Category: Cover

A conversation with Frank J. Oteri
May 27, 2011—10:30 a.m.
Audio and video recorded and edited by Molly Sheridan
Transcribed by Julia Lu
Edited by Frank J. Oteri, Molly Sheridan, Alexandra Gardner, and John Lydon

Over the past 12 years we’ve spoken to people who have created all kinds of music on these pages, but we’ve never met up with anyone quite like Charles Fox. There probably isn’t anyone reading this who can’t hum some of the music he’s written—at one point it was virtually ubiquitous. He penned the intro themes for three of the most popular TV shows of the 1970s—Happy Days, The Love Boat, and Laverne and Shirley—and if you flipped the dial around on the radio, you’d inevitably hear Roberta Flack singing “Killing Me Softly with His Song,” Jim Croce’s posthumous blockbuster “I Got a Name,” or Barry Manilow’s recording of “Ready to Take a Chance Again”—all songs by Fox. A cover story in Songwriter magazine at that time boasted that more than 300 million people listened to Charles Fox’s music every week. Though that was more than 30 years ago, those shows are still in syndication around the world, and those songs are still all over the airwaves. And when Lauryn Hill sang “Killing Me Softly” with the Fugees in the 1990s, it put the song back on the charts all over again.

But that’s not the whole story. In addition to the megahit records and TV themes, Fox has composed extensively for chorus, orchestra, and ballet. A favorite student of Nadia Boulanger’s, Fox planned for a career in classical music composition and initially only turned to the world of pop in order to earn a living for himself and his family in the early 1960s. He’s probably the only person on the planet who can boast connections to both Nadia Boulanger and Barry Manilow!

Even in the late 1950s, however, Fox started dabbling into other musical streams. He had a fondness for jazz since he was a teenager, and he even briefly studied piano with the great Lennie Tristano. His first paying gigs were in Latin music, a genre for which he felt a natural affinity despite not being able to speak more than a few words of Spanish. After working the commercial music circuit for a few years—he is the uncredited composer for numerous TV commercials, as well as the theme of ABC’s Wide World of Sports, the first-ever evening sports program on television—he wound up in Hollywood. One of his earliest motion picture assignments was scoring the zany Jane Fonda sci-fi send-up Barbarella, which gave him an opportunity to show off the electronic music techniques he had learned under the tutelage of Vladimir Ussachevsky.

You might think that given the broad range of work he’s done that he is the ultimate post-modern polystylist, but that is far from the case. What is extraordinary about Fox is that while he’s completely comfortable working in all of these different genres, in his conception they are all distinct and he writes music that is completely idiomatic and true to whatever idiom he happens to be working in at any given time:

[E]very time, I approach music with an empty page; I have no preconceived notion about what I must do. There’s certainly not a Charles Fox sound. […] That’s because for the last 50 years everything that I’ve done for the most part has been on assignment, whether it was for a Latin band, for a film, or a commission to do a classical work. It’s just that simple. So I always start with nothing, and then I get into the work, and decide what it is that I want to do.

But don’t assume that means he writes music that’s cookie-cutter or made to order; everything he does is something that he becomes totally invested in, intellectually and emotionally:

I have a lot of fun playing Latin music. On the other hand, I love being in my studio and getting up and working on a long-form composition. And I love writing songs with people. […] I still enjoy it all. I still look forward very much to what I want to write.

Talking with him about how he has navigated so many different realms so effectively and successfully over the past half century was more than instructive; it was inspiring.

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Frank J. Oteri: Nowadays we talk a lot about there being no such thing as genre anymore. All these young composers are now writing music that’s just as informed by pop music as it is by concert music; it’s a very exciting time. But you’ve worked in all these different styles for over 50 years and what’s different about it for you is that you stay within those specific genres when you are working in them. It’s not like you’re doing a concert work that has salsa or ’50s rock and roll in it. When you do ’50s rock and roll, you do ’50s rock and roll. When you do salsa, you do salsa. But are there certain things that you do no matter what you’re doing, that could be described as “Charles Fox’s sound”?

Charles Fox: It’s a harder question for me to answer than perhaps you, because every time, I approach music with an empty page; I have no preconceived notion about what I must do. There’s certainly not a Charles Fox sound. When I did my early television series Love American Style, people would say, “Oh, that’s your sound.” I can promise you, I was never after achieving a sound. It was never important to me. However I do gravitate toward certain things. I think most composers do. And in a period of time, there are certain things I really gravitated to more than others. It could be harmony, expectation, something more punchy, more legato, I don’t know what. That’s because for the last 50 years everything that I’ve done for the most part has been on assignment, whether it was for a Latin band, for a film, or a commission to do a classical work. It’s just that simple. So I always start with nothing, and then I get into the work, and decide what it is that I want to do.

I discovered Latin music early on when I was about 15-years old, and I heard my first Latin band in the Catskill Mountains. One night some fellows came over to the hotel who were with a band called Randy Carlos. They were playing in one of the bigger hotels in the Catskills, the Emerson Hotel, and that to us was like playing at Mecca. So we went to see it, and I fell in love instantly with those trumpets and guitars and Latin singing and all the action on the dance floor. And I said, “Wow, this is for me.” I really loved it.

Charles Fox’s first professional band, in the Catskills

At the same time, I was in high school, and I was studying jazz piano with Lennie Tristano, the great jazz pianist. I was also studying classical composition. I never drew the line to say if I do one thing, I can’t do the other, because it all appeals to me in different ways. When I went to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger, my life became much more embedded in the formalized world of classical music. I studied harmony with her during my whole time in Paris. It was very formal; we spent a year on triads before we moved to seventh chords. I was all the while composing, and she was offering comments on my work. She was an extraordinary person. But when I came back from my stay in Paris for two years, I needed to earn a living. Someone suggested to me that I get into pop music, but I really had no idea what was on the radio in those days. For me, the radio was Latin music and jazz.

FJO: One of the things I found so fascinating in your autobiography is that before you began writing pop music, you had never really listened to it. You’ve claimed that you were even ashamed to listen to it. That’s an amazing confession from a guy who wrote hit songs for Seals and Crofts, Barry Manilow, Roberta Flack, and all these big pop stars who have performed your music.

CF: To be honest with you, I didn’t like it. I was really involved with classical music. I had an orchestration teacher in high school who said to me, “In order to learn to orchestrate properly, aside from learning ranges and abilities of the instruments, you need to know the sounds of the instruments as they merge together.” The sound of two flutes together, or a flute and a clarinet—what makes a difference in sound? The dynamics and attacks on an instrument—these were the things I had to learn. So he suggested I just get close to an orchestra and watch them play, watch the string players bow the instruments. The only place I could afford to go to get close to an orchestra was the Metropolitan Opera, the old one on 38th Street before they tore it down to build a parking lot or something. They had a kind of horseshoe standing room around the orchestra section, and if I got there early enough I could stand right behind the double basses. So I used to go at least once or twice a week. I would lean on the rail, if I got there early enough. I watched musicians, and as a result of all that, I also have a lifelong love of opera that I acquired by being there. My ears were telling me that what I gravitated to between opera and classical music was Latin and jazz. I just really had no time for the stuff that was on the radio when we’d go to dances and things in high school in the ’50s. I really didn’t find it interesting.

FJO: How did you learn how to write that stuff and eventually find it interesting?

CF: Learning to write anything is just a process. I had a friend who was in the record field and said, “If you would learn to arrange some of this music, you might be able to get some work.” And I needed the work. So I started listening to songs on the radio, records that just were really not my kind of music at that time. This was in the early ’60s. I’d listen in my car, driving into town; we lived in Queens that first year of our marriage. If the window was open in the car, and someone stopped next to me at the traffic light, I’d roll up the window so they wouldn’t see me listening to that kind of music. It was a lot of nonsense; it was a lot of angst for nothing. It was just a matter of listening.

However, I have to tell you what changed: the Beatles, Paul Simon, Burt Bacharach, and Hal David. They came along in the ’60s, and for me, they became role models. The Beatles wrote some beautiful melodies, which, in their own innocent Beatlesque style, became part of the landscape in the world. Burt Bacharach to me had a very musical kind of sound and style. So in my own writing, I got influenced by the fact that one could write in a more developed harmonic style. One could fuse more jazz language. One could fuse more classical elements. In “Yesterday” there’s a string quartet; George Martin used a string quartet. The pop music of the ’60s was an inventive period, I think much more inventive than now. Everything now has a tendency to sound more or less the same. In the 60s, if you were an arranger, you were trying to bring in bells, or some kind of exotic instrument: a piccolo trumpet or a tuba. You were looking for those sounds that became hooks. So it was a kind of a creative world in that innocent music style. And the arrangers, myself included, looked for ways to make a record sound unique.

But all of that was not necessarily influencing me in each of the genres that I worked. I was asked years ago, “Why don’t you devote yourself to one kind of music rather than do all these various things?” First of all, I really wanted to compose music, and arranging was just a step towards composing. I was trained as a composer, I know that my heart was in it, and I knew that I had a lot of music to write. But it was also a question of earning a living. So for example, if I had a choice between an arrangement to do or a short film, a short documentary film, I’d always choose the film. I’d always choose the short documentary. It gave me a chance to express new music. And I was able to keep all those things separate. For a while, I was still playing in Latin bands to earn a daily living, and writing for those bands. My early songs were in Spanish.

FJO: You don’t speak Spanish.

Playing Latin Music in the Joe Quijano Band (Fox is on timbales on the far right)

CF: And I don’t even speak Spanish. But I had the feel. I did. I had the feel, and of course I got to know some of the words that I was dealing with. And I wrote for some of the big bands, some of the ones that I played for like Ray Barretto and Tito Puente. I did a lot of work for Joe Quijano and a number of other bands around the Los Angeles area. And I was accepted by those Latin players as someone who plays typicale. So, it was a real, a real Latin feel. Latin music is all based on the clave, that’s the essence of Latin music right there [snaps rhythm]. I still love that music. I hear that music and I still get into the rhythm of it. I think that might have influenced a lot of my future writing also, I can’t say. Did it influence my classical music? Perhaps. I know in the ballet Zorro, we had one big dance number that was done in front of the theater where Zorro‘s being shown and Michael Smuin, the choreographer, called me when I sent that piece of music in and he said, “Zorro meets Stravinsky.” Carlos Zorro, meaning me, meets Stravinsky because it was classical music that was angular, that sounded modern, but with that Latin infused beat.

FJO: So now you listen to everything.

CF: I still listen to mostly classical music. That’s still what I listen to. I don’t really turn on the radio to listen to pop music. I will if I’m studying something, if I want to know what a particular sound is. If there’s a particular artist I’d like to know about, I’ll get the record, Iisten to it and say, “Now I get it.”

The other thing is in film you’re called on to do so many different genres. I can’t tell you how many different periods of music I’ve had to write: big band, the ’20s, the ’30s, the ’40s, the 1890s—you know, the waltzes—and Hawaiian music and all kinds of ethnic music, African music. That’s part of the landscape of film, so as a film composer now, you really have to be very chameleon-like. You really have to know the genres. I just think it’s a part of the world of music that we have today. And, as you said before, the lines are now much more crossed between one genre and another. The avant-garde composers of the ’60s probably wouldn’t have had anything to do with pop music of the day. You know, Stockhausen, Berio, Nono, and Boulez, but I can tell you that in the graduate composition class that I’ve taught for a number of years at UCLA, the kids come in and say, “You have to hear this new hip-hop record. It’s so great. It reminds me of something classical.” So they see more of a crossover, and I think it’s for the better. I think it’s for the better that music co-exists together. I mean, what we hear on the radio all kind of goes into our world, this world of contemporary sound where there’s a conflux of things going on at the same time. Why not draw from everything?

FJO: It’s interesting that you mentioned the Beatles and Stockhausen because the Beatles actually listened to Stockhausen. His face is even one of the faces on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

CF: I didn’t realize that.

FJO: And their “Revolution Number 9” that was released on The White Album the following year shows how they absorbed the influence. It’s a piece of musique concrète.

CF: Right.

FJO: But even before all this adventurous arranging you talked about getting exposed to in the 1960s, back in the ’50s, when you were studying with Nadia Boulanger, you were writing a composition for a weird instrumental combination as well as a very ambitious harp concerto. I’m wondering what your feelings are about those compositions now. Do those scores even still exist?

CF: They do. I’m putting together this new website, which will be online shortly, and in there, I’ve put a number of those early pieces also. They’re not recorded professionally, just from live performances, with a little tape machine in the late ’50s. I hadn’t heard them in years. Forty years maybe—I don’t know—is the last time I ever listened. I find it interesting to listen to something of mine I haven’t listened to in a long while. It’s a different part of my life, but I still relate to everything that I wrote. I don’t disdain anything I ever wrote. But frankly I don’t listen to my own music anyway. I listen to what I’m writing now, unless I’m conducting it. Then I have to get back into it. But all my projects bring back a moment in my life.

That piece you mentioned for an odd combination—in 1959 I came to Fontainebleau, France, to study with Nadia Boulanger, just for the summer. If you want to know the truth, at my first private lesson with her, when I saw the joy on her face while talking about music, I knew that all I really wanted to do in my life was write music. It was like a door that opened. It didn’t mean that I had to drop anything else; it just meant that this was going to be my life. And she took a great interest in me. She asked me to study with her in Paris, and I had very little money. My father was a window cleaner. They sent me there just for the summer, and even that was very difficult. She worked out a budget for me. She said, “If you can get your parents to send you a hundred dollars a month, you can stay.” And we worked out a budget, and I said, “Mademoiselle, you didn’t allow for lessons in the budget.” She said, “Oh, no, no. I can’t worry about that. I’m more worried that you have enough to eat.” So in fact, I never paid her in the years I was there for all the lessons I took, and that was because she saw in me a person with a great need to learn. And she wasn’t a scholar. She was a teacher who wanted to teach me, and I wanted to learn. In the years I was there, if I said I felt bad that I wasn’t able to pay her, she wouldn’t hear of it. She said, “Maybe one day if you can, you’ll do something for someone else.” You know. So that’s the kind of legacy I live with. But I’m getting off the point of your question, which I can do very easily.

That particular summer in Fontainebleau, which was a very large school, there were seven flutists, there was a string quartet, and there was a trumpet, and there was a clarinetist, maybe some other instruments. I don’t remember. She asked me if I would write for those specific instruments so that we could perform with them in a concert. So I did. I thought it was an odd combination—seven flutes. And actually there have been performances of that; the New York Flute Club has performed it over the years. But I don’t think about it very much. It was a very nice part of my life. I conducted it the very first time. When she said to me, “You have to conduct” and I said I’d never conducted, she said, “Well you must conduct.” I tell that to my students at UCLA when I ask them to conduct their own work. They bring an ensemble in and I just pass along the words of Nadia Boulanger: “You must conduct. A composer must know how to speak to an orchestra. They control his music.” Ultimately you want to get greater conductors doing your work, you hope to, you know. But it’s very important for you to be able to stand up in front of an orchestra and speak to them in terms of how to communicate what you want, tempos and all that. So I just taught myself quickly to conduct, and I did.

I will tell you one moment that I had. I had some anxiety in one of the early rehearsals of that piece. That concert hall that we had at Fontainebleau was originally the palace for François the First, and this was his indoor tennis court. It has now returned to being an indoor tennis court, by the way, and the local people in Fontainebleau now play tennis there again. But while we were there as students, while there was a Fontainebleau school, it was a concert hall. So I was on the stage conducting, and at one point, Mademoiselle Boulanger was standing right next to me, and she stopped me. I don’t remember the comment at the moment, but she says she thinks it might be better if I do something else. Faster, slower, louder, I don’t recall. And I know it was something that didn’t sound right to me, in my ear it had to be as I was doing it, not as she was suggesting it. And I said, “But Mademoiselle,” and she said, “Well, try it.” I knew it wasn’t in my heart to do it as she did, and so I turned to the orchestra and said, “All right, would you play it halfway between the way I said and the way Mademoiselle Boulanger suggests.” I raised my hand to conduct, and she pulled my jacket like this, and she said, “But my dear, compromise makes for very nice friendship, but for very bad music.” She says, “Play it the way you want, or the way I want, but don’t compromise.” I got a very good lesson in music right there, frankly.

FJO: And you wound up playing it the way she wanted it played.

CF: Of course! I wasn’t going to go against her.

FJO: In your autobiography, you talk about the struggles you had working on the harp concerto, but you never mention completing it.

CF: I never did complete it. I completed the first movement, but there’s a second movement and a third movement; the themes I’ve never forgotten. They still float around in my mind. Actually, I have just been offered a commission to complete that work. It’s very interesting to consider going back to something that I started 50 years ago. I’m very tempted to find the time to do that, and I probably will. It’d be an interesting experiment for me, because I remember the piece very well. The fact that 50 years later I’ve worked with so many different styles, that doesn’t trouble me. It doesn’t trouble me because it’ll be what it’ll be. And it’ll be with a 50-year difference, but I plan to finish it.

FJO: Would the goal be to try to get in the head of who you were then or be you now?

CF: I don’t think I’ll try to get back to that. No, I would just simply write the music as I hear it. It’s hard to go back and really think of myself like that. I have my memoir in which I’ve expressed my feelings for those days, but I can only live in the present, really. I can only write what I want to write today. There’s no need to adhere to something I wrote 50 years ago.

FJO: There’s one thing I’m curious about in the non-completion of that piece. You sort of alluded to it talking about the avant-garde composers of that time, and the walls that they constructed between popular music and concert music and all of these things. In your autobiography, you reproduced these letters you wrote back to your family. You talked about going to hear Boulez and Berio, and really not relating to that music at all. But by the end of the time you were there, you talk about how fascinated you were with Webern. So I’m curious, did you ever start writing 12-tone music? And is that what created a compositional block for you at that time?

CF: If you want to call it a compositional block. I don’t think it was really that. I was very immersed in formal harmony and my studies of it. Everything I had to do with Nadia Boulanger was very strictly formal. We did figured basses with voice leading. We had to be absolutely proper. She would make a correction, point it out, and I would have to go home and correct it. And, by the way, everything I wrote was in pen. She wouldn’t even look at pencil. So whenever I had to work out my harmony, it was in pencil. Then I’d have to re-write it in ink. And to make little changes, paste one on top of the other. I was so involved with looking into the scores of composers to see how they got out of problems, how they resolved a specific problem of developing something which didn’t quite go where it needed to go.

As far as the music of the period, there were a series of concerts that Pierre Boulez used to conduct. He conducted magnificently. All the music students in Paris came. And Nono was there, Stockhausen, Henri Pousseur, and Berio, and whoever was in town having a work presented. It was avant-garde in that period, very avant-garde. It was very kind of “Wild West”, in a sense. It was like all new things happening, kind of raucous. If people liked things, they screamed. If they didn’t like things, they’d boo. I myself at the moment was more into traditional work; I really was.

I never got formally into 12-tone music at all. On the other hand, little by little, I did absorb all those kinds of influences, to the point where I love that kind of music. Then it seemed to me the only kind of music that could exist. And then I myself had to make a break with traditional harmony. But there was a slow period where that happened. [Performances of] Wozzeck and Lulu and all those marvelous things were happening and Boulez’s new work. My ears were completely open, but at the same time, my writing wasn’t. I wasn’t into that. I was just listening and absorbing. And there were concerts of electronic music, musique concrète, where you’d see nothing but a tape recorder in the middle of the stage. And aleatoric music where the composer would be on the side of the stage and he would move a cart around and things would happen. You know, games of chance, all kinds of experimental stuff.

The Moog sythesizer at Charles Fox’s home studio in 1968

When I came back, I went to study with [Vladimir] Ussachevsky at Columbia University. There was a Columbia-Princeton electronic music laboratory. I didn’t even like electronic music, to be honest with you, but I got into it because I learned what it took—the craft of making electronic music. And I got to be really very enamored with it. It was a long, hard process. This is before the synthesizer was invented. Eventually I got one of the first synthesizers that Robert Moog came out with. But it was a process for me. I really never did formal 12-tone music. It seeped into my music and I’ve written dissonant music, but never formal 12-tone. I always rely on my ear more than that, and I never worked with a system. I know composers have systems and sometimes different systems; it was never that for me.

FJO: Definitely your score for Barbarella has some very modernistic sounding things in certain scenes.

CF: Well, it was a film score that was meant to be futuristic; it was a spoof, you know. But I did get a chance to do electronic things mixed in with some classical things, too, actually. Next week I’m going to conduct some music at the Dorothy Chandler which includes some of my work from Barbarella actually. And some of it—like when Barbarella’s flying around with Pygar and the winged angel—is very Baroque sounding.

Charles Fox (left) and Bob Crewe (right) on the set of Barbarella

FJO: Then there’s that wild music during the confrontation with the sex machine.

CF: Oh, yeah.

FJO: That trumpet line sounds like something out of a Berio score. It’s that same sound world.

CF: I think I’m influenced by the world around me. And film gives many opportunities that were quite wonderful to have fun—especially with a film like that, where anything kind of goes. I haven’t listened to the score for a long time. I don’t even remember, if you want to know the truth, but I know I had fun with the score. I had the whole canvas in front of me to do what I wanted.

FJO: Before we get to the successes, one area that was very sobering to read about in your book were your experiences as a young composer getting taken advantage of in the field. These are things that many young composers have faced, and I thought it would be interesting to talk about that a bit, because to share accounts of these experiences with everybody helps to keep them from happening again, we hope.

CF: Right.

FJO: Like getting forced into signing work-for-hire contracts. Or that awful story with Dizzy Gillespie.

CF: Now, let me just say that all composers in Hollywood working with the studios are working for hire, which essentially is not a bad thing. But it means that the composer is no longer the legal owner of the work. Twentieth Century Fox apparently becomes the legal owner of the work. But they put your name on it, and they give you all the proper royalties. We would prefer to have ownership of our own music obviously, but it’s never going to happen in Hollywood. So “for hire” means that we work for them and they own and control it. So, for example, if they want to license it to themselves for another use, they don’t have to come back to us. They control it. They do that with every aspect of a motion picture. Otherwise they can’t put out a DVD or some other method that hasn’t yet been invented. But we get paid all the proper royalties and we get our name on it. So it’s almost the same as if we controlled it. The difference is all in the publishing.

Charles Fox conducting the theme he composed for ABC’s Wide World of Sports

At the beginning of my career, I didn’t have to, but I accepted some work where I was hired to write without getting future royalties. That was very consequential to me at the time to help earn a living and pay the rent. So, for example, Wide World of Sports was the first theme I wrote for television. And I wrote it for a company that really appreciated my work and used me in a lot of things. They did a number of Goodson-Todman game show themes. And each time I’d get a little bit more money, but I didn’t get the proper credit or any royalties. Would I advise anyone to do it today? I think everyone has their own path. I do get asked the question all the time by students and by other people. You have to have your own sense of what you need to do to get ahead. When I did Wide World of Sports, they publicized it. It was all over the trade papers that I did that. The fellow that hired me to do that used that as an audition piece to get me other work. And it did get quite a bit of work. Frankly, it was the only work I was getting on television in those days. I never regretted it. Now the curious thing is the world seems to know that I wrote that, and I get requests to have it performed all the time. I don’t even know how that happened. Are there stories on the Internet about it? Is there a true story? Whatever, it’s of little consequence to me now.

But Dizzy Gillespie, that was a real heartbreak for me. I was introduced to Dizzy Gillespie by his attorney with the idea that maybe I would write for him. I was 22-years old. Dizzy Gillespie was a hero to me. I loved his music. He himself gave me a stack of records to listen to. I’d go to Flushing, where he lived, and he used to rehearse his group in the basement with James Moody on saxophone. I became friends with Dizzy. I used to go to his house and play chess with him. I never beat him, by the way. He was very good at chess. He was very nice to me, very warm and welcoming to a young composer. I even dreamed perhaps maybe I might play the piano for him one day. Lalo Schifrin was his piano player for a long while and I thought Lalo was fantastic. But I sort of dreamed that maybe I could go in that direction, you know. I was 22, 23-years old, so I didn’t know where life was going to take me professionally, but I knew the areas that I was interested in pursuing. So I spent quite a bit of time with Dizzy, writing tunes for him all the while. Eventually I showed him about ten different tunes, and he chose four or five that he liked and asked me to arrange them for his quintet with James Moody. I forget the other fellows. They were very complimentary to me, a young composer, and I was thrilled about them in his basement playing my songs, my arrangements. Then he went on the road and he performed them all over the country.

When he came back, he said to me that when he got started the early things he wrote he had to sign away to other people, and he expected that of me, too. I wasn’t getting it. I said, “You mean you want to put your name on it?” He said, “It’s just the way it has to be.” So I was really heartbroken. More than anything, this was a loss of a hero. Dizzy Gillespie was one of the great musicians of all time. It was a big blow to me that he said that he had to put his name on my tunes. I never considered that. Why would Dizzy Gillespie have to put his name on it? He’s written “Manteca”; he wrote “A Night in Tunisia”. Maybe that was just the business aspect of it. In the pop music business, I’ve heard of that a lot, where singers would perform someone’s song and say O.K., but you have to include my name on the copyright. It’s happened to me a couple of times where one singer says the name has to be on the copyright. Sometime managers try. They call up and they say, “Didn’t he change your word?” or “Didn’t he add a sentence?” or something. Well, if you accommodate a singer who has a problem with a word or a line or a sentence, it doesn’t mean he’s a co-author. So in my professional work since, I’ve never done that. And I didn’t even with Dizzy Gillespie. As a result, they didn’t record the pieces. I ended up forming a jazz band myself, and I recorded them. They never got released or distributed, but it was the conclusion of that point in my life, and I think those tunes are still pretty good actually.

FJO: This raises a whole interesting question about your being a composer who works in many different styles and is able to do any assignment you’re given. Where does your ego live in all of this? It’s obviously very important that your name is on this music.

CF: Right.

FJO: Even if you can’t necessarily tell from the sound of the music that it is you.

CF: Right.

Charles Fox on the cover of the June 1979 issue of Songwriter Magazine

FJO: I was blown away seeing that cover of Songwriter magazine from the 1970s where the headline stated that 300 million people listen to the music of Charles Fox.

CF: Every week.

FJO: That number is unfathomable even today. Everything now is so splintered, it’s hard to imagine that many people agreeing on anything. But even at the same time that all these 300 million people were listening to your music on TV shows, most of them probably didn’t realize that they were listening to you. You were a name on the credits at the end, but they never saw your face on their TV screens. You’re not a celebrity in that sense. A composer is never a celebrity the way a movie star is, or a politician. We’re always these behind-the-scenes people.

CF: Right.

FJO: So what does it mean for your ego to have your name out there? What do you want in terms of recognition from the public? How does that play out in your mind?

CF: Well, first I would say that I identify with every project that I do. I don’t necessarily take every project. There was a movie called The Bad News Bears that was a fun picture. I was originally hired to write the music for it. Michael Ritchie was the director, and he asked if I would adapt the music from Carmen. He saw the baseball arena as kind of a bullfight ring, and he wanted me to literally adapt the music of Carmen. I thought it needed an original score. I was ready to write a song and do an original score. And he said no, it’s just not the way that I want it. I want [sings tune] and so I refused the job. I just turned it down, which is one example of not wanting to do something at that moment in my life. I just didn’t want to spend the next two or three months adapting music of Carmen for that film. It’s always a matter of getting into your own work.

FJO: You worked with Gilbert and Sullivan’s music in your soundtrack for Foul Play, so you’re not averse to working with pre-existing music.

CF: Absolutely. As a matter of fact, normally I get involved after the film is shot. As a film composer, you come in and usually the composer sees the first cut of the picture. Directors are more prone to wanting the composers to see the picture even before the studio to get some kind of feel, some kind of feedback. When I worked on the film Foul Play, Norman Gimbel and I were asked to write a song, because Goldie Hawn, the star of the picture, was going to sing along with the supposedly big hit song of the day. And so we wrote a song, based on the title, “Taking Chances” that was in script. Norman wrote “Ready to Take a Chance Again” for Barry Manilow hoping he would sing it because he was the big hit singer of the day. We didn’t know him then, but all those things came into play, and Barry loved the song. It became the big hit record of the day. And then Goldie Hawn was sitting in a car singing along with it.

The other thing was the ending of the film has to do with someone attempting to kill the Pope at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco. And the whole end of the film is a chase to get to the opera house to stop him. On the stage, The Mikado is going on, so I actually worked with the New York City Opera company and Julius Rudel, told him which parts of the opera we needed to record, and ultimately to film because we had to start with the overture and then follow the progression of the first act of the opera. By the end of the first act of the opera, our movie was over. So I had to work with him in terms of how many minutes and how many scenes. I didn’t do any writing for this, by the way; I just sat next to him. I produced it, you might say. I did produce it. Then they brought the whole New York City Opera company out to the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, where they filmed it. They inserted that into the War Memorial Opera House through the magic of Hollywood. But when it came to this big chase scene at the end, Colin Higgins, the director, before he even shot the film, said, “How do propose to handle it?” Because we have all the opera music and chase music in between. So I said, this is a real challenging work for me; I’m going to have a lot of fun with this. This is going to start with the Overture to The Mikado, and then wherever you cut away from it, I’ve got to pick up and go to my own music that pertains to that set of characters in that chase scene. I think it was John Denver in one, who was kind of a movie cowboy, and then there was an Asian couple in the back seat, driving down the hills of San Francisco with cars flopping around, and Kojak lovers with an American flag. There was just a lot of fun stuff going on. All the while, there was tension because they had to get to the opera house to stop the murder. So my challenge there was to take the music of The Mikado and lead to my own music so they were seamless, so that Arthur Sullivan himself could have written it that way. The last ten minutes in the music of the film was this one steady stream that went back and forth between Mikado and my music. And each time it was different. As a result, because of that, I used some motifs of The Mikado in the film. I had good fun with that. I had no problem with that. With Bad News Bears, I just didn’t want to spend two-and-a-half months doing that when I thought I would write the original score.

FJO: So then in terms of what you want people to walk away from, in terms of your identity, where your ego is invested in the project, obviously it’s important for your name to be there. But it isn’t necessarily important that they walk away saying, “This is what Charles Fox’s music sounds like.”

CF: I don’t feel the need to have an identifiable sound in my music. People have said to me they recognize my music. If so, then so be it. I don’t start to do that. I don’t start to say: this is my sound; I always use trombones this way; I always develop motifs this way; or I always try to do this in the counterpoint. I don’t always try to do anything. I just do it as it comes. I don’t usually have any grand scheme of things. If I’m working on a composition for performance with an orchestra, I may not necessarily start at the beginning. I may start at the end. And my ideas, however they come to me, they come to me. And then I work them. But I don’t start with a preconceived notion at all that I’d like to retain these elements. The work I’ve done is so varied and disparate that I’ve just become used to working within that genre. However, in some of my Latin records, for example, my own music, I do have a “Tosca Pachanga” where on the beginning I emulate the chords of the opening of Tosca at the piano. I did one album with a fantastic pianist, Ben Lanzarone early on in the ’60s. Bob Crewe, the great pop and rock and roll songwriter who I did Barbarella with, came to me and said he always wanted to do a pop record that mixed classical music and jazz and Latin. He said, “You’re the perfect person to do it.” So I took themes from the classical repertoire that I liked, and I turned them inside out, and I made new compositions, or I developed them. And they led to some songs and really probably a different style. I didn’t just take a classical piece and arrange it. I used the motif to lead me to someplace else, so it all became original compositions. So I was able to use a lot of background that I had. I don’t really think of that so much. It’s all a part of what I’ve done in my life.

A production still from the Charles Fox-Michael Smuin ballet A Song for Dead Warriors

FJO: But in the world of classical composition, when you’re writing a ballet score like A Song for Dead Warriors, or the opera on The Grapes of Wrath, it’s a very big deal when somebody says, “Oh, that’s what a Charles Fox score sounds like.” All these composers who are out there, whether it’s Beethoven or Stravinsky, they have a certain identifiable sound. And maybe this is one of the lies in this music: this great person wrote this and it’s always this way. Classical music is very much caught up in the ego of a person that has this very specific, stylistic sound to the point that I think a composer develops a sound, and maybe gets a little trapped in it. They have to write stuff that sounds like their other music. Now that you’re doing the concert music that you do—it’s something that you’ve always done but it’s become a more important part of your public persona—does that becomes an issue in that music for you? But you say there isn’t a Charles Fox sound.

CF: I don’t know. If so, I don’t do it intentionally, I can tell you that. My commissions have been rather different and have come from different places. About two years ago, I wrote this piece based on the words of Pope John Paul II—the [Latin] words that he inserted into the Wailing Wall. He was the first pope to visit the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, and only the second to visit Israel, by the way. These were the words of apology that he wrote to the Jewish people and that he put into the Wailing Wall. It wasn’t written in English, but I actually set them [in English] and asked for them to be translated into Hebrew and Polish. Polish because he was Polish, and also because the premiere was to be performed by the Poland National Opera Company Chorus and Orchestra. That, too, was a very important work for me; I got to express a lot of feelings that I had within me about the significance of those words. I knew those words had to be taken with great depth, because they were really monumental words—simple but very monumental in terms of their impression. So I started off the piece with a chorus, full fortissimo, calling to God in three languages—a powerful statement, then a quiet statement. Then it went off into sort of an airy space, almost 12-tone like, but very simple. As I say, I don’t deal with 12-tones literally, but it’s almost 12-tone like in terms of the aural sounds. Very spatial, and then it goes into a kind of undulating sound underneath, a kind of a string pad with baritone soloists. At the end, I wrote a fugue because I needed to combine the expression in three languages. I needed people to sing in Hebrew, English, and Polish—some of this is quite harmonic and some of it is quite dissonant, although the quieter portions are quite tonal.

Of course, we had to have approval from the Vatican, contractually, with my publisher, Peters. Anyway, I conducted that piece with the full National Opera company, plus a children’s choir of 40 voices. Then the Minister of Culture asked me if I would write a piece commemorating the 200th birthday of Chopin the following year which, of course, I gladly accepted. They have a fantastic jazz as well as classical pianist Leszek Możdżer, and they asked me to write a piece for him with orchestra and come and conduct it in Gdansk. It was the 30th anniversary of the Solidarity movement, last year, 2010. So I wrote quite a different work, Hommage a Chopin. But because he’s a jazz pianist as well, for a long time I had been telling Eddie Daniels, who’s a fantastic jazz clarinetist, that I would write a piece for him one day. So I asked if he’d like to be involved in this with me, and included the piano and the clarinet. I wanted to do that also because I was going to write a piece that was somewhat Chopin-esque, but was my music, too, whatever that means. I thought that if I added a clarinet to the piano, it would take it away from being strictly in the fingers of Chopin, so to speak. I wrote some music, as I say, that might be Chopin-esque to the point where some people said to me, “Which piece was that? I forgot.” I said, “No, it wasn’t.” I didn’t have to study the music of Chopin; he’s very much in my ears and my fingers. Nor did I want to step on anything, so it just was stylistically in Chopin’s style. But then it fused with some jazz and more modern elements, some very different, dissonant elements. As you said earlier, I think we have all those tools at our disposal now, and I love that. I love where we are with music. There was more of a boundary in the ’60s you know. If you wrote dodecaphonic music, you stayed with that; you weren’t interested in your audience having a melody. I think obviously we have to please ourselves first as composers. But the question is, stylistically, are we in a period where we can reach out with melodies that an audience can absorb as a melody, or are we trying to do the opposite and have something that doesn’t become melodic and tuneful. Nothing against those composers—they are fantastic. I love the works of Nono and Berio. I adore Boulez and all that he’s accomplished. It’s just that we’re in a different period of music now. We’re in a period of music where music can be more sensible. Maybe accessible is not a bad word, whereas in the ’60s, accessible was a bad word. That’s all I’m saying.

FJO: What’s interesting, though, is that in the ’60s there were already composers working in film who wrote accessible music and also explored very advanced techniques. I’m thinking of Jerry Goldsmith, who wrote strict 12-tone music for The Planet of the Apes.

Four of Hollywood’s top composers play through some music on two pianos, eight hands (left to right): James Newton Howard, Jerry Goldsmith, David Newman, and Charles Fox

CF: It’s a 12-tone score. No question. Jerry also has a wonderful eight-minute 12-tone piece called Music for Orchestra. Jerry and I were good friends. When he got sick at the end, he asked me to conduct for him a few times, so I did some concerts for him in Los Angeles and Japan, and know a lot of his scores very well. I didn’t conduct The Planet of the Apes, but I’m very familiar with it. I spoke about Jerry one day not so long ago at a symposium in Morris Hall in Los Angeles, and at the end I made the comment that I don’t think of Jerry as a film composer. I think Jerry’s a great American composer who spent his life devoted to film. I don’t draw any difference between someone who writes music for film or someone who writes music, because, given the opportunity, most people would write for film today. I think Mozart would probably write for film if he were alive today. He’d have a blast. He’d be charming and wonderful and add to films. Jerry Goldsmith was a great American composer who devoted his life to writing film music. He wrote beautiful melodies also, very jazzy tunes, and fun upbeat music. You can use the tools of 12-tone music if that’s your bent. In my film music, some of my more dissonant, 12-tone-like music just was appropriate. Like for example in Foul Play, I talked about the chase scene before with The Mikado, but there are moments where Goldie Hawn’s life is threatened, and there are bizarre things going on, and it’s some of the more dissonant music that I’ve ever written—for this comedy picture!

FJO: Early in this conversation you talked about needing to know a variety of musical styles when you work in film—1890 waltzes, Latin music, African music. There are all these languages you need to know. And we talked about how in so-called concert music, people go off and do their own thing but it still has a basic frame that audiences for that music will identify with. It’s the same thing with all the different subgenres of popular music, whereas film music really can be anything. But is that really true? Might there be certain things that you can’t write for film?

CF: You know, I think you can do anything for anything. I do. I think you can use any sound, any texture. The difference is when you write for a character or a dramatic situation, you have to understand the needs of that dramatic situation. We know there’s a difference between music that’s made to be performed independent of any visual substance. Some of the greatest music ever written is the Bartók string quartets. If you place a Bartók string quartet against a scene in a picture, it’s too much, I will say. Just to pick something based on your question. It’s such fantastic music from the inside; it’s so involved that if we were to place it against a dramatic scene I think you’d be drawn so much to the texture of the music that you might not see the scene that needs to be brought out. But if you’re writing to that scene, and you wanted to use the language of Bartók, if you had the ability to do that—and some composers do and some composers don’t—and if you have the ability to place yourself in the scene, you understand what the nature is of the scene and how the characters have to interact and what the message is. Am I underscoring some sort of subtext that they’re thinking about? That tone, or what could have been. If you understand all that, then I think the language you can use can be the same language. But it has to move with the film, and I guess there’s a kind of mystery to that. How do you make someone do that? I have a class that I’ve taught at UCLA in film composition. As any teacher could help a student, you can kind of direct them to something, but you can’t make them feel the needs of that picture.

I think to retread the composers of the past on films is nonsense. But to try to emulate some composer that came before you, I think that’s true in all music. The purpose is not to emulate them. The purpose is to move ahead and, as you say, establish your own sound, or your own identity, whatever that is. I feel the dramatic needs of the film, and I relate to that. I take those characters with me. I don’t just write music, I’m a dramatist. In film, I’m part of the drama. My music is winding its way through the film, and it helps them to make the film be properly understood as a dramatic work. As long as you have that concept, I think the language doesn’t matter. It can be dissonant. It can be harmonic. It can be what you like. It just has to be of that film.

FJO: Television is a different medium in some ways. Jerry Goldsmith can compose a 12-tone film score, you wrote some really wild things in Barbarella and Foul Play and even in 9 to 5—I’m thinking of those dream sequences. But could you have a really dissonant TV theme? Maybe not, since it’s something people hear every week and having an easily memorable theme song is part of what brings you into the program. We didn’t really talk much about the difference in writing for film and television.

CF: Same thing. No change for me when I’m home working on a score; they all come up on the same screen. There’s no difference. The only difference is where you have a shorter time span to write the music. Maybe a budget difference, you have to use a smaller orchestra. It’s not so much movies and television; it’s drama and drama. I never have seen a difference. No one ever said to me, write that because it’s television. You don’t have to make it so “whatever” because it’s television. Television has been good to me. My themes and my music have been on the air for many years. I see it as just another form of film making, just shorter. Television series—comedy shows—have different needs. There’s music that plays into scenes and out of scenes. I’m not really talking about that. That’s a very specific thing when they have laugh tracks. Laugh tracks supply what people at home are supposedly laughing along with. Basically, I didn’t really do a lot of shows. I started those shows off. I did Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, Love Boat. And I didn’t stay with those shows. I established the musical identity. I wrote the theme. I maybe did a couple of episodes. I maybe did some music, and then I recommended other people to take over the shows. Love American Style actually was the only show that I did show after show after show. It’s what brought me into Hollywood. And, actually, each show was a different challenge because within every hour, there were three separate stories and three separate casts. And I got to choose the ones I wanted to do, the ones I thought were most interesting or the most challenging. [There were] I think 22 episodes a year; I did 11.

FJO: So considering all the different kinds of situations your music has appeared in and all the different areas of music that you’ve worked in, is there an ideal context for hearing your music? What do you want in a listener hearing your music?

Receiving the 1973 Grammy Award for Best Song (left to right): Norman Gimbel (lyricist), Charles Fox (composer), Lily Tomlin (presenter), Robert Flack (singer), and Isaac Hayes

CF: I enjoy being in the audience watching someone listen to my work. A very important part of my life was working in ballet. I wrote a ballet for the San Francisco Ballet Company that was based on American Indian motifs that [choreographer] Michael Smuin and I researched. Then it was picked up by the Dance Theatre of Harlem, and they performed it around the world. I went to see it last in London a few years ago at Sadler’s Wells. It’s been a great thrill for me to see my ballet performed around the world. But I can’t tell you that I enjoy it any more than I do hearing one of my songs coming up out of an elevator if I’m in Budapest, or someone whistling my song on an airplane as I’m flying someplace. It all makes me feel terrific. I love the idea that my music is out there some place. You mentioned all those people in the world listening; at one time I had six or seven shows on the air at the same time that were prime time. Plus all my songs. They still reside some place in the world. They’ll sit in some radio or television station. I know they’re out there. I see my statements and I know they’re performed and I hear new records of my songs all the time. I can only tell you that it’s a marvelous feeling to know that my work is being performed and enjoyed.

The last decade or so, I seem to be doing more classical music, which I love, and I have lots of thoughts for new pieces that I want to do. I’m commissioned to write music for the opening of the Jewish Museum in Warsaw—a huge museum; it’s going to be the first of its kind. And the great lyricist Hal David and I are writing a show that we started years ago. We’d finally gotten the rights back to a musical based on The Turning Point, the great film from the ’70s about ballet dancers. What we’re going to do is hopefully a Broadway musical. And I’m planning to do another salsa record. I have an idea for a big band salsa record with Spanish lyrics, with some American lyrics, and I think it’s going to be a new sound. I think it’s going to be very energetic. I’m going to play the piano, and I’m going to have a lot of fun. And I love it. I really do. Because when it comes down to it, I have a lot of fun playing Latin music. On the other hand, I love being in my studio and getting up and working on a long-form composition. And I love writing songs with people. Tomorrow night, Jane Monheit and I are going to talk about writing some songs together for her. She’s a fantastic singer. I still like all those different worlds; I don’t want to separate myself to any one kind. It takes me a lot longer to do classical. It took me a year, for example, to do Warriors. It took me a year to do Zorro. But on the other hand, I had a commission last year for the Young Musician Foundation, which I conducted, called Arabesque for Orchestra. That’s up at probably three or four months, same with my piece for Chopin. But I love to sit down and write a song that someone can sing and perform in a nightclub or record. I still enjoy it all. I still look forward very much to what I want to write. I have lots of ideas and hope to see them come to fruition.

A conversation with Alexandra Gardner
February 23, 2011—1 p.m.
Transcribed by Julia Lu
Edited by Frank J. Oteri, Molly Sheridan, and Alexandra Gardner
Video presentation by Molly Sheridan

Composer and drummer John Hollenbeck seems most content when faced with musical uncertainty of any sort. Whatever the musical context, Hollenbeck lets go of conceptions around style and genre, happy to enjoy musical experiences without the immediate need to know exactly what they are or where they might be heading. His primary musical residence is arguably the jazz world, where he composes for and plays with his own groups, Claudia Quintet and the John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble, performs as a sideman with a wide variety of musicians, and holds a professorship in Jazz Drums and Improvisation at the Jazz Institute Berlin in Germany. In addition, Hollenbeck is an active participant in the new music community, composing for groups including the Bang On A Can All-Stars, and composing and performing with Meredith Monk. His interest in diverse musical experiences and the desire to imbue each piece with its own individual musical language are further informed by the practice of meditation and a deep interest in contemporary composition, creating music that is at once lyrical, approachable, and complex.

Originally from Binghamton, New York, Hollenbeck credits his older brother, also a drummer, for fanning the flames of his musical interests early on. After receiving degrees in percussion and jazz composition from the Eastman School of Music, Hollenbeck moved to New York City, where he has worked with leading jazz musicians such as Bob Brookmeyer, Fred Hersch, Tony Malaby, Kenny Wheeler, and Pablo Ziegler. The roles of sideman and bandleader have always held equal ground in Hollenbeck’s musical life, both necessary forms of musical nourishment. He composes much of his music exclusively for Claudia Quintet, his ensemble comprised of drums, bass, vibraphone, accordion, and clarinet. The 18-piece John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble (he prefers this more open-to-interpretation term to the standard “Big Band”) provides an even larger palette for his compositions; he writes both original works specifically for that group and creates arrangements of his other works, such as “Abstinence,” which was originally composed for Claudia Quintet.

While often highly active and solidly packed with dense counterpoint, Hollenbeck’s music possesses an astonishing clarity of line, form, and structure that he attributes to his training as a drummer. “When I started writing music, I realized if I didn’t play clearly, I couldn’t hear my own music and no one else could either. So I think that kind of clarity is something that I’m always searching for. Like, how to make each voice clear and transparent.” He also mentions that the drummer mindset helps keep the music fresh, in that gravitating towards conventional melodic material or standard chord progressions is not an issue when one is steeped in the world of percussion. In the making of each piece, he also strives to use a different process in order to create a truly unique sound, thus avoiding repetition or ingrained habits.

Despite his devotion to exploring new sonic terrain, Hollenbeck also draws upon a deep understanding of jazz, world, and classical music for his compositions. For example, the work “Foreign One” on the CD Eternal Interlude is based on the Thelonious Monk tune “Four in One”—the full quote is revealed in the middle of the work, but the building blocks can be heard throughout the work in snippets, playfully reformed in different guises.

Like many contemporary composers and performers, Hollenbeck admits to struggling to answer the loaded question, “What kind of music do you play?” Although the temptation is to simply answer “jazz music,” he is well aware that the term holds many meanings for many people. Over the years, his personal definition of “jazz” has remained open, illustrating a rich and varied career in composition and performance driven by the spirit of discovery. “For me, it’s always been about the new thing; something that I can’t define yet, that I just listen to it and I think, ‘I don’t know what that is. That’s so interesting.’ For me, that’s jazz.”

We met with Hollenbeck in late February, as he was preparing for a West Coast tour with the John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble. He discusses his composing process, the challenges of organizing tours both in the U.S. and abroad, his thoughts on genre definitions, and more.

—AG

*

Alexandra Gardner: I understand that you started drumming because your older brother was a drummer, and his activities inspired you to begin. When and how did the composing part enter into the picture?

John Hollenbeck: Well, my brother was also composing, and he gave me this idea that that’s what musicians do. I kind of thought that you had to; it was part of the package. So I thought about it a lot early on. I don’t think I really had the tools yet, but I thought about it. I had some attempts in high school to write some big band charts and some small group things. I wrote some marimba solos and little things like that. But nothing that I was proud of until I was in college.

AG: Each one of your recordings is so unique. You have a very specific musical language, and yet every recording sounds completely different from every other one. There is music that sounds specifically like jazz, and there are elements of world music in some works, and things that sound like electronic music but aren’t. The Gray Cottage pieces performed by Todd Reynolds fit into the genre of contemporary art music. Are you always trying to do something completely different with every work, or are you just sort of being present in the moment and letting things happen?

JH: I think early on I was really attracted to the mystery of something—when I heard something that I hadn’t heard before. So in my own writing, I think I’m kind of trying to capture that in some way. A lot of people would say you can’t do anything new. You know, everything’s been done. But it’s really important for me that each piece kind of be its own little universe. It has its own language and it does sound essentially different than other pieces. As I write, that becomes harder and harder to not repeat myself. And I also enjoy diversity; when I was younger, I was often making little mix tapes that were pretty diverse—it was normal for me to go from Stevie Wonder to Aaron Copland, and I enjoyed that. In the course of a record or a concert, I like to go to very different worlds, and maybe even inside one piece I might be doing that. It was a little bit harder for me to listen to a whole Stevie Wonder record, but to go from one to the other, and then maybe a little jazz in there… I was always attracted to that diversity.

I think it’s like trying to find things that I can’t figure out or that I’ve never really heard before. It doesn’t even have to be incredibly different, but just a slightly different tint on something. And that’s then a piece that I’m going to be able to play and enjoy playing night after night.

AG: It seems as if your style has really evolved in an interesting way from your early recordings, in which everything is thick and tumbled together, and there’s a lot of really intense counterpoint going on. It’s still that way, but now the music fits together more tightly and more precisely. You can hear everything that is happening in the music, even when there are 18 people playing. Nothing gets lost.

JH: I think some of that comes from the drummer part of it; when I started writing music, I realized if I didn’t play clearly, I couldn’t hear my own music and no one else could either. So I think that kind of clarity is something that I’m always searching for. Like how to make each voice clear and transparent. And when I work with people that are improvising, I find myself repeating the same phrases which are usually, you know, you look for your own little place in the sonic universe and do whatever you want there. And someone else will be over here, and the music can be pretty dense as long as people aren’t all in the same area.

AG: How does your composing process work?

JH: I think about it a lot ahead of time. I have a bunch of lists—ongoing lists that I make about the process. How could I potentially start a piece, and then how could I work on a piece, and what tools will I use to work on this piece. Usually it just happens naturally, but I think making a list and thinking about it ahead of time lets me have a slightly different process than I’ve used in the past, which hopefully again gives the piece its own little sound. So the process, I think, is what makes each piece different. A lot of people for instance start on the piano, and, especially if you’re not a pianist, if you don’t have piano chops, then you will gravitate towards certain harmonies and your fingers kind of do the walking and thinking for you a little bit. I try to be careful about that and not repeat the same process. And then I think about the tools; piano being one tool, paper is another tool, the computer is another tool, the drum set, or my voice, and I can use all those tools at different parts of the piece, combining them in a way so that the process is a little different.

JH: A lot of the stuff for large ensemble has come out of commissions, so it’s been officially for another group. And then I have it in my mind how I could adapt it for my group. With the Claudia Quintet, I’m usually writing for them specifically. One reason that I do have this traditional instrumentation, even though I think the music’s not traditional, is that I can write for other groups and then at some point still bring it back to my band and it’s not too hard to do.

AG: That’s efficient.

JH: Well, it’s been working out pretty well. I mean, of the last two big pieces, one was written originally for wind ensemble and then one of the guys in the wind ensemble is in my large ensemble and he basically just said, “You should arrange this for large ensemble.” I hadn’t really thought about it. So then I did, and it ended up being the title track on the last record. And there’s another piece on there, “Perseverance”, that was written for a band in Portugal and that works with my group too pretty well.

AG: How does the work you’ve been doing as a percussionist with Meredith Monk inform your composing and performing?

JH: I guess the biggest influence would be that she composes very intuitively. Not a lot of the process is intellectual. It would be more emotional—so what is that sound, or that rhythm, what feeling does that give you. Composing can get very academic and intellectual, to the point that the music part goes away and you come up with a piece that is incredibly well crafted, and is symmetrical and it’s got all this incredible structural cohesion, but it’s in the end not moving. So I think that’s the biggest influence that I can see from her.

AG: To bring a more emotional sensibility to the music.

JH: Yeah, whatever it is, she’s creating pieces that, in the end, are incredibly intricate and layered. Often there’s kind of a theatrical aspect that is really new to me. And then of course, a lot of the pieces incorporate visual elements—either what are we going to wear, or what’s the lighting going to be, or am I going make this movement here—and that’s really a new thing for me to be a part of.

AG: You composed the percussion part of The Impermanence Project. How did that process work?

JH: Normally the process is very collaborative. She comes in with something, and then it keeps getting developed through lots of rehearsing, and she’s video-ing everything, and so you’re kind of right there in the middle. It’s a very vulnerable state for her to be in, and it takes a lot of courage to be open enough to let everyone in on your compositional process. In the end of course, she’s the composer and the decision-maker. But when it comes to the percussion, she’s not a percussionist and so she gives me a lot of freedom, and it has worked out somehow. We’re somehow in tune with each other. Usually she just gives me a sort of idea of where to play and some ideas about sounds, and then I just try. Usually it works out pretty quickly that she likes what I do, and then I just have to remember it!

AG: In addition to your many musical interests and activities, the practice of meditation is also a big part of your life, isn’t it?

JH: Yeah, I would say I practice meditation. Try to.

AG: And would you say that brings a spiritual element to your work? Do you find that meditation has affected your compositions and the way you approach music?

JH: A lot of times the pieces themselves are aspirations. So not necessarily how I am, but how I wish I could be. I have a lot of pieces that are somehow based on spiritual texts, or even just based on meditation. And in the process of writing the piece, I learn a lot about the subject, whatever the subject is. Also then in the end, you’re sharing that with people, and so maybe they will latch onto that and hear about some text or meditation or something that they didn’t know anything about, or only knew a little bit about. It can kind of be some free advertising for something that you want to share.

As far as the meditation, it really helps make things clear. So if you’re composing, that’s very good. But even if you’re, you know, walking down the street, it’s also very good. Meditation I would just say helps everything, composing being one of those things.

AG: Speaking of aspirations, is there a place or situation where you would compositionally like to ultimately arrive? For instance, a lot of composers want to write an opera. Is there something like that in your mind for the future?

JH: I think for the most part I really like to write for the groups that I’m writing for. So I would just like that to continue. But you know, of course, if it could be easier, that would be great! It would be great to do more commissioned work, to really get to know other ensembles and write for them. I feel like I’m on the edges of the jazz community, and maybe on the edges of the new music community. So the jazz part I’m not so concerned with, but I would love to be more a part of the new music community. The one bit of confusion in my mind is about writing for orchestra. Some days, I really want to do that. And then it can be just the next day where I think, no, I don’t want to do that. It would be great if the opportunity came at some point, and then I would just do it and stop thinking about it.

I think when I was younger, that probably would have been the goal. Like, wow, maybe someday I could write for an orchestra. Then other people come around and show you other models where you don’t actually need the orchestra, and you can create your own ensemble and write for your own ensemble and that works maybe even better. So I think I’m kind of somewhere in between.

The other big part, which might not seem like a big part to someone who’s not doing it, is if I could do less of the business part of what I do. That would be great. I could spend more time composing.

AG: Is the balance shifting between the amount of time you’re composing and playing with your own groups as opposed to the amount of time you’re playing for other people?

JH: Well, it’s shifted in that I’m doing a lot more with my own groups. But it’s kind of an OK balance. It’s like a holiday when I can just be the drummer in a band. It’s so easy in a certain sense. Of course you have to take care of the music part, but that’s it. You just have to show up on time and, and play the music and that seems really easy at this point. So I do like to do that as a relief from the leading. I love playing the drums and just being the drummer.

AG: And you’re teaching as well.

JH: Yeah, I love teaching, and it’s something I’ve always loved. I’ve been thinking recently about smells and odors, and I love the smell of a school. I don’t know what it is, but when you walk into a university, it has a certain smell. I’m attracted to that. I’ve always been attracted to the utopian environment of a school. I really enjoy teaching, but it does take a lot of energy, and it feeds everything else, but you have to balance the teaching with doing your own work. I’m responsible for many students, and I really want to take care of that. I also have to take care of myself, and I want to play, and I want to do my own music, and so that’s a constant, daily schedule battle.

AG: Yet on top of all that you’re going on tour with the John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble. That’s a huge project, taking an 18-piece big band anywhere, especially to Europe. What do the logistics of that look like?

JH: Right. Well, I have a booking agent in Europe, and I have a new person who’s helping me with the Large Ensemble tour. I actually started doing it by myself, and I booked the whole thing by myself. Then it got down to, you know, oh my god I have to book like, 60 plane tickets, and I have to figure out how to get from here to here. Then an opportunity came up to work with someone, and so I think that’s great. Even if I have a booking agent, I’m the one that’s booking all the travel and figuring out how many hours it takes to get from this city to that city, and what time is the sound check, and where are we gonna eat, and how many CDs are we going to sell, and where do I get those CDs, and how much does the bass weigh, and if we take, you know, Easy Jet versus Lufthansa.

AG: Is the process very different for a European tour versus one in the U.S.?

JH: Well, in Europe it’s not based on the quantity of people at the concert as much. Because there’s more funding, there are a lot of places where you play where it’s not about how many people are coming to a concert. It’s about, “This is really important to present this music. We want to present this music, and we’re gonna pay you really well.” And then, you know, 20 people come to the concert. It’s like OK, here they are, and here you are. Great. Whereas in the U.S., usually it’s much more based on numbers. For me as the leader, I’m getting paid according to the number of people that are there. So it’s just because there’s less support. Unfortunately, a lot of the funding in Europe has gone down pretty drastically. I think I got in kind of on the tail end of this, but I think it used to be pretty incredible that most of the musicians that were living in New York were making a living in Europe. And at one time even in Japan, there was a lot of work. It’s much harder to do now because the money’s just not there anymore.

AG: Do you change up what or how you present the work depending on which side of the ocean you’re on? Do you think at all about audience expectation?

JH: Well, when you play in the U.S., I think you might be playing for people that are more familiar with the music, because I think people are less likely to take a chance on something if they don’t know anything about it. In Europe, it’s a lot of times more based on the venue, so they’ll say, “Let’s go to that venue because we know it’s always good. I’ve never heard of this group, but let’s just go.” It’s different when you’re playing for a bunch of people who know your music and know at least something about your music versus playing to a group of people that know nothing about your music at all. The vibrations are completely different.

AG: You mentioned that you are on the edges of jazz and of the new music world. Do you find yourself affected in any way by the discussions revolving around genre? Tonality, versus atonality, classical versus indie-classical, etc.? Do those conversations take a different form within the jazz community?

JH: Jazz might be a little bit different in that it’s always been a hybrid form of many different types of music. Some world music and some European music and some folk music, and it’s always open to adding new influences. It kind of just matters what definition you use for jazz. So for me, it’s always been about the new thing; something that I can’t define yet, that I just listen to it and I think, “I don’t know what that is.” That’s so interesting. For me, that’s jazz. The real innovators in jazz were people that didn’t think about that at all. And later on people named the music that they made, but they never really were concerned with the naming of it. Probably the hardest question to answer is when I just meet someone and they say, “Oh, you’re a drummer. What kind of music do you play?” And there’s always like a huge silence there. They just think, “What’s wrong, I just asked a very simple question. Why can’t you answer that?” And it’s a hard question for me to answer. So I answer it differently according to whom I’m talking to. The Claudia Quintet is on the Cuneiform label, which is mostly known as a progressive rock label. I don’t even know what Prog-Rock is, you know, but to some people we’re automatically that. They hear it as that. To other people, they would hear it as jazz. For people that really know jazz, they probably wouldn’t think of it as jazz. So everyone makes their own idea. A lot of people are very uncomfortable with the mystery of not knowing. So a lot of people will even say to me, “Yeah, I don’t like jazz, because I don’t understand it.” And the same thing with a lot of contemporary music, “I just don’t get it.” But I enjoy being in there when I don’t get it.

All the names and the genre stuff, I try to leave that to other people because I’ve always been interested in the music that you can’t classify. It’s not a great business decision, but musically it’s natural for me.

AG: Do you have a way of describing the work to yourself?

JH: I guess I would say I’m interested in lots of music, and always have been interested in lots of different kinds of very diverse music. And I just let that kind of naturally go in and come out, and usually I’m most interested by hybrid forms. So you take like a Joni Mitchell tune and a Morton Feldman tune, and you put them together, that’s not a combination I’ve heard too much. So that could be a disaster, but it might be very interesting.

It’s a very natural process for me, so that’s why it’s hard to talk about, because it’s just normal. I don’t think about it. This is just what comes out. Then later on, you know, people want to know, well, what is it? And that’s when I think, “Oh, I’m not sure what it is, but this is it.”

Stephen Schwartz and Lauren Flanigan in conversation with Frank J. Oteri
March 8, 2011—11 a.m. at Lauren Flanigan’s home in New York City
Audio/video recorded by Jeremy Robins
Edited by Frank J. Oteri, Molly Sheridan, and Alexandra Gardner
Transcribed by Julia Lu

Few composers in any genre can boast as great a popular success as Stephen Schwartz, who has left an indelible mark in several musical areas including pop, Broadway, Hollywood, and most recently, opera. Few singers have starred in as many contemporary American operas as Lauren Flanigan, for whom the lead role of Schwartz’s first opera, Séance on a Wet Afternoon, was created. At first it seems an unlikely alliance, but the seeds were actually planted in the beginnings of their respective careers forty years ago.

In 1971, Godspell, a modern-day retelling of the Gospel According to St. Matthew, opened on Off-Broadway with music and lyrics by Schwartz. A year after that, a song from the show’s original cast album, “Day By Day,” climbed to Number 13 on the Billboard pop singles chart and Schwartz’s second musical, the equally contemporary-sounding Pippin, landed on Broadway. (Pippin‘s cast album was released by Motown Records, a first for musical theatre.) As Pippin was still all the rage, Schwartz’s The Magic Show came to Broadway, as did Godspell, making him one of the only composers to ever have three shows running consecutively on the Great White Way, and the only one ever to accomplish that while he was still in his 20s. By the 1990s, Schwartz was the go-to song man for Disney’s animated features, writing the lyrics to Alan Menken’s music for Pocahontas and writing both music and lyrics for The Prince of Egypt. His triumphant return to Broadway was in 2003 with Wicked which, eight years later, is still going strong. But before any of that happened, Schwartz had studied composition at Juilliard and while an undergrad at Carnegie Mellon had composed a one-act opera. Although he was admittedly not attracted to the contemporary classical music scene at first:

I shared a lack of affection for the extreme contemporary music. To this day, I don’t like serial music. I don’t understand why that dominated classical music for as many years as it did, because it seems to me so over-intellectualized and so limiting.

Back in 1971, Lauren Flanigan was only twelve years old, but she had just made her stage debut in Benjamin Britten’s opera The Turn of the Screw. And while she claims that she hated modern music when she was first exposed to it during her vocal studies at Boston University, that “pre-exposure” at the age of twelve must have ultimately had the upper hand, since she went on to champion the work of so many living composers. Although she has appeared in over 100 different operas on stages all over the world, Flanigan is most treasured for her roles in such important contemporary works as Virgil Thomson’s The Mother of Us All, Samuel Barber’s Vanessa, Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler, Jack Beeson’s Lizzie Borden, Hugo Weisgall’s Esther, Deborah Drattell’s Lilith, Marvin David Levy’s Mourning Becomes Electra, and Thomas Pasatieri’s Frau Margot—many of which she either debuted or helped bring back into the repertoire. Carnegie Hall even expressly commissioned Philip Glass to create a special work for her, which resulted in his Symphony No. 6, a setting of Allen Ginsberg’s massive Plutonian Ode.

Ironically, when Flanigan was starting out, she opted not to pursue a career on Broadway because the more overtly pop/rock musical style of the new shows, like the ones composed by Stephen Schwartz, were not suitable for her voice:

That vocabulary was just not going to work for the soprano-y Show Boat-y way I sang. You can’t make a career off of a hundred productions of Hello Dolly, although I’m sure some people have.

But forty years later, Schwartz has created the perfect role for Flanigan. As he exclaimed to her in the middle of my talk with the two of them, “Even though I wrote all of the music and I wrote all the words, and I knew what it was going to sound like, when I actually saw you do it, there were things that completely blew me away. You revealed things that I was not aware were in the work.”

Without revealing too much of this new opera, which both of them insisted should remain a surprise until after the run at New York City Opera this month, both Stephen Schwartz and Lauren Flanigan reveal a great deal about themselves, the creative process, and the state of both musical theatre and opera today.

—FJO

*

Frank J. Oteri: The very first musical I ever saw on Broadway, when I was 11 years old, was Pippin. Aside from it being such an effective show, since it was the first one I ever saw, it really left quite an impression on me. And, of course, I knew Godspell. I saw it not long after when it finally came to Broadway and even before that “Day by Day” was all over the radio. And more recently I saw Wicked. But when I first learned about the opera Séance on a Wet Afternoon, I was somewhat baffled. The idea of Stephen Schwartz writing an opera was kind of a surprise to me, and, beyond that, an opera starring Lauren Flanigan.

Lauren Flanigan: It’s because you didn’t read his bio. You didn’t read the Juilliard/Carnegie Mellon part.

FJO: I didn’t know any of that. I also hadn’t yet seen the 1964 movie, which the opera is based on; I didn’t know any of this stuff yet. So I had a real disconnect with the whole thing. But then as I probed into it, more and more of the pieces fit together. In some ways this project culminates a 40-year career arc. Godspell was 40 years ago.

Stephen Schwartz: It was; it was 40 years ago, literally, this May.

LF: That is amazing.

FJO: Forty years ago, you were a little girl.

LF: I was 12. My opera debut was 40 years ago. Forty years ago this year.

FJO: So both of you made your debut in the public arena 40 years ago, doing seemingly very different things, but I think there are some intrinsic connections between them, as well as with what both of you are doing now. Lauren, as a 12-year old, you were singing in an opera by Benjamin Britten. So you were doing an opera in the English language, by a contemporary composer who was still alive at that point. It was the beginning of a career that would be defined by your being a champion of contemporary works in the English language by living composers.

LF: To be perfectly honest with you, when I went to Boston University in the late ’70s, the concentration there was not on opera. It was all on modern music, which I loathed and detested and made fun of constantly. I ran screaming from the room any time there was a Xenakis piece or a Cage piece. Everybody wanted to go see David Del Tredici’s Alice, and I literally made up a big lie that I had to do something or somebody needed me for something so I didn’t have to go. I wanted to be pretty and be Juliet. But once you kill someone, they never let you go back. You know, once you’re Abigaille or Lady Macbeth, you can never go back, so maybe that is what it is. Now it’s so funny that I’m friends with David, and I love that piece, and I’ve sung it. So you’re right, in a way. Having to conquer that crazy music at 12 maybe put some kernel in the back of my head, it created a musical curiosity that lay dormant for a while and then, you know, once I came to New York, started reviving itself.

FJO: And Stephen, it seems you wanted to completely change the tradition of what the Broadway musical was 40 years ago and what you did was revolutionary. But now, 40 years later, you’re embracing the traditions of grand opera. The word opera is simply the plural of opus—works, which means that the word could theoretically be used to describe anything and people have taken it to do just about anything. And yet the word has a very specific meaning for most people. Similarly the word musical is not terribly specific despite many people making assumptions about the kind of music that is in a musical, although that has changed quite a bit, in no small part due to your musicals.

SS: Well, I don’t think that I had revolutionary goals when I started out. I was just trying to do shows that worked as shows, and I was writing the kind of music that I was listening to. And that happened to be what I guess we would call pop music, or rock music. But I had grown up going to see shows, always having an ambition of writing for the musical theater, and so really all I did was to take the structure of musical theater and the sort of storytelling drive that I loved in musical theater and set it to rock music, because that’s what I listened to and it was the kind of music that I would want to hear. I guess there was something a little bit revolutionary about it. I wasn’t the only one doing that, but there were very few of us, and when I first started out, lo these 40 years ago, there was a lot of criticism, particularly in the intelligentsia and critical community, that you couldn’t actually tell a story using rock music. Rock music was fine for a revue kind of format like Hair, or in fact Godspell. Once you actually got to characters in storytelling, you had to revert to more traditional musical theater sound, and I just didn’t believe that was true. And of course, time has proven that it wasn’t true because now all music on Broadway basically is rock music.

FJO: In the early 1970s, before the rock revolution really hit Broadway and seems to have ultimately conquered it, opera was still sort of a bizarre middle ground between popular music on one side, and classical music on the other. Of course for a previous generation, the music that was done for the Broadway theater was the most popular music. The songs from those shows were the hit songs of the day. And even earlier, arias from operas were the popular songs in 19th-century Italy. But cultural shifts happened in terms of what was popular. This certainly affected the public perception of opera long before it affected the popularity of songs written for musicals. But you at least can address that shift vis-à-vis Broadway, since you were a kid going to shows when their songs were still mainstream popular music.

SS: You would turn on the radio and “The Sound of Music” was being played as a pop song. Songs from West Side Story or Gypsy became pop hits. With the advent of rock and roll, if you will, or rock music, there started to be a bifurcation between Broadway music and what was being played on the radio. So by the time I was writing for theater, there was a big gulf. So when a show like Godspell wound up having a hit song—not only from the show, but from the cast album—that was very unusual at that point.

LF: It’s funny you say that, too, because growing up I wanted to be a musical theater actress. I didn’t want to be an opera singer. I grew up singing all those songs from The King and I and Carousel. All of the things were still being played on television, and occasionally in some movie theater in San Francisco, and that’s sort of the way I thought my voice was going to work. But by the time I got into high school, you’ve got Godspell, and you’ve got Pippin, and you’ve all these other shows like The Wiz, and Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope, and Raisin, and things are jazzy pop. I know my voice won’t do that and I end up going more toward classical music unwillingly because my voice couldn’t go where Broadway was going at the time. That vocabulary was just not going to work for the soprano-y Show Boat-y way I sang. You can’t make a career off of a hundred productions of Hello Dolly, although I’m sure some people have.

SS: Well, I know someone who has.

LF: But you know what I mean. If you’re going to move with the times, you have to find something. Even as an undergrad, I wasn’t sure I was still going to be a singer. I thought I was giving up singing to concentrate more on acting, because if modern music was the only way to go, I wasn’t that interested in it.

SS: Well, I’m glad you didn’t. But I’m also glad you concentrated as much on acting as you did because we need them both.

LF: I love that. That’s my passion, my real passion.

FJO: So going back again to 40 years ago. Lauren said she didn’t initially like contemporary music, and you, Stephen, were listening to rock music and wanted to bring this stuff into the musical theater. But at the same time, you were also listening to classical music.

SS: I was classically trained. And I started out by writing little classical pieces. I wrote a very bad one-act opera when I was in college, along with the musical theater stuff that I was doing. But like Lauren, I shared a lack of affection for the extreme contemporary music. To this day, I don’t like serial music. I don’t understand why that dominated classical music for as many years as it did, because it seems to me so over-intellectualized and so limiting.

LF: And I love that now. I like that it’s over-intellectualized and in its over-intellectualization, I find it not limiting. But I’m 52 now, so.

SS: Well, classical music has turned around again, starting with the minimalists, who sort of just broke the mold and allowed classical music to be accessible again. Then from there, you have people like John Corigliano, who’s certainly not a minimalist but is writing extremely tuneful and very emotional music and is not at all intellectual in terms of how he approaches music.

FJO: But in terms of what his compositional toolbox is, he incorporates serial techniques, too.

SS: He uses everything.

LF: That is true.

SS: Well, Leonard Bernstein used serial techniques as well.

FJO: There’s a 12-tone row in West Side Story.

SS: And in Mass, you know—which I worked on—there’s a lot of 12-tone stuff in that. But the point is that’s not all they’re using. Now I feel classical music, or what we call classical music, is much more interesting, much more accessible, and much more varied than it was for a very long time.

FJO: Well, that’s the other thing: the labels we put on stuff. When we say classical music, there’s an assumption in the general public—the public who will listen to hit songs and will probably know “Day by Day” even if they have never been to a Broadway show. For them, the word classical conjures up the past.

SS: The dead.

FJO: Yes, so to say “I’m writing classical music” now in a way hurts that music’s ability to ever become popular.

SS: They don’t realize that they’re being sold cars and other products with classical music playing.

LF: How about when somebody says, “Oh, I hate classical music. I’ve never been to an opera.” And their ring tone is the Toreador. I’ve been in that situation so many times when people are talking, or where they talk about how crazy modern music is, and you can’t listen to it, and I say, “Well, have you seen Lord of the Rings?” And they’ll say, “Well yeah.” And I’ll say, “Do you understand that in any given scene in Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter, you were hearing soundscape; you’re hearing sound effects; you’re hearing a confluence of sounds come together in a way that John Cage had never even thought of.” Our ears are so sophisticated now: somebody can sit through something like the Lord of the Rings, especially these big battle scenes where your ear is taking in so many disparate musical sounds and sound effects and making sense out of it. I think it’s fascinating that we’ve come to that, and yet we’re still saying there’s a death of classical music.

SS: I agree.

FJO: Except that with a film, or even an opera, there’s a storyline. There are words. There are things that take you along, as opposed to sitting in a concert hall, hearing an instrumental piece, and having certain expectations about what that’s going to be. No matter what genre you’ve worked in, and your music’s taken many, many forms, words have been pretty primary to what you do. And you write your own words.

SS: Yeah, for the most part.

FJO: Once you open the door that your music is narrative, the music can be anything you want it to be to serve those words.

SS: To serve the narrative. That’s exactly what I was going to say. I feel that it’s not so much words that are important to me, though of course they are, but it is storytelling. It’s narrative. That whatever medium I’m working in, I’m very much about what the story is I’m trying to tell, why I have an emotional connection to this story, and how I transmit my connection to this story to my listeners, or viewers, or audience, or whatever, so that they also have an emotional response to it.

FJO: To draw a connection between Godspell and Séance, because I’ve been trying to figure that out—

SS: I know you think there are connections, which I don’t see.

FJO: Well, both are telling supernatural stories, stories about miracles, but in a way that’s totally believable. They both take something otherworldly and bring it down to earth somehow.

SS: I guess you can say that. To me what’s interesting about Godspell is that it’s really not dealing with the sort of supernatural or religious aspects of the Jesus story, but is dealing much more with the philosophy. What was he actually saying? What was he trying to teach people about how to behave to others and to themselves? Its emphasis is on the philosophy rather than did he actually ascend to heaven or not. Those things really have nothing to do with Godspell and so to me, that’s what’s so interesting about that particular piece. In Séance there is some maybe supernatural stuff that happens, but to some extent it’s open to interpretation. And in the end, for me, that’s not what it’s about at all. It’s about this woman and what she needs, what she wants, what she loves, and the lengths she’s willing to go to get that.

FJO: I’m curious about the road that led to making this opera happen. There’s quite a big difference between getting a show on Broadway and getting an opera produced in an opera house. I mentioned that the first show I ever saw on Broadway was Pippin. As an impressionable pre-teen who wanted to write music, I thought Broadway theater was something I could aspire to one day. It seemed like there were opportunities for people at that time. And you were certainly a hero role model, because you were in your 20s and you had three shows on Broadway simultaneously. So it led me to believe that this was somehow possible, whereas at that time almost nobody ever did an opera by a living composer; in the ’70s, that was unheard of. But now it seems, 40 years later, that the tide has turned in the other direction. You had this immense and unprecedented success on Broadway—at least for anyone your age—but then decades passed. You were writing lots of things that had lots of exposure—film, T.V.—but it wasn’t for Broadway again until Wicked. These days it seems as though Broadway takes fewer chances whereas opera companies have grown more adventurous—every time I turn around, there seems to be a contemporary opera by a living composer being done somewhere.

SS: I think some things have changed in the opera world. The most important thing is that opera companies have discovered that when they program the new piece, and either the composer or the subject matter is interesting to people, they can actually sell tickets. In the old days, I think that was not their experience. It was the new pieces that they couldn’t sell, and the warhorses that they could. So first of all, that’s changed a bit because the nature of what audiences will go to see has changed in the opera house.

LF: I’ve done Merry Mount, Peter Ibbetson, and Mourning Becomes Electra—operas that were done in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. What opera houses needed to do was if you had a Butterfly, everybody learns Madama Butterfly. But when you have Merry Mount, you have one cast that learns Merry Mount. You always have a specific cast do a new piece, and so it becomes very difficult. It’s very easy if your Butterfly gets sick to have another Butterfly come in. If your Pinkerton has an engagement and he can only do three performances and you need another Pinkerton for three more performances, it’s very easy to find another. If you were an opera company and you were going to do Merry Mount, and then every college and university decided they would add Merry Mount to the curriculum, you would have a certain level of singer who would have come up through the ranks knowing Merry Mount. So in any given time, you could do it, and you wouldn’t have to pay special singers to learn a special piece.

It also would set up this idea of seeing different interpretations of the same thing. That just simply never has been done in modern music. It was always a one-off. I think Ghosts of Versailles broke the mold for that. Baby Doe certainly did for a while, but Ghosts of Versailles did it very big. It’s been done in a lot of different places by a lot of different casts. And it’s really held up very well, and is very popular. So part of the issue is what opera companies need to do, and does modern work fulfill that, or does it work against it. I’ll be honest with you, Rosenkavalier, Romeo and Juliet, La Sonnambula, Lucia—those were the things you studied in college. I’d never heard of Merry Mount or Peter Ibbetson or Mourning Becomes Electra.

SS: But now people are learning Mark Adamo’s Little Women.

LF: And Dead Men Walking.

SS: Many, many different companies.

LF: Tom Pasatieri’s operas are being done in colleges and universities all over the place.

SS: That’s what I’m saying. There’s a shift that’s happening in the world of opera, which I think is very encouraging. In some ways it is akin to what was happening on Broadway in the ’70s, where you had a kind of music that had become popular and was being played on the radio. The people who were producing shows for Broadway or running record companies didn’t really understand that music because they were from a different generation. So they were much more willing to take a chance on young writers such as myself, and I think to some extent opera companies are now saying we need to broaden our audience. We need to reach a younger, more contemporary audience, so we’re willing to take more chances on younger, more contemporary writers. Or not even younger writers, but more contemporary writers.

LF: And yet what always makes me laugh is whenever we do VOX for City Opera, or whenever I do something for American Opera Projects, the average age of the audience members is clearly in their 50s, early-60s. I went to the Armory two weeks ago for all that music. The audience was my age. But there is an intellectual group out there that is adventurous in what they want.

FJO: Well that makes me ponder what you can do in the opera house that you can’t necessarily do on Broadway and vice versa. Stephen, you have mentioned that, for you, writing for opera means writing for unamplified voices, which requires a different kind of orchestration; whereas, in Broadway theater, you always write for amplified voices. Of course, once upon a time, there were no amplified voices on Broadway, either. But there are many contemporary operas that use some amplification.

SS: We don’t do any miking.

LF: No. God, no.

FJO: There are certain critics who will go ballistic if there are microphones or any kind of an amplification enhancement used in an opera house, but in a way aren’t they like the folks who were criticizing that same stuff on Broadway back in the ’70s?

SS: Well, I think it depends on the style of music. When I was offered an opera commission by Opera Santa Barbara, before I made the choice to do Séance on a Wet Afternoon, I did think a little about doing something for opera voices which involves more electronic instruments and is therefore miked. But I didn’t want to do that. I actually wanted to do a more traditional opera, an opera that was written for classical voices that would not be amplified in any way. But I think that you could legitimately do an opera in another way. It depends on the instrumentation. If I really thought about it, I could find a way to compose something which used more contemporary instruments, Fender bass, electric guitar, etc. Actually there’s electric guitar in Séance, and yet it still allowed voices to be unamplified because of the way it’s orchestrated and because of the way it’s structured. But I think there is a way to use “legit” voices.

LF: There are so many issues related to amplification. One of them is what you actually create. What Stephen’s suggesting is orchestrating in such a way for instruments that are amplified that it necessitates that the voices also become a part of that soundscape. That’s one way of looking at it. Are you trying to recreate the sound people have in their home with their surround sound? My feeling is, if you want that, stay home. Or create a performance that specifically says, “This will be a Madama Butterfly in surround sound.” Are we going to experiment with this for one performance only? What separates me from, let’s say, Cristine Ebersole or Victoria Clark, is that I’m specifically training to be heard in a 3,000-seat theater without amplification.

I remember one time he wanted to change a note—he didn’t understand what I said—and I said to him, “Why are we changing that note?” And he said, “I can’t really understand you.” And I said, “Let me work on it. And then once I’ve worked on it, if it’s still unintelligible, or if it’s still covered, then let’s deal with that.” But see, your job is to come to me and say, “I can’t hear you here.” And then I say, “Oh, OK.” And I fix it. And then, if despite my fixing it, he still doesn’t get what he wants, then we start changing things. I expect that a conductor or a composer’s going to come to me and say, “I have no idea what you’re saying. Can you either walk downstage, fix whatever you’re doing, take it to your teacher or coach, but fix it?” Because in Butterfly, they’re not going to change the notes for you; you have to fix it.

SS: But I also feel that in writing for opera, because it’s unamplified, part of my task was to orchestrate in such a way that words could be understood. When I write for theater or movies or records, I’m not really thinking of trying to stay out of the way of the voices. I’m writing music that voices sit above, and I know I can always bring the voice out through mixing and amplification. So it’s kind of a horizontal writing of music. With opera, and in listening to classical operas, and really hearing what they did as I was preparing to write this piece, I realized that it’s much more what I call vertical writing. When the voices are singing, there’s much less going on underneath it—unless you’re Wagner. Then, in between, the music comes up. So you’re getting these peaks and valleys, and the voice is sitting in an instrumental valley. I was very conscious of that in writing. Not to say that happens all the time, but I feel that part of the responsibility is to write in such a way first of all where the voice is set, that if you really need to understand the words, it’s in a place where the sound can be produced so it’s understood, and to make sure that the orchestration is not overwhelming the singers. A great strong voice—yes, you—can sing over far more instruments than anyone on Broadway, mostly.

LF: But I’m also acutely aware that there are some Strauss operas I’m appropriate for and there are others that I’m not, simply for the fact that the orchestration is so big.

SS: And so heavy.

LF: I will not be heard over it. Maybe every piece isn’t meant for every singer. Maybe you do write specifically for a singer, and then maybe you have to wait a generation for another one to come along who can fill those shoes. I think Philip Glass’s Symphony [No. 6] is a terrific piece. I happen to absolutely love that piece. There may be nobody else who’s ever going to try to sing that piece. It’s possible. It’s 55 minutes of non-stop singing, and there are probably about 130 high B’s in it, with words on them. What I always found fascinating about that is when reviews came for it, I was criticized for unintelligible speech. And I thought, not once did anyone say, “How the hell did she sing up there for that long, and it still sounds so pretty?” Do you know what I mean? Like if it’s pretty and if you’d have listened to it twice, I feel like I’ve done my job because now you’re compelled to understand the text. I’m not saying that I seek to do that, but we’re not all meant to sing every piece. And there are Wagner pieces some people can sing, and then there are Wagner pieces that they cannot sing. As singers, we know that. It’s an interesting discussion to have with a composer. That was one of our ongoing discussions. I kept saying, “It has to be able to be only sung by an opera singer.” It has to utilize the things that we do.

SS: And that’s certainly true. I definitely wrote for you.

LF: This will not be done by colleges and universities pretty much. The stamina alone would be an issue. It’s why schools don’t do Elektra or Salome. They can do it, but they don’t, or Ballo in Maschera. It’s like you didn’t write your version of La Bohème where there are some arias, and then you’re off stage.

SS: You’re always there. Well, when we first met, I just wanted to warn you about it, and you did say to me, “I like to be on stage.”

LF: I’m a stage creature. Keep me on the stage.

FJO: You were talking about having to change a vocal line that could not be heard against the orchestration; in a Broadway show if the singer can’t be heard above an orchestration, I would imagine that it’s the orchestration that would be changed.

SS: That’s true. With Broadway, basically what happens is the orchestrator comes in and watches a number once it has been learned and staged, tapes it, wanders off with the composer—you kind of talk through what it is you want and what it is you’re hearing—and then they go off and orchestrate. And you as composer are still at rehearsal doing other things. There are almost no Broadway composers who’ve orchestrated their own pieces, including Leonard Bernstein who did sketch things in, but didn’t orchestrate his own Broadway work, never, despite obviously being an extremely competent orchestrator. The only time that I’ve experienced as a composer orchestrating my own stuff is when it’s a pop band and you’re just working out the arrangements with your band live. Then afterwards, it gets written down. Then you do it. Like for Godspell, that’s how we did it. And I think maybe Duncan Sheik for Spring Awakening may have done his own arrangements or some of his own arrangements that way. But basically, you just don’t do it for Broadway. Also, you’re thinking of the song. Sure, you have orchestration in mind, but it’s much more about what the song is, as opposed to what the sound is of the orchestra that’s carrying it. Conceiving for opera is completely different; the orchestration is absolutely integral to the conception of what the music is.

FJO: Since Séance is an opera and not a musical, I want to dig a little bit further into how you draw these distinctions without giving away too much about the details of Séance. I thought it was interesting that you had rejected basing a musical on Séance on a Wet Afternoon, but yet that film was the first thing you thought of when your received a commission to write an opera.

SS: Absolutely.

FJO: This gut reaction seems to strike at the heart of what you believe inside yourself are the differences between these two genres.

SS: When we were talking about this before, I was trying to think of an answer that was very articulate and specific, but the truth is that a lot of it was just instinct. It didn’t feel like musical theater to me, but it did feel like opera. But, since you asked, and I knew you were going to ask, I did try to analyze why I made that sort of leap. Musical theater is a lot based on energy and humor. And opera, particularly if it’s not opera buffa, doesn’t necessarily need those elements.

LF: Pelléas et Mélisande is very humorous and has a lot of energy.

SS: And I think we have laughs in our show.

LF: Oh, we have wonderful laughs in our show.

SS: And we have a lot of energy. But it’s basically about the mood, and the music sets a certain tone, and the music carries so much of the story. There’s so much subtext going on. The characters are saying certain things, and behaving in a certain way. But there’s all this other stuff going on underneath, and the music is telling a lot of that story. So that to me seems particularly operatic. Sure there’s subtext in the best musical theater songs, but basically what they’re singing is what’s going on. And in opera, that’s not always the case. So there were a lot of these instincts that led me to say this is more of an opera. And then I just felt the characters were operatic characters, whatever that means.

FJO: What’s interesting is the piece where you came closest to that sort of thinking before—where you thought that the story demanded that you write a different kind of music than what you normally would write—is The Baker’s Wife.

SS: Because it’s set in France in 1935. Real France, not fake medieval France like Pippin, which is supposed to be contemporary. I felt it was very important for Baker’s Wife that the music be redolent of that period and that locale. It’s all about where it’s taking place. So musically it had to summon up the locale. But I don’t see The Baker’s Wife score as particularly operatic, though the voices are a little bit more legitimate. I think it’s more a harkening back to a more kind of traditional Broadway writing than opera writing.

LF: It’s operatic in its emotional language, though. The big separation between musical theater and opera is when the audience can go there. In opera, we almost always go there with every character. It’s beyond that basic level of communication when you just need to open it up and then the only thing that can do that is some sort of extended vocal writing. In The Baker’s Wife, all the characters get so close to that emotion where it’s just like, here I am. I felt that piece specifically seemed to fit what I really have come to know and still know, 40 years later, as operatic emotion. It’s just contained differently.

SS: It’s so hard when you have this discussion about what is opera vs. musical theater. I tend to say that it’s like the Supreme Court definition of pornography: you can’t quite define it, but you know it when you see it. For me, Séance on a Wet Afternoon just seemed an ideal subject for opera and not for musical theater. And I can’t really tell you why, but I just felt it needed to be treated in the way that I did. In musical theater, I don’t think I could have gotten the same kind of psychological complexity.

LF: This story allows for the orchestra to say something the voice is not saying. Whereas in some, not all, musical theater, the orchestration acts as an accompaniment, and often pushes things along. In opera, there are times when we’re able to sing something and the orchestra’s saying something completely different. That is, I think typically, a compositional idea that’s employed in classical music. Do you know what I mean? Or in, you know, symphonic music where instruments are saying different things at the same time. And I think that’s what really makes this piece operatic is that he does do that.

SS: I agree.

FJO: O.K., so to take it beyond the music and to take it to the words, and the differences of the roles of words in operas and musicals. We’ve been talking so much about music and the details of the mechanics of orchestration and shaping vocal lines. One of the things that I thought was very interesting—without giving away the plot Séance—is how the opera and the film it was based on are very different pieces in a lot of ways. Film is very specific in a way. It’s a very immediate medium, even though that particular film is so wonderfully ambiguous. One of the things that I get from that movie is how much about London it is. There are all these amazing shots of London, very specific details that you see close up: various street corners, the Tube, etc. You could never do the same thing on a live stage in an opera performance. And in a way, it really doesn’t matter where the opera is supposed to take place.

SS: It takes place in San Francisco.

FJO: But it has to be a stylized and somewhat mythologized San Francisco. Even Nixon in China, which was based on a very specific event in recent history, has to mythologize to some degree—because of the very nature of the medium of opera. There’s a kind of distance that automatically happens in opera because the action is being sung, and as a result, the drama takes a different form.

LF: Like La Bohème, it becomes emotionally specific and not place specific.

SS: Though I did want to set it someplace where it’s always raining.

LF: And the fact that I was born there was very, very helpful. But, you’re right, and I never thought about it. This piece is emotionally specific in the way that La Bohème is, and in the way Don Giovanni is, and that’s why it can successfully take place almost anywhere because the emotional context is what it is. And it speaks. It really does speak.

SS: But I still try to be really accurate about where I was placing this. I went to San Francisco. I researched locations. They’re mentioned in the piece. I found the house I thought it had taken place in, and took a picture of it. I found the house where the rich people whose daughter gets kidnapped lived and took a picture of that. Because the movie takes place in London, the kidnapping plot very specifically unfolds on the Tube and he gets off at Leicester Square and so on and so forth. I had to find a way that the husband in the piece could succeed in collecting the ransom in San Francisco and went and figured out how you could do that with the trolley, and the bus system. It actually is described in the text.

LF: If you see La Bohème and you walk away going, “God, I want to go to Paris,” it has not been a good night for you at the opera. So maybe in a way, it succeeds because it transcends specificity and so you follow this story instead of the locations.

SS: Movies are very real. Theater, by its very nature, is abstract because you can’t bring in all the reality and detail that you can in film.

FJO: Since Séance is an opera based on a motion picture—something that is out there and that’s very tangible, you can easily acquire a DVD of it—this raises another issue about expectations. Of course, there’ve been a number of very successful contemporary operas based on motion pictures. You referenced Dead Man Walking, and before we talked about André Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire. I think in a way, Séance overcomes some of the baggage that those other operas might have had initially in that those movies were so famous and everybody knew them so well. When you’re watching Streetcar recreated as opera, it’s really hard not to think of Marlon Brando. But even though Séance is an amazing film, it’s not that well known. It’s a cult film, but it’s not something that everybody immediately knows. In a way, that allows you to make something that’s really surprising. If it were a plot that everybody knew, you wouldn’t have been able to do that.

SS: Right. I agree.

FJO: But, even still, you changed the story somewhat.

SS: Because that’s what you do. When you want to adapt something, I think you have to make it your own. But in light of what we’re saying, it’s significant to note that I would say 75 percent of the libretto is the screenplay. It is literally lines from the screenplay that I set. And then maybe 25 percent is either stuff that I invented because I was changing the story, or it’s stuff that I lyricized by giving it more of a song structure or aria structure. Like doing some light rhyming. But I used a lot of the screenplay because it’s so well written.

LF: It’s really brilliant.

FJO: I know that you want the audience to be surprised. So would it be better if they saw the movie or not before they see the opera?

LF: I found it doesn’t matter.

SS: I don’t think it matters. The movie’s very repressed. Part of the effectiveness of it is that it’s claustrophobic and very, very repressed. Opera by its nature is not going to be repressed. But I was very pleased that when Brian Forbes, who wrote and directed the original film, came to see the opera in Santa Barbara where we did it, he was so enthusiastic about it and felt that I’d actually improved the story because I took it places that he didn’t really dare to do for commercial film. He was really taken with it. So I felt that I’d at least done well by its creator. But I like that people don’t know what’s going to happen. If we’ve been successful, it’s the equivalent I hope of a page-turner. You want to know what’s going to happen next. That I feel doesn’t happen often enough in contemporary opera. I don’t know this for a fact, but I have to assume that when people went to see Tosca for the first time, when it first was presented, they didn’t know how it was going to end, and they really wanted to know.

LF: Well, they did because it had been a famous play. But you get so used to La Dame aux Camelias or La Tosca, and then it’s suddenly recreated in front of you in a way you had no idea. That’s what’s so great. Those words and the situations are the same, they’re not really changed. My friends had the exact same experience [with Séance]. You take something that’s so direct—spoken word is just really direct—and then suddenly it’s musicalized and there’s something before it that brings you into it. Very often, in a play, you can put your own brakes on in the audience. But sometimes in an opera, you’re seduced. A musical idea starts to happen and you’re listening to it and all of a sudden, you’re like “Oh my god, I can’t believe he just did that.” You’re led into a story that in a play sometimes you’re able put the brakes on and say, “I’m not ready for this yet.” A great playwright has another character do something and suddenly now you’ve been brought in by another character. You know, great writing is that it’s not one person’s story that you’re constantly following. But when you musicalize language, the music can often take you somewhere where you wouldn’t allow yourself to go. I think this definitely has done that.

FJO: Although one of the things that we hope is that this becomes repertoire. And, when it becomes repertoire and gets done all over the world, all the time, every other season, in some other city, people are going to know the story.

SS: Well sure. I remember when Wicked first opened, and we were just begging everybody not to give away the ending and not to tell people what happened because there are so many big surprises in the second act. Eventually one loses that battle. Now most people who go to see Wicked do know how it ends.

LF: But everyone knows how Tosca ends and they still go back.

SS: It can’t just be about the surprise, but I think there’s fun in people seeing something and not knowing what’s going to happen next.

LF: I think it’s the interpretation; people go repeated times for the interpretation and to re-experience it. The interesting thing about theater is the surprise element may have captured 50 people, but it might not have captured 100. It could have been someone else’s way in through a character, and they want to keep re-experiencing that, and they don’t really care about the surprise element of something.

SS: You want to be able to identify with characters, feel for them, feel how you are like them, how you’re not like them, etc. It’s really how much as an audience member you get inside the character. You take the emotional journey with the character, and that doesn’t necessarily depend on surprise.

LF: Right. I mean I’m in a business where everybody knows the endings to everything that I do. It’s what can I bring to it Tuesday that I didn’t necessarily hook into the Saturday before that, but then maybe the following Friday I find something else. That’s the thing that compels people to come back to the same operas over and over again.

SS: You remind of one of the things that’s been so great about working with you. Even though I wrote all of the music and I wrote all the words, and I knew what it was going to sound like, when I actually saw you do it, there were things that completely blew me away. You revealed things that I was not aware were in the work.

LF: That’s where I pretty much feel like acting stood me well. I don’t make a decision and impose the decision on a piece, which is basically how we’re trained as opera singers. I wasn’t trained that way. I was trained to be open to finding something every time. And I always say the piece that literally lit me up the most was Mathis der Maler by Hindemith. It’s such a dense, thick score, so it reveals itself differently every night. I remember so clearly—Allan Glassman and I had this big duet, and every so often one of us would make a mistake in a performance, which was really anathema to both of us. We would constantly talk about it, and he would say, “Where’d that flute come from?” And I would say, “You gotta be kidding me. It’s the same flute every night; it comes in exactly the same place.” And he’d say, “I never heard that flute before.” Then I would make a mistake, and he would say, “What did you wait for?” And I would say, “Well, I was waiting for the oboe.” “What do you mean, the oboe is playing the note over and over and over again.” That was a score that was so complex that in a performance, you never ever heard it the same way twice. That’s the genius of a Thielemann; that’s the genius of a James Levine. Every night, they’ve got the same material in front of them, 50 times, but they take this amazing step to try to reveal it to you differently.

FJO: So a final basic communication question then. Wicked and The Baker’s Wife are being done in Germany, in German. Séance was written in English. We do Tosca in Italian here in America. Let’s say they’re going to do Séance in Germany. Translated?

SS: No. It’s an opera. That’s one of the good things for me. It has to be in English all the time. When you do theater, you translate mostly into the language of the country where it’s being performed. Although I know in opera, there are plenty of cases of Mozart operas in a couple of languages, etc., so I’ll take it back.

LF: The funny thing is, Strauss and Poulenc wanted their operas in the vernacular of the countries they would be performed in—

FJO: —Dialogue of the Carmelites.

LF: He wanted it done in English; he wanted it done in Spanish. And the same with Strauss. Neither was happy when it was done, though. It just sounds different. The emphasis is different. You’ll get to the point at the end of the sentence in English, and in Italian or in German, you don’t get to the point at the end of the sentence. You know what I mean? Composers have to give up control. They have to get used to the musical line making a shift—this note becomes that note. So it’s a mixed bag.

SS: When Wicked is being done in Germany, or Japan, or Finland, or Denmark—now I’m working with the translator into Dutch for the Holland production—I work very closely with the translators and we pretty well achieve what the lyric achieves. But you have to go quite far afield in terms of the meaning.

LF: Everybody gives a big thing about the Ruth and Thomas translations for all the Schirmer scores, but basically they found a very compelling way to keep the emphasis completely intact. A really great English translation changes the emphasis in the middle of the line.

SS: Anyway, I will be happy for this to remain in English, but I do hope it gets done in countries where English is not the lingua franca. Sorry to make a pun.

LF: It would be interesting if this is a universal. I don’t know. The situation seems oddly, quintessentially Anglo to me.

SS: There’s a Japanese movie based on Séance.

LF: There is?

SS: Yes. I think it’s a very universal story because it’s about two people who want things very, very much, and it causes them to make very extreme choices. People all over the world want things and do things to get what they want.

FJO: It’s a quintessential tragedy about parenthood, and all the different layers of it.

SS: To me it’s about love, which is very generalized. I hope this doesn’t give too much away, but one of the lines I added that’s not in the screenplay is the character Bill—who plays Lauren’s husband—says to her at one point in a big confrontation scene, “We both wanted what we wanted. We both loved what we loved too much.” I wanted that stated out loud because to me that’s the tragedy of these people, and of this piece.

LF: For me, it’s a real piece of transcendence. I feel like that’s why people like me in the piece. I cling to that in every scene, this desire to transcend that moment. In that way, I think it very much is Godspell; there’s a thing of transcending your human experience, being asked to do something and figuring out if you can transcend that, the constant search for something else. Do I accept this thing, or do I transcend it and try to change it?

FJO: Transcendence does crystallize the connections between all of your pieces. Because Godspell‘s about that. Pippin is about that. It’s about Pippin transcending his fate in what he’s asked to do, and what he winds up doing. Baker’s Wife is about that. Wicked is about that, too. And it’s about acceptance. They’re all about that.

SS: Well, thank you.

LF: At some point, we transcend our relationships with our mothers, with our husbands, with our neighbors. We are seeking something else. It’s so interesting. [Stephen and I] had our picture taken for Vanity Fair by this guy, Steven Pyke who’s this amazing photographer who became quite famous in the 1980s for these beautiful black and whites that he took in Ireland. At first I thought this can’t be the Steven Pyke. It’s just the weirdest coincidence ever. There’s a line in the very beginning of our piece about my relationship with my mother and my grandmother and passing this family idea of being a psychic. I always look for interesting visual representations in art and literature and everything and I put a book together for every piece that I do. And I found this beautiful picture, this black and white photo of three women just standing in a doorway. It’s just three women standing in a doorway, and I thought, “There we are: that’s me, there’s my mother, and that’s my grandmother, and it’s San Francisco.” Not so much. It’s Connemara in 1985, and it’s a Steven Pyke picture. So the picture that I’ve been basing my whole emotional life on for the piece was taken by the guy who ended up taking our photograph for Vanity Fair.

SS: We’ve had a lot of coincidences like that. I also like that audiences come out and have little arguments about what actually happened. I like the ambiguity. The ending [of Séance] is both tragic and joyous at the same time.

LF: It’s for everybody. It should be. Our dress rehearsal audience was 700 high school kids. It was the greatest single audience I’ve ever had, and I’ve had great audiences, you know what I mean. They were so vocal the entire time. Then I happened to be shopping in downtown Santa Barbara. I was trying on something. These five girls all went Aaagh! And then my friend Paula said, “You have to come out.” I said, “Why?” And she said, “They were at your show last night. They have to talk to you about it.” They’d been following us for an hour. So I ended up going to the high school, and I spent two hours with these kids. And we talked about theater, and drama, and what is a happy ending, and what ambiguity is, and is anything that’s ambiguous good. You know, is it good for you to have your decision about what something is and for me to have my decision about what something is, even though we’ve seen the same thing? This piece is very exciting because it does create a conversation.

SS: I have to feel good about whatever else it is, about having written an opera where teenagers who happen to be in the audience follow you around because they have to talk about it.

FJO: Forty years ago, when you were traumatized by contemporary music, and you were you disassociated from contemporary classical music and were connected to pop music, did either of you ever imagine that a contemporary opera could trigger such reactions from high school students?

LF: No.

SS: But I always knew that someday I wanted to write an opera. And therefore I was hoping that I could do it in such a way that it would tell a good story and connect with audiences. So, maybe I hoped it.

John Luther Adams and I are sitting together on a rock in Central Park, well within earshot of the evening rush hour traffic that’s beginning to crowd Fifth Avenue. At this point, I have already spent the afternoon in his company and hours with his work, finding each experience to be a kind of lesson in listening—whether drifting inside the dream that is In the White Silence, getting aurally shocked and beaten by Strange and Sacred Noise, or simply walking along the park’s reservoir while observing him taking in the surrounding environment. Poetically, however, it is here, in a forest fenced in by honking taxi cabs, that he distills the journey of his work to date down to its fundamental revelation. “If we’re listening deeply, if we’re listening carefully, if we’re listening with our broadest awareness,” he explains, “both noise and silence lead us to the same understanding, which is that the whole world is music.”

In a complex, chaotic world, Adams is the best kind of sonic guide: a humble, innately curious man with an ear deeply immersed in study. Glimpses of what he comes to know are reflected back to us through his music. In many cases, the aural images can be directly traced to the powerful natural world that surrounds him in his home state of Alaska, a landscape that has undeniably left its imprint on his work. More broadly, however, Adams uses composition as a way to explore and understand the world around him, regardless of borders real and imagined.

His openness to the new and unexpected has served his music well. He also welcomes the insights of those around him into the push and pull as the music finds its footing. A case in point: when a graduate student suggested an outdoor performance of Strange and Sacred Noise, a work that uses the constraints of the concert hall to rattle its audience to the bone, Adams heard how easily the sound blew away in the wind once the walls came down. Inspired, he made Inuksuit, a work designed to be played outside. Once again, however, his original intentions were allowed room to morph when eighth blackbird and the Park Avenue Armory in New York asked to bring the piece back under a roof so that 78 musicians (the majority of them percussionists) could gather in the venue’s expansive drill hall and bring it to life in the heart of the city. As the Armory performance began, I saw Adams, tall and delicately built, standing among the more than 1,300 people who had gathered to experience it. His eyes were closed, and I wondered how conscious he remained of the crush of people that surrounded him. When a smile suddenly crossed his face, I suspected that he was once again off following the sound running out ahead of him.

Adams has a careful, considered way of speaking which, by all indications, is quite similar to the way he works in the solitude of the small cabin he calls his composition studio in Alaska. In a pre-concert discussion before Inuksuit was performed, Adams noted that it wasn’t a site-specific work, but rather a site-determined piece. Listeners are invited to find the music in the space, wherever that may ultimately be. This takes his work beyond the idea that it is music that is about place and makes it music that is place. As an audience, we are invited to listen with him, hearing the world through his ears and also our own.

Performers fill the Park Avenue Armory’s Drill Hall before the NYC premiere of Adams’s Inuksuit.

Molly Sheridan: I know that you’ve begun work on a book that looks back on your career, a kind of memoir. As you’re engaged in that kind of reflection, what things about your life in music are revealing themselves to you?

John Luther Adams: I hesitate to call it a memoir because it’s always struck me that memoirs are written by truly famous people: politicians or movie stars or people who have done something extraordinary. I don’t feel that I fit any of those descriptions, so it’s a little uncomfortable for me, but the idea came up in a conversation I had walking across a frozen lake in Alaska with Alex Ross. Alex just very casually said, “You know, you’ve led a pretty interesting life. Have you ever thought of writing a memoir?” And my answer was, “No.” But several months later, the idea came back to me, and a few months after that it came back, and it kept coming back. It occurred to me that it might be useful to try to remember things and begin to create a kind of map of where I’ve been, where I think I am now, and where I might be going. I’m thinking of it more as an atlas of a life. A working title is Not Down In Any Map, which is stolen from a line in Moby Dick where Melville writes, “It is not down in any map. True places never are.” So I began at the beginning and have been gradually working my way north from my childhood in New Jersey and in the South, school in California, a kind of bucolic period on a farm in Georgia, and then a time on the Nez Perce reservation in Idaho, just before finding my true home in Alaska. It’s still early in the process and I’m not sure what I’m learning yet, but I’m enjoying it. I don’t really fancy myself a writer, and writing is a slow process for me. I’ve written two other books, and it wasn’t that much fun. But this one is kind of writing itself and I’m just along for the ride.

MS: In comparison with composing, is it a very different process for you?

JLA: Yes, it’s very different, and I value it because of that. Writing about my primary work, which is the music, usually after the fact, is really informative. It helps me understand in a different way what the music is about and where it’s leading me.

MS: There are a number of other people writing about your work right now, as well. Bernd Herzogenrath is in the process of editing a collection of essays and David Shimoni’s doctoral dissertation is about your music. Reading what other people have to say about the music you’ve written and looking into that mirror, what has that experience been like?

JLA: It’s curious to read other people’s ideas and understanding of the music. It’s very useful and informative and sometimes surprising. When someone discovers something in the work that I didn’t know was there, it doesn’t get any better than that. Whether it’s a performer finding something in the music that the composer doesn’t realize is there, or a writer who’s considering the music in an analytical or philosophical way and says, “Here’s a connection,” I read it and I think, “Hmm, I never thought of that.” That’s great because it means that the music has a life, that it engages other people in a direct and vital way. Other people are making the music their own. What more could a composer ask for?

Adams, Doug Perkins, and Steven Schick confer before the Inuksuit performance at the Park Avenue Armory, NYC.

MS: Do you think you would have always been open to hearing that kind of feedback? I can also see that being a tension and those surprises might not have been welcome at a certain point or to certain people.

JLA: When I was younger, I imagine I thought I knew what the music was about, so I might not have been as open to other people’s ideas about it. Now I just delight in it. Maybe the timing is really good. I’m so happy when they argue with me! David Shimoni will say, “Well, no, that’s not what you’re doing in this passage. No, look, this is how it works.” Well, yeah, maybe so. That’s one way of considering it. And I love that.

MS: Beyond the fact that you chose to make your home in Alaska rather than a major urban hub, though likely because of it as well, you’ve held a kind of outsider position in the music scene. In fact, it’s been something of a calling card and a listener only had to look at your catalog to see that association on display. In the past year or so, however, there has been something of an explosion of attention surrounding your work, including new recordings, major performances and awards, films, teaching positions at Harvard and Northwestern. Is that having a perceptible impact on your music or your relationship to it?

JLA: Without sounding flippant about it, I want to say no. It’s wonderful and I’m thrilled. Yet it really does seem in a way somehow separate from me and from my real life, if I can say that. My primary relationship with the work is still very much an introspective, lonely, solitary experience. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’ve always had this kind of bipolar life, but it’s a matter of keeping the internal and the external lives in balance. I can’t get enough of these wonderful performances by these incredible musicians, and it’s nice to occasionally get paid now for doing my work. It’s lovely that some people are taking note and writing about it. But I think as far as the rhythm of my life goes, the balance needs to be very much sort of 80/20, you know, solitary versus extroverted.

No one ever told me that I could have a career as a composer. No one ever told me I couldn’t. I just didn’t think in those terms, and I made all the wrong choices every step of the way. I made all the wrong career choices and I didn’t know what I was doing, but I think the music knew where it wanted me to go. By a series of happy accidents, and a few conscious choices and maybe the peculiarities of my own psyche, I kept making all the wrong choices, and that’s turned out to be the best possible thing that could have happened for the music and for the composer. If I’d come to New York as a kid and had been that hotshot young composer, I think that would have been a bad thing for me. So it’s great that the music is getting some love and attention now, and I’m eating it up. But at the same time, I feel a certain detachment from it, and that’s good.

Sample page used in the performance of Adams’s Inuksuit.

MS: Looking back at that time when you were “making all the wrong choices,” artistically what were you going through? What do you consider some of the milestones of that period and the hallmarks of the sound that you were discovering and developing?

JLA: The voice, somehow that happened very early for me. I don’t know exactly how, but I can tell you where and when. It was after graduating from CalArts and studying—lucky me—with James Tenney and with Leonard Stein. I retreated into the woods, and I started listening to birds. I listened for six months, learning the strange syllables one by one before I began writing things down. That for me was the beginning of the life’s work that’s continued ever since. That would have been 1974; I was 21.

As I’m teaching at Harvard now, and I’ve been teaching at Northwestern, I’m starting to understand how unconventional a path it’s been. I wasn’t aware of that because it’s just my life. And I still don’t know what I’m doing, and I hope I never do. When I find that I know what I’m doing, I’ll know I’m doing the wrong thing. For me, it’s this continuing process of discovery and exploration and taking on new things, following the curiosity, the fascination, and occasionally the wonder of creative work. I don’t think that’s something you understand while you’re doing it.

MS: You say you felt like you found your voice quickly. Do you think that taking that time alone to reflect is what allowed you to do that?

JLA: Yes, somehow. I’m actually a very slow learner. I’m a slow worker. I have to chew on things for a long time, and I’ve learned that I can’t rush that process. Some pieces are quicker than others, but none of them are fast for me. I have to trust that. I have this need—it’s not just the desire, it’s an actual need—to feel as though I’m always beginning again, that each time I’m starting from scratch. That’s not a very efficient way to work, or to live, but that’s what works for me.

MS: There seem to be some fundamental things that you have carried throughout your career, though. In what respects do you feel that you’re starting over?

JLA: I’m not changing anything in the music; music is changing everything in me. Maybe it’s fascination—maybe it’s that word again. Curiosity. Wonder. It’s that energy that moves around. Early in my life, it might be in bird songs, and then I start listening to the habitats in which the birds are singing, and that becomes an obsession with landscape. Then I’m exploring the landscapes of the Arctic and starting to understand a little bit of the history and to feel a little bit of the presence of the people who have lived in the Arctic for countless centuries. It becomes sonic geography, a piece like Earth and the Great Weather. Then somehow I’m listening and making field recordings in the Arctic and my ear, which has been tuned to animal calls or bird songs—the more poetic dimensions of the soundscape—becomes fascinated with the noisier, more complex elements: wind, waterfalls, ice sounds, thunder. That becomes an obsession. Through that fascination with noise, somehow I stumble into chaos theory and complexity theory and I wonder how the forms of fractals might sound. I put that together with noise and out comes Strange and Sacred Noise. Then I hear Strange and Sacred Noise and inside of that howling noise I hear voices, these sort of disembodied voices that have an almost human quality to them, and I want to hear those alone. So I begin sculpting noise and trying to extract pure tone out of complex noise, and then we have The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies. One thing leads to the next, leads to the next, and each time there’s something that carries forward from the previous work, but there’s also some new element that feels like the essential core of the new exploration.

MS: Though you make a practice of careful listening to your environment and frequently draw inspiration from that, your music is not a literal recreation of a true-to-life sound world. What are you actually listening for? What translates over into your music and how do you find yourself using these experiences?

JLA: Even when I was just beginning with the bird songs—unlike Messiaen, who prided himself on the accuracy and, as he put it, the authenticity of his bird settings—that was never my objective. Quite frankly, I think it would be impossible. But everything we human animals do—everything we think, everything we speak, everything we are—derives from the world in which we live, and the deepest, most inexhaustible source for my work is the world in which I live. And yet, I’m not trying to reproduce anything that I hear or experience in the world. I’m more interested in the resonances that a bird song or a peel of thunder or the dance of the aurora borealis or the noise of the traffic on Central Park West might evoke in me. That meeting of my listening, my consciousness, my awareness: that’s the music that’s happening around us all the time. For me, that’s where it is. So these pieces, even the very earliest pieces when I was involved with a kind of tone painting, it was never about representation or reproduction. It was always somehow about finding in music an equivalent to the experience of hearing a bird song, or being on the tundra, or being inside of an installation work by James Turrell. It’s about experience. I can use the word authenticity, but in a different sense perhaps than Messiaen. For me, it’s about authentic personal experience, about the primary experience of being there and paying attention.

MS: Should we as listeners take it as anything more than just where you go to find your creative inspiration?

JLA: I don’t know because I can’t separate my music from my life. Music is not what I do; music is how I understand the world. I hope that if I find myself in a singular place: wilderness, urban, indoors, outdoors, real, imaginary—doesn’t matter—if I find myself in a real place, a true place, and I am paying attention, then maybe I hear something that becomes music. If that happens, then I hope the music floats away, takes on a life of its own, and becomes something else to you when you hear it. What I may have experienced, what I may have been reading, or looking at, or listening to, or thinking about when I was in that place working on the music really doesn’t matter. What matters is the music and how it touches you.

MS: Are you always listening with that kind of intensity, or is it more like a well that you go to when it’s time to write another piece of music?

JLA: Pauline Oliveros is a samurai; I am not. Pauline has taken as her life’s discipline a very simple formulation that is exceedingly difficult to practice: Always to listen. I’m not that strong, but that is an aspiration wherever I am, whatever I’m doing, to really be there and really pay attention. For me, and I bet for Pauline too, as for all of us, there are moments, there are places, and there are times when you just know, this is it. I’m here, right now, and something magical happens. I don’t live for those experiences—that would probably be a mistake—but I do my best to be in the right place at the right time. Maybe it’s realizing that every place is the right place, and every time is the right time. For me, those are peak experiences.

Composing is slow, arduous, sometimes painful for me, but it has to begin with some primary experience of that magic. Then all the grunt work can follow, but I’m not one who can sit down and just sort of make it up. I admire anyone who can do that, but that doesn’t really interest me. I’m much more interested in being part of this larger dance.

MS: Can you file that kind of thing away, make some notes in a notebook or process it in some way and save it for later, or do you have to take it right to the studio, that impression and that energy?

JLA: It couldn’t be more inefficient. I carry notebooks and I’m always making sketches. I have a little music notebook and a little words notebook, and I carry them both with me and am constantly jotting down little things. Again, I’m a slow learner, and I’m sometimes amused when I see the same image or the same idea cropping up again and again over a period of several years until finally I begin to understand what it wants to be, or what it wants of me.

MS: Is there any piece where that was particularly a part of its development?

JLA: All of them are slow, but Strange and Sacred Noise is on my mind right now because Len Kamerling has just made this new film of a performance out on the tundra in the Alaska Range. That’s a piece that evolved slowly and sometimes painfully over six and a half years, and it involved many, many sketches—jottings of thoughts, little sketches of geometric shapes, ideas for instrumentation, and draft after draft after draft. That’s just one example of a piece that took a long time and involved a lot of sketching. I’ll bet half my catalog fits that description, really. I worked on In The White Silence non-stop for a year and a half, but that was once I had the basic material: the instrumentation, the basic harmonic and melodic elements of the piece, and a sense of the overall shape. That was just a process of putting one foot in front of the other, day after day, and just letting this expansive landscape emerge. It’s a very different process from composing Strange and Sacred Noise.

Sample musician set-up used in the performance of Adams’s Inuksuit.

MS: The way that you’re talking about it might seem to imply that all of these pieces are epic in scope and length, and some of them truly are. But some of them surprise me. In my memory it seems that they surely go on for an hour, but in reality they’re closer to 13 minutes. This condensing of time, is that an intentional detail on your part or is that just my personal experience of this music?

JLA: There must be, in the back of my mind, a purpose or purposes for making these shorter pieces. One obvious answer would be that they’re more practical. In the White Silence is one of my, I guess I would say, signature pieces, but the performance next week in Chicago will be the second live performance since the premiere 13 years ago. Apparently, it’s quite a commitment to program—let alone rehearse and perform—a 75-minute orchestra piece. Who knew? So doing these 13-minute pieces has a practical aspect to it. But I also think there’s a more centrally musical question that I’m exploring in pieces like The Light Within. White Silence is this vast tundra landscape. There’s a lot of sound in it, but the sound takes a long time to happen. The Light Within has just as much sound as that 75-minute piece, but it’s compressed into a 12-minute temporal space, and the tonal space of the piece is saturated from the lowest lows to the highest highs pretty much throughout the piece. So there’s a different exploration of saturation which, in some of these recent pieces, is more about density. If White Silence is a series of Robert Ryman white paintings, a mural of multiple panels, then these recent pieces are more like Richard Serra sculptures. They’re very heavy and they command the time and the space with a great deal of weight. Maybe they’re more earth than they are air.

MS: Do you have a favorite child among your pieces?

JLA: Well, there are two answers. Do I have a favorite child? Absolutely not. There’s not even a piece that I think, “Oh, that’s the really good one. Now my life is over.” And it’s not really my job to worry about that stuff. The other part of the answer is, “The piece I’m working on now.” Always. Like the whiskey I haven’t tasted yet is my favorite.

MS: Why is that?

JLA: That’s what it’s about for me. It’s about following the music because it’s my life, and it knows more than I do. It tells me where we’re going and, if I’m lucky, maybe after the fact, what we were doing. To me, that’s not just the fun, it’s the core of why this is my life’s work. It always knows more than I do.

MS: Do you actually like the writing more than the performance then? The process of making the work, exploring it, as opposed to sitting in the hall and hearing it come back to you?

JLA: Well, I’m with Morton Feldman. You know the WBAI conversations, John Cage and Morton Feldman—incredible, incredible series of unscripted conversations. At one point, John asks Morty, “Do you like composing or hearing the music?” And Morty, without missing a beat, says, “I like hearing the music.” And I’m with him. That’s the best. But it’s all great, even when it’s painful.

My other favorite part of it is the very beginning when there is no music, or I can’t hear it yet. It’s vague, and I’m not sure it’s even there. I have no idea what it wants to be, or where it’s going to take me. I try to avoid writing anything down for as long as I can because I found that somehow that helps clarify and distill that energy. Then, when I can’t not write, I start. So I love it all. The pre-compositional phase, then I love the composing—most of the time. I love rehearsing, I love learning from the performers. I love hearing it. And, call me crazy, I love recording.

MS: Let’s talk about recordings and how what you make translates to the document that it represents. Do you find that the recording or the live performance more often captures what you envisioned as “the work”?

JLA: I think it’s all the work. We can talk about the CD that we finished yesterday, which we expected to finish two months ago. It has a new piece for piano, mallet percussion, and electronic sounds. It was commissioned by Stephen Drury, the incredible pianist, and Steve and Scott Deal, percussionist, recorded it at Jordan Hall, New England Conservatory in Boston. It’s called 4000 Holes and, believe me, I’ve counted every one of them several times. We’ve been working on the mix for two months, daily, and in the process discovering the piece. It’s a new piece, and nobody knew how it actually went. Steve Drury and Scott Deal know it much better than I do, in a certain sense, because they learned how to play it, and it’s very hard. I know it in a different way because I worked on it for two years and went through I don’t know how many drafts. Then Nathaniel Reichman, my audio producer, knows it in a completely different way. And it was in the process of working with Nathaniel, putting the pieces together—the piano tracks, percussion tracks, the electronic tracks and trying to get it all to come into focus—that we really discovered the piece. I had my idea about the piece, but at a certain point, the music takes on a life of its own, and I can’t push it around.

Especially in the process of making a recording like this, I become kind of another performer. I was already a performer in the sense of making the electronic tracks, but then we had to learn how to play the piece in the studio to make the recording. I have the great good fortune to work with these superhuman performers: Steve Drury, Steve Schick, ICE, Doug Perkins, the Percussion Group Cincinnati, eighth blackbird, you know, these incredible musicians, all of whom understand the music better than I do and are dedicated to it and to sharing it with their listeners. But it occurred to me in the past week that the foremost interpreter of the music of John Luther Adams is Nathaniel Reichman, my audio guy who’s been working with me for 15 years and truly knows better than I do how things go together. So I love the process. I love the solitary part—I still regard that as the primary work—but I thrive on the social part. The collaborative part working with these gifted musicians who bring their skills and creative intelligence and generosity and good will to the music. That’s wonderfully gratifying and just fun.

MS: How much of their imprint ends up on the music then?

JLA: A lot. The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies would just simply not have happened, at least not the way it did, were it not a piece for Steven Schick. Percussion Group Cincinnati is deeply embedded in Strange and Sacred Noise. I don’t know that anyone else would have had the courage or the patience to work through that bizarre piece, to accompany me every step of the way and try out these different drafts of it. Al Otte and Jim Culley and Stuart Gerber and Rusty Burge—their personalities, their musical intelligence is inextricable from that piece of music.

You could name any number of examples of pieces that were made with and for specific musicians, but then there’s another way in which the musicians’ identities become part of the music, and that’s when musicians who weren’t involved in the first performance—maybe musicians who haven’t even worked with me—pick it up and make it their own and find a new take on it that I couldn’t have dreamed of. Recently I had that experience with the earliest works in the catalog, the songbirdsongs—little pieces from the mid ’70s for piccolos and percussion and a few other assorted instruments. There’s a new recording of those pieces after all these years, and it’s Steve Drury’s group, Callithumpian Consort, at New England Conservatory. I went in for the recording sessions, but I hadn’t coached the group at all. And here are these early 20-somethings, incredible musicians—I expected that—but what I wasn’t prepared for was how they got the music. Not only did they know how to do it the way I knew how to do it from my experiences performing with my own little groups back in the ’70s, but they knew how to do it in ways that I never imagined. Sure, they had Steve Drury there to work with them, and he understands my music profoundly, but there’s something else that happens, too. I’m not sure if it’s a zeitgeist thing, but somehow this music that we’re all involved in gets into the air, and people start to learn how to hear it. The first performances are difficult. Then, a generation goes by and suddenly people just know how to play it.

78 performers prepare for the NYC premiere of Adams’s Inuksuit.

MS: It seems like you’re getting at something that’s more than a technical consideration.

JLA: I think it’s absolutely more than technical. Clearly the technical proficiency of musicians, like the technical accomplishments of athletes—without performance enhancing substances—continues to increase, but that’s not what I’m talking about. It’s something truly musical.

MS: To what do you attribute that?

JLA: The music—maybe it’s hard to get it out the first time. It’s hard to find it for the composer; it’s hard to get it on paper. It’s hard for the poor people who have to wrestle with it the first few times and figure out what the hieroglyphs mean: how it really sounds and what it wants, to get the composer out of the way and get it into the air and get it to our ears. But then something happens and the music teaches us all how to hear it and how to play it, and I love that.

Lou Harrison was the first person to encourage me in that regard. I was interviewing Lou—it must have been in the early ’80s—for a weekly radio program I did about new music. Somehow we got onto his Fugue for Percussion from 1941. It’s a short piece for percussion ensemble in which he wanted to make a fugue, but not a fugue in which the entrances and the relationships are in harmonic terms, but in purely rhythmic terms and tempo relationships. He got together with John Cage who helped him a little bit with the math, with its “is-tos and as-tos,” as Lou put. He wrote this exquisite and challenging piece for percussion, and he gave it to Stokowski, who was a proponent of his music. Stokowski said, “This is not performable—yet.” And he was absolutely right. Now it’s regularly performed by college percussion ensembles and even high school ensembles. What happened? Who knows! But people learned how to see it on the page, how to hear it, how to play it, and that’s a beautiful thing. There’s a way of listening and a way of playing that’s implicit in new music. Sometimes it takes a while to figure that out. We all have to kind of figure it out together.

MS: You’ve been teaching at Northwestern and Harvard. Teaching is not a new experience for you, but in these particular environments, what do you find yourself passing on and what are you taking away?

JLA: As you say, I have been at other schools in the past: at Bennington College and at Oberlin and occasionally at the University of Alaska. But I began my seminar at Harvard with a series of disclaimers. I remember the first time I heard e.e. cummings reading his six nonlectures—I was still a teenager—and there is this recurring refrain. Again and again he says, “I’m an artist. I’m a man. I’m a failure.” And I found myself standing there at Harvard for the first time invoking cummings and feeling very much the same way. I’m not an intellectual. I’m not a teacher. I write a little bit, but I’m not a writer. The only thing I really know anything about is my own work as a composer. I’m an artist. I’m a man. I’m a failure. So there I am at Harvard, and the students are wonderful. And there I am at Northwestern, and the students are wonderful. And I think I must seem a little bit like the joker in the deck. Perhaps some of them are still trying to figure out what I’m doing there, but it’s a very interesting conversation for both of us. I’m so curious about what aspiring young composers are listening to and thinking about and reading and, most of all, what they’re writing. No, even more than that, what I’m fascinated with is the questions that they’re asking. They’re asking questions not only about music, but about what they’re doing with their lives and what meaning music and art have in this world of ours that is so crazy and mixed up right now. It’s profoundly reassuring to me that there are these brilliant young people who are not only struggling to dedicate their lives to music, but are also struggling with questions about what that means in the larger sense.

MS: What about questions that you struggle with? I’m thinking specifically about the fact that often you are not only John Luther Adams, but you’re John Luther Adams from Alaska. It was a fair connection to make considering how open you have been speaking about the role that place, and particularly your home, has played in your work. Yet I imagine that the weight of that association at a certain point becomes an issue. At the point you are in your career now, how are you carrying that aspect of who you are?

JLA: That’s an interesting question and one I am asking myself a lot these days. I’m in the middle of a nine-month period that is the longest I’ve been away from Alaska in 35 years, and it’s good. It’s kind of an extended camping trip, an adventure. Alaska is my home, and it always will be. Alaska gave me not only a life, it gave me a life’s work. I went there with the idea that I might be able to find a new kind of music there. Maybe I did, and I’m always grateful for it.

Alaska is home, and will always be home, but there comes a time when we have to leave home, and that’s where I am right now. I’m traveling around and having new experiences and exploring new places, both geographically and artistically. I’ve written extensively about my relationship to Alaska, my music has been directly influenced by Alaska, many of my pieces are about Alaska in some sense. One of them, The Place Where You Go To Listen, you might say is Alaska. It’s the installation work that’s at the Museum of the North in Fairbanks, and it’s controlled in real time by the weather and geomagnetic activity, the aurora borealis, seismic activity, all these things that are happening all the time, right now, in that place.

MS: How did you come to make that work specifically? I’m curious because for a composer who points to place as a driving inspiration, that’s a more concrete version of the place where you are than any work that you have made?

JLA: It was difficult because it was a new medium. I’d never done an installation work before, a purely synthetic work. It was difficult because I’d never worked with raw data streams as source material for music. It was difficult just because it was the biggest and most ambitious piece I’ve ever attempted. And, in addition to all the abstract dimensions of the piece, it’s very, very physical. I not only had to design the instruments—the virtual orchestra that makes the music—and compose the music, I had to design and build the room in which it’s heard. So it was a huge and all-consuming process for three or four years.

After all these years of making music about place, and then trying to make music that somehow is place, this was the most concrete opportunity I’ve ever had to work with place not only as a metaphor, but as an actual, physical reality. So I really was thrilled by the opportunity and thought about it for a couple of years. One beautiful fall morning, we were flying out of Fairbanks—to go to Oberlin, actually, I was teaching there that fall—and it was an absolutely cloudless morning. The sun had just risen, and we were flying over the Alaska Range, and I felt this intense, almost erotic love for that landscape. It’s the landscape of my soul. Sitting next to this poor person on the plane, I’m looking out the window and I start weeping. For the next two and a half hours, I just sat there and started writing down these ideas for The Place. It kind of came to me in this flood of inspiration, but inspiration mixed with longing. So that love and that longing became The Place Where You Go to Listen.

MS: Why would you feel that as longing, though, since you have been able to make your home physically in a place where you have also found a profound spiritual connection? What are you longing for?

JLA: Well, I was leaving home, and that probably had something to do with it. Though my wife, who is very wise, has observed on several occasions that she’ll hear a piece of mine and she’ll say, “Oh, there’s so much longing in that music.” And I think she’s right. Sometimes I experience that longing in a beautiful landscape. I’ll be out in the mountains or on the tundra somewhere and just overwhelmed by the beauty and the power and the all-encompassing presence of the place. At the same time, I’m filled with this love for it. But also there’s an element of wanting to know it or become part of it even more completely. Yet, there it is, there I am, and what’s missing? Maybe it’s something that we’re always longing for in our consciousness. To be more fully present in the moment, wherever we are. Nostalgia for the present moment.

MS: Is that a state you find yourself in a lot?

JLA: Yeah, I’m kind of goofy that way.

MS: Is the piece that you envisioned when you were looking out that window really what the piece ended up being? Did it stay pretty true to that original vision?

JLA: Yes and no. I think the overall vision of it didn’t change, but of course the sounds, the moment-to-moment details, the texture, the colors of the piece, I couldn’t imagine at that moment. I had to discover that over the course of the next few years while working it out.

MS: We’ve covered a lot of ground here and spoken about pieces that led you to new ideas and the creation of the next piece of music in your catalog, but to bring it up to the present and the most recent chapter of your music-making, what are the hallmarks in that work?

JLA: For years I’ve felt that there are two, apparently opposite, sides to my work. There’s this very spacious, beautiful, suspended-time atmosphere, and then there’s this muscular, almost violent side. In part, I think that did grow out of my own experience of living in the subarctic for most of my life. It’s dark all winter, and it’s light all summer. It’s pretty extreme that way; there’s never equilibrium. You swing from one extreme to the other in the rhythms of the season, in the rhythms of night and day. I’ve always been drawn to extremes and not been too much about the middle, so that rhythm of going from one extreme to the other feels natural to me. Without my being consciously aware of it or trying to put it there, I think it found its way into my music.

Another way of thinking about those two sides or two sound worlds: let’s take In The White Silence and Strange and Sacred Noise, two landmark works of mine that appear to be completely opposite. White Silence is 75 minutes of sustained and lyrical and unabashedly beautiful music for strings. Strange and Sacred Noise is 75 minutes of relentless noise for percussion. So you might say that one side of my work originates in silence, and the other side originates in noise. We usually think of noise and silence as being opposite extremes, but in recent years as my work has evolved and in a way expanded, those two extremes have started to converge. Again, take those two pieces. In the White Silence is 75 minutes of continuous music for a small orchestra. There’s not a second of silence in the piece. Strange and Sacred Noise is 75 minutes of loud, physical, even violent percussion music, which contains several minutes of composed silence. So what’s that about? Did I just get my titles transposed? I don’t think so. I think there’s something deeper going on. There is a point at which noise and silence are the same thing. If we’re listening deeply, if we’re listening carefully, if we’re listening with our broadest awareness, both noise and silence lead us to the same understanding, which is that the whole world is music.

Sample pages used in the performance of Adams’s Inuksuit.

Barbara Benary: Mother of Lion from NewMusicBox on Vimeo.

A conversation between Barbara Benary and Frank J. Oteri at Daniel Goode’s loft in New York City
January 4, 2011—2 p.m.
Transcribed by Julia Lu
Edited by Frank J. Oteri, Alexandra Gardner, and John Lydon
Audio/video presentation and photography by Molly Sheridan

The following description of the relationship between a composer and a composition, which appears in Kyle Gann’s booklet notes for Barbara Benary’s New World CD, Sun on Snow, was written by Benary nearly forty years ago:

The piece is a child
It is also a vehicle of communication
The child is an idea in the parents’ mind
They give it life, try to shape it to their imagined end.
Other things shape it too.
Other people, life’s happenings and the growing plan from within.
The good parent knows when the shaping is done.
Lets go.
Has no fear of the diverse possibilities into which the child may grow.

While the passage of time has seen Benary’s compositional aesthetics evolve from post-Cagean conceptualism to minimalism (she was an early member of the Philip Glass Ensemble) to an eclectic polystylism, her comparison of making music to parenthood remains apt not only for her own compositions but everything she has engendered in the new music community.

Benary built the instruments for Gamelan Son of Lion (GSOL) and together with fellow composers Philip Corner and Daniel Goode made GSOL a model for composers’ collectives everywhere. While the ensemble is named after her (Benary in Hebrew means “son of lion”), she hardly thinks of it as “her” ensemble. For her, being part of something much larger is far more meaningful:

Although I imagine I have as much of an ego as many composers do, it’s not that important to me that I be in the forefront of the experience.

After devoting years to the study of ethnomusicology, Benary has a much broader view of the cultural context for music than our contemporary Western society’s typical parsing of the world into composers, performers, and listeners. Benary finds joy not only in playing her own and others’ music in Gamelan Son of Lion but also in reading through string quartets with a group of amateur musicians. For her own amusement, she has even written several novels (one of which, Princess Without a Nose, you can read here).

Yet Benary remains ever self-effacing and is rarely the center of attention. But for founding and maintaining this seminal new music organization, as well as for her own extraordinary compositions which surreally blend Indonesian sonorities and musical traditions as diverse as Baroque passacaglias, Scottish fiddle tunes, and Karnatic kritis (as well as occasional hints of jazz and rock), she should be.

—FJO

*

Frank J. Oteri: Walking around Manhattan, I keep seeing photos everywhere of The Beatles because they recently allowed their music to be released on iTunes. To the general public, even though they established separate identities as songwriters and performers, everybody still thinks of them collectively as The Beatles because The Beatles as a group were more successful than any of them ever were individually. The notion of a collective identity is a rare thing in—for lack of a better term—contemporary classical music. And it was even rarer when Gamelan Son of Lion first came into existence; this was more than a decade before Bang on a Can. And with Bang on a Can, more people know that name than know Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe, and David Lang, although that’s been changing to some extent. But I would posit to say more people know Gamelan Son of Lion than know Barbara Benary.

Barbara Benary: It could be true. But I think in a way the separate people in Gamelan Son of Lion also have had pretty strong, independent lives and what we do is different from each other. We’re not going to be like The Beatles. We’re not going to all produce the same kind of thing separately that we do together. And that together changes identity all the time because people join the group, and people leave the group. Daniel [Goode] and I have been in there for 30 years, but nobody else has. There are several other people who have been in there 20 years. Some were only there for two years. It changes. And I think the collective nature of our music has changed accordingly. We were into heavy minimalism in our first decade. Now it’s more involved with multimedia. I don’t want to say maximalist, but it is music that is full of different ideas, more dramatic and, within a piece, much more changing happening.

FJO: From the very beginning, even though Son of Lion is an English translation of your Hebrew last name, Benary, it was never your ensemble. It has always been about thinking collectively and having a collective voice. To make a very significant portion of your life’s work this thing that is ultimately not about you seems extraordinarily selfless and almost goes against the grain of composing, which is, after all, an egotistical activity to some extent.

BB: I’m not a soloist kind of personality. And although I imagine I have as much of an ego as many composers do, it’s not that important to me that I be in the forefront of the experience. I play violin, but I don’t like to play solos. I like to play string quartets. That’s the kind of person I am. So the gamelan is my adult continuation of the string quartets I played as a teenager.

Concert at Washington Square Chamber Music series

When I’m playing in the gamelan, it rarely occurs to me that we’re doing my piece or we’re doing someone else’s piece. Even if I didn’t write it, I feel pretty close to it, as if I wrote it. The line between performer and composer is a pretty thin one, since most composers are performers. So every time I do somebody else’s piece, it enters into my own collective experience of everything I’ve heard and played. And some of it gets reflected back into my music. As a group I think we have borrowed from each other on numerous occasions.

FJO: There have been some pieces over the years that have been collaboratively composed, pieces like Gamelan NEA and the 9/11 Suite.

BB: Those are fun. But those two pieces in particular are built on small, interlocking sections, so each composer wrote their section entirely according to what they wanted to do. But the form was determined pretty much by the players, by the other people who were not the composer. So that was basically a really, very nice collective input of getting everybody to be the composer in the sense of setting up the structure. There’s a third piece that we did collectively which was called Gamelan Round Robin, which we only did for one season. That was based on the idea of a round robin letter or exquisite corpse. I set up the parameters for us. It was an instruction piece. My instructions were first of all, that your section has to be no longer than two minutes and that you have to not make it up ahead of time, which is sort of like the joke about trying not to think of a monkey because everybody right away had something in their head. We drew lots and came up with an order, so the first person will write the first thing. After we played it, then the second composer should make up the second thing. And it should either relate to it, or deliberately not relate to it. Plus we had some people in there doing things who were actually not ordinarily composers. But they could do it because they were just reacting to the former pieces. And that was kind of fun, too.

FJO: I wonder if those collaborative pieces somehow have influenced you when you go back to write pieces by yourself. Pieces like Jigalullaby, which combines gamelan and Scottish folk songs.

BB: The one with the Scottish songs worked because basically the gamelan was doing gamelan patterns and the strings were doing the melodies. And I didn’t try to reverse that. So that was basically two different things going on at once.

FJO: Even in a piece like Downtown Steel, there are multiple stylistic layers that somehow coexist. You said that in the beginning you were all doing minimalist stuff and then everybody started doing other things. You’ve been a fixture throughout this history, so that means that you’ve changed as a composer, too.

BB: I hope so.

FJO: And before minimalism became the predominant stylistic language for the group, there were a lot of conceptual pieces that seem to be coming out of a post-Cage compositional aesthetic. Your earliest pieces, too, before you started Gamelan Son of Lion.

BB: That’s probably true. I have a whole bunch of early pieces that I published called system pieces. There’s potential to turn any of them into a gamelan piece quite easily, except for the ones that require sustained sound, because that wouldn’t work so well. That’s an idea. I hadn’t thought of going back to those old things, but everything’s there somewhere in the clutter of my room.

FJO: So how does somebody join Gamelan Son of Lion?

BB: Primarily I would say it’s been that we meet interesting musicians, and they say, “Hey, could I play with your group?” That’s one way. In fact, most people have drifted in that way. The other is, “Hey, would you like to come play with us? You’re a new person. What you do would be very interesting to us.” So, we invite people to join. Those are mostly the way it happens.

FJO: So you don’t need to have prior knowledge of how to play gamelan instruments?

BB: Oh no. When I brought the gamelan to Rutgers, the other two co-founders had never played gamelan. They probably intellectually had heard of it, of course, and had listened to it perhaps, but had not played it. Philip Corner had written many, many pieces for gamelan before he finally got together with Jody Diamond in California and took some lessons. I actually studied Indonesian gamelan a lot. Some members of the group here have had some prior experience in some other gamelan group somewhere else or in their college. But I feel like I’m the main teacher of Indonesian music to a lot of people in the group. And that’s kind of frightening since I know so little compared to the people who have devoted their lifetime to it. But what we’re doing is not really Indonesian music. What we’re doing is whatever we can make the gamelan instruments do. And if we can make it do things that come from our world, that’s good. And if it doesn’t work, then that’s kind of interesting, too, like when you try to get Western tunes to come out on these instruments which are tuned in a non-diatonic, non-harmonic scheme. If you try to play a Western tune, it comes out a little wacky. And that’s kind of good sometimes, and people take advantage of that.

FJO: Is everybody who’s in Gamelan Son of Lion a composer?

BB: Not always. And we also have had people who were in the group who are composers, but not necessarily doing pieces for gamelan. For instance, we have one person in the group named John Morton who’s an interesting musician, and I think quite a lot of his connection is social. He’s written one terrific piece for us and is about to write another, but he’s not in a hurry to keep throwing out pieces. He’s kind of enjoying the experience. I’m trying to think how long non-composers have stayed in the group. Some have stayed in the group for a few years, but none for very long.

FJO: But repertoire for the group is chosen from among all of you, and sometimes you’ll even do music of an outside composer. I’m curious about how that happens.

BB: I guess I’m the big pusher for that, because I feel we can get awfully insular if every program seems to have the same composers doing different pieces. Some people are very happy to do the same thing over and over. I’m not. So I like to get in new people and new ideas. So in the last four years or so, I’ve tried to make it a point of inviting a guest composer or two every year. If we have regular, reliable funding, we could do that in a better way with commissions and things like that. Instead we’ve initiated what we call the Bupkis Commissions. Bupkis means nothing. So the nothing commission is basically that we’ll do your piece and we’ll even try to record it for you. And if I can scare up a few hundred bucks, we’ll do that. And of course we pay the composer for performing if they’re performing with us. And most of our composers do in fact perform.

Concert at the Noguchi Museum

FJO: You are nominally the artistic director, but you seem to be somebody who’s very reticent to be a leader in that sense. So who makes the artistic decisions about choosing composers and finding repertoire?

BB: Well I’m reminded of the story about the Indian chief when the white person asks him, “Why can’t you do this; you’re the chief? Why can’t you just tell them what to do?” And he says, “I’m only the chief if they care to think so.” In Indian culture the chief might have one opinion, but it’s probably the committee of grandmas that makes the decision about whether we go to war.

FJO: So who’s the committee of grandmas in Gamelan Son of Lion?

BB: Oh, I guess I’m a grandma. [laughs] No, I don’t know. Basically, what happens is at the beginning of each year, we sit around and we say, “O.K., who wants to do what this year?” And somebody will say, “Well, I have this idea I want to develop.” And then we use it as an open workshop. Other people come in and say, “O.K., my piece is ready; here’s the entire thing.” And they have everything worked out before we even play a note. And it’s kind of fun to get to play between these two kinds of people. And we try to do everything. Sometimes somebody in the process of working something out will find it’s not working too well. And, like 95 percent [of the time], the composer will make the decision not to do it. I’ve never really had to say we don’t want to do your piece.

FJO: You say that you don’t ever like to do the same thing over again. You like to constantly do new things. That can be very difficult to pull off.

BB: I think if you follow our repertoire for any year, I’d say you can only introduce so many new pieces and do them well in a given amount of time. So if we do between four and six or seven pieces that are new in a year, that’s plenty. That’s a lot. We’ve got ten composers in the group, and people like to be represented. That’s their payback for being a member of the group: You get your pieces done.

If a piece goes over very well, we certainly do it through the whole season, and sometimes we carry it over to the next season. So every piece that we do, that ends up being do-able, we do at least three times. After that it becomes a matter of necessity and the programming. Depending on where we’re performing, if we’re performing in a kind of situation where the sponsor, let’s say, wants to have some representative of this, some of that. We’ll look at this back repertoire which is very large now and say, “O.K., what can we do with these people?” Our personnel is not always the same for every concert, so we drag out old pieces that fit. Some of them, like one piece of Dan’s called Eine Kleine Gamelan Music, we’ve been dragging out for a long, long time. It’s a great piece. And it’s easy to prepare. We can bring new people into it in one rehearsal. Other pieces are more difficult. They require practice. They require a lot of ensemble work, and those generally only get done during the first season, when we have a fixed bunch of people who know how to do it.

FJO: I wanted to get back to what you were saying about being the principal gamelan teacher for everybody and feeling a little uncomfortable in that role. Why gamelan? What made you embark on this in the first place?

BB: Well, I have two graduate degrees in ethnomusicology, and my work was primarily with music of India and Indonesia. All my scholarly work was in India, but I played gamelan the whole time I was in graduate school and—when I interviewed for my job at Rutgers—that was sort of my shoe in the door. I said, “I can make you a gamelan; I can start a gamelan program.” At that time it was very difficult to get gamelan instruments. They were very expensive. So the fact that I could make them was very helpful. And that’s where the Gamelan Son of Lion group started, Rutgers.

Why gamelan? Because although I had really loved Indian music, and I was very influenced by India in terms of structure, the fact is it’s hard to become a good Indian musician in a short amount of time. And I also had no particular motivation to mix it with new music, which is something I had been doing since way back. However, I discovered since it’s fairly easy to teach gamelan on a simple level to anybody, that became the easier thing to sell, and also the easier thing to open to composers. And that’s where Philip Corner and Dan Goode were a huge help, because we just got this idea to do things with them. Dan was playing a piece of his called Circular Thoughts on the clarinet, and he was playing it while we were rehearsing one day. And I think one of us said to him, “Why don’t we make a gamelan version of that?” And he did. He wrote his first gamelan piece, which is wonderful. That’s something we could pull out of the can and do again any time. And Philip Corner was writing these sort of indeterminate pieces, the sounds out of silence spaces pieces. And he was very attracted to the idea of percussion as just-found sound, and so he had a lot of fun trying to apply these to the gamelan. I had some indeterminate pieces and some process pieces I had written for sort of a mixed group of instruments or vocalists. I had been doing that for a few years before I went to Rutgers. And so I adapted one of them to the gamelan, and then another, and then it just picked up and went.

FJO: It’s interesting that composing and ethnomusicology were initially in two different places for you but then they somehow got fused together. I’d like to take it back even further. I’ve read that you were composing music from the time you were four years old and you were playing violin. You mentioned that you played gamelan when you were in graduate school, at Wesleyan. You were there when Dennis Murphy was building the very first gamelan made in America.

BB: Dennis Murphy was a wonderful person. He passed away just a few weeks ago. I must have met him when I was at Wesleyan. He was a graduate student, but not living there. He came by and visited. One of the things he told me about was that he was making instruments. He made a gamelan out of metal and junk, but I didn’t actually play on his instruments. It was quite a while before I actually saw them, I think. The one I was playing was an Indonesian set of instruments that came over to the World’s Fair.

But the idea that came to me was that I could continue to play gamelan if I made one, because I certainly didn’t have the money to buy one and import it from Java. Nowadays, you can do that because things have changed a lot. A lot of iron gamelans are being made at a much, much lower cost. And there’s one gamelan maker whose wife has a whole import/export business. Universities in this country buy instruments, and she sends them out. That kind of thing didn’t happen before.

FJO: This has been an amazing cultural transformation over the past 40 years. There are now over 100 universities in North America that have gamelans. But all this didn’t start happening until after you started doing this. And you’re part of the first generation that took these instruments and said let’s make something else using them—let’s make it an American music ensemble.

BB: I must say that I’m not the only person who did that, because I got in touch with people in California, including Jody Diamond, and Daniel Schmidt, and Lou Harrison, and Bill Colvig. Bill was making instruments for Lou Harrison. It was a different technology than Dennis Murphy’s, because Bill was working with aluminum. Murphy worked with iron.

And here I should mention that there’s this whole business of traditionalism. Nobody can be more hard-nosed about it than a new convert. We had people who studied gamelan and who really got very fixed ideas that this is sacred and you can’t mess with it. I think I spent the first 15 years or so of my gamelan career trying to justify what I was doing. But if you made the instruments, they weren’t that sacrosanct any more. When I was in California, at the ASEA summer school, American Society for Eastern Arts, Lou Harrison was there. There was a Javanese gamelan there and a little Balinese gamelan. And there were a whole bunch of composers. And Lou Harrison got the idea of getting these kids to write pieces. He was a wonderful man that way. He was always very generous and non-competitive and encouraging. So four or five of us who were taking a class with him said, “Oh, that would be fun.” And he said, “Why don’t we do a concert of new music that Americans wrote?” But of course there was this problem. If we played them on the traditional instruments, people might get their feathers ruffled. So he brought in this set of instruments that Bill Colvig had made, which he just called American Gamelan. It was a whole set. And we all adapted pieces that we knew for this set of instruments and did a little concert. And what’s interesting is every one of those composers in that group went on and started their own gamelan.

FJO: The accusation of cultural appropriation is somewhat disingenuous in 21st-century America. Almost none of the instruments or the roots of those instruments used in any of the music we make on them belong to us per se. The gamelan might not have been conceived to play American music, but neither was the cello or the piano or even the guitar. As an ethnomusicologist, you probably find it somewhat odd that there are people who put Western music in this weird frame claiming it’s universal. We elevate it in a way that keeps it away from its cultural context. But other music we’ll say is Indian music or Indonesian music or African music. And if you’re not from that culture, you’re somehow a plunderer of it if you start using it in your own music.

BB: That idea’s been around for a long time. It’s just nonsense. That’s all I can say. Lou Harrison said it very eloquently in some of the articles he wrote that say it’s a whole world of sound out there, and we’re a part of the world so it’s also part of us. Every classical composer has borrowed from lots around them. Everybody borrows from everybody, but that doesn’t mean that they are trying to injure anybody thereby. It’s just what it is.

FJO: To bring this back to you, before you were ever involved with ethnomusicology, you were a composer. But you decided not to pursue a degree in composition.

BB: I suppose what happened was that when I look back on it, my first two influential composition teachers were a set designer and a musicologist who gave lectures for the New York Philharmonic. They were both great composition teachers because they weren’t trying to put themselves forward as an example of anything. They would say, “Write something.” And I would write something. The one who was the music historian would say, this reminds me of so-and-so. And then he would teach me about someone. And he said, “This is what that composer did with that. Not that you have to do it. But what would you think about doing something like that?” And the one who was the set designer was a theater person, and he would say, “This is the play. And these are the kinds of music it reminds me of.” And he would pull out examples from this record or that record and say, “That’s the flavor that I’m after.” And he would assign me to write something that fit that, and fit the play. And I wrote theater music for him for more than four years. He was very influential, but he never told me a single note of what to write. He’d just push me forward and say, “Keep going, just keep doing it.” And that was great.

In a way the gamelan’s collective of composers have been my teachers. Having a group to play things is the best lesson you could get. You can have this wonderful idea. You put it down in front of real people, and they try to realize it, and then you have to clean up your act. So I think that was very good for me.

FJO: So you never had the experience of studying composition and being told that what you were doing stylistically—like conceptualism or minimalism—was somehow not right?

BB: Oh no. I avoided all of that [laughs].

FJO: In terms of how have taught others how to play gamelan music, I was curious about musical notation. Not everyone would agree, but I think Western notation is usually a very efficient means of dissemination. But it’s very specific to Western music, even though for better or worse it has become the de facto way all music is notated, because now we have computer software that we can easily rattle stuff off by using. It’s become a language into itself. But it’s an imperfect language, because it’s very specific to the music it was designed to notate.

BB: Of the three composers who were in this group [initially], we basically didn’t use staff notation until we started having pieces for which it was appropriate. But I should say at the far of end it, at the present, almost all the pieces that come through Gamelan Son of Lion are Finale notated because this awful thing happened: the band became Finale literate. They all learned how to do it. However, we understand that the staff does not sound the same as these [instruments] do. So basically we’re using number notation also.

I have a translation system up on our Gamelan Son of Lion’s website. It shows how you get an equivalency. For each note, there are 10 different pitches in the two combined scales. For each of those 10 pitches, there’s the closest equivalent staff note. And that’s what we use with the understanding that that’s what it sounds like, which is fine, except if you get Western instruments or singers with you, they have to adjust. Basically we write it out in this regular staff system, but underneath we write the numbers instead of where lyrics would be. We write the number that goes with each note. Some people just simply read the numbers and ignore the staff. Some people read the staff and ignore the numbers. And there’s the third language which is where you just have a word score like Philip Corner would do. Just words to explain what happens. This happens first. This happens next. This is how it ends. He also used graphic designs a lot. It’s nice to be able to mix these all up.

Cymbals in Balaganju parade

FJO: Of course the other factor in composing and notating music for gamelan is that each gamelan is completely unique in terms of its overall tuning. So specificity is problematic if you want this to be playable by multiple groups, and if you only want it done on one set of instruments, they’re not particularly portable. How is the consideration of specificity or lack thereof an important issue in composing practical music for gamelan?

BB: It is, and it’s actually an interesting possibility. When this group went to Java in 1996, we had a repertoire we were going to play. Of course I told people not to write pieces that are pitch specific because it’s not going to be the same pitches over there. You’re going to have only an approximation of the intervals. Well, some people listened to me and some people didn’t. And some people said, “Well, this is my piece, and I just want to do it.” Then we got over there, and it took a lot of adjusting, because we were rehearsing on one set of instruments, performing on a second set of instruments, and then we went touring. We went to about three other places where the instruments were tuned totally differently. And some things were pretty difficult.

It depends if you’re thinking in terms of melody or not. If you’re thinking in terms of something that’s process based, it’s easy to do. But if you want to do something that has a specific tune, you’re running into trouble if you expect it to stay the same. I wrote a piece that was a ragtime for only four pitches to do over there [in Java]. We ended up having to transpose it from the four notes here, to four other notes to make it work. And it was an interesting and challenging thing to do. But if you’re dealing with Javanese tunes, basically they’re written in the numbers and they will sound somewhat different on different gamelans. I think of it in terms of taste or flavor. It’ll definitely have a different flavor, but it will be recognizable. Maybe there aren’t that many pieces that all composers do that can withstand that kind of interpretational change.

FJO: So how does this open-ended aesthetic play out when you compose music for Western instruments? You’ve mentioned writing for string quartet—do you expect them to play intervals that are like the intervals in gamelan music? Do you write specific pitches that are meant to be played the same way every time? Or is it as malleable as your gamelan music?

BB: When I play the violin with the gamelan, which I do frequently, I can actually play the scales, because they’ve just been in my ears for 30 years, so I can just do it. But it involves stretching or, in some instances, retuning the instrument. What really works for me is if you just move the entire pitch up so many cents or down so many cents. I can cope with that. But I haven’t found it easy to actually change it so that the intervals between the open strings aren’t fifths any more. I can’t cope with that.

I did an arrangement with the gamelan of Scottish songs for harp that I had learned in Cape Breton. It was called Gallic Weaving. I actually took a weaving class up there. I love things having to do with numbers and number permutations, and the instructions for weaving a pattern are in fact number permutations. So I decided to throw those into a gamelan piece. And then the gamelan was doing all these number permutations. And then I had the strings doing the actual songs, mostly in canon, because canons are a form of interweaving. It was a compromise. It was either have the string players try to match the gamelan’s intonation or not. I was writing as close to staff notes as it really could be. But it did involve either tuning instruments up a little bit, or just moving your hand and reorienting.

But [when I write for just a] string quartet, I don’t try to mess with the intonation. I’m not an intonation freak. I never really got into the Partch idea of infinite fractions and ratios and stuff like that. I guess I’m kind of a reactionary. I just have the same pitches be what they’re supposed to be. I think I’ve made them non-standard in other ways, but not pitch.

FJO: You’ve written operas, too, but you did those with the gamelan.

BB: That’s kind of a different line. I started writing opera stuff when I was an undergraduate. The two pieces that were done, one toured New Jersey with a dance company, and the other toured around Europe with the La MaMa Company. But then I didn’t really do anything else of this sort at all until much later when, while studying everything about Java, I got very involved with Wayang Kulit, which is shadow puppet theatre. And I just got the idea to write an opera using the puppets as the medium of actors. I didn’t really have any preconceptions of how the music would be, but I wanted to do it on the gamelan. In the first opera, Karna, I ended up using gamelan forms. But I did use a kind of stratified polyphony; if there was a melody, the other parts kind of wrote themselves by the process by which they do that. But I must say that 10 years later when I did Wayang Esther, I was not really doing very much that was Javanese-form-derived in there. It was mostly stuff I was just making up, probably more from my Western background than anything Indonesian.

FJO: Your sound world is malleable from piece to piece to make things work for each piece.

BB: Absolutely. It’s not like I’m setting up the image of myself as this kind of composer, and then I’ll do 50 more pieces of this kind. That just doesn’t seem to work for the modern world to me.

FJO: One of your most unusual pieces is Aural Shoehorning, which I find particularly fascinating because it puts things together that wouldn’t necessarily fit together—a group of Western instruments and a group of gamelan instruments—and purposely maximizes their incompatibility: Both are in different tunings, and so when one group plays material that the other group has played, it really clashes.

BB: The assignment from the Schubert Club people was to write a piece for this ensemble, Zeitgeist, and gamelan, so that it can be played by any gamelan. So I thought O.K., this has got to be a heterophonic piece. And so that was kind of fun. It established a structure for me. O.K., this is what it’s going to be, and it’s got to work. So I just started with what gamelan notes are the same as diatonic notes. There were only two or three notes that were the same. And so O.K., those were starting points, and then the piece will go off, away from them, which was very easy to do. So it was kind of fun to take advantage of that possibility.

FJO: And they frequently share material, but as a result it becomes different material.

BB: That’s all of what it’s about.

Phill Niblock in conversation with Frank J. Oteri
September 30, 2010—2 p.m. at Experimental Intermedia, NYC
Audio/video presentation and photography by Molly Sheridan and Alex Gardner
Transcribed by Julia Lu

The music of Phill Niblock is so completely different from other music that it sounds like it is from another planet. Yet to create this totally unique approach to sound, Niblock uses standard instruments—e.g. cello, flute, trombone, electric guitar. However, Niblock multi-tracks these instruments, originally with tape recorders and currently with computers. The basic idea is for an instrumentalist to record a series of long, held tones, all ever so slightly out of tune with each other, and then to play additional long held tones along with those tracks at an extremely loud volume for about half an hour, and sometimes longer. There are no melodies per se and it is devoid of harmony and rhythm in the conventional sense. But multiple layers of pitches only slightly away from each other is after all a kind of harmony, and the way the ear perceives the jarring clashes of those pitches—we actually hear fluctuations in volume occurring with periodicity (what acousticians, in fact, call “beats“)—really is a kind of rhythm.

If this all sounds pretty heady, well, it is. And Niblock rolls off numbers of Hertz frequencies—e.g. the number of cycles per second at which a waveform oscillates—with the same kind of glee that other composers might reserve for harmonic progressions or polyrhythms. (Watch the video!) Yet despite such seeming erudition, Niblock’s approach has little to do with theory; it’s completely intuitive:

I completely don’t use any sort of tuning system. So whatever tuning system there is, is just made up.

Niblock never formally studied musical composition and did not even start composing until he was 35. In fact, in college he was an economics major.

I was in pre-med for a year and a half, and then I was a sort of an undeclared major for about a year, and then suddenly, I realized that I had to graduate with something. Having an economics major meant I could get a B.A. ’cause I had all the science credits and still take on business courses, and so I became an economics major. But theoretically, I wasn’t much of an economics major; I wasn’t much of a theorist at least.

Four decades later, he’s more fired up than many composers one-third his age, and his mind-bending sonic experiences attract devotees of experimental music and even the indie rock and laptop crowds. In fact, CDs of Niblock’s music are now released by the British label Touch, which issues recordings by Fennesz and Brandon LaBelle. He’s also writing lots of music for orchestra, a performance paradigm that might initially seem completely at odds with his compositional aesthetics, but he’s found a champion in conductor Petr Kotik, and a second CD of his orchestra music is coming out on Mode Records later this month.

Most of Niblock’s projects, however, are totally DIY. It’s a self-sufficient business approach that goes back to his early years as an experimental film maker, before he composed a note of music, and it has also guided his half-century of work as a concert and visual art presenter (he runs Experimental Intermedia) and as a record producer (for Experimental Intermedia’s XI label). Perhaps that economic degree helped steer his path after all.

—FJO

Frank J. Oteri: Although you’ve had a career in music spanning decades, you started rather late. And music wasn’t your first passion. In fact, the early part of your life wasn’t really spent with music at all.

Phill Niblock: That’s not true. There are six hundred 78s sitting on the shelf over there which started in 1948.

FJO: What’s on those 78s?

PN: It’s mostly jazz. There’s some classical stuff, but 78s weren’t great for classical stuff.

FJO: I mean in terms of you creating your own music.

PN: Ah, that’s a different issue. I didn’t make music until I was 35.

FJO: And the first thing that you did artistically, and did for many years, and continue to do is make films.

PN: I made films, but I made films just a couple of years before that actually. I started doing films in ’65 and then music in ’68. I was doing photography from ’60, ’61 on.

FJO: And before that, you earned a degree in economics, which seems completely unrelated to the kinds of non-commercial enterprises you’ve spent a lifetime pursuing.

PN: Well, it’s barely a degree. I was in pre-med for a year and a half, and then I was a sort of an undeclared major for about a year, and then suddenly, I realized that I had to graduate with something. Having an economics major meant I could get a B.A. ’cause I had all the science credits and still take on business courses, and so I became an economics major. But theoretically, I wasn’t much of an economics major; I wasn’t much of a theorist at least.

FJO: So it wasn’t your parents saying, “Oh you can’t really have a career as a filmmaker or composer. You’ve got to do something that’s going to earn a living.”

PN: Well it all came much later anyway because I went from school directly into the army, to a voluntary draft, so I was gone for two years doing that. It turned out to be a fantastic period because I traveled really extensively. The traveling began in the army, including taking a month’s leave and going to Europe in ’58. I was at the Brussels Expo.

FJO: So that means you heard the premiere of Varèse’s Poème électronique.

PN: I did, yeah. I don’t remember much about it, that’s true, but I did know what it was also because I was already collecting records and knew of that stuff.

FJO: So where did the passion for music come from? Where did it start?

PN: Well actually it probably started in ’48 listening to jazz. I was always interested in sound. And that was the beginning of LPs, the beginning of hi-fi, and the beginning of tape recording. So there was an incredible sudden blooming of technology. It was actually possible, because of hi-fi, to hear sound in an entirely different way. This was not your typical Edison phonograph. So all of that was a really big influence. I was a hi-fi fan. I built a speaker system in 1953 which is in that corner over there which the guy who records for me thinks sounds best of all the speaker systems here. My first tape recorder was 1953 also. But I wasn’t using it at all creatively. I was just transferring time essentially. I was using it to just record some sounds, but more for dubbing stuff from records to tape.

Phill Niblock’s studio is filled with 16mm film cans and reel-to-reel tapes!

FJO: Back in those days, why would you convert a record to a tape? I know that years later you could carry around a cassette on a Walkman. What would be the reason to convert something to a reel-to-reel tape?

PN: Records are more expensive and harder to transport. I converted a lot of stuff when I was in the Army because I started to do a night show for the in-house hospital radio station, which had a lot of 16-inch transcriptions and stuff. And so I could take that stuff off on tape, too.

FJO: You said you were in Brussels and heard Poème électronique and you knew what it was. So were you exposed to that music also by just picking it up at record stores?

PN: I started collecting because there was a guy in Anderson, Indiana—my hometown—who had a small record store, which was in a former alley way. It was actually about one and a half widths of a car. And the shelves were constructed along the brick walls of the alley way, which had a roof over it. I began to go there and listen and take his advice. Then, for some time, if he had to leave town or something like that I would hold the store open and stuff. So I bought most of those 78s in that occasion, sort of under his tutelage. And I heard a number of jazz bands. I heard Ellington first in 1948 actually playing in a theater, in Anderson. And then I heard the, the band in either late-’50 or early-’51, which was just after Louis Bellson joined the band and Willie Smith. And Willie Smith was actually the only person sitting with a book. And the book was open in the middle, and was this thick on both sides. It was really amazing to see. No one else had any sheet music as far as I could tell at all.

FJO: Wow.

PN: So the band just played.

FJO: But he needed it because—

PN: He just joined.

FJO: So jazz was a passion of yours. And when you got to New York, you were making films, and you made a film about Sun Ra.

ON: I made a film about Sun Ra in ’66 to ’68, so I had started making films not too long before. And I had an idea that I could realize in 20 minutes shooting a live set; it was totally stupid of course. So then I spent two years developing, and redeveloping, and working on new stuff for that film. And when it was finished, it was sort of a tour de force. It was very, very nice. It’s still nice to look at.

FJO: But then you went from being a passionate listener of jazz, and maybe some classical music, and later being a documentarian of that scene, to creating your own music in a style that’s decidedly not jazz—

PN: Decidedly not jazz. OK, but to go back a little bit, I’m not a musician. Totally. And so when I’m listening to music, I’m listening to sound. That’s also part of the thing about Ellington; Ellington is about sound much more than almost any other jazz around. So that was a big, a big element, and I was also listening to hi-fi. So I was listening to sound systems as well. And because I was collecting records in Indiana, I was listening to jazz as sound from speakers. And since I was also recording, all of that technology of sound reproduction and recording was a basic part of my thing. So I stole. I constructed pieces directly as recordings. And so when you hear a piece of mine, you actually hear a recording. In a concert I’m playing back a recording. And frequently there are live musicians playing along with the recording, but they’re still playing along with the recording. In recent years there have been a few orchestra pieces where it was just an orchestra playing, there’s no other foreign pre-recorded sound. But for the most part, the pieces are constructed as sound, and as recorded material.

FJO: I want to get to those orchestra pieces a lot later. We have a long way to go before we get there. So you’re listening to music, and it eventually makes you want to make your own music.

PN: Well hmmmm, it’s a little more particular. I started in film working with a choreographer and filmmaker herself—Elaine Summers. I was immediately involved in the Judson Dance Theater at Judson Church. So I was around a lot of dancers, and there was an intense period when I was shooting film of a lot of different dancers. I was sort of the cinematographer of choice. So I was slated to make live performance events because of that. The first piece of music was actually for one of those events in late ’68. I decided to make an organ piece. I was interested in this phenomenon of microtones creating different tonal patterns. That’s what I was working with. And I was using an organ because if you use different stops you get microtones because nothing’s ever pitched quite the same.

FJO: Where would you have become aware of microtones? How would you have known about them?

PN: That was around. I was listening to music, and I was listening to this kind of music, and I was listening to some technical stuff. So I knew about that, and it was part of the sound world I was interested in.

FJO: Stuff like The Theatre of Eternal Music, La Monte Young, Tony Conrad?

PN: I heard those pieces. I actually heard a fantastic concert of everyone, the whole band, in ’65. But I also heard some pieces of Feldman from a very short period in Feldman’s writing life, from ’61, called Durations. The fact that they could play long tones, where there was no rhythm, and no obvious melody and no sort of obvious harmonic progression happening was an amazing idea, I thought, so in some sense that gave me permission to think about making music, which happened a few years later.

FJO: What’s so interesting though is that in some ways this is the exact opposite aesthetic to jazz which is all about a feel and a swing, taking a melody and transforming it through endless variation. And you had such passion for that music, and you followed that scene. But then when you created your own music, it was 180 degrees away.

PN: Well it was also for a purpose. I was creating music to be part of this performance scene. And, in fact, the music almost immediately began to be more important than anything else. Somehow or other, I became known for making music much more than I was as a filmmaker.

FJO: It’s unusual that you started writing this piece from an idea you had without ever having studied composition formally. You said you’re not a musician. So you didn’t play music. Did you know how to read music? How did you get this piece done?

PN: Oh, I can figure out what the note is if I spend a little time looking at it. But that piece was basically improvised as I was recording it. I was making a recording of the organ, again a recording. And it was a through recorded piece, so I was not constructing something. I was actually improvising and using that material later. So I didn’t need to write anything down, and since I was ignoring melody and typical harmonic progression and rhythm that was O.K.

FJO: Well the other thing I’m thinking about in terms of the music that you’ve done is, based on what notation is optimized to convey, it really can’t be written down.

PN: Well, that’s I guess probably not true. The pieces which exist—except for that piece—virtually are all completely scored.

FJO: Using standard music notation?

PN: No, using my own notation to make the piece. In the scores of all those early pieces, there are mixed scores. They’re my scores. They’re not for the musician to play. So the musician is already out of the loop. I’ve recorded the musician, and then I construct a score given that material that I’ve recorded.

Multitrack recording “mix score” for the flute composition Held Tones

FJO: But theoretically, if somebody were able to decipher your notations, they would be able to re-create the process.

PN: Uh, yes. It’s happened. There are a few people who’ve actually done that. They’ve gone back to the score, and they’ve remade a piece that sometimes doesn’t sound much like the piece, but.

FJO: Why doesn’t it sound much like the piece? I’m curious.

PN: Stephan Mathieu from Saarbrucken did it recently. He was using an instrument which has a very steady state, like a synthesizer. And it just creates a very constant beating. So the whole piece was full of these constant beatings which is totally against what I would do normally—recording instruments which have some variations in pitch as they play: wind instruments or string instruments. That really seems to destroy the constant beating a lot. I’ve learned a few things in my day.

FJO: I will say the style you developed is quite different from the other drone-type pieces that were being done at that time by composers like La Monte, Charlemagne Palestine, Tony Conrad, etc. When they were using just intonation they were trying to create things that were somehow natural, or cosmic, or otherworldly, and serene, in a way, if I may posit that. Whereas I get the sense from your work, even from the onset, that serenity has nothing to do with it.

PN: I should be appalled.

FJO: [laughs] This is not qualitative. It seems like you’re aiming for something else, something that’s potentially more visceral, and more difficult to listen to in a way. Is that fair?

PN: Yes. I don’t know how much is prescribed and by me when I do it. And a lot has happened over a long period of time, ’cause I’ve been doing it for a long time. So that I find that the pieces which I’ve done in the last five years are in a way much richer. But partially they’re richer simply because I’m using 32 tracks instead of eight, or four. So things really get compounded when there’s that much more possibility. And the recordings are very clean. I really like the idea of analog, but digital really works out very well for me. And working on the computer is much, much faster than working with tape machines.

FJO: But getting back to this idea of a visceral, almost dangerous sound.

PN: I should say one thing, I completely don’t use any sort of tuning system. So whatever tuning system there is, is just made up. That was one of the things I decided not to do, so.

FJO: But in a way, it’s also—if I may posit this—to re-contextualize these terms. Other people are using ratios to be more in tune, you’re using them in a way to be more out of tune, to highlight the discrepancies.

PN: Um hm.

FJO: It’s not something coming together, but something breaking apart somehow. Is that fair?

PN: That’s really a fantastic statement. Can I use that?

FJO: Sure.

PN: Well I think that’s pretty much exactly it. Part of the unease is that it tends to break apart. There’s actually a piece which I think is really classic from ’77. It’s the piece for trombone that I made for Jim Fulkerson. And it’s based on As and sharp As. So I’ve actually recorded the 55 [Hz], 110, and 220. So in the lower octave it’s 55, 57, 59, 61, and then in the next octave it’s 110, 113, 116, 119—three Hertz differences; two Hertz, three Hertz, and then four Hertz in the upper octave. So when you play the 57 hertz against the 113 hertz, you have a one hertz difference. And in the middle of the piece, it just becomes harmonic distortion. It’s just completely shattered. And so I think probably there’s very little sense of As or anything, you know. It just really falls apart. And it’s only eight channels.

Multitrack recording “mix score” for A Trombone Piece

FJO: Now to continue along those lines. You create clashes like that and the playback is at very loud volumes generally.

PN: If you play the pieces at a low to middling volume, you hear the instrument and you don’t hear the overtone patterns. But when you play it louder, the overtone patterns really become very prominent. There’s another piece, which is the first piece that I finished which I think is really a classic piece for me, made in ’74 with David Gibson on cello. When you play it really loud, you hear this incredible high cloud of overtones. And the cello disappears. And when you play it very softly you hear cellos then. You don’t hear the overtones virtually at all.

FJO: And your piece is about hearing the overtones.

PN: The piece is about hearing the overtones. It’s like a tape music concert in some sense because I sit there and I just push a button and the piece starts. However, if I’m not there, and I’m not doing it, you don’t hear the music because I’m the one who’s setting the levels, and tweaking things and making sure the speakers are turned in the right direction or something like that. So really the music is about creating the sound and the space and that’s what I’m controlling. It’s bad when I don’t have a good sound system.

FJO: So the goal is to emphasize very distorted intervals that are not quite matching each other.

PN: Um hm.

FJO: And it’s a continuous sound with no break, sometimes with durations of a half hour or more. It’s an intense experience, which might even border on painful for some listeners.

We found this box of earplugs perched atop a turntable in Phill’s studio!

PN: There are some people who leave. And I’m actually playing it a lower volume than I was ten years ago so. I mean I was actually doing 115 [dB] with the sound level meter ten or fifteen years ago and I’m probably playing more like 105 now with the sound level meter setting.

FJO: Are you concerned about audience reactions that are negative in that way? Does that impact what you do?

PN: No. Audiences are so completely different. I just had a concert, a really fantastic concert which wasn’t loud enough in Milan. But there were six film images, five meters wide, each in a row. It was really fantastically beautiful, in a huge place, 30 by 100 meters. And there were four to five hundred people sitting on a concrete floor, at the very beginning there were that many. But at the end there were about 50 or something like that. But it was a three-hour concert, so it was long. And they simply ran into real budgetary problems. The guy didn’t pay enough attention to what I said when I asked him for six speaker systems, and he had four. And it wasn’t loud enough. It was right at the edge of distortion, so if I made it really louder, it would have started to fall apart.

FJO: But I thought that you want it to fall apart.

PN: I want it to fall apart naturally, but I don’t want the speakers to be distorted.

FJO: Right. Of course.

PN: Sounds systems are always a big problem for me because. And it’s amazing because now in the last 10 to 15 years, it’s possible to have really fantastic sound systems in a lot of places. I mean there are sound systems which sound good, and they will produce that much volume. Thanks to rock and roll, but, so that’s the way it goes.

FJO: So to get back to those concerts years ago that were at immensely loud volumes. You have this space in New York City where we can hear the traffic outside—

PN: —You don’t hear the traffic when there’s a concert of mine going on.

FJO: I’m thinking the other way. I’m thinking about people hearing the concert who maybe don’t want to be hearing the concert somewhere else. Are there issues in terms of volume with things that you’ve done, either here or elsewhere; has that ever been a problem?

PN: Well sure, there’s a multitude of problems if it’s an audience which comes and doesn’t expect to have what they get. They’re confused, and they’re much more apt to leave quickly. I did a concert not so long ago at the REDCAT Theater in L.A. and half of the audience had gray hair, and they didn’t last too much, so. But the other half didn’t have, and they stayed pretty much. It was a pretty loud concert in a fairly standard concert hall, you know, raked seating and plush seats. Plush seats are usually very bad for me. Usually the best places for me are churches. They really are fantastic. There’s a really great one in Cologne which is extremely bare stone. There’s no pews. There’s virtually nothing in the church except this carapace, and it’s very nice sounding because it’s very reverberant, because of the size of the church and the curved ceiling. Big reverberant spaces are the best thing for me so that the sound is sort of going around. There are a lot of standing waves and typically in a concert like that, if you walk around, you would hear entirely different things if you walked close to a wall or into a corner. If you just keep walking around in a space, the sound changes all the time. The sound’s changing all the time in the piece, but the sound is really changing in the space as well.

FJO: So ideally, that’s a good thing for the audience to walk around.

PN: Yeah. That’s a good thing. And the problem with film is that people don’t walk around when they have film. They watch the film, so they’re looking at the screen. And especially if there are seats. Then they sit down, and they never get up.

FJO: So in terms of audiences walking out—you talked about REDCAT and Milan. Does it bother you at all that people leave, or is that just par for the course?

PN: That’s the nature of the music and the scene. I’m not trying to please everyone in the world, or I wouldn’t be making this kind of music.

FJO: So to talk a bit about musicians you’ve worked with. You record people playing these different tones, and then you take over from there. But you’ve also written pieces that involve players in real time, whether they’re playing with a recording, in the sense of some of these pieces, or the orchestra pieces, where they are orchestra pieces in real time. I’m curious to know your thoughts about the ideal musician.

PN: A virtuoso musician is always good to have. It does make a huge difference. When I’ve worked with musicians who weren’t very good on their instrument, it’s not so interesting. And especially if you’re working with a musician who knows that you’re going to do microtones which are going to make a lot of close pitches, they tend to play differently. I mean I made six pieces for Ulrich Krieger for saxophones, and he totally understands what’s happening. He’s incredibly supportive. And I made a lot of pieces for David Gibson, this cellist in the ’70s, and he was really amazing. I’m working recently with Arne Deforce, who is a Belgian virtuoso cellist. And we’re making another piece, on November 9th in Cologne, in a really fantastic studio situation.

FJO: So, most of the people you work with are people whose backgrounds are, for lack of a better term, “contemporary classical music performance.”

PN: Yes. Or in this experimental field, ’cause there are very good players who don’t normally play classical music, but they’re playing this experimental scene, so they have something, they really have knowledge of what the things sound like.

FJO: And you mentioned the speakers getting better because of the rock world. You’ve also worked with people who have very strong ties to the more experimental end of the rock community, like the people who founded the Band of Susans.

PN: Robert Poss and Susan Stenger. Yeah.

FJO: So your music does overlap different genres to some extent, which makes me curious about how you perceive your music in the greater arc of history. Would you consider yourself a composer of classical music?

PN: It’s not a big issue. [laughs] How’s that for an answer?

FJO: It’s a good answer.

PN: I’m not trying to please the audience, but I am interested in having the music live further. So for one thing, it’s quite important to make recordings. I’m on an English label [Touch] which is still selling CDs, which is totally amazing, and they’re pushing it because they keep doing stuff. So virtually nothing I’ve done in the last 20 years hasn’t been published on CD, except some of the orchestra pieces, simply because it doesn’t make any sense to do them on Touch, but I have a new DVD with three orchestra pieces coming out on Mode in the beginning of the year.

FJO: The thing with performances of orchestra music is that most of time you automatically have to face the question of what your relationship is to older music. They’re going to get played alongside a Beethoven piece or a Tchaikovsky piece. And if these pieces are to live on, and you talked about having the music live further, they’ll probably get played on these kinds of concerts.

PN: It’s sort of unlikely. The orchestra pieces that have been played live so far have been played mostly in Ostrava by [Petr] Kotik, and consequently they’re not easily played on a program with Tchaikovsky.

FJO: Are those pieces more conventionally notated?

PN: They’re scored dots on a line, or between the line sometimes.

FJO: They would have to be for all those intervals that you’re playing around with.

PN: They’re scored in a very peculiar way, I think. There are no parts for the differentials. They’re scored so everybody gets the same score, and they play an A, for instance, and there’s indications whether they should play a certain amount sharp or flat, how much sharp or flat with a series of arrows beside the note, etc. And they have to play in the octave which is natural for them, so it’s written in the middle octave and they play whatever they play, whichever octave they play, or maybe two octaves, or three depending on the instrument.

FJO: So that means that multiple performances of a piece will be somewhat similar, but never exactly the same.

PN: Sure, but that’s true of Beethoven too, so.

FJO: Maybe, in a different way though. What I’m trying to understand is the element of indeterminacy that may or may not exist in this music in terms of your own aesthetic for it. How important is the precision?

PN: If I play a concert in one hall, and I go to the next hall and I play exactly the same program, it’s not going to sound the same, even though it’s playing from recordings. It doesn’t sound the same. And if you move around the space, it also doesn’t sound the same. So if you’re standing in one corner, there’s a huge standing wave right where you are; it’s totally different than if you’re sitting in the middle of the audience. So there are so many variations. The structure of the music has a lot to do with sound, not with the musical ideas that would be present in Beethoven. So that sound is the musical idea, and that changes really constantly, so.

FJO: On your website you define yourself as a Minimalist composer. You embrace that word.

PN: Yeah, I think it’s very good.

FJO: Why?

PN: Why not? Everything that I do is really the Minimalist aesthetic. The essential Minimalist aesthetic is to get rid of, to pare down, to deliver decisions about what you’re going to include, and mostly what you’re going to exclude. And so that’s very inherent in what I do in film or in music basically.

FJO: So here we are in this space. Experimental Intermedia. This place has been another lifelong project of yours. This Experimental Intermedia was founded the very same year that you started composing music. 1968.

PN: Yes. I also moved to this space in ’68. The lease runs from June 1, 1968. I probably put those 600 78s on the shelf in late ’68, and they haven’t moved since.

FJO: You haven’t listened to them since then?

PN: Most of the really good stuff in there has been reissued in much better sounding form. And a lot of it actually is in that pack of CDs that were on that chair when you came in, which haven’t been opened yet. I never really play LPs, either. So there’s this big collection of LPs, and there are LPs from 1950 on the shelf, too.

FJO: So why do you keep them if you don’t listen to them?

PN: Oh, ’cause I’m a collector. I don’t see that one thing has to do necessarily with the other. A collector collects, you know. I mean, people buy paintings and they put them away someplace and they don’t necessarily look at them every day, but they’re still part of the collections. I can feel the music on that shelf.

FJO: I actually really understand that. I also feel the energy that’s emanating from it, but it still begs a further question about what you acquire and how you acquire it. You’ve said that stuff gets sent to you, and I know that you also buy things. Is there any rhyme or reason to how you collect? What makes you pick up something rather than something else?

PN: Things come to me, but there’s two things. People give me music because I’m a producer at Experimental Intermedia, or because I’m another composer and they want me to hear what they’re doing, which I want to do, too. So I get a lot of CDs or whatever form it could come in, mp3 files even. But I also collect. Last week I bought three or four hundred CDs in Mannheim. Really. It’s a great store. I bought a big box of Brendel playing piano for instance, so.

FJO: Beethoven.

PN: Beethoven and other things. It’s a mixed box.

FJO: So you get a lot of recordings when you’re traveling and you’re always traveling. You also have an additional Experimental Intermedia venue based in Belgium, in Ghent.

PN: It’s so totally different. I bought a house in Ghent in 1992 and the first exhibition there was is in 1993. It’s a window gallery. We can’t do sound. It’s a very small room. It’s triangular. The house is built on a curved street with the tram coming right in front. The tram stops in front of the house now. You get out of the tram, you’re in front of the window of the gallery. And you don’t go into the house. The house is normally closed. There’s no one there. There’s just a window gallery. You look through the window; that’s what you get. And if you go into the house, the floor of the gallery is raised this high. So you have to get on a ladder to get up into the gallery floor, from the inside of the house. The space is about four meters, by four meters, by four meters. But it’s a triangle, so when you look in the window, you’re always looking in a corner of the space as well.

FJO: So you exhibit European visual artists there?

PN: Mostly European artists. My original idea was that we wouldn’t do any Belgian artists. So for years, all the artists were from elsewhere. And I tried to invite as many people from the East as possible in the ’90s. It was very difficult because we didn’t have a lot of money, even when we had some money. Then in recent years, the board has sort of fallen apart, so the exhibitions are much more chaotic. There’s someone in Ghent who’s actually taking care of that and doing mostly video installations and stuff.

FJO: But you do tons of concerts all over Europe. In fact, it seems like you make more music outside of the United States than you do here.

PN: Totally. Totally. Absolutely. Totally. Like 90 percent.

FJO: So are audiences abroad more attuned to your music outside the United States?

PN: Audiences are more attuned. And there’s obviously much more of an infrastructure. There’s more money. There’s more possibility of doing it. Oh, yeah. The U.S. was beginning to be a little bit good at the end of the ’80s, and then it completely fell apart. When the NEA was attacked by the religious right wing, it just destroyed the whole fabric of artist-run spaces like this one for instance. We lost all of our NEA funding in that three years.

I don’t know how we get more funding. It isn’t a natural part of the American ethos to fund culture, particularly culture that is more emerging. MoMA can get money, and the Metropolitan can get money easily. But not something like Experimental Intermedia or even Roulette or Issue Project Room, which continue to do a really fantastic job.

FJO: So where in Europe is there a really exciting scene right now from your perspective?

PN: There’s an incredible array of stuff happening in more composed music, but also it’s harder to distinguish any more the improvising scene for instance with composed music, because that stuff is so solid. There are amazing people, and when they come together in different combinations, amazing things happen. And there’s just simply a lot of places and there’s money. One of the country’s that has a really amazing infrastructure is France; the only problem is that they mostly do French people. But there are many small organizations spread around and they get enough funding to have one or two people who can work only on that. So they get money for production, but they also get money to support someone who’s working, which is very hard to do in France. And Germany is good. Holland used to be very good. And in the last ten years, it’s really shrunk a lot. And now the funding scene will be extremely tightened for culture in Europe. The recession has really hit, and it wasn’t just that initial hit a year ago, it’s what’s happening now to funding and countries are really having trouble; Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain are very hard hit.

FJO: So then for all the American artists who are going abroad to make a livelihood as a creative artist, like yourself, what happens now?

PN: There’s less. That’s all.

FJO: Any other avenues to open, like in the Far East?

PN: There’s some activity in China which I haven’t tried to go to, to actually play. I was there a lot shooting film in the ’80s, but I haven’t really pursued that for myself. Japan is also like America; there’s no tradition of cultural funding in Japan. They play in clubs, and you get door money and stuff like that, but that’s a lot of it. There’s not as much city funding or federal money for cultural projects.

FJO: But to get back to home and to Experimental Intermedia: You have this idea, you wanted to create music, you’d never written music before, and you wrote a piece that was fully formed, as it were. And your ideas about music have been pretty much consistent since that very first piece, which I find fascinating. But you also established a do-it-yourself aesthetic with this place. You curate concerts, so you became the presenter of your own work. You have a record label; you became the recording maker. So you became the means by which your music was disseminated, as well as the creator of it. But you also present and record other people.

PN: I’ve always felt that artists should produce other artists. When artists produce other artists, it’s different than when professional curators produce other artists. They are more apt to see people for their work and for their personality, I think. They’re also more apt to find things which are not so obvious and so mainstream. I get a lot of emails cataloging who’s curating what. And you see either totally strange names, or the same names coming up all over. There are a few people who get curated a lot, and they’re very famous either in visual arts or in music. And other people are not, and I think it’s really important that we search around.

The reason for doing XI records, for instance, was there were a lot of people even in sort of my generation who simply didn’t have very well-made CDs out. There wasn’t a real collection of their work. For instance, we did the very early edition of Eliane Radigue when there was virtually nothing out. And that’s what I think was really her crowning work actually. So I’m very happy, because she’s become much more famous; it’s really amazing. And she’s touring a lot, so. I thought it was really important to give these people an opportunity to have a CD for which they essentially could decide what was going to be on it themselves. And that we did as much as we could to make it work. One particular one was Jackson Mac Low. Anne Tardos and Mary Jane Leach produced that and it never would have happened. It was a combination of Jackson and Anne, but also Mary Jane really put together the record. And so there’s a real document of Jackson who, whose work is very scattered and not so well documented. It’s really an amazing thing. Now it’s still pretty much the same. I think probably there’s less emphasis on certainly people of my generation, but we’re still interested.

FJO: What about digital dissemination?

PN: One of the problems with digital dissemination is that things like the notes don’t go along. It becomes much more anonymous, even the name. I mean, once you have an mp3 file, where does it get named? Virtually.

I noticed in the early ’90s that people consistently did CDs without enough notes; not playing notes, but notes to read. There was not enough text material. There was not enough background. And so the second CD I did, I decided I would really try to make a model for it. I asked several people to write and the scores are in the CD as well. And I think it was really an amazing model. Then I tried to make everybody do something similar so that there were a lot of extensive notes, historical information, and background for the piece, and all of that stuff.

We don’t do very many CDs and we really try to make each one good. And some years ago, I decided to make it two CDs for the price of one. And so people have to come up with two CDs full of stuff or they can’t do a CD. And we sell them for very cheap in fact.

In conversation with Molly Sheridan
at Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut
September 29, 2010—2 p.m.

Transcribed by Julia Lu
Condensed and edited by Molly Sheridan
Audio/video presentation and photography by
Molly Sheridan and Alex Gardner

Christopher Theofanidis is a composer focused on the big picture. His music is rooted in expressing life as he experiences it. A moment alone can spark a bassoon solo, a question of spiritual faith can be unpacked in a score. “I think that the trajectory has really been about freeing myself, in terms of musical language, to the point where I can really take a humanistic approach to other things that I’m interested in,” he acknowledges. “The music became a by-product of my approach to living more than it did anything else.”

That music almost wasn’t a product at all. Like many young students weighing their career options, he was seriously considering enrolling in business school after completing undergraduate studies at the University of Houston in 1990. The richness of musical experience on offer at Eastman won him over in the end, however, and a Ph.D. from Yale rounded out his education. After going on to teach at Peabody and Juilliard, he returned to Yale as a faculty member in 2008.

Although many people first encounter Theofanidis’s music through his astoundingly popular orchestral work Rainbow Body, which won the 2003 Masterprize competition, he has resisted the idea that he is trapped in any groove cut by holding such a calling card. A steady flow of music has continued to pour from his studio, music that whether scored for a full compliment of choral and orchestral musicians or a more conservative troupe of chamber players carries aspects of his expansive approach to life and listening. His ideas are full and lush, purposefully organic in their development and richly textured in their execution.

Ahead of him are two opera projects—Heart of a Soldier (2011) for the San Francisco Opera and Siddhartha (2014) for the Houston Grand Opera—which though he gracefully declined to discuss in detail at this stage in their development, seem well matched to his musical instincts.

“Although the trappings may be different from Rainbow Body‘s harmony or sonority, the sensibility of unfolding things in a storyline is still very important to me,” he explains. “It still makes sense to me. And as long as it does, I follow that.”

—MS

Molly Sheridan: As I was preparing for our interview, I noticed that this early recording of your work on Albany came out in 1995, and then this one on Telarc which includes The Here and Now, a huge piece commissioned and recorded by the Atlanta Symphony and Chorus, was brought out exactly a decade later. When you think about the composer that you were in 1995, you probably had certain ideas about the road ahead, and the composer on this second disc may have followed that road, or may have changed course. How are the expectations of the Chris Theofanidis of 1995 connected to what really happened?

Christopher Theofanidis: When you start writing music, you’re so self-conscious about what you’re doing, and you’re trying very hard to grasp onto anything that feels like solid ground. For me, at that time, solid ground was strangely people like Bartók and Prokofiev. I mean, I had no knowledge of what was going on in contemporary music; just stuff that I heard my father playing as a pianist when I was growing up. And so I was trying to figure out how to make music work through those things. Fast forward ten years later, and I’ve lost a lot of that concern for solid ground. The things that drive the projects tend to be extra-musical for me. So I think that the trajectory has really been about freeing myself, in terms of musical language, to the point where I can really take a humanistic approach to other things that I’m interested in. Not just the music.

MS: What did it take to get you to that point, to win that freedom?

CT: I think first you have to go through school to get to that level of freedom. And then, when you get out of school, you have to reorient to the things that are actually deeply important to you without anybody else telling you what’s important. Because your network of people is no longer there saying, “This works. This doesn’t work.” You have to figure it out for yourself.

When I got out of school, strangely, I had more time for reading and things like that, and so I read a lot more poetry. I read a lot of things that I became very interested in, and that then started to drive my own personal motivations for doing things and sometimes became the launching pad for pieces of music that I was writing. The music became a by-product of my approach to living more than it did anything else.

MS: What kept you motivated during that period?

CT: I think everything is driven by curiosity, at some level. For me, when I was in school, I was very curious about what everybody else was doing. All these post-minimal ideas, spectral music, anything you could think of was part of that curiosity, and I was trying to weigh whether or not it worked. I wouldn’t describe it as a painful or hard process or anything like that, but the idea of having tools and all that stuff needs to be worked through before you have a sense of really playing in the sandbox, which is I think the ultimate goal, in a way.

MS: When I opened your CV, it was of course impossible to miss the long list of orchestras you’ve worked with. Has orchestral music always been the primary sound palette in your head, or was it simply a product of the opportunities that presented themselves?

CT: I think everybody when they’re, you know, 18 years old, wants to write an orchestra piece. There’s just something really wonderful about that idea. In my case, a lot of it was circumstance. I didn’t set out with the idea of writing a lot of orchestral pieces. With Rainbow Body, a series of things happened that put that piece out there, and then that led to a lot of other possibilities for my writing orchestral music. I love solo piano music as much as I love the orchestra, honestly. You can make music from kazoos interesting and beautiful. But I think circumstance does drive a lot of that. I remember Chris Rouse talking about how, early on, he wrote several pieces that caught on like fire in the percussion world, and he was asked to do more, and more, and more. And he had to deliberately steer his career away from that so that he could keep it kind of broad. It is tempting. People keep asking you to do pieces, and you’re happy to have the opportunity. But at the same time, for your own artistic fulfillment, you’ve got to keep it interesting.

MS: I think about that a lot with you particularly, because early in your career Rainbow Body became so popular. It was your calling card, whether you liked it or not.

Images from Theofanidis’s studio

CT: Right. The mixed blessing of having a piece that actually gets performed a number of times is that people expect that for your next piece and the subsequent pieces. It was Penderecki’s problem in the ’60s. He tried desperately to extricate himself from that very narrow thing that he was defined as. Of course, that was one component of his personality, but it wasn’t the only thing.

I don’t feel like I need to do things a certain way because of loyalty to some idea of style. My natural tendency is towards a storytelling kind of narrative structure. So although the trappings may be different from Rainbow Body‘s harmony or sonority, the sensibility of unfolding things in a storyline is still very important to me. It still makes sense to me. And as long as it does, I follow that. But I think most of the composers I know, if they start to get tired, are self-aware of what they’re doing. They want to shift; they want to turn a little bit. That happens whether or not you’ve had a piece that gets done a lot or not.

MS: Regarding your own work, that shifting and turning happens within a certain sector of contemporary classical concert music. With all of the possible sound options available to you, what about that palette speaks to you so strongly and attracts you to using those tools as a means of expression?

CT: I read an interview with John Adams many years ago that really affected me. Somebody asked him a similar question, like, “Why are you still writing for the orchestra?” And he said, “Well, I know it’s like the Titanic; I know it’s going down. But I just can’t help but think about all those great buffets, and the beautiful scenery, and that kind of thing.” I’m paraphrasing, but that was the idea, that the variety is so great. There’s so much that you can say in the medium that you don’t feel the limits, you feel the possibility of it. I think that’s the point with anything. You could ask the same question of pop music, of course. It’s partly the vision and the way you see the medium as a potential for what you’re doing. I don’t need revolutionary breaks in what I’m doing, but I need additional steps in my own sense of growth. That’s enough for me. That’s good for me. I think that that’s the thing that keeps me focused. I see a million possibilities in the orchestra or in the opera. It’s not to say I wouldn’t try other things. Every once in awhile, I throw in something, like the heavy metal in the Cows of Apollo piece that I did a number of years ago. I really enjoy things if they have a motivation behind them, but not just for random reasons.

MS: Can you look back over your shoulder at your evolution and point out where those steps occurred? Are they attached to concrete moments or experiences?

CT: I think you can point to individual pieces like that, but you can also point to individual moments. There are a number of ways to look at yourself. Looking at individual pieces, the first time I saw Ligeti’s Lontano, for example, I mean, strange as it might be to say, that piece really influenced me profoundly because I started to see, “Oh, so he’s saturating areas that have a feeling of major and minor, but are not exactly those chords there. They have a kind of voicing and a particular saturation of sonority that gives the inference of that feeling.” I really responded well to that, and I started to think more expansively about harmonic language—at least in my own way of seeing it. I’m not saying that anybody else would necessarily perceive it that way.

The two other things were Steve Mackey’s Indigeneous Instruments and Jacob Druckman’s Aureole. Steve Mackey because I realized that music is dance, essentially, and movement. The way the music moves, it has a physicality, and that can be communicated in the music. Similarly, Jacob Druckman has that physical, gestural nature to it. It becomes a kind of propulsive force in moving music forward. So, those two things really influenced me also in terms of specific musical things.

In terms of career-type of things, I suppose my residency with the California Symphony was hugely helpful because I got a lot of feedback directly from the players. I learned how to work with an orchestra. They were really nice to me at that time when you think you know everything, but you’re scared as hell because you think they’re all making fun of you behind your back or something. So it was a great way to start to feel comfortable working with large ensembles. Barry Jekowsky, the conductor, was brilliant at nurturing people who were coming up but didn’t quite have their footing yet. There were a lot of those throughout my life, I would say.

MS: As I worked my way through the extensive audio sample library on your website, the work taken as a whole sounded very big and lush. And I’m not only referring here to the orchestral and choral works, but even something in the character of pieces such as the flute duo, which is not something that I would have anticipated. What qualities do you seek to foster in your own musical voice and what marks its character to your own ears?

Images from Theofanidis’s studio

CT: For me, the binding glue between the different pieces is that essentially an ensemble, or even a solo player, is an organism. And the music moves as an organism does. So if you have a massive orchestra, lumbering in quality, you have to do things to make it graceful, proportionately to the movement, and make it move in a way that makes it beautiful. That’s different from a two-flute piece to a string quartet to an electric guitar ensemble or whatever it happens to be. Each of those things as an organism has its own mechanics, its own logic, and part of composing is finding out what it is. I’m very aware of that when I’m doing it. Again, it comes back to movement, and dance, and gestural motion. It has a different scale. Also, larger ensembles tend to be more like public oratory. You’re speaking to people who are slightly at a distance. Things read differently. You can’t micro emote in those things, you know. Whereas, if you’re singing lieder, you can. You place things very deliberately and carefully. Understanding that as a starting point is something that I feel really close to in my concept for pieces that I’m working on.

MS: You’ve mentioned at a few points the importance of storyline in your work. Would you speak a little more about how that folds into your process?

CT: I think it comes actually from a general humanistic way of thinking: the transformation of emotions; how you care about something. If it’s a melody or person or whatever it happens to be, it happens over time in a way that makes you care about them more, or hopefully deepens your understanding of them. And that’s where the storytelling thing comes into play for me. It’s something to hang the flow of time on that makes sense. It creates meaning and depth for me.

MS: What about your real life process, if we were to peek in through the window to your studio?

CT: Probably half the music I’ve written is pumped up on caffeine. That’s one thing I would say is a constant force, especially if I’m writing in the morning or the early afternoon. But apart from that, a lot of it is just singing through things and making sure that the line flows. I try to play every day through everything that I have on a piece up to that point to start off with so I really have a clear sense of the line and shape of the piece. Just to remind myself where I’m at and where I want to go. But apart from that, it’s chicken scratch and singing.

MS: You don’t find that you over-edit the first part by starting over at the beginning each day?

CT: I don’t. Once something feels right, it usually stays that way. There are times when I go back and I’ll tweak an eighth note or something. Things like that do happen later on in the process. Or in the case of the opera I’m working on now, I might excise a half a minute of music or something like that. That happens, too. But for the most part, if it feels right over a day or two, I have a sense that that’s the way it should be.

MS: You shepherd your work all the way through publication. What made you decide to oversee it all and maintain your own publishing company?

CT: It was practical. Early on, nobody was really that interested in anything I was doing. Rightly or wrongly, when I was a student, I really wanted to be with Schirmer or Boosey and Hawkes, and that didn’t pan out. There were a couple of other people who were interested that were running smaller houses and I thought maybe I should do that, but I’ll hang on a little bit longer. Eventually I realized that with a little help, you can actually do it yourself and it turns out to be much more interesting in some ways. You keep track of what’s going on and you keep the money, which is not small. So it’s a good thing.

MS: You think you’ll remain on that path?

CT: I think so. There’s really no reason not to at this point. Part of it is a juggling act of making sure these parts get from here to here. And then once you’ve got that down, it’s okay.

MS: Does it take up much of your time?

CT: Oh, I have good help, which makes a difference.

MS: I know we almost lost you to business school early in your career. Are you fulfilling a bit of that dream through your self-publishing work?

CT: I feel like I’m a big picture person, but the details get past me quite a bit of the time in terms of management things. So had I been a businessperson, that would have been the worst decision of my life. It was very close. I’d applied and the whole thing, but had I gone that direction, that would have been disastrous. I think part of it was not being totally aware that music was really a living art. I grew up in Houston, but my sense of what music and new music was, was extremely limited. For a long time I had the kind of church-choral tradition, and Bartók and Prokofiev. That was what I knew. I just didn’t know that there was a lot of other stuff going on out there until I actually got into Eastman and started to see the bigger panorama of what was going on and the possibilities. My wanting to go to business school was largely driven by that. Once you feel it as a living art, suddenly you become totally obsessed about how to do what you want to do, and it becomes vital. I think in a lot of places, it may not have quite that vital thing for people, and if you don’t have things to stimulate you, you don’t necessarily go in the places that you could.

MS: And you found that at Eastman?

CT: That’s right. Joe Schwanter and Chris Rouse were there, and those were great models. There was the enthusiasm of Sam Adler, the kind of obsessive theoretic stuff that was happening which I thought was really amazing. And you could see people who really, genuinely loved those things and were pursuing them to the farthest extent that they could. To have that in your field of vision empowers you in a way. It makes you feel like, well yeah, I can do my own thing too. Which I think is the point.

MS: You mentioned the early influence of choral music and that made me think about spirituality and the role of that in your work. It seems as if spirituality is definitely a force in your music.

Images from Theofanidis’s studio

CT: I think it is. I always get nervous speaking about anything that’s metaphysical, but it’s dealing with things that you can’t quite touch and you can’t quite imagine—which for me is largely spiritual matters—to the extent that dealing with things which are not concrete is in the music. I very much feel it that way. In the same way that I feel emotion, and emotion is very similarly elusive. It comes out in the music. Spirituality and religion is an ambition, too, in a sense. I mean, it’s what you hope for. Not good or bad, it’s just the thing that motivates you to do something. I think that there’s a lot of that in creating music, too. What you’re hoping to do is ambitious. So that’s how I think of spirituality in my own music. It’s kind of idealism.

MS: How much of a through line do you maintain from piece to piece?

CT: After a few pieces, you step back and you can see bigger patterns and shapes emerge. I think that you can start to understand bigger things about your work from looking at many pieces like that. In the moment that I’m writing something, I’m trying desperately not to think about those things. I’m really trying to keep it real and focused on what’s motivating me in that moment. But if I do look over what’s happened, I see where my motivations have shifted over time. The things that I want to dedicate my time to are different.

MS: Do you let things just happen as they may, or do you force some of these shifts?

CT: One of the things that comes up a lot, and in new music in particular, is the idea of a clean break or revolutionary turnover with what you’re doing. For me, the idea is to take steps toward where you genuinely know that you want to head and go towards that in whatever way it may be. I’m very aware if I start to make a move in my own music that feels stagnant to me, relative to what I’ve been doing. So, that wanting to sweep away stuff from the past is still there. It’s just happening more incrementally. I don’t get quite the adrenaline charge out of just lopping off the head of what I’ve been doing and moving on, as some other people do. People have different chemistry make-ups and needs that way.

MS: What is the impact of your teaching on your creative life and philosophies?

CT: Being around people who are trying to figure things out, basically, is a great stimulus. That’s why they’re in school, particularly in graduate school. They really want to get better at what they’re doing, and that is a great environment to be in because you can’t help but be influenced by that. It keeps your mind active.

It also reminds me that there are a million different ways to make music work. If I just take the 12 people here, you know, in the program at Yale, and you look at each one, it’s like wow—I would not have thought of that. That’s pretty interesting. They have a different way of getting to something which is real for them—and great! It reminds you that it’s a really broad thing, and your little slice of the idea of the way music is is just that. It’s humbling, and it’s a good thing to have that in your field of vision. Hold your judgment a minute. See if this works or not.

And part of it is also psychological. When you’re working with a student, you’re trying to understand what it is that makes them tick, what their values are for making the music happen. Do they see it the way somebody else might see it? And that helps you to also think about the way you perceive your own stuff versus the way somebody else might see it.

MS: How does that compare then to working with performers?

Images from Theofanidis’s studio

CT: Teaching is kind of psychological work, and with performers it’s like athletic training or something. The idea for me of working with performers is kind of as much about getting the feeling of the music, of the metabolism of the music, into their bloodstream as I can. Sharing with them my feelings about what I’ve done, and then getting them to be a physical representation of that music as much as anything. This might be a strange distinction, but I’m not really usually terribly heady with performers. It’s very concrete. So I see those two things quite differently.

MS: Looking at either line, do you see changes coming down the pike that other people who are not constantly interacting in these environments might not witness? Is anything different or is it all the same as it ever was?

CT: I think it’s always changing. Things have become much more integrated and less genre distinct. Something which is interesting is interesting, after all. It’s not because it’s written for orchestra or for whatever ensemble. All the students who I’ve seen come out of here and also Peabody and Juilliard, all of them are doing their own things. They’re making it work in one way or the another. They’re combining theater and this; they’re doing detailed ambient music. Great. I mean, it works. My sense is that the shift has happened, or we’re right in the middle someplace, and that over the coming years, it will be less of an issue as it already is for the students now. People haven’t made uptown/downtown distinctions for the last 20 years. That’s a lost categorization. And similarly, I don’t think some of these genre issues are going to be an issue in the future. That’s what I think I see, but who knows.

MS: Has that had any impact on you in your own work? Maybe you feel this even more than they do?

CT: Yeah. The cultural shift over time basically empowers you more than you were before. You become less fearful that you’re doing the right thing. You go for it. I wouldn’t go out of my way to do some of these things necessarily, but if the moment presented itself in which it was the right thing to do for that project, I would. It’s a fine distinction.

I co-wrote a piece with my friend Mark Wingate, who did the electronic realization in the hall. It was so much fun to do that, and I was thinking, I feel like I can do something with him that I couldn’t do by myself in composing. I will continue to work with him in the future because of that. It wouldn’t have occurred to me before, but this collaborative thing can take you to a different place, if you’re open to it. I’m not going to be able to write ambient music, but if I find beauty in it, and I know somebody who can do that, I put those pieces together. Part of it is your internal, big editor being able to combine things that you see are interesting even if you can’t do them yourself, to see that these things work together. It’s the Phil Glass model. His brilliance is being able to bring together things that he thinks are really interesting across many genres and make them work.

MS: Does that play into your new operas?

CT: I’m a little bit hesitant to talk about it because they’re still being formed, but there are a couple of things in there.

We have this idea about opera. I mean, what was the video I saw recently? Who’s the rap artist who had that series?

MS: R. Kelly?

CT: R. Kelly, yeah. So he did that series of, like, short opera videos. It was so hilarious at one level, but it’s so brilliant at the other level. It’s amazing that opera companies haven’t quite picked up on that idea yet that you could just pick up people who have a knack for storytelling. You know, you could have a country western opera. An Eminem opera; I would love to see that. Get somebody to tell a long, full, engaging story, and learn how to tell the story well in their medium. I think there’s incredible possibility there. It’s just that you’ve got to get the right people involved.

MS: In a pairing that’s not so radical to the field, CDs and concert programs that you tend to appear on mix your work with pieces by Copland and Barber and Mozart. Theofanidis and…Brahms! Are you comfortable with that type of programming or is it an awkward fit?

CT: It’s fun. I’m not so often on the programs of new music ensembles anymore. I had more of those new music-y concerts earlier in my writing. To my mind, actually, it’s more of an issue of programming. People have increasingly limited ideas of programming, in a sense. They’re really interesting—better programming than probably ever before!—but just more narrow in terms of what an ensemble presents. And so the idea of putting a chamber piece of mine on with Lachenmann or something like that would seem preposterous to the groups that play Lachenmann. It’s just the way things have evolved. I think it becomes less and less probable that an ensemble will program on a wider spectrum stylistically.

Poster advertising an upcoming concert at Yale

MS: This is a very broad conversation we’ve been having, and I want to drill down a bit and talk about how an individual work, like your quartet Visions and Miracles which will be performed here in New Haven early in October, came into being and hooks into the bigger picture of you as an artist.

CT: The story to that was that I had written a string of pieces that were fairly gritty and dark. And somebody told me, “You’re gonna be happy when you’re ready to be happy.” He wasn’t directing it at me—he was just saying that this is the way things are—but I really liked that idea. I thought, “You know, I want to write a really up piece.” So I wrote three up movements for this string quartet I had been asked to write by Cassatt.

The ideas came from little fragments of poetry. One was from Nietzsche actually, who’s not necessarily the lightest person, but the phrase was “All joy wills eternity,” which I really liked. Mahler used that line, too, and thought that was an inspirational starting point for joy. Another one was something that Timothy Leary, the counterculture guru from the ’60s, Harvard professor run amok, had written on his vial of ashes when he died. He was cremated and he was sent up into outer space and dispersed among the stars, and on the vial, he had had written “peace, love, light, you, me, one,” but all one word. And that also struck me as a particularly great feeling for a starting point for a movement. And then the last one was from a medieval troubadour that said, “I add brilliance to the sun,” which also struck me as particularly fanciful. So all three of those movements started with the feeling of each of those phrases, and then spun out into the music. At the time, I was listening to Ensemble Alcatraz, which is a Bay Area early music ensemble, and they had released a recording of Spanish medieval music, The Cantigas de Santa Maria, that were like super fast twos and threes. I’m really averse to like the Greek, you know, dun- dun- dun- dun, dun- dun- dun- dun. I mean, that does nothing for me personally unless you totally speed it up. And then it becomes unbelievable, which is what these medieval Spanish realizations of that music were. They sounded brilliant. I picked up on that language of the really, really fast alternations of twos and threes that kept a constant surface and really up kind of feeling. And this piece came out of that.

MS: How does that process of creative thinking compare to what happens when you’re putting together a bigger work, such as a work for soloist and orchestra like your bassoon concerto?

CT: A lot of times, at least for me, it’s something that gets you up to an orbit of something and you figure out what it means later. So for instance, in that bassoon concerto, without going into gory detail, I wrote a solo kind of minute-plus cadenza, which is the way the piece starts, on a really bad day after quite a long, bad year. I was alone in a hotel room, and nobody knew where I was. And I just wrote the words, “alone, inward,” because that’s the way I felt, and then I started to write. What does that feel like? That’s all that it took to get the whole piece going. That one impetus to start was enough. It wasn’t about defining the whole piece by that, but it was just to get the first notes on the page, to understand how the music starts and where the beginning impulse is, and then to develop it from there. Sometimes when I explain the back story to my pieces, it sounds like that’s the thing. But that’s not the thing. That was the way that it was one night that started the piece, but it doesn’t mean that the rest of the piece goes that way, and actually it doesn’t. But there’s something to the starting moment that’s the spark that gets the piece to have a kind of identity.

MS: We started out this conversation talking about how the present would have looked to the Chris Theofanidis of the past. Looking back at that composer, is there anything you wish you could tell him, or that you tell your own students now as you guide them into their composing lives?

CT: Boy. When I was in my master’s program at Eastman, one of my kind of grunt jobs among many grunt jobs was bussing everybody around who was a visiting person there. One of them was Otto Luening, who at the time I think was 90-something. He had this big handlebar moustache, incredible guy. He got off the plane and he wanted to go straight to have a vodka with me. He was so interesting. He had taught at Eastman in the early 1920s. The first thing he said when he walked in is, “The carpets are still the same. They haven’t changed.” But he said something that I remember, which—because, I mean, he was involved in the invention of the tape recorder for god sakes, you know—he says, “The best advice I can give you Chris,”—and this was over the vodka, so I don’t know how much of it was the vodka talking and how much was real advice—but he said, “The thing that has allowed me to keep doing this is that all my friends dropped out of it. You realize how few composers there were when I was coming up? And most of them got discouraged at a certain point in their 20s or their 30s. They realized they weren’t going to have a stable financial situation for a long time. They changed professions. They got out. I stuck with it anyway, and I’m the last one standing.” And it is true, the first 20 years or so are pretty rough. You see your friends who have stable professions. They have children. It’s a little bit more unstable as an artist for longer. I mean, there’s no question, it can get there, but you have to create a community for yourself once you’re out of school. It doesn’t necessarily have to be all composers—probably shouldn’t be all composers—but it has to be something that will keep what you’re doing a vital experience for yourself. As long as you have something to say, you’ve got to try to say it. That’s the advice.

Transcribed by Julia Lu
Condensed and edited by
Frank J. Oteri and John Lydon
Audio/video presentation and photography by
Molly Sheridan and Alex Gardner

Henry Threadgill makes music because it is an extraordinarily powerful force. Although his music can often be extremely entertaining, he dislikes the word entertainment. Many of his musical compositions leave a lot of room for individual interpretation, in fact they demand it, but he categorically rejects compromise:

It’s an expression, and you really don’t want anything to get in the way of that. […] There can be no compromise. This is not business. This is not politics. Compromise is something that’s part of business transactions and political transactions. Not artistic transactions.

If you’re not paying careful enough attention, Henry Threadgill might seem like he’s full of contradictions. While he is an avatar of musical progress, he disdains a great deal of technology. He prefers LPs to CDs. And forget about mp3s; Threadgill proudly refuses to own a computer and to this day there’s no henrythreadgill.com. In fact, he’s most comfortable chatting while drinking a coffee at DiRobertis Caffe, an old Italian bakery and café that has been a fixture of his East Village neighborhood since 1904. So that’s where we spoke.

But don’t get the impression that Threadgill is a Luddite. He is someone who abhors any kind of bandwagonism whether galvanized to march forward or back. And for Threadgill there is no such thing as a linear progression along one trajectory. There are way too many strands. While he’s always seeking out a new sound, he’s also very consciously aware of the long tradition that has preceded him. While the 1970s group in which he first came to national prominence, Air, came out of the free jazz scene, an important part of their repertoire was the music of Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton. Their piano-less trio performances of that piano-based repertoire was old and new at the same time.

Few composers in any genre have been as clear and articulate about precisely what they want, yet surprise is a fundamental component to Threadgill’s aesthetic and it impacts the musicians he works with as well as the audience. For nearly half a century, he has put together ensembles with some of the most unusual instrumental combinations out there—e.g. the core of his 1990s band Very Very Circus consisted of two tubas and two electric guitars and his seminal 1980s sextet (later called “sextett”) had seven members since he conceived the two percussionists as one part. (“It’s not about people; it’s about parts. There were two people playing the percussion part.”) And while he carefully notates his music, Threadgill has been known to shake things up by handing musicians new arrangements of his material at every performance:

It’s not just about composition. It’s about challenging the musicians. You’ve got to have people in a position where they don’t really know, where they’re a little bit off guard, a little bit off balance, and they can really be spontaneous and extemporaneous […] Familiarity makes you kind of absent from really understanding something. So you need musicians to be challenged. You don’t want them to come up and say, “Oh, I know what that is” every time. You’re not going to get anything. You’re not going to get anything fresh out of them. They need to be challenged every time they come up.

Our conversation at DiRobertis Caffe was full of surprises, too. In addition to discussing his own career in music and how it has connected to the larger arc of music history, over the course of an hour we spoke about everything from why so many people don’t vote in this country to the way Napoleon divided up his police force to maintain control of it. Henry Threadgill is a man of deep insights and convictions. And while he states that art should not compromise because it is not business or politics, his music offers a model that businessmen and politicians would do well to emulate, too.

—FJO

*

DeRobertis Caffe (established 1904)

FRANK J. OTERI: Being in this old, historic place makes me want to talk to you about history more than anything else. I know you love this place and it’s a wonderful environment to talk about your music since it is music that is always very mindful of what has gone before but also finds ways of bringing that tradition into the present and making it new.

HENRY THREADGILL: You have to. I have and I think most artists have to look at the history of what they’re involved in, because a lot of times you can reassess history and take pointers from it. You can get salient points; you can learn salient ideas and points from it and restate things another way. When I first came to New York, I lived right around the corner from this place on Eleventh Street. This was the first place I used to come to. So my roots go back to that. And it wasn’t only that, this café is a place for artists that would come in here and write and think and read or sketch in here for hours. Nobody would bother them about getting another cup of tea or another cup of coffee. And it’s remained that way, so that’s why I come here so much. And this is a place where you can have a conversation.

FJO: So do you write music in here sometimes?

HT: I don’t generally write music outside. I generally write music in the house when I’m inside. I come out to think. I come in here and I think. Or I go to the park and think. This is just about the only place I can come to; I don’t know any other place I could come to sit down and think about something. Or the park. I use the park a lot because of the trees. Trees help me to think.

FJO: I’d like to talk to you about your own history before we tackle the larger arc of music history that informs your work. I know that as you were growing up you learned to play many different instruments. You taught yourself to play the piano before you were six years old.

HT: I was about four years old. Three or four, three to four when I taught myself to play the piano.

FJO: What drew you to music? How did you find that as an outlet?

HT: I wasn’t drawn to music at that time as a mature thinker. As a child, music just attracted me. I guess different things attract children: sports, movies. I grew up with radio. There was just so much on the radio. It wasn’t controlled the way it is now, the way television and radio are controlled. So it was radio and stage shows at the movie houses. My mother would take us to see stage shows. That was a thing. I think it was probably all around the country. You went to the big movie houses and you would see a film, and then there would be a stage show. Artists would come out to perform. I went to see so much music, live music that way, and then listened to it on the radio.

FJO: When did you decide that this was something you were good at and wanted to do for the rest of your life?

HT: When I got in high school. I guess when I was in the second year.

FJO: And from that how did you find the other members of what became the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians?

HT: We kind of met up when I got to junior college. A number of people were at Wilson College at that time: Joseph Jarman, Malachi Favors, Charles Clark. And Muhal [Richard Abrams] came there. We had a music club, and we brought him there just to play. And he invited me down to his rehearsals; he had an experimental band. This was prior to the AACM. And I went to some of those rehearsals and took music down there and then the AACM got started. I left Chicago in about a little while after AACM got started. I went in the service. But when I came back, that’s when I was like fully integrated into the AACM.

FJO: Now what I find so interesting is growing up, you were involved with playing all different kinds of music. You talked about playing in polka and mariachi bands. Then when you were enlisted in Vietnam, you played in a rock band. And later you toured in a gospel group. The people in the AACM were involved with so many different kinds of music, but to most people on the outside, it gets put in the jazz box. So I thought it would be interesting to talk to you about what it means to play different genres and if these names that we put on music are all that relevant.

HT: Well you know, it’s nothing new what I did. You can find these experiences with a lot of different people that went before me. The interesting thing about the AACM people is that I think you had for the first time such a large amount of performing composers. I’m not just talking about people that write songs, and write little pieces every now and then. I’m talking about complete composers. This is the first appearance in my review of history of so many composer-performers out of one group. It’s a very challenging role when you undertake that. It takes years to get everything balanced. You spend a lot of time as a performer, so you play a lot of different music. I think that was one thing. I had to survive playing a lot of different music, because it just was taking so long to perfect what I was, what I was doing. And then we were all basically multi-instrumentalists too. That created another problem in terms of how long it takes to get things perfected.

FJO: What was so wonderful about the AACM was that everyone was involved in playing each other’s music. There was no leader who refused to be a sideman for someone else.

HT: We had to. That’s the way the AACM was set up. It was set up on a democratic basis. It was like you were agnostic, and that person is an atheist, and that person is a Buddhist, and that person is a Hindu, and that person is a Jew and this person is a Roman Catholic. And you gotta all agree to accept everybody’s position. That was very, very difficult. And those ranks shrunk. I remember when I came back and came in, there must have been about maybe 30-some musicians. But they couldn’t take it. They couldn’t do it. So the ranks got smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller because people were intolerant. If I get up there and tell you how I want this music to go, I’m not interested in your opinion. It doesn’t matter how good or how bad my music is, whether it’s the work of a genius. You can have nothing to say about it. You’ve got to give me 150 percent. That was the problem. Because people had their likes and dislikes. And those people couldn’t stay. So it took a while, and the numbers just shrank. We were like 37, next thing you know we’re down to about 18, and it kept shrinking. Because of intolerance. Braxton would stand up and tell people I don’t want you play any feeling on this music. I want this music as cold as ice. Well that ran against the grain to a lot of people, so they said, I can’t do this. Well if you can’t do it, you can’t stay. Whatever somebody asked you to do, you had to do.

FJO: Wow. And that even involves polystylism to some extent. So if you had preconceptions, oh jazz is this pure thing and I’m being asked to play a rock beat… Or classical music is—

HT: —Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So the numbers got smaller and smaller as a result of that, but you’ve got to understand, the only way as a composer you can work out what you’re doing is you’ve got to have complete cooperation and you’re not open. There can be no compromise. This is not business. This is not politics. Compromise is something that’s part of business transactions and political transactions. Not artistic transactions. Therefore the numbers had to be reduced to the people that really understood what things were about.

FJO: Now the whole multi-instrumental thing seems to be an extension of what Eric Dolphy did.

HT: But it goes way back. Look at King Oliver’s band. All those bands back then. Guys would sit up there and have a whole rack of instruments. Look at Sonny Greer up there behind Duke Ellington, it looked like a symphony orchestra. One man was back there with timpani and everything. You were talking about going back. This was typical of going back. You start seeing how musicians double on a lot of instruments. A guy would be sitting up there, he’d have banjo, and a violin, and a clarinet.

FJO: But I think Dolphy took it to another level by doing extensive solos, and this was right before the AACM got started. He was a thorough virtuoso on alto sax, bass clarinet, and flute.

HT: Oh yeah, yeah. Of course.

FJO: And while I was listening to the recording of Muhal’s Wise in Time the other day, I heard some echoes of Dolphy in your solo. Is that a fair assessment?

HT: I admire Eric Dolphy, but I’ve never really emulated any alto saxophone players. I’m originally a tenor saxophone player. And I was more influenced by tenor saxophone players for years, and they had a more direct impact on me than alto players. That was one of the reasons I switched to alto.

FJO: To get rid of that influence?

HT: Right.

FJO: Interesting, because back in the ’50s, that’s why everyone was playing tenor so they wouldn’t sound like Charlie Parker. So all of a sudden, you had all these tenor players emerge. But, like Dolphy, you also took up the flute. Of course there were others who did that too, like Yusef Lateef.

HT: Oh yeah, and Frank Wess, Sam Most.

FJO: And Buddy Collette.

HT: Buddy Collette. Exactly.

FJO: But I’m thinking Dolphy in terms of the whole virtuoso approach.

HT: In terms of that virtuosic approach to each instrument, this is something new. And it’s a result of the times. You’ve got to remember what they call modern jazz was the Bebop period. That was really the era of the virtuoso, because everything got small. You were completely exposed for a long period of time rather than in a large ensemble. Charlie Parker did stuff up there and just demonstrated virtuosity that was unparalleled. So the stage was set in terms of the virtuosity. By the time you get up to Eric and people like that, that idea’s already there. You don’t just pick up another instrument. You’ve got to really be planning it when you go from one instrument to the next.

A late 1970s promotional photo of Air, from left to right: Steve McCall, Fred Hopkins and Henry Threadgill. Photo by Bobby Kingsley

FJO: Now in terms of virtuosity and being totally exposed, I can think of few things that are as open and exposed as your trio Air. I’d love to talk about that a little bit with you because to my ears, it’s very different from the music you did subsequent to that. It’s much more cooperative, very open, and the whole idea of a trio of sax, bass and drums with no piano had very few precedents.

HT: Sonny Rollins had done that a little bit… And Sam Rivers.

FJO: Spiritual Unity by Albert Ayler is another classic example.

HT: Right.

FJO: You talked about being exposed in bebop, this takes it to an even further extreme. There’s absolutely nothing to support you. All three players are on their own. And it’s such a heavy dynamic listening to that music. You made that music 35 years ago and I think it’s still so fresh. But how did that group come together?

HT: Steve and I were AACM members. He had just come back from Europe, from Paris, from that whole period. Paris had come to an end. At the end of the 60s, the beginning of the 70s, the Paris thing was over. And that’s why you had all the people coming back you know—Dexter Gordon, Don Byas. The painters, the writers they were all coming back. And Steve came back to Chicago. Fred Hopkins lived next door to me. And so I got them together. I said would you want to do some playing with me? So we just started rehearsing. We had a place to rehearse. And we were just rehearsing and rehearsing. No place to play, and then I got a show with a theater company because I was doing work with dance companies and theater companies at the time. And the guy wanted me to write half of the music, and for the other half of the music, he wanted me to use Scott Joplin’s music. So I arranged Scott Joplin’s music and I wrote the rest of the music. From there we just kept rolling, getting other performances—clubs and concerts and stuff—going up to the point where critics were writing about us all over and we didn’t have a record out. Critics were clamoring to the record companies. They actually beat the drum for us to get our first recordings.

Air’s 1979 LP Air Lore, featuring Joplin and Morton compositions alongside Threadgill originals, made it into the list of 1000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die.

FJO: Wow. That’s a big difference from nowadays. The early records are on small labels, but then you were signed by a major, Arista. But getting back to Joplin, most people think of his music as piano music but there was no piano in Air. Later on you performed music by Jelly Roll Morton, another pianist, again with no piano. It’s really different hearing their music the way Air played it. You were able to take music that was more than half a century old at that point and make it sound completely new.

HT: I didn’t play that music the way it was being played on the recordings with these strict tempos. And we improvised on that music. There were no recordings of anybody that was improvising on that music or were doing fluctuations of tempos, you know. We opened that music up. That’s the difference in the way a lot of the guys in AACM think music. That is something that I can speak for all the AACM people. We don’t have an endgame. There is no final. It’s only next. There’s only the next thing to be discovered. And the next universe. That’s the criteria of this art form: It’s an expanding art form. It’s like the idea of an expanding universe you know. You know a little bit here. The more you know it expands. You don’t stay with anything you know. And people can have their own ways of approaching. If they want to be traditional and stay with something, that’s all fine. But this is not the way that we think about music or art. It’s an expanding thing. It keeps going.

FJO: So the implication of that for musical compositions is that they’re never 100 percent finished.

HT: Never. There is no ultimate form. The idea of form and how you write music is what’s been the problem with the conservative elements that want to hold onto tradition. You’ve got to remember, I don’t consider myself part of the classical tradition at all. But I’ve studied classical tradition, like I’ve studied other things. Debussy you probably would have to say is the father of modern music and the person that freed European music and freed Western music in terms of being able to just do what you wanted to do and forget about procedure. Forget about like processes and form; whatever your intuition tells you to do, that’s what you do. This is what Debussy did. For years Debussy was denied the seat at the conservatory as the head of the conservatory, because every year he failed to win the Rome Prize. He failed to win that prize because he wouldn’t write music the way they were writing music.

This is the same problem we have today: people saying that this classical music, this is jazz, and this is not. But we’ve become a multinational country. America keeps assuming one thing: that there’s only one thing going on. There’s a lot of things going on and things get morphed. We keep trying to say that there’s an orchestral tradition, or this kind of thing. And it’s not anymore. Yes that exists, but there’s other things that’s happening. We keep trying to force things under one banner. That’s that European thing: Keep it controlled. Things have changed. Go with the change. Art can’t be restrained that way in my opinion. Otherwise it becomes a relic and a museum piece. It just becomes stylized. And it’s really not a part of the American tradition.

I don’t know where this kind of thinking is coming from. I think the influence of the commercial industry has impacted art. The same way we see it every day in films; the same movies are just played over and over in different formats and different actors and different so-called plots. But it’s not a different plot. They see something that works, and they repeat the thing that works. The music world and the art world have all been victimized by this type of thing.

FJO: Now, I read somewhere that after your group plays a piece, you’ll hand everybody a fresh new arrangement. You’ll change the piece.

HT: The next week. If I can’t find another way to play it, I’m not going to play it.

FJO: That’s a very different approach to composition.

HT: It’s not just about composition. It’s about challenging the musicians. You’ve got to have people in a position where they don’t really know, where they’re a little bit off guard, a little bit off balance, and they can really be spontaneous and extemporaneous. Albee the playwright said the one thing about a really good actor is it gives the directors a chance to really mess something up. They know it so well, they really mess it up, because they know it so well. Did you ever see how there are familiar things that get trashed? They can really get trashed, you know. Familiarity makes you kind of absent from really understanding something. So you need musicians to be challenged. You don’t want them to come up and say, “Oh, I know what that is” every time. You’re not going to get anything fresh out of them. They need to be challenged every time they come up.

FJO: That’s the exact opposite of the approach of the symphony orchestra.

HT: I know.

FJO: But you’ve written for orchestra.

HT: Right. Right. But let me tell you: people say that they write orchestral music. I don’t write orchestral music. I write instrumental music. I write instrumental music for different types of instruments because I don’t want to claim to be a part of the European orchestral tradition. I’m not. I don’t have anything against it, but I’m not. My tradition is more African art evolved. That’s the tradition that I’m really concerned with. That type of creativity where there is no form, number one. Form is a result.

FJO: So in the paradigm in which you usually create music, when you are working with your own group and not working with a symphony orchestra, you hand people written music even though you’ll hand them newly written music for the same piece to keep things fresh. But I wonder where the room for individuality is for the people who play your music in terms of their own improvisations, their own interpretive style, etc.

HT: It depends on the composition. It all depends on the composition. For one thing, there will be order. There will be order because I don’t know of any other way to create art other than through order. So everybody has to observe some type of order. And depending on what we finally figure out the piece is going to sound like, that particular version of it, will determine how much a person will input into a piece. But when I bring in a piece of music, I don’t bring it in as a completed arrangement.

I can’t think of the German word for rehearsal, but what they mean is a place to start, whereas we have taken rehearsal to mean a place to learn and repeat. You come here and repeat and repeat. This has nothing to do with it. We constantly explore and start, and explore and start, and explore. That’s the German. I like the German word for rehearsal because if you bring some musicians in, once they learn the music, there’s no sense in keeping them any longer. No sense proving they can play what’s on paper so let them go. I don’t bring music in in that fashion just because you can read what’s on the paper, that’s not what it’s going to be in the first place. That’s just a place to start.

FJO: In terms of open form versus a more fixed form, it seems there’s a big difference.

HT: It’s not open form. It’s just a form yet to be determined.

The Henry Threadgill Sextet: Just The Fact and Pass The Bucket (1983)

FJO: But still it seems that there was a significant evolution in your thinking about music between the period when you were doing stuff with Air and then the sextet. The music for the sextet is much more fixed.

HT: Yeah. Hopefully a person has some kind of growth in their life, and some kind of development as an artist. You know, Blue periods and things like that. My compositional thinking at the time of Air was one thing. When I got to the sextet, it had advanced a little bit more in a different kind of way. And then it moved further with Very Very Circus and then with Make a Move was probably the very end of dealing in the whole world of the major-minor system. Major-minor thinking meaning chords and things like this. After that, I completely moved past all of that. I grew to another spot where I am now with Zooid. It has nothing to do with major-minor. This is a chromatic music that exists in some different terms and the tones and pictures behave in a different way.

FJO: Now before we get to the theory, I still want to get to the point of the personnel and the politics and how that works. I don’t want to gloss over the fact that there were seven people in that sextet, but you called it a sextet anyway.

The Henry Threadgill Sextett: You Know The Number (1986)

HT: Right. Because it’s not about people; it’s about parts. There were two people playing the percussion part. You could have a quartet and have 40 people. You could have 50 people and have a quintet. You could have 50 women singers, and they’re singing a quintet. That’s all it was.

FJO: But I guess you made it easier for people by putting that extra “T” in Sextett later on.

HT: I tried to.

FJO: Now with Very Very Circus, you started emphasizing electric sounds. At times, it almost sounds like progressive rock. It’s real abrasive and visceral. We were talking before about styles. There was a huge schism in the jazz community between acoustic music and electric music. If it was electric, it would be classified as fusion.

HT: I never pay any attention to what people say. It just doesn’t make any sense for me you know. I’ve been through enough things in life. Why should I pay any attention to anything?

FJO: So what made you bring in the electric guitars?

HT: Well because two acoustic guitars would have been very difficult at the time with two tubas. The basis of this group was two tubas and two guitars. That’s what everything was sitting on top of. So it was like these two lines running into these two tubas. Kind of like two tightwires. That’s how it worked. And then we danced around; me and the French horn player, we danced around on those wires.

FJO: That’s a crazy combination.

HT: Yeah.

FJO: Hence Very Very Circus.

HT: Right.

Everybodys Mouth’s a Book, an album by Henry Threadgill with his group Make a Move was released in 2001 simultaneously with the album Up Popped the Two Lips by Threadgill with his group Zooid

FJO: Now the last of your Very Very Circus recordings was called Make a Move. I assume that your subsequent group Making a Move came out of that.

HT: Right.

FJO: You’ve talked about balancing things. You’ve put together some of the weirdest combinations out there.

HT: Well, you know, I never thought about these ideas. I never accepted any of the ideas about jazz or orchestral music. These are limitations, like to describe a string quartet as two violins, viola and cello, or a trio as a piano, bass and drums. I never bothered with these things, you know. And the reason I didn’t is because after I heard so much great music played by orchestras and jazz groups and big bands, I said well there’s no sense in me even going over there in that format. I’ve heard that and people have already done it. It’s kind of like what Alfred Hitchcock said, why would I do a great classic? I could only fail. If it’s a great classic, it’s already great. Now how could I expect to do something greater than something that’s already great?

FJO: You even invented your own instruments.

HT: We invented a lot of instruments in Chicago.

FJO: What is the hubcaphone? I have some ideas after hearing recordings of it, but I’d love for you explain it.

HT: It’s a set of pitched and unpitched hubcaps. They’re eight hubcaps strung and hung and played in a percussion style. Almost like a large set of vibes or marimba. They lay flat, and they’re all classic hubcaps because that’s the only material that has any kind of a good quality sound. Because you know everything from the ’60s on is basically trash. In the ’60s they were still making things in America that were of quality, but by the end of the ’60s, America was on its way downhill in terms of making anything of quality. Radios. Hubcaps. I don’t care what it is.

FJO: Except for music.

HT: Yeah. True.

FJO: Now to get back to these crazy instrumentations. If you’re leading your own groups, there’s a limitation in that you’re a part of it. An instrument you play has to be a part of it. What I found interesting in Make a Move, another record of yours, is there are some compositions that you’re not playing on.

HT: Right.

FJO: That’s a very unusual thing in the so called jazz tradition.

Up Popped the Two Lips

HT: I know. Again, all this is rigid thinking. A lot of times when I’m setting up to play with Zooid, the guy puts the microphones up on the stage and then he turns my mic up louder than everybody else. I said, see, this is that type of thinking: that they’re supposed to be accompanying me or something. A lot of times, I don’t play on pieces. It’s not necessary. It’s boring in the first place. If we have four people that come to the table, and every time you’ve got to talk, what are they sitting there for? Every time, you know. Every other time, maybe number two will get a chance to say something. Three or four, you may never hear from them. So why are they there in the first place?

FJO: That gets to this whole classical music thing. You can write a piece of music, and you don’t even have to be there. You can be in another country or dead and they’re playing your music.

HT: Right.

FJO: So how do you feel about other groups playing your music when you’re not around?

HT: Oh, it’s fine.

FJO: But how much control do you give up?

HT: Well you give up all the control because somebody has to see it through their eyes and do what they can with it. That’s the way I like it. It’s like a piece of poetry, you read it and certain things come to you more than it does to someone else, but you and that other person can agree about what this piece is about, but yet still there’s like some big sub-topics and some things that really stick out in your mind as opposed to the other person’s mind. They might not even see these things the way you see them. They suggest other things. That’s my thinking with art. I like it that way. Because people should have a different experience, I don’t like the idea that everybody has to have the same experience. They can’t.

FJO: Is it possible then for a group of people to play your music and for you to think, “Gee they didn’t get this at all. That’s not my music.”

HT: Oh, I could say that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s possible, too.

FJO: Has that ever happened?

HT: No. Fortunately I haven’t had that, but I’ve heard it happen to other people, unfortunately.

FJO: So then how much detail is in your scores. If somebody turned around and said: I want to play Henry Threadgill’s music. I don’t want to play with Henry Threadgill, but I want to play his music. And I’m in South Korea, let’s say, or Slovenia. How could they get your music? How does that work?

HT: Oh, it depends. They could transcribe it for one thing, if it’s a small group. If it’s something for a large instrumentation, they might have to write to me and ask for parts.

FJO: And you’ll send them scores?

HT: Sure. If they want to do it.

FJO: How much is worked out in those scores? How much detail?

HT: Oh, it’s all detail. When you use orchestral players, you have to do the details. That’s all they know. They’re not really good in filling in the blanks.

FJO: But you want to change it on them every week!

HT: Yeah. Well I stopped writing anything for the people in that world because they refused to change, and I have a piece I’m going to be doing next year with the American Composers Orchestra because they decided they were going to do things my way. Because I said, there’s no sense wasting time with these people any more because look, they’re making me try to do things their way, the European way or something. That makes no sense. That’s not me.

FJO: So are you going to hand them a different part at every rehearsal?

HT: No. But they’ve got to improvise for one thing. And there’s going to be conduction going on by the conductor.

FJO: Now in terms of improvisation, players can’t play whatever they want because you’ll limit things to certain pitches. It’s very controlled.

HT: Yeah.

FJO: How does that work?

HT: Well it depends. In Zooid there is no limit. They know everything that you can do and what you can’t do. And there’s no such thing as you can’t. You can do anything if you know what to do, what you’re not supposed to do. Everything that you’re not supposed to do, you can do if you know how to do it.

FJO: But you’re there with them. So that helps.

HT: Well, the whole idea is you have to understand that you have to be musical in the first place. A lot of classical players, because they don’t improvise, they’ve forgotten or they don’t really know what it means to be musical. If only they would go back and remember taking lessons, piano lessons or violin lessons, or whatever. First thing you’re going to do, first big thing that you’re going to get is an etude when you get to a certain stage of playing, whatever instrument you’re playing. I don’t care what it is. And the teacher will say wait, wait, wait. You’re playing all the right notes, now make music. Breathe. Play dynamics. Do something with the music. That’s not music. That’s not musical, you know. Be musical. So a lot of times, you might get in to a position where I have to put these people in a position to play, and then you’ve been in this one environment. Here’s an environment, this table is an environment. And all of a sudden, I tell them, let the person jump out doing some stuff like this. What are you doing? That’s got nothing to do with this. Stay in the environment and be musical. Extend the environment you know. Don’t jump out of the environment and start doing something, and whatever you do, be musical. They’ll just start sawing away or beating away and forget that you come out of some type of texture, some kind of background. There’s a back story to your musical life, you know.

Threadgill’s latest recording, with Zooid, this brings us to, volume II has just been released (October 2010)

FJO: I wanted to talk a bit with you about recordings. You’ve got an extensive discography and there’s a brand new recording coming out this fall. Over the years you’ve been with major labels as well as small labels. At some point, you had a three-record deal with Columbia Records which is mostly unheard of nowadays. But for the last decade you’ve recorded for Pi, an independent boutique label that’s willing to take risks that the majors would be afraid to take. I love that in 2005 you put out a recording that was only available on LP.

HT: Yeah, I love LPs. I love analog because digital is not true. It’s the truth, but it’s a bad truth. It’s not the real truth, but it is the truth. Because that is really not the way things sound. It’s just like when you’re sitting here with digital equipment, you can put everything in little neat compartments. You know, that’s not the way things are. When you sit in front of an orchestra, when you’re out in the street, you can hear some people right here, some people back there. You’re not supposed to hear everything. That’s why you go back and re-read poetry the second time. That’s why you go back to the museum to look at a piece of art, because you didn’t get it all the first time. So that you can revisit it and revisit it you know. This way of packaging and making it so crystal clear and all up in your face, you really don’t get it then. And actually, I think it makes people bored.

FJO: And now, even worse than digital, you’ve got people listening to mp3s with severely compressed sound.

HT: It’s a very different world now. It’s frightening what I’ve seen people do with technology. Earphones and things—it’s just frightening. We don’t store information in our minds anymore as a result of all of these iPads, iPhones, b-phones, c-phones, whatever. How many times do you stop by in front of your house and somebody’s standing in front of your house across the street, which house did you say is yours? I told you my number is 1-2-3. Oh yeah, you did say 1-2-3. Now what is that again? 1-2-3. I lost my cellphone. I can’t reach anybody anymore. You didn’t write it down on a matchbook? You don’t have an old telephone book? No. Everything was in my cellphone. My mother’s number. I can’t call my mother. I can’t call my sister. She’s on the death bed. You can’t remember your sister’s number? No, my sister’s number’s in there too. What about your father? Oh, he’s in a nursing home, and I don’t have that number. It’s in the cellphone, too.

Henry Threadgill and Frank J. Oteri in conversation

The computer is based partly on the human brain, but we can no longer use our brain to store. You have immediate storage, recess storage, and deep storage. Every time you ask someone for information, wait a minute. What year was your mother born? What year did you finish school? Your last address? What did you think about so and so? I knew this was coming with my oldest daughter was in grade school. She came home and brought me this thing that said I had to give her money to buy a little digital calculator. And I said what is it for? It was for math. I said, why do you need this for math? She was telling me they were trying to do some project, she couldn’t find her calculator, and she was doing multiplication. And I said: “What’s 12 times 12? What’s nine times eight? What’s seven times seven? You don’t know what seven times seven is? Well you’re gonna learn the way I learned, each one 20 times, starting with one.” How many times have you walked in the store and they say the power’s down; I can’t give you your bill ‘cause I can’t figure out the tax. You can’t figure out the tax on 99 cents? I have nothing against any technology. It’s just like somebody wants to criticize if I’m not going to vote. I have a right not to vote, just like I have a right to vote. I can abstain. The politicians do it every week in Congress. They do it in the United Nations. I abstain. I don’t have to use a computer. Don’t criticize me. I say, you can; I’m all for you having it. Don’t jump on me because I don’t want one.

What I’m talking about makes no sense for young people, because they’ve got no precedent. They don’t know what music sounds like in mono, analog, stereo and hi-fi. They don’t have any reference to that. It’s like hot dogs, hamburgers, caviar. They start with caviar. They don’t know anything about hot dogs or Philly steaks or anything else. That’s where we are, so what I’m talking about falls flat if you’re talking to young people. Because what are you talking about, all I know is, I grew up with this. I don’t have reference to any sound before this, which is really something, something new.

FJO: But this is the world you’re making music in now…

HT: I don’t worry about that stuff anymore. You know, because technology comes and goes, and I have my preference for the sound, but I’m not stuck there, because actually, the biggest thing for me is live performance anyway. It’s not recordings. It’s live performance. My whole life is about playing music in front of people to impact people with live music. Records don’t do that. My mission in life is to play in front of people and to have an impact on people’s lives. You can only do that in real time.

FJO: So legacy. Do you care if people are listening to your music a hundred years from now?

HT: I don’t really care. I can’t deal in that. I’m only concerned with how powerful an impact I can have at this moment. I want to be like 250 percent on, like I’m going to be dead tomorrow when I come on. That’s the only thing I can think about. That’s it. The artist is a difficult stance to take in life. But it’s my belief that art is the most powerful thing in the humanitarian aspect of civilization.

I know that if you take some kids that completely have nothing, and they could be acting up; if you could get them sensitive to art, they’d behave. Everybody changes. Art will change you. It makes you sensitive to human views and to the idea of being civil and human. So you don’t want it to be as powerful an element as possible. Because our statesmen and politicians, they really don’t understand this place. They always want to put caps on it and try to define it. And this is something you’re not supposed to try to define. It has a very subtle effect on humanity. All of us have gone and looked at a piece of artwork and all of us can come out impressed totally differently and moved in a different way. See, I’m also a believer in the fact that it doesn’t bother me when people come hear me and they walk out. They’ve been impacted too. Because you don’t like what I’m doing, it might make you think about something, too. I could have a reverse effect. Art can have a reverse effect. It could turn you off and it would still be affecting. It’s making you think about something or do something in a different way than you had been doing things. I move you away from what I’m doing, but I made you look at something else more seriously that you haven’t been paying enough attention to in the first place. People always think that because like art turns people away that that’s the end of it. No, that’s not the end of it.

I see art as a spiritual thing. That’s why I don’t like the word entertainment and these other terms. Art is spiritual. A person that does not care about the fact that you’re laying down on the ground hurt, art can change that person and make them care to call 911 or get down to try to give you a hand. Remember, in New York about a month or so ago, a guy was on the street in Queens or somewhere, and people walked by this man and he had been on the street shot or something. And some people stopped and took pictures with cell phones. This shows you how badly we need art. And art is literature and everything. You see, people don’t read. Kids don’t read, they sit up and play games. Humanity’s playing games and looking at little quick spots on television and things like that. Nobody’s sitting up in front of a painting these days. Art affects every part of you. It’s not an intellectual process. It’s a complete process. It activates your mind, your emotions, and your psyche.