Category: Cover

Imani Winds: Terra Incognita


July 15, 2010—10 a.m.

Valerie Coleman, flute
Toyin Spellman-Diaz, oboe
Mariam Adam, clarinet
Jeff Scott, French horn
Monica Ellis, bassoon

Transcribed by Julia Lu
Condensed and edited by Frank J. Oteri, John Lydon, and Alexandra Gardner
Filmed and recorded by Molly Sheridan and Alexandra Gardner
Video presentation by Molly Sheridan

Traditionally, new music has always thrived in chamber music settings more than it has within larger, more institutional environments like orchestras and opera companies where it can be too much of a wild card—maintaining payroll for so many people sometimes tempers a desire to take risks. In order to set themselves apart, chamber groups by definition must do things that others don’t if they want to succeed in the long term. Of course, there are many classical piano trios and string quartets that survive on a steady diet of the tried and true—after all, there’s a lot of great music for those combinations that’s still in demand by presenters and audiences all over the world. The wind quintet, however, has a somewhat different story. For starters, the heterodox combination of flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and French horn (which isn’t even a woodwind!) makes for a pretty strange blend of sonorities. And while it has attracted a wide range of composers for nearly two centuries (e.g. Anton Reicha composed 24 wind quintets and Schoenberg’s first large-scale twelve-tone composition was scored for this ensemble), the repertoire has never had the same cachet among chamber music aficionados.

That precarious legacy has not deterred legions of fabulous groups from pursuing making music within this unique timbral configuration. Most of them do so by reviving the lesser-known gems of the wind quintet canon, performing transcriptions of works originally composed for other instruments, and commissioning new work. Arguably none has plunged into this endeavor with greater élan than the Imani Winds. What began as a wild and somewhat starry-eyed dream to form a new kind of ensemble that would reflect its members’ shared heritage as well as reshape people’s perceptions of what a wind quintet could be is now entering its 14th season with all five of its original members.

Imani Winds has made this unlikely amalgam work through a combination of great performance chops, charismatic stage presence, fascinating projects, and a selection of repertoire that both calls attention to each of their personal strengths and pushes them to other places. Their stage performances and recordings have found them doing everything from cabaret at the Apollo Theatre in honor of Josephine Baker to tackling the music of Elliott Carter and Karel Husa. On the day we visited with them they were preparing for a session exploring quarter-tones and maqam with Palestinian oud virtuoso Simon Shaheen, and on their latest album, Terra Incognita, released this month by E1 Entertainment, they are performing brand new compositions created especially for them by jazz composers Wayne Shorter, Paquito D’Rivera, and Jason Moran.

To hear the five members of Imani Winds talk about their history together and what keeps them going is like walking in on a great party. It’s perhaps the only thing as joyous as hearing them make music.

—FJO

*

FRANK J. OTERI: I’ve been following what you’ve been doing since almost the beginning. I think we first met at one of the Chamber Music America conferences. It was before you had management and before you had released a CD, so it was pretty close to the beginning. But I never knew the exact beginning of Imani Winds. How did you all meet each other? Whose idea was it originally, and how did it start?

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Valerie, Mariam, Monica, Toyin, and Jeff

VALERIE COLEMAN: I basically called up everybody. I was a student over at Mannes College of Music. The three ladies were at Manhattan School, and Jeff here just graduated from Manhattan School and he was doing the Lion King. Somehow or another each person was referred to me and I guess New York is a small place when it comes to freelancers and what not. So I called them up and said, “Hey what do you guys want to do for the rest of your life?” The whole idea was bringing together five people of color, and using our backgrounds as a means of interpreting music of any kind of genre: from Mozart to contemporary music. We felt that it would be a great experiment, so to speak. And so we rehearsed, and I was all energetic. I’m like, this is great. They’re like, this girl is so a nutcase.

JEFF SCOTT: I don’t know if I shared this with you guys. I was about six or seven months into it and you put together this graph of how much money we could make if we did this many gigs. This was your hope and your dream, and I remember being in the car with my good friend Greg, and we’re driving along, and he’s like, “How’s this wind quintet working out?” I’m like, “Well, I don’t know. This crazy flute player actually thinks we’re going to make a living out of this.” He’s like “Really?” I was like, “Yeah, man. I don’t know how long I’m going to be in this group.”

[group laughter]

FJO: Where did the name Imani come from?

VC: The name was before the group. I think it was what gave me the inspiration or the courage to call people and act upon a dream.

TOYIN SPELLMAN-DIAZ: What a crazy thing that you were a student, going to music history class, music theory class, and you’re thinking, I’m going to start this wind quintet. It’s kind of rare when you’re in school to play with people from other schools.

VC: It’s not as crazy as we all think because we always say in classical music that a person of color may be the only chocolate chip in the cookie. It’s up to you if you want to keep doing that. Going to different schools and looking at all the freelancers in town was a necessity.

FJO: It seems like you’re all good friends now. But the music happened first.

MARIAM ADAM: I think that is the one thing that people are shocked at that we have this camaraderie that is not found a lot in chamber music groups. But I will say it’s something that we worked on. It’s something that grew because we didn’t know each other even though we maybe had common backgrounds. Actually, we had very starkly different backgrounds. But the respect level and the friendship level has grown over the years, and therefore, the music has also grown, and our ideas have grown together. You don’t have these elements in a lot of groups. Some people just focus on the music, or just focus on their career goals; they don’t focus on the unity of the group and the impact that an organization like this can have. And I think that’s something that comes across in our teaching, and in the music, on stage, and that helps develop audiences.

FJO: The wind quintet is sort of an odd combination, and it has a weird history. It goes back quite a long time, but it doesn’t have the repertoire that, say, the string quartet or the piano trio does. So why did you want to form, specifically, a wind quintet?

VC: I think it was because when I was growing up I always wanted to be in a wind quintet. Even as a teen, I’d seen wind quintets around me, just other students, and I always wanted that. So there was that deep-rooted seed that was planted early on. Then when I went to the Aspen Music Festival, I finally got to be in a wind quintet and I was just so thrilled. It was great having five people working together. It was chamber music at a different level to me. Before I was doing duets and trios, but now, it was just like a whole family.

MA: It’s kind of our only genre for wind instruments. String quartets have string trio, or piano trios, they have the string quintet even. Wind players don’t really have a standard. There’s a brass quintet. And that really is all we have. And so even if it’s not a standard configuration in most peoples’ minds, it is. And there is repertoire out there. And I think the biggest things for us have been: deciphering to the world and our audiences that it’s an established instrumentation; that there is a lot of repertoire out there and it’s growing (it’s not all great); to encourage people that it can be great; and that there can be this modern take on the sound that a wind quintet can produce. So now it’s been a great pleasure in all our new endeavors to discover the new sounds and styles that these five different instruments can make.

FJO: That’s the key, that it’s five different instruments. A string quartet is all about the blending; it’s the same family, and there’s a continuum and range hierarchy. But in a wind quintet the sounds are produced in different ways. And they’re not even all woodwinds. There’s a brass instrument in there. What’s cool about the wind quintet as an ensemble is that everyone is instantly equal, and it’s instantly counterpoint driven because you have these different timbres. So Valerie, part of this fascination with this idea of playing in a wind quintet must come from your being a composer. Before you formed Imani wind quintet, you went to B.U. and have a degree in composition—a double degree in flute and composition—so you were thinking like a composer. The very idea of wanting to put together such a group, wanting to make a statement, but working with a group of color and it being a wind quintet, is compositional. And I know you wrote this piece Umoja really early on.

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Umoja, Imani Winds’ self-produced debut recording

VC: Umoja came first. You said something very interesting that the concept of getting this group together is very composer-driven. I wasn’t even thinking as a composer at the time, and that’s always been the battle in my brain. One side wants to be a flutist; the other side wants to be a composer. And it was purely the flute side that was going into that mode of wind quintet. And the composer side came out later on when we just needed more repertoire to fit a purpose. As a matter of fact, when I graduated from B.U., I didn’t even want to consider myself as a composer because—no offense to anybody anywhere at B.U.—I was so disenchanted with what I had seen in terms of composers. It was so smarty-pants. And you know, I came from the ‘hood. I came from Louisville, Kentucky, and that’s just so anti-me. You know, I do have my little Star Trek spells, granted.

[group laughter]

VC: But at the same time, I would sit in composition class and all of a sudden, somebody would break out NWA and then they would look at me and expect me to be the expert on rap music. I’m like, “Why are you looking at me expecting me to do this? I want to do Schenkerian analysis with you guys.” So there was always that fight about what a composer is, and what the stereotype is that I just was not attracted to at all. But when I came to New York, I realized that composers define themselves in a different way. There are so many of us here. So whereas B.U. was my first introduction to this concept of composer and put it in a box, New York opened it up.

FJO: But you said Umoja came before for Imani.

VC: Well, it was a choral piece. It was a women’s choir piece. I was in my first year at Mannes College of Music. I’m always dreaming, and so I was thinking, why not put together a black history concert. And there was a need for some music so I created Umoja. Then somewhere along the timeline when Imani Winds came together, we had to do a wedding. And the person who was the groom wanted some Africana type of music. So I thought about Umoja and thought it would transfer easily into wind quintet. And that’s what happened.

FJO: So once you formed the group. Now you had an all-black wind quintet, but there was no repertoire.

MONICA ELLIS: As you were saying, in comparison to the string quartet—they’ve got dozens and dozens of pieces, whereas we have a dozen. But within that, there are really good pieces. There is quality within a small quantity. We’re only half as old. If the string quartet is 350 years old, we’re like 175. The mid-1800s is what we’re talking about. So naturally we’re going to only have a certain amount. But it is indeed true that when it comes to repertoire, if you’re going to sustain yourself like we have, you absolutely have to have something else more than just the standard stuff that’s out there, because you’ll finish the repertoire in two or three concerts. And then, what do you do next? So, there are people in the group writing for us. And then finding other pieces that are already out there, because sometimes there are wonderful pieces. You just have to unearth them. They’re just not really known amongst the greater population. That’s part of the problem too.

TSD: But we have to feel some sort of connection to it ourselves going into the decision-making process. We do have to feel like it is something we enjoy playing, as well as think an audience would enjoy listening to it. When we choose repertoire, we really think about that throughout the whole time that we’re reading through new music or listening to new music. The whole time we’re thinking: Would I really want to work that hard? Is the work we’re going to put into it worth the output that you get at the end of it?

MA: But sometimes there is the cart before the horse. We will get a piece, because somebody says we really should: “You’re going to love this piece.” And it’ll take us a few performances—not just rehearsals, but performances—to really warm up to the piece. Sometimes it’s the audience response that then turns us around to really loving a piece. And then we’ll think: Really? We didn’t really know. It’s giving a piece a chance or certain repertoire a chance, because my other theory that I was just thinking of is that the wind quintet, around the world, has had many fires started. There have probably been Imani Winds-type groups around the world, because you find the repertoire: Brazilian pieces, a lot of eastern European composers, too. We find, we unearth these pieces that maybe are no longer in print, or that some other group finds us and says, “Have you heard this group or this piece? You should really check it out. It’s only published in Siberia.” Through MySpace and the modern technology of social networking you find pieces. I think we have just been lucky that our fire is going strong and that we’re able to keep this little train in motion.

VC: I think that what’s going on right now with the computer is because wind quintet groups are not competitive by nature. We’re trying to all survive, so now we’re depending on each other to put our brains together and share information. If some group has unearthed repertoire, they record it and then people like us who do research and go onto iTunes or Amazon.com or web sites that have wind quintet recordings, we find that and we track down either the composer or the wind quintet group that did it. And we say, “Hey, where can we find that piece?” And they tell us, and they in turn say to us, we really enjoy your Liber Tango arrangement. Can we get that? So it is truly a matter of survival.

FJO: It was interesting to hear you say that you would sometimes play pieces a few times before you started to like them. So you’ll actually play pieces you don’t like.

ME: I don’t think it’s that we don’t like them. We do sense some goodness in it in the reading process when we’re choosing programs and repertoire for our new season. We go through an often very laborious task of listening to music and playing through music, then we whittle it down. We get big old Post-Its on this very wall—those big humongous Post-Its, you know—and try to make lists and see which pieces are going to work. And we often come across pieces that feel good in that moment. And we say we are fortunate enough to have the type of touring schedule and the type of performance opportunities where we can plug something in and then give it a few shots, give it a few chances. Then if it seems as though it doesn’t work, we just say we’ll scratch it. But there’s always some part of it that makes us want to do it. We never play a piece that we really don’t want to play and think, “OK, let’s give it shot ’cause it might work.” We always have some kind of feeling that this is a good piece. But it’s usually after playing where we realize what just didn’t cut the mustard as much as we thought it would.

FJO: And all five of you have to agree?

TSD: Yes.

VC: Well no.

[group laughter]

JS: We’ve had occasions where four people will be pro one piece, and one person has to be convinced to try it.

ME: Jeff is often the one.

JS: Yeah, I’ll admit it.

MA: The programming that we do really also has a very pragmatic approach, too. Because we’re wind players, we have to think about our chops and how well we can sustain throughout one half, then the second half of a concert. And repertoire gets selected based upon that. So we have also this other portion to our programming has this non-glamorous—

VC: Practicality.

MA: —which is really important. But it’s also about the whole package deal. Because if you feel bad, or if you’re not energetic and you don’t love the piece—you don’t love the moment of this part of the concert, the audience isn’t going to love it. We are very conscious of this relationship with the audience. I think again that’s something groups don’t often think that much about. Or they don’t put it that high on their priority list. For us, it’s high because it’s a constant building relationship. We’re still plowing new paths. We still have to earn the trust of that seasoned chamber music subscriptions ticket buyer who really only likes string playing.

VC: But at the same time, we don’t pick music solely because of the audience.

JS: It’s kind of a good thing-bad thing: we don’t have Saint-Saëns, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Beethoven. They didn’t write for wind quintet. So when you send a program out to a presenter, they’re usually looking at a list of names they’ve never even heard of. It’s a bad thing because they’re usually worried about whether their audience is going to even relate to this. The good thing is we get to introduce people to new repertoire. And because, like Monica said, we take our time in picking repertoire, if we feel strongly about something, it’s turned out over the years that usually the audience appreciates the music that we bring to them, and therefore, the presenters like us. So it’s a good thing that, along with the new quintets that are out, that we’re sort of ambassadors shuffling in new names in composition.

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The Classical Underground, Imani Winds’ first release for Koch International Classics (now E1), from 2005

VC: Speaking of which, what percentage of composers on our programs would you say have written music after 2000?

JS: Usually it’s at least half.

MA: Recently yeah, because of all the commissioning.

JS: Look at our programs. Most of the repertoire we’re playing has been written in the last five years.

ME: And often, even if the pieces have been written decades ago, they’re new arrangements. So that is another mix of times and periods that is involved.

FJO: There’s another aspect to the repertoire problem. It’s not just that Beethoven or Shostakovich wrote for string quartet and didn’t write for wind quintet. Each of them wrote a ton of string quartets. Even though Reicha wrote 24 wind quintets and Danzi wrote nine, most of the famous modern-era composers who had written for wind quintet, like Schoenberg, wrote only one. There’s also only one Barber wind quintet. Perle is one of the only people I can think of who wrote four. Composers constantly return to the string quartet but mostly will only write one wind quintet. Maybe part of the reason why certain things don’t work in certain registers is that someone’s first attempt is not going to be as good as the second.

VC: You’re absolutely right. This is what saddens me about the whole concept of commissioning composers and the granting process. Most grant groups are only interested in giving money to people who commission that composer once. You only get one shot at it. Composers have to make a living just like anybody else, and you can’t just necessarily call the composer and say hey, will you be our resident composer? We’re not going to pay you a dime for anything, but you know, you get to write all this music for us. Either the composer is really wanting to write for wind quintet, or we have to just figure out a way of getting money to commission that person over a long period of time, and invest so that person can develop their own inner ear when it comes to a wind quintet setting. Unfortunately, funding is a big issue in that.

We don’t have Brahms. We don’t have Beethoven. We don’t have Tchaikovsky. But we have Paquito D’Rivera. We have Wayne Shorter. We have Jason Moran who just wrote his first wind quintet for us. And it’s incredible. Imagine what he would do with the second and third wind quintet. That’s part of a bigger discussion about where we want to go over time. And if we want to keep coming back to that same composer, investing to make sure that they grow, and that they give us products that we can get out to other wind quintets and spread the name of the quintet to be more like the string quartet.

FJO: I want to get into some details about the composers that you’ve chosen and how you’ve found them. It’s one thing to find a piece that some other group has done, even if it’s buried under a vault. But to ask someone to create a piece that doesn’t exist is something else altogether. You don’t know if it will work for you beforehand. You said that you don’t play music you don’t like. But what if you commission a piece and it turns out that you hate it?

VC: We’ve had that before. We’ve had that before. I think every group has. But I think we try to make it a point of working with that composer, and getting their ideas, before we actually do commission, in the whole process, at the very least, making sure the practicality is O.K., because much of anybody’s dislike of any kind of new music piece has to do with its practicality: if it sits well with your instrument, what kind of stretches you have to do, are you willing to do those stretches? How are your chops? Are they being taken into account?

TSD: Are there places to breathe?

MA: This is why we get drafts. We almost put it in the contract. I would say that it has very rarely been—especially in our commissioning project—where we just say when it’s done, give it to us. We say we would like to see a draft. We would like to see all the things she was just talking about: the chops, the breaks, maybe the horn can’t play in the high register for 20 pages in a row. That’s huge. And that is one reason why the people that we’ve chosen to commission, we kind of know through the wayside, we know them through people. We know them through the industry. And they might know us already, so that there is a possibility for a dialogue.

FJO: I want more details. How do you know them?

JS: Here’s the thing. In my opinion it’s probably the most beautiful and wonderful process because it wasn’t like we said, “All right, let’s look at today’s established composers in chamber music.” We said let’s look at anybody who’s ever written music in whatever genre: jazz, pop music, classical. Let’s just listen to the music and say if this person is somebody that you would like to hear write a wind quintet, that’s open for discussion. We can listen to much of their music and just sort of say, “Can we hear them writing a wind quintet?” And in some cases, there were people that none of us knew. It was just a recording that we dug up. And somebody said, “Hey, I like this person’s orchestral piece. You know, I think we should listen to some of his music.” And some of it was very close associations, like it was with Jason Moran, where he was literally someone that was in our fold—our family so to speak.

TSD: We had this friend who has amassed a vast collection of people who have written classical music who are of African descent. So he let us borrow these huge stacks of CDs. We listened to them in this very room and we all made the decision: “OK, we like Alvin Singleton. We like Roberto Sierra.” So those were two of the composers we got that way.

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Monica, Valerie, Mariam, Alvin Singleton, Jeff and Toyin

FJO: Now there’s always an African-American connection or a Latin connection. Simon Shaheen—whom you are currently developing a piece with—is from the Middle East.

JS: We’re workshopping with Simon right now. Um, today was supposed to be one of the days we work on those weird scales.

FJO: So I imagine you’re all going to be playing quarter tones.

JS: And then some. What he hears naturally is what he grew up with, it’s so subtle. But when you hear it, it’s beautiful. I’ll admit to you, I usually practice watching sports, but I can’t with this. It’s not an easy thing. He’s very patient with us.

FJO: I’d like to talk more about how the music you perform is an integral part of the mission of the group: redefining and broadening cultural identity. Part of finding and commissioning composers is searching for people from communities—from the African-American community, from the Latino community, now from the Arabic community—you wouldn’t normally associate with writing wind quintets.

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(L-R) Alex Brown, Monica, Jeff Toyin, Valerie, Mariam, Paquito D’Rivera, and Silas Brown during the recording ression for Terra Incognita

MA: I’ll just jump in on that with Paquito. I was living in New Jersey, and I ended up knowing him when I moved to New York in ’97 or so. So when we started playing a piece of his, I told him. I had a friendship with him, and that turned into a working relationship with the group. And now he’s become a great mentor and friend with us. So that was a natural collaboration. And for me personally—I’m half Latino, Mexican, and half Egyptian—through the group, I’ve been able to channel this search for the music that is from these two different regions and influenced maybe at least from these different regions and use this platform of our search for music to keep exploring. Fortunately, everyone’s been on the same page with a little bit of bribing and coercion. So Simon Shaheen was a result of that. And I actually knew about him. He’s a world famous oud player, and I know that Ethos Percussion Ensemble had commissioned him several years back, and so through them, I got the contact information. I thought he lived in Syria or in I don’t know where. But he has a 718 number; he lives in Brooklyn! Living in New York it’s really easy to make these collaborations happen.

ME: We absolutely feel as though the importance of our similar backgrounds—being African-American and Latino—is very important and we wanted that fact to actually be represented in the music that we play and in the musicians that we ask to write for us. But it’s something that we don’t really talk about as much anymore, because it’s obvious. So even though we’ve gone after composers that we’d label unrepresented, at least for the wind quintet, we do want to have this kind of balance occur, which is have them be represented as African-American, Latino composers writing for an African-American, Latino group. At the same time, let their music speak for itself.

We also realized through the Legacy Commissioning Project that collaborating with jazz artists would be a fabulous thing to do, since we’re kind of joining in so many different types of players and thoughts and musicians, people that have written for all facets of every kind of music. Let’s look at really almost straight-ahead jazz players and what their perspective would be for writing for a wind quintet, writing for a classical—in all regards, most regards—type of group. And that has led to so many other types of platforms and landscapes of sound.

FJO: The fruits of working with the jazz musicians definitely took you to another place. It wasn’t just them writing pieces for you, but it was also you working with them and then them playing with you. I remember going to a Wayne Shorter gig and you guys were part of the group up there with Wayne.

ME: He was originally supposed to write a string quartet for the La Jolla Chamber Music Society.

MA: But Mary Lou Aleskie [then La Jolla’s artistic director] convinced him. Apparently she gave him our CDs and then he fell in love with it and then he memorized our CDs and after hearing us play live, we played his piece live. Then this collaboration started where he said, “This is not going to be it. We’re going to keep doing something together. Then he asked us to join him on the road. These concerts that we were able to do here in New York were a direct representation of what we did on tour with him, which was to play a little of our music for his audience then he’d play his half with his group, and then the two played together and not in a background kind of way. It really was an integrated collaboration.

FJO: So all of you improvise?

JS: Yeah, to some level. I mean, certainly not on Wayne’s level. I don’t think anyone’s on Wayne’s level.

TSD: Well, I think all these jazz composers that we’ve collaborated with have brought us to a different level of improvisation, each in their own way: Stefon Harris, whom we also commissioned, has a very thoughtful and organized way of teaching improvisation. He literally sat us in a room and taught us his method of learning how to improvise. Wayne wrote out his parts for us when we were playing with him collaboratively, but every now and then he’d let us play our own little bit of stuff in there—our own little spice, our own little pepper in there. And when we were working with Steve Coleman way back in 2000, he let us do whatever we wanted to do when we were playing with him in his group. He’s more of a free jazz agent, so he liked it when we went all out and all crazy. All these different jazz musicians have brought different stuff to us. And we have this kind of unique, classically based way of improvising.

ME: I think what we improvise on is oftentimes the interpretation of a piece. It’s not necessarily that we will, as Toyin just said, play Cherokee and blow over changes. It’s not about that, but it’s more about allowing ourselves to have freedom, to have real autonomy when we come to a piece of music and there’s never something that’s going to have to happen the same exact way each time. It’s still, of course, with precision and synergy, but allowing for the energy of the moment to take it to another place. And that is improv, in a way. It’s certainly different than your standard jazz definition, but it’s the way that we do it.

FJO: This brings us to the whole question of authenticity and playing idiomatically across genres, and that loaded word: crossover. You’re all classical players with conservatory backgrounds. That’s what you know and what you’ve primarily done. But you’ve had different experiences, and it’s not like other genres of music are unfamiliar to any of you. Jeff played in the pit for Lion King and toured with Luther Vandross. Monica’s father is a jazz musician, so jazz was presumably in her ears from the beginning. But how do all feel about this concept of cross through genres? How do you immerse yourselves to the point that you feel it’s convincing enough?

MA: I think that the most important thing is that we’ve had instruction and that we’ve learned as much as we can from the source. Even when we started exploring music of Piazolla, we did some collaboration concerts with a bandoneon player, Daniele Danelli. We had him come in, and even though we had already been playing Piazzolla, he came in and said, “No, this is how it has to move. Like this, or feel like this. You can’t just add a trill here.” There were certain nuances that we had to make sure didn’t come from our arsenal of crossover back tricks that can be used in every genre. The lines of our little box inside a circle have become more defined so that we’re not just crossing over arbitrarily and willy-nilly. We really understand the need to be authentic. Otherwise anybody could do that. So especially with Simon Shaheen, we’re learning quarter tones and maqām style. It’s like if you go play tennis: Take some lessons first, don’t just go there and start waving your arms. We’re taking lessons. We’re back to school.

FJO: So is crossover a good word or a bad word in your lexicon?

TSD: It’s a necessary word. I don’t think we’ve gotten to where we’ve gotten by thinking any word is bad. We have really learned to explore everything. Imani Winds is more of an inclusive group rather than an exclusive group. If you want to call us crossover, hey, go ahead. Call us whatever you want. Just come to our concert and have a good time.

FJO: It’s ironic, in a way, though, because on the surface you might say your new album, Terra Incognita, is the most crossover of them all. It’s all music by jazz composers. But in a way, it’s the most repertoire driven. It’s the least crossover.

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The new album!

ME: It puts your head on the bottom and your feet at the top, because if you listened to Imani Winds, or you kind of have all of our CDs out in front of you, you’ll listen to the Josephine Baker CD and say that is some serious crossover ’cause it’s very jazz influenced. And we have a singer and a percussionist involved. We’ve had percussion on every other album. This is the first one actually that we haven’t had any percussion component to it, so in a beautifully strange way, it does come back to the more core roots of us as a wind quintet unit. But we’re playing this kind of repertoire from these composers. We were definitely trying to teeter on a lot of different concepts with this one.

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The Imani Winds’ salute to Josephine Baker

VC: What I love about all this is the library that we’re amassing right now. It’s stacks and stacks of quintet pieces that we’ve researched over the years—things that have been unearthed but also multicultural, multiethnic, multigenre works that you cannot find on SheetMusic.com or any music store.

FJO: That brings us back to finding repertoire. You talked before about you all getting together and listening to recordings, but what happens when someone you don’t know sends you a score out of the blue?

JS: We get that. And we’ve put out calls for scores so many times.

FJO: Do you play through them all?

TSD: Every single one!

MA: But can we put up a disclaimer, because of this new evolution of “I’ll just email you the PDF”? Print them and mail them to us. And it’s nice if we can have the actual printed parts. Not “I’ll just send you the score.” We’re not going to huddle around.

VC: We’ve done it before, and it’s not pretty.

FJO: But how do you have the time to do that?

TSD: We spend a couple of days doing it. We really block off days and read through the music, and occasionally there’s still some stuff left over that we don’t get to in those couple of days, and then we’ll stick it in on the road somewhere. We’ll read through three or four other pieces.

VC: There have been pieces that we’ve taken on because of composer readings. And different colleges as well. And music festivals, like the Virginia Arts Festival. John Duffy had a composer reading, and a fellow by the name of Narong Prangcharoen wrote a work called Shadow. And we read through it. We liked it so much we programmed it for every main stage concert for two years in a row. And there are other works that have been submitted to us that we’ve included in this Institute library that we feel students will get a lot out of.

FJO: I’m curious how you balance doing what you do, with having lives, or other projects you might do musically. Valerie writes other pieces of music: trios, and even orchestra pieces. That takes time. Jeff does other arranging stuff. Toyin was showing me pictures of her one-year old daughter; that’s something that takes time. How do you balance a life? How frequently are you on the road? How frequently do you play together?

MA: I would say it’s a full-time, first priority commitment for everybody, so a lot of things had to fall to the wayside because of that. But in that commitment, the life of the Imani Winds has been able to flourish. I have a trio I play with that’s mostly in Germany, because that’s where my pianist is based. And so I try to squeeze that in, in the off times when we’re not working, but obviously my calendar is Imani Winds and then you just pluck little days. It’s not always easy. I think when we’re in town for maybe one or two weeks, these guys more than me can have a freelance career—because there are too many clarinetists in New York.

VC: And flutists.

MA: It’s not always possible. It is a little bit of a blessing and a curse, having a group that is so busy. At any given time, there are so many projects that we have to focus on: the new album, the touring schedule, picking the repertoire, starting collaborations, taking our lessons with Simon Shaheen. It’s fancy footwork and the prowess of a great business member, Monica Ellis.

ME: We’ve all taken various roles in the group when it comes to the non-musical side of things. I’m the business manager and accountant and bookkeeper and scheduler…

MA: And executive director.

ME: I guess so, yeah. Everybody’s an artistic director, but right, when it comes to the business side of stuff, I’m the liaison with the managers. That’s just the mundane busy work, which is fun, because I actually kind of like it. I’m um a little on the OCD side with that. I like to have things in order. So I took that task on early on. But as far as the balancing act goes, as Mariam said, it’s really all comes down to Imani Winds. And then you fit other things in. So there isn’t really much of a balancing act. Now with Toyin having a baby, it is the newest and most interesting and fabulous and beautiful addition to our world.

TSD: I took some time off when I had the baby. Now she’s a year old, and I’ve been traveling with her. I didn’t want to bring a four-month old baby on a three-week tour. So I insisted to the group that I couldn’t go much longer than a week in this past year. And this year there’s been a sub coming in and playing when it’s been longer than a week. So that was a decision I just made on my own. And this next year I’m going to try to take on everything again, and I’m going to continue to bring the baby on the road. We’ll see how that goes. But yeah, it’s the group. We’ve been together 13 years going on our 14th year now, and we evolved. We’re growing up. We’re adults now and we have our own responsibilities.

JS: Because we spend so much time together, probably more time together than we do with our significant others at certain points of the year, you have to be able to be yourself. If you’re not, if you don’t have the space within this group to—if you’re not feeling good—not feel good. If you’re feeling great, express that amongst everybody and have everybody share in that. If you can’t do that, then it makes the time on the road really, really difficult. And so what you’re seeing is, like Mariam said, the result of 14 years of maturity, and acceptance, and I think that’s why we’re able to balance it all. That, and a good bottle of scotch.

[group laughter]

MA: We like wine spritzers.

JS: Pinot Noir!

Who Is Bunita Marcus?

Bunita Marcus in conversaion with Frank J. Oteri
Brooklyn, New York on July 15, 2010—12 p.m.
Filmed and recorded by Molly Sheridan and Alexandra Gardner
Presentation and photography by Molly Sheridan

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“Bunita Marcus’s music is extremely refined, professional and decided in its pureness. It is like touching a flower, which you fear will fall down into pieces, but then it turns out to be a very strong plant. No wind can blow it away.”

—Louis Andriessen, November 1986

“Two Pianos and Violin by Bunita Marcus…is made up nicely just like the ocean is made up of many patterns of sounds, which is sometimes increasing or sometimes decreasing, is very beautiful—just like the designs on a Persian carpet.”

—Toru Takemitsu, March 1981

“Marcus has composed a uniquely personal and boldly designed music whose unhindered pacing and invented shapes create an almost hallucinatory response in the listener.”

—Morton Feldman, January 1983

It has been a fascinating experience to discover the music of Bunita Marcus. A rare symbiosis of mind and spirit, it’s very intellectually stimulating as well as really engaging emotionally. But at this point in time, listening to much of it is nearly impossible. Only one piece of hers has ever been released on a commercial recording in this country, a CRI CD that had been out of print for many years, although luckily, it is finally available again through New World Records. And custom CDs featuring rare recordings of some of her compositions can be obtained directly from from her own website. Yet only a couple of decades ago, her compositions had been presented by some of the most prominent outlets for new music—the Darmstadt Festival, the ISCM World Music Days, the Bang on a Can Marathon—and various pieces of hers had been performed by major new music practitioners, including Eberhard Blum, Robert Dick, Francis-Marie Uitti, Aki Takahashi, Lisa Moore, Margaret Leng Tan, the Kronos Quartet, the Cassatt Quartet, the California EAR Unit, and the Netherlands Wind Ensemble.

The story of Bunita Marcus has been one of new music’s great mysteries, one that few have explored, although hopefully that will be changing in the coming years. Performances of her music are finally beginning to happen again, and a recording of her startling Music for Japan was released in Europe earlier this year. In addition, Bunita Marcus is the subject of a doctoral dissertation by composer Jenny Olivia Johnson who kindly provided us with an original essay this month derived from her research into Marcus’s oeuvre.

Upon hearing Adam and Eve, the work of hers that appears on that CRI disc, I was immediately struck both by its similarities to and differences from the music of Morton Feldman. Many people will have heard Bunita Marcus’s name without ever having heard a note of her music, since one of Feldman’s most widely performed solo piano pieces is a work titled For Bunita Marcus. Feldman wrote several such pieces in his later period, and his other dedicatees—Samuel Beckett, Frank O’Hara, Franz Kline, Philip Guston, Willem De Kooning, John Cage, Christian Wolff, Stefan Wolpe—are some of the most significant figures in 20th-century literature, art, and music. As I started to search for clues and discovered more about Bunita Marcus’s connection to Feldman, I began to wonder if perhaps she might be the Lee Krasner of music. Might her relationship to an American icon, like Krasner’s to Jackson Pollock, have also been one that was mutually influential? Could her seeming marginalization today and lack of recognition as an important creator in her own right have also been a by-product of the gender politics that has played into so much of how cultural canons become codified?

It turned out to be far more complex than that. Bunita Marcus’s connection to Feldman, as well as to John Cage, proved to be the oasis in an often very disturbing biography which is thoroughly documented in her own music. It is a deeply moving narrative and ultimately one that proves the resilience of human creativity and artistic expression.

—FJO

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(Conversation transcribed by Julia Lu and then condensed and edited by Frank J. Oteri and John Lydon)

FRANK J. OTERI: The first time I heard your name was not because of your own music, but because of Morton Feldman’s solo piano composition For Bunita Marcus. I had gotten interested in Feldman because I was already interested in the other people he named pieces after: For Samuel Beckett, For Franz Kline, For John Cage. All of these people fascinated me. But I had no idea who Bunita Marcus was.

BUNITA MARCUS: Morty was my biggest fan. He talked about me everywhere he went and so everywhere I went afterwards, people acted like they already knew me.

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In Francesco Clemente’s kitchen, 1987; pictured from left to right: John Lurie, Clemente, Morton Feldman and Bunita Marcus, photo by Barbara Monk Feldman

And some of them liked me and some of them didn’t like me, based on what he said. A lot of my friends were saying to Morton, “Look, why don’t you let Bunita just be the person she is? Let her music stand on its own, and don’t get involved in it.” But I think he didn’t want to lose me. That was the big thing. So he kept hanging on to me any way he could. And in the end, we became family. We called our relationship family because we were so close. Even though he got married, we were still as close as we always were. And Barbara, his wife, and I were very close friends, so it made everything very acceptable. At the wedding, I did Barbara’s makeup. It was really a good time. At the same time, a week later, we found out about him having inoperable cancer. He had surgery, and we thought the cancer was in the stomach, and it was going to be O.K., and they could remove it. Then it was found to be inoperable, and from there, everybody knows the story.

FJO: But most people still don’t know your story.

BM: Yes, Bunita Marcus is quite a story, a bigger story than the composition of music, actually. I’m lucky to be alive. I grew up in the Midwest. I left my home at 17, but music saved me. It saved me from the violence of my home. I taught myself piano at 8; I taught myself theory at 10; I started composing when I was 13; I started playing the bass clarinet when I was 13.

In Madison there were so many great groups that you could play in as a youngster—orchestras, Dixieland bands, and wind ensembles. And I played in all of them and the adult groups. My teachers would put me in the adult groups because they needed a bass clarinet player, too. I grew up listening from the inside of the orchestra, so all of my music is very up-front. You’ll never find a foreground and a background in my music. It’s all primary material. And I think a lot of that comes from being a young player, and playing everything: classical, jazz, anything.

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Bunita Marcus premiering Feldman’s final solo piano composition, Le Palais de Mari at the Salon Concert Series. Photo by Clare Ascani

I had a huge reputation in the ’80s. I wrote a lot of very strong works and in every one of my works I tried to develop a new abstract language for the work. I didn’t really go back to old material. I was always reinventing abstract language. At the same time, I wanted to engage the listener emotionally and intellectually. In the ’80s, not many people did that. You were either uptown or downtown, but you weren’t in between. And I was sort of in between.

During the ’80s I also produced the Salon Concert series with Francesco Clemente. These concerts were just for New York’s artistic community—artists, musicians, poets, actors, filmmakers, anyone creative. My idea was to premiere one new work at each concert and have a long intermission where everyone could talk about the music. We used the best performers, the Kronos often played there, Aki Takahashi, The Bowery Ensemble, Eberhart Blum, and Paul Zukofsky were all introducing new works. It was very successful and after five years it had grown to such a point where it was unwieldy. Francesco and his wife Alba had twins that year, and we all moved on to other things.

FJO: There’s a comment that you made in one of your writings at that time about how all creatures in the world besides humans are always listening.

BM: In order to communicate.

FJO: But also, as you pointed out in that comment, to be on the look out for possible prey and to protect themselves against predators.

BM: Yes.

FJO: Humans rarely associate an element of danger with the listening experience, at least not consciously. I don’t know if you intended it to be interpreted that way, but it immediately made me think about the pieces you were writing at the time you made that comment, pieces like Music For Japan, The Rugmaker, and Corpse and Mirror. All of those pieces have a real element of danger in them, and there were even warnings to audiences prior to performances. This is so much more than most listeners allow music to be in their lives.

BM: Well, I don’t have any other choice, because I’ve lived a dangerous life.

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Bunita Marcus with Morton Feldman in 1979

I know now that all of my pieces have been autobiographical, even Two Pianos and Violin. At that point in my life, I was trying to decide between two men in my life: my husband and Morton Feldman. And I was the violin. I wasn’t aware of this when I was writing. I’m never aware when I’m writing. This happens because of my compositional process: it comes from somewhere very deep and I just trust it and I go with it, even if it takes me places I don’t want to go. Even if I write music that embarrasses me, or will make me ill. There’s a page in Music for Japan that I cannot listen to without feeling like I want to scream. When I wrote it I was feeling that way.

The Rugmaker is probably the most notorious autobiographical piece. And after they finished playing the piece at Darmstadt, the Kronos and I came onstage, took our bows, and left—half of the audience yelling “Boo!” and the other half yelling “Bravo!” David Harrington, being the person that he is, said, “Let’s go back onstage.” So we walked back out onstage, and it just made the racket louder. The audience was so divided. We did not have a warning because we did not know what it was about yet. The warning came later when the Kronos put it on their radio series, The Kronos Hour. That’s the first time we had to start putting warnings before people heard it, because people listening to public radio want to hear a nice string quartet and not be so upset that they’re going to break down and have to call their psychiatrists. And it did happen. At what we called a “preview” before the premiere in Darmstadt, at the Nieuwe Muziek Festival in Middelburg, the Kronos played and women came up to me weeping afterwards. They didn’t know why; they were just so affected by the piece. I didn’t understand it, either, and it took me about five years from writing that piece to where I actually began remembering my father coming into my room and violating me. So I started adding that to my program notes, and people would come up to me and say, “I feel so bad liking your piece when I know where it came from.”

The truth of the matter was the Kronos had been asking me for a piece for three years. I could not imagine writing harmony or something really cohesive like a string quartet, so I kept saying no to them. I remember being in L.A. at a festival—it must have been about ’85 at that point—and David said, “When are you going to write a string quartet for us?” I realized that he’s not going to keep asking me this question: One of these days, they’re just going to drop me. So I said, “Get me a good premiere, and I’ll get you a good piece.” He said, “How about Darmstadt,” and I said, “Perfect.” And so, that’s how it started.

I went home, and I had talked to my father. Morty tried to encourage me, and I kept saying to him that I hate my parents. And he said, “You gotta get to know your parents as adults.” So he encouraged me to have more conversations with my parents because his relationship with his parents changed as he got older. Well, I talked to my father, and he told me that when he was five years old, he really wanted to play the violin. The family was poor—it was back in the Depression—and there were no little violins for anyone to play, but his uncle was a great violinist. So I had this image of my father as this poor little five-year-old boy in love with the violin and never having a chance to play it. And so that’s how I began the piece. The piece starts out with all these sweet feelings a child would have for their parent: innocence, unconditional love. And as I worked through the piece, creepy things started happening. I didn’t know what these creepy things were, but I’m not a person to throw material out. I really believe that if it comes to you, it needs to be there. So I decided O.K., I’m just going to let the creepy stuff build, and build, and build, and build until it reveals itself. And so it revealed itself in a huge, angry section and then essentially a rape afterwards. That’s how the piece ends. And all through the rape, you still hear the little voice of the child. It’s very quiet, yet no matter how loud the rest of the stringed instruments are, you can hear this quiet voice. It never goes away. People were shocked. Even the Kronos were shocked. They said, “You really want us to play that soft? No one will hear it.” I said, “Oh, yeah. People are gonna hear it.” And indeed, you do hear it. Jenny Johnson has now taken this and written a dissertation about it, on music and trauma.

FJO: Allowing your music to go to places you might not have consciously wanted it to go might have ultimately been what brought back all your memories that had been subconsciously buried.

BM: In about 1989 or ’90, I started having very strange feelings, and I couldn’t explain them to anyone. I started having flashbacks to sexual abuse. The first flashbacks I had were to my grandmother abusing me. It was very disturbing. I went to a therapist, and she diagnosed me with post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and a few other conditions. But she could only see me one hour a week, and it was just not enough. I was being flooded with memories coming out very fast. So I started looking around the city, and I found a psychiatrist—the president of his organization—who worked with post-traumatic stress disorder. And I spoke to a number of people in the organization, and they recommended this guy. So I went to him, and a nightmare began. In the course of trying to recover memories from my childhood, this man also tried to take over my life. He would call up people, friends of mine, even people like David Lang, and say, “You are not a good friend of this person; stay away from her.” And he refused to let me compose.

The hardest thing for me in all of this was not to be able to write music. I think the biggest crime that was committed was that I could not write music for 15 years. And I was at my prime. I was 40 years old. This is when people write their best music. This is when people start getting job offers at universities. They start getting big time performances.

FJO: But ultimately finally being able to compose music again is also what healed you and brought you back into the world and made you into the person you are today. And that started with an amazingly simple, tender, and beautiful piece for solo piano, Sugar Cubes, which John Cage got you to write and which took you years to complete.

BM: John Cage saved me. I went to him right when I started having the flashbacks, and I said, “John, I can’t compose anymore. I don’t know what to do. I can’t focus long enough to concentrate.”

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Bunita Marcus with John Cage in 1990

I would concentrate for 14 to 16 hours straight on these pieces that I used to write. That is unbelievable concentration. The whole day would go, and I would just be lost in the piece. But now, I couldn’t do anything. John said to just write little pieces. He said, “What’s that they give horses to get them to do tricks?” I said, “Sugar cubes.” He said, “Yeah, give the composer in you some sugar cubes.” So I totally took this literally. I went out, bought a box of sugar cubes, and put them on a nice little plate on the piano. And I said, “O.K., simple: Cage. C-A-G-E. These are the only notes I’m going to use in this piece, and it’s all going to be quarter notes. It can’t be simpler.” And so I start this piece out, and it’s all counterpoint. I love counterpoint. I studied species counterpoint when I was a teenager and I apply it to everything: orchestration, every aspect of composition. I recorded what I had written so far of the piece and I went to John and played it for him. He didn’t have any equipment. Somebody had to go outside and find a cassette recorder and bring it in, so he could listen to this cassette of my piece. He really liked it and he was very encouraging.

I also knew that other artists had similar problems, which they handled in similar ways. Like Matisse at the end of his life. Matisse had this heart condition, I guess it was. All he could do was cut out shapes of colored paper, but what he did with colored paper was unbelievable. To be an artist means you do what you have to do no matter how you can do it. You just do it.

John Cage died a couple months later. I couldn’t finish the piece. I was just heart broken. And in 1998, the piece was still sitting there. That was after I had gotten rid of my crazy psychiatrist. I take the Jewish holidays very seriously. I met Morton Feldman on Yom Kippur, and he didn’t even know it was Yom Kippur. I just mentioned that I was fasting and he said later he thought I was a hippie. On that day I always try to tidy everything up for the year, spiritually and otherwise, and I needed to finish this piece. So I said, O.K., today I finish the piece. What happens in this piece, which is this very sweet kind of counterpoint, is a little lopsided and unexpected at times. And it hardly ever goes off of one staff. I started writing counterpoint that started breaking the rules. Every note I wrote broke more rules. I was like leaping to and from dissonance, leaping to perfect intervals, leaping to imperfect intervals, crossing voices, I mean everything you could do wrong, I was doing. It just got worse and worse and worse, until the piece ended. But for some reason, it ends beautifully. I guess I knew the rules well enough; I knew which ones to break. That’s all I can say. And now it’s very popular. A lot of people are playing it. Aki Takahashi is playing it all the time. She really loves it.

FJO: It’s also extremely practical in ways that some of your earlier pieces, as wonderful as they are, have not been. I’m thinking again of Two Pianos and Violin, and the piece that you have described as the first piece where you felt you were expressing your own voice compositionally, Oboe, Clarinet, Bass Clarinet, Trumpet, Trombone.

BM: Morton Feldman did one very valuable thing for me, and that was to teach me to write the music I was actually hearing in my head. And not what I thought I was hearing, or what I wanted to hear, or what I planned to hear. The first piece I wrote that way was called Oboe, Clarinet, Bass Clarinet, Trumpet, Trombone. This work actually started out as a string quartet. And every week, I would take it into Feldman, and he’d look at it and say, “Let’s look at this violin line here. What instrument really plays a line like this?” And I’d think, an oboe. And he’d say, “Yeah. I think this is an oboe line.” So then I changed the violin part to an oboe. And we worked this way with all the melodies and all the lines and all the textures. At one point, there was a tuba in there. It just kept changing instrumentation until we ended up with this really odd instrumentation.

I think after that, there was nothing to learn, except to learn his notation, which is brilliant, and I love it, and I use it, and I’ve developed on it myself in my own notation.

FJO: In your introductory notes for Two Pianos and Violin, you wrote that the work began as a duet for violin and piano, which is a combination that is much easier to navigate.

BM: Again, I had no choice. I was supposed to be writing a piece for violin and piano, demonstrating my skill as a graduate student. But I kept hearing two piano parts. It was driving me crazy and I didn’t know what was going on. One morning I woke up and I just realized it’s for two pianos and violin. Obviously, it’s not an either-or situation. It’s both. The trick was to get the right sort of metric notation to make everything float. After I wrote that piece, many people copied it. There were lots of pieces at SUNY Buffalo for two pianos and clarinet, two pianos and this, two pianos and that. I remember hearing a piece for two pianos and clarinet which completely fell on its face. And the reason it fell on its face was because everybody was counting together. If everybody’s counting together, it’s imbalanced essentially. But if everybody is on the same beat, but playing different meters in different worlds, then they can co-exist. And that’s what happens in my piece. They co-exist. And sometimes things line up a little bit, and sometimes they’re not lined up exactly.

In 1981, Two Pianos and Violin was the first choice of the jury for the ISCM World Music Days. This was a great opportunity for me, and a great shock because I had stopped entering my pieces in any competitions; I decided they were all rigged. I don’t even know who entered my piece into this competition. But the performance there was so bad. At times the violinist was eight measures apart from the other instruments. And the violinist would play loud when it said soft, soft when it said loud. I stood up and booed. Then the audience was applauding, but at a certain point, they called for the composer. So I just turned around to the audience, and looked at them and bowed. That’s all I could do. But Aki Takahashi and I have played this many times and in many places. When I was in Tokyo in 1983, the ISCM had a world exposition there and they wanted us to repeat the piece with Aki and I playing. They had the most beautiful pianos I ever saw in my life, two Steinway Ds. You didn’t even have to touch them; they played themselves. I never felt like I was playing the whole time at all; something magical just happened.

FJO: A few years after that you composed a rather unusual and very beautiful solo piano piece for Aki Takahashi based on the Beatles’s song “Julia.” In some ways it’s very different from all the other music of yours that I’ve heard.

BM: That’s because Aki is so special and Lennon’s “Julia” was so special. It was Aki’s idea to have contemporary composers write their own versions of Beatles songs. She proposed this idea to me in my kitchen one day. Immediately I asked If I could do Julia, I was already hearing it in my head—a counterpoint of voices dancing around the melody. I loved the Beatles, grew up with them and felt particularly close to this work of John Lennon because it was about his mother who had just died. I had an aunt who was like a mother to me and saved my life many times growing up. She was my Julia and my inspiration. The opening chord progression was absolutely beautiful as were the imagery of the words: seashell eyes, sleeping sand, windy smile. So this is where I began, this is the opening of the piece, a chord, a spoken phrase, another chord, another spoken phrase, and so on. I immediately went into the counterpoint from there, the counterpoint I had heard in my kitchen that day. What happens next is the melody undisguised, accompanied by a flourish of left hand activity that floats so beautifully you are hardly aware of its difficulty. I loved and respected “Julia” so much that anything I tried to do to it just destroyed it. It was too perfect. And I loved its perfection and tried the best I could to make a piano composition that would respect and amplify the true feelings of Lennon’s “Julia.” I didn’t want to get in its way. It was not about me or Aki, it was about John Lennon’s creation and I wanted to respect that.

FJO: There’s a story about you and Aki that strikes to the heart of what you were talking about earlier: music emanating from a subconscious place that you allow to happen.

BM: Yes, where does music come from? I went to Darmstadt in ’86 and ’88. And I always thought it was great to be able to present a lecture to all the other composers there from all over the world. You could ask them anything you wanted. So the first question I wanted to ask was where music comes from, and they got really annoyed with me. They expected me to write things on the blackboard and draw charts and everything. But I was asking this question: where does music come from? Well, there was a little debate. Some people said this is not an important question. Some people walked out. But in the end, it seemed to me that 95 percent of the composers in the audience felt that the music came from them. They heard something, and they wrote it down. Or they got an idea, and they wrote it down. This is not my experience. When I sit down at the piano, I am like a channeler. I channel music. I get into a state where sound starts coming to me. And now I’m to the point where I don’t even have to check the sound on the piano. My fingers will actually just go and play what I hear in my head. Then I write it down. You get to that point after a while. I usually just use the piano to double check things, especially to check register—do I have my pitch in the right octave and things like that.

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Bunita Marcus with Aki Takahashi in 2006

One day Aki was staying overnight at my place. I was sleeping in the living room by the piano; I gave her the privacy of sleeping in my bedroom. Early in the morning I wanted to compose. And I couldn’t compose because I didn’t want to wake her up. So what I did was I wrote down the melody I was hearing on a piece of paper. And within 20 minutes, Aki walks out into the living room and says, “Were you playing the piano?” And I said no. She said, “I heard the piano.” I said, “No, I was composing though.” I said, “What did you hear?” And she sang the tune that I had just written down. That blew me away. But it got me thinking, because I think there is a stream of music that is always flowing. It flows along with history and time and everything else that makes up our existence. And I think sometimes musicians tap into this stream of music.

When I compose, I use a technique that John Cage taught Morton Feldman and Morton Feldman taught me, and I really think is a great way to go. What I do is I put myself into this state of emptiness, and I allow the sounds to come to me. Now obviously, they’re coming from my subconscious or somewhere. I don’t know where. If everything’s autobiographical, it must be subconscious, I suppose. And when the sound comes, I write it down, and sometimes I have difficulty, like in the beginning of Adam and Eve. I was writing that for the Xenakis Ensemble and Aki was the pianist. But what I was hearing in the piano part were a B-flat minor arpeggio, an A minor arpeggio, and A-flat minor arpeggios. I’m thinking, “What is this doing in my music? It doesn’t work. It doesn’t fit. It can’t be right.” And yet when the rest of the parts were put in, it was absolutely perfect. But I felt guilty writing it for Aki because she was such a great pianist. Shouldn’t I write her something better? But actually it takes a lot of skill to play those arpeggios.

FJO: I found it so fascinating to discover that around the time you composed Adam and Eve, you were also writing about music for Elle magazine. I thought it was pretty unbelievable that Elle magazine ran an article by you about Paul Dresher, Mary Ellen Childs, and Joan La Barbara.

BM: Elle magazine decided in 1988 that they were going to change the focus of the magazine and they were going to bring in more arts. One editor in charge contacted me and said, “Would you write about music for us?” And I said sure. And they let me pick my subjects. And I pretty much picked my price, too, and they paid very well. They paid much better than music. And I could have expenses. I could fly to New Music America and stay in a hotel and interview people and take them out to lunch, have photographers come and photograph them—all of this for new music. So I was delighted, and I wrote a number of articles. The last article was going to be on women composers. We had this image of a line of women composers going all the way across two pages. And I was going to really talk about women composers being the composers of the 21st century. That was my theme. But in the magazine business, things change very quickly. And at this point, the photography department took over. They wanted a photograph of every single female composer before they would allow me to write the article. They had some idea that these women were horrible, ugly, terrible, I don’t know what. But just the fact that I was getting this kind of censorship really made me want to leave. Then the editor that invited me there left. So I just left. They paid me for the article anyhow, a kill fee, but I never wrote it. I wish I could have. But they were just being outrageous.

FJO: Writing about other people’s music is ultimately about putting yourself on the line as a listener. So I’m curious to hear your thoughts about the listening experience as it relates to both you as a listener and how other people listen to your music, especially given your statement about how the other creatures in the world are always listening.

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Bunita Marcus in the wilderness
Photo by Mark Hennen, 1996

BM: I listen to everything. I love being in nature. I have always loved being in nature. I go on months-long canoeing trips into the wilderness—get away from the world—and this is where I really listen. You hear all the communications going on between the animals. They are communicating. It’s very clear. They talk to each other. Birds talk to each other all the time, all these animals, even beavers. We camped once by a beaver hut, and the beavers would get out in the middle of the night and they would slap their tails. It was really, really loud—the biggest sound you’ve ever heard, a warning to other beavers that there were humans around. I got so interested in it that I hired an on-location film person to go up into northern Minnesota and Canada and record all these different sounds that I wanted, because I was going to make a musique concrète piece out of these sounds. He recorded some amazing sounds for me. I spent a lot of money on it. I still have the tapes. But I never could finish the project because that’s when I got ill. But I’ve found it very difficult to listen to recordings. I only like live performances.

I listen “intellectually,” which I wouldn’t call academically, because I make a distinction between what is academic and what is intellectual. I am an intellectual; I am not an academic. And a lot of artists are intellectuals, but not many artists are academics. So I don’t try to analyze the piece or anything like that. I listen and I act like a sponge. I let the music just come over me. I’m totally submissive and let it do whatever it’s going to do. And if it does some magic to me, I remember it. I remember the composers, I remember the performers, I go back, I congratulate them, and new relationships develop because of it.

FJO: So ideally, what do you want listeners to your music to be experiencing? It was interesting talking before about this warning for the string quartet. You obviously don’t necessarily want to exclusively entertain them. You want to take them somewhere else. Where do you want to take them, and how do they get there?

BM: I want them to listen the way I listen. I want them to really just absorb the experience. Now, some of the experiences where the warnings come up, of course, that’s going to be difficult. And I don’t know if it’s cathartic for a survivor to hear it or not. It might not be. I wouldn’t recommend it to a survivor. Especially the piece I’m writing now. I don’t write entertaining music, do I? I used to. I’m very entertaining when I’m improvising on the piano or the bass clarinet, but that’s not composing. And I couldn’t compose for the bass clarinet for a million years, because it was my instrument and I thought like a performer and not like a composer.

But now I’m writing a piece for bass clarinet, orchestra, and tape. This piece is called Sacred Souls and it’s dedicated to the victims of child abuse, but I want to really expand that to include anybody that suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, which are all our young soldiers coming home now, all the victims of war. Even people that have severe car accidents get post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s a real thing that happens in your head, and it’s very disabling. It happens to me: I’m sitting talking to someone like I’m talking to you right now, and I get a flashback. And it may be a horrible, horrible, horrible flashback, but I can’t say anything about it. I have to keep my smile going. I have to keep the conversation going. I’m able to do this now. There was a time I wasn’t able to do this. I’ve had a great psychiatrist to help me with this and I want people to understand it. This is what people go through, and it’s an ongoing process. It doesn’t ever really go away. And I think now we really have to acknowledge it. It wasn’t really acknowledged in the Second World War, and a lot of people came back very badly hurt and they took it out on their families or in other ways. They shot themselves.

I’ve been through the pain. So I want to use myself as an artist and make myself vulnerable as an artist to create this work to show the world that not all parents are good parents and not all children have great childhoods. I am very turned on by orchestrating violence, hatred, betrayal, all the things that I felt coming at me while I was being abused and living in a dysfunctional, abusive family. That’s a big, big challenge, how to do that. I think I can do that. I usually take on big challenges.

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Bunita Marcus at the piano
Photo by Erika Kuciw

I wish I was going to write it for piano so I could write something for Aki Takahashi, but the piano cannot express the emotions of the sacred soul: the child. I really felt after I started getting into the piece, I needed a strong voice. And then it just hit me, the bass clarinet. It’s autobiographical. That was my instrument. I chose it for a reason. It’s been my friend forever, and the bass clarinet can stand up to the orchestra, fight with it, and win. And so I hope that this piece even though there will be maybe very terrifying sections, that in the end, the soul of the bass clarinet will survive. And that it will have a positive ending.

FJO: So do you believe that music has the power to heal people?

BM: Well, I know this sounds weird, but I’m not interested in writing music that heals people, really. That’s music therapy. I really feel I’m creating art. Some art is nice to look at and some art isn’t so nice to look at. And why couldn’t that be true about music too? I remember there was a show in SoHo by David Shapiro, the poet, on melancholy. They were playing this piece of mine, Lecture for Jo Kondo, which is melancholic, too. And they had a Bruce Nauman painting there which was just sort of gray. Nothing else. Just a color. Phil Glass and I were standing and looking at this painting at the same time, and I said to him: Why can’t we do this in music? And if we did do this, would anybody get it—the subtleties, the nuances, the details? That’s where everything happens.

I call myself a post-minimalist, and I think that’s accurate. You’ll find in my work where there’s a lot of repetition, that I tend to repeat things not exactly, but with very, very small changes. And I try to find the smallest change I can that will change the feeling of the music the most. Like in the opening of the piece I wrote for Morton Feldman, the piano piece, …but to fashion a lullaby for you…. The opening is just pages and pages of something that pretty much is the same thing repeating itself, but it’s not the same thing, because there are tiny little things that change. Sometimes there’s a grace note and sometimes there isn’t a grace note, and sometimes a note will go up and sometimes it’ll go down, but basically it’s just a little cell of notes that repeats. But while you’re hearing this cell of notes, if the pianist is playing it right, you go deeper and deeper and deeper into something. And you don’t know what the heck it is, but you can feel yourself sinking into it. I had to feel myself sinking into it in order to write it, and it was very difficult to write because it’s so long, and I had to hang onto that sinking feeling and stay with it as long as possible. Essentially it’s depression. It was my depression over losing Morty. And then all of a sudden out of the top of the piano comes this crazy little theme, twittering around like a little bird flying in the room. And the scene ends, and I bring back the love theme from Adam and Eve. I present it in its most stark fashion on the piano, just very straight-forward and simple. At that point, the minute that ends, you are in another world, because all of a sudden the piece just blossoms. It’s this romantic music and all the feelings that I’ve been holding back are coming out, all the emotions. At the very end I wrote a lullaby, because the piece is called …but to fashion a lullaby for you…. That is actually a quote from him. I dedicated it “to Moichecal,” which was Morton Feldman’s Yiddish name when he was a baby. That’s what his grandmother called him. And the lullaby can stand on its own as a piece. It’s a very beautiful piece. It’s very simple, but it takes you somewhere.

FJO: What I found so extraordinary about the piece in performance when Lisa Moore did it 11 years ago is that there’s this pause before the lullaby.

BM: Oh, yeah, the grand pause.

FJO: What I found so interesting was your instruction to listeners that during this pause they should allow the music to continue in their heads.

BM: They won’t have any choice. They’ve been listening to it.

FJO: What an extraordinary idea! But this is getting back to what you expect from a listener, what you want a listener to do? You’ve said that music is this force that’s somehow beyond you and that it’s this stream. But the stream you’ve taken them to in this piece actually stops. There’s no music being made consciously, but it should continue on in their minds until this lullaby.

BM: You know how I got that idea? I got to a point where the music in my head stopped, and I had this image of a leap of faith. That’s really what it is. It’s a leap of faith. It’s the person on the trapeze flying through the air. At a certain point, they have to let go before they can grab the next bar, and that grand pause is where they are when they let go. So I have, hopefully, prepared the listener for this up to this point, so they really are in some kind of a state that they can float in for a minute or two until they get the lullaby, because there was no way to use music to make a transition to the lullaby.

What I learned from Cage and what I learned from Morty—what I learned he learned from Cage—is very simple: You work one page at a time. You hear the sounds for the page. You hear the sounds for what you’re creating at the moment, and you write them down, and then you copy them. And then you go to the next page. You compose that. Then you copy it. There is no going back to change a theme. There’s no going back to add an instrument. You made a decision. You stick with your decision, and you move forward. And what this does is it gives the piece a sense of inevitability. It really does. Because you are constantly forced—in the process of copying the music—to look at it and deal with it from a lot of different angles that you wouldn’t normally have to do. And you process it. So when you go to write the next page, you’re already kind of a step ahead of yourself.

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Bunita Marcus with Francesco Clemente at the Salon Concerts, circa 1989

I don’t know that you can ever write wrong music. I don’t think there is such a thing as wrong music. Francesco Clemente and I used to have this argument essentially because he would paint some absolutely beautiful canvasses and literally would cut them apart and destroy them after he made them. I just thought that was horrible. It’s the European in him, I think. He had an image of himself, and he only wanted to project that image. He didn’t want people to see another side of him, and this other side of him was so beautiful. It was the side that showed his love for his children, it was his side that showed his love for women, things like that. I’d say, “Francesco, I don’t think you have any right to censor your work. Period. I think if you do the painting, it’s your painting. You should stand behind it. Don’t try to hide it from the world.”

FJO: That brings us back to Oboe, Clarinet, Bass Clarinet, Trumpet, Trombone, since you have described it as the first piece that expressed your own compositional voice. What about your earlier pieces? Would you want those pieces to be out there in the world as well?

BM: They’re all good pieces. And you can see the influence of jazz in my work. You can see the influence of all my studies in counterpoint. I wrote a whole series of pieces called Apogee I, Apogee II, Apogee III. They’re essentially for soloists or duets to show off the skills of different performers. And I’ve written a mini-opera for children, which is really a fun piece. Nobody knows about it, and it’s never been played outside of its premiere on my senior recital.

FJO: It’s fascinating to learn that you’ve written vocal music since the only piece of yours I’ve heard that has a text is Lecture for Jo Kondo and in that the text is spoken word and, according to the score, even that is optional.

BM: Yes, there are vocal pieces. But once it comes to using words, I have a lot of trouble. I think I would enjoy writing for voice without too much text, like Morty often did. It was very interesting how he wrote the opera, Neither. Beckett sent him these eight lines of text. He didn’t even read it. He put it on the wall and covered up everything but the first line, and he started composing. He composed that line, then he lowered it to the next line, and he continued, and that’s how he wrote the opera. So he never knew what was coming up. He didn’t have any idea how it was going to end, except that he trusted Beckett.

FJO: It was interesting to hear you say that if you set words, you only want to use a few words, so they don’t get in the way. Words can get people to understand things on a certain level very quickly and effectively. But maybe they can’t take you down to the deeper level.

BM: I think that’s true. But I also feel that there is vocal music in my future. I would love to write choral music, for instance. I started singing late in my life and started studying singing in ’86, and there are singers that I just adore. So I think that’s out there for me. But I think that’s a little bit farther down the line. What’s important to me now and what’s really exciting for me is that when I first got sick I was told by a number of people in the music business that I should not let anybody know about my traumatic past. That to do this would destroy my career. And as I got more and more into therapy, I had this abusive psychiatrist who wouldn’t even let me compose. But my new therapist promised me from the first day I saw him that he was going to get me back to composing, and I kept saying no, it’s not going to happen. It’s never going to happen. You’re never going to get me back there. And indeed he did.

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Bunita Marcus at the MacDowell Colony in 1989

I don’t know if I can say this without getting tears in my eyes, but not composing for 15 years was one of the most horrible things that ever happened to me. And I think if Morty knew that this was going to happen, it would have broken his heart. It definitely breaks my heart. There’s so much lost music that I could have written. I did get a commission from the NEA to write an orchestral piece in 1989 or 1990, but I could never finish it. So I lost that opportunity. I’m 58 years old; there isn’t a CD of my music out there. This is crazy.

But what’s great about what I’m doing now is I can take everything that I’ve learned from my trauma and my work on my trauma, and I can bring that to music. It can be part and parcel of what I’m doing in music. I’m very excited about it because I have very strong emotions, and I really want to get them out.

For me, music represents human experience. That’s what my music is about: the experience of being human. If some aliens came to our planet in the future and wanted to understand what it means to be human, I think they would find it in our music more than any other place.

Augusta Read Thomas: Perfect Clarity

In conversation with
Molly Sheridan
at the American Academy of Arts and Letters
New York, New York
May 18, 2010—3:00 p.m.

Transcribed by Julia Lu
Condensed and edited
by Molly Sheridan and John Lydon
Filmed and recorded
by Trevor Hunter
Presentation and photography
by Molly Sheridan

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Integrity. Soulfulness. Beauty. Proportion. Form. Elegance. Grace. Balance. Flexibility. Spontaneity.

When asked what defines her artistic journey, Augusta Read Thomas doesn’t hesitate even for a second. “Those are probably the ten words that leap to my mind about this 30 years of writing music so far,” she says.

Later, I go back and count them. Ten.

I have no idea how she did that, but after a few hours in her company chatting about her life and work and the inspiration that drives it all, this level of attention to detail and clarity of purpose are not surprising in the least. Descriptors like “extremely specific” and “incredibly nuanced” become touchstones as we talk. Like her music, Thomas speaks in clear, concise paragraphs that reveal her voracious appetite for sound, both consuming it and creating it. Perhaps most fascinating are the warring tensions inherent in her own work: she is prolific yet perfectionistic, a composer of carefully notated music but also one seeking the energy of spontaneous creation.

Thomas possesses a sharp musical intellect but also a remarkably unjaded perspective on the value, need, and potential of concert music in 2010. For her, music has always been the pulse driving her life, and though she is also a committed educator, standing at her drafting tables and creating scores one after the another remains the unrelenting core instinct. “I have all sorts of things I want to make,” she says. “So I do it, I just get up and do it. No matter whether anyone likes it or not.”

—MS

***
Molly Sheridan: The sheer amount of music you’ve created is really impressive. That said, however, I don’t get the impression that you are just banging out piece after piece. I know that perfection is really important to you, so it seems like those two traits must be a little bit warring. I’m curious how that works for you.

Augusta Read Thomas: One of the things I’ve tried to do is to write music for lots of different genres. So for instance, I’ve written quite a lot for large orchestra, but I also write for children’s choir, for high school band, for opera, and so on and so forth. And I find that when one writes in one genre, let’s say an orchestra piece which is followed by a solo piano piece which is followed by something for 12-year-old girls to sing and then followed by a piece for the Cleveland Orchestra, it’s so invigorating to move from one to the other. So I’ve really tried to have a wide reach for the music that I’m making.

MS: What keeps you coming back to the table again and again? Where do you look for the inspiration and the motivation to keep creating?

ART: When I was really little, I used to lie underneath the piano and listen to the sounds coming over my head and I just fell in love with it. And that desire to make sound or the curiosity for the sounds that other people are making is so alive in me, as if I was still a child. So the thought of being able to get up in the morning and go to my drafting table and make a new symphonic piece or a new solo piano piece or whatever it might be, it comes from that original love affair. I think that’s what brings me back to the table every day.

MS: Growing up, was music a whole family endeavor then?

ART: My mother supported the family—she taught kindergarten—and music was a big part of the household. I come from a really large family, actually ten children, and I’m a twin. So I’m number ten and my twin brother is number nine. And inside of the ten children, there are a lot of people involved with the arts. For instance, I have one sister who’s a poet; one sister who spent a lot of time dancing; my brother is a ceramicist, and he’s actually a dean of fine art at a university; I’m a composer; another brother plays rock and roll drums. And in addition to composing, I also paint as well. So there was a real emphasis and interest in the creative arts.

MS: You must have been able to put on quite the family talent show.

ART: I remember growing up, one of my older brothers would be playing the Beatles and my sister would be playing Simon and Garfunkel, and then my father would be listening to, like, the B-minor Mass of Bach. There was all this different music in the house all the time, and it really affected me. Of course, I was playing an instrument the whole time, as well. I started very young playing piano, and then I was playing trumpet.

When I was little, I also used to just make up tiny little songs that would be, like, two bars long and really bad—really, really, really bad. But I would make them up and my piano teacher would say, “Oh, that’s good, write it down.” And I started to learn how to write down the notes and things. I mean, I must have been five or six, but I was constantly making sounds up or painting, making things. And little by little, that developed and by about ninth and tenth grade, when I was in high school, I became very involved with composition. I began to find that really enriching and challenging. I went to college as a trumpet performance major actually, but ended up graduating as a comp major.

MS: Clearly you’ve come a long way from writing in two-bar chunks. What is your working process now? I know that you like work at a drafting table, but what happens once you are at that table?

ART: For me, to get up and get to my drafting tables and to make up, let’s say, a whole new symphonic piece, it really has to come from a desire to create things—a deep, deep-down inside passion or vision of something that has to be said. And without that kind of pure love and passion for it, it’s very hard to keep going for years or for decades. It really starts with that kind of creative spark, I think. And then from there, I work into the pieces. I usually improvise quite a bit at the piano, actually, and sing quite a lot, and try to create for my pieces different arenas of material. It might be chordal ideas, or motivic ideas, or character ideas, colors, timbres, whatever it might be for a particular piece. I usually sketch these out on different pieces of paper. So for each piece, I’ll have several sketches and maps of the piece. And then I actually write the pieces standing at a drafting table. I have three very high, large drafting tables, and I stand at those drinking tea, usually in sweatpants with my hair sticking straight up early in the morning. I just go right into creating things. And I basically work from my sketches into the full scores.

You get very attached to the paper and to the physicality of doing it. I’m really picky about my pens. I have certain pens that the tip is very soft, and harder, and harder, and fine lines, and my rulers. If somebody comes over and they’re like, “Oh, I’ll borrow your pen to write down that phone number,” I leap, you know, because I have them all lined up exactly where I know where they are. There’s a certain Zen about it, in a certain way. To constantly just spend your whole time standing there in total silence making up big sound worlds.

MS: How many pens do you go through when you write a piece?

ART: Well, I press too hard, so I buy them by the box. I think there are 16 in a box. So I probably go through 32. Maybe more. It’s hard because they get moved around and then some get broken, but yeah, my drafting table is basically an array of pens, rulers of different sizes, Wite-Outs of different types, you know, the brush one, or the nib one, and tea.

MS: Your music does sound very clean and precise. It’s not sharp, but it’s very specific, at least to my ear. Do you do a great deal of self-editing or is that just how you think and that’s how it comes out?

ART: I’ve always admired composers with clarity: the idea was clear, the conception was clear, and the execution was clear. In my own work, there’s this balance between clarity and complexity. If things get complex, I don’t want them to become muddy and unfocused. They should always be crystalline and clear. Even if I have different objects interwoven or crosscutting one another or in a certain kind of contrapuntal configuration, the clarity is really important to me. I like it clean.

One of the things that interests me a great deal is for the music to be very nuanced. So the notations are extremely specific, and I think that lends itself to a clear and crisp execution of the piece. Yet on the other hand, I want the pieces to sound really spontaneous—”There it goes! The orchestra’s playing, and the train has left the station! Or a pianist can sit down and play my piece Traces, and it almost sounds as if they’re improvising but it’s incredibly nuanced in the notation. That’s something I’ve been working on for about 30 years to refine and refine and refine.

MS: I’m interested what you found to be the solutions to getting some of those outcomes, because they seem like they’re at opposite ends. How do you have extremely detailed notation that still allows performers to appear as if they are spontaneously creating?

ART: Performers these days can play anything, and that virtuosity really excites me. So I feel that if I can give a player a very particular text that says this is what I want to hear, they’re like, “Okay, that’s no problem.” In a way, giving them an articulate poem, or an articulate sentence, allows them to then deliver it with their own sense of it and take it one step further. Then it becomes a little magical, like what I made plus what they made becomes something else. And I like that synergy and that kind of—poof!—when the sound comes out just right.

MS: It seems like that’s maybe one of the things you take the most pleasure in—exploiting virtuosity and seeing where that can take you.

ART: I’ve always been interested in exactly how the sound is made, what the player is physically doing: where is the finger on which harmonic; what kind of bow speed is being used; exactly how much air is being passed through the instrument; that kind of thing. I’m very sympathetic to what it is they have to do because I spent so much of my life practicing to learn how to do it, and I think that’s very characteristic of my work. I grew up as a player, and I think you can hear that in the compositions to a certain extent.

MS: Are there particular things that you’re mindful of because of that? Are there little pet-peeve things that you’re careful about because you come from that performer’s experience?

ART: I like my music to be fun to play, so that people go, “Oh, I love this bar here,” or “That was such a groove. I really thought that was great.” When players tell me things like that, I can see that it was fun. In a way, I feel that a lot of my work has sort of a whim about it, or a caprice, or a certain kind of wink of the eye, or sunshine. It’s not dark, heavy, somber; it’s not at all.

Another thing I’ve been working very hard at for about 20 years is to make my works very concise: to say a lot in four minutes; to say a lot in two minutes; to be very articulate in what I’m saying. So the pieces are generally short, very colorful, and capricious.

MS: You keep mentioning what the music “says.” And since I have had at least a handful of conversations with you and have a sense of your personality, I’m curious if there are things that you say in music that you wouldn’t or couldn’t say in words.

ART: Although this sounds kind of corny or hokey, when I’m writing my music, I’m writing it from the heart. I really am. Like somebody might not like a particular piece, but I feel incredibly naked. I feel like I’m completely exposed. There’s no artifice. I feel that when I’m writing my music, I’m able to reveal some little glimpse of what’s really happening in my heart. I’m aware that this sounds corny or it might sound a little bit odd, but it’s the only way I can really express what it is that I’m trying to say in the music.

MS: Because you have had so much conventional success, does that make it any easier to be vulnerable in that way, or not really?

ART: It’s really interesting, because sometimes when people hear a piece of mine on the radio, they’ll say, “Oh, that’s Augusta Read Thomas. I’m sure that’s Augusta.” You know, so there’s some kind of signature sound. On the other hand, I’m not writing the same piece over and over again—all kinds of different genres, sizes, durations—and every piece for me is a new adventure. And as such, I feel completely vulnerable. You have to just have the courage to break the silence and to make up a sound and try to make a form that’s very organic and has a beauty and also a deep honesty and character about it. That’s such hard work. So I think that being creative every day, the vulnerability or the honesty is definitely there for sure.

MS: Do you get emotionally tougher as the years go on? Is there a point where you had to come to terms with the fact that you have a creative life in the public eye, and this is a piece of it?

ART: Throughout music history, I’ve always loved the composers who really put themselves on the line. They absolutely were who they were to the maximum. So when you think of Mahler, or Bartok, or Debussy, or late Beethoven, or early Stravinsky, or whoever you would like to pick, there’s just no turning back—these artists showed us complete iconoclastic vision. I really like it when composers are able to dig deep and come out with who it is that they are: highly characterized music that isn’t derivative; that has a personality; that invents its own kinds of risks. And for me as a creative person, those role models are really important. And of course, we all have had pieces that people don’t understand, but you have to really dig deep and believe in what it is that you’re searching for and what you’ve been working at for a long time. In a way, I think of my works as kind of chain-linked. So you maybe make a string quartet, and then the next piece you make might be a piece for orchestra, and then the next piece might be for oboe and six players, or whatever it is. They’re all independent pieces, but you learn from one how to improve for the next. And in that sense, it’s a chain link of growth: a search for “excellence” or a search for “clarity.”

MS: Are those the words that you use to describe the journey that you’re on: excellence and clarity?

ART: I think the journey I’m on has to do with integrity and soulfulness, the attempt to make things of beauty, of great proportion or beautiful form, elegance, a certain kind of grace, balance, flexibility, spontaneity. Those are probably the ten words that leap to my mind about this 30 years of writing music so far.

MS: It is almost never easy to put artists into camps and categories, but where do you see your closest kindred spirits in the music that you’re writing?

ART: I’ve always loved the spontaneity of jazz. And jazz is a big word, I’m aware, but there’s a certain kind of turn on a dime flexibility and instant creation that’s going on that I’ve always tried to retain in my own sound even though my music is highly notated. I’ve always loved Debussy for this refined, very velvety sonic palette, harmonically and timbrally. And of course, those are very much related. I love Varèse for his colossal kind of industrial sound fields. My favorite composer is Johann Sebastian Bach. I listen to Bach every day. He’s always inventing, and his concision and the deep spirituality of his sound and the immense imagination that’s taking place everywhere—that is so enriching and beautiful to me. And there are so many others. I mean, it just goes on and on. I love everything Brahms wrote, and, boy, the early ballets of Stravinsky have directly, clearly influenced everything I’ve ever done. So there’s a million grandparents.

One of the things I feel really strongly about is that we should really be looking at somebody’s exact music—the exact piece, the exact sounds. I think we tend to put people in boxes too much. Okay, this one is a such and such and that one is a something-ist. You know, I have young composers saying, “I’m a such and such-ist,” and they’re, like, 18 years old. From my point of view, one can easily grab something from a vocalization of Ella Fitzgerald and have it make complete sense in relation to, let’s say, a Debussy prelude. And they’re very different musics, and they’re both fabulous, but they can both enrich someone who knows that music. So I really don’t like boxes and categories, and I always listen carefully to what it is that the piece is saying.

MS: With all the lessons you’ve taken from listening to music, what’s the “equation,” if you will, for how this then shakes out to equal music where people would say, “That’s Augusta Read Thomas. I’d know that sound anywhere”?

ART: I just had the chance to work with the Juilliard Orchestra, and the fourth movement of my piece is this kind of mad gambol or some kind of like bebop-meets-Varèse kind of thing, you know, just very jazzy with all these weird hits and things coming in and out. Yet when you put it in a big orchestra, it starts to sound like, oh, a little bit Stravinskian, but then it’s kind of like rock and roll, but it’s not—the harmonic fields are more chromatic than rock and roll. So where do you draw the line? Where can you say, okay, there’s the bebop bit, and then there were the jazz harmonic fields. It’s also extremely concise. So then it’s kind of almost Webernesque. This huge orchestra playing this romp that’s only four minutes long. The transformations that are happening inside of it actually come from listening to Bach. So there are all these kind of weird rivers and grandparents of different kinds of music that are all being digested. And, hopefully, what pops out is this movement of orchestral music by Augusta Read Thomas. It’s completely its own honest thing, but it does clearly understand or have the perfume of other kinds of music in it.

MS: Can you point to what is the Gusty part, or are you too close to it to know?

ART: There are certain things that are very characteristic of my work. One is that I love pitch—I love the notes. I spend enormous amounts of time at the piano playing for every piece. And if you change a note, or if you hit a wrong note, my ears catch it instantly. So I think that’s one thing. I think another one has to do with rhythmic contexts and rhythmic syntaxes. Not that everyone else should do it—everyone has to do it their own way—but for myself, I’ve always liked rhythms where they are slightly unpredictable. I’ll set something up [sings], and right when you think you know where you are, you’re interrupted. You can actually feel the groove, definitely, but then there’s a hiccup. And I like those little spontaneous rhythmic twists and turns. I stand at my drafting table and I tap, I conduct, and I sing the whole thing out and feel exactly where the rests should be, or exactly how long that note should be before the next thing comes in. So basically I’m singing it and feeling it, and so that certain kind of rhythmic syntax comes up in a lot of my works. And sometimes that’s related to the meter. It depends on the context and the particular piece, so it’s not just the actual rhythm, but the metrical structures as well. I think that in general I’ve always liked a colorful palette. I think of certain painters like Van Gogh or Matisse or Picasso or Turner, their different use of color. It’s very interesting to me, and I think in general one would say that my palette, the big palette, is colorful.

MS: What is on that palette? When you speak about that, what are you thinking of? Instruments? Timbres? Rhythms? All of these?

ART: If I could try to describe the way I think of music, I would draw a big circle. Then inside of it, I would put a lot of words, such as counterpoint, harmony, rhythm, harmonic rhythm, pitch, flow, flux, density, tessitura, balance, and so on and so forth. For me, it’s a big huge gestalt. So you can’t actually separate it out and say, okay, this could be moved, because if you’re talking about harmony, you’re also talking about pitch. And if you’re talking about pitch, you’re also talking about tessitura. And if you’re talking about tessitura, you’re talking about instrumentation. If you’re talking about instrumentation, you’re talking about color. They’re all connected with this beautiful web, and so while I could talk about rhythm independently, or I could talk about harmony independently, for me, they instantly plug back into that gestalt.

MS: When you’re at that drafting table, is there an imagined audience for this music in your mind at that point? Have they entered that into the equation at that point?

ART: It’s a very difficult question to answer because so much of this is about this very internal process of making things. You’re standing alone with your drafting table for months on end with paper. No one can hear it, except for yourself. Then all of a sudden, 3,000 people are in a huge concert hall. I’m aware that there is an audience out there, but when I’m creating the pieces, I’m really trying to listen deeply and make up the sounds for my own ears. It’s a very tricky thing to balance because it’s commissioned, let’s say, by the New York Philharmonic, or the Chicago Symphony, or the LA Phil. I know there’s going to be thousands of people that will hear it. So I already can project that audience. But at the moment of creating it, for me it has to stay more private.

MS: When you came on with Schirmer, you already had some 400 works in your portfolio, but I read an interview that you gave around that time in which you said that you reviewed them all, selected about 25, and withdrew the rest. Now, you’ve gone on and created quite an impressive catalogue of music since then, but I want to dig around a little bit in what the motivation was for pulling back so many works.

ART: When someone goes to Schirmer and they say I’m interested in Augusta Read Thomas, I want that person to find a piece—a string quartet, or an octet, or a piece for chamber orchestra, or large orchestra, or chorus, whatever it might be—that at least I like. There’s a certain kind of Gusty quality control that’s going on so that I feel the pieces are something I really stand by. I don’t want to waste anyone else’s time with a piece that I didn’t even like. It doesn’t make sense in this day and age. But also, if they then decide, “Oh, we didn’t like it,” at least I liked it. In other words, it just keeps it a whole lot cleaner. For me, it’s very important to keep my catalog at G. Schirmer what I would call clean and organized and very much edited, as it were.

MS: Do you still pull things out?

ART: I would like to have the option to withdraw some very early works. I think probably all composers would like that, but before I went to Schirmer, I pulled back tons of the works that I had written really early and then all through college because I felt that they weren’t strong enough. Like, one piece might have had a nice idea here, but the whole piece didn’t work. Or another piece might have had a really cool harmonic field there, but the piece didn’t work. What’s interesting to me now is that the whole gestalt works. The form is the right length for the materials and the character shifts within the piece, the balance, the sense of flow, the inevitability of sudden shifts. Just getting it all right, you know, and that’s really hard to do in any art form. So the works that I have with Schirmer, I’ve been trying over many, many years to have them be as refined as possible.

MS: It seems like that’s something that would be even harder to do going forward—maintaining complete control over access to anything that has been published in the digital age.

ART: It’s really true. I’ve always admired Brahms, because he only left exactly what he left. He pulled back everything else and burned it, or threw it out, and he leaves us just a blockbuster piece after blockbuster piece. I thought, “That’s a smart man.” Usually composers are pretty good judges of their own work. A tailor knows how well he or she made the suit, how beautifully the lining was or wasn’t done. And the same with the composer: You know how beautifully you made that symphony or not. At least, I think so. There’s a huge Gusty self-editor. Major. Very often, for instance, I’ll write a piece, let’s say the piece is 15 minutes or something for orchestra. I’ll write 19 minutes, and I trim myself down. Is this absolutely essential? How can I make it tighter, so that I really have this chance to pull my listener’s ear through the piece in a way that’s logical, but that isn’t self-indulgent? That really has something to say at every moment? I’ve always liked articulate music.

MS: Let’s talk about the orchestra, because that was clearly a big part of your career establishment. Was that sound palette already a central focus of your internal musical imagination? Were your ears already focused in that direction, or did that come with the opportunities?

ART: I grew up with two different kinds of experiences: playing piano alone and practicing, practicing, practicing for years, and playing trumpet in an ensemble, in a chamber orchestra, in an orchestra, in a big band, in the church brass quintet, in various large ensembles. As a composer, it was very useful for me to have both. And here, fast forward 30 years, I’m still writing for solos and for large ensembles because I grew up in that, and I can feel exactly how it feels. So writing for orchestra, really, is a natural outcome of having played trumpet for so long and falling in love with the repertoire as a trumpet player. And the inspiration of what, let’s say, early Stravinsky made and how one can move forward or sideways or in any direction from that seemed very natural to me.

I think also when you grow up playing an instrument in an ensemble, you learn a lot. For instance, when I was, like, 16, I probably knew a lot about clarinets and oboes and flutes and snare drums because all of my friends were playing those and I heard them every day. So you soak in like a sponge all of this knowledge without realizing it. And therefore, when you start to write for an oboe, or a bassoon, or a euphonium, or whatever it might be, there is ten years of stuff that’s already in the ears. I found that very useful.

I’m still madly in love with writing for orchestra, and I can’t wait to write my next orchestral piece. It’s very labor intensive, obviously. Most of my orchestral pieces are about 150 pages of hand-written, very large manuscript. It’s very physical. That’s why I have bad posture. But I still want to get up and make the next orchestral piece. Definitely. It is a certain art.

MS: And a lot of pens.

ART: A lot of pens, a lot of Wite-Out.

MS: You do have this amazing insight into the world of the orchestra as a composer who was a performer, who worked intimately with both the administration and musicians of a powerhouse orchestra in America. So if you were asked to kick in your ideas, as this person who has all this experience, are there things that you see that orchestras might do differently? If you could take any risk with such an ensemble, what would you like to see tried or implemented?

ART: For an audience member at an orchestral concert with a world premiere—let’s say the piece is 20-minutes long, and they’re hearing it performed once—there’s an enormous amount of information that’s being transmitted. It’s almost like reading an entire novel in 20 minutes. And it’s a lot to digest, even for the specialists. Even for the performers. I mean, there’s this big, very thoughtfully created work, and it takes some time to get to know. As such, I feel that we really need recordings. If orchestras could literally record everything they do and get it up on radio, make it accessible, make it downloadable, allow people to hear it many, many times, I think if you multiply that out by 30 years, 50 years, it’s going to make such a huge difference to the education of the audience, and the enjoyment and the beauty of the art form. For instance, let’s say a composer has a premiere in a certain city: no one can hear it unless they happen to be there. So even great pieces are being made that nobody ever gets the chance to hear. I mean, that’s just crazy.

The other thing that’s interesting to me is how much music people are listening to. I have a ton of nieces and nephews, and they’re all plugged in. They all have their handheld. They know how to get the music off the Internet. They know how to steal it off the Internet. They’re listening to it nonstop, maybe three hours a day. On the way to school. On the way back. On the bus. At the gym. Listening, listening, listening. So you have these young people listening to hours of music a day—not minutes, hours. And yet, how do we get to them this new orchestral piece that was just performed? We’re not going to get it to them if we don’t allow anyone to get to it.

So thinking of how many hours of music people are listening to every day is quite exciting in a certain way. But how can we make sure that they’re listening to a huge array of musics, not just only one type. I think one of the categories that’s left out is classical art music. So large organizations, such as a large orchestra, really need to figure out a way to reach all these people who are listening for three hours a day. I don’t have an answer, but I believe that it’s possible.

Having taught orchestration for many years, and having written for orchestra for most of my life, I actually believe that the orchestra’s really young. I mean, when you actually think about it, the orchestra for which we are writing today was developed by Strauss, let’s say. We’re talking, like, 100 years old! This is incredibly young when you think about music history. Where will this be in 200 years? Or 300, 400, 500, 800 years? We need to keep this vibrant, alive, young, flexible, wonderful instrument moving forward as opposed to making it stiff and like a museum. And I think when we as a culture start to only play older works—and lots of them—and not enough new work, it can be very, very dangerous.

MS: Is it ridiculous to think that those attendance graphs will start going up again, or do we need to be more optimistic about the future? Are there possibilities in front of us?

ART: I’m a complete optimist. I may sound like a fool, but I have a lot of hope because I basically get up every day and I write orchestral music. And to do that, you have to be either crazy or have a lot of hope. So I really believe in the instrument. I believe in its past repertoire. I believe in what tons of composers are writing for it today. I think it’s vibrant and vivid, and there’s nothing like a great orchestra performing a great piece. We just have to be willing to keep going forward. And it’s so interesting because many people want a new car. They want a new cell phone. They want the latest in brain surgery. They want the latest technologies. Then, when it comes to [classical] music, they’re like, “Well, I only like Mozart, please. That’ll be fine.” But they want new of everything else: new theater, new cinema, new video games, new rock music. So I think there’s a disconnect. For me, I want new orchestral music. And so I worry when people get really stiff about wanting something that’s 200 years old only. I think, with all due respect, that that’s a mistake in any genre. Architecture, gardening, medicine, you name it. We have to keep moving forward.

MS: I’ve got to believe that your students look to take something from you that they can emulate—not the music that you make specifically, since they make their own music, but how you lead your life and how you have had success in your career. Do you have ways of guiding them, or thoughts that you offer them to help them along with their own dreams?

ART: I’ve taught for many, many years at Eastman, Northwestern, Tanglewood, and lots of residencies every year, where I go in for a week and do intensive teaching. I love it. And actually, I’m still in touch with Eastman students that I taught 20 years ago. I mean, I build real relationships with people. Like, I’m the godmother of lots of their children. They become like family to me.

I really care about what they’re making, and they send me all of their recent pieces. The one thing that I care a lot about is that they be who they are. I always say, “Let’s look at what you need to do. Look inside. Be yourself.” What I don’t want is to create a whole bunch of Augustas. The more honest people are, the more I’m enthralled with their work. So none of my students sound the same; they’re all doing completely their own thing. And that’s what I like. There are other styles of teaching where there’s sort of a guru and people follow in that system, or with those methods. And that’s also very valuable for certain teachers and certain students. But that’s not me. I’m much more about really having people be who they are. And so the things that interest me in their work are the same things that interest me in other people’s work, which is a certain kind of honesty, and integrity, and risk taking on their own terms.

MS: Do you suspect that teaching will always be an integral part of your career then, or will you eventually give it up so you can devote yourself exclusively to composition?

ART: It is my dream to found and direct an institute for advanced studies in composition. The institute would have fellows, who would be young composers, recently having finished a DMA or a Ph.D., who would come to work with me for two years, have all their compositions performed and recorded, would receive a yearly stipend on which they can live, and have the opportunity to teach. Being a fellow would provide them time and space to compose with concentration, closely rehearse and hear all their works played, make a wonderful portfolio of scores and recordings, and grow as artists. There are many more aspects to my dream, but that’s a quick summary. I just need some financial help building it!

MS: What about when you look back at your own career. It’s far from over, obviously, but at this point, if you turned around and looked over your shoulder, what are some of the milestone markers for you?

ART: For me, the actual, very specific sound that I want is very important. Like the difference between whhah and whhhhhaaah. They’re very similar, but they’re actually profoundly different, if we were to analyze those two. To just really have such a clean idea of the sound that one wants, and then to notate it and to hear it performed with the perfect bow speed, great intonation, beautiful blend—every time that happens, that’s a huge joy for me. This certain sound was imagined and executed. And hopefully captured on a recording, but that’s rarely the case. If you ask me about my career, what’s important, I would say that’s important. That really matters to me.

I think it’s also very helpful and meaningful to me to have real discussions about real music with people that know the same music. Where you can actually say, “Did that little thing work right there?” or “How could this little thing have been better?” It’s sort of like if you’re a young poet and you need advice, you really need to go to a great poet who will say, “You know, if you move the comma one word to the left, your whole poem will have this extra double meaning,” or you know, something really technical. Those conversations that I’ve had with people over the past 30 years have been really meaningful and really helpful. And those are the kinds of conversations I try to have with my own students. Like, let’s really get into it here. Let’s not just drink coffee and chat. I like to get into the sound and talk about it.

MS: When you first got on this path to being a composer and sort of looked down the road and thought about what that was going to mean, how does that vision mesh with where you’re actually standing today?

ART: I was totally infatuated with music as a young person and then I practiced for, you know, five hours a day, and then I played, and then I started writing, and then I kept writing, and now here I’m writing. I mean it feels very natural, very integrated. It’s just a path that I’ve been on, and that I’ll keep walking. You have to know your own truth. You have to get up every day and face another piece of blank paper and create a piece. I’ve always admired painters. They make a painting, and they get up and make another painting. And for myself, that’s very much been part of my process. Sometimes my husband will say, you know, “Why don’t you take a morning off?” But I’m so on my path that I want to make the next one. I have terrible insomnia also just thinking about the next sound. So it’s really just this huge, long, ever-extended journey.

MS: Do you think it will ever end? Will you ever stop being a composer? Will you retire?

ART: For me, I think it would be impossible to not be a composer. It’s just so natural to who I am. It takes a lot of physical health to have the strength to stand there for eight hours, ten hours, get on an airplane and fly halfway across the world and then do a rehearsal, then get back on the plane and then teach all day. So I suppose at some point if I become very sick, it would be very hard to do. And that’s why I feel, while I am in good health, I should be so thankful for that. I have all sorts of things I want to make. So I do it, I just get up and do it. No matter whether anyone likes it or not.

George E. Lewis: The Story’s Being Told

George E. Lewis: The Story's Being Told from NewMusicBox on Vimeo.

George Lewis in conversation with Trevor Hunter
May 11, 2010—1:00 p.m. in Lewis’s office at Columbia University
Video presentation by Molly Sheridan
Transcribed by Julia Lu

In the arts, you’ll come across a lot of multi-talented people, but not many who can boast the depth of accomplishment in as many areas as George E. Lewis. Since the beginning of his involvement with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) at the young age of 19, Lewis has engaged in a dizzying number of projects with an impressive array of collaborators. As an improvising trombonist, he has worked with not only AACM luminaries Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrams, and Roscoe Mitchell, to name just a few, but also with the likes of John Zorn, Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, and Miya Masaoka (who is also Lewis’s wife). And that’s only a very small sampling.

Starting in the late ’70s and continuing through the time he spent at IRCAM in Paris during the early ’80s, his interest in improvisation drew him (perhaps counterintuitively) to work with computers. Between 1985 and 1987, he worked on his software for Voyager, improvising software that reacts in real time to the input of another (human) player, and which has been featured on two of Lewis’s album releases. In the last few years, his palette has widened to use computers as something other than an independent factor in his composed works, which are increasingly fully notated for non-improvising performers.

But even with such an array of accomplishment as a musician, his work as a musicologist and scholar might even be more impressive. Lewis has published dozens of articles, notable not only for their depth of insight but also for his skill as a writer. His 1996 article for Black Music Research Journal, “Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,” is pretty much a must-read for anyone interested in the subject. In 2008, the University of Chicago Press released Lewis’s magnum opus to-date, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, a formidable 700-page tome that’s nonetheless highly readable, the culmination of more than a decade’s work and thousands of hours of interviews. He is currently editing the first two volumes of Handbook of Improvisation Studies, due next year.

So the man received his 2002 MacArthur fellowship with good reason. It’s clear enough that no interview is going to be able to come close to addressing everything that engages Lewis’s prodigious intellect; but equally true is that any interview will be expansive and intensely interesting. The two hours NewMusicBox spent with him is no exception.

—Trevor Hunter

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  • READ an excerpt from A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music by George E. Lewis (Courtesy of the author and University of Chicago Press).

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Trevor Hunter: One of the interesting things about your past is that while you have achieved so much in the academic realms of music and musicology, your own degree is a bachelor’s in philosophy from Yale. Why philosophy?

George E. Lewis: When I went to Yale, at first I was pretty naïve about what you could do and what you should be doing. So the idea was to do some professional thing, because that’s what you were supposed to do if you were a regular reader of Ebony magazine—you wanted to be in that part of the paper where they show what the cool blacks are doing. And they were always doing something like being a lawyer or a doctor or a businessperson, or whatever. They were never a composer or anything like that. So I thought that was what I wanted to do, and then I left school for a year, and then came back. And in the interim, of course, I met all those AACM people. And a lot of those people were really doing interesting things. I think it was probably Muhal who had a copy of the Walter Kaufman translation of On the Genealogy of Morals at his house, and he let me borrow it—that along with an Elliott Carter score of the First String Quartet. I thought both of those were pretty great.

It looked like something you could really study academically, both of them. The music major thing kind of collapsed, but the philosophy major thing continued. Because what was nice about that is you could still think about music, and you could write about it. There were all these phenomenologists there at the time, people who actually ended up doing very interesting things—Edward Casey and David Carr. And there was a team-taught class with the late Thomas Clifton who wrote this well-known book called Music as Heard, which dealt with the phenomenology of music. Very inspiring class. So in the end, it made sense to follow up with that and try to get a degree in it. It’s been very helpful since then, because I’ve continued to maintain my link with that world academically.

TH: After graduating in 1974, you released four albums of your own music in the late ’70s with you as the primary performer, starting with The Solo Trombone Record. It seems like at that point you could have sculpted a career for yourself as a sort of go-to trombone player, but you also started to work with electronics at that time. How did you get involved with making your own systems?

GL: There was a community that developed in the mid- to late-’70s surrounding computer music, an itinerant kind of community. I went to Mills and saw what they were doing there—David Behrman, Jim Horton was still alive, Rich Gold, and John Bischoff. They had a quartet of these little microcomputers, and they were hooked up to each other and doing these cool things. I thought, “This sounds like people improvising. I think I should try to do this.” It was great. I went home and got one of these things, and tried to learn. And there was a community available, so you could ask people for advice and assistance.

The goal was always to make some sort of improvising program; I wasn’t particularly invested in any other way of doing things at the time. Maybe I’ve sort of expanded my horizons since then, but it was good to do this because it called upon a lot of intellectual faculties as well, thinking about what it meant to be a person improvising, what real-time activity meant. The more you learn about what people believe they’re interested in, what they think they’re hearing, or what they think they’re communicating while in the process of making something improvised—at some point, it became pretty clear that was pretty much what people were doing in their every day life, whether they were walking across the street, or deciding what to eat in the morning, or whatever. There wasn’t a lot of difference between that and what they were doing on the stage; they were drawing upon the same faculties, having the same problems, and the same opportunities for learning. Any life experience was somehow grist for the improvisation mill.

So there was this sort of radical art-life blending that went on being technologically mediated. Maybe you could also think about ways of approaching this without the computer, but somehow the computer made it that much more evident—you were able to create an avatar that represented something different from yourself, that you somehow had to communicate and negotiate with. There were two different modes of experience, the programming experience and the performing experience. And, of course, you didn’t have to be the only one performing; other people were performing, too. And you were creating a group of people who were thinking hard about what it meant to do what they were doing. And that’s what I always wanted: music as a space for reflection on the human condition.

TH: During the process of developing all your work with electronics and eventually your program Voyager, did your relationship with the trombone change?

GL: Yes, it did. It sort of made the trombone superfluous, and in the end I decided to stop doing it as much. The trombone opened up a space of being able to do certain things, and also being able to collaborate with really wonderful people. Having the trombone as a medium for doing that was a very important thing, and in a sense without the trombone, there was really no way of investigating what would happen at the computer, because I was the number one guinea pig as a performer.

I was communicating and trying to reflect at the same time how else to communicate. I began to develop what I thought was a facility for having multiple mindsets while improvising. I’ve read that people say things like, “I blank my mind out when I play.” That’s not my experience: usually I’m thinking about a lot of different things at the same time. I think that helped me perform in a different way, because it provided a space where I could at once hear the sound and to have a sense of the intent of the other person. It’s not mysterious; people experience it every day. Parts of sound and intentionality create a link.

TH: After your activity in Chicago in the late ’70s, you moved out to New York at around the same time as several other members of AACM, and you got the curating gig at The Kitchen. How did that come about?

GL: My girlfriend at the time worked there, but I had been going there all the time anyway. I saw some great concerts there. Alvin Lucier with his dancers, or composers with electronics. It was incredible seeing David Tudor and those guys putting those speakers on resonating boards and sounding boards and pianos. It was fascinating stuff.

Rhys Chatham had a sort of drone band, and he and me and Peter Zummo played trombone; basically playing one note very loud. Being in that milieu, at a certain point Rhys said, “I’m going to step down as The Kitchen’s music director. Would you like to do this? What would you do?” So I came up with a list of things I’d like to do.

The loft jazz thing was happening at the same time, but that was more about performance, acoustic stuff. Some people were doing electronics, but people looked at that in a funny way. You know, there’s a lot of leftover received wisdom from jazz that people were trying to break out of to some extent. But there was this ambivalence that often happens to artists of color where you can’t go too far afield, because you’re already being accused of certain inauthenticity. You’re basically being policed by yourself in a way; it’s kind of a self-censorship. And then there’s a community that’s there to make sure that you don’t go beyond a certain point. So, basically, I wanted to make sure that I was with the weirdest people around, and The Kitchen was a good place for that.

So I was music director of the Kitchen before I went to IRCAM. Two years of that, from 1980 to 1982. That was cool. I gave a lot of people their first big concerts; I think Zorn was one of those, and Diamanda Galás. Some pretty good people got concerts while I was there. We had Bill Laswell’s Material group—or we thought it was going to be Material, then Bill calls the week before and says, “I want to change the band.” I said, “I don’t care; you can bring whoever you want.” He said, “I want to bring Derek Bailey and Charlie Noyes.” Who would complain about that? So instead of doing Material-type rock stuff, they did this two-hour improvisation that nonplussed a lot of the fans, but that was sort of the idea. There was a period of trying to stretch people’s ears and their consciousness. Anthony Braxton would go to Donaueschingen and play Charlie Parker for them, and then he would go to the Newport Jazz Festival and play this 50-page notated piece. That’s how it would work. You want people to not be settled in their beliefs; you want to challenge their beliefs through music, in some way.

TH: Do you think that era has ended?

GL: Well I hope it hasn’t. I mean, it hasn’t for me, but maybe I’m feeling a bit isolated. Maybe it’s not as necessary. Maybe all that work that was done before had some effect. But then, maybe not. I mean nowadays, everyone seems to want to be confirmed in what they currently believe. Technologically mediated narrow casting seems to make that possible. You don’t have to go to a concert of anything you don’t like; you don’t have to encounter a sound that you’re not interested in. What we find, though, is that there are people still out there who seek out new experience in sound; and that’s our audience. Or my kind of audience, anyway.

TH: You’ve been involved in several rich and diverse communities, including the AACM and the downtown New York crowd during the early ’80s. From my own perspective, looking at various communities of young performers and artists now, there’s a lot of anxiety about community. From your perspective, what makes a successful artistic community?

GL: Communities provide access. They provide access to history, they provide access to key individuals and traditions. So if you’re going to make a community, you have to be aware of how to provide access to community. How to provide access to tradition and history is extremely important. So, with the AACM, they may have come from the same background in some superficial sense as African Americans. But while they were all seen to be striving to do interesting things on their own, they had very diverse ideas about sound, and about compositional, improvisational direction. What brought them together?

What brought them together was a shared sense that they should be responsible for each other, because they were trying to do what you were trying to do, which is trying to advance as a person and as an artist. That seems to be the basis on which a kind of mutual aid society gets developed, and that mutual aid society doesn’t have to be limited to just that group. If there’s like 10 or 20 or 30 people in that immediate community, they should really have the sense that they should be reaching out to other people who might be thinking along those lines who they don’t know. They should be open to new people and new ideas, and treat those people as part of the extended community of people who are trying to do what they do. There are no limits to the size of the community, otherwise it becomes like a clique. But to avoid becoming a clique it means you have to be open to new ideas. You just take upon yourself the notion that you’re going to support people in whatever they would like to do; that becomes a part of personal transformation, a community of people who all are engaged in personal transformation. It becomes a practice of the self that looks outward toward the community and without limits.

TH: In terms of your relationship to New York, you started out in the downtown scene in terms of your interactivity with people like Rhys and eventually Zorn. But now you’re at Columbia, which has this stereotypically uptown history.

GL: Well, it certainly had that reputation when I was here in the ’70s. But this is my third tour of duty living in New York. After I lived in Europe, I came back to New York for a couple of years; those were not very good years. Then I went to Chicago and taught at the Art Institute for a couple of years. And then I went to UC San Diego with the help of Stuart Dempster, who didn’t teach there, and Bert Turetzky, who did, and Roger Reynolds, and then we brought in people like Anthony Davis. Isn’t that a strange community of people already? Some people might think so. But that was an amazing, extraordinary department. And that was when I began to write. So that’s a little bit of a 13-year blip on screen before the most recent New York experience, which certainly made Columbia possible.

There were a lot of wonderful things that happened when I was in California—I got the MacArthur grant and all these things happened. My big fear of coming to New York again was that I would be doing the same things I was doing here when I was 23 years old. I was coming back at 50, and didn’t want to do the same things; I wanted to try something different, something new. And then the other fear was based on not knowing anything about Columbia other than my memories of the ’70s, which were generally uptown/downtown. I remember when I came here at first, that dynamic was a family squabble as far as I was concerned. I was as happy listening to Charles Wuorinen as I was listening to Sam Rivers. I didn’t care; I liked them both, and I got to know them both while I was in New York the first time. So, for me, all those things didn’t really matter very much, although they probably matter much less to most people than they did to me at that time.

The main fear for me was that I wouldn’t be able to maintain a certain diversity. But that turned out to be completely chimerical. First of all, I’m on two faculties, composition and musicology, and the composition side includes computer music so it’s a very wide field of operation for me personally. I don’t know about the uptown/downtown thing—maybe it’s still important. There’s a great deal of diversity here with the composition students, of a kind that maybe there might not have been when the previous generation of great people was here.

TH: What goals did you have coming here as a faculty member?

GL: Columbia’s a research university, so if you’re a composer or a musicologist your research is basically musical research. And so the goal was really to extend the scope and breadth of my musical research. And what has happened has even exceeded that goal. At UCSD, I wasn’t really a part of the composition faculty. In fact, we made our own sort of faculty; our area was called Critical Studies and Experimental Practices. But here a lot of the effort has gone into trying to extend compositional practice. It’s been great being a part of the composition seminar on a weekly basis, being exposed to a lot of new developments in composition from around the world, and being associated with an open-minded group of people who are nonetheless firmly invested in what they believe in. You don’t want to lose who you are, but still, I’ve really been able to learn a great deal from that, and that’s reflected in my current set of compositions.

I’ve been getting more involved with the thorny and cranky medium of composing for non-improvisers in more extended ways. There are improvisers here at Columbia; there are people doing what might even be called “sound art” or “interactive media and music”; but you know, there’s a majoritarianism about writing scores on paper here—virtual paper nowadays. So you sort of get swept up in that, but I was swept up in a different way than I was at IRCAM in the ’80s. There’s more of a maturity about it. That’s on the composition side.

On the musicology side, I’m sort of the 20th-century person here, or at least I was until Ellie Hisama came. Which is great, because now there are sort of two of us in musicology. We’ve been able to do several interesting things. We’ve been able to diversify the student body, in particular in the area of having more African Americans. African Americans in composition programs, especially the so-called elite ones, are very difficult to find. And the hardest thing to find in any avant-garde scene in music is an African American woman. So we managed to break that particular barrier at Columbia in terms of the graduate student make up, as well as other seeming barriers.

Another goal is to do what happens in the AACM, which is to provide the atmosphere for exploration. You try to instill a sense of that openness about gathering community that I was talking about earlier. Communities—even a diverse community like Columbia—does have its preferred set of value systems: some of them are built into the curricular requirements; some of them are built into the folkways of the institution; and some are built into the faculty and the people who come here with their own views of the world. The people who don’t share those views just don’t come, or are selected out of the process. And that ends up being a problem because you don’t want to be self-fulfilling or self-perpetuating where the same people come every year with the same sense of ideas. So there is a bit of a struggle, but I don’t think I’m the only person struggling. I think we’re all trying to struggle in our own ways with those issues.

So I’ve found it to be a pretty salutary experience being here. And there’s community beyond the music department: there’s a comparative literature department; there’s a history department; there’s an anthropology department; there’s an African American studies department; there’s women and gender; there’s art history. It’s a huge place, and there are amazing people in all these fields. What I find interesting about being in an academic institution is that you are able to interact with ideas from other areas of the intellectual community, and actually bring your own sense of discovery and research into the public sphere. I think the challenge for me in musicology and composition is that we are not really sufficiently invested in the public sphere. When I say the public sphere, I’m talking about The Atlantic Monthly, New York Review of Books, or various blogs that are out now. The public sphere’s kind of fickle. If we’re not a part of it, then those ideas aren’t influencing the conversations. So certain kinds of humanisms that come out of contemporary music don’t turn up in that sphere, and it impoverishes both our community and the communities that could benefit from that.

Nobody came here with the intention of being an underground hero. We want our work to be seen and heard and understood, or misunderstood. We believe there’s something in it beyond just the careers. Not just the composers, but the performers, and the performer-composers. In the last 20 years, the most amazing development for me has been the number of ensembles, much more than there was when I was in New York the last time. Wet Ink, Argento, Talea, ICE, Sospesso, and Pamplemousse, just to name a few, they’re all doing these amazing things. And it’s not just in New York, either. Tristan Murail was telling me about going to Alabama and meeting contemporary music groups there. It’s happening in a lot of places around the country.

I think these developments are the result of people redefining what they mean by “communities.” A community of that kind has to necessarily be international; it’s supported in part by the internet to make things possible that weren’t possible before, but overall, it’s still this internationally, technologically mediated community that is gathering people in and looking for some new experiences. I think we see it now, and I think we’re going to be seeing more. I don’t know how people are surviving, but they’re doing incredible work. When you go to see one of these ensembles perform, it’s just unbelievable. How do they do it? I remember trying to get together a freelance band with these wonderful freelance musicians who are among the best in the world at what they do. People like Jean Kopperud, an incredible clarinet player. But now, there’s 20 of those people who are capable of doing incredible work, and come from these top flight places and who are, as they say, serious as a heart attack about doing what they’re doing. And a lot of them are composer-performers, which is in another kind of tradition; but composer-performers maybe in a slightly different way than previously. Although composers always did perform their own work, and the work of others to a very high degree, somehow I think that there’s something a little bit different in this group. I’m not quite sure what it is. Anyway, I’m pretty happy about it. I think it’s something that surprised me and it has been very, very gratifying for me to see how these people operate.

TH: Contemporary music and musicology entering the public sphere is sort of The Big Question in those fields, it seems to me. For the people involved with that, what can be done to take an active role in entering the public sphere?

GL: This is one of the hardest things to do, and people are going to have to be pretty ruthless and cynical about it. I was at UCSD in the ’90s. There are people there who are pretty influential in the world of scholarship—not just music, but many things. And they had no idea about what the musicians in this great music department were doing. So your job as a person is to go out and make those links. But that requires you do some research about what has been going on in those areas, and it might require you to develop some moles in the system, so to speak. There’s always somebody in there who is interested, and you don’t know who they are, but it’s kind of your job to find them. There’s no possibility of mass marketing. You’re not going to get attention without some mole in the system.

I think what’s going to have to happen is that people have to do things on a more personal basis. They have to extend their community to people who are more involved in the public sphere than they are, and be prepared to articulate the reasons why they think it’s important. A lot of people just aren’t; the old reasons don’t work anymore: it’s good for you; it’s going to be great in 100 years; it’s high culture work that exemplifies the highest ideals of human kind. People don’t believe that stuff anymore. Plus, it was never really true.

As others have remarked, people are ready for very interesting sounds in the movies. So there’s already an installed base of people who understand odd music because they listen to it all the time. They’ve been listening to it since they were kids. But they don’t connect that with larger structures that are active in their own experiences. That means that some people have to be developed who can make the translation. And I think that musicologists are in a place to do that. The ones who are working on new music are going to have to investigate the place of new music.

If they want to see how it was done successfully, look at new media. New media is definitely in the public sphere. Everything from intellectual property to the interfaces for DJs and electronica to ideas about identity and computing, they’re filtered into the mainstream discourse. It’s all there. The people who did computer music in the ’70s could have done that, but they were pretty much navel gazing about trying to get into the pantheon of Beethoven. If we hadn’t been thinking about that, we would have spent our time trying to acquaint people with these fascinating ideas that were coming out of music. We acquainted ourselves with it, but we didn’t go any further with it. I think new media was very successful in forging an institutional matrix that included technology corporations, government institutions, and academic institutions. There’s a lot of intellectual power there.

TH: I’m actually quite curious about the appeal of the pantheon, or what drew you in. Why is there a greater emphasis placed on the historical significance versus the significance of now?

GL: It’s not that you don’t want to be a part of history or be disconnected from a tradition. I think a lot of people in my generation wanted to be connected with more than one tradition or history. You know, they were Americans. There’s an experimental music tradition here, and they saw it as being a multi-cultural, multiple media experience. They wanted to be a part of that, and somehow make their mark on it. That was their notion about what the so-called pantheon was.

At the same time, you want to be aware that the pantheon is being made now. People are dealing with the issues of their time and not some other time, and that has to be the primary focus of that artist’s work, as he or she sees it. But there’s kind of a career move where if you can become associated with a particular genre, maybe rewards come for successful incorporation into that genre—you get more money from ASCAP or BMI, or you maybe get a certain commission, or maybe publishers come in your direction.

Those personal rewards are still mediated by race and class and, to a lesser extent I think than before, gender, although I still think gender is very important. So you may find a sort of disappointment if you’re not one of the favored members of those groups. It’s been denied that Saul Bellow asked about the Proust of the Papuans and Tolstoy of the Zulus, but that was the attitude. And so if you were considered to be one of the descendants of the Zulus or the Papuans, you would have a harder row to hoe in certain communities. Maybe you go outside and look for them and develop your own pantheon, or maybe you just don’t think about it. You spend your time concerned with grappling with those issues and looking for other people, regardless of field, who are grappling with the same ones.

TH: I want to step back to where we were before I got off on that tangent about the public sphere. You said that you were writing notated music for non-improvisers, but there’s sort of a politic to notated music; in my experience people who do more improvised music need to grapple with the different relationship that exists with performers who are playing your music off the strictly notated page. Is that something you’re considering in your work?

GL: In the old days, when I was writing, I tended to let my ideas about improvisation and egalitarianism enter into the composition. I always felt like I didn’t want to have some people just sitting there doing very little and other people are doing a lot. I wanted to try to make sure everyone got a chance to exercise something important. That tended to make the piece a little overly busy in some ways, which was mirroring what was happening in certain strands of improvising where things would get pretty busy, partly because the notion of egalitarianism meant that people were loath to think of themselves as background or foreground. But you need to think about background and foreground in any kind of music, including improvising. The other thing is that improvised music is not free of power relationship problems. There are power struggles and struggles for attention going on right there inside the piece, right there while it’s being performed, and you can hear that. Certainly as a performer you can be attuned to it, but not all performers are. Not even all improvisers are. But after awhile you do learn to hear these things, and to use them as part of the work. You could simulate that in a composition, in a notated work, but there’s no reason to.

Just go for the sound. That’s how I look at it. Go for the form. Go for the ideas. Try to figure out where the piece is headed. All the talk of linear form and stuff, it’s so retrograde. I mean people in other areas of art practice aren’t talking in those ways. So you need to get outside the loop of just the people thinking about composition. Now what you said was something a little different. What you asked about was whether I’m thinking about performer-composer power relations?

TH: Right.

GL: The funny thing is I’m not quite experienced in that in the same way, because people decide to play this music because they’re interested in it. So the most powerful thing you can do is to write something that the musicians really want to play, something they maybe haven’t seen before. I don’t think of it so much as power. I look at it as opportunity. I don’t have power struggles like that. I’m not trying to impose my will on anybody.

TH: Well, especially with chamber ensembles, it’s much easier to maintain an individual level of engagement. But within certain grander institutions of music like, say, the New York Philharmonic, there’s a disconnect between performer and composer. They’re doing it because it’s a job, and if you’re doing it because it’s a job, then power relationships become more pertinent than they would in a more open environment.

GL: One of my very best students, Ben Piekut, wrote a chapter in his dissertation on the John Cage performance of Atlas Eclipticalis with the New York Phil. Talk about power struggles. It’s a very legendary performance because everyone basically accepted Cage’s view, which was that the performers were childish and stinky and they busted up the instruments and they played the music wrong and they deliberately sabotaged the performance. That narrative from 1964 goes on 40 years. Then Ben says, “That’s very interesting. Let’s ask the performers what they were doing.” So he interviews these people, and the things they say are variations on, “Well, I wasn’t acting that way, but maybe some of the other guys were.”

Yes, they were doing it because it was a job. One person said as an excuse, “Well, we didn’t have any private stock options.” Sometimes people form their own judgments about the composers, especially these young composers. Maybe some of the players didn’t get into music to play certain kinds of pieces, and so they play them under duress. But even so, one hopes that a kind of professionalism will prevail on both sides of the aisle. And one of the things that I think Ben’s research turned up was that John and those guys were still learning how to do orchestral music. They didn’t have the same experiences as Stockhausen because they didn’t have access to the same resources; that wasn’t happening in the American context.

It may be that as a composer you will encounter situations that are not ideal in terms of how your music is regarded by the people who are charged with performing it. That’s your problem. It’s always the fear, sometimes justified but often overblown, that the orchestra has this reputation regarding contemporary music for being sometimes recalcitrant. I’ve only had one orchestral piece performed. It was the American Composers Orchestra and they were pretty tractable. I mean they were tractable to the extent of performing on stage live with a computer-pianist who played the music, and they had very complimentary things to say about my computer-pianist, which pleased me and relieved me to no end. There were a lot of codes being broken, and the orchestra exists with a series of codes. Sometimes younger composers don’t know what the codes are, and don’t know how to finesse the codes.

You know, being an optimist as I am, I feel that composers do have an ability to inspire people that think they’re doing it for a job. Sometimes by what they write, sometimes by their fervent belief in what they are doing, and sometimes by just laying back and letting it happen. Where the problem comes is when people respond right away to any sense of antagonism. Just don’t let the neurons fire. Just suppress them. If you feel a little draft, you say, “Okay, I felt a draft. Now let’s go to measure 47.”

Even if they’re doing it for a job, they want to feel they’re doing a good job. Basically, it’s on the composer to deliver a score that lets people do a good job. One that’s well written, that’s well orchestrated, that lets people sound good. Thelonious Monk supposedly said to Steve Lacy, “You’re supposed to make the musicians sound good.” Well, that’s what you want to do as a composer. You want to let everyone sound as good as they can sound even though they may be doing something they’re not that familiar with.

TH: One last question: to use the colloquial metaphor, you wear a lot of hats—composer, improviser, performer, scholar, teacher. I would think that breadth of activity requires such a commitment of time and energy that it’s hard to keep all the balls in the air. Why do you engage with so many different areas of activity? Do you feel like being spread out as a scholar, as a performer, as a composer, et cetera, does it have a negative impact on any one aspect of what you do? And actually, I’d be curious to know how separate you consider all these aspects anyway.

GL: I used to think they weren’t that separate, if one gets the same sort of emotional impact from all of them. For me, when a composition is working—I’m looking at a piece and thinking, “Yes. This is it. It’s working.” The same thing when you’ve got the scholarly article working, “This is working. The story’s being told. It’s all coming together. Fantastic.” Or if there’s a certain part of the improvisation where you think it’s working—although I find that a little more illusory. I’m always skeptical, even at the time: “Is this really working?”

But yes, there could be an issue of spreading oneself a little bit thin. I spend a lot of time investing in diversity, and now I’m starting to reap some of the benefits by having a wider palette of references for me to draw from, and that’s going to enable me to look at the particular areas that I want to concentrate on and do my best work in for the next few years. The thing I’m working on the most right now is composing and then probably just as much on writing—scholarship of certain kinds, a new improvisation book. The thing I’m not working as much on is performing because when you’re not working on it, you’re not really advancing in it. It’s the old model of practicing everyday—I’m just not doing that. I want to be able to do newer things. I mean, I’ve played the trombone in improvised contexts since 1971. That’s quite a long time. I think that if I stopped tomorrow, it would be okay.

What would I do if I couldn’t play anymore? Is that going to be the only leg you stand on? Are you going to bet your whole creative life on this one thing? From the age of 20, I didn’t feel I could do that, and in the end, I feel that was a good question to ask early on. A lot of my resistance has been to resist people who have tried to channel my playing to be the only thing. That’s a point of active resistance, because of the peculiar nature of the policing of the African American artists in particular. And I think a lot of artists, regardless of color or gender or whatever, do face this.

So yes, certain things over the next five to ten years may be done less—but then I’ll be enjoying them more. I’m feeling pretty free, especially after the McArthur thing happened. I mean, it was really not the money. It was mainly the sense that you had been doing something all this time that you got recognition for on some level, and I was unclear as to what it was. People say, “Why did you get this thing?” I have no idea. First of all, they don’t call you up and say you got this for doing this. You just got it for being who you were. So if I just keep being who I am, then probably other cool things will happen. And if not, what the heck. You did it. It was encouraging in a major way, and I stopped worrying about identity at that point. Suddenly there was no need. Do what you’re doing and keep exploring and see what happens, and it was felt there was some kind of support. There was a community out there to support that. But there always has been because of the AACM. And you talked about a goal here, earlier about the academic environment, I’ve often wondered why the academic environment couldn’t be more like the AACM. That is, having a sense of people who are committed to supporting you no matter what. So that’s what I think I try to do with the students here. You know, no matter what happens, no matter where they go, we’re going to try to help them do it.

John Kander: Passing Through Curtains

John Kander: Passing Through Curtains from NewMusicBox on Vimeo.

John Kander in conversation with Frank J. Oteri at Kander’s home in New York, New York
April 7, 2010 at 10:30 a.m.
Video edited by Molly Sheridan

John Kander knew that he wanted to write music for the theatre from his earliest childhood. He wrote his very first song instead of paying attention during his second grade math class and had already completed a musical for his high school. A protégé of Douglas Moore and Jack Beeson, with whom he studied composition at Columbia, Kander eventually found himself accompanying singers, conducting summer stock productions, and playing in the pit orchestra for West Side Story. One thing led to another and he wrote the music for the short-lived 1962 Broadway musical, A Family Affair which Harold Prince directed. As Kander explains:

The theater community is very small. Once you pass through a curtain which lets people look at you as a professional, you can really get to or make contact with just about anybody from one or two degrees of separation.

Later that year, Kander met lyricist Fred Ebb which proved to be the most important encounter of his entire career. Kander and Ebb sustained one of the longest lasting as well as one of the most successful of songwriting collaborations in the history of the American musical theater. Only months after they began writing songs together, Barbara Streisand recorded two of them. And a few years later they landed on Broadway with their score for Flora the Red Menace, about a Depression-era ingénue (Liza Minnelli in her debut) who unwittingly joins the Communist Party. But it was their second Broadway musical together, Cabaret, which solidified their reputation. Against all odds, they transformed Christopher Isherwood’s unlikely narrative about sexual awakening amidst the rise of the Nazis in the final years of the Weimar Republic into one of the most popular song and dance extravaganzas of all time. Says Kander:

I can remember when we were writing Cabaret and were talking about the subject, people said “That’s really not a good idea.” I don’t remember reviews very often, but there’s one line in the Variety review for Cabaret which I will always remember: “It is unlikely there will be much of an audience for this sort of thing.” It all has to do with people’s imaginations, what you find theatrical and what you don’t.

Kander and Ebb’s landmark partnership also yielded such classics of the Broadway canon as Zorba, Chicago (currently on stage at the Ambassador Theatre and the longest-running revival in Broadway history), Woman of the Year, and Kiss of the Spider Woman—all challenging shows which respectively deal with such difficult atypical Broadway topics as revenge killings, corrupt trials, the private life of a celebrity reporter, and prison torture. In between, they found time to write songs for cabaret acts and motion pictures, the most popular of which remains “New York, New York,” which has been performed by everyone from Frank Sinatra to the Three Tenors. But perhaps unsurprisingly, given the vagaries of the Great White Way, not every one of their efforts has been a blockbuster. However, some of the lesser known items in their oeuvre—such as The Rink (a poignant mother-daughter face-off), Steel Pier (about rigged dance marathons in the heyday of Atlantic City), and 70, Girls, 70 (exploring the shenanigans of the residents of a retirement home)—are extremely worth revisiting. Luckily there have been recordings of all of their Broadway output as well as of Go Fly a Kite, an industrial musical they wrote on hire for General Electric.

Kander and Ebb wrote almost all of their music and lyrics together in the same room and their collaborative process was so fruitful that they did not work on projects with anyone else for the duration of their creative partnership, which only ended when Ebb died in 2004. Actually not quite, since Kander has spent the last six years finishing work on four musicals that were left in various stages of development at the time of Ebb’s death:

I just channeled Fred as much as I can. I had done a lot of lyric writing before I met Fred and in our collaboration we bounced off into each other’s territories freely a lot. When there were new songs to be written for these projects, at first I was nervous about it. Then I got a little more confident. Every once in a while I look up and say, “Where are you, you son of a bitch!” But I’ve enjoyed doing that; I got to flex my lyricist muscles a lot.

The first of these shows, Curtains, ran over a year on Broadway, while two others—All About Us (based on Thornton Wilder’s zanily experimental play, The Skin of Our Teeth) and The Visit (inspired by a macabre Dürrenmatt play)—have been mounted outside of New York City. Their final show, The Scottsboro Boys (about the wrongful, racially-motivated incarceration of nine African American young men in Alabama in the 1930s), just completed a successful off-Broadway run and will be mounted on Broadway next season.

Kander, now in his 80s, once said that he would not work on anything or with anyone else until these four projects were brought to fruition. But now that all four of these shows have been produced, it seemed like a good time to talk with him about his career thus far and what his plans for the future might be. Talking to him was a time portal to a by-gone era when the Broadway musical was central to American popular culture—after all, he is one of the last surviving composers who was around during Broadway’s Golden Age. But there was very little time or inclination for nostalgia. Indeed, Kander’s determination, creative process, and overall positive outlook make him an excellent role model for composers of all stripes nowadays.

—FJO

*

(Conversation transcribed and edited by Frank J. Oteri and John Lydon)

Frank J. Oteri: I’m curious about where your interest in writing music for the Broadway theatre began. What was your exposure to musicals growing up in Kansas City?

John Kander: I’ve always been kind of a musical schizophrenic. Classical music is where I lived mostly, but I was also always interested in popular music, and in theatre music particularly. My brother was, too, and my father. We now loftily call it musical theatre, but in those days musical comedy songs accounted for about fifty percent of the popular songs that the whole country knew. When that changed, I’m not exactly sure, but I grew up in a tradition of listening to a lot of that as well as listening to all the Saturday afternoon broadcasts of the Met. As a matter of fact, when I was in high school I had a picture of Lotte Lehmann as the Marschallin at one end of my bureau and a picture of Gertrude Lawrence at the other end. And I thought if I ever ran away from home, I’d run away to one of these two women, but I wasn’t sure which, though not for a second realizing the symbolism of that. I guess that’s a long-winded way of saying that I’ve just always been attracted in both directions.

FJO: So when you first started composing music, what did you compose?

JK: The first thing I wrote was in second grade during arithmetic class. The teacher asked me a question, which of course I couldn’t answer. And so she said, “What are you doing?” And I said, “I’m writing a Christmas carol.” And so she came to the back of the room where I was sitting and there it was with big notes and all the words about Jesus in the manger and all of that. She made me stay after school and she played it. And they sang it at the Christmas program. This is all faint to me now, but I found out years later that she had called my parents to say, “I just want to let you know that John wrote a Christmas carol; is that all right because I know you’re Jewish?” And they said that was O.K. And so that, I suppose, was the beginning of my downfall.

FJO: So does that Christmas carol still survive anywhere?

JK: I hope not.

FJO: It’s interesting that for that very first composition you wrote both words and music.

JK: Yeah, I didn’t know that there was anything else that you did. I certainly didn’t want to do my math exercise. I’m one of those lucky people who always had something I loved to do. I thought that everybody had a passion for something until I got into college and realized that wasn’t so and that I was just lucky. Music was in my life from the time I was four years old. It just seemed like a natural part of the world that I lived in. There were no professional musicians in the family, but my dad loved to sing and there were children’s concerts that I went to. I got a record player when I was 10, and from then on that was all I wanted, recordings, mostly operas. But I didn’t draw much of a line between opera and musical theatre. I was always attracted to the idea of words and music together telling a story. It sounds phony, but it’s true. It’s just something that I did and didn’t think about a lot. I wrote a show for high school and a couple of other local shows, but it was just a part of life. And I assumed that my life would continue in that direction. I didn’t feel special and I didn’t feel removed from the world around me or my friends.

FJO: Does that first show survive?

JK: I don’t know. Songs from it do. I wrote that with a friend of mine in senior class. It was the senior show and it was 1944. We were all going off to war. I remember we had written this sort of anthem called “Carry On” and all the mothers were weeping at the end of it because their sons were going off to be slaughtered in battle. We all came back. I don’t think anybody saw any serious action; I certainly didn’t. But when I think back to that big emotional moment, which all of us in our class were playing to the hilt, it makes me smile a little.

FJO: So what did you do right after you got back from the war?

JK: I went to Oberlin, where I graduated in 1951. And then I came to New York, where I went to grad school at Columbia, and I’ve been here ever since.

FJO: At Columbia I know that one of your mentors was Jack Beeson, who is one of the great American opera composers.

JK: Yes, he and Douglas Moore. I came to New York trying to decide where I wanted to go to grad school. I didn’t particularly want to go to Columbia. I was sort of interested in Yale. But a friend of mine, a girl who had graduated a year before me, was Douglas Moore’s assistant, and she thought I ought to go and talk to Douglas. It didn’t interest me very much, and it certainly didn’t interest him very much. But as a favor to her, he said, “I’ve got ten minutes before I go to the country.” So I had an appointment with him and we talked for almost two hours and became great friends. And I stopped looking. I wanted to go to Columbia and Douglas and I struck up a friendship. Jack Beeson was my first composition teacher. And they became my surrogate family in New York. We always said that Jack was Douglas’s legitimate son and I was Douglas’s illegitimate son, because of the directions that we went in. But I was then still sort of schizophrenic musically, and Douglas one drunken night said, “You know if I had it to do all over again, I think I’d write for Broadway.” And that was the kind of kick in the ass that I needed to help me focus on the direction that I wanted to go.

FJO: When you say schizophrenic, what other kinds of music were you writing?

JK: I was writing some chamber music, a couple of orchestral pieces, and a one-act opera that was my thesis. When I look back on it, it’s like every composer I’d ever heard went into my head and stayed there. It was second-rate Stravinsky and second-rate Menotti, maybe not so second-rate but recycled; it didn’t have any voice. Much later on, maybe ten or twelve years ago, I started writing art songs where I think maybe I’ve found a little bit more of a personal voice.

FJO: I’m curious about what happened immediately after this epiphany inspired by Douglas Moore’s drunken proclamation. I know that you wound up being a rehearsal pianist for West Side Story.

JK: That’s the end of a long story. I had an assistantship in the Opera Workshop at Columbia when I was getting my master’s, which essentially meant playing and coaching singers. So I supported myself that way when I got out. Everything sort of leads to something else: I was playing a lot of auditions as well as coaching and that led to me getting a job in summer stock as an assistant conductor. I had studied conducting at Columbia.

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A young John Kander (far right) relaxing with stage legend Beatrice Lillie (reading).

So first I was an assistant conductor, then a conductor in stock and also toured as a two-piano accompaniment to Beatrice Lillie when she was on tour. Jobs came. I found that my hands helped me a lot during the ’50s. I always seemed to be able to get a job playing. I’m not a very aggressive sort of fellow, but fortunately if you do what you do as well as you can, opportunities present themselves.

I was conducting an off-Broadway show called Conversation Piece when West Side Story opened. But I was at the party. I was trying to get a drink and it was like five deep at the bar. This little short man was standing in front of me and saw my dilemma and said, “What do you want? I’ll order it for you.” So he got me a drink and we talked and he turned out to be the pianist for West Side Story. We kept up an occasional conversation over the year, and he had to leave, so he needed a sub and he asked me if I would be interested. So I said yes. I just said yes a lot in those days. So for three weeks I was playing in the pit for West Side Story. And while I was playing in the pit, Ruth Mitchell who was the stage manager had to put in some new people, and for that you usually call the pianist from the orchestra to rehearse. So I was playing all those rehearsals.

And then she went on to become the stage manager for Gypsy and she needed somebody to play the auditions. So she asked me to do that and I said yes. So for weeks and weeks and weeks I was there playing piano for people who came in to audition for Jerome Robbins. And so he got used to me, and at the end of that period, he said literally, “Hey, do you want to do this show with me?” And I said, “Do you want me to?” And he said yes, and I said yes. So I became the dance music arranger for Gypsy, and from that I did the dance music for another show, Irma La Douce.

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The original cast album is one of the only historical documents that survives from John Kander’s first musical on Broadway, A Family Affair (1962).

The theater community is very small. Once you pass through a curtain which lets people look at you as a professional, you can really get to or make contact with just about anybody from one or two degrees of separation. It’s sort of a long story, but my two closest friends, with whom I shared an apartment at that time, were James and William Goldman. The three of us had known each other since we were children. And we had written a musical together [A Family Affair] that we tried to get on and did get on [Broadway] because of some help from people that we knew. It was a flop, but Hal Prince came in at the last ten days and directed it, because we were in serious trouble and he made it almost work. And I believe it was the first thing that he ever directed as well.

FJO: But how did you get to meet Harold Prince, just through your connections to the people you knew from the shows you had previously worked on?

JK: I’m trying to think. As I said, the community is very small. And when Jim and Bill and I had our apartment on West 72nd Street, nine rooms for 275 dollars a month, we just got to know people. Mary Rodgers was there. And Sondheim. I can’t remember the first time I met Hal.

FJO: For a flop musical, A Family Affair didn’t do so badly. There’s a cast album that was released on United Artists, which gave you an imprimatur. And it’s a nice album.

JK: There were wonderful people in it. The thing about all of this—I’ve always said this—is that if I had been more aggressive and had been able to get my own drink at the opening night of West Side Story, I would never have had a career, because everything stemmed from that. I’ve always thought back: If I’d been a little taller or if I’d waved my arms a little higher and the bartender had noticed me, I’d still be playing the piano somewhere, I guess.

FJO: Of course the next big part of the beginning of this story is your first meeting Fred Ebb.

JK: Dick Seff was the agent for Jim, Bill, and me—Jim’s plays and Billy’s novels. Dick really worked hard and saw to it that A Family Affair happened. And he must have brought Fred to the backer’s audition, but I don’t remember meeting him at that time.

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One of the longest songwriting collaborations in the history of the American musical theater: John Kander and Fred Ebb.

What I remember is that we were signed to a publisher named Tommy Valando, and it turned out that Fred was, too. And Tommy at one point—this was after A Family Affair—said, “I think you should meet Fred Ebb; I think you two would get along together.” That would have been in 1962.

And so we did meet and we did get along. Fred and I began writing together almost immediately. And we wrote a lot. We wrote in the same room and at the same time. It started off that way and it stayed that way until the end of his life. That’s really all there is to the story. It started and it never ended.

FJO: What’s so amazing to me is that before you wrote a show together you wrote these two songs together very early on, and they wound up on a Barbara Streisand record. And legend has it that one of them was written at a dinner party.

JK: That’s true! We were very fast. It was at Fred’s apartment. He had some friends over for dinner which was very unusual [for Fred]. I can’t remember how long we had been working together [at that point], but we were talking about how fast we wrote together which was really strange. I guess we were kind of boasting and we said that if they’d clear the table between dessert and coffee, we would write a song. They took us up on the challenge, so we went to the piano and both of us sat on the piano bench. And Fred said, “What’ll we write about?” And I said, “I don’t know; I don’t care much.” And he said, “Play a waltz.” And we wrote a song called “I Don’t Care Much” before coffee which oddly enough—and though this sounds like vanity, it’s not—sometimes you can write something in fifteen minutes that is really good in the same way that you can work on something for three weeks and it can really be lousy and sound labored. This was one of the songs that just sort of came out.

FJO: You mentioned that when you got together with Fred Ebb, you would create music and words at the same time. Did either of you ever come to a writing session with something already written: a lyric or a melody line?

JK: Rarely. But every once in a while when we were separated, Fred would have a lyrical idea and write out a verse. When we were writing Cabaret, he had an idea for a song called “Meeskite.” But I was in Long Island. And he called and had read me a version of that over the phone, and so I copied it down and then set it, and we revised it when we got together. But those moments were rare.

Mostly, I would say ninety percent of what we wrote, we wrote in the same room at the same time. I’ve said this often: Fred could improvise in rhyme and meter in the same way that I could improvise. And we would get a phrase or a rhythm. But before any of that happened, when we were writing a theatre piece, which is mostly what we were doing, we would talk a lot. Sometimes we’d even play the roles until we could find the voice of the person who was singing or the people who were singing. Then it would evolve into song. Fred was very inventive and would frequently have thoughts that I would not have thought of on my own. But I don’t ever remember handing him a melody and saying, “Put a lyric to this.” It never worked that way.

He had a little study in his apartment. I went to his house mostly. He lived four blocks from here. I liked to go out for work and he liked to stay home. In that room is where most of the work got done.

FJO: How frequently would you meet?

JK: If we were working on a show, we’d work every day.

FJO: Including weekends?

JK: No. I like to go to the country. The normal pattern was going to Fred’s house at about 10 or 10:30 [A.M.] and we went until about 3 [P.M.]. We were very different people in terms of our interests and personalities and friends and maybe even outlook on the world. But when we got in that little studio room of his, we became almost like one person. It was amazing, because that never changed.

FJO: What I find so remarkable about your collaboration is that all those years neither of you ever worked with anyone else.

JK: It just didn’t seem like a lot of fun. I did some movie scores. Fred did some special material occasionally. But the idea of doing a project—I don’t know; I think we kinda got spoiled, because of the way we wrote. It’s not a way of working that you can export. A lot of people don’t work that way and would be very uncomfortable working that way. When Fred and I were working together in the room anything was possible. You didn’t have to worry about making a fool of yourself—a bad joke, a really lousy melodic line. We were free in there. And I think that one of the things that made it possible for us to do good work when we did good work was the fact that we allowed ourselves to do bad work and tear it up. We didn’t work with a censor over our shoulders. We could try anything.

FJO: Was there ever something that one of you thought was good work and the other thought was bad work?

JK: A final product?

FJO: No, something while you were working.

JK: Yes. But if either of us had a passion for it, the other person would go with it. It was like an unspoken rule.

FJO: One of the strangest projects you were involved with earlier in your collaboration with Fred Ebb was a full-length “industrial” musical commissioned by General Electric for a convention of their employees. I’m too young to have ever seen one of these industrial musicals, but there were lots of them.

JK: It was a different world then. An industrial show was on the magnitude of a Broadway show for some product. And the Oldsmobile show, for instance, and the General Electric show were yearly things. They would employ a lot of people from Broadway—they would have stars—and pay them handsomely, and writers the same way. I think those are gone now, but it was a very common thing.

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Joanna Lester sings “Make a Woman Out of Your Wife” from General Electric’s Go Fly a Kite presented at the 5th Electric Utility Executives Conference in Williamsburg VA, September 19-21, 1966.

There was a General Electric show which we were very happy to get, because it paid well. I conducted a couple of industrial shows, too. There are some funny stories connected with those. You would have a certain amount of freedom, but you had to sell the product at some point. They were sort of fun, and they were very lucrative. Every chorus kid on Broadway was eager to get those jobs, which meant you had to get to work early in the morning, but they paid a lot of money.

FJO: There’s even a cast album of your industrial show, Go Fly a Kite; I tracked down a copy of it on eBay a few years ago. But it was never commercially released.

JK: No, those were never intended for commercial release. I never remember anyone saying, “A song from this industrial show, oh boy, somebody else is going to sing it.” It was sort of a separate world.

FJO: But the songs in that show are quite good. “Be Direct with Me” is wonderful, and “Heaven Out of Hell” and “Make a Woman Out of Your Wife” are a hoot.

JK: I can’t really remember it. I’ve always thought there were two reasons to write for the theatre. One is to write what you love. And the other is for money. They’re both perfectly respectable as long as you know the difference.

FJO: So when you wrote music for an industrial show, did you have to relinquish your rights to the material?

JK: I don’t even know. In those days I think we were just for hire. And when I was a dance arranger for Gypsy and Irma La Douce, the dance arrangers didn’t get a percentage of anything in those days. They got like three thousand dollars and that was it.

FJO: But there are quite a few shows you did for love and, luckily, for money as well, very lucrative shows like Cabaret, Chicago, and in more recent years, Kiss of the Spider Woman. It’s interesting to hear you describe the process as fun, because though these shows are all fun, remarkably, their plots are very decidedly not fun. The subject matter is so dark: the rise of Nazism, sensational murder trials, torture. Your most recent show, The Scottsboro Boys, is about racial injustice. These are very serious topics, and a far cry from what might be considered fun Broadway fare. But you’ve found a way to get a message across in all of these shows and have them also be fun.

JK: When I say fun I was talking about working. I don’t know how to explain it: working is fun. It was for us, and it depends on your collaborators, but most of the time our collaborations were with people that we really felt warmly towards and with whom we could be free. And a good collaboration is a wonderful time. This last work, the collaboration on Scottsboro, was one of the great joys of my life. Fred died in 2004, but David Thompson and Susan Stroman and I over these last few years have had a wonderful time. As grim as that piece is, and intentionally so, the process is fun. The excitement of the process—and I hope I’m not sounding too lofty—of trying to make art in a collaborative way with people whom you respect and/or love is pretty good.

FJO: But what has attracted you to create so many shows that deal with grim, social charged issues?

JK: I don’t think that we ever started something with the idea that we were sending a message. Cabaret was brought to us; that was Hal [Prince]. Two weeks before Flora, the Red Menace opened, Hal said, “Whatever happens with Flora, we’ll meet the next day and start to work on the next piece.”

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Rehearsing Flora the Red Menace (1965), left to right: Harold Prince, George Abbott, Liza Minnelli, Bob Dishy, John Kander (seated at piano), Fred Ebb

And Flora was not successful, but that was Cabaret. For the most part, from then on we were able to work on the pieces we wanted to work on, so some of the things came from us. I think the thing that attracted us to any piece of material was its theatricality. We feel strongly politically about something—about the things these pieces are discussing—but I don’t think we ever set out to do good deeds. With Kiss of the Spider Woman, Fred just said the title, “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” And I said yes. And we got on the phone and the next person we spoke to was Hal Prince. And we simply said the title and Hal said yes. It wasn’t because it was a great message for the world, that was tangential, it was because it was immediately theatrical. What could be more theatrical and musically theatrical than a story half of which takes place in somebody’s mind summoning up movies in contrast to the grim atmosphere where he’s living? All three of us saw the possibilities of that immediately. And when you look back on it, it’s quite clear that Kiss of the Spider Woman would be quite an attractive thing to set musically. But whenever we told anybody what we were working on they thought we were just crazy.

I can remember when we were writing Cabaret and were talking about the subject, people said “That’s really not a good idea.”

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From Kander and Ebb’s most successful musical, Cabaret (1966): Joel Grey and company at the Kit Kat Club.

I don’t remember reviews very often, but there’s one line in the Variety review for Cabaret which I will always remember: “It is unlikely there will be much of an audience for this sort of thing.” It all has to do with people’s imaginations, what you find theatrical and what you don’t.

What is hardest, I think, and I see evidence of it all over the place, including our own work, is to do a simple contemporary boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. What worked in the early intermezzos operatically, the little opera buffas that were written in the 17th and 18th centuries, are hard. I’m relating this because it’s really all the same. It’s hard to take those stories and find anything new and interesting.

FJO: Of all your shows, the one that seems closest to boy meets girl is Steel Pier, although there are lots of underpinnings around it.

JK: Oh, no! That’s not true! Steel Pier is about all the people in it. The boy meets girl part almost came as an afterthought. The thing that attracted us to it—and it’s one of my favorite experiences I’ve had in the theatre—is the dance marathons. What we had to do, which was hard, is to diminish all these other stories until we could find a hook to move us through the evening. But it was like Spider Woman, the first thing we were attracted to is the thing that feels theatrical, and that is the atmosphere.

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Woman of the Year (1981): (left to right) Peter Stone, Lauren Bacall, Ebb, Harry Guardino, Kander and other members of the original cast.

What’s closer to boy meets girl is Woman of the Year. That is a standard story, and consequently was much more difficult to write. I’m very pleased that it was successful and that we got an award for it, but we did not do our best work on it.

FJO: I think the duet you wrote for the lead character and the woman who married her ex-husband, “Grass is Always Greener,” is pretty unique.

JK: That was fun, but I meant it was harder to give that a fresh color than something which takes place in pre-Nazi Germany, or on Crete [Zorba], or at a dance marathon, or a prison in Latin America.

FJO: That raises another interesting issue. At the very beginning of our conversation you were saying that once upon a time about fifty percent of popular music was music that came out of Broadway musicals and that is no longer the case, and it hasn’t been for decades at this point. But you circumvent that issue in your shows by taking them outside of the here and now. Even Steel Pier takes place in another era. And shows like The Happy Time and The Rink are all about reliving memories. A Family Affair took place in the present, but when you wrote it the sound of Broadway show music was still part of mainstream popular music. But the only later show of yours I can think of that takes place completely in the present is 70, Girls, 70. However since that show is about elderly people who live in a retirement home, it’s perfectly natural that the kind of music they sing would sound like music from an earlier era.

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70, Girls, 70 (1971), one of the few Kander and Ebb shows to take place in the present tense, closed on Broadway after only 35 performances.

JK: I have a theory about that and it has to do with operas as well as musicals. If you look at it realistically, ordinary people during their ordinary day do not suddenly burst into song. If you look at the operas that have lived and the musicals that have lived, they all are at some remove from the audience. There are very few exceptions. If you look at all the Jerome Kern musicals with those wonderful songs in them, all of which were contemporary comedies, the only one which lives as a piece is Show Boat because it was at a remove. It has an atmosphere that is exotic to the audience.

When Traviata was first premiered, there were a lot of things that went wrong with it. But one of those things that was wrong was that it was in contemporary costume. At the revival, they went back one generation or two, at which point it developed its reputation and, as you know, it’s not exactly a popular hit [smiles]. Even Gilbert and Sullivan were at a remove from the audience.

Now think of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals which have lasted. The only ones that really didn’t work all that well for an audience were the ones which were contemporary in the sense of being ordinary life.

FJO: Like Allegro.

JK: Even Me and Juliet, which is about the theatre. So the pieces of ours which seem to work best and lasted longer are pieces which are at some sort of remove. I just think it’s true of musical theatre almost totally. The Menotti pieces seem to be dealing with contemporary subjects, but again in an exotic way.

FJO: But by having the plotline situated at an historical remove, it also gives you an opportunity as a composer to evoke those earlier styles rather than trying to be part of whatever we think the zeitgeist is.

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Steel Pier (1997) was the last Kander and Ebb show to be produced on Broadway before Fred Ebb’s death in 2004.

JK: Right. I think that works on the writers as well as it does on the audience. But it is true. Try to think of how many operas are in the standard repertory which took place in the time of the audience when they were written.

FJO: It’s staggering to me that when Fred Ebb died, there were four shows the two of you had been working on that were not yet finished. Since then both The Visit and All About Us have been produced out of town and Curtains ran for over a year on Broadway. And now The Scottsboro Boys has been having a very successful run on Off-Broadway and will be moving to Broadway next season. I’m curious about what your process was for completing these shows without him over the past six years.

JK: I just channeled Fred as much as I can. I had done a lot of lyric writing before I met Fred and in our collaboration we bounced off into each other’s territories freely a lot. When there were new songs to be written for these projects, at first I was nervous about it. Then I got a little more confident. Every once in a while I look up and say, “Where are you, you son of a bitch!” But I’ve enjoyed doing that; I got to flex my lyricist muscles a lot.

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The final Kander and Ebb show, The Scottsboro Boys, is coming to Broadway next season.

FJO: I remember reading somewhere that you wouldn’t work on a new project with someone until all four of the unfinished Kander and Ebb shows had been brought to life; now they have. So what’s next?

JK: At the moment I’m working with a young writer named Greg Pierce on some very, very small chamber pieces—three short stories—which you could do in this living room. They’re going to use just four instruments and the same four actors in all three stories. We finished one of them and did a little workshop for ourselves with a few people listening. And we’re halfway through the second one. I remember standing upstairs and thinking, “What do I really feel like doing right now?” And I think because the projects I had been doing with Fred were large, suddenly the idea of doing something really, really tiny appealed to me. And so I approached this friend of mine who is a short story writer and we started. So that’s something—once Scottsboro gets itself worked out—that I’m eager to get back to.

FJO: You mentioned writing art songs. I know that Renée Fleming sang a wonderful song that you had written for her.

JK: We’re back to fun again. It’s hard to imagine not writing, so it’s what I do. It’s what I’ve done since second grade. Someday I’ll stop, because I’ll die, but I can’t ever imagine not feeling or thinking musico-theatrically, and by that I mean songs which have a certain theatricality to them as well.

FJO: So to get back to your observation that if you do what you do as well as you can, things will happen and people will notice—

JK: —I don’t know that things will happen. I was very lucky. As a pianist and sometime conductor, I played well and I enjoyed coaching, and some things came from that. If I had had to go knock on doors, I would have starved to death.

FJO: So what would be your advice to people starting out now who want to create the kinds of work that you’ve done.

JK: It is so much harder. When Fred and I were starting out, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick were already established and Steve Sondheim was just starting and Jerry Herman had just started. We were all allowed to fail. We were part of a generation where there was so much being done that if people thought you were talented the chances are that they would listen to your work and maybe hire you. It’s so much more difficult now. Theatre is so expensive to produce.

The only advice I could have for anybody is if you really love something, if your passions are what sustain you through life, then you just have to find some way to survive and to support your passion. I have an actress friend who loves the theatre. She is a great actress. Her name is Debra Monk. And she once told me that she told her agent that if she could have five lines in any movie she’d say yes and earn a living so she could support her habit, which is playing in the theatre where you can often not make any money. You have to find some way, if you’re a composer or if theatre is what you love, you have to find some way to support yourself while you’re doing it. We had it easy. My generation had it really, really easy. Hal Prince used to produce a musical for $160,000. They all did. And if a show ran for a year it was a success. That’s not true anymore. These are different times. And the music business is different. But all I can say is if you love something, don’t let go of it.

Kyle Gann: On Both Sides of the Fence

Kyle Gann in conversation with Frank J. Oteri at Gann’s home in Germantown, New York
March 1, 2010—12:45 p.m.
Transcribed and edited by Frank J. Oteri and John Lydon
Video edited by Molly Sheridan

As one of our era’s most articulate writers about new music, Kyle Gann has been an extremely influential critical voice. Through his provocative weekly columns for The Village Voice and his subsequent Postclassic blog on ArtsJournal, Gann largely defined the new music scene for a generation. And his books—The Music of Conlon Nancarrow, American Music in the Twentieth Century, Music Downtown, and the just published No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4’33”—should be required reading for anyone who cares about what music has been and could be.

The reason Kyle Gann has been able to write so effectively and authoritatively about the composers of our time is that he is also a composer himself. Yet despite how well known his opinions on the music of other composers have been, his own unique sonic contributions, which are just as well crafted and thought-provoking, have for too long been known only to a few connoisseurs. But there is arguably even more to be mined in Gann’s own music than in his writings. Works like his early Native American-inspired Snake Dances for percussion ensemble and the monodrama Custer and Sitting Bull offer a viable path to develop ideas beyond Western classical traditions based on musical traditions developed over centuries in our own country. Gann’s wild microtonal studies for keyboard sampler and rhythmic studies for Disklavier offer tantalizing new ways to carve up scales and meters that despite their obvious complexities are instantly accessible from a listener’s perspective. In fact, the sumptuously gorgeous music he has created for pianists Lois Svard and Sarah Cahill, as well as a totally schizophrenic concerto written for the Amsterdam-based Orkest de Volharding, might deceptively lull listeners into not realizing how amazingly difficult these works are for the players who have performed them. The same is true for The Planets, which is arguably his most significant work to date, a ten-movement, 75-minute tour de force created for the Philadelphia-based ensemble Relâche.

What is perhaps most extraordinary about Gann’s music is that he has composed so much of it over the years, years in which he has also been extremely prolific in prose. However, as much as his prose has benefitted from his music, his music has suffered from his prose, which is something he acknowledges:

People fall in the habit of thinking of you as somebody who can do something for them and not somebody they should do something for. And so it’s really tricky to turn that around. In fact, I feel really lucky that twelve years ago I think there was still a question as to whether I was ever going to have any career as a composer at all, and now I’ve had this spate of high visibility performances lately that twelve years ago would have thrilled me to death. So I feel like I’ve managed to turn that around.

Now that the inevitable polemical debates his critical writings about music sometimes used to engender have begun to subside, Gann is finally beginning to get the recognition he deserves for his most important activity—his own composing. There have been so many articles and interviews by Gann over the years about countless composers, it was a particular treat to turn the tables and create a presentation that focuses on him. And it seems a particularly apt time to focus on Kyle Gann both as a composer and music writer—this month Gann’s long awaited book about John Cage’s 4’33”No Such Thing as Silence—has just been published by Yale University Press and his own The Planets, performed by Relâche, has finally been released on CD.

—FJO

  • READ an excerpt from No Such Thing as Silence by Kyle Gann (Courtesy of Yale University Press).
  • LISTEN to Neptune from Kyle Gann’s The Planets (Courtesy of Meyer Media LLC)

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    FJO: You are an extremely articulate person and your opinions about music are pretty well known and are easy to find in articles and books as well as online. But I think there’s very rarely been an opportunity where someone else is asking you pointedly about your own music and your writings and the relationship between the two.

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    Kyle Gann. Photo by Molly Sheridan

    KG: I appreciate you putting it that way, because everybody thinks: Why interview Kyle Gann since everybody already knows what he thinks? The problem with that is no one ever asks me the things that I wouldn’t think to mention, so it’s whatever I come up with myself, which tends to get pretty repetitive after a while, and frankly I’m kind of sick of it.

    FJO: Here we are in upstate New York on one of America’s two coasts, but as a composer you really are a product of neither one. Some people use uptown/downtown to differentiate compositional polarities, others use East Coast/West Coast, with the East Coast looking more to Europe and the West Coast looking more toward Asia for inspiration. You grew up in the middle, in Texas, and also studied in the middle of the country, which might have something to do with your music looking more internally for inspiration, like the influence that Native American music has had on many of your works.

    KG: Rumors that I’ve grown up are overstated. And I don’t like to overstate the American Indian stuff. It was really helpful to me, but it had nothing to do with my growing up in Texas. I have no idea what growing up in Texas had to do with anything. Actually I think what was much more influential was the fact that I was educated in the Midwest and I think I absorbed the Ben Johnston-Sal Martirano Midwestern kind of complexity that was really very much oriented towards European serialism and not American serialism, which is one of the things I had mentioned to Boulez in a 1987 interview I found the other day and put on my blog.

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    A Pensive Moment for Kyle Gann

    American Indian music solved a rhythmic problem for me, because I was really interested in music with different tempos. I was doing different tempos at the same time. I had a big disastrous piece called Sweeney Adrift which was for three or four ensembles playing at different tempos unsynchronized. Sometimes I still get out the tape and listen to it; it’s a God awful mess. But then I found in Robert Cogan and Pozzi Escot’s Sonic Design book this wonderful analysis of a Zuni buffalo dance. It was going back and forth between different tempos: triplet, quarter, dotted quarter, and quarters. So I started collecting American Indian music. You could get great stuff on vinyl back then which you can’t get now. That really gave my music a direction all through the ’80s.

    But in the ’90s, when I came to New York, there was kind of a bad taste to white people using music that wasn’t from white people. I remember being on a Rockefeller panel once in which there was a really good, old, august, white gamelan group that they wouldn’t fund because it was all white people playing gamelan. They said, “Why don’t they have any Indonesians?” In the same group there was a play about a Native American and black lesbian couple that they didn’t want to fund because the director wasn’t lesbian. There was this intense identity politics, and so I backed away from the American Indian stuff. I did Custer and Sitting Bull because Custer was as much mine as anybody’s. In fact, Custer was my identity politics piece because it was about the white man and self-loathing and self-justification.

    FJO: I want to go back to the piece of yours you mentioned that’s in four tempos and predates your hearing Native American music. I imagine it probably doesn’t predate your first hearing Conlon Nancarrow, whom you wrote a book about many years later. But what made you gravitate toward that stuff in the first place.

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    A young Kyle Gann with Conlon Nancarrow in Tepoztlan, Mexico

    KG: Oh, that was very simple, that was [Charles Ives’s] Three Places in New England. That was the two bands going three against four in the middle movement of that piece. I heard that and I wanted to do that for the rest of my life.

    FJO: But how did you even come to that?

    KG: My mother was a piano teacher. I was the oddball who was listening to Mozart and Schubert at age six. In seventh-grade music class, there was one day a week where you could bring recordings in and play them. I brought in Mozart’s D minor concerto, and the teacher wouldn’t play it because he thought the other students would rebel. Mom had her master’s in music ed, and one day I asked her why there were no living American composers. And she said, “Well, I think there are.” So I asked who, and she said Charles Ives and Roy Harris. So I ran to the record store and got the Concord Sonata and just sat there thinking—what the hell is this?—until I got it.

    FJO: How long did it take?

    KG: Probably fifty listenings over three weeks. I just sat there ’til I got it. Then I got The Rite of Spring. The Harris Third must have come around the same time. That was a little easier. And I had read a biography of Gershwin. I remember being so absorbed in his biography that a teacher tried to get my attention and couldn’t. I may have even known about Gershwin first, but Gershwin was half-in classical, half-out.

    FJO: But this other kind of music definitely became something that once you got, you internalized and it became your music.

    KG: Oh yeah.

    FJO: So then this desire to write your own music, to actually be an American composer yourself, when did that happen?

    KG: I’ve got a little piece I wrote for piano when I was six. And I kept trying it. I liked listening to the music so much that I felt naturally that I wanted it to be my music we were listening to. When I was thirteen, I had a really strong identification with Gershwin. It was August of 1969, and I just sat down at the piano one day, because I was playing piano, and wrote a piano piece. And then I wrote scads of music in high school, more than I do now. But I was kind of embarrassed to look through all that stuff one day and realize that it looked like somebody who didn’t have any talent. I wanted it to look good so I would tend to continue composing to the end of the page. After it should have been over, I would think, “Well, it needs to end there.”

    FJO: So your immersion into classical music does make sense given that your mother was a piano teacher. Most people growing up in America don’t find classical music on their own, but they often find lots of other kinds of music. What else were you exposed to besides classical music?

    KG: Nothing.

    FJO: No jazz? No rock? No blues?

    KG: Nope. Nope. Nope. You don’t hear jazz in Dallas. I discovered jazz in grad school and really got into it. I was a really introverted kid. I must have read fifty books a year when I was junior high school. I was aware of the Beatles, but in Dallas particularly, the classical music community gets really fanatical because that’s their buffer against the football and fundamentalist religion society.

    FJO: Van Cliburn at that time was still really active so he must have really been a very visible local hero.

    KG: Yeah. I heard him play the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto when I was twelve at SMU. I was astonished at how many wrong notes he hit. I didn’t think you were allowed to do that if you were Van Cliburn!

    FJO: What about the whole marching band scene?

    KG: I knew a little bit about it. I went to the magnet arts high school and the band director there was a composer and my first composition teacher. But the only thing I ever did with the band was play the inside of the piano in a Karel Husa piece. So even in high school I was not getting much pop music. And there was a lot of avant-garde music around.

    FJO: So the environment you grew up in was pretty hermetic. And then you get to college and all of a sudden you’re in another hermetic world, albeit a somewhat different one. You mentioned European serialism having a huge impact on you.

    KG: And that was before college. I was buying Stockhausen records the moment they came out back in the early ’70s, and Nono, and Maderna.

    FJO: But something turned you away from that music.

    KG: Well, I was totally into it until minimalism. I first heard Steve Reich and Philip Glass in the summer of 1974, and Frederic Rzewski’s Attica and Coming Together. My favorite of the [European] composers was Bruno Maderna. But I didn’t see how to achieve any individuality for myself in that style. It was too complicated. You build up to something like Maderna’s Aura or Grande Aulodia—two fantastic pieces. Those are not pieces that an 18-year-old American can listen to and then go out and do the same thing. You have to start from somewhere, as Maderna did. Look at Nono’s Polifonia – Monodia – Ritmica—these really simple pieces they started out with to grow into. You don’t start out with Grande Aulodia or Aura. So minimalism gave me a new starting point.

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    Kyle Gann on his porch. Photo by Molly Sheridan

    FJO: But Stockhausen’s juvenilia is actually 12-tone, although admittedly some are somewhat Bergian and Neo-Romantic. Might there be some rigorous serial piece by you hiding out in a trunk here somewhere.

    KG: No. I couldn’t do the 12-tone thing. And I haven’t done it to this day. What Cage said about it is perfect: you run up and down the row matrix like a rat caught in a trap. But I’d written lots of atonal music. The stuff I wrote in high school, and I have an example of it up on my website, sounds like Ives and Ruggles, Bernstein, Copland.

    FJO: The earliest piece of yours I spent any time with is Satie, since you described it on your website as your “Opus 1.” It’s certainly not atonal, and it’s actually quite gorgeous.

    KG: Thank you. That was spring of ’75. I was a sophomore at the University of Texas.

    FJO: They probably didn’t like you writing that.

    KG: No. I transferred to University of Texas from Oberlin and then I went back to Oberlin. I had a brilliant teacher at University of Texas, but he told me that Cage was a charlatan and minimalism was a hoax and that I should be using good 20th-century intervals like sevenths and ninths. But I just couldn’t connect to that. The idea that because you live in a certain time you’re supposed to use a certain kind of interval had no intellectual basis for me. It seemed like totally useless advice.

    FJO: But you did eventually get into sevenths, albeit purely tuned ones in just intonation.

    KG: And not purely tuned. That was later. I didn’t study with Ben [Johnston] until after I finished my doctorate. He had a concert in Chicago that I went to. I had already heard him. He came to Oberlin when I was a student there, but I had never really figured out what microtonality was about while I was in college, although I was really into Harry Partch. But I went up to Ben at that concert and asked him if I could take some lessons with him, because I had never studied with anybody that was terribly well known. (I studied with Peter Gena, who is wonderful and was fantastic for me—you should do something on him sometime, very interesting music.)

    Ben was in Urbana and I was in Chicago, so I offered to drive down there periodically, and I did. But he was also coming up to a Zen temple. I think his priest had advised him to try Zen. So he would drive up and I started meeting him there. Then I started coming early and going to the Zen services with him, which were creatively fantastic—there was a tremendous burst of inspiration after those things.

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    Some of Kyle’s music and some math. Photo by Molly Sheridan

    He never pushed me toward microtonality; he never proselytized for it. But at my first lesson he made a casual comment about how good a chord I had written would sound if it were tuned correctly and he reeled off the fractions. The moment he said it I realized that tuning was all about fractions. I had been the number one math student in my high school, even though when I got out I couldn’t do calculus—calculus was just absolutely beyond me; put dx over dy and my eyes would roll back up into my head. But I have a tremendous gift for exactly the kind of math that tuning needs. And so as soon as I realized that, I thought, “This is it—I’m gonna have to do it!” I was already 28 at that point. I really envy my students who find out something about microtonality in their late teens because they have much more time to adapt to it. I was 28 and had to redefine everything I was working from. I figure it slowed down my career by about five years. I wrote very little music between 1986 and 1991, because I was just filling notebooks with fractions and making up tuning systems.

    FJO: And all of the early microtonal music you finally did write was music that you either played yourself or that you composed to be played back electronically. One of the biggest challenges with this kind of music, of course, is finding players who are willing to take the plunge with you. You can get it to the point where you can hear it and come up with something that works on paper, but most musicians are so entrenched in playing everything in 12-tone equal temperament, so getting them to play other intervals can be quite a hurdle.

    KG: So I just use electronics, except for one piece—Pat Spencer wanted me to write her a flute piece. I did flute and clarinet, and it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever written. It’s a really simple, pretty piece, but it’s torture. There’s a different fingering for every one of the 29 pitches. She had to put a fingering chart in her part by every note. I don’t know how she did it or why she wanted to do it. [laughs]

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    Kyle Gann performing Custer’s Ghost

    The advent of my microtonal music coincided with my coming to New York. And just like when John Cage came to New York and all of a sudden everything was prepared piano, when you get to New York you realize that you’re not going to have a career if you can’t do it all yourself. Because there’s no rehearsal time and there’s no rehearsal space. So I had gone from writing mostly ensemble music to realizing that I’m never going to have a career in New York on the Downtown scene unless I could do it all myself. So that was the push.

    FJO: Curiously though, you did come to New York and wind up having a big career, but the big career was not as a composer; it was as someone who wrote about other composers. And I think it was both a blessing and a curse for you. On the one hand, your columns in The Village Voice made you the spokesman of this scene, but it also made your own composing activities less visible. Obviously what prompted you to do it was that you needed a job.

    KG: I had been applying for academic jobs starting around 1984. I applied to over 100 academic jobs before I came to Bard. But my first job was for New Music America and I met a bunch of Chicago critics, and it was easy to get started in Chicago at the time because the Reader was there. It was not at all lucrative, and somehow I was about to give up being a critic because I was making like $5000 a year doing it. I was actually thinking about becoming an astrologer. But then the phone rang and it was Doug Simmons at The Village Voice asking me to apply for a job. There was no choice involved. I couldn’t have said, “No, I’ve got something better to do.”

    FJO: How did he learn about your writings?

    KG: Yale Evelev at New Music Distribution Service used to read my Chicago Reader clips. (I was pretty good about sending my clips out.) And he recommended me for it.

    FJO: You already said it wasn’t lucrative, so when you were in Chicago, what prompted you to write about music?

    KG: It was a little bit here and there, and at New Music America my boss told me I write really well. I had no idea. I’d never even thought about it. But I don’t know what inspired me to do the first one. It was a hundred bucks I could get through something I knew how to do, and I didn’t have anything else.

    FJO: Working for the Chicago Reader and then the Voice was first and foremost a job, it was about making money. But you were really good at it and wound up having tremendous influence and impact. I’m curious about when you became as invested in that as your own music.

    KG: The person I always think about in this respect is Henry Cowell. He wrote not nearly as much as I have but he wrote a couple of hundred articles about music and he published New Music Editions. Nobody else was writing anything about new music; when Tom Johnson and Greg Sandow stopped there was a vacuum there. I’ve always said you can’t be a famous composer in a music scene nobody knows about. You’ve got to bring the entire scene up and make it visible. You’ve got to define for people what’s out there. And even if it’s just your definition that’s wrong and everybody else has a different definition, there’s got to be some narrative to start with. And that narrative wasn’t out there. I couldn’t make anybody make sense of my music without providing a narrative about what was going on in the first place.

    FJO: But, of course, the tricky part is writing about a scene that you’re very much a part of yourself. On the one hand, you’re ostensibly the only guy covering this scene and you’re a member of this scene, therefore you don’t get covered. Or, you’re covering this scene you’re part of so of course you’re going to cover yourself, but then people dismiss it because you’re just writing about yourself. You can’t win.

    KG: That’s the problem I feel about my blog right now. I feel that people read my blog to find out about other music than mine, but all I really want to write about is my own music at this point.

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    Kyle Gann and friend. Photo by Molly Sheridan

    But this kind of happened in phases. When I first came to New York I had no performances for years. And when I started getting performances they were more on the West Coast than the East Coast. By the time I started performing in New York more often I was also teaching at Bucknell, and the Voice had cut me back to half-time when everybody cut back their arts coverage. And so the moment came when I was doing more teaching than writing. And I was getting more performances, and I went into a kind of mode in which I was really only writing positive reviews. I quit trying to be the objective eye on everything and would just write about things I liked. And then every year from 1997 on, I wrote less and less at the Voice. I quit three times. They kept bringing me back. Once I quit by just not writing anything for a few months and they finally called me up and said, “Kyle, what’s going on?” So even though I wrote for them until 2005, I really felt that it was only until about 1997 that I was performing the function of a really objective music critic. After that it started to veer off into something else.

    FJO: The world of composers and journalists are very similar. Both communities are somewhat unsocialized by the very nature of their activities. And yet they’re somewhat distrustful of each other. Trying to be an active member of both communities must have been something of a challenge. Composers all wanted something from you and perhaps didn’t completely trust you. And some journalists might have had issues with you since you were worse than friends with the composers you were writing about, you were a composer yourself.

    KG: Whenever I’d become friends with other critics it’s always been kind of a nice friendship. I guess partly because I never expected anything from them and I know what their lives are like. But I also have always thought that Virgil Thomson gives very clear rules for what a critic should do that no one follows. Nobody cares about your opinion, so if you really want to put your opinion in, put it in the last sentence so if anything gets cut for space it’s that. The things you do are: provide context, explain ideas, and talk about where this fits in. You can do that objectively in ways that don’t put people off. I got a review recently that was just, “Oh, I liked this, I didn’t like that.” No context—it was as though it was the only piece I’d ever written. Criticism doesn’t need to be that way. It shouldn’t be a thumbs up or thumbs down. It should be more: these are the ideas; this is where this fits it; and this is how you listen to this kind of thing. Sure, some pieces work and some pieces don’t. But I prided myself on writing negative reviews that the people involved didn’t realize were negative because all I did was state what they were trying to do and they said, “Yeah, that’s right; he got it.” Everybody else would read it and say, “Oh, geez! That sounds horrible.”

    FJO: But to be totally candid, there have been composers that you clearly don’t like and you’ve made your opinions known very clearly about it, like Elliott Carter and Charles Wuorinen.

    KG: O.K. But to me they’re totally safe targets, because I’m not going to make a dent in their reputations. They are so safe from me; they are gods. Who cares if I don’t like that music? I like some of Elliott Carter’s music; I especially like the stuff he was doing around 1950. I just don’t think it’s all that good.

    What I really don’t like is the negative attitude that people in really powerful places have toward the music I advocate for. Wuorinen used to go around giving lectures blaming America’s increasing musical illiteracy on minimalism. He’s pissed a ton of people off, not just me.

    FJO: What about John Zorn?

    KG: I’ve admired Zorn in a lot of ways. I especially admire what he’s done with his record label and performance space. But when I first came to the Downtown scene, it was so dominated by free improvisation and lots of other musicians couldn’t get their music out. Improvisers didn’t need to rehearse. They could just run up there with their instruments and start playing. And so it was squeezing out all the other different kinds of music. And I knew lots of musicians who were very unhappy with that scene because it was so dominated that way. And so I fought against that domination. But I didn’t fight against the music so much. Some of it I liked and some of it I didn’t like. And I made distinctions. But in that scene you’re not allowed to make distinctions; you’re just supposed to like it for what it is. I’m a big minimalism advocate, but there are good pieces of minimalism and bad ones. I’ve never thought that you have to accept it all as a bunch. But that’s the way people reacted to it when I made those distinctions.

    FJO: Because of the strong beliefs you have about our field, being in the position of having a column gave you the ability to take people to task from time to time. But doing that was potentially harmful to your career as a composer.

    KG: Probably, yeah. I’ve blown up a lot of bridges. I seem to have a perverse delight in making things difficult for myself. [laughs] I would have done that no matter what I did for a living.

    FJO: To my mind you are one of the champions for the music of our field, and there are many composers who agree with that assessment, but there are some on the other side of the fence who think that you’re divisive.

    KG: I found myself in a set of musicians in New York whom I found really sympathetic. And when you advocate for one group of composers, composers who aren’t in that group are going to hate you because it’s not them.

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    Kyle Gann (far right) with Arthur Sabatini (far left) and some simpatico composers (from left to right): Elodie Lauten, William Duckworth, John Luther Adams (with hat), and Trimpin.

    A lot of people really resent me simply because I was a cheerleader for a kind of music they weren’t doing. It was rarely that I was dissing any other kind of music; I was mainly just dissing intolerance toward the music I like.

    FJO: There was a music critic from another publication I talked to who was active around the same time you were whose mandate from his editor was that out of five CD reviews he wrote, three had to be negative. Was there ever any pressure from anyone at the Voice for you to be negative at times?

    KG: Oh, good lord, no! That’s that horrible conception of music criticism—if it ends tomorrow, we can all have a party. To me it’s really important as a music critic to write negative reviews occasionally, because if you go to something—especially if it’s some big name and the audience is sitting there and realizing, “Gee, this really isn’t that great”—you have to say that so the audience knows you’re not just cheerleading for everything. You have to acknowledge the perceptions and values of the audience to keep the dialogue going. Otherwise, they’ll say, “That’s just Kyle Gann; he likes everything.”

    FJO: That’s what folks say about me. [laughs]

    KG: But you really do. That’s the difference. It would have been hypocritical for me. Even my favorite composers have pieces I don’t like. I just try to steer away from those pieces and try to write more about the ones I do like.

    FJO: But I think it’s important to point out to folks who might think that you only have advocated for certain branches of composition, how articulate and persuasive your writings about George Perle have been.

    KG: I did notes for one of his CDs once.

    FJO: They’re wonderful notes.

    KG: He liked them. And I did some for Milton Babbitt. I knew all that music. I’m teaching a 12-tone analysis class next semester. We’re gonna do Babbitt’s All Set, a piece I loved when I was young. It reads to me now like a gigantic Sudoku puzzle. But so be it. It’s fun. I went to college with Cage and Babbitt as my favorite composers. But things happened.

    Davidovsky came, and if a piece of music didn’t fit his standards, he would just simply hand it back without comment. People like Pauline Oliveros and Ben Johnston would come in, and they were fun and open-minded. We had a great time. And then these hard-ass 12-tone guys would come in and just diss everything. But that’s not why I went the way I went. I heard Philip Glass’s Music in Fifths and I liked the rhythms. He was getting these wonderful asymmetrically syncopated rhythms out of his additive processes that would have been difficult to achieve any other way, and I wanted to do that.

    FJO: You’re now an academic. You get to influence young, impressionable minds and shape their thoughts about music. Given the tangled path your own career has taken, what advice do you give them about the career paths they should pursue as composers?

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    Kyle Gann in the classroom.

    KG: I tell them anyone’s but mine. I don’t push them to apply for prizes and competitions, but when they show interest in it, I try to encourage them. I’m always writing recommendations. I wouldn’t want any of them to have to go through the really long and circuitous route that I had to go through. Teaching has such a disconnect between input and output. I’m sure I have a lot of impact on these kids, but they’re undergrads, and I think back to how well I remember my undergrad education, and it’s not very much. I remember the first week I was at Oberlin and the first week in my theory class my teacher Paul Mast demonstrated meantone tuning. I wish now I had paid more attention. Now I do a lot with meantone tuning. You hit them with lots of information and it takes roots in ways you wouldn’t expect. You have no control over what seems most important to them. You just throw a lot of stuff out there and some of it sticks and then they go off to grad school or something else. It’s not a plannable situation; it’s a big John Cage piece. You throw the I Ching and what happens happens.

    FJO: Does teaching help you keep up with some of the newer music that’s going on?

    KG: A little bit. I heard operas yesterday written by Missy Mazzoli and David Little. And we’re getting more and more sophisticated students lately. And some of them are really interested in composers who are just names to me. Some of them are Magnus Lindberg fanatics. They get excited about pieces that make me squirm a little bit sometimes. I say fine. I never dampen anybody’s enthusiasm.

    FJO: But does it ever work the other way where students get you enthusiastic about something?

    KG: Not yet, but maybe it could. Until recently, many of the students were interested in writing music but not going out and listening to lots. That’s changed in the last few years. It strikes me that it has changed for younger composers in general. It’s a real generational thing, but I can only really judge from my own students.

    FJO: What about getting ideas from the music of your students?

    KG: Oh yeah, I stole a rhythmic device from one of my students that I’ve written a Disklavier piece based on. The nested triplet thing that I wrote about in my blog. If people come up with a better idea, I’m glad to have it.

    FJO: I’m wondering if during the years you weren’t composing and just making ratio charts, if there was something you heard that finally got you back into the process of composing, or did you start finding your way again because nothing you heard was like what you wanted to do?

    KG: I was doing all of these minimalist-inspired rhythmic things in the early ’80s. And when I came to New York, I heard Michael Gordon, Mikel Rouse, John Luther Adams, and Evan Ziporyn, and I realized, “Oh shit—they’re all doing the same thing; I have to do more than this.” [Before that] I had thought I was going to get the rhythmic originality award and rest on my laurels, but I realized it was not enough. I was going to have to go beyond it somehow, as I think they all did, too. There was a point at which I felt that Michael Gordon and I were very much in synch, but then he went off in another direction around the time of Yo Shakespeare and I ceased to feel that.

    I think my approach to microtonality is pretty original although it does have arguable antecedents in Partch and Ben Johnston, because that was the microtonal music that appealed to me—it seemed like it grew organically from tonality. But my microtonal music is really only about a third of my music; the rhythmic aspect is really the one that’s always there.

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    Kyle Gann’s Disklavier Studies
    (New World 80633)

    FJO: And one of the directions your own ideas about rhythmic complexity took you to are all those Disklavier studies, which is music that is probably never going to performable by human beings in real time, although with groups like Ensemble Modern and the Calefax Reed Quintet being able to play transcriptions of Nancarrow’s player piano music so adeptly, I should probably never say never. But you’ve also written a piece like the Desert Sonata, which is so extraordinarily beautiful and therefore somewhat deceptive about its complexity. I had heard it for years and thought about it a certain way, but then I downloaded a copy of the score of it from your website, and was shocked to see passages that totally flowed that were in meters like 41/16. This is something that also probably shouldn’t be playable by a human being, but Lois Svard did it somehow.

    KG: Yeah, it’s really hard, and no one else has ever played it.

    FJO: So you say you gravitated toward minimalism, but you never gave up writing music that’s really difficult.

    KG: It’s a tremendous misconception that minimalism was ever about simplicity. Some of it is, and there are people that write simple music, like Peter Garland and Beth Anderson—and I just love it. But I came to serialism before I came to minimalism, and so minimalism, to me, provided a way to do all those rhythms I was interested in and you’d actually be able to hear them. It’s not just a conceptual thing where you analyze the score. You can actually do 10 against 11 and sit there and listen to it go by. And then when it’s 10 against 13, it will have a different sound. For the people of my generation who took all that stuff from minimalism, minimalism has always been misunderstood from the very beginning. To talk about Michael Gordon again, in Four Kings Versus Five, he builds up to eleven different tempos going at once. In my Unquiet Night, there are seven tempos in almost every measure. But the context is very minimalist, because they’re all pretty much steady beats. Now, if you do what an Elliott Carter or a Pierre Boulez would do, you’d put rests in and some of them would be dotted. So you’ve got this tempo complexity, but you can’t really hear it. I love analyzing Gruppen with students and they love it—Stockhausen’s got that graph in Die Reihe that shows how it works—but you can’t hear it on that level. I’ve got pieces that if you graphed them out would look like that Stockhausen graph, but I don’t fool around with it—I just do the beats, and so you can hear it.

    FJO: But with the Desert Sonata, I didn’t hear it. I never imaged how complex it was until I looked at the score. But I also didn’t feel like I didn’t understand it, because I got pulled into it by its surface beauty.

    KG: Yeah, there is a logic underlying it that you can’t quite figure out when you hear it.

    FJO: Which I suppose is what differentiates a piece that is post-minimalist from a piece that is minimalist in your definitions of those terms. But another piece of yours, the piano concerto Sunken City which Volharding recorded for Mode, doesn’t sound minimalist, post-minimalist, or even totalist in the ways that you have defined these terms. There are moments in the second movement which might qualify as post-minimalist, but the first movement is almost neo-romantic on some level. And hearing you talk about Gershwin today now helps me understand where it’s coming from a little bit better.

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    Kyle Gann’s post-minimalist Sunken City appears on Orkest de Volharding’s collection, The Minimalists for Mode Records.

    KG: And Milhaud, I was a big Milhaud fan. And also the Copland Piano Concerto, which I still think is the only other two-movement piano concerto besides mine. I’ve been trying for years to say what post-minimalism is and I’m not sure I got it yet. The second movement of Sunken City is about twenty minutes and there are seventeen chords in it. In the romantic attitude about composing, a piece starts somewhere and then it keeps going and reaches new levels. The post-minimalist idea is that you start out with the contained world you’re going to work within. And so even though that piece gets fairly complex at times and there are built in irregularities to the rhythmic display of the chords, I knew from the beginning that all I was going to use was those seventeen chords. It’s kind of a theme and variations—it’s a chaconne. So first you just have the chords. Then you have the chords real loud with the whole band, and then the chords with a certain asymmetrical rhythmic displacement with solos going around. Then there’s a section where the momentum starts going, and then it’s in 9/4 for a long time, and then it switches to 7/4. I realize it doesn’t sound minimalist, but I still feel that it’s one of my post-minimalist pieces because of the way I thought about it.

    FJO: But what about that first movement?

    KG: The first movement’s a little different, yeah. I write the occasional collage. I’ve been doing that since high school. I wrote a band piece that was never played that had both a satire on the beginning of The Rite of Spring and Liszt’s Liebestraum. One of the things working with the Disklavier pieces did for me was before that, all of my pieces would be structured out before hand so I’d know how everything was going to work. When I got the Disklavier, I learned by disciplining myself to just start a piece and have no idea where it was going to go. With the Disklavier I didn’t have to worry about coordination, people being able to play together, any performance issues. And also, since I’m not very good about electronics, I didn’t have to worry about timbral issues.

    When Anthony Fiumara from Volharding called me up about a piano concerto, he said he really loved my Disklavier pieces. And I thought, “Uh oh, I have to write a Disklavier piece for ensemble now.” It was really scary; I didn’t know if I could do it. So with that first movement, I just started off by putting down the first chord and having no idea what was going to happen.

    FJO: If I may dare say something super-contentious: the first time I listened to Sunken City, I was reminded of John Adams’s Violin Concerto, a piece I know you don’t like. Not because of its content, but because of its form—both pieces are totally schizophrenic, which is something I love about them both. The Violin Concerto doesn’t really offer us an explanation for why there’s such a musical transformation—the title is totally abstract—but you called your piece Sunken City and the first movement is a clear evocation of New Orleans. So it’s clear that the transformation is a metaphor for Katrina. But in both cases you think you’re listening to a certain kind of piece and then it becomes another piece entirely.

    KG: [laughs] All right.

    FJO: No comment?

    KG: No. I have a choral piece that’s being done this Saturday in New York, Transcendental Sonnets. I once submitted it to one of the few competitions I ever entered. I didn’t get anything, but the guy who headed the committee really loved the piece and wanted to program it some day because it reminded him of all these really conservative British choral pieces by people like Howells, people I don’t even listen to, and that was fine with me. If he heard that, I’m happy for anywhere it goes.

    FJO: What I thought was unusual for you about Transcendental Sonnets, after both listening to it and looking through the score, is that it doesn’t seem to have any polyrhythmic stuff going on. And it also isn’t microtonal. Of course, when you’re writing something for such large forces as chorus and orchestra, if you ever want it to be played, it’s probably best to mostly avoid doing stuff that’s off the beaten path. I was reminded about a comment you made that if somebody wanted to get a sense of what your music was about, they would not get it from hearing what you’ve composed for orchestra. So why would you even write a piece for orchestra?

    KG: It’s not that I’m not interested in the orchestra. I really am. In fact, I’m orchestrating The Planets so I’ll have a 75-minute orchestra piece that will sit on my shelf. So it’s not that I’m not interested, it’s that—and everybody knows this—you can’t just write whatever you want. So everybody tones down their language. Compare any composer’s orchestral music to their chamber music—even Philip Glass for that matter, who does fantastic things for his own ensemble that he can’t do with an orchestra.

    FJO: But we’ve finally arrived at The Planets, which seems somehow appropriate, considering how long it took for the piece to get completed. And though you started writing it while you were still at the Voice, it seems like it was only possible to do something of this scale after you were no longer active as a critic.

    KG: It was written over an extraordinary amount of time. I got to know Joe Franklin and Relâche from New Music America back in 1987. They gave me a commission in 1994 and I wrote four movements. Being in Philadelphia, they were outside the Village Voice coverage territory. And we did it out in Seattle. So it was extracurricular to my Voice stuff. But after doing it, I said, “Gee I’d like to do the rest [of the planets].” And seven years later they came up with more money and I wrote three more. And then two years ago they called me up and said they wanted to record it, so I wrote the rest of it. But I probably spent a total of 25 weeks working on it. Well, maybe a little more than that.

    FJO: But despite the many years separating the composition of various movements, it’s remarkably consistent. You mentioned in passing that you contemplated being an astrologer, and astrology plays a big role in this piece, at least as a structural underpinning. It also feels like a culmination of sorts of your music to date. It explores a wide variety of rhythmic and harmonic terrain as well, even though it’s not microtonal.

    KG: We tried. The first version of Saturn was microtonal, but everybody agreed that it sounded like a junior high orchestra. It just sounded like crap.

    FJO: And you’ve come up with some really creative ways to get really complex rhythmic textures without having to reply on something strict that would have been impossible for players to do precisely. I’m thinking of Neptune, specifically, where all the players are in different tempos, but it’s written in such a way where it’s O.K., and in fact encouraged for them to deviate from synchronizing with each other.

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    Kyle Gann: Neptune (2001) from The Planets (1994-2008) performed by Relâche (Meyer Media LLC MM10014)

    KG: I have a blast listening to that movement because it’s different every time and I never feel like I quite know what that movement sounds like.

    FJO: I’m curious about some other details in it, like why is Mercury out of order?

    KG: Because I really did think first of Sun, Moon, Venus, and Mars. They make a nice little symphony. And it was very symmetrical. And I didn’t want Jupiter and Saturn next to each other, because Jupiter starts out very beautiful and ends sad, and Saturn starts out messy and horrible but ends beautiful. So I felt like there needed to be something in between. Holst didn’t write them in order, either. I just couldn’t stick it in between the Moon and Venus; it just wasn’t the right place for it.

    FJO: And, of course, you have Sun and Moon, which Holst doesn’t include in his Planets, and which are not planets from an astronomic point of view. And neither of you have the Earth.

    KG: The status of the Earth in astrology is not very well defined. There are actually people that use it, but it’s kind of theoretical to think about where the Earth is in position to you at any given moment. Hopefully it’s right underneath you.

    FJO: Since each one of these movements is an audible musical process, would it be fair to say that this is a minimalist piece?

    KG: In that sense, yes. In the ’90s, my standard way of working would be to start out with additive process and just do 1; then 1, 2; then 1, 2, 3; then 1, 2, 3, 4. In Jupiter, I changed it to 1; 1, 2; 1, 2, 3, 4; 3, 4, 5, etc. It’s still a process, but it’s not linear or predictable. Coming out of minimalism, that just seemed like sonata form. That’s how Philip Glass started everything in that period I love of his, so unless I have a better idea that’s my process. And that works for Sun and Jupiter because those are both planets that have to do with gradual increase. But the Moon is based on things going in and out of phase, which is just an expansion of Steve Reich and Terry Riley. Neptune is kind of Feldman-y, but Pluto is Bruckner.

    FJO: I actually hear recent Philip Glass in Pluto, but he’s perhaps chanelling Bruckner also.

    KG: We’re all chanelling Bruckner. Glenn Branca’s also a big Bruckner freak.

    FJO: And you’re now orchestrating it all so it will be even more Brucknerian. But you said it’s going to sit on a shelf. So why bother doing it?

    KG: Because after Feldman died somebody put all of his CDs out. I’m going to die someday and maybe somebody’ll say, “Hey look, there’s an orchestra score here.” I know a couple of people I can send it to. I’ve had “flirtations” with a couple of young orchestra conductors that have never led to anything; I don’t know how to break into that world, but I’ll try.

    FJO: Posterity is obviously important to you, though.

    KG: Well, the piece is not going to go very far in a version written for eight oddly picked instruments.

    FJO: That’s the curse of writing for Relâche; they’re wonderful, but they’re the only ensemble with their instrumentation.

    KG: And Relâche will die too someday. Relâche and I will both be dead and the piece will get somewhere faster if it’s got a more conventional instrumentation. But I realize I have to have a tenor sax in it, and nobody wants to hire a saxophonist to play in an orchestra. So that’ll kill it, but that’s O.K. I’ve also got a piece for soprano and orchestra that had an accordion, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, and harmonica. I have a MIDI version of it; nobody’s ever going to do that, either. It also changes tempo a lot very suddenly. [laughs]

    FJO: That’s a good way to sabotage a performance. But I thought your instructions for performing Neptune was almost an admission of the fallibility of human performers. Where is the room in your mind for interpretation, or even mistakes? What separates a good performance of your music from a bad one? And what gets it to the point where performers can play a piece of yours so well that they “own” it?

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    Sarah Cahill plays Kyle Gann on New Albion

    KG: I have pretty broad latitude with how I think about interpretation. And this is my argument with people who think that you have to notate a score to death. Sarah Cahill plays a lot of my piano music, and she plays it absolutely beautifully. Some of it she plays more beautifully than I thought it could be played. But every now and then she and I have an argument and I’ll say, “In this section, why don’t you do it differently. And she’ll say, “No, I don’t like it that way.” And then I’ll say, “Hmm, all right.” And then to the next person I go to I’ll say, “Why don’t you do it this way?” But you know, if it doesn’t feel right to them, they won’t do it. Private Dances is now the piece of mine that gets done most often. I’ve heard tremendously different tempos and interpretations of it, and I’ve liked them all so far. There’s a Japanese pianist who did them very, very fast, which was kind of cute. But I do find that with a few of my pieces that the tempo is really essential and I can’t take any chances. Kierkegaard Walking, one of my favorite of my pieces, is a really simple piece and so people tend to do it too fast, so I put a note on there saying not a hair faster than [quarter note equals] 84.

    A really great example is the Volharding performance of Sunken City. All those glissandi especially in the first movement—I didn’t write any of those in. I wanted them all—I could have stopped them if I didn’t like it, but I was more interested to see where they would put them than in putting them in myself. It even changed a little from performance to performance. I just loved that about it. I’m tempted to go back and write some of those glissandi in, but I really don’t want to. I want people to feel where they go. I’m really happy to have such a good recording of that so people will listen to it and think that’s what I wanted.

    FJO: This brings us back to the whole notion of legacy. Once upon a time, most composers hoped that a publisher would take on their music and some got lucky, and that was the way scores got disseminated. Nowadays if you don’t have a publisher, you can do it yourself as you’ve done. You have most of your music on your website and people can download it from there for free. While it’s not a revenue stream, the work is available for anyone who might be interested in it which hopefully could lead to performances, etc. But what happens after you’re no longer around to maintain it? You talked about someone finding the score of your orchestral piece years from now, but who’s going to pay for the registration fees to keep the website active and who’s going to keep it current?

    KG: I don’t know. I’m partly involved in an effort right now to get Roy Harris’s music out.

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    Kyle Gann at the grave of Virgil Thomson

    His children and people who are interested in his music are trying to get that. It’s always nice—it’s always a sign of how much your music means—when there are people who do something to get it out there. I have lived my life in very intimate connections with dead composers. To me Roy Harris isn’t dead and John Cage isn’t dead. I realize my music is a specialized taste, but maybe the people who will connect with it aren’t around yet. One of my favorite composers from the 19th century is Franz Berwald. I love the guy’s music; it really speaks to me. I’m glad there are just enough people out there to keep it going that I can actually get to hear it. I would not want to deny people who might feel that way about my music the same thing. You know, I love going down to Danbury and visiting Charles Ives’s grave and I’m so pissed off that John Cage got cremated. I want there to be a grave.

Vijay Iyer: Hybrid Sensibility

Vijay Iyer in convedrsation with Trevor Hunter
February 11, 2010—1:30 p.m.
Video and audio recorded by John McGill
Video presentation by Molly Sheridan

To the surprise of most of us who are highly suspicious of such labels, Vijay Iyer’s years of being anointed “the next big thing” in jazz have actually led to him becoming a “big thing.” His latest album Historicity topped many year-end best-of lists, and his various projects are garnering increasing amounts of attention. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Iyer is a gifted communicator whose writings on his own music as well as the music of luminaries such as Andrew Hill and Thelonious Monk have appeared in many publications.

All of this activity has generated numerous interviews and features, few of which fail to mention his extra-musical pedigree (a master’s degree in physics from Yale and a degree in interdisciplinary studies from Berkeley) or his remarkable autodidacticism when it comes to the piano. And Iyer is definitely a smart guy, whose research on music cognition has been published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, for example. But it’s worth noting that for all of Iyer’s musical cerebrations, his often-attained goal is a simple engagement with the fundamental properties of the embodied experience. That is to say, his in-depth studies in music, cognition, and different musical cultures are tools to understand how to make music feel good, so that he can do it with greater efficacy. It seems to be working.

Although NewMusicBox has previously included Iyer as part of our 2004 cover on artists taking politcal action, there was clearly much left to be discussed with someone whose musical activities range so widely. Armed with a few pages of questions and a camera, we sat down with Iyer to probe more deeply into what exactly makes his music work. Despite the fact that we spent more than an hour and a half talking, there is undoubtedly more to cover still. Nonetheless, what we learned along the way was quite simply fascinating.

-Trevor Hunter

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Trevor Hunter: I notice you have George Lewis’s book on the AACM, and Lewis is actually a good place to start with you, since he was a participant on your first record, Memorophilia. I remember in the introduction of his book he notes the schism in the documentation process between anecdote and historicity, which is of course also the title of your newest album. Your new album is a direct, deliberate way of engaging with the concept of historicity, but as you yourself write, it’s a process that occurs whether you’re conscious of it or not. It’s been 15 years since that first album, so I’m wondering if you’re in a position to describe your journey in those terms. Not only how you viewed your role in the stream at the time, but how you now see yourself as having fit in.

Vijay Iyer: That first album was released when I was 23 and had only just recently decided to make music my life. In a way that album was kind of a coming out party of sorts. Obviously you never know what’s going to happen, but I really felt like that was possibly the only chance I would ever have to leave any kind of imprint on the world as an artist. So I think in a way it had a sort of naïve grandeur to it, really trying to cover everything in one breath.

And there was also a lot that I felt needed to be set forward all at once in terms of what I was interested in artistically—and also just the fact of my existence, of somebody like me doing music like this. Which itself was, especially at that time in 1995, a brand new thing. There are historical reasons for that, as I’ve probably said elsewhere. I’m part of the first wave of Indian-Americans born in this country. We were kind of the first generation of people coming of age from that community who grew up here and who had that sort of hybrid sensibility—whatever that means, I mean, that can mean so many things.

For me, in the beginning certainly, music making was a way of expressing or coming to terms with that hybridity. Not just, “this is me as an artist,” but, “this is the beginning of this massive dissertation on what it means to be Indian-American in 1995.” So there was that component to it, which I feel over the years of having now been a part of thirteen albums as a leader or co-leader, composer, bandleader, performer of my own music, that has sort of been sketched out enough. I hope that at least really I can be heard on my own terms, whatever those are. And those keep changing too.

What else is happening in the meantime is a lot of incredible collaborations with people at length and in-depth that have opened my ears and opened my musical outlook in many ways, just by learning how to harmonize with somebody else, or groove with somebody else, both literally and figuratively. Everything that gives you as an experience has made me what I am now. So that’s the beginning of an answer to your question. It’s hard to encapsulate a decade and a half in those terms.

TH: From the beginning I think that a lot of the success you’ve had in your career so far partly is because of your success as a communicator. Not only in the music, but outside of the music—in your liner notes and your writings, etc. I don’t think it seems like you think the context and explication you give the music is necessary for understanding it, but I do get the sense that you believe it adds another level of appreciation.

VI: That depends on what context I’m speaking in, I think. But if you’re talking about liner notes, I just offer them to whoever wants to read them. Lots of people say: “To hell with liner notes! Who does this artist think he is, addressing us?” Which I think is funny, because that’s what the music is doing anyway. Personally, I cherish any discourse from any artist. We don’t often get the opportunity to have our perspectives on our own work heard or acknowledged or given any kind of permanent quality.

I also appreciate that music is something that circulates in ways that I have no control over, and don’t wish to control. Part of what it means to be a musician is that you basically set your work free in the world—not literally free, but you can’t really control that either. But you have to be willing to accept any reading, any interpretation of your work because that is what it means to put it out into the world. And I don’t really try to set forth interpretations of my work. I just try to frame it, in case anyone wants to know why I did this: here’s why, or what it means to me, here’s one articulation of what it might mean to me. Some people want to know that and some don’t. I know that I, 20 years from now, will want to know why I made that album. So at the very least it’s a message to my future self, and to whoever else cares to read it.

TH: But as innocuous as those reasons might sound, the practice still draws you criticism. I’m thinking of the first All About Jazz review of Historicity, which opened up with a bizarre attack on the concept of your liner notes—

VI: Basically almost the concept of me, which I thought was—

TH: It certainly was strange for the people who work for this publication, since we’re all about nerdy explanations, but it actually reminds me of another thing that was in George Lewis’s book about the schism regarding the complexity of discourse used to critically describe music.

VI: I used to just out and out say that critics don’t know what they’re talking about, but I’ve come to appreciate how interdependent we are. They don’t have to know what they’re talking about, they just have to be communicators in their own rights, and have an authentic response that they can then communicate. If it’s an authentic response, that’s great. But when hostility creeps in, that’s about something else that’s not fair to the reader. But for the most part I welcome all and any interpretations and responses, and obviously for the most part I’ve been blessed with very many favorable reviews. So I’m not here to issue some condemnation of jazz criticism, because certainly that critical success has opened doors for me.

But at the same time, I like to see musicians talking about their music. And I like to also see non-“experts” talking about the music who are good writers and who can actually represent their experiences well. And that to me is often more interesting than a self-appointed expert talking about the music.

Basically I’d like to just see more written engagement with music than I see. There’s a lot of blogging by self-appointed experts and a lot of criticism at that level, and there are plenty of real experts who write very knowledgeably about the music; but this music isn’t for experts. Certainly experts can appreciate it, just like experts can appreciate red wines of different kinds, but red wine tastes good and it makes you feel good, and anybody can experience that. So I’m interested in expanding the discourse and making it seem okay for people who don’t have that expert sensibility to engage with it, because I’m more interested in how the music circulates outside of that community—and not just my music, but music in general.

TH: I want to dive into some specifics of your own music. Let’s start with harmony. Since you have a graduate degree in physics, it’s not terribly surprising to me to hear you previously say elsewhere that you think of harmony spectrally. First off, so as not to leave anyone in the dust on this, would you describe what that means, and how you would use those concepts to create music?

VI: Spectral harmony is a term that’s applied to something that in a way already exists, which is an understanding of harmony that’s based on the harmonic series and the physics of sound. It’s been said by others that the history of Western harmony is kind of a gradual march up the harmonic series, starting with say Haydn, which barely even has any dominant chords, and then Mozart which starts to introduce secondary dominants and seventh chords, and so on. So it’s sort of like there’s this vision of Western harmony as a teleological march upwards into enlightenment, which is I think a little bit problematic.

I think really the thing is that the harmonic language that came out of African-American improvised music—jazz and everything connected to that, blues too—begins with a pretty profound awareness of that. It begins with 7ths and 9ths as stable entities; as stable parts of the I chord. And when you look at stuff that Monk did—or even pre-Monk, Coleman Hawkins in the ’20s, dealing with these whole tone collections that were actually ways of dealing with dominant chords, you heard the 11th partial, you heard the 13th partial, and you heard them on some level as consonant.

There’s this legendary Lester Bowie recording where he says “What is jazz?”, and he plays his trumpet solo, and at the end he says “that depends on what you know.” And I think when you look at so-called jazz harmony, what’s in versus out really depends on what you know. I think there’s a strange way that some of the fundamentals get taught that bypasses this basic sense of how sound works. And to me, harmony has to be [taught that way]. When you’re sounding tones together, you always have that continuity between harmony and timbre. And that’s just how it works.

TH: But what’s interesting about thinking of harmony that way is that you’re using a piano, an equal tempered instrument. And once you get to that 7th or 11th partial, you’re in a completely different logarithmic world instead of a ratio-based world. And certainly Steve Lehman, your co-leader in Fieldwork and another jazz musician very interested in spectral harmony, eschewed the piano completely with his octet in order to have the microtonal freedom he needed to achieve that sense of harmony. And with the orchestral piece you wrote for the American Composers Orchestra, I definitely heard some quarter tones.

VI: Oh yeah, two inter-penetrating spectral series form the backbone of that piece. I don’t know that I can say that I was using [Spectralist] techniques, because it’s not like I studied their techniques—I just studied the fundamentals of sound. But also, I didn’t go any deeper than quartertones, because when you have two rehearsals that are 40 minutes apiece, and you have to put together a 15-minute piece, you can’t really go much deeper than that. And even then it was a bit blurry. Not everybody agreed on what F quarter-sharp would sound like. So you had sort of a smear going on, which I remember [conductor] Dennis Russell Davies saying, “I hope that’s what you were going for, because that’s what it’s going to be.” [laughs]

Equal temperament is a synonym for compromise; I think we can all agree. But you know, when you listen to the tradition of blues pianists, when you listen to Monk, when you listen to Bud Powell, Randy Weston, and Andrew Hill, they’re working with those compromises but still developing something very specific and rich and physical with harmony. No one can tell me that just because they had computers at IRCAM that their solution was better than Monk’s. It’s actually the same problem that’s being handled two different ways, and I think that the way someone like Monk handles it is by taking slices of a chord that evoke very specific angles of the [harmonic] series, you could say. It brings out a certain facet of the possible resonances. And you know, that level of specificity, he spent years perfecting. It was very directed and very studied—and it felt good, and that’s sort of what it was about. It’s about resonance at that level of physical engagement and physical experience.

TH: Have you tried any of your own solutions to this problem, like retuning or preparing the piano?

VI: What I end up doing is not using many thirds, because the thirds are all wrong. Everything else is cool—well not really. Sometimes you can evoke something triad-like without having a third in it through the accumulation of resonances. It’s a little—well I don’t know if I’m ready to give my tricks away [laughs], but I guess that’s one solution. I’ve worked in contexts where I had to play non-equal tempered keyboard instruments. And those have been in some ways just hilarious because it completely undoes everything you thought you knew about the piano, because resonances don’t work the same way all of a sudden; suddenly certain combinations that you’d always sworn by sound utterly wrong. And others are revelations.

I did a couple of things with Amir ElSaffar, the Iraqi-American trumpet player and composer, and we re-tuned a few of the notes. The hardest thing I think was, just because he wanted the variety, we didn’t do everything consistently throughout all of the octaves, so when you lose octave equivalence that’s one of the weirdest things on the piano, partly because of how that affects the timbre in ways that I didn’t expect. So you come to realize how interdependent all of the keys are.

So maybe I’m just a little lazy about this [laughs], but I find I like to see what I can do just by dealing with the instrument as it is. But you know, it’s a goal of mine, particularly in terms of engaging more deeply with Indian melodic traditions from Carnatic and Hindustani traditions, and trying to get that level of flexibility and nuance and resonance. So, we’ll see. Someday.

TH: Speaking of Carnatic and Hindustani elements, certainly something your music shares with those traditions is a certain rigor with regard to rhythm. During your interdisciplinary studies at Berkeley, your thesis concentrated on rhythmic aspects specifically. And you use a term in your research that you call “microtiming.” I see that you’ve written about this for the Journal of Consciousness Studies, but I’ve seen less about it in more popular music publications. So it would be great if you could describe your work in these areas for our readers.

VI: Sure. The thrust of that academic work is actually a little deeper—and a little less deep, at the same time. It’s basically dealing with the role of our bodies in music perception and cognition, and that’s grounded in a relatively recent paradigm for cognitive science, which treats the body as one with the mind. In the past there’s been this dualist understanding of the mind versus the body, as if the mind is somehow a thing that’s not of the body, which gave rise to a whole understanding of mental processes as context independent and also independent of medium. So then there was this idea that computation like what you do on your computer is at some level equivalent to the kinds of processes that happen in the brain, and the brain is just one of many such possible machines that do those things. So this vision of body cognition, this paradigm that emerged about 20 years ago, is basically a critique of that. It sets forward the idea that actually what we call cognition emerges from embodied experience, and mental processes and mental structures are only possible and only exist because of how they emerge from our embodied experience in the world.

Here’s an experiment: you take a sheet of glass that’s lit from below so that you don’t have any reflections from above, and you put it over what seems like a cliff, on a small scale. And you let a baby crawl over it, and what do they do? Well, it depends on their level of cognition. If they think that there’s a precipice there, then they won’t proceed. But they only know such things if they’ve had experience. So babies that have been crawling around for longer have that experience of not wanting to, say, fall down the stairs. Sometimes that comes from a painful lived experience. Other times it comes from more subtle, everyday experiences. But there is a clear cognitive moment at which a baby knows not to do this.

So that’s basically what it is. It’s about this sensory motor loop, as it’s called: the connection between what you perceive and what you do that is what we call embodied and situated cognition. So I tried to bring this view of cognition to the realm of music, because there’s a field called music perception and cognition. In the past, it’s dealt with pitch perception, timbre perception—and actually this whole spectral harmony thing is connected to that whole history of music perception research. And what’s funny is that historically, the way that music was viewed in that academic community was often reminiscent of Cartesian dualism: that music was seen as something that happens in the realm of abstraction that’s not connected to action; that it’s something we perceive passively, and that doesn’t involve any physical engagement. Which is basically a Eurocentric and classical view of music as the abstract play of forms in hypothetical pitch-space, or something like that.

And that to me was so in conflict with my entire lived experience with music, so I wanted to bring in some other perspective on it as a sort of supplement to what was there. So in a way, focusing on embodied cognition meant focusing on rhythm. When you look at what’s happening in the brain when you perceive rhythm, the same areas light up that are involved in motor planning, meaning motion. The way it’s encapsulated often is, “a perceived rhythm is an imagined movement.” Your brain thinks that it’s moving when it’s hearing music. So that’s an interesting and really fundamental finding about the role of rhythm in our experience of music, and its primacy—the connection between rhythm and motion, to me, that’s the first thing that music is. So that’s what led me to focus on rhythm in that academic work.

To get back to your question on what is microtiming: it’s the difference between what one would call robotic rhythm, and what one would call human rhythm. What it means to groove is not necessarily mathematically precise equidistant beats, but clearly working with music that doesn’t have the classic notion of expressive timing that we have in western music, where you have ritardandi and the tempo ebbs and flows—expressive timing in western music is about modulation of tempo essentially, and there’s a unified way in which everybody in an ensemble is doing that. Now when you have something groove-based the sense of tempo doesn’t change, but there’s still a universe of rhythmic expression that’s possible within that context. And what is it? Well, that’s what we call microtiming. It’s your relationship to a pulse, in the most basic sense. First of all, what is the beat? How is it constructed? Where does it come from? When we hear an Afro-Cuban rumba ensemble playing, where is the beat? Who has it? Somehow everybody feels it, yet no one is playing it. It’s the emergent property of the ensemble. And not only is no one playing it, but people are playing all around it, on both sides of it. If you were to look metronomically at what’s happening, there would be a stable tempo, but you’d see attacks on either side of whatever this fictional pulse is. So the studies on microtiming were about trying to examine that. It’s very difficult, because it’s sort of this ineffable quality, and some would say that we murder to dissect [laughs]. It’s touchy, you know, some people don’t want to talk about it. And the vocabulary to talk about it is quite impoverished. But there’s a lot to learn from that.

TH: It seems like there’s an aspect of this in some of your compositional conceits as well—I’m thinking specifically about your cover of Mystic Brew. You wrote about your use of the Fibonacci sequence for the piece in The Guardian. In itself it isn’t that novel a concept; Bartók did it and so did Tool—

VI: Yeah, it’s such a tried and true technique in a way, the fact that I use it is almost barely worth talking about [laughs].

TH: Oh, I disagree with that. The way you employed it is notably different than Bartók and Danny Carey because of the way that you’re using it as a very subtle way of dividing the measure, rather than as a sequence of accents or as a melodic contour. It’s very reminiscent of your work with rhythm cognition—you have the robotic method of increasing subdividing the same musical space, but, as you’ve written, even this process maintains a natural groove to it. It seems like a systemization of the natural phenomenon that you’ve been studying.

VI: It’s hard to know which came first in this case. There was this idea that maybe successive notions of long and short beats that were increasingly detailed but maintained a certain sort of macroscopic profile—even as their innards transformed a little bit—would somehow maintain that bounce that you hear. But honestly it wouldn’t have made it on the record if it didn’t feel the way it did. I liked it enough, and not only did I like it but the drummer liked it, all his roommates liked it. And I was like, well, it’s not that I’m just doing this to be liked, but there’s something here. But I would say that I’ve been fooling with those kinds of ideas and those kinds of structures for a while, I mean dating back to my first album actually.

TH: You have these rhythmic structures that permeate your music, but it’s of note that they’re not often all that jarring or angular. There are obviously a lot of counterexamples to that too, such as your three albums with Fieldwork; but on the whole the aspect of groove seems central to any rhythmic conceits you bring out in your music.

VI: That’s fair enough. Basically it has been the area that I’ve been exploring for a while. That’s not to say that I don’t explore other areas, but things have coalesced around that and particularly in the groups under my name. So we try to build from within something that is cycling and is stable and can be expanded in intensity, texture, density, and counterpoint, but not necessarily in duration itself.

But that’s not entirely true, because if you listen to the end of “Historicity” or the ending of “Helix,” those two pieces from the latest album, there are these experiments with cyclical tempo modulation. It’s basically the tempo equivalent of Shepard tones. You’re accelerating, but you’re also removing levels of subdivision as you accelerate, so then you’re kind of back where you started. If over nine bars you go to triple tempo, but you remove the subdivisions of each pulse so then suddenly you’re back at nine; or if over four bars you decelerate to half time but you add subdivisions so that you seem to have looped around. And then there are things that are just more in a breathing kind of rhythm, or in a very contemplative and non-metered rhythm. Like the last track on that album. So I guess we’re trying to broaden our horizons in that sense.

TH: Before we leave this area, just to cover all the bases: does your work with cognitive science or physics impact your work in any other ways than the ones we’ve discussed?

VI: That’s a good question, because we’ve discussed the signature ways. I think orchestration’s another piece of the harmony-timbre puzzle. I think sometimes in those fundamental terms about just energy distribution through the sonic space, in frequency and intensity and so on. And I think just in general I’m willing to deal with things a little more rigorously than many people in this area of music are. I won’t say “the most” or “all” or anything because there are plenty of people who are much nerdier than I. For example, Miguel Zenón, have you heard his music? Lots of math. Or Ethan Iverson—it’s very formalist the way he puts his solos together, for example. But it’s funny, because they don’t get called that, neither of them. I don’t know why that is. But I think they are bigger nerds than I am. [laughs] And I am saying that in solidarity with nerds across the universe!

TH: I’m sure the press gravitates towards your academic pedigree.

VI: Well it’s partly that I suppose.

TH: Since you mention orchestration, have you ever thought about expanding into big band, beyond your usual trio or quartet?

VI: I’m working with the opportunities that I have. I’ve been talking with one of these German radio big bands, and we might manage to do a project together. It’s an amazing palette, and I’m really interested in particular in how some of the newer composers are expanding the possibility with that palette. I think John Hollenbeck is probably the best example in terms of really blowing your mind with what you think is a tried and true format. So I’m interested in working with that.

Also I’m doing the other extreme: I’m making a solo piano record in the coming months, which is terrifying to me. I already talked about collaboration as the main thing, so when you’re out there by yourself—basically, what is the dialogue that’s happening? Between you, and what? That’s the question. Basically one of things you’re doing is you’re dialoging with the history of the instrument. It’s pretty well traveled as a format; a lot of people have tried it and found a lot of possibility in there.

But Historicity was like that in a way—I mean, how do you make another trio record? A thousand people have made a million trio records—or probably more than a thousand people, unfortunately. I remember I had to do this blindfold test a couple years ago for DownBeat, and he only played me piano trio and solo music that had been issued that year, and by the end of it I was ready to shoot myself. It all blended together in a way that was just depressing, like how do you really distinguish yourself in this format? And I guess one thing that I tried to do with Historicity, which wasn’t even like, “okay we’re going to show the world how to make it,” it wasn’t at all like that. It was me like, “God, I hope this works.” But it’s almost like letting history sit in with the band and become this fourth member of the group. When you work with an established piece of music, it carries its own sort of aura that on some level exceeds anything you can say about it. It’s already said what it has to say. And people, when they listen, are working with all that historical baggage that the song carries around with it, and that’s affecting what they’re hearing. So in a way it was just about leaving space for that to happen, and letting that invisible aura become a member of the group for each of those tunes. And so that dynamic is I think even more crucial with some the solo repertoire, just sort of letting that sound. I don’t know, it remains to be seen whether I can pull this off. There’s a lot riding on it, it seems. But I’ll do my best and get back to you.

TH: So going back to this question of improvisation, and complex rhythmic and tempo structures. How do you approach that in a way that makes it work?

VI: That is the question that, by playing, we hope to answer. There’s no one answer to that question, but for me, it’s about learning to coexist with these structures, and navigate them to the point that you’re not owned by them, but that you own them. But I’m also not necessarily in displays of mastery, that’s not really music either. So sometimes I’m interested in dialoguing with structure rather than displaying mastery over a structure. So you’ll hear these more, quoting Steve Lehman quoting Boulez, “diagonal” approaches to these forms. You play across it. Not over, and not in, but across.

And I think also, because partly I’ve ever been concerned with displaying my own virtuosity—because I never really thought that I had any to display [laughs]—but it’s really been about just doing enough to let the music persist for a little while, and no longer than it needs to. It has to do with basically my relationship to the instrument, and my own path through this music, which itself has been one discovery after another. So I don’t really have any grand plan of domination or anything like that, I just want to be able to move with some amount of grace and some amount of power inside of the music.

TH: In relationship to the term jazz, and how to define it, you wrote on All About Jazz: “And that’s closest to what jazz is for me: an expressive and critical take on reality, at once tough and fragile, culturally and historically grounded yet perilously unstable, miraculously existing in the most unlikely circumstance and simply devastating in its effect on one’s worldview. The kind of musical experience I crave is the kind that makes me wonder if I even know what music is.” I like this quote, because I basically and broadly agree with it. But I’m not totally sure if it serves as a way to discuss what jazz is, because I would personally take all definitional aspects about that quote and apply them to a lot of other musics that I love.

VI: What I was doing in that article was—as I recall, it was years ago—I wasn’t trying to define jazz. And I generally try not to offer some sweeping definition of anything—certainly not as charged a term as jazz. Like you quoted, I was talking about what it is for me. And that of course is going to overlap with what other musics are for me, or for other people. And I don’t think that any definition of a field as wide as jazz should be something that excludes. When you talk about it being historically grounded, and culturally specific, that’s true of many musics, but it’s specific in a specific way, you know? It’s this specificity, and it’s this historicity. And it’s affected me in its own way over the last 25 years—and continues to. I’ve had the great good fortune of being able to affect it back on some small level, which I never dreamed possible.

But I would say that part of the reason that I’ve been able to do that is because I’ve not treated it as a closed system, but rather as a field of possibilities. I think that that has to be true of any creative endeavor, because if you treat it as a closed system, there’s only so far you can go. And I’m interested in pushing beyond what I know and connecting to things I don’t know. I don’t really work with a working definition of the music. Maybe that was more a description, a qualified and provisional description of how it works for me. And I also tried deliberately to frame it as openly as possible because that’s how it works for me.

I often find that people impose the word “jazz” in ways that are meant to limit what the music can be, and that is of no interest to me. And yet at the same time, I’m 100% indebted to the history of the music that’s called jazz, so I’m not going to betray that history or its impact on me. So it puts you in an interesting situation when its 2010, and you have this hundred-year-old music that is hotly contested and that different people want to own and define and contain, and ignore and so on, and meanwhile the music’s been chugging along on its own steam and expanding and having this huge impact on the world the entire time—all these debates notwithstanding. It’s like Monk said, you can’t make jazz do anything, and maybe it’s going to hell.

To me, what jazz is is a field. It’s an area of overlapping interests and overlapping histories. It’s not a style, actually—or if it is, it’s a huge compendium of styles. But it’s also people who didn’t care about style, and care instead about information and history and community and memory, and these kinds of things.

There’s a line from Abbey Lincoln that I quote sometimes, and I think quoted in that article: “A lot of musicians on the scene now think they’re playing jazz. But there’s no such thing, really.” Which is a very controversial thing to say or for me to quote, I’ve also found. I shouldn’t say those kinds of things, because of course it exists. But it also exists in an oppositional sense, so that when Abbey Lincoln says something like “jazz doesn’t exist,” part of what she’s saying is that it resists definition. You know, there’s the history of the music, and then there’s the word. And are those two things equal? Of course not. In particular, the word has been used to deny whole sectors of the history of the music, or to imprison whole sectors of the music, and to deny musicians the mobility that they deserve in terms of opportunities and how much they get paid, frankly. So those are some of the complexities involved in trying to define anything, and specifically this music, which has such an historical weight.

Margaret Brouwer: Multiple Planes

Margaret Brouwer in conversation with Frank J. Oteri
January 12, 2010—1:00 p.m.
Video and audio recorded by Trevor Hunter
Video presentation by Molly Sheridan

I’ve known Margaret Brouwer for over a decade, and her music slightly longer than that. I first became aware of her eclectic chamber music compositions through a disc issued toward the end of the era of Composers Recordings, Inc. (CRI), which was luckily made available again a few years back by New World Records. That disc was a difficult one for me to wrap my brain around stylistically since it featured a sumptuous, almost neo-romantic string quartet, a populist-sounding clarinet concerto, a solid neo-classical horn sonata, and a bizarre solo flute piece involving loops and spoken text. A few years later another disc of chamber music appeared, this time on New World, featuring three more gorgeous quartets including another gem for string quartet, as well as a formidable nearly 20-minute piano solo, plus a fascinating vocal work for solo soprano accompanied by the ubiquitous “Pierrot” ensemble of flute, oboe, violin, cello, percussion and keyboard—only Brouwer’s keyboard was harpsichord. And in 2006, a third disc—this one devoted to her orchestral music and featuring a percussion concerto with Evelyn Glennie—appeared on Naxos American Classics, and it is every bit as heterogenous as its predecessors.

As the years went by, I would frequently see Margaret at concerts all over New York even though she was primarily based in Cleveland. I later learned that she tries to hear as much music as she can wherever she is, which probably ought to have already been clear to me from the broad aesthetic range of the music on those three recordings. A few years ago I visited Cleveland for the first time and had the pleasure of hearing her Violin Concerto in two separate venues—it was being performed by CityMusic Cleveland, a group that presents free orchestra concerts in a wide range of neighborhoods in the Greater Cleveland area. I was curious about how the same piece would sound in different spaces and it offered me a rare opportunity to dig deeper into a new work than hearing a one-off premiere. It was also the first time I’d ever heard a work of hers performed live, and it was a sonic revelation for me and everyone else in those halls whose response was absolutely euphoric.

So when I finally had the opportunity to sit with Margaret and have an extended talk with her about her music, just days after the premiere of her Viola Concerto by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, it wasn’t much of a surprise to hear her talk about music’s emotional power, her love of timbre, her orchestrational strategies that are conceived to have maximum impact in concert halls, or her wide-ranging listening habits. That’s not to say there weren’t some surprises, like how composing became an obsession that made her give up a lucrative career as an orchestral violinist, or that she toured with Johnny Mathis and Tony Bennett, and how she recorded music for radio commercials and some of the rhythms she played in those settings left an indelible impression on her that still surface in her music from time to time, even when she’s juggling twelve-tone rows (she still uses them!) and tonality.

Margaret Brouwer writes music that exists on multiple planes. It is crafted to stir your emotions as well as to provoke your intellect. It is unapologetically polystylistic and an extremely personal response to centuries of music, and in so being is very much music of our own 21st century.

—FJO

*

[Conversation transcribed and edited by Frank J. Oteri and John Lydon]

Frank J. Oteri: Usually when we have a conversation with someone for NewMusicBox, we totally immerse ourselves in that person’s work. We listen to everything going all the way back to beginning. We treat it the way a museum does a retrospective exhibition. And from that immersion, a narrative usually emerges that gets fleshed out in the conversation. But when I tried to do the same thing in preparation for talking with you, I soon discovered that there’s nothing by you out there that’s earlier than the 1980s.

Margaret Brouwer: I don’t think there’s anything recorded—certainly not anything people could listen to—that’s any earlier than that. I wrote some things way back in high school and in college. In fact, in the summers when I was in college, I worked at various places where what I did was write music. But it was for amateurs. One summer I still remember, I worked at an inner-city church in the Hough area of Cleveland as a music director. We did different things all summer, different big productions. But the one that I remember that turned out really well was a sort of multimedia extravaganza based on the story of Job. There was a speaking chorus, a singing chorus, and singing soloists. Then God and the Devil were represented by dancers that were behind a scrim, and there was miked voicing coming over for them. It turned out pretty well, but we didn’t record it. Those were the kinds of things I was doing.

But I always thought I’d be a violinist. I was writing music and doing these creative projects, but it was just something to do for fun. My family always thought I’d be a violinist, and I studied violin from a very early age. I was a performance major in college at Oberlin Conservatory, and my undergrad degree was in violin performance. And so when I started out, I was playing the violin, although I was doing some writing. And I was writing quite a bit until two children came along. Shortly after that I was on my own raising the kids. So with making ends meet financially, which I was doing playing the violin, I wrote, but not a whole lot for probably five or six years. First I played in the Fort Worth Symphony and I also played in the Fort Worth Opera Orchestra. It was a terrific opera company. And I was doing a lot of freelancing, playing with visiting pop artists. They would hire string players in Texas. I actually went on tour with Johnny Mathis throughout the whole Southwest; I was his concertmaster. The biggest memory, I suppose, was Tony Bennett. Playing three weeks of shows with him was just wonderful. His charts were terrific, as were Johnny Mathis’s. So then I started getting asked to play in the recording industry in Dallas, which was actually very busy at that time. They were still hiring string players back then. I understand now that that’s completely dried up; they’re just using synthesizers. But at that time they paid really really well for a very small amount of time. You’d go in for an hour session and you’d usually be finished in ten minutes, because it was for sixty-second spots. But I could recognize on a station ID or a commercial when it was the Dallas Strings; we had a special sound.

So [after about four years] I quit Fort Worth [Symphony] and was just doing the freelancing in order to have more time to compose. My children were still really young and I was trying to fit in more time. But then they were short on violins in the Dallas Symphony, so I was hired to play in all the subscription concerts. I even toured with them and played in Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center. But more and more it was dragging on me that I didn’t have time to compose. And I did have some things performed, but I don’t think we ever made a recording of any of it. It was done by musician friends of mine. I did write a couple of pieces for Ellen Rose, who just last week premiered my Viola Concerto with the Dallas Symphony. One of the pieces that I wrote for her I actually loved; it has a lot of extended techniques in it, lots of George Crumb-like sounds. It turned out really well but I’d forgotten about it until right now [laughs].

But anyway, it was bothering me so much that I wasn’t getting to write; even though I loved playing the violin, I loved composing more. I loved the creativity of composing. Playing in an orchestra is very gratifying, but what makes a good orchestra is if all the strings completely give up their own individuality and personality and sound [in order] to blend, so you can get this wonderful sound of a whole section with no one sticking out trying to be soloistic. Even in the recording industry, where we’d rewrite things sometimes on the spot when they weren’t working (as a composer I loved that).

So I quit everything and went back to Indiana University to get my doctorate. The musicians were just shocked; they couldn’t believe that I would quit, because I was making a good living. It was kind of crazy, but in the end it has worked out. I’m really happy. It took me about three years to get up my nerve to do it. I saved up money. My kids and I lived on savings the whole time I was getting my doctorate. Then, luckily, I was able to get a job immediately afterwards teaching composition, and that’s my life.

FJO: Your family always thought you’d be a violinist, and you actually had a successful career. But you weren’t satisfied because you wanted to compose music. So where did that desire come from? What was your exposure to other composers? What was your association with being a composer that made you do it the first time and then keep wanting to do it?

MB: That is really difficult to say. I lived a pretty sheltered life when I was growing up. But there was a lot of classical music in my home. My parents were both musicians. My dad was an amateur pianist and my mom a singer. But I didn’t even know when I was growing up that there was such a thing as a woman composer. So it took me a while to even think I could be a composer. I was pretty naïve, I guess; it seems like I should have thought of that sooner, but I didn’t. It was mostly that I just loved doing it and I had opportunities with different amateur groups and summer jobs—another one was at a camp where I was the music director and I put on these things that I wrote with the campers all summer. It was all amateurs and oftentimes young people, but I just loved doing it—creating things and then trying to get everybody to do it the way I had it in my head. And it just gradually evolved.

I don’t think there was an “a-ha!” moment, except for when I was doing all the violin playing and began to realize that I didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life, to have my life be three-quarters violin playing and one-quarter composing. At that time, I was thinking one-quarter violin and three-quarters composing. But eventually, I had to give up playing the violin. I actually kept the violin up while I was getting my doctorate. In fact, one of the writers in the recording industry in Dallas gave my name to one of the recording companies in Indianapolis, and they were hiring me to go up and play sessions there, too, although it was a much smaller market. But once I started teaching, I was also getting commissions to compose. So I was trying to compose as well as teach composition and also play the violin. I wasn’t practicing until 11:00 at night. I’m a morning person so you can imagine me sitting with my back hurting trying to make myself practice music, because, at least for me, as a violinist, to have decent chops, I had to practice every day.

FJO: It’s interesting to me that when you decided you wanted to primarily be a composer rather than a violinist, the way you went about it was to get a PhD in composition. Rather than plunging yourself directly into the composing world, you created a life for yourself in academia, which wasn’t 100 percent composing. It was probably 50 percent, or even more than 50 percent, teaching others, which is very different from both composing and performing.

MB: My specific situation was that I was raising two kids. Had I been on my own, I might have tried to be just a freelance composer. And it probably would have worked. Sometimes I wonder. But I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to make ends meet financially. So I knew I had to get a doctorate. (It was a DMA, actually, that I got at IU.) Because I knew I had to teach. I wasn’t at all positive I’d be able to get a teaching job, because lots of composers who want to don’t get teaching jobs. I was really lucky to get one. I was sort of nervous about it the whole time I was getting the degree because the savings were going gradually down.

So I was probably spending as much time teaching composition as I would have been spending playing the violin. The only problem being that the practicing and the composing are so similar in some respects. They both require loads of energy, dedication, and discipline. To be a composer, you have to make yourself go in and write every day, at least I do. Same thing with playing the violin: I had to make myself practice every day. And I only had so much discipline. I’m not really disciplined in any other part of my life, actually. I use up all my discipline in making sure I compose what I need to each day, and before, in making sure I practiced. But I didn’t have enough discipline in my life to do both.

FJO: But it would seem to me that teaching also requires loads of energy, dedication, and discipline—being responsible for others, keeping them interested, preparing materials.

MB: Maybe you’re right. But it’s different because you’re with other people; you’re not all by yourself. That’s a lot of hours to spend in a room by yourself if you’re spending three or four hours composing and a couple of hours practicing every day. The really good thing about teaching was that my students and my colleagues became like my family.

FJO: So maybe it’s not so much about discipline as it is about being in a social milieu versus being isolated. I’m a very social person, so it’s always a struggle for me to do something completely by myself which is usually a necessity for composing. But interestingly enough, I’ve seen you for years on the scene in the whole social milieu of the new music scene, both when you came to New York and the times I’ve visited Cleveland—you’re a voracious concertgoer. You seem to be always listening to music and absorbing it. Even if I didn’t know that from frequently running into you over the years, I could hear that voraciousness in your music; it feeds the music you create. But it’s a double-edged sword. It makes your music more connected to the world we live in, but it also reduces your composing time, because the more time you spend listening to the music of others, the less time you have to create your own music.

MB: But you can’t spend all day long writing music. I guess some people do, but for me I’m completely intensely focused and into it for maybe three hours and then I get sort of burned out. What I can do is write in the mornings. Sometimes I write for four hours, maybe five, but then I really need time off. Sometimes I’ll go back to it late in the day. For some reason, it’s very strange, but it seems like my most creative time is right around dinner time. But I definitely need the time off. When I was going to concerts when I was teaching, I think that part of it was discipline, too. I wanted to be well informed.

One thing that I really did emphasize with my students was that I didn’t expect them to write in one style. I really liked to encourage them to try styles and find a style that was their expression. So at the Cleveland Institute of Music, composers all had extremely different styles, from really atonal to basically tonal, and I liked that. I like that going to a concert, too. I like the variety of hearing a lot of different styles, and I actually think that’s one of the strengths of the 21st century so far. There are quite a few styles that are viable and where people can actually get commissions. They can even teach. There was a time when you had to pretty much write in one or two styles in order to get a teaching job. So I think that’s really positive. And it’s important to stay informed. But of course when I was teaching it probably really did take away from composing time. When I’d come to New York and go to concerts, I did some writing but not as much as I can do now that I’m not trying to fit in teaching, too.

FJO: Your music has been informed by so many spheres of influences. You grew up in a musical household. Then you had a career as an orchestral violinist, which gave you the opportunity to hear music from the inside of it. Then there’s the influence of some very formidable composition teachers, such as Donald Erb and George Crumb. Finally your own experience of teaching, where you’re imparting your knowledge and experience but you’re also constantly hearing what others are doing. Plus you make it a point to attend tons of concerts. So you’ve been exposed to an ocean of information from a variety of sources. And perhaps that is why your own music is so difficult to glibly pin down to a sound-bite description.

MB: Maybe so. I know that some composers really took on the style of their teachers and many composers adhere to one style. My philosophy, now anyway, is as a composer in the 21st century. I’m thinking, “What is the music of the 21st century?” And I know it’s different for many people, which I think is terrific. But one of the things that really strikes me is that we’ve got all these periods of music behind us. When you take Bach or Mozart, they were studying the composers from earlier periods but they didn’t have half as many composers to look at as we do. We’ve got all this music. And you’re right, I played a lot of that music. As a violinist, I played a lot of the solo violin literature, chamber music, and also lots and lots of orchestral music. So I know all of that music well. Maybe better than a lot of composers do who haven’t played an orchestral instrument. But my feeling is that what I need to do as a 21st-century composer is look at all the styles from the past, just like Mozart did, except I’ve got a lot more to look at, and somehow find a way to be influenced or to bring elements from that music into my music.

The 20th century is a period of music now. When laypeople who aren’t composers say “contemporary music,” they mean the music that was being written in the early 20th century. That’s what I find when I delve deeper into what they’re talking about, especially the ones who say they don’t like it. It turns out that it’s something from way, way, way, way back. That music began over a hundred years ago; that’s a long time ago. I’ve even been thinking about what we should be calling the different periods that happened during the 20th century, and as far as I’m concerned the 21st century is up for grabs right now. So my music is not only influenced by Renaissance and Romantic period music, but it has also been influenced by the contemporary period.

FJO: That’s interesting, because I hear more recent things in your music as well—there are vestiges of atonality and even hints of minimalism without the pieces actually being minimalist, perhaps just sharing a similar energy and propulsiveness. I find this particularly interesting because once upon a time, the aesthetics of atonality and minimalism were so opposed to each other. Now it is possible to write music that can go beyond both of those concepts and not be particularly beholden to either aesthetic, but which also could not have existed had those movements not happened. But, if I could make a generalization, especially now that I know that you worked with Johnny Mathis and Tony Bennett, all of what we’re talking about so far has been in the realm of classical music. So while you may not be identifying yourself as belonging to any camp within classical music, you can’t deny that you are in the camp of classical music, vis-à-vis other genres and styles.

MB: I think of myself as an avant-garde composer. But that again is another term that has so many meanings to different people. For me, I use a lot of extended techniques in my music, some pieces more than others. There’s not a load of extended techniques in the Viola Concerto, but there are some, especially in the last movement. And some of my chamber music has a lot of it. I love the sounds. I love traditional sounds, the way each individual instrument sounds playing the normal, classical way, but I also love the unusual combinations of instruments to try to get new colors and I love using the instruments with extended techniques to get entirely new sounds from those instruments. I often get together with musicians when I can to try to make new sounds.

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Photo by Christian Steiner
courtesy Carl Fischer/Theodore Presser

So there’s that, and the idea of combining contemporary sounds with very old sounds. In the Viola Concerto, the first movement has quotes from the Gregorian chant “Ubi Caritas.” I love the way that sounds, to have this very modal chant juxtaposed with very contemporary sounds. There’s actually a twelve-tone row in that concerto, which I made out of the “Ubi Caritas”—it only uses six pitches, four for the most part but a couple of times the fifth and the sixth pitches come in, and then I add the other pitches. And in my Violin Concerto, which probably people would think of as tonal, there’s a twelve-tone row that runs all the way through it. In fact, the violin states the row in the first two and a half measures of the concerto. One of the parts that I like the best in the Violin Concerto is that in the slow movement, which is basically tonal, there’s a place where the violin is playing the twelve-tone row while woodwinds are playing tonal chords. I love the way that sounds. I like mixing. To me, that’s what I love to do as a 21st-century composer. And to me, that seems avant-garde.

FJO: But all these things we’ve been talking about—concertos, twelve-tone rows—these are classical music paradigms. But then you’ve also done this crazy multimedia piece with the video artist Kasumi. That piece seems more avant-garde somehow. You called it an opera, which is also a classical music paradigm, but it in no ways resembles operas as most people perceive the term.

MB: We called it a sample-based opera.

FJO: And the Violin Concerto is actually informed by recent sample-based pop music, even though it doesn’t sound like that music, for the most part, these are sounds that were in your head when you wrote the piece. So I’d like to talk with you a bit about the influences of music from genres outside of classical music. Where do you see your music fitting it with these other kinds of music? You listen to all this music, because you have an open ear, but you identify yourself as being a classical composer.

MB: I’m in the classical music camp. That’s what I know. That’s what I’ve spent my life doing. I played in a string quartet for years, and I played orchestra music. So that is the base of what I’m doing. But my music is definitely influenced by all the other things I’ve done, like playing in those recording sessions. Those were really good writers that we had in Dallas. They did some really terrific stuff. And a lot of it wasn’t easy. It wasn’t just background music. Some of the rhythms that I learned playing in the recording industry, as well as playing with jazz groups, I still use. In fact, shortly after I left there, I wrote a brass quintet called Timespan, and the last movement is miserably difficult—it’s fast and has a lot of sixteenth notes and constant changing meter, but it also has a lot of rhythms that we were playing in the recording industry. It all comes in and is all part of the layers of my music.

FJO: If there’s anything that most listeners associate with a genre of music, more than specific melodies, harmonies, or rhythms, it’s timbres. And the sounds that exist in much of today’s pop music genres are very different from the sounds typically associated with classical music in the past. Some of the same instruments might appear from time to time, but they’re treated in a different way. And the whole advent of electronic music affects not only the creation of new timbres but also the way old timbres are presented through various recording techniques as well as amplification and processing in live performance. In your apartment here you have an electronic keyboard which you’re obviously using to compose music, but you don’t really write music for it.

MB: I think I might have used it in one orchestral piece a long time ago. I do think I’m creating some new sounds, but they’re not the sounds that you’d hear in a rock group.

One of the things that people always comment to me about—and it’s also one of my real interests—is the colors that I get in an orchestra, even in the Viola Concerto, in which I was very careful to make sure you’d be able to hear the viola, and you can, so I’m happy. There was a composer there who told me my orchestration was flawless [laughs], but I’m also combining instruments in unusual ways. Another [composer] was trying to find out how I did one sound. I didn’t tell him, but obviously you can just look in the score and you’ll know. Some of the sounds maybe sound electronic, but I shouldn’t even say that because that’s not the sound that I’m looking for. I like ringing sounds. I like to use the instruments in a way where the sound will really just ring in the hall. That doesn’t always come through as well on recordings. But true, I’m not normally looking for the sounds of rock music, although my piece Sizzle was completely inspired by hearing rap music. It’s an orchestra piece, but when I was starting it I was driving the car a lot—I was living in Cleveland. And when you stop at a stop light, coming from the car next to you, you hear these rhythms. You hear the rhythm of the rap voice, even though you can’t hear the voice, and you can hear the bass rhythm. It’s booming out of the car next to you. It was that whole thing that’s really the whole basis of the piece. It starts very obviously in the beginning, I think anyway, and then everything evolves out of that.

Also, in my Clarinet Quintet, and in a lot of my recent music, there is some world music influence. That’s kind of an angry piece. One of the things that I ended up doing was putting in some quotes of typical American music, quotes from hymns actually, and melodies that were very influenced by Persian and other Muslim music—the intervals, and trying to get the freedom of the rhythm. There’s really no way that you can be exact, because it’s not the same scale, but there are a lot of melodies that are Eastern sounding. There is one place in there where I combined a hymn in three of the voices and the other two—the viola and the clarinet—play low and play a melody which is sort of a rendition of the Muslim Call to Prayer. There’s no way to make it sound exactly the same, but the sound of the viola and clarinet in unison is pretty interesting and sounds a little bit like a nasal singing voice. I love the way the combination came out—the tonal hymn that’s very rhythmical with this Muslim-Persian-sounding melody, that’s totally non-rhythmical. It’s actually a terrible place to put together for the group; they’re playing eighth note quintuplets half the time and things that have nothing to do with the rhythm going on. It’s pretty interesting the way it works.

FJO: I want to get back to those sounds you heard coming out from the car next to you driving in Cleveland. You turned that into Sizzle, but I doubt that anybody who is a listener of rap music would think that your music is in any way related to rap.

MB: Probably not, but I don’t know. It would be interesting.

FJO: It would be. But to take this timbre discussion to yet another place, one of my favorite pieces of yours is Light, which uses a harpsichord, an instrument I really love, but in a completely unexpected way. We’ve started talking about how timbres are signifiers of style.

MB: My style anyway.

FJO: Well, if we’re going to identify you as being in the camp of classical music, you are because of the instruments that you use. That’s the way that most listeners are going to be hearing it. They’ll hear an orchestra or a string quartet and think, “Oh, that’s classical music.” The harpsichord has an association with older classical music, with Baroque music, so when you throw in a harpsichord, you conjure up a sound world that evokes another era, deep in the past. But what you’ve done is create a piece for singer accompanied by one of the most characteristic ensembles of 20th century music, the “Pierrot plus percussion” ensemble of percussion, flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and keyboard—with the keyboard player on harpsichord. So you’re throwing an 18th-century monkey wrench into this 20th-century ensemble. And sonically it’s hard to place, because a harpsichord is usually not in the same ensemble with percussion or even a clarinet.

MB: The commission for that was from the Cleveland Museum of Art. They had acquired this wonderful new harpsichord and they wanted to commission a piece that would feature it. They were doing a concert of my chamber music and so wanted to do this piece. Actually the harpsichord has never been one of my favorite instruments—sorry, I know it is yours—because there’s so little color variation. To me, color is the important thing with an instrument. So my initial feeling was: “Harpsichord? I don’t know!” But the harpsichordist they wanted to use was Jeannette Sorel, who is a fabulous player—she conducts Apollo’s Fire, which is a wonderful early music group. And they said I could add whatever other instruments I wanted, and they sort of thought it would be nice to have a soprano, and they wanted to use Sandra Simon, whom I also really love. That was a big plus, so I started thinking about what I could combine with a harpsichord to try some interesting colors that would be interesting because of the instruments I was mixing with it. So I decided on the Pierrot ensemble and definitely mallet instruments, because I was thinking that if I mix the harpsichord and the marimba playing the same material fading in and out, the color change would be interesting. Same with a vibraphone. And so there’s a lot of vibes and marimba in that piece.

In my Viola Concerto, too. A lot of the accompaniment in the places that are intimate, where I didn’t want her to have to play loud, are harp, marimba, and vibraphone. There’s a lot of vibraphone. There’s one place where the only instruments playing are the viola, accompanied by marimba with soft mallets—so you get that great tremolo sound where you don’t hear the attack—and harp. That is not typically orchestral; other viola concertos don’t use those instruments at all. But anyway, that also made it OK with the harpsichord, that challenge to think about sounds.

When I first start writing a piece and I know the instruments I’m going to write for, I spend a lot of time lying around daydreaming about the sounds I want to hear and I make lists of all the things I could do in the soft parts and in the loud parts with different combinations of instruments. And, of course, with the viola in the concerto, one of the crucial issues was what to use so that I wouldn’t cover up the viola. It’s this absolutely gorgeous instrument. And the violas in the string section of an orchestra are the guts, the inner backbone; they’re what gives this wonderful depth of sound. If you didn’t have the violas, you’d just have these thin violins and thin cellos and it wouldn’t be half as nice. But they also completely blend in. That’s their value in the orchestra—most of the time they’re blending. So how do you use a solo violist and get that wonderful gutsy, rich sound and those gorgeous low sounds without completely having it blend with other instruments? So a lot of the time that I spent in my daydream period was imagining how the viola would sound with, say, the harp and the marimba—I knew you’d hear it then—and also with the vibes which have a ringing quality which the viola doesn’t have. The viola has this rich, honey quality. And so they would be contrasting colors. And I use the brass a lot, the whole brass section, in accompaniment, too. And that worked. It didn’t cover up the viola.

FJO: I’m curious to hear more about these daydream periods. Some composers use generative processes. It was a particularly big part of 20th-century compositional activities—twelve-tone pitch matrixes, or the melodic and rhythmic cells from which many minimalist pieces begin, even the strategies determined beforehand for indeterminate pieces. But it sounds to me like the ideas that initiate a piece of music for you begin with timbre and the specific ways instruments combine with each other.

MB: It’s certainly a big part of it. But I don’t just sit down and start writing once I know the colors. I make big lists of the timbres, but I don’t use all of them. The next thing I do is spend a lot of time working on musical material, because usually my pieces start with one little idea that then expands and becomes the entire piece. So next I’ll come up with either a series of sonorities or some melodic material that the piece would go from. Then, at that point, I come up with a lot of different ways to use that material so that I would have all that to look at. I make a lot of graphs, little pictures. So if it’s a melody it would be a wavy line. And if there’s going to be big chords, I’ll have these dark lines. Or a might have a lot of little dots. [And I put it] all on a time line.

I’ve found that it’s good to make a bunch of those with a lot of different possibilities and then I can go through a ten-minute piece in ten seconds. I can see how it evolves. That’s not to say I always stick with my plan. If I’m writing and then I get some idea about how to develop that idea that I didn’t have before, and I think it’s better, I’ll just go in that direction. So there’s a lot of planning that goes in before I start to write a piece. And I plan how I use my materials pretty thoroughly. Lately I’ve been using twelve-tone rows some, although it’s true that I like to use thirds, fourths, and fifths which make it sound tonal. The plan is not tonal at all, occasionally maybe I’ll have a cadence that sounds pretty tonal but oftentimes those cadences are planned in other ways. Usually the way these sonorities go from one to another is some other plan entirely from a traditional tonal plan. I don’t think I’ve ever planned chords according to what one would learn in music theory.

FJO: But I would have thought from hearing the results of your pieces, which are often so emotionally driven, that there was a lot more intuition in your methods than it sounds like there is.

MB: There’s intuition, too, once I actually start writing. One thing that I learned from Don Erb that is absolutely crucial, even though my style is probably not much like his except for some of the big orchestral moments, is the pacing of a piece. When do events change? If you’re having a big build up, how long does that build up last? I’m very much a goal-oriented composer; I’m not Eastern at all. I like to feel like the music is moving forward and going somewhere. And so if you’re going toward this goal, and it’s getting bigger and bigger, how long do you stay there before it goes back down or changes to something else? That’s the kind of thing that Don Erb always stressed a lot. But where the intuition comes in is I go through the piece from the beginning in my head every day. This is why I’m always printing things out, because I’ll sit with the score, going through it in time. Sometimes I’ll even use a metronome to make sure I’m not slowing down, because I learned when I heard things performed that the first part always seemed slow. I realized what I was doing was going faster in the beginning and as I got into music I didn’t know as well I was slowing down a little bit in my head. I do feel that you have to go through it even though it gets a little boring when it is ten minutes long to start at the beginning and go through it. But if you don’t, it may not make sense musically. But I’m using my intuition as to how long a thing should be or when things should change. And when I go through [a score], I’m always changing little things about the rhythm in a melody. I’ve probably got 25 to 30 different versions of most melodies I’ve written. I don’t just write it down and that’s it. I play with the rhythm and I play with the intervals a lot. Even sometimes when I’m ten minutes into a piece and there’s one spot in the beginning that still doesn’t feel like it flows, I’ll x one measure as I’m going in time and then later I go back and fiddle. Maybe I’ll change a quarter [note] to a dotted quarter, or maybe I’ll change a 4/4 bar to a 5/4 bar and then I’ll try that for a couple of days as I’m going through it. I’m kind of anal about all this. I just keep working at it until it suits my intuition.

FJO: To take that then to the people who perform your music, how malleable can your initial notions become once your music is in the hands of someone else? You’re willing to entertain the notion that an initial idea you have might not work and you’ll revise it many times until it feels right to you. But are you willing to be equally flexible about a piece once it’s out of your hands and an ensemble or a conductor feels that something isn’t working. You go through so many possibilities, perhaps others are as a viable as the one you opted to put forward. Is the one you ultimately choose the only one that’s right? How wedded are you to your final score?

MB: The final one is the one I like the best, otherwise I would have stuck with one of the earlier ones. But it is true that in working with performers, if there’s that luxury of working long enough before that you can change something, sometimes I do change something. If it isn’t working for the musicians, there’s no point in leaving it. Usually it’s little changes. It might be a change of adding a beat or slowing something down, or whatever. But I do write in tempo changes. If I’m thinking of a ritard, it’s usually all written out, and musicians have learned that. They’ll say, “I think this should have a ritard, don’t you?” And I’ll say, “Well, actually, it’s already written in the music.” I guess the reason I do that is that sometimes people don’t play the ritard even though I feel like there should be one. I used to write a lot of music that used proportional notation and the problem was I was always saying, “Hold this note a little longer. Play that one a little faster.” And I thought, “This is ridiculous. I might as well write it all out.” I’m usually pretty definite about how I think things should go. But it doesn’t always end up that way in performance.

FJO: This seems a good time to ask you about the intent of your music versus the sonic result. We’ve had several conversations over the past few years about angry music. I’m not sure how much of that translates to listeners unless they read what you’ve written about the music or hear what you have said about it in a pre-concert talk. But I’m curious about what got you interested in wanting to write angry music and what your expectations are for the listener.

MB: When 9/11 happened I was working on a commission. Luckily I was only a couple of minutes into the piece; I couldn’t go on with it. There is very much an emotional and expressive element in my music and I am definitely expressing myself in my music. And I was in a different frame of mind after 9/11 and I couldn’t write the piece I was writing. So I started another piece and it became a very sad piece. It’s called Lament. And it has four movements. The big movement in it is the slow movement, which is also called “Lament.” It’s a downer piece in some respects. But it kept striking me that I wasn’t writing angry music. I tried but I didn’t know how to do it. Then I realized I’d never written angry music. Then I realized that I don’t know how to express anger when speaking, either. It’s just not part of my nature. So I studied a bunch of books about expressing anger.

Then I wrote a piece called Declaration for soprano, violin, and piano. But there I had a text. I picked either sad or angry texts. That worked really well. In fact, that was the first piece I finished that’s serial—twelve-tone. There’s one really angry text by Alice Walker and it worked just perfectly to use twelve-tone. So it was not too difficult to write angry music with a text.

The next piece I was due to write was the Clarinet Quintet. And I really wanted to see if I could add anger to my palette. So in the first movement I wrote really angry music. And the second movement ended up being [based on] one of the sad movements from the [Declaration] songs. I did an instrumental version. It still has a lot of the same sonorities and melodies, but it also has more instrumental stuff. But, anyway, Dan Silver had commissioned this piece and he was going to premiere it in Cleveland with the Cavani String Quartet. The year before that, the Cavani were out in residence where he teaches, at Colorado State, so they decided they’d learn what they had while they were there. And they decided to give a preview of these two movements. So we did it in a classroom with a little audience and I absolutely hated the first movement. It was just these real gritty, dissonant chords grinding your heel into the ground all the way through the movement. So I decided that that wasn’t the way I wanted to express anger. It was kind of a learning process. Luckily, the musicians were willing to throw that away, even though they’d spent a long time on it because it was hard. So I wrote a new first movement for them. And that one I’m much happier with. It’s more assertive, and sometimes kind of aggressive. It has a lot of very atonal music in it, but somehow it works.

FJO: So does atonal equal angry? Do you think that in the 21st century that people will still associate certain intervals with certain moods, like major triads are happy and minor triads are sad?

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Photo by Christian Steiner
courtesy Carl Fischer/Theodore Presser

MB: I’ve written atonal things that weren’t the least bit angry. I think it depends entirely on your row, the pitches that you pick. But it can give you chords that are dissonant and that sound angrier than chords that are consonant. I do think that. I’m a firm believer in music affecting the body. I had one person tell me once that she was always going home physically sick after [attending] concerts of mostly atonal stuff. I think that certain intervals resonate with the body. The Greeks, of course, were dealing in modes, but they had all these rules that there were certain modes that statesmen and athletes couldn’t listen to, and should listen to some others because some would not give them the right frame of mind and others would. That’s putting it very simply. And maybe it’s not true for everyone. You’re looking very skeptical so it must not be true for you. [laughs] But I think it is true for me. I really do have a physical reaction to music, and I think one of the strengths of music is that it speaks at a different level from words. And it affects you in a different way than having a word conversation. And what I love about art music, or classical music—maybe I shouldn’t narrow it down that much—what’s great about a lot of music is that you hear it on two planes: you hear it in your body but it also goes to your brain because it stimulates your intellect. There are a lot of things to think about and understand, but at the same time you’re having a physical reaction, too.

FJO: There have been so many instances of this idea around the world. You mentioned the ancient Greeks. In India, for centuries, certain ragas have only been played at certain times of the day. And in the most basic clichéd way, in the West we delineate between major being happy and minor being sad. But all of these things seem culturally specific rather than inherent in the music itself. How much of this stuff is nature, how much is nurture? Can there really be human universals with this sort of idea?

MB: My goodness. I’m not the right person to answer that. I haven’t studied this scientifically. It would actually make a really interesting study for someone, but I just know for myself and also for other people who’ve basically said the same thing to me that it seems true. It’s an observation more than a scientific study on my part.

FJO: So to ponder the future, the world is a changing place. We talked about audiences for classical music versus audiences for other kinds of music. But nowadays everything is blurring and morphing. Thanks to technology, the world is more interconnected than it has ever been. Once upon a time you might have been able to come up with someone who had never heard a major or minor triad. I remember having a conversation decades ago about whether someone in Indonesia would hear Mozart’s music as consonant or dissonant. What is the context that somebody should have coming to your music the first time? And do you see that context changing for this music in the future?

MB: For people listening to my music for the first time I think they should just let it be an experience that washes over them. I think there is quite a bit of emotion in my music, or expressivity, that I would assume anyone could listen to and get something from. There’s also a lot of rhythm in my music. My slow movements are often hard to find the beat in, but my fast movements are very rhythmical and have a lot of excitement and drama, I think. I like all that, and that’s what I think I’m good at. Some of my music is intellectual, but probably not lots of it in recent years anyway. People who don’t know much about classical music or contemporary music react to it.

The thing that I regret as far as my music goes is that I think my music is heard best in the concert hall. Probably because of all of the years of experience I had playing in concert halls, I think very much about the space and sending the sound all through the space. In the pitches that I work out, I work out the overtone series because I like the way it rings. It’s fine recorded, but it’s the best in a concert hall. And I think we are going more and more toward just listening to things on the internet, which is wonderful because it does give an opportunity for sounds and musical ideas to be passed around more easily.

What is interesting to me, though, is that although you were saying it’s become such a small world and we know what’s going on, the honest truth is that most American composers don’t know that much about what’s going on with European composers and vice versa. I’ve discovered this when I’ve talked with European composers. They’re naming all sorts of names I’ve never heard of and when I ask them who they know among American composers I’m lucky if they know two names, period, for all time in American music. It’s certainly not recent composers. Maybe one. It’s kind of strange, isn’t it that we’re so isolated even though we’ve got all these opportunities not to be isolated? American orchestras who have European conductors will tend to mostly play composers they know from Europe if they haven’t been here a very long time. It seems so provincial and just the opposite of what you said. We don’t know what’s going on. Maybe we know some world music, but I bet that for the most part it’s not because composers have gone there in recent years. We’ll hear recordings of groups that have come over to the United States. And of course that’s getting harder and harder to happen, too. There was a wonderful series of world music at the Cleveland Museum of Art. But in recent years I’ve gone to a couple of their concerts where the musicians didn’t show up because they couldn’t get a visa. So I’m not sure that things are all that small as far as the world goes.

What I really think about, and this is probably every composer’s concern, is that getting living composers’ music performed is so important because we need to go through the weeding out process of audiences and performers wanting to hear or perform pieces again that they like and maybe not the ones they don’t like. And especially for musicians, during the period of learning a piece, do they come to hate it or love it? We need to have more of this going on. If the world is still here in 200 years—maybe it won’t be, I don’t know—and music is still around and acoustic instruments are still around, it would be nice to have something to show from the early 21st century of what was happening artistically. So I love it when certain groups or certain orchestras do make it a part of their mission to perform new music, even though it’s harder. A soloist like Ellen Rose, who learned my concerto, she had never heard it before. Obviously, nobody had because it had never been played. So it was much harder to learn that than to learn Beethoven or Bartók, because she had to not only learn the notes but make musical sense of it. And the last movement was really, really difficult. It’s very fast and has a lot of extended techniques and lots of sounds passing around the orchestra. I know she hated it for a long time. We did all these interviews for it in magazines, and at first she was referring to it as a fiendishly difficult movement. But she kept at it. It’s actually supposed to be fun; it’s supposed to be kind of humorous. You’re supposed to be up there smiling and laughing while you play it, and I kept telling her that. And she came to the point where she could do that. And after the final performance last week we were sitting in the audience listening to the last piece [on the program] and she whispered to me, “I really loved playing that last movement.” That was so great. But it took her some time to get to that by learning it. So my hat is off to the performers who are willing to spend the time to learn a piece well enough to really show what it’s about to an audience. If you just sort of learn it—I’ve had musicians say to me, “I think I gave them the idea of how the piece goes”—that’s not good enough. You need a piece performed beautifully. I’m hoping that can happen in the 21st century more than it is happening so we’ll have some wonderful music to pass down to future generations.

Larry Polansky: Open Source

Larry Polansky in conversation with Frank J. Oteri
November 16, 2009—2:30 p.m.
Video and audio recorded by John McGill
Performance footage featuring Margaret Lancaster and Larry Polansky
recorded on December 17, 2009 by Trevor Hunter
Video presentation by Molly Sheridan
Transcribed and edited by Frank J. Oteri and John Lydon

He’s nowhere close to being a household name (something he’d probably never want to be anyway), yet few people have had as significant an impact on as many facets of contemporary music and how it is made and disseminated as Larry Polansky.

As the co-founder of Frog Peak Music, Polansky has helped make available the music of hundreds of composers and established an alternative paradigm for the distribution of printed music, reading matter, and recordings decades before the DIY era of self-publishing. As a pioneering music software developer, his work in the development of Hierarchical Music Specification Language (HMSL) eventually led to Max/MSP and SuperCollider. As a theorist and musicologist, he has written major treatises on tuning as well as many other aspects of music theory and has also played a key role in documenting and explicating the music of many important American mavericks, including Ruth Crawford Seeger, Johanna Magdalena Beyer, and James Tenney. As a teacher, first at Mills College and now at Dartmouth, he has been a mentor to generations of musicians. As the founding editor of Leonardo Music Journal, he helped to set a broader purview and more open-minded perspectives in scholarly writing about music. And as a composer, Larry Polansky has created a vast body of compositions that defy stylistic pigeonholing, from 2-second canons to massive solo piano showcases as well as works for rock band, interactive computer environments, and solo piccolo in extended just intonation.

To Polansky, all these activities are symbiotically related:

It’s all one world of doing music in lots of different ways, and they feed into each other. I’ll be working on a theoretical idea or a software idea and that will feed into a piece, and vice versa. So it’s not quite as distracting as it might sound.

Every project he gets involved with ties into his social philosophy, as well. In everything he does, Polansky aims to create a model for a better world, a place where hierarchies cease to be oppressive and barriers are abolished. To that end, he aims to create music and promulgate music by others that defies one-line explication.

Every time you give a name to something, you hasten the decay of information; you’ve made things more simplified and less interesting than they should be. I don’t want to have sound-bytes associated with anything I do. I think also the people whose music I respect the most have a similar kind of attitude. I want to follow musical ideas out to their natural fruition, at their most complex, at their most deep, at their most other.

And perhaps most importantly, he aims for maximum availability:

[Frog Peak] gets a lot of people’s work out into the world in a very honest, simple, sincere way, with no cosmetic nonsense and also no hype. I’ve been committed to that all through my life—never selling anything, never convincing anybody of anything, of really staying true to the musical idea as much as possible. [N]ow with the web, there’s no reason not to put all your pieces on the web as well, and, certainly, we encourage that. […] All of my computer music life has been devoted to making cheap, public domain available software.

This non-propertarian attitude applies to Polansky’s own compositions, as well:

Music should be open source and should be a collective activity. It always has been […] It shouldn’t be about me guarding my style or me putting down historical claims on things. It should rather be a fluid bidirectional and N-directional process.

Ultimately, whatever your stance on today’s seemingly irresolvable intellectual property debates, Polansky’s idealism has ramifications that go well beyond music and how it is composed and distributed.

People can do a lot more than we think they can do, especially if you relax ideas like practicality, time, things like that. In some kind of ideal world there should be time enough for the most complicated thoughts and ideas and skills.

—FJO

*

Frank J. Oteri: Before we turned the camera on, we were talking about dividing time between composing and other activities. I’m just floored by how much music you’ve written. I’ve deduced from the CV you’ve posted on the web site that you average about seven compositions a year, and some years you’ve written more than ten, which is staggering, considering all your noncompositional activities.

Larry Polansky: I don’t know what those numbers exactly mean. I do write pieces constantly, but some of them are smaller pieces. I work in a lot of series, like The Four Voice Canons or the Etudes or all these rounds I’ve been writing—hundreds of these in the last couple of years. I make a list of everything I write, but some pieces are only two seconds long. Schoenberg lists Pierrot and I’m listing a piece that’s two seconds long! But I always have a couple of big pieces that I’m working on, and I keep going. So I wouldn’t say I’m all that prolific; I’m reasonably constant. It’s slowed down a tremendous amount as I get older.

What is interesting to me is to not distinguish too much between composing and performing and teaching and doing theoretical stuff and the kind of amateur musicology stuff that I do plus working with Frog Peak. I keep pretty busy. But it’s all one world of doing music in lots of different ways, and they feed into each other. I’ll be working on a theoretical idea or a software idea and that will feed into a piece, and vice versa. I’ve spent a lot of time in the past five or six years playing music with Christian Wolff. That directly informs what I write, and, hopefully, what I write directly informs how I play with him. And being at Frog Peak, it’s all with composers. So it’s not quite as distracting as it might sound, although sometimes it can be.

I’ve been editing the works of Johanna [Magdalena] Beyer over the past fifteen years. That’s something that has to be done in a very focused way. Or writing that book on Ruth Crawford [The Music of American Folk Song]—that was an amazing composition lesson, but it also took a couple of years of my life to really address. I find that the one thing that gets sacrificed is my ability to spend long periods of time writing software. That has really ratcheted down. Maybe as I’ve gotten older it’s a less attractive personal activity: it doesn’t involve other people; it’s very grueling. And I also teach full time. So that has changed a little bit over the years. I find myself doing less software, but I suppose I still do quite a bit, relatively speaking.

FJO: You say that all these activities are somehow complementary, and indeed they are—they are all connected to music. The theoretical stuff, the publications of other composers, performing other people’s compositions—it’s all music. But all of these things involve different parts of your brain, or at least occupy different spaces. So I’m curious about how you make the space specifically for composition amidst all this other stuff.

LP: I often exile myself to some place, like I work in the Hanover Public Library quite often. There’s no email and no phone, so I can just sit at a table and compose. When I’m working on a big piece, I’ll often go there three hours a day and just do that. You may mean space metaphorically, but I take it seriously: physically. I have a family. Frog Peak is in my house. I have students at Dartmouth. So I tend to find these isolated spaces, and I tend to work in libraries a lot. Even in New York. NYU, thanks to Kent Underwood, has very graciously given me privileges there, so I work there and I work at the New York Public Library, just because they’re quiet and they’re nice places to sit and really, really think. And when I do that I only think very carefully about pieces.

But it’s hard. Waking up in the morning it’s often hard to know what to focus on. More and more as I get older—one’s brain is not as quick—I work on one thing at a time, and if that thing is big that means I don’t do much of anything else for that period of time. Then I’ll work on the next thing. A lot of this fall I was working on a heavily mathematical theoretical paper, in collaboration with Alex Barnett and Mike Winter, and while I was doing that it was hard to think about other pieces. But once that was done, all of a sudden I was in the middle of a big string quartet. I find it’s mostly the very serious, large-scale activities that completely consume you. I can do that and practice at the same time, or that and run Frog Peak. But the kind of musicology I did on Ruth Crawford, or software, or theoretical work, or composition—it’s hard to do more than one of those things at the same time for me anymore.

FJO: So you don’t allot a specific amount of time every day to composing.

LP: No, but I’m always composing. As I said to one of my students the other day, I think this is true of a lot of composers my age. Most of the time some significant percentage of your brain is working on [your own] music and some lesser percent is focusing on the world. That’s a humbling admission to make to your students or when you go to concerts. You know the feeling. You go to a concert and you love it and might be really interested in it, but you start thinking about your own work. The older you get, the more that’s the case. It’s not a question of not paying attention, it’s a question of paying such hyperattention that everything is focused back on what you’re working on.

FJO: I find it curious that the space that you find to create your own work is not a space of your own making. It’s not a studio. You go to a library, which is actually a public space. And also you don’t necessarily have tools at your ready disposal there. You have to bring your tools with you. So, despite all the work you do with software, are you a pencil and paper guy?

LP: I do a lot of pencil and paper and I do a lot on the computer with software. Often I’ll have a guitar around me or a piano.

FJO: But not at the library.

LP: No, but I find that I don’t need much. I’m getting less and less interested in having devices. And I’ve never done a lot of “synthesis” electronic music; I’ve never used a lot of gear. All of my computer music life has been devoted to making cheap, public domain available software—DIY kinds of experiences. That’s what HMSL [Hierarchical Music Specification Language] was all about, and SoundHack (Tom Erbe’s brilliant program to which I was privileged to contribute a few ideas), and projects like that. So I’ve never needed much, and in fact the less I have, the happier I am. I’ve mainly been a software guy since 1973.

FJO: But that’s a long time ago. [laughs] It’s interesting that public domain availability is important to you because you also run Frog Peak, which is a publishing company, although it’s a very unusual type of publisher. How and why did you start doing that?

LP: My wife, Jody Diamond, and I started it. It was in the early days when I was at the Mills Center for Contemporary Music and Jody was working at the other end of the building with Lou Harrison, as Lou’s gamelan director. At that time there was a whole community of people who really had no outlet for their work. And there were a couple of significant theoretical works I read that I had manuscripts of and that I thought should be out in the world, like Jim Tenney’s Meta-Hodos and John Chalmers’s Divisions of the Tetrachord.

There were no personal computers at the time. Jody and I had just gotten a KayPro, which was an early CPM machine. And we started with this idea that composers would take control over the distribution of their own work. Not to be so much a publisher, but to be what I like to call an availability site. That by pooling resources, instead of composers going to a photocopy store and mailing it out when somebody asked you for something, there’d be one place where people could get it. Make it a collective and to dedicate ourselves to no interest in advertising or promotion whatsoever, and also to try to have no interest in the notion of imprimatur. We weren’t certifying anything. David Mahler joined Frog Peak and David controlled everything about David Mahler. Or David Rosenboom, or Anne LaBerge, or whoever came in. So it was a philosophical, social, artistic experiment in every possible way.

And as it has remained an experiment, it remains fun. Not so parenthetically, but somewhat surprising, it has started to become all those things it has tried to avoid—that is, being at Frog Peak may have a certain kind of non-functional importance to people that we never wanted it to have. But it still serves the community. It gets a lot of people’s work out into the world in a very honest, simple, sincere way, with no cosmetic nonsense and no hype. I’ve been committed to that all through my life—never selling anything, never convincing anybody of anything, of really staying true to the musical idea as much as possible.

FJO: So how does one sign up with Frog Peak?

LP: Well, one asks us [laughs]. We try to take people, but it’s hard. The overhead of taking someone in is pretty significant. We lose money. Jody and I subsidize it. We’re also not a nonprofit. We decided at the very beginning to never apply for a grant and to never devolve into arts administration. It was always two crazy composers running a crazy thing in their house, and we’ve stayed that way. So we seldom, but regularly, take people. We try to take people who are very committed to their music and very sincere. We have to like them, because they become a part of our family. But the other abiding principal when we started was, since there is no imprimatur involved—we’re not saying anything about these people, it’s just a collective—if we’re not a comfortable fit for someone, we can very easily say, “Do it yourself.” That’s all we’re doing. Buy or rent a copy machine, or go to Kinko’s like we did for the first ten years in the 1980s (or whatever the copy stores were called in Oakland!). There’s nothing we’re doing that’s not completely transparent.

FJO: So what are the things that you’re doing—you’re copying and binding scores and then mailing them out; I imagine with big people perhaps you’re also dealing with rental parts?

LP: No, never. Nothing like that. We don’t rent scores or parts, and except in rare instances when really extraordinary people donate them, we don’t take any [ASCAP or] BMI royalties. We don’t function as a traditional publisher in any way. We don’t own anyone else’s work. We have published several books and we’ve put out about 15 CDs in 25 years, but there it’s not really with the notion of being a CD company or a book company. We’re only interested in availability, simple design, no promotion, serving the music itself. There’s a garage somewhere where there’s a master of hundreds of Philip Corner and Dennis Kitz scores and you can get them from us. That’s the abiding principle. We’re not going to try to convince you to get them and we’re not going to make it all that easy (because we’re a small group, so personnel and labor are issues), but if you want it, we will send it to you for a small price. And then we pay rather small royalties to the composers based upon the actual item that we sell, which is not economically viable. A lot of composers have chosen to support Frog Peak by foregoing even those royalties, and in general, they’re not all that substantial. No publisher would survive two weeks if they operated like we do, but we’re not supposed to be economically viable, so we’re O.K.

FJO: So if this is all run out of your house, you must have a big house.

LP: We have a big garage. And we have another older house that we rent out and we keep a garage there, too. It’s gotten a little smaller because of technology. Computers have helped us keep things in PDF. And we also mostly take one copy of a score. Some composers, like Eric Richards, will make their own multiple copies. They want it to look exactly their way. So they’ll send us a box of 15 or 20, but mostly we have big file cabinets full of master copies and more and more of those are PDFs.

FJO: So you don’t keep a stockpile of ten copies of each title.

LP: Well, we do have a lot of things, because we’ve also rescued physical items. We have all the back issues of Soundings. We have all of Lingua, too, which is huge. We have old LPs, cassettes, art objects, books, all kinds of things like that as well, which we simply keep available. Part of our mission has been to enter into the history of the American experimental tradition of publishing, which I trace back to [William] Billings and [Arthur] Farwell, who is a great hero of mine. And [Kenneth] Gaburo and Peter Garland and [Henry] Cowell, a number of people—I mention the people I have personal connections to, but there are a lot of them—Carla Bley, for example. A lot of us composers over the years have decided we need to do it the way we want to do it. And really it’s not an economic decision, it’s a personal and artistic and social and political decision and it’s a labor of love kind of decision.

FJO: So what is the difference between being published by Frog Peak and being self-published?

LP: It’s whatever distinction you want it to have. [laughs] None as near as I can tell, except that you don’t have to send out your own score. That’s from my point of view. Stamina is everything in the world. I always say to a young composer or to my students, that the only thing you want to aim for is that the person keeps composing. It’s almost irrelevant what the piece is today. It’s a good piece, it’s a bad piece, whatever. It’s got to motivate the next piece. It’s got to be interesting enough that you keep composing. And I only consider myself a successful composition teacher if I’m getting letters from 45-year-old ex-students who are still composing. It’s really what I care about.

I think with Frog Peak, its main virtue is that we’ve stayed afloat for a very, very long time. We’ve kept small. We’ve kept to our basic principles, as high in integrity as we possibly can. And to our surprise we’ve gotten noticed. We have a lot of standing library orders. Complete collections are in a number of really good libraries. So now it’s a good thing for composers because they get out in the world, to safe, widely available places. But really now with the web, there’s no reason not to put all your pieces on the web as well, and certainly we encourage that.

FJO: I found it interesting—and now that you’re explaining your philosophy it totally makes sense—that even though you’re the co-founder and co-director of a publishing operation, you’ve made all the scores of your own music available to be downloaded for free on your website.

LP: Sure. I don’t see why not. I think they should just be available in every possible way. The disconnect between paper and PDF is that there’s a whole generation of composers who are not comfortable or facile with those technologies. And in that case, Frog Peak helps them. Or if my friends who are older want to put something up, I have a whole website of my friends’ work as well. There’s a lot of people who still don’t have access to the web, or unlimited storage or whatever. The other thing is libraries are still in a very transitional state, and they’re learning how to deal with distinctions between paper and electronic formats in a lot of domains. And as far as I know, no library has really decided that all their scores will be digital at this point. At a certain point we turned a corner where economically we’re being kept alive by major libraries.

We certainly wouldn’t survive—not that we survive anyway economically—by one person in Belgium needing a Peter Garland score or one person in New York needing a Paul Paccione score. That should be on the web, and we’ve had trouble keeping open even for that level of business. For the first ten or fifteen years, that’s what we did—one-shots to people. But now the web has made it much easier for even someone with no web or computer chops whatsoever to find someone to help them do that to a certain extent. We don’t really want to make money, and we don’t really want to survive if what we’re supposed to survive to do is not interesting anymore.

FJO: Of course the tricky thing there is if the scores are all available for free, isn’t one of the few revenue streams a composer could have gone?

LP: That’s a matter of some contention, and one that I think is widely misunderstood. I don’t think most composers make much money from the physical sale of scores. There are certain cases where they do, of course, if you’re a choral composer for high schools for example. But most of the composers we represent are not like that. And if they want that kind of relationship, they can go to a traditional publisher. We don’t own anything (for the most part). We have no rights. In a few cases we do, but it’s sort of accidental. So there’s no notion of exclusivity. We don’t even have contracts. People don’t sign anything when they come to Frog Peak, because nobody’s bound to do anything. I didn’t want that kind of relationship with anybody. These folks are my friends. I play music with them, I have dinner with them. I don’t want to do business. And finally, I don’t think it’s the score itself that generates revenue for composers; it’s the performance royalties.

I have a lot of respect for traditional publishers. And Frog Peak has always maintained I good relationships with Peters, and other companies, even though I think they kind of scratch their head in wonder when they figure out how we do what we do. Yet the most enlightened of them, I think, understand that what we do has an important function in our world. They can’t take all the people that we can take. When we take Frank Abbinanti, or Frederic Rzewski or Brenda Hutchinson or Daniel Goode, we are willing to take everything they’ve ever done in any form they choose. If Ron Nagorcka wants to write a piece on a paper napkin and sell it, we’re fine with that. My standard joke is that we draw the line at pieces made on bowling balls. But we really don’t care. We make no editorial or curatorial decisions; we choose people. A big publisher has to make economic decisions. We don’t; we make no economic decisions.

FJO: You say that revenue comes from performance royalties, but you don’t track those. So it’s up to composers themselves to contact ASCAP or BMI.

LP: And we don’t take the publishing rights.

FJO: Normally composers share a 50-50 split of the performance royalties with their publishers, but at Frog Peak the composer gets 100 percent.

LP: Yes. That’s why we’re not viable.

FJO: That can be a huge amount of income.

LP: Well, it is the income of a publisher. And we decided not to be a business, so we don’t take it. That said, in a few cases composers have donated one piece, or some pieces, and we call them the angels because that helps. Some people in my mind are saints—Ezra Sims, or Eric Richards, Paul Paccione, just to name a few. There’s no reason for the donation of these royalties that they do donate, but they do, I guess, because they think Frog Peak is doing a nice thing, and we happily take the money. And as I said, many of the composers decide to forego even the smaller royalties on the scores themselves, just to help them get out in the world. These composers do a lot to keep FP viable, and we’re really grateful to them.

FJO: With the roster of composers that you have—a lot of them are friends or at least kindred spirits in some way—is there something that links all of these people’s musics somehow?

LP: Quite honestly they’re the people that Jody and I decide we want to invite to this family. Of course we like their music but it may not even be that, we may like the way they deal with the world, their integrity, how serious they are. Some of the people are very, very different. Some of them can be kind of annoying, some of them are amazingly thoughtful and helpful. [laughs] But they’re all friends. That’s my criteria. I can’t not like someone in some profound way and commit so much of my life and resources to them. On the other hand, I tend to like most people for a lot of different reasons. So we’re fortunate in that way.

FJO: So it might be an oversimplification to say that most of this music is coming out of the American experimental tradition.

LP: I don’t know that that term means much to me anymore. We use it as a kind of shorthand, but it comes from a community, and that community is ever-expanding and ever-malleable. I’d be hard put to find connections between a lot of the people in Frog Peak. I work with New World Records a lot and I’m very dedicated to that company. And [New World’s Director of Artists and Repertory] Paul Tai has a phrase: “things coming over the transom” – things just arriving. And Frog Peak submissions are that way, but not a lot of composers enter that way, although we try and listen and look and respond to everything. We have to establish a relationship with people in some way, or often it will be that core Frog Peak composers will recommend someone very strongly and I’ll take those recommendations seriously. If Christian Wolff or Kyle Gann or David Mahler or Lois Vierk or Jim Tenney and Lou Harrison (the latter two are sadly not with us anymore)—if they said this person really belongs, I take that very seriously, and have in the past, that’s how a lot of younger or lesser-known composers have joined.

FJO: Silly question—where does the name Frog Peak come from?

LP: I used to be a mountain climber when I was younger and I climbed a mountain in Idaho once called Frog Peak. There’s probably a Frog Peak in every state, but that was an unusually tough experience, so when we started it no one could think up a name and I kept saying “Frog Peak! Frog Peak!”—I had this vision of crawling out of the woods in Idaho—and just from my tenacity of saying it over and over again, we stuck with it.

FJO: To bring it back to you the composer—and you are one of the Frog Peak composers—this operation seems like it could be a very time-consuming operation.

LP: Less so for me that it used to be. We have one person who works for it full time and who does all of the grunt work. I do a lot of the curating and steering of the thing. Jody does an enormous amount of the design. She’s a brilliant designer, and she’s also good at the practical and tactical sorts of things in the office. So it does kind of have its own inertia at this point, but that took a long time.

FJO: We talked about how the different streams in your life feed each other—a composition could lead to a theoretical idea, a publication could lead to a musicological idea or could feed a composition. Do you feel that dealing with all of these composers has directly influenced the music you write?

LP: Sure… Maybe. Oddly I don’t see it all. Once somebody joins I don’t need to see their submissions. They could have 300 pieces in Frog Peak that I’ve never seen, because it’s all under their control. It has more to do with my philosophy; it’s just an extension of how I feel about being in the world: You do things with other people and nothing is a solo act. There’s no exultation of person. Everything is a kind of collaboration. So I think that the act of doing it is a composition in and of itself, much like my other pieces. But I’d still be interested in Lois Vierk’s music, or Philip Corner’s music, David Mahler, Michael Byron, Daniel Goode—these are people who are my close friends and whose music I love and respect, and I’m interested in it, as you are. But having their scores in my house doesn’t actually have much of an effect on me, oddly enough, because I feel the act of making this collective is much more important than seeing more of their scores. The only thing I yell at people about is when they send me, at home, a score to put in Frog Peak. I say, “No, I don’t need to see it unless this is for me, the composer. Render unto Frog Peak that which is Frog Peak’s, to the P.O. Box” because I don’t want to get involved in their work in that way in my role as Frog Peak director. That’s not at all interesting to me. It’s their work, and I’m just giving it a home.

FJO: You alluded to using “American experimental tradition” as a shorthand, but admitted that it doesn’t really mean that much to you. How do you think the term relates to your own music?

LP: Only historically and personally. The people I have been closest to in my life, the people in the previous generation who have been my closest friends and biggest influences and probably my peers are called part of that tradition. I don’t know what it means, and I certainly don’t know what I have in common with some of those people other than a long-standing personal connection. My music and Lou Harrison’s music are completely distinct. My music and Christian’s music are completely distinct. I think we’re often talking social groupings, the people who hung out together. I think the longer it’s gone on, the more people feel free to cross boundaries that they wouldn’t have crossed.

FJO: One thing that all this music shares, which is definitely an attribute of your music as well, is that it’s somehow other than what the mainstream is, whatever the mainstream is at any given time. It’s in a different tuning than the mainstream of 12-tone equal temperament, or it uses different instruments than what is mainstream, sometimes homemade instruments, the rhythms are not quite the same as those of mainstream music, so it’s somehow going against the grain of the normative.

LP: Maybe we should just call it “unusual music.” But there’s a lot of unusual music out there that comes from different musical cultures. Gordon Mumma used to say, “Every time you make a tape dub you pick up more noise.” Every time you give a name to something, as Herbert Brün would say, you hasten the decay of information; you’ve made things more simplified and less interesting than they should be. And these things become brands and slogans. And then people argue about the slogans and the brands. And that’s fine. I think there’s probably an interesting musicological socio-historical reason to do that, but I have zero interest in it just by nature. I don’t care about branding and slogans and simplification. I don’t want to have sound-bytes associated with anything I do. So it’s not so interesting to me to figure out why that’s the case. I think also the people whose music I respect the most have a similar kind of attitude. I share that with them. Maybe there’s no time for that kind of nonsense. I’m not trying to sell anything. I’m not trying to get a gig. I don’t want to have a one-sentence: “He’s the tuning guy” or “he’s the “morph guy”. I don’t want any of that. I want to follow musical ideas out to their natural fruition, at their most complex, at their most deep, at their most other. That’s what I want to do with my life. I don’t have time to figure out what school I’m in, nor do I want to be in any school like that.

FJO: Although to some extent it would be fair to say that you’re a tuning guy. Just intonation has been a very big concern of yours for decades and still is.

LP: But you could also say I’m a computer person, or a guitar person. I have interests and they inform my music. But my way of dealing with tuning has nothing to do with Ezra [Sims] or even Lou [Harrison]. It’s maybe closer to Jim Tenney. But that’s sort of like saying someone’s a note composer or an orchestra composer. It may be true, but it’s not that meaningful a thing to characterize somebody’s music. And I sure hope my music survives a deeper analysis and encourages a deeper consideration, as should everyone’s, I think.

FJO: But I would still like to talk to you more about your use of just intonation, just in a practical sense, because it does raise performance issues. You can do a computer piece in just intonation with no problems whatsoever, which is one of the wonderful things about the technology. Or you could retune an electric keyboard and even an acoustic keyboard, and that’s taken care of, if you limit yourself to a pitch gamut of only 12 pitches per octave.

LP: I’ve done all of those things.

FJO: Sure, your Piano Study No. 5 uses a retuned Fender Rhodes, and Psaltery is a good example of an electronically generated piece in just intonation—that’s probably not something that you could pull off live.

LP: There are live versions, but you have to tune a lot of things.

FJO: However, you also have a piece like Piker that does all this oddball tuning stuff with a live piccolo player. That’s amazing. That’s something that’s meant to be done by a human performer in real time in live performance, in this case Margaret Lancaster. I would imagine that she had to learn a bunch of new fingerings, because those aren’t standard pitches coming out of that piccolo, and at times it races by.

LP: And writing it for piccolo was even more foolish, but I’m just blessed to have Margaret Lancaster in my corner and as a good friend. And there are a couple of performers like that who it’s wonderful to be able to ask to do things that you really shouldn’t ask them to do, and then they do it, and do it beautifully. And they still are your friends. That’s the part I haven’t figured out. [laughs]

But my approach to tuning has been to try a lot of different approaches. And that’s different than, say, building a set of instruments or typing in scales on a computer, and I think that has to do with my attitude towards intonation which is it’s really a deep, philosophical topic of interest to me, the whole idea of what is a tuning system, or what is a scale. When I started working on what I call paratactical tuning systems, that piece B’rey’sheet is probably the most important example where computers are thinking on the fly and adapting, thinking formally as an improviser might think about tuning, but making some very sophisticated and very rapid decisions. That in a way comes out of my interest in Lou Harrison’s free style experiments, those three pieces where things are tuned to the previous note. That’s also insane, to ask humans to do things like that. But Ben Johnston asks performers to do very sophisticated things.

I think the best way I can exemplify it is to mention a piece that’s just been recorded—it’s coming out on New World—called for jim, ben and lou. One movement’s for Jim Tenney, one movement’s for Ben Johnston, and one movement’s for Lou Harrison. And what the performers are asked to do is pretty crazy. The piece for Jim is for guitar, percussion, and harp. The percussionist retunes the guitar continually throughout, and the guitar player is playing some pretty difficult stuff. The percussionist is tuning the strings to different just intonations as the piece progresses. As I’m writing this, I’m going: “This is a crazy thing to ask.” And I’m also thinking of the Smothers Brothers, because they used to have a bit where they did that. I remember showing the score to Jim and he said something like “Good for you; someone needs to push it to the next level.” That’s an interesting thing to say, not so much as a compliment, but more in terms of recognition that if we don’t try it, it’s not going to happen. That piece has now been played a lot by a group in Belgium [featuring] a guitarist named Toon Callier, who’s a spectacular player.

So you wait long enough and you have enough tenacity of idea and confidence in what you’re doing and they happen. Toon has done that piece now beautifully, and Margaret does Piker. But you’ve just got to be patient. And you’ve also got to not go for the cheap laugh. What we’re doing is somehow different from entertainment in that we’re not trying always to make an immediate splash. We’ve got to have a lot of faith in history and what comes next, and the possibility of people like Margaret Lancaster or Toon Callier or Nick Didkovsky, performers whom I’ve worked with who do things that are not practical. They’re not in the day-to-day New York practical musical world. They require a kind of dedication to idea that composers have and some performers have.

FJO: Then, of course, there are computers and they can do some things that people will probably never be able to do.

LP: That’s an interesting dynamic. Although, again, people can do a lot more than we think they can do, especially if you relax ideas like practicality, time, things like that. In some kind of ideal world there should be time enough for the most complicated thoughts and ideas and skills.

FJO: So you wouldn’t necessarily think to work on something and have it be a computer composition because it’s something you know that nobody would ever be capable of doing.

LP: No. All my work stems from an idea. And that idea gets manifested through different performance media. But I’m not a practical composer. I really come up with philosophical and aesthetic and musical ideas and they get implemented in some way that I don’t exactly understand. Why write a five movement piece for piccolo like that? It’s probably because Margaret said, “Hey, write me a piece for piccolo.” And I knew that I could ask her to really think about some new ways of playing and she did. And I’m eternally grateful to her.

FJO: Your Hierarchical Musical Specification Language is sort of practical in a way.

LP: [laughs] Not really. Again, it was another kind of experiment. At the time that we started it, there was no real-time interactive, intelligent language for composition. And this was also before personal computers, so we were modeling something that couldn’t really be pluralized. Then when personal computers happened, it did get pluralized. But it remained a very arcane kind of environment, because you had to be a fairly sophisticated Object oriented programmer. It wasn’t shrink-wrapped in any way; it was a pretty hardcore coding experience. [There were] maybe a hundred composers using it seriously and a lot of other people scratching their heads. I think its influence was probably a lot stronger than its use patterns. What Nick [Didkovsky]’s doing with JMSL at NYU, lots of things like that, SuperCollider—HMSL had an impact on all of those things, I think. And that makes me happy, because we had a really theoretical and idealized view of what a language should be and we resisting any attempt to make it easy or more accessible or to implement some kind of stylistic idea. We had this notion that it would be a nonstylistic based platform.

FJO: So how does it work?

LP: How did it work? It was a full-fledged computer language that you could also write a database in, if you were so inclined, that had some fundamental concepts of how music is structured in time: scheduling; hierarchical representations of music, some drawn from Tenney’s work, others drawn from David Rosenboom’s work, others drawn from mine. Phil Burk, one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever known, is largely responsible for the final software design, and is the third author with David and I. And those data structures were implemented so that composers had these tools, but they didn’t do anything that looked like quote, unquote music. They were meant to facilitate real-time improvisational structures or coming up with your own, like what George Lewis does. I think he still uses it, or maybe his computer finally died. [laughs] And you can write your own musical ideas in it, not just your own music: environments for improvisation and/or experiment.

Our goal was that nothing should be precluded, but that also meant that nothing was easy. Later, with an environment like MAX, you could probably do 95 percent of what you wanted to do in about a 1000th of the time it took in HMSL. But that other 5 percent is what we were interested in, and in maintaining a structure that never precluded the wildest possible idea. To do that you had to make it general enough that it was difficult. Generality is inversely proportional to usability, so the more general you make something the harder it is to use. And I think that’s true about the world. The more quickly you can sum up someone’s music—i.e. they work with anvils on reverb units—if you can say that and that’s true, there’s probably not a lot else to say. I’ve always been interested in working in those domains where there’s a lot else to say and very hard to make that first statement. And HMSL was very much about that.

FJO: You’ve used these tools to generate your own algorithmic compositions as well. And what I love is that there’s no stylistic boundary to it vis-à-vis your own music, either. You can wind up writing a virtuoso solo piano piece like The Casten Variation or a piece for a rock band like 51 Melodies.

LP: Yeah, and they have similar structures.

FJO: But very different end results, at least sonically.

LP: Though both are written in HMSL. When I moved to Hanover in 1990, I shifted my focus away from live stuff to scores, because I didn’t want to travel as much. And I was hitting certain computational boundaries doing things in real time, which are interesting and sort of inviolable. If you’re truly in real time, you can’t know what’s going to happen, so you can’t have a structure that depends upon the future. And so I wrote a whole series of works like 51 Melodies and The Casten Variation, which are very complex structurally, especially The Casten Variation. I couldn’t really explain it to you except to say that it’s a kind of reworking of the Ruth Crawford Piano Study in Mixed Accents by abstracting its essences in these distant spaces and then resynthesizing it. After I finished it, my friend Charles Dodge remarked, very insightfully, that it was analysis/resynthesis in the classical computer music way where you take a sound and break it down and resynthesize it. This is a kind of a formal analysis and resynthesis of Crawford’s Piano Study. But those pieces were the result of having this very powerful language that didn’t preclude the wackiest idea you could possibly throw at it. But they were also both really hard to write. They took a lot of time and a lot of software.

FJO: The rock band piece is a piece that you’ve actually played in.

LP: Yeah, and that’s part of my philosophy as well. I should not just write for Margaret and Nick and people like that, but I should be able to play my pieces, and difficult but important works by others, too. So Nick and I played it. And I play with Margaret. I recorded Lois Vierk’s Io on Margaret’s CD. That’s important to me. I’ve always been a musician; I’ve always been a playing musician, and I don’t want to ever lose that skill. I don’t want to simply off-load that responsibility, I want it to be a direct relationship. I play all the time.

FJO: As a performer you also play mandolin and you told me earlier that you had studied with Frank Wakefield, who is one of the legends of bluegrass.

LP: I did. He is a genius.

FJO: So do you play bluegrass?

LP: I did for many years. I mostly played bluegrass guitar and then learned mandolin later on. Then I got a mandocello, which is one of my favorite instruments. But I don’t play much of that anymore. I don’t really play any kind of popular music anymore, just because of time. But last Saturday I played a wonderful gig with Dan Zanes. We did a duet concert down in Washington, D.C. for the 75th anniversary of the school that Ruth Crawford helped found. I was just playing mandolin the whole day in Dan’s music, which is children’s music—or family music, as he calls it—really embedded in the American folk tradition. That’s something that I’m very interested in and love. So I spent hours playing folk tunes on the mandolin for kids. And I’ll do that if the right situation is there. Dan Zanes is definitely the right situation—he’s a great musician and a good friend.

FJO: When we were talking about things that might influence you earlier on in this conversation, we never talked about the impact of being married to another composer has had on you, which is an interesting dynamic.

LP: Another composer who works in a very specific area.

FJO: Gamelan. And you’ve also done gamelan music.

LP: I’ve only done a couple of gamelan pieces. We lived in Java for about a year and I learned to play gender, but mainly as a practical thing to help Jody and not be dead weight on gamelan gigs with Lou [Harrison] and Jody. But I’m not really involved in that world. That’s Jody’s world, and I’m only involved in it by marriage. Her project was amazing. She went to Indonesia in 1988 and interviewed and recorded and documented 50 new music composers coming out of Indonesia. And that was a fascinating experience. I was her sound guy and carried the equipment, and I learned a lot and met a lot of great people, some of whom are still good friends. But gamelan is her part of the house [laughs]. I don’t even carry them anymore. And I’ve only written three pieces—or four, maybe—for gamelan.

FJO: But that’s quite a bit, actually. Most people haven’t written any.

LP: I know, but most people don’t have several gamelans in their house, or have been to hundreds of gamelan concerts, or lived in Java for over a year, or, heck, speak Indonesian! It would be hard for me not to have written a couple.

FJO: What I find so interesting, though, is that the year you were in Java, the piece you wrote was Lonesome Road, a gigantic nearly hour-and-a-half set of piano variations which pretty much has nothing to do with gamelan music, at least directly.

LP: There are a couple of transcriptions [in it], but they’re all kind of woven in. It was, again, a practicality. We travelled an enormous amount, and in Indonesia you travel very, very slowly. We went all over the place, and I realized that I needed a big piece to be working on all the time. She’d be interviewing these guys for two hours and I had nothing to do for a lot of the time. It was a very modular piece; it’s a set of variations. I had plenty of time to write it, but what was hard was being away from the piano. I’m not really a pianist, so that wasn’t that great a problem. Then when I got back to the States, Sarah Cahill, who’s a close friend of mine, sat in a practice room with me on a regular basis for almost a year and played all the drafts, so I could revise it using her as the pianist. I’m very grateful to her for that. And then later when these three Swiss pianists—Martin Christ, Urs Eggli, and Thomas Bächli—started to do it consecutively and then Martin started to do it solo, it kept getting revised and revised and revised. So it was written in a year, but the score didn’t appear until five years ago, and it was almost a ten year process from starting it to making a score of it to having the recording done.

FJO: One of the things I find so frustrating about that recording is that all the variations couldn’t fit on a single CD, so some of them were cut.

LP: That’s a red herring. Together we picked just a couple of minutes of the piece that we left out. But even in performance he’d shift it around a little bit. In the middle section the variations are quite long and heady. The piece is huge and there are places where you can cut down a couple of minutes here and there and you wouldn’t know. I’m not sensitive about that at all.

FJO: But I’m a completist, so I want to hear those missing variations. How could I hear them?

LP: I have other recordings, just ask me.

FJO: How can the rest of the world hear them?

LP: Maybe I should put them up on the web. There are actually some funny bootleg recordings of that piece, some other pianists have done them. One pianist in Berkeley did it in well temperament; it’s quite beautiful. Joe Kubera and Michael Arnowitt have made their own shorter, but quite beautiful suites. But as far as I know, Martin’s the only person to have ever performed the whole piece in public; it’s pretty daunting.

FJO: Another big piece, which is ongoing, is The Four Voice Canons. I’d love to talk to you a bit about those.

LP: I tend to do these things over many years, developing an idea. But then it hits a certain point where they need to evolve into some new level of existence, not just my own cleverness in orchestrating another four-voice canon, but rather liberating them from the bounds of my own me-ness. So the Four Voice Canon No. 13 is simply a do-it-yourself manual for other canons. For a while I was talking about those pieces a lot in public, and the talks would simply be an invitation for other people to write them. And a lot of people did. Then Al Margolis put out a wonderful two CD set of other people doing four voice canons and that was really gratifying.

Music should be open source and should be a collective activity. It always has been. Schoenberg invented the twelve-tone system (although I think it was Hauer!). It’s a pretty simple idea, but a lot of people got a lot of interesting music out of those very fundamental ideas. [We need] to change the notion of what composition is, whenever that can be done explicitly and in a kind of truly collaborative way. It shouldn’t be about me guarding my style or me putting down historical claims on things. It should rather be a fluid bidirectional and N-directional process. And I like it when that happens. It was kind of a revelation to me with The Four Voice Canons that that was pretty easy to do. Pieces came out that were charming and funny and interesting and completely different from anything I would have done. And it made me able to continue, because then I knew I was just one of the gang, I wasn’t this precious futzer.

Roger Reynolds: The Benefits of Being Outside the Loops

Roger Reynolds in Conversation with Frank J. Oteri at the home of Matthias Kriesberg
May 13, 2009 — 4 p.m.
Transcribed and edited by Frank J. Oteri and John Lydon
Videotaped by Trevor Hunter and John McGill
Video presentation by Molly Sheridan

The year 2009 has been bookended by major music festivals celebrating the eclecticism of composers based in California. In January, the Juilliard School mounted a week-long festival devoted to 100 years of music from our most populous state. And we’re currently in the midst of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s West Coast, Left Coast, an unprecedented three-week celebration that offers an extremely broad range of Californian music-making. So for our final cover of 2009, we’re featuring a composer who has been based in San Diego for over 40 years, Roger Reynolds.

But although he is nominally a West Coaster, Reynolds’s Midwest upbringing and formative experiences in both Europe and Asia have given him a world view that knows no boundaries. While his music incorporates ideas from many of the stylistic paradigms that have defined the music of last half century—serialism, conceptualism, and even neo-romanticism—it is somehow not beholden to any of them. When Roger Reynolds was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twenty years ago for his string orchestra composition Whispers Out of Time, Kyle Gann quipped that it was the first time this honor had been bestowed on a composer from the experimental tradition since Charles Ives was so honored in 1947. And while experimental is perhaps the best word that can be used to describe Reynolds’s overall approach to composition, it is only part of the picture.

For an experimentalist, Reynolds can come across as downright practical:

[M]ost pieces get about six hours of attention from the musicians who are going to premiere them. I don’t remember exactly when this hit me, but I realized one day as a composer I can decide how my six hours are going to be used. I can decide that they’re going to be used figuring out what the notation means, on learning how to communicate with each other, etc., or it can be used in playing music and in being musical. You don’t have both things in most situations. The music which has been heard for a long time and the musicians who write now in a way that is resonant with those traditional ways have an incomparable advantage over people who don’t write that way because it’s “in the ear” of the performers.

That said, most of Roger Reynolds’s music sounds nothing like music which has been heard for a long time. From his early works for the legendary ONCE festival to elaborate multimedia works and pioneering electroacoustic manipulations of performative information, Roger Reynolds is constantly redefining what music can be and how it can be used. Even when he is tackling tradition-bound genres such as the song cycle, the string quartet, or the symphony, Reynolds is inevitably pushing the boundaries of what is possible. In fact, many of the works he has created extend well beyond music and are nearly impossible to convey on sound recordings, although over the years there have been some remarkable documentations attempted on Neuma, New World, and most significantly Mode which issued the very first Classical DVD custom-designed for 5.1 Surround-Sound featuring some of Reynolds’s otherwise undocumentable creations. But no matter how far out his music is, he’s completely down to earth about it:

I’ve done a lot of pieces that others have told me may count as “projects,” so I started naming a lot of works “projects,” because if that’s what they are, then let’s call them that.

Roger Reynolds’s unique combination of pragmatism and inquisitiveness extends well beyond his own creative work. Over the course of two hours, we talked about a wide variety of topics spanning poetry, teaching and being taught, technology, societal rewards, and even the military, although it inevitably always came back to music. It was a heavy conversation—I’m still processing it more than six months later—and it is by no means a quick or easy read. But Reynolds’s highly individual take on the world around him should be required reading for anyone interested in the state of contemporary music today and where it might be going.

—FJO


Frank J. Oteri: You’re a difficult person to pigeonhole. Somehow you seemed to have escaped all the “ism” wars that everyone else in your generation was fighting over so passionately. Your music incorporates ideas from a lot of stylistic proclivities, but it is somehow not beholden to any of them.

Roger Reynolds: I think that’s very true and it’s very deliberate. I had an unusual background. I came to music much later than most of my peers. I heard Horowitz on recordings when I was 14, and it opened a door. I hadn’t realized that room was there. It was a very galvanizing moment even though there were a lot of detours along the way; I didn’t start actually composing until I was 25. I had been at the University of Michigan for nine years. I went through an engineering physics degree and then through an undergraduate and master’s degree in music, and my mentor at that point, Ross Finney, said, “What do you think about the Ph.D.?” And I said, “No way! I’ve been here long enough.” And he said, “I understand.” The idea was to get out and to have the time to do the kind of growing that I thought I needed to do, because I had composed very few pieces by the time I had graduated from the University of Michigan. So at that time, although it seems odd now, going to Europe was a way of living cheaply. I lived in Europe for almost three years on nothing and with nothing, and that time was spent trying to find myself and my voice. It was very clear that there were dangers in becoming part of any clique. I knew Cage. I knew Babbitt. I knew various people as a student before I left the country. But I didn’t want to be part of any particularly defined group. You pay a price for that, of course. If you are not easily categorized, you tend to be—by definition—marginalized. You can’t be in the middle if you don’t belong to anything.

I was out of the country for seven years. [My wife] Karen [Reynolds] and I were living in Japan at the time, and we had a child. And we realized that many of the expatriate children looked like hothouse plants. They were pale and thin and seemingly lifeless, and we didn’t want our daughter to grow up that way. So we decided to come back to this country. We thought that the most dynamic social scene at that point—this was the late ’60s—was California, and so that’s where we went. But there was not much in San Diego at that time. It was primarily a Navy town. There was a fledgling unit of the University of California, but it was only four or five years old and it had no profile yet. But it was an open playing field, so the possibility of doing things was very great.

FJO: It’s interesting that you said that you were attracted to California’s social scene, but you went to a part of California that didn’t really have a scene at that point.

RR: Most of the dynamic music scene at that point was happening in the Bay Area. But by the time I went there, Partch was in San Diego. That wasn’t a reason to go there, but it was certainly an attraction after we got there. When I was at the University of Michigan, I was the editor of the arts magazine there, and Tom Hayden was the editor of the Michigan Daily at the same time, and Carl Oglesby was my drama editor. So I knew these guys. And here we are living in Japan seven years after I’d been in Ann Arbor and I see them on TV literally leading marches and having a very dynamic relationship to social issues. Of course, there was also a lot of that going on in Japan at the same time. So maybe it was less that so much was going on in California as that California represented a kind of horizon that had more malleability, more flexibility, and more potential.

FJO: To backtrack a bit, there seems to be quite a leap from hearing Horowitz to having Ross Finney as a mentor at the University of Michigan, and then to being in Europe and Japan. You also had a military career.

RR: Briefly. I was a military policeman, of all things. I had graduated with an engineering and physics degree from the University of Michigan and I wasn’t drafted into the Regular Army, but I had a two year obligation as a reservist. I think that the Army was particularly perverse at that point. Knowing that I was an engineer, I presumed I would have been an Army engineer. But in fact my MSOs [military service obligations] were either light-truck driver or military policeman. So I chose military policeman, and I learned how to disable people and how to be extraordinarily brutal. It was a rather weird experience.

FJO: That’s a very different world from being a composer, for the most part.

RR: I should say! It didn’t come in handy.

FJO: But one of the things you did once you got involved with music at the University of Michigan was to co-found ONCE, a festival of extreme historic significance, with Robert Ashley and Gordon Mumma. I’m curious about how that came about, especially since you said you hadn’t composed much music at that point.

RR: Well, I think the primary force in the beginning was Bob and Mary Ashley. Bob had been studying at the University of Michigan with Ross Finney. [George] Crumb was there at the same time. [Ashley] had been at the Manhattan School of Music; he was a pianist at that time. He was very intense and very rebellious in some regards. Mumma had been at Michigan but had dropped out and was working in some kind of research dealing with seismographic measurement and so on. The two of them had become involved with an art professor named Milton Cohen, who had what he called a Space Theatre where he had taken canvas and stretched it to make a circular, tent-like situation and then in the middle there were projectors and mirrors which flashed imagery on the screens. And Bob and Gordon had been involved in making electronic music in relation to Cohen’s stuff. I think that they realized that if they started a festival, they were going to need resources. They were going to need instruments and performers. And since neither of them had a particularly robust relationship with the university, I think that I came into the picture partly in that way. Of course, I got to know them. I went to Milton’s productions, and so on. Also around that time I met Cage in New York. And so I knew him before they did and I arranged for Cage and Cunningham to come to Ann Arbor High School, which I think is the first time they had been in Ann Arbor.

So there was a confluence of capacity, differential abilities, and common interest. And the common interest was fueled by the fact that—I don’t remember what year it might have been, maybe 1960—there was a UNESCO conference on composition in Stratford in Ontario, Canada, and Varèse was going to be there and so was Berio and a number of other major figures. So we all got in a car and decided we were going to meet all these people, but when we got there we realized that they were insulated from mere commoners like us and it wasn’t really possible to meet them. I don’t think we met any of them except Berio, and that was accidental. So on the way back we basically said: We can do better than that. If there are going to be music festivals, there ought to be festivals that represent less well-known composers, they ought to be open to the public, there ought to be the possibility of exchanging views and taking the heat, and all the rest of that. And that’s where the ONCE festival came from. We needed something to happen and if nobody else was going to do it we’d do it ourselves.

FJO: Interestingly the other two composers also studied with Finney, but they had a very different experience from yours.

RR: Ross was a very dynamic and forceful personality. He was unremitting. He said exactly what he thought, always good-humoredly, as far as I’m aware. He was never angry or nasty, but he just said what he thought. And I remember at either the first or second ONCE Festival, I had a duo for violin and cello played called Continuum. I can see him in my mind’s eye at that moment. He came blustering up with his pipe sticking out and his face very rosy and said, “Congratulations Reynolds, that piece never got off the ground!” That was the way he was. He hit you straight. And I think that was very hard for a lot of people. The first course I took from Finney was called “Composition for Non-Composers” and it was a course in which he tried to explain what it was to be a composer. And it was extremely seductive. It was extraordinary. He began the whole thing with a staff on the classroom wall; he drew a circle in the third space of a five-line staff and asked what that sounded like. And then we started exploring the whole question of notation. What’s the pitch? Depends on the clef. What’s the duration? Depends on the tempo. What’s the sound? Depends on the instrument. Etc. So he was an extremely basic sort of teacher and that’s why he could deal with me, Ashley, Mumma, and Crumb all at the same time. No problem, because what he talked about was in a certain sense more fundamental than style. But he was really, really tough, and it was not easy for people to deal with him.

FJO: It’s interesting that Ashley and Mumma were already involved with electronic music at this early stage but you had come to want to be a composer after hearing Horowitz. So what tipped you toward a more avant-garde direction?

RR: It was actually very simple and just circumstantial. I had studied engineering. Engineering is about making things work in the real world. So I went to California and I became a systems development engineer at the Marcourt Ramjet Corporation in Van Nuys. I realized after a few months that I was practicing the piano at night in the local Unitarian church more hours than I was at work; I thought that this made no sense so I went back to school. I had planned to become a small liberal arts college piano teacher. I had started too late to really have any kind of career as a performer, I thought. But I promised myself that if I was going to re-educate myself, I was going to commit to practicing six hours a day, seven days a week, continuously. That was just going to be necessary, whether I was sick, whatever. And I did that. After a few years walking down the halls I heard all this music that was from remote times and remote societies, and so I thought, “What’s happening now?” I didn’t know anything about that. So I took Finney’s course because of that interest.

At the end of this course, we had to write a small piece. I wrote a string trio as I remember it. And he just destroyed it. Everything was wrong. So I was slinking out of the classroom afterwards and he pulled me aside and said, “What are you doing this summer?” And I said that I was here because I had to go the year round because I had lost so much time with engineering. And he said, “Why don’t you work with me this summer?” That was very surprising given what he had just done to my piece, my poor little trio. We worked all summer and every week he destroyed everything I brought in. One point, sometime around the end of August, I said to myself that if he doesn’t like what I have this time then it’s over. And at that moment he said, “Now here we really have something.” Now whether he intuited that I was close to the breaking point, I don’t know. I remember we were walking out afterwards and he looked at me and said, “You’re hooked, aren’t you?” And I said “Yes.” Ross gave me a lot of special attention. We had this Midwest Composers Symposium and he did three of my pieces on one of these student festivals, which was unheard of. He was very kind and very generous.

FJO: So what was the first piece that he liked?

RR: I don’t remember. I think it was a string quartet movement.

FJO: Do any of those pieces survive? Do you acknowledge any of them?

RR: That’s another odd story. While I was at Michigan, I wrote a number of fairly small-scale pieces and at a certain point—I don’t remember whether it was Ross or Babbitt or Cage—somebody said, you should send these to [C.F.] Peters. And so I sent everything I had. I was basically living with Karen at that point; she was a flutist at Michigan. I got a call on a Sunday afternoon from Walter Hinrichson [of C.F. Peters] and he said, “Evelyn [Hinrichson] and I are working on an edition of these pieces you sent.” But they had never said that they were going to publish anything. I was of course very excited, but on the other hand a little stupefied. And I didn’t have the sense to say, “Wait a minute! Let me think about this a little.” You’re offered something like that and it’s already a fait accompli so far as they’re concerned; they’re working on the layout. So I let it go ahead. It was a big mistake. Those early pieces didn’t belong in the public sphere. And it’s actually a disquieting feeling at this point to know that they’re in lots of libraries everywhere, even in Europe. They shouldn’t be. The one piece that I do still think is significant from that period is the short piano piece called Epigram and Evolution. Ashley premiered that. The year after, Paul Jacobs played it, also at ONCE. And in fact Mode [Records] is releasing a 2 CD set of my complete piano music and it will be on that.

When the ONCE Festival album was proposed by New World [Records], we had to go back and listen to all the music that they were talking about releasing. And I realized in a very alarming way that while I thought this music has to be—to put it mildly—inexpert, because I was just starting, I still could hear very clearly that it was me. I don’t know exactly why that’s true, but that music is me; my sensibility is there. And that one piece somehow still seems O.K. from my perspective now.

FJO: Interesting, because I definitely hear you perhaps even more so in A Portrait of Vanzetti from those ONCE recordings.

RR: Oh yeah. That was a very important piece for me. I did the electronic part of that at the West German radio studio; that was another strange experience. I went to Cologne on a Fulbright. I was supposed to study with [Bernd Alois] Zimmermann. I went to his class. And afterwards he took me to coffee and he said, “Look, there’s no point for you to be in this class.” He didn’t say why but he said, “Just do what you want, come back and see me at the end, and I’ll sign off.” So I actually never met with him, never had a lesson with him, never even had a conversation with him. Instead of that I met Michael von Biel, who was living in Mary Bauermeister’s atelier—and Bauermeister was Stockhausen’s “friend” at that point. Cardew was there. Kagel was there. Globokar was there. A lot of very remarkable people were in Cologne at that time. And so it was a very dynamic and maybe partially disorienting experience.

FJO: Using that Vanzetti piece as an early example of a breakthrough point to your subsequent work, I hear in that piece the desire to somehow want to go beyond, whether it’s going beyond what notation can do, or going beyond what a player can do, and even going beyond what music can do in terms of how it is received and perceived by listeners—the incorporation of electronics, visual elements, text elements, extended notations and extended techniques. A Portrait of Vanzetti seems to be the earliest piece of yours that does those things. But I also wonder, since it’s now finally available so many years later on this New World recording, how you feel about it existing exclusively as pure sound, since there were so many other elements to it in live performance. A later work of yours, Ping, also exists in a tangible form only as sound on an LP recording that was re-issued many years later on CD, but it too has all these extramusical components in your original conception.

RR: Vanzetti is the first piece that is another me. From the very beginning, and that tendency still continues to some degree, I separated music that I thought flowed along with music from things that I thought of as experiments or laboratory activities, for example the Voicespace series. Another musician who was at Ann Arbor at the same time as Finney was a composer named George Wilson. I remember George in one of our classes at some point attacking one or more of the other graduate composers at Michigan for involving themselves with political issues when, as he put it, they had not suffered anything. And that was a very dynamic and galvanizing moment because every young composer thinks about motivation, meaning “Why am I doing this?”, “What is it for?” I have shied away from overly political things during my career as a composer, and I do that primarily not because I am uninterested or unmoved by them but because I don’t think I’m an appropriate commentator. That is to say I have no expertise. I don’t really know what’s at issue because I don’t have time to immerse myself in those things. But in regard to Sacco and Vanzetti, I don’t remember how I came across them. But when I read Vanzetti’s letters, there was something that really came through, a lyricism and humanitarian sensibility that was very touching. At that time Jack O’Brien was in the theater program at Michigan. I met him through Bob James who had played the piano with Karen on my flute and piano piece. And he agreed to narrate. You may or may not know that he is now a major director and producer and he runs the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego. We both have been there four decades and we’ve never met since Ann Arbor. It’s a strange situation. But that piece also was very much a product of my fascination with Donald Scavarda’s piece Sounds for Eleven, and Scavarda conducted the first and, in fact, only performance of Vanzetti. It’s going to be done when the University of Michigan does the new ONCE Festival (ONCE. MORE.) in Ann Arbor, in the fall of 2010; that’s the piece that I’ve chosen to have done because I’d like to get into it again. We’ll all be there: Bob, Gordon, Don.

FJO: I wonder what your thoughts are on people experiencing only the sonic components of pieces like Vanzetti and Ping, considering that your original conception of them included many additional elements that do not translate on an audio recording. How important are those other elements?

RR: I would never do anything knowingly in any work that wasn’t essential. But you have to face the fact that at the time that that recording [of Ping] came out [in the early 1970s], there was no possibility of releasing a film or a DVD or videotape; that wasn’t available yet. So it was a question of having it not represented or representing it partially. In terms of “going beyond,” music was a vast and uninhibited horizon. I did not have the experience that the majority of composers I know have of improvising as a child and learning the repertoire. So I didn’t really think of Ping or Vanzetti as being outside of anything because it was all a part of the way I responded to using sound for aesthetic purposes. And I had always been intrigued by visual art—I’m very much involved with it—and literature, text. So it was very natural to use all of those things. But I think I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to work with film had I not developed a relationship with Takemitsu, because I actually had one of Kurosawa’s cameramen to work with and the actor/dancer who was the figure in the box in the film that I made was Sekiji Maro, one of the great Butoh dancers. There’s actually a funny anecdote about that. We filmed for two days and he had to be covered in white powder to look the way I wanted him to. When we met in the morning I said to him that I was worried about him sweating. And he said, “No, I won’t sweat.” And I said, “And blinking too.” “I will not blink.” And he did not blink, and he did not sweat. At the end of six or seven hours, as soon as the light went off, sweat. He was…he is (I think he’s still alive) something phenomenal.

FJO: Wow! To jump now many decades, there are pieces that you’ve created since we have a whole array of new technologies. And your multichannel music was the first to be recorded on DVD. And, as a listener, I know that I would have gotten so much more out of a piece like, say, Odyssey, had I been able to experience all the other aspects of it that you can’t get from just hearing an audio recording. By only listening to it, I felt I was really missing something.

RR: Oh, you were. Not only in terms of staging and so on, but in terms of the six channel structure, because the idea in Odyssey was to have a confluence of two views from the same author, of the same set of ideas: Beckett in French and in English. And I found two multilingual translators. So there was a female voice and a male voice, and both of them read in both languages, and then these languages were put in stereo fields moving in front of the audience. If you had heard it live, it is actually a completely different experience. You really do feel these voices moving in front of you. And then there are other things happening from the ensemble as well as electro-acoustic elements. From the beginning, I’ve done a lot of extremely impractical things—and living in San Diego may have been one of those—but there are benefits, too, of being outside the loops.

FJO: But maybe a piece like that could be effectively captured on a recording that was released on DVD with 5.1 surround sound.

RR: Sure.

FJO: Would that be something you’d want to pursue?

RR: Certainly. After a certain point in life you realize that you could spend all of your time curating and managing what you’ve already done. This is not what I want to do with my life. I want to continue to make things. So it’s always a little tricky to think about improving on the record, as it were, and to go back and pay some serious attention to Ping, which I’m doing this next summer, or to Vanzetti, where I’ll have to re-create the electro-acoustic part. I don’t do that easily because it means I won’t be doing the next thing I’m interested in at that moment. It’s clear from the outside that it would be very nice to be able to capture some of these things that are more dimensional than the current documentation shows. I don’t know whether that will happen or not.

FJO: These multidimensional works also bring to mind the whole question of collaboration as fodder for inspiration. You’ve done incidental music for theatrical productions. There’s a very nice disc that New World put out featuring your music for Ivanov, which I found very exciting. But once again, the CD only has the music, so it’s hard to get an idea of how this worked within the context of the original performance.

RR: Actually there is a video of the Tadashi Suzuki production, which is pretty amazing. The things he did with that music will blow your mind. What he asked me to do was to provide him with “primitive music” and “religious music,” and he wanted me to select one from a number of pop tunes he would send me and that couldn’t appear on the CD, because we couldn’t get through the maze of permissions that would have been necessary to use it. We negotiated a lot and I said, “O.K., I’ll do two kinds of music for you. There are the set pieces, each of which will be four minutes long, and if you use them you must use everything exactly as it is. And then I’ll do a couple of continuities, and you can do anything you want with them—you can cut them up, run them backwards, whatever.”

We first encountered each other when I was in Japan in the ’60s and he was a student at Waseda University. He had a group, the Waseda Shogekijo, and later he formed his own theater company. He asked me at one point if I wanted to collaborate with him and I said of course I’d love to. So he said, “Send me sound postcards over the next year. When you think of a particularly interesting fragment of a piece, just send it to me.” Then, after a year, we met in Japan, and the first thing he said was, “There’s no room for me.” I didn’t know exactly what he meant by that, but then he explained that the music takes up all the attention that there is and that there’s no place for actors and lighting. So I said, “I get what you’re saying, and I will try to make some music that leaves room for you.” That was an interesting challenge.

FJO: And yet what you wound up composing still works as a pure sonic experience.

RR: Wait till you see what he did with it!

FJO: The question of collaboration and influence also comes into play with the musicians you’ve worked with extensively over the years. There are certain people who crop up again and again, like Harvey Sollberger and Steve Schick, who are both UCSD people.

RR: Phil Larson’s another important one.

FJO: Aleck Karis, too, and obviously your wife, Karen. I would suggest that this not only affects, obviously, the instruments you choose to write for, but also possibly the kinds of things you wind up writing for them, or at least the kind of compositional directions you get pulled in.

RR: It’s an interesting question. When Karen and I were living in Japan, we ran a series called CROSSTALK. We did a big festival in 1969 in Tangei’s Olympic Gymnasium and one of the composers I wanted to feature on that series was Sal Martirano, who was at the University of Illinois then. He’d written a lot of music for particular performers. And I came to understand after a while that he did not believe that anyone else could perform that music. It was the property, in a sense, of the people for whom he had written it. But I didn’t think that was true. And when we in fact did all this music in Japan with American servicemen and Japanese musicians he loved it and thought it was fine. I think that what a relationship with a performer does is ease the way into one’s understanding or one’s picture of what the instrument is about. But I don’t really think that it’s the performer who actually creates the spur for the writing. I have enormous respect for all the people you mentioned, and others. I have worked with them closely and I’ve valued that interaction enormously, especially—collaboratively—the idea of being able to hear something with the option to change it. The feedback process is so important and is very rare in my experience. Most performers don’t want to get fully involved until the piece exists as a final document. As a result, it’s very hard to try something out, which is the most valuable of all, because I already know what my own imagination is going to produce. What I don’t know is exactly how that imagined sound is going to intersect with the physics of the instrument in the moment of real performance. So I don’t really think that the performers make the music. I think they make the opportunity to engage with the medium.

FJO: But what’s interesting is that in some of the pieces you write, there will always be a piece of the original performer. I’m thinking specifically of the Transfigured Wind pieces that combine live and prerecorded flute sounds, and those prerecorded flute sounds were performed by Harvey Sollberger. So he’s always there.

RR: This is something that I realized at IRCAM in 1981. It suddenly dawned on me that there were two kinds of information in music. There were the relational structures that the composer imagines and creates. And then there was the performative information that the performer gives in realizing the implication of those relationships. Performative information is a resource, and quite a few of the pieces that I’ve done that involve computer have involved the idea of writing some basic thematic material and then working with a performer in a very detailed and demanding way to get them to realize it. Of course this is hard for them because the piece doesn’t yet exist, so they don’t know where it’s going; all they know is that small maybe minute or two.

As you say, Harvey will always be in Transfigured Wind, and there are many other pieces I’ve written in which the person who recorded it provided an essential aspect of the sonic material of the piece, both in the sense of the immediate realization of my ideas and telling me something about what the music means, because of course a composer doesn’t ever really know exactly what the music means until you hear it. But it also becomes sonic material which in a computer piece you can use.

FJO: And of course the other possible collaborative aspect in any piece of music that is derived from the use of computers involves the people who designed the programs or the hardware that was used to generate the piece. How important have those people been to the process? Have you also worked with the same people over the years for those aspects of a composition?

RR: Probably not, in fact. The first person that I worked with technologically was a guy in Japan—who was working with Takemitsu at the time when I arrived—named Junosuke Okuyama. He was an engineer and he built boxes and would say, “What do you want to happen?” And then he would build a box that would do that. It was extraordinary. Later when I went to Stanford to start working in computers at the end of the ’70s, I worked with a lot of different people there who were around the lab, because this was at a time when the so-called time-sharing machines meant that everyone in the building heard what everyone else was doing and everyone was involved with everyone else. So if something wasn’t working you just asked the person sitting next to you and you’d work it out together.

When I went to IRCAM, however, there was this concept of the Musical Assistant. And in fact that concept came from the Center for Music Experiment that I started at San Diego, because when Boulez decided that he was going to begin this project at IRCAM, he sent a team around to MIT, Stanford and San Diego, and maybe one or two other places in the States, to just see what people were doing with technology. And I had started the Center for Music Experiment and had what I called Fellows there who were young creative people who worked on their own stuff, but also helped the senior visitors with what they were doing. This had not occurred to the IRCAM people before that, but then they started this idea of the Musical Assistant. So I realized right away that this allowed me to make a choice: whether I would decide to spend a few years not composing and learning what I would need to do to become a self-sufficient computer-music composer or that I was going to collaborate with other people.

You had mentioned at the very beginning of our conversation I had been very much a loner and had not collaborated, except for once, with anybody but Karen. So that was a watershed moment. I decided that I was going to take that very seriously and that working with these people who were younger than me was going to involve a lot of respect and a lot of attention and the cultivation of a real relationship that they could get something out of and that I would get something out of, too. So I worked with a lot of different young people. And I think that every one of those relationships has been good for me and good for them, at least I hope so. And it’s still going on. I’m working right now with an extraordinary young guy from Lima, Peru, named Jaime Oliver, who is very much interested in the real time instantiation of algorithms by using multimodal input devices that allow eight different parameters to be constantly molded in performance. This is very exciting territory, and I couldn’t do it without him. On the other hand, he couldn’t do it without me.

FJO: So how much influence do any of these people have on the resultant composition of yours?

RR: Well, a lot and none. A lot, in the sense that they are the instantiators; they make it work. Everybody, I’m sure, has had the experience of depending unwisely on a computer and having it fail at the most crucial moment. And there’s nothing you can do. You cannot cajole a computer. Either it’s working properly and you know what to do or it denies your desires. So they are crucial in the sense that they actually make it work. Because of my background in engineering, I’m frequently—I would say almost always—able to say, “This is how I think we can do this.” For example, when I conceive an algorithm I have the entire logic of it laid out: point by point exactly what is supposed to happen, how I think it can be realized, what the goals should be in terms of sound. But I don’t code it. Somebody else codes it. So it’s symbiotic.

I think that that’s what collaboration is all about. You enter into a relationship with one or more people and you have to sacrifice some of your autonomy and they have to sacrifice some of theirs in order to get to a place that you couldn’t get without each other. And I like that kind of situation.

FJO: These kinds of relationships with individual performers and tech people are very different from working with an orchestra. You mentioned earlier on that Peters published some early music out of yours before you could think twice about it, and now it’s out there in the world. All the music you’ve written subsequently is now out there, too. So theoretically someone could get your music and perform it and not work with you directly at all. When you get to an orchestra, maybe you work with the conductor, but chances are you’ll never interact directly with any of the musicians in the orchestra. It’s a very different way of realizing a piece of music. But you have also written pieces for the orchestra, pieces you’ve even titled symphonies. So it would be fair to say that you also believe in the continuance of that tradition as a way of expressing yourself musically. Yet it seems like a very different aesthetic from your other work.

RR: I suppose, largely because of the rather unusual background that I have, that I really wanted to address the tradition in some way at a certain point, as I felt more confident in my capacities and I had more opportunities in front of me. So I wrote some string quartets and I wrote some symphonic works. And that was an important thing I felt for me to do. It’s certainly nothing that I did in an artificial way. It was something that I wanted to do. I think that there is extraordinary richness in all of the traditional vehicles that exist in Western music, certainly the symphony orchestra and the string quartet are the two most important.

The orchestra, of course, is a social organization and, at least as I’ve understood it myself or have even seen it work elsewhere, there’s no way that you can penetrate that. You can work with a string quartet or an individual pianist or violinist or percussionist, but you can’t really work with an orchestra. An orchestra is an entity and I think it has its own social boundaries. I could give you an example which I don’t think is deleterious to the reputation of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. At the time that I wrote Symphony: The Stages of Life for [Esa-Pekka] Salonen, in the last movement, which is about age, there was a long passage where I wanted the whole string section to be playing very assertively but very ponticello. In the first rehearsal that passage went by and there was no ponticello. So I talked to Esa-Pekka and said that I really wanted that. So we talked to the concertmaster and he said, “Yes, yes, Maestro.” But in the next rehearsal, same thing—no ponticello. And after a while, Salonen said, “They’re not going to play it; it’s not beautiful.” You can tremolo, as in the Viennese, but you don’t play sul ponticello if you’re the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It’s a great orchestra and they’ve played a number of my pieces magnificently. And they played that piece magnificently, too, but that was not something they believed was in their proper purview. And I’m O.K. with that.

This was one of many such instances that I experienced with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the BBC Symphony, and so on. You realize there’s no point in trying to make that beast something it isn’t. On the other hand, there’s no comparable sonorous resource. It’s not just the variety of sources, it’s this choric effect—the idea of people doing things at the same time. It’s actually related to collaboration. Something happens when you get twenty-four violins that cannot happen with two.

FJO: You’ve also done a number of pieces where you’ve created your own kind of orchestra. I’m thinking of a piece like Archipelago, which is a large one-of-a-kind ensemble piece where you picked the players, which is very different from working with an orchestra. And you’ve worked with large groups dedicated to playing new music, like the Ensemble Intercontemporain, which is very different from working with the L.A. Phil. They’d probably do the ponticello!

RR: Not as different as you think, but they would do the ponticello. But the EIC [Ensemble Intercontemporain] is also a social structure. They’re civil servants. They cannot be fired. It’s complicated.

FJO: In terms of tradition—we talked about symphonies and string quartets which have histories that now span centuries—you also wrote a really unusual song cycle based on poetry by John Ashbery. That form really isn’t as much alive as a form nowadays in new music.

RR: Maybe regrettably.

FJO: Your solution to that was very unique and also is another example of a deep collaboration. Ashbery will always be present in that piece, not only through his words but through the recording of the sound of his voice, which is part of your piece.

RR: I was a visiting professor at Amherst. I don’t even remember what year that was, maybe ’89. I’ve moved around a lot, but I always try when I go to a place I haven’t been to before to take that occasion to re-ignite something, to do something I haven’t done before that I wouldn’t otherwise do. So going to Amherst, where Emily Dickinson was, it was clear that what had to happen there had to have something to do with poetry. So I went to Dickinson’s house a number of times, and I read Richard Wilbur and other poets associated with that area. But nothing clicked. Then one night I was reading, in Helen Vendler’s book of American poetry, “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror” of Ashbery’s. And the next morning I realized that things that I had understood the night before I couldn’t understand the next morning. In other words, there was something time specific about comprehension. It wasn’t a general thing; it wasn’t as though you’d understand and after you understood you’d understand the next day. It isn’t like that. That was very interesting. What usually happens when something like that occurs is that I want to write music about it, and so I decided to do a string orchestra piece [Whispers Out of Time].

After it had won the Pulitzer, I sent a CD and a score to Ashbery. And he wrote back and said the next time you’re in New York, let’s talk. So I did and he told me that he frequently writes poetry while listening to music. But it isn’t contemporary music—it’s Brahms and things like that. And he said that it would be really interesting [for him] to write listening to music written about his writing. I never found out whether he did that. I doubt that he did that, but it was fascinating. And we really did collaborate, because I would go to him and I would say, “Here are the poems that I want to work with, here’s what I think, and here’s some questions.” He would give me different answers every time. And he would deny that what he said before was true at all. At a certain point I realized there was no point in pursuing that line of inquiry anymore. And I was just interested in John as a human being, a fascinating and elusive fellow.

Then he had to produce the text. He sent me a number of things which I didn’t think were what I wanted. Then at one point he sent me this text, “Debit Night,” and he said, “I send this as something like styrofoam peanuts in which you can pack the precious poems.” Beautiful! And it turned out that that text had references to all the poems in subtle ways. And then he came out to UCSD and he read it. And his reading was so laconic, so flat. And I said, “John, can you put a little more into this reading?” And then—he…would…talk…like… that. And I’d say, “John, that doesn’t sound natural.” John is John. What you get, that’s him. And several times we had to re-engineer individual words which couldn’t be understood. The very last phrase he says is, “Last things I think to think about.” We had to actually microsurgery that in order to get it so that it sounded like “Last things I think to think about.”

FJO: And that became the title of the piece.

RR: Probably because of that!

FJO: Since you mentioned winning the Pulitzer, which was now 20 years ago, I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts about that award. At the time you won, there was commentary floating around describing you as the first experimental composer to win the award since Charles Ives. There have always been people who have taken issue with the composers who’ve won the Pulitzer and the kind of work that wins. And in the last decade or so, the Pulitzer committee has issued prominent public statements about wanting to open up the award.

RR: There are several things to say about this. One thing is that it seems to me to be very clear that our society already rewards certain kinds of behaviors lavishly. And it strikes me as being bizarre that any institution would spread its wings in such a way that it uses what could be a mechanism for increasing the awareness of areas that do not get attention in the society in order to improve its own image. It seems regrettable and outrageous. It’s not that I have anything against the idea that there are very expert people doing all kinds of music. This is clearly true, and it always has been and always will be. But it’s also true that certain kinds of activity gain enormous notoriety, financial reward, privilege, etc. and others don’t. If you think of the number of ways in which this society applauds its serious artists, be it composers or poets or painters, it’s very small, particularly compared to other societies, especially in Europe. It seems to me that it would be nice if there were some sort of balance between societal reward and—I don’t know what you would call it—specialist reward. This is not just in music. It’s true everywhere. And from my point of view it used to be the case [with the Pulitzer], which is by no means to say that every judgment made by the Pulitzer process was a good one.

I was actually rather insignificantly, though meaningfully, a part of that change, because there was a time in the early ’90s when I was on the committee along with George Perle. We had a number of very remarkable opportunities that year among the applicants, and the one we chose was Ralph Shapey, who had written an hour-long orchestral work that he conducted with the Chicago Symphony. Now, Ralph’s music is tough, and this definitely was not a fun piece; it was acerbic and dynamic and raw and amazing. And we thought that Shapey deserved recognition in this way. The charge to the committee was to choose three people, and then the board, which consists mainly of journalists who have no musical background professionally, makes the choice. But in this case the committee decided we didn’t want to give them choices. We were just going to give Ralph Shapey. And so there developed quite a contentious situation. Needless to say, I have never been involved in the Pulitzer operation since then. And I think as a result of the board’s decision that it wanted to be more in control of this capacity to bless certain work, that’s the way it is now.

FJO: To spiral back, I brought up Archipelago, but we never really had an opportunity to talk about it. I’m particularly curious about that piece because it served as a springboard for you for so much other music. I’d love to know more about what your compositional process was.

RR: I mentioned earlier that I like when I go to an unfamiliar locale, or have a special kind of experience, to use it to do something that I haven’t done before. So when I went there [to IRCAM in Paris] in 1980-81, I decided that I was going to remake my way of composing. And so I thought a great deal and did actually take a new approach, which has certainly been relatively dominant since that time. I think occasionally about how unusual it is in mid-career to have a year or two to do just what you want to do. It’s really an amazing gift that I received. And so I took it very seriously. I rethought my way of composing. I got into the idea of using recorded sound and the idea of performative information. It was a very special time.

There’s an anecdote that I really enjoy about that. When the piece was done in Toronto at one point, it was done on a program with Cage—they did Archipelago and Cage’s Dance /4 Orchestras—and Paul Zukofsky conducted the Canadian National Youth Orchestra, which was very, very good. After the performance of my piece, I had gone up and taken a bow and John was sitting on the aisle. He reached up and he grabbed me as I came back up the aisle. And I stopped and leaned over to hear what he was going to say. And he said, “That should keep you busy for the rest of your life.” And at the moment I thought, “What does he mean?” But then I understood that he had heard what you said. He had heard that there was potential in the strategies of that piece. And interestingly enough when Xenakis heard it, he was critical of the conventionality of the thematic material. And I said, “But Iannis, it needs to be ‘conventional’ at its beginnings so that it can go somewhere else.” He didn’t buy that.

FJO: So how did you get it to go to other places?

RR: I thought at that time that the quintessential musical process—and I think not only in the West, but internationally—is variation. That is to say you posit something and then you elaborate it—you change it, you return to it, you go away from it, you go very far away from it, etc. It really had to do with the basic idea of variation. And I got interested because I had a colleague in San Diego—Jerry Balzano—who was a cognitive psychologist and he talked to me one day about the term (in psychology) invariance. Invariance is the measure when you change something of the degree to which you have not changed it. In other words, it’s what remains characteristic of something as you alter it. So that was a part of all of this. Of course you can change things by instrumentation, but I also found that you can do some remarkable transformations through the computer. That was the first time I had a lot of time to work with computers in that transformative strategy, and also spatialization. My Musical Assistant, Thierry Lancino, and I created an eight-channel spatial paradigm. And so there were a lot of ways in which I was trying to take recognizable kernels and weave them into a mosaic of interacting transformations. That was the idea: a transformational mosaic, as I called it.

FJO: That raises the whole idea of how your acoustic music affects your electronic music and vice versa. There’s a very early piece of yours that I’ve always been a huge fan of, Quick Are The Mouths of Earth, which I don’t think has even been re-issued on CD from the original Nonesuch LP. It’s a purely acoustic piece, but what you’re doing with timbre sounds to me like it’s very much informed by the whole world of possibilities that was opened up by electronic sound.

RR: Nope. The origins of that piece were in Carter’s Double Concerto. Karen and I were living in Paris. I was composing and had no peers, so there was nobody to talk to. We found out through the International Herald Tribune that Carter was in Berlin, so we bought a car for 28 dollars and drove to Berlin. And I called up to try to get an appointment—I didn’t know him at all—and [Carter’s wife] Helen agreed to an appointment. And it happened that Maderna was conducting a performance of the Double Concerto. I heard that and particularly the four percussionists who were stationed at the periphery of the stage in raised platforms—it was really something, and, of course, the differentiation between the harpsichord and piano, and so on and so on.

We came back and then we left Paris and went to Italy. And I thought, I want to write a piece that deals with spatial differentiation, and so there are three flutes and three cellos—a very impractical piece as many of my pieces turned out to be. And because we were being supported in a very roundabout way at that point by the Rockefeller Foundation, I sent the score to a foundation officer as evidence that I was not wasting their money. And for some reason they put it on a table in their office. Arthur Weisberg came in, looking for money for the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, saw the score, and said, “I’m gonna play it.” That’s how it happened. And so I got this message at some point, through Peters, “Arthur Weisberg is going to perform the piece; do you have parts?” I didn’t have any parts; I didn’t think anybody would ever play that. So I copied out the parts and sent them. We were still in Europe. And I was in New York at some point a few years later and I met Arthur. And he said, “This is unbelievable. We’re editing the recording right now. So come up and listen.” So I came up and of course it was a beautiful performance and a beautiful recording, but there was no spatial impact at all. And I said, “It all sounds like a central orb with everybody in the same space. How come the instruments don’t sound like they have any distance between them?” And he said, “Oh, the engineer doesn’t like the ping-pong effect.” And I said, “But if you look at the score, it’s very clear that it says there are spatial motives that are passed back and forth. That’s part of the information of the piece and it’s completely lost in that recording.” They would not change it. It was against that recording engineer’s personal ethic.

FJO: That’s like some musicians not being willing to play sul ponticello.

RR: And that’s the only recording. So far as I’m aware, it’s never been recorded in a way that shows what the piece actually is.

FJO: One final area that I’d like to explore with you is that you have been based at UCSD for the last forty years; that’s an incredibly long amount of time to be in the same place. And you’ve had students who have gone on to become pretty significant in this world of composition—Paul Dresher, Michael Daugherty, Chaya Czernowin, and many others. We began this conversation talking about Ross Finney and how tough he was on people but with you it was actually a very valuable mentoring relationship. I’m curious about the role that you feel that you’ve had as a teacher.

RR: UCSD is a very remarkable program. From the beginning we have had a lot of international currents there. So there have been a lot of very smart, very gifted, and very diverse musical visions among the students that have passed through there. So there’s no question that encountering under demanding circumstances the designs, the desires, and the frustrations of strong young composers is a very enlivening activity. It doesn’t mean, of course, that every student that goes through there or every student I’ve had has been a pleasure. But it’s certainly the case that by and large, it has been an extremely rich experience, and it continues to be. They’re very smart. They’re very idealistic. When you feel frustrated or irritated about other aspects of musical culture, especially in this country, the idealism, energy, and vision of these young people is a tonic. It doesn’t stop. Every year a new crop comes and they’re full of dreams and capacity; it’s wonderful.

FJO: So has it influenced your own work?

RR: I imagine so. I wouldn’t be able to identify specific things, but my feeling is that everything that I do and everything that I hear influences my music. I hope it does. That is my aim. The aim is to embody life in what you do in every way you can. The other teacher that I had, Roberto Gerard, always used to say that composition involves—and this is before we became aware of the problems of language— “the whole man”. And he always said that you must put everything that you have and everything that you are into every musical act. And so where I live, who I interact with, what I hear, what the weather’s like, what my granddaughter says to me, and so on, they all affect the music. And so I’m sure that the students affected the music, too. But I’m not aware of any particular relationships.

I enjoy teaching. I think that there are some things that you can’t really teach. But the one thing that you can do is to accelerate and expand the process. You can affect time in the sense that you can make young people aware of things that would otherwise have taken them a little bit longer to become aware of themselves. I don’t think that you can give them things that they don’t have. And of course you can’t take away the things that they do have.

It’s the same as the situation you asked about earlier in relation to early pieces. I listen to something I wrote forty years ago, and I know without question that that is me. And these young people who come through: they are what they are and they will always be what they are. But one thing that you can do, I think in some cases more than in others, is to help them move more rapidly in the direction that they’re probably going to go in anyway.

FJO: So, in the curve ball department, you once said something to me over lunch many years ago; I don’t know if you remember this, but you made a very provocative comment.

RR: Uh oh.

FJO: You said that perhaps there are too many people studying musical composition.

RR: At one point we [at UCSD] used to have from time to time a “retreat” (Joji Yuasa used to, memorably, call them “retreatments”) where we would go for a couple of days and discuss things that you don’t normally have time to. And at one of those retreats I proposed that we abolish the undergraduate music major. And that we continue service courses, of course. But we would change from trying to teach young people how to be musicians to trying to teach everyone how to listen and enjoy music. That was not well received. I got into a lot of trouble with my department. The same kind of thing I think potentially applies to undergraduate composition major situations. And this is something that I still worry about a lot. I worry about the idea of anything that smacks of seduction, anything that leads a young person into something that they might not otherwise enter. To me it’s a kind of scary thing given, again, the nature of the American society’s reaction to and relation to “art.” We put quotes around that because who knows exactly what art is. We’re an extremely utilitarian society and we want things to be useful. And if they’re not useful in obvious pragmatic ways, we tend to value them less. So if you have feelings for people and feelings for music, and you see someone who’s earnest and hard working and it’s your guess that this is not going to work out, what do you do? Do you go right on encouraging, exhorting, etc., or do you say maybe this is not the right direction? I find that it would be too personally painful to say that to anybody. But it certainly occurs to me.

Does anyone have leisure time anymore? And if they do, there is an incomparable number of ways they could spend it. So how many people are going to spend it on music and listening to demanding music? It’s a small subset. Of course, as I’ve pointed out in other situations, it’s still the case that orders of magnitude more people have heard Elliott Carter’s music in concert than had heard Mozart’s while he was alive. The largest audience that Mozart ever played to was something like 140 people. So we think about our small audiences and the idea of a ghetto for new music, from a statistical point of view it’s not true. Lots of people hear this music. And lots of people are interested in it. The picture shifts because the society is so large and because the power of economic forces is so great to exploit what can be exploited.

FJO: Given all of that, it’s interesting that you’ve chosen a personal compositional path that you admit is frequently impractical. And as a teacher your impracticalities can be perceived as a role model.

RR: Impracticality has several dimensions. One form of impracticality is that it is difficult to bring together, in a collaborative way, resources which actually exist. For example, I did a piece several years ago called Justice. And it turned out that to bring an opera singer, a solo percussionist, and an actress together is extraordinarily difficult because they live in totally different value contexts in professional ways. I had not anticipated that. So it’s impractical, but actresses act, singers sing, percussionists percuss, and there’s no problem there. The impracticality is in the combination of real resources. The thing that bothers me is the situation in which the young composer is committed to what I would call fragile or unreliable or evanescent resources, things that are extremely difficult to do and that almost certainly can never be done twice in the same way. And, in addition, in less than totally ideal circumstances may not be even heard. And, of course, at least among some composers, there’s a very high value put on being sonically novel.

I like strange sounds as much as anybody, but at a certain point I realized that—and this goes back to pragmatics again—I would say that by and large, most pieces get about six hours of attention from the musicians who are going to premiere them. I don’t remember exactly when this hit me, but I realized one day as a composer I can decide how my six hours are going to be used. I can decide that they’re going to be used figuring out what the notation means, on learning how to communicate with each other, etc., or it can be used in playing music and in being musical. You don’t have both things in most situations.

Back to the issue of more conventional music, the music which has been heard for a long time and the musicians who write now in a way that is resonant with those traditional ways have an incomparable advantage over people who don’t write that way because it’s “in the ear” of the performers. The musicians who are performing know the standard and that standard is expected of them, whereas in the context of many new pieces the standard, the reference, is unclear. The reference might actually not exist; it may be created in the context of working on that piece. That takes time. That time—the six hours, if that is an appropriate figure—is then spent on getting to the point where the reference exists and not with a refined and elegant use of that new space. So there are a lot of kinds of impracticality and they each have their perils and they each have their wondrous rewards.

I mention impracticality in relation to my own work because I’ve done a lot of pieces that others have told me may count as “projects,” so I started naming a lot of works “projects,” because if that’s what they are, then let’s call them that. But it means that you spend a considerable amount of time creating a fairly large and ungainly experience and then it’s performed maybe very well just once or twice: Odyssey, for example, that’s been done maybe five or six times.

FJO: But the pieces that were done once were at least done once well.

RR: They were done once honorably; it’s different.

FJO: This is an advantage to writing for groups like a string quartet or interpreters of your music that you have long-term relationships with as friends and colleagues, as opposed to writing a piece for an orchestra, where you’ll get only one shot at a performance or perhaps, if you’re lucky, a four-performance run if your piece is part of a subscription series concert, or if it’s a three-orchestra co-commission, you’ll get performances by the three orchestras, but then that’s usually it. If you write for individual players or a small ensemble that tours to many different cities, maybe they’ll give that six hours to that first performance and that performance will be honorable, as you say, but not transformative. But after that it can enter their repertoire, and they’ll keep playing it and their performances will get better and better.

RR: If you’re lucky. I’ve had that kind of relationship with the Arditti Quartet, and it’s been incredible. They played pieces many times, and they get better and better and better. And it’s a different experience to hear your work played by masterful musicians who have a history with it.

FJO: So to spiral it back to the teaching question, in terms of the students that you encounter: You are a creator of impractical projects. So do you try to instill in your students the goal of being more practical, to write pieces that will work at least do be done well once and ideally go on to have a life, or do you encourage them to be who they already are.

RR: The philosophy of the composition department at UCSD is this: if you read the catalog it says: We try to find out what the composers who come to us want and try to get them to be better at that; we don’t try to impose anything on them. The thing that I do with my students is try to make very certain that they understand the consequences of what they’re doing. It doesn’t mean that I’ll say, “You should do that.” It means that I’ll tell them, to the best of my ability, “This is what is likely to occur if you go down that path.” And so if they choose that path, that’s fine. I think my job is to say, maybe prophylactically, “I think there are issues in what you’re doing. And these are what they are. And this is why they are there.” And then we go on. They make their own call. They decide whether they want to continue on this path, whether they want to inflect the path. I don’t tell anybody they have to do anything; that wouldn’t be honorable. But I do want to make sure that they know what I think the consequences of what they’re doing could be.

FJO: On your website you have a wonderful series of talks about the future of music by a wide variety of people who have visited San Diego over the years. The person who is sadly missing from that list is yourself.

RR: Oops. Well, there are two sources where I’ve talked quite a bit about these things. One is an article in the journal, American Music. And the other is an interview in Computer Music Journal. It’s a very tough question to answer because I think that music as a phenomenon is probably undergoing a change. When I was a student, I imagined that music would continue to be something that occurred in halls, in front of quiet audiences, and with performers who were dedicating their lives to performing that kind of music. It doesn’t seem to me that that’s true anymore. I think there are a vast number of ways in which musical creativity can be exercised. And I always encourage my students to build a way of working that allows them to use any material for any musical purpose. That’s what I try to do, so I’m interested in non-traditional spaces—working with theatre, working with dance, and other things. I think that the likely future of music is much less a locus of clear points than it used to be. I think that music is likely to be a behavior that spreads into other venues, into other media, mixed with other media, in contexts that we don’t now think of as music presentation contexts, and so on. I think that music is, or will become, the eloquent, elegant, masterful use of sound in whatever context for whatever purpose. A musician who thinks in terms of opportunity as tied to particular sorts of venues and media is probably deluding him- or herself; it’s not going to continue to exist in the same way that it does now. But exactly where it’s going, I don’t know. But I do know that it’s moving to a more generalized profile. And that doesn’t mean, again, that it can’t be masterful or moving or everything that music has been before; it’s just that the frame is not stable anymore.