special.

AG: The benefits of a music-making family. That’s great.

PJ: Yeah, absolutely.

AG: You’ve spoken about teaching and how you try to get your students to think about the broad picture of a piece. It’s a way that your creative life has influenced your teaching. Do you find that there are other ways in which this happens, and vice-versa; has your teaching influenced your creative life and the work that you do?

PJ: Oh, absolutely. I think it goes both ways. You know, in one of my orchestration classes, we sometimes try to pick a work that the orchestra is playing and really study that work. And it may be a piece that I’ve never really studied. So for instance, this past year, we did the Lutoslawski Concerto for Orchestra that the orchestra was playing, and went to some rehearsals after we had really dug into the piece in class. And you know, all these student composers are going to be writing for the orchestra at some point, either as a master’s student or a doctoral student here, because the orchestra plays their master’s thesis or their doctoral thesis. It’s a great lesson in orchestration just going to a rehearsal with the score, having really studied the score. That’s one thing I did as a student when I went to Tanglewood. Before I went, I tried to get as many scores that the orchestra was playing as I could, and would go to rehearsal almost every day with the scores and that was one of the greatest orchestration lessons I’ve ever had. So I certainly encourage my students to do that sort of thing.

AG: Are there things that you tell your students as they’re finishing their education that you feel are really important for young composers to do or to know about?

PJ: Basically, you wish them good luck and try to help them land a job somewhere so that they can continue to compose. It’s a hard slog trying to find that first full-time teaching gig somewhere, at a place where you really want to be and that’s conducive to music making and gives you some creative freedom to do that. Just from a practical standpoint, I tell them to try to find time every day to compose. I can’t imagine a pianist graduating from college and then not practicing for six months. You have to keep up your chops, and I think it’s the same for a composer. It’s something you have to continue to do to get better at it, I think. And the most important thing, obviously, is to be able to hear your music performed. Not just with a MIDI file, but with real live performers and having that interaction. Most of them, after they’ve come through school here, have a base of friends that they can draw on and keep writing for who will keep performing their music. That’s lots of times how it starts. And so, we tell them early on, you have to be passionate about this. And they’re all like that, I mean it’s obviously something that they’re really passionate about. It’s something that they just have to do, whether they like it or not. It’s a calling and so we send them out into the world and hope for the best and try to help them as much as we can.

AG: And what about living in Texas? How has the environment in Texas played into your musical life?

PJ: Well, in terms of new music activity, it’s not New York or Boston or LA, but there’s opportunity here. And some of my colleagues—Karim Al-Zand, Tony Brandt, Rob Smith, and Marcus Maroney over at University of Houston—we started a group ten years ago called Musiqa, and we do some concerts at the Contemporary Arts Museum. We do concerts downtown and the whole idea behind it was to get new music out of the university and into downtown, into the community down there. The music school here is just top notch. All the musicians here are really fantastic. So it’s a really conducive environment for thinking about music and writing music. And the nice thing about Houston is it’s in the southern part of the country, but it’s sort of in the middle—it’s only a few hours flight to LA or a few hours flight to New York. It’s pretty easy to get places and it’s a big enough city—it’s the fourth largest city in the U.S.! I must say the weather took some getting used to, having grown up in Vermont, but I find the summers actually conducive to working because it’s so hot out. Unless you’re in the water, you don’t want to be outside for the most part. Then the rest of the year is quite lovely, actually. I miss the snow, but I try to get up there in the winter and do a little skiing.

AG: Do you have a particular composition that you feel stretched you farther than anything else?

PJ: One piece was an orchestra piece I wrote for Barry Jekowsky with the California Symphony when I was a young composer in residence there. It was the second piece I wrote for them called Sinfonia Sacra, and it was the longest piece I’d ever attempted to write. It was 30 minutes long, and for an orchestra piece for me, the longest piece I had written was maybe 15 minutes. I had written chamber pieces longer than that, but to use a huge orchestra and to sustain something for 30 minutes (though it is in three different movements), it was a big challenge for me. I thought it really taught me a lot, and it really came out well. Another example was when I first worked with this filmmaker in Montreal named Jean Detheux, and we collaborated on a piece for computer-generated images and music. We wanted it to be done with live music. It’s a very colorful, abstract work. I had to look at these moving images and come up with music that not just fit the images, but fit the timing of the images. How to try to do this live? At 12 seconds, oooh, that happens. So I have to compose something so that at 12 seconds exactly, something will happen. And then at 1 minute and 20 seconds this happens. That was really challenging. It was really fun to write the music because the images for me conjured up all these musical ideas, but I had to make it fit. And the amount of time I had to spend on that, you know, I probably could have written a 90-minute piece! And it ended up only really 12 minutes of music. But it was just a lot of going back and forth and trying to refine this and that. We since have done a second project together in which the music was already done, and he fit his images to the music. So we reversed the process the second time around. He had all the work. So that was really challenging and a really fun project to work on. They’re both up on Vimeo. One of them is the live performance of our first project together, and another one is from a piece called Visual Abstract that I had already written a number of years ago that he did the images to. We’ve also performed that live with the images. We projected on this giant screen and then the players are on stage underneath.

PJ: No, I’m constantly thinking about communication. Ultimately I’m after two things: writing a piece that works on its own musical terms and writing a piece that communicates something to an audience. I’m constantly thinking about that. Now having said that, an audience is not a one-person deal. There are all sorts of people with different backgrounds in your audience, but if you study comedy and you tell a joke and a whole room laughs, there’s something universal in that joke and the timing of that comedian. There’s something that works in that. And so communication is a big deal for me.

AG: Is there anything about your composing career that has just been really surprising to you?

PJ: You know, I took a pretty traditional path. I started playing piano when I was really young. I started to compose pretty early on. It was all piano pieces because that’s my instrument, and I just played them myself. Early on, Copland was a big influence. We were playing his pieces in orchestra and youth orchestra and band and he was the only living concert composer that I knew of that was making a living writing music. But that was sort of the path I thought I would take, was to somehow try to make a living in music by composing and teaching. In school, I played in the school bands and youth orchestra and all of that and went on to college, got degrees. I was out of school for a few years just trying to have teaching gigs here and there, until I landed a full-time job at a university. I mean, that’s a pretty basic traditional path, at least for composers. I think it’s surprising that I’m a pianist, and I really like to write for piano, but I’ve written maybe two solo pieces for piano in the last 11 years! I’ve written a lot of string quartets, and I’m not a string player. So that was sort of surprising. I’ve actually written quite a lot of string music, or strings with piano, because a lot of musician colleagues who have asked for music happened to be string players. I’ve been very lucky I think in my path thus far. I hope along the way there’ll be more surprises!