Category: Cover

Transcribed and edited
by Molly Sheridan
Videotaped by Trevor Hunter
Video presentation
by Molly Sheridan

Or maybe he sits—at a desk, or at a piano, or by the side of an imaginary road.

Or maybe when the lights come up, he has an accordion in his hands. In fact, you realize you heard it breathing in the darkness just a moment before but didn’t understand at the time what it was. And now there is a bald, 6’2″ white man standing before you, larger than life and singing several octaves higher than seems quite correct considering his size. And you are not sure where you are, and yet you feel that is all right. Rinde Eckert has asked you to follow him off the path of what is expected and into the mind of one of his characters. You may not have known this is where you were headed when you arrived at the theater, but here you find yourself, mesmerized by this 21st-century bard.

Playwright, director, composer, musician, dancer, librettist. Eckert was a carpenter at one point, too, so it probably wouldn’t be a stretch for him to build his own sets. Sometimes it seems like he can play any role, both onstage and behind the scenes. Once out under the stage lights, it’s often startling how swiftly he can build up a world around him out of a just a few items—a coat hanger, a piece of cloth, a box. But it’s also a fascinating lesson in the rules of fantasy and what it takes to bring an audience along for the ride. For his part, Eckert has discovered it’s often more about an open mind than an open checkbook, more about always trusting than about always being right.

Towards the end of a two-hour conversation that ranged from the challenges of collaboration to the boundaries of imagination, Eckert boiled his thoughts on the life of an artist down to their bare essence. “The career is an artifact of a greater search,” he explained. “And art I don’t think is ultimately the point either, which probably makes me a philosopher. You’re building a life, actually. And you make sacrifices for that life that may not necessarily do anything for your career or even directly enhance your art. And that’s important.”

<align=”right”>—MS

Rinde Eckert: More of the latter. My parents were both opera singers, and in order to save on babysitting costs, they would take my sister and I to rehearsals. I was in my first opera when I was seven. We went to see my dad do Rodolfo in La bohème—this was at the Amato Opera Company in New York. At intermission we walked back stage, my sister and I, and Tony Amato came up, the director, and looked at us and said, “Oh, they’ll do. They’ll do fine. You’re going on in the second act. We need more kids.” So he put me in the hands of this kid, [also named] Tony, and said “Do whatever Tony tells you.” So Tony took me by the hand and the music came up for the second act, that wonderful street scene, and we ran out. He was giving me instructions, “Okay, now we fight. Now we play with the toys.” And these women in hoop skirts are going around us and the lights are blinding and I felt absolutely at home. I’d never felt so safe in my life. Later I’d understand how vulnerable you actually are! [laughs]

When I did a performance of Slow Fire years later in the ’80s, there’s a moment in the piece when I’m plastered against a little white door, holding it like my life depends on it, and the piece goes quiet for the first time. All of the sudden, there was this guy right by the stage and he’s pounding with his fist and yelling at the top of his lungs. I don’t know what he was high on—utterly high on something serious—and it just shocked the hell out of me. He was two feet from me and he just came out of the dark. Suddenly I felt like, “Oh, man. I’m up here and I have no idea who’s out there!” But at seven, I felt really safe.

MS: Was that a kind of magical, movie-script moment where you just saw your future and knew that this was the path for you?

RE: No, not really. My father didn’t want me to go into the arts. He had been disappointed to a degree in his own career and he didn’t want me to have to go through those disappointments. But at the same time, I think it was only half serious. Both my parents have been extraordinary supporters of my work.

I tried to avoid this completely. At one point I tried to be a carpenter, but I couldn’t stay away. That’s my council to people in the arts: Try all you can to, like, not. But if you can’t, know that there are other people who have done it and been okay, so you’re not alone. It can happen and it can be a really rich and wonderful way of life. And that’s the way it was with me; I couldn’t really avoid my fate. I would try and move away from it and then something would get me back in. And now, of course, there’s no hope for me.

MS: Was there a big moment that pulled you back in all the way or was it a gradual tug that was just unrelenting?

RE: My whole career has been real steady, but it always fell short of the thing that would just make you a household name or put you in the way of a lot of “important people” who would suddenly be your champion.

If there was any kind of realization in the beginning it was that I didn’t belong in opera, and that was the beginning of everything. It was very practical. I looked at my voice and my personality and all the indications I had gotten up to that point and I thought, well, if you were hoping to be on the scale of Pavarotti, not your profession. Opera is not really where your voice is going to find its soul. So I immediately started thinking, well, how can I be at the top of the game? What gifts do I have that I can bring to the table and where can I use them? The avant-garde provided that for me; they were thrilled by my diversity. I’d studied dance and worked with movement artists. I had a lot of various things I could do with my voice, and so I started working with composers who were excited about that—principally Paul Dresher out in California, with whom I have had a long and prosperous relationship.

Later on I started working with dancers—Margaret Jenkins, and Sarah Shelton Mann out in San Francisco. Both really interesting choreographers. And we would run up against some issues with the funding where they’d say, “Well, we don’t have any money for a composer.” And I’d say, “I’ll do that.” [laughs] And so I started writing dance scores. And the more dance scores I wrote, the more other dancers would come and hear the score and would say, “Can you write one for me?”

That was a great moment, when you give up the dream that you had and you start making the other dream which you can’t imagine. It’s like you see one road and you know exactly where it leads. So either I go there and I become a kind of second-rate opera artist, or I travel down this other road and I either fail completely or something happens and it works. As it turned out, this worked for me, this other path. And it offered me extraordinary opportunities and challenges. One of the presumptions of that little exercise, that little dialectic that I went through, is that it presumes that you might belong at the top of some list, you might belong at the top of some genre, that you might have something to contribute of value. It’s a pretentious thing to think, but it’s one of those things, you say maybe these gifts can be molded. I like to say that my education has been entirely public. The public has seen me work through every problem. I’ve never had the luxury of actually not having my mistakes visible.

MS: There’s an interesting parallel there then, between you—choosing between the road that you know and the road that is unknown—and the characters that you play. It often seems that something has happened to shake them and they suddenly don’t quite know where they’re going.

RE: The art reflects life, of course. My characters end up being these rather common people, often failed in one aspect of their lives, who have a very large inner life. And I think I felt at that time that I had a very large inner life, and it remained to be seen whether there was a way of translating what I thought was a large inner life to an audience that would appreciate its particular size. So yeah, I think the characters are reflective of some of my personality, certainly.

MS: Does that make it easier for them to suddenly launch into song? Because as an audience member you can kind of go with them and get into this sort of odd personal space with them, and then suddenly these things that they’re doing are okay because all was not quite normal to begin with.

RE: Well, one of the things that is true about a work that centers around a particular point of view is that poetically we can go anywhere in that world. People sing in their heads; people can be grand in their heads. But you get into a social context where you are responsible for adhering to the laws of that social context, and you are restrained by that. I was looking for something that would incorporate all these particular ways that I wanted to move, so we follow one guy through this landscape and the things that happen are an outgrowth of his consciousness.

MS: But big things happen, and some of these are really big things—Melville scale. But even when they are smaller and more personal in scope, they trigger these huge reactions. What triggers that creative impulse in you to follow these characters to these places?

RE: Well, as Paul Dresher says, “Really, Rinde, you’re just a philosopher.” I’ll often have unprepossessing characters philosophizing: You’ll have a couple of workmen and suddenly they get into something really heavy. I’m working on a new piece right now in which a couple of orderlies show up to clean a hospital, and they have a huge philosophical discussion. One guy’s talking about, “Well, you know, what we’re doing is quite possibly destructive.” And the other guys says, “What do you mean? Cleaning up the clinic is destructive?” “Yeah, we are forestalling the possibility of a beneficial mutation. We’re always taking it back to zero. We clean up it up and make sure it’s exactly as it was to begin with. If we let it grow like an unweeded garden, we might find that in that bed of weeds, there are these extraordinary plants.” And he starts to talk about the remarkable discoveries that have been made as a result of accidents—things that weren’t cleaned up. And so they get into this whole thing about the organization of the future, our organized progress toward cure versus, say, the accidental, the natural vs. the machine, the intellectual vs. the spiritual, and they get into this huge dynamic. But essentially we’re dealing with two guys who are arguing about whether they should clean up the hospital or not.

I love looking into the mundane and seeing a grand idea or problem where just an argument about whether to clean up something becomes this huge philosophical debate. And then eventually it has to come down to, well, of course we’re going to clean it up—something has to happen in the world. Either the tragedy realizes itself, like in And God Created Great Whales, where yeah, this guy isn’t saved. Eventually the world catches up with him and destroys him in a sense. Or as with Reinhart Poole in Horizon, the guy has to come and answer the question, “Well, what am I going to do next?” And he has the voice of his wife, which brings him back to the world all the time, “As soon as you’re ready to stop farting around, Reinhart, go take care of business and then we can go for a walk.” “Okay, dear.” And he comes down to the real world. I love going into the really large and then returning to the small. So it has heroic proportions but no heroes.

MS: It’s often you performing these roles. But you have a kind of Meryl Streep-ness about you in that the audience seems to take you in as you for the first moment, and then everyone settles in and you have a way of convincing them to pretty quickly go into the fantasy with you. Are you conscious of that? Is it a technique in your repertory that you think about as you’re creating these pieces?

RE: It’s part of my aesthetic, and I’m looking for devices that will allow me that privilege. But audiences will pretty much go anywhere with you if you explain the rules. Initially they don’t know the rules, and then very quickly they get comfortable with the rules. If you drag a cardboard box onto the stage, the audience will see a cardboard box until you write the word “boat” on it with a felt tip pen. You write the word boat and then you get in the box, and the audience immediately knows what’s required of them and you are essentially in a boat. They don’t care if it looks like a boat—they know what it’s supposed to be. This has happened before; as children, they’ve gotten into boats [made out of boxes] and this is the same thing. And then you behave like you’re in a boat and they’re fine with it. And they will treat it like a boat for the rest of the piece until you rename it. And then you can turn the box and name it something entirely different and they’ll be fine with that, as well. It will be a boat until you name it a law office. And then you get in the box and act like a lawyer, and they’re thinking, “Oh, so it was a guy who was in a boat and now he’s in a law office. No problem. We just want to know what we’re supposed to do.”

The thing about hard and fast genres is that they come with the context already proscribed, so the trouble with a lot of, say, opera-goers, is that they want the laws that govern opera to govern this. And they think these are the best laws, and these laws should govern everything that’s music theater. And you say, no, those laws are really good for the opera world, but they don’t apply here. This goes different places.

Now the nice thing about avant-garde and new music audiences, though it can be a problem for them too, is that they know to wait. We don’t know what the laws are. The piece will tell us, if it’s a good piece, and then we can relax and be there. So those initial moments of a piece are really critical. I’ve never been much of a fan of cunning exposition. If you want them to know something, tell them. They need to know at the beginning of And God Created Great Whales that Nathan is losing his memory, so I just have an announcement—”Nathan was surprised how calm he was when he found out he was losing his memory”—and we know as soon as we see this guy that he’s losing his memory. He’s sitting at the piano, so we expect that he’s going to play it. And then we see this otherworldly creature plucking a ukulele, so already things are going on and the audience says well, we’re not in Kansas. They’re already getting educated by the way the piece begins. And then the piece reinforces that when Nathan pushes a button on his tape recorder that he hangs around his neck like the proverbial albatross, and the tape says it again: “Your name is Nathan. You are losing your memory. You are working on an opera.” It just flat out does it and then they know what the parameters are. “Oh, he’s working on an opera.” It’s all there.

MS: Still, that can be a lot for a single work to take on: it has to shoulder setting the rules of the form as well as express the content of the piece, and do both better than average to succeed, doesn’t it? Does that limit what you can do in an evening?

RE: Well, I had a case where I did a piece called Romeo Sierra Tango, which was a take on Romeo and Juliet. And I loved the opening when I first did it. I would be under a piece of brown paper and then suddenly these arms would come out, and the paper would crumple down and I’d do this thing like I was some kind of creature just waking up. My body was coated in clay, and up and out of this primordial ooze Romeo would come. He wakes up 400 years after he’s taken the poison—it actually didn’t kill him, it just made him almost immortal, much to his regret. He’s spent 400 years trying to find ways to kill himself. The piece never really caught on, and I never understood why because I was really pleased with it. [laughs]

So, I did this thing and a friend of mine came back after the performance and said, “You know, I had a problem with the piece. You presumed that we’re all familiar with Romeo and Juliet. And even though I read Romeo and Juliet, I was halfway through the piece before I could actually remember it. So I wasn’t with you; I was behind.” I thought, “Oh, man, I have to start this is in a completely different way. I’m not getting them in there; I’m not telling them what they need to know. I’m not telling them the laws of this piece.” And I haven’t done it in years, but if I were to do it again I would do it the way I now do it: I come out to the audience and I actually take off my clothes while I’m talking to them. I’m talking about the evolution of the piece, my feelings about Romeo and Juliet, and while I’m doing that I start putting this clay all over my body. And then finally I finish and I put my bucket aside and get under the paper and start it the way I want to start it. And it just takes them. They knew the parameters; they knew what the story was; they knew how they could appreciate it.

Although many people were mad at me for another reason with that one because they didn’t get the kind of soaring music that they have come to expect from me. There was this movie actress from L.A. who came to a performance of it in New York and dragged her famous boyfriend. She came back afterwards and she was so pissed at me, and she wanted to tell me how pissed off she was because I didn’t sing in it. “I brought my boyfriend and I told him about what you do and then it didn’t happen; this other thing happened.”

MS: Of all the artistic challenges you’re facing when you’re working in a field like this, isn’t that one of the biggest burdens of it? You’re dealing with your own expectations, you have to be in a place where you’re able to evolve your own expectations, and then decide what feedback you’re going to take—because reading reviews of your shows, it can really run the gamut from you being the Second Coming to the piece being a complete disaster. Was it a struggle to learn how to deal with it?

RE: You know, as an artist you have to routinely deal with that. Are you beholden to a crowd that insists that this is what they want, or do you follow the logic of an idea to its proper conclusion—do you do service to the art, and by doing service to the art, do you do a greater service to your audience, because you’re taking them somewhere that they couldn’t imagine by themselves? There are certain ideas that you have to say, “I trust that this art is actually doing exactly what it needs to do.” And whether or not it’s what they’ve come to expect, if this is where it has to go, you have to have the courage or the foolishness to actually do that and then take the consequences. And for some art you know there will be consequences, and you hope that it won’t be so bad that you won’t be allowed to continue doing it.

I trust at this point that I have enough of a track record so that if I do go somewhere that I need to go and that I feel my audience ought to go, that either they will trust me and go there, or that if they’re mad at me, they won’t stay mad that long. And I’ve certainly made mistakes in my career, artistic mistakes that I’ve learned from. As I say, I’ve tended to educate myself in public and throw myself to the lions. And sometimes that’s worked, and sometimes that has not worked.

Eckert performing Dry Land Divine.

MS: You seem to prefer working with small stage teams. Most of your pieces are you solo or there are just a few people on stage, and even when there are more characters, a small group of actors play them all. Is that vision? Is that economics?

RE: Say you get three people. You can do something pretty serious in six weeks. It’s harder with twenty people to do something serious in six weeks, especially if you’re inventing it. It’s one thing if it already exists and you’re just putting it up, but when you’re still trying to find it, part of your rehearsal is dedicated to just finding what it is. By the time you discover it you may have two weeks left to actually put it together, and so you learn to be fast but you also learn the aesthetic of poverty. It’s like Jerzy Grotowski in Towards a Poor Theatre. You start to like it being funky, you start to say, “I trust this. That looks a little too ‘theatery’.”—that’s a technical term. [laughs]—”That looks too pretentious. No, just write the word boat on the cardboard box. That will be fine. In fact, that will be preferable.” Then we unmask the pretension of the whole thing. It’s theater. We’re asking them to take a leap of faith. They know it’s not a ship; they know you’re not out to sea. We can make a very impressive ship and it’s fun to look at for a couple of minutes and then it’s just a big burden because you can’t go anywhere. It can’t be anything else but a ship.

So you learn this utility of poverty, too. The fact that the little broomstick can be a spear, a baseball bat, a gun, and anything else you want it to be. You get a gun out there, you’ve only got a gun and then you have to shoot it. But a broomstick? You’re not obligated to shoot a broomstick. And it can still be a very effective weapon. So you learn that there are some advantages to that aesthetic. It starts off economically. You can’t do it any other way so you try and make the art with whatever garbage you have laying around, but then you grow to love it—you start liking the garbage, you start seeing its value to you. So it’s a strange one.

Still occasionally you do have dreams and ideas that would demand a larger cast, more time, and greater resources. Only so many people can command those resources or have the necessary organizational genius to make that happen. Guys like Robert Wilson can make big things happen. They can make big things and then find big spaces to put the big things in and have the big things do big things. And you kind of marvel and you go, “Oh, wow, that’s really cool.”

MS: On the flip side of the small budgets and very small cast of characters, you collaborate a lot. In that way you don’t seem to have any restrictions on lots of people working on a single project. What is the key to being successful in that kind of environment?

RE: I play very well with others, which is part of the source of my success, as limited as it is. And I have to remind myself at all moments that I’ve got it pretty good. People want me to be myself; people want me to do my work. At this point, I very rarely work with people I don’t love. And I think the affection translates into the product.

MS: You’ve had some really long-term collaborators in people like Paul Dresher and Steve Mackey. When you get to that level of relationship then, how have you pushed and pulled at each other as time went on? There must be things that made you come back to one another again and again.

RE: Well, there’s love—especially those two guys. And that means a lot to me. Respect is another—I respect them both. It’s not that I don’t have problems occasionally, especially being a composer myself. I look at things and I go, “Not what I would do.”

MS: What do you do in that situation then?

RE: I just don’t put that hat on. I define my job pretty clearly, and that’s what allows me to be a director for these guys and to be a good collaborator with them.

MS: So you’re never tempted in the car on the drive home to nudge Steve and say, “You know, I think it’d be great if you just…”

RE: There are ways. You say, “I think we have to look harder at this because it’s not quite doing what we need it to do.” But it’s always in the way of saying, “just think about this. See if you can make your way.” And sometimes he’ll say, “No I can’t. I’ve got to have this.” And then I know. And then I trust. If you’ve got to have it, fine with me. If you’ve thought about my reservations, fine. So you go back and forth on this stuff. And we’re still going back and forth on a new piece with eighth blackbird called Slide which was just done out at Ojai. The opening was good, but not where we want it, so we’re going back in and saying, “Well, how can we make this better?” And I’ve done that with Paul, as well. We wrote a whole two-act piece and threw out the whole second act and went back to the drawing board. We took it back and said, “Where did we start to lose it?” We went back to there and built a completely new piece.

MS: You talked earlier about setting up rules. When it is you writing the music, do you have rules you follow? You have an exceptional vocal range and a way of pulling out singular instruments to play onstage that all seem like they might be representing some point on an underlying framework, maybe just for you or maybe for your audiences. Are you following a playbook of sorts?

RE: Horizon is a case where I found a basic sound world that I came back to over and over again. Everything related to this kind of jangling prepared piano. So we had this instrument that was doing things that weren’t normal to it, and it fit with Horizon—this idea of the exchange of the routine. Reinhart Poole, [the central character in this production], is still a Christian, but his Biblical exegesis has transformed this instrument and it no longer sounds like a piano. Even though we’re not conscious of these things, I’m firmly convinced that there’s an unconscious way in which we interpret them and we understand exactly what’s going on. I do need devices; I do need something unifying the music. I don’t just throw things together because I feel like it. And even though it seems eclectic to a degree, it’s not really that eclectic, which is code for, “he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

MS: So is it fair to say that you kind of play your way, or experiment your way, to the piece? It seems like in so many of these examples you don’t know what you want until you get it.

RE: Yeah. I call it willful ignorance. Experience has taught me that if you think you know what you want, you sometimes miss what’s available to you. For instance, I was interviewing a woman and her husband because she’s going blind and she’s trying to get a driver’s license. I was curious about her and what she was going through because I’m writing this piece about blindness. So I’m concentrating on her because she’s the major source, I think, of information. And then out of the corner of my eye I see something happen in her husband. It’s just a flicker and I glance over, and just for a moment I see the sadness overwhelm him. They had described themselves as athletes and they do all kinds of things together, and he sees that the future that he planned is going down the tubes. And he’s trying to be a good guy, a supportive husband, but then there’s just this sudden weakness and we see him just succumb to a kind of self-pity. And I wrote a whole scene based on this husband who is reviling himself for that moment of self-pity. But if I think it’s all about her, I miss that moment.

And that’s the way I feel in the rehearsal studio. I come in and I generally have a lot of material, I just don’t know what it means. I came in for Horizon and I had a 250-page document. I sat it down on the table and said, “Let’s read.” We read for three days together. And that was an important thing because later on I was in trouble in a transition. I didn’t know how to get from here to there, and then that night an actor knocked on my door and said, “I got this from the middle of those 250 pages. You’d forgotten about it, but I put the first half of this scene with the last half of this scene. Take a look.” It was perfect. If we hadn’t read that 250-page document, I would have just discarded it because it didn’t seem pertinent. He remembered and pasted these two scenes together and handed it to me. Perfect! How do you get that?

You want to be surprised in your work, it seems to me. You can build your dream house and it might be pretty nice, but I keep thinking it could have been so much better if you had not had such a clear idea of what your dream house was, if you’d known that on the way to Oz you were going to find some extraordinary people to walk with and they were going to save your butt. Those people you met on the road to Oz, those are the ones you’re going to actually need, and you didn’t know this when you started the trip.

And that’s what I find wonderful about the community of art and that’s why collaboration is so much fun. People bring odd things to the table. They have quirky ideas. I’ve argued this over and over in lots of places where I say, “Look, do you want to be making literature or do you want to be on an adventure of discovery? That’s a different thing. Do you want to discover the piece? Then don’t start with Hamlet. Hamlet is already done, it’s finished. You don’t need to discover that any more.”

MS: Do you find yourself in that situation when you go back to your own work after a number of years? You just put up And God Created Great Whales again, you’re going to do Orpheus X. Do you get to that point that when it’s your piece in the first place?

RE: Yeah, actually, it was a lot of fun going back to Whales. Number one, after you’ve finished a piece, all of the sudden the logic of it starts to be clear to you—why you did what you did. At the time you did it, you were just guessing. It was a great idea as it turned out, or not, and then later somebody asks you, “Why did you do that?” And then in hindsight you build this whole logic, and pretty soon it’s the story of your building of the piece. And everybody thinks, “Oh, that’s amazing! How did he come up with that? It’s so logical.” And it wasn’t logical at all; it was completely intuitive. And it’s this intellectual exegesis and it’s fun, but it has no bearing on what went on in the room; what went on in the room is something far more interesting than your pathetic analysis. If you proceed that whole process with the pathetic analysis, it’s like, “Okay, I’m analyzing the hell out of it so by the time I get to the piece, why do the piece at all? I’ve already worked out everything. I don’t need to do the piece. There are no surprises left. What’s the point? I’ll just describe it to you. We’ll just parse the sentence and call it a day.”

I think it was maybe after Dry Land Divine at Zankel Hall. A guy came up and said, “Well, you know it’d be a great piece if you did this…if you could just do this.” And I said, “Hold on, let me clarify this for you. This piece is done. You don’t like this piece, but the piece is done. I’m happy with this piece; you are not. End of story.” And there are some pieces I can go back to and think I’m not particularly happy with the result, but I look at the idea and I think, “Is there anything else I want to do with this piece? Why do I want to save this piece?” It’s flawed, but no, I’m not going to change it. I’ve already learned what I need to learn. And then there are the pieces you’re really happy with and you’re just done with.

MS: So it sounds like you do make a habit of some reflection and self-analysis. So is there a macro, “This is what am I trying to do” message that has emerged on a sort of overarching scale? Is there an über-destination to this?

RE: Well, of course one is tempted to see one’s life as the über-journey. And this is something I will always council younger artists to recognize: You’re not building a career here. The career is an artifact of a greater search. And art I don’t think is ultimately the point either, which probably makes me a philosopher. You’re building a life, actually. And that’s important. And you make sacrifices for that life that may not necessarily do anything for your career or even directly enhance your art.

I feel completely at home on the stage at this point. It really is the most comfortable place in the universe for me now. In fact, recently we had a technical problem and we had to stop the show. I just started talking to the audience, and it felt like we were just in my living room, we were always in my living room. This is where I live. If this is what’s happening, fine. Everything is stopped now and I can’t do anything for that, so I’ll just talk to you for a second. And I played some things on the piano and talked about other times in my life when I’d had to stop shows. And we were having a high old time and finally they come back having fixed the equipment, and I said, “Okay, we’ll start from the beginning now.”

Marilyn Crispell in conversation with Molly Sheridan
August 20, 2009—2 p.m. at Crispell’s home in Woodstock, New York
Videotaped by John M. McGill
Video presentation by Molly Sheridan
Transcribed and edited by Molly Sheridan

A dark house. A quiet night. John Coltrane coming through the speakers to deliver A Love Supreme.

When pianist Marilyn Crispell was already in her late twenties, jazz arrived like a spiritual revelation and pushed her through the ensuing decades as smoothly and swiftly as a line of falling dominoes. From Boston to Woodstock, from the Creative Music Studio to the Braxton Quartet and then beyond, Crispell has explored a rich catalog of music both alone and in the company of some of the field’s most talented artists. For a musical trajectory that began behind a piano at the Peabody Conservatory in 1960s Baltimore, it may not have been the most obvious career path, but it’s also not one Crispell seems to have had any doubts about following.

Soft spoken but not shy, in conversation she betrays only hints of the passion she seems to reserve for performances—an experience one critic equated with “monitoring an active volcano.” Still, she aspires to an openness and truth in performance that she also readily offers in off-stage encounters, calling up a rich volume of anecdotes and observations collected in the course of building a life for herself in what she often refers to as “creative music”.

White, female, caught between the worlds of classical music and jazz: Crispell has carried a number of labels through that life, and some have weighed on her more heavily than others. But no matter these pressures, she has been able to follow the music wherever it has led her.

—MS

Marilyn Crispell: It was kind of a combination. I was living with a guy at the time on Cape Cod, and he was a jazz and blues pianist. He had a great collection of contemporary jazz. So one night he was out playing a gig, and I just picked out some stuff to listen to. One of the things was A Love Supreme by Coltrane, and it was a life-changing experience.

MS: Do you remember what it was specifically about that experience that affected you so strongly?

MC: Well, it was dark and very quiet, and I just had this record on. There was a McCoy Tyner solo during one of the sections, and something about the spirit, the feeling of the whole thing, I just felt like—I don’t know how to describe it, really. I felt everything shift. I felt totally drawn into the music, like I had to figure out what was happening and I had to be part of it. But it was very, very intense; I wasn’t just sitting there thinking this. It completely took me over. And not to get too Woodstock-y and weird here, but [laughs] I felt a presence in the room and I felt connected to this presence, which I felt to be the spirit of Coltrane. This is the only time in my life I’ve ever had an experience like this. It was very emotional. I felt like we communicated, and I said something to the effect of “Please help me to enter into this and to learn it and be a part of it. This is what I want my life to be.” And I felt like that was heard. I felt this incredible presence of love. I was just completely overwhelmed. And the interesting thing is, I’ve talked to other people about it—not in this depth—and other people have had the same experience with that recording.

I also told Alice Coltrane, when I was on a double bill with her at a concert in London, about that experience, and she said, “Yeah, that sounds like John.”

MS: So what’s your next step? You had trained at Peabody and the New England Conservatory, and you had all this experience playing the piano in a classical context. What happens after that night?

MC: Right after that I heard about Charlie Banacos, a teacher in Boston who used to teach at Berklee School of Music. At the time I heard about him he was teaching privately, so I moved back to Boston and started studying with him. I studied with him for two years, and while I was in Boston, I met the saxophone player Charlie Mariano who told me about the Creative Music Studio, which was a school up here in Woodstock. I came up here for a visit, went back to Boston and got my stuff, and came back to Woodstock. After that Coltrane experience, things just happened one after the other [snaps fingers quickly].

When I came up to the Creative Music Studio, almost immediately I met Anthony Braxton; he heard me playing in a workshop and then we started playing together. So it was almost as if things were orchestrated. They just happened very fast, and before I knew it, I was on the road playing with all these people who up until that point I had never heard of, actually.

MS: I love that story about your first performance with Braxton where there’s the moment when he puts a beer in your hand and tells you not to play so many notes. It’s such a cute story, but how did it feel for you at the time, while you were feeling your way towards what you wanted to say?

MC: Well, I was still very new to playing this kind of music. I had been improvising since I was young, because when I was at Peabody in junior high school and high school, there was a woman there named Grace Cushman who taught theory and harmony and composition to pre-college kids, and she required everybody to be able to improvise on the piano, even if they weren’t a pianist. So we would learn intervals and then each person would have to do an improvisation focused on perfect 4ths or perfect 5ths or major 3rds or whatever it was that you were studying at that particular time. I still use that concept in my improvisations, like using major 3rds but in an abstract way, not connected to any particular tonal center.

Then after I had this Coltrane experience, I met a guitarist named Baird Hersey, who lived in Boston and had a band called The Year of the Ear. He came over one day and said, “Okay, let’s get you improvising.” It was just him on guitar and me on piano, and it was very scary: It was like going to the edge of a cliff and just jumping off. And he said, “Just keep playing and don’t stop!” So that’s what I did. I played as fast as I could and as much as I could, and until Anthony put that beer in my hand, that was my modus operandi.

MS: So, you come to the Creative Music Studio and meet Anthony Braxton, and from there you moved on to Braxton’s quartet, which represents something like a decade of experience. You came to that at a relatively young point, and then all of you grew so much inside that experience it seems, and then went on to have these amazing careers after the quartet disbanded. What was going on inside that ensemble?

MC: Yeah, well, it was like a family. Playing with Anthony really taught me a lot about space, the use of space and silence and breath, and the use of composition in improvisation. I would say that a lot of the changes came about through the changes that were happening with Anthony’s compositions. When we first started, we were playing quartet music. There would be a small composition or a head, and we would improvise on the feeling of that, on the motives contained there. And then we would play that again and then go on to something else. But as time went on, he got more and more interested in incorporating improvisation with written composition, to the extent that by the end of my time in that quartet we were playing pieces where even some of the solos were written out.

When you play with a group for ten years, a lot of things happen; it’s like a marriage. I feel like we had kind of reached a plateau, actually, and it would have been really interesting where we would have gone from there, but at that point Braxton was teaching at Wesleyan and had just got a MacArthur grant, and I think he wanted to start focusing on operas and other types of things. I think he just felt like we had reached an end of the road that we were exploring together. Each person knew what the other person was going to do; this was his feeling. But I felt, and I think the others in the quartet felt, that we could have and maybe should have pushed past that to see what would happen then.

MS: Any chance for a reunion?

MC: I kind of doubt it. I’m not sure that Braxton is interested. I don’t think he’s ever gone backwards.

MS: Well, to go back to that beer one more time, then, and what he said to you—to kind of give things some space. What about that spoke to you that you could turn around and say yes, you’re right?

MC: It was maybe the beginning of my thoughts about space and silence. Just being inside his compositions taught me a lot about composition. You know, it’s something that I can’t really put into words. What really impressed me is that he was composing in a way that was very similar to contemporary classical musicians but with a lot more freedom, allowing interpretation. Also, when he played, you could hear that he had equal exposure to Stockhausen and to the world of jazz. People accuse him of just being intellectual, but he plays with a tremendous amount of passion. And when he does play traditional jazz, he plays it very creatively.

MS: Do you approach your own music somewhere in the middle of those two points then?

MC: I approach improvising in a very compositional way. I won’t know what I’m going to play when I sit down, but after the first notes, then there has to be some kind of logical development from that. It’s a very natural result of having studied composition and being exposed to a lot of music.

MS: When you do sit down at the piano to play, often your hair is down and covering part of your face and you appear to be very focused on the instrument in front of you. Where are you—mentally, creatively—at that moment? We’re talking so much about energy, so how is it flowing for you at those moments?

MC: I’m not thinking about where I am. I like it when I kind of disappear, because if I’m there too much, if I’m thinking about things too much—especially about who might be in the audience and that kind of stuff—it doesn’t come out right. The best times are when I can disappear, and for that to happen certain things have to be in place. I have to allow myself to go there. It’s hard to do sometimes if there’s a lot of extraneous noise or if the lights are really bright. Sometimes it just happens more easily than others. It’s like in meditation, you know, when they talk about the state that you’re in; they compare it to tuning the strings of a violin. And it can’t be too loose, unfocused, and it can’t be too tight–it has to be just the right tension in the string.

MS: Is that very much an internal headspace equation, or is it more what’s happening around you?

MC: It’s everything. I never know what I’m going to play until I walk into a room and I feel the room, I feel the atmosphere, I feel the people, the ambience—everything contributes to it.

MS: Do you have a process that you go through before each performance to prepare yourself?

MC: Well, beforehand I’ll go through some compositions that I’ll think I might want to play, but I may or may not use them. And I’ll usually practice Bach, just to be in shape. I almost never practice just free improvising because I don’t want to get into a rut—I don’t want it to be really predictable, what I’m going to do.

MS: Is there anything in particular, though, that you find yourself going back to over and over again? And do you keep digging at it or decide it’s time to put it away for a while?

MC: Sure, absolutely. If I’m not feeling particularly inspired, I’ll tend to fall back on certain tried and true things—not planning it that way, it will just happen. I will consciously try not to do that unless it’s what I really feel. I’m trying to be honest in every moment, I’m trying to feel what is real for me at that moment, and what it might be is a lot of silence. If I’m playing with a band, and I’m not particularly feeling or hearing something, I can just lay out. But when I’m playing solo, that’s another story. In that case, I might just allow the space.

Other times I’ll sit down and I’ll feel a lot of energy and I’ll just start right in. I have noticed that I have certain types of things that I often play. There is a totally free thing that will start with some kind of motif, and go through lots of different spaces, often involving a lot of energy. There are the slow, ballad-type things. Or just using sound, maybe even inside the piano. There’s stuff using rhythms, which in a way works better with a band. There’s what I call a sort of bebop feeling, which is not traditional bebop, but it’s a feeling of it, so the bass will be doing a fast walking feeling, not necessarily locked into a time, and then I’ll play fast and free on top of that, sometimes coming into other stuff. And now I have all these compositions that I play by other people.

MS: Well, that reminds me, I’ve heard you talk very carefully about this as “creative music.” It’s not this equation of “this is the head, develop it here, now the drum solo, okay and we’re out.” Is there a categorization for your work that you struggle with, or don’t you pay it any mind?

MC: Yeah, I struggle with it; I think everybody does. I think what I do is largely inspired by contemporary jazz. So in that sense, I would call myself a jazz musician. But I’ve allowed a lot of the things that inspired me when I was doing classical music to enter back into it. I feel there’s a lot of counterpoint to what I do and things that people could think sounded almost more like classical music than traditional jazz, but I wouldn’t call myself a classical musician. And I don’t play much traditional jazz, so some people would say I’m not a jazz musician.

MS: When you’re talking about composed pieces, because of the nature of this art form, you’re composing even when in some ways it’s someone else’s “piece”. How does that flow together? Are there issues of control during a performance that are sort of parsed based on who the primary author of a piece might be?

MC: Well, I have definite ideas about the kinds of things I want to hear. I have a piece called Rounds, and it’s a series of phrases using segments of major scales. And I didn’t write them in any particular time or phrasing, I just wrote all quarter notes with no stems on them. And if there was a space, I’d leave some space on the page. When I played with Joe Lovano and we played that piece, he wrote it out for himself, but I liked it being more free, even though I definitely hear how I want the phrasing to be.

I also have a piece called Ahmadu (Sierra Leone), and that uses a lot of different rhythmic cells that I wrote out. I have definite ideas about how I want people to play certain rhythms against each other and the kind of sound I want, so I do want to have that much control. But then when it gets going, it gets going. All those years I played with Braxton, he never told anyone what to play, never once. I feel like I’m a little more controlling than that, that I might want to hear a certain type of thing or have something interpreted in a certain way, so I want to have some control, but then I have to let go.

MS: It seems like this whole process is a very immersive thing for you, emotional and musical and intellectual, so where does this intersect with your day-to-day life? Which pieces end up actually in the music? Where do you go for inspiration, what do you draw on?

MC: That’s not a conscious thing at all. I don’t see colors and pictures in my head. It’s a totally abstract thing. The one thing that sometimes comes into it is dance, because I did dance and I worked a lot with dancers and did music for dance, so more than anything it’s a sense of movement or choreography, but that’s more when I’m listening to other people play. When I’m playing, myself, I’m just in a space and I don’t feel like there’s any particular thing that is informing that space, but I would say everything in a person’s life comes into that space. It’s like when you cook something and you mix a bunch of ingredients together, and when you’re cooking it you know what the ingredients are. But when it’s all finished and you’re just eating it, you don’t remember what every separate ingredient was.

Like I said, I’m very into dance, I’m very into visual art and nature and animals and poetry and literature, Eastern spiritual philosophy. I’m very interested in other cultures and how people are different and how they come together. So all that stuff is a part of me. I don’t think any of it enters into the music in any particular, specific way.

MS: Occasionally in the media I see you identified very specifically not just as a woman, but as a “white pianist”. Is race something that’s very much on your mind in this semi-jazz field?

MC: Mostly it hasn’t been an issue. Especially when I was first starting, it wasn’t an issue. A lot of the music that inspired me was black music at that time, and I was interested in playing with black musicians. For me, it was a different feeling, and it related to that emotional intensity, although you could say well, okay, white musicians have that, too. But I have to say it was exclusively black musicians who heard me, kind of liked what I was doing, helped me, and invited me to play with them. There was no feeling of competition. It was very generous and kind and respectful. There weren’t any white musicians at that time who took that road. Now I play with a lot of white European musicians and not so many black musicians. That is not by choice, not at all, and that is disappointing to me. It’s not a good or bad kind of thing or better or worse, it’s just different, and I like to experience everything.

But there are racial issues that come up. For instance, one of the musicians I played with early on, Oliver Lake, made a point of saying, “Well, the black musicians help the white musicians to get started, we hire them in our bands, are their teachers, in a way.”—And I have to say, absolutely, Anthony Braxton, Reggie Workman, Roscoe Mitchell, Oliver Lake, they were my teachers.—And he said, “and then they go off and form bands of their own with all white musicians and they just forget about us.” Well, I don’t think that that is intentional. I mean, I notice that I’m playing with these all-white bands, and it’s not intentional. I don’t even know how it happened, really. What I do mostly is play solo and then play with people who invite me to play; I don’t even really have a band at this point. But I do think about trying to consciously get back to play with some of my friends, people like Oliver Lake and Reggie Workman and Andrew Cyrille. I miss playing with them.

MS: When you say that early on that’s where you felt at home, to what do you attribute that? Can you pinpoint what it was?

MC: No, no, I just felt understood. I felt whatever impulse was deep within me, propelling me to play this music, came originally from hearing Coltrane, and there is some seed there; there’s some kind of understanding that I feel with them. Also a kind of emotional compatibility, a kind of sympathetic way of being, a sensitivity. I don’t know. It’s different and not different at the same time. It’s just because people come from different places, different cultures. And so everything that makes you who you are, different things make them who they are, and that’s going to come out in the music. And it’s not a good or a bad thing, it’s just different.

MS: Another facet of the issue is the male vs female categories musicians get strapped with, and I didn’t notice so much in the way of you being identified as a female avant-garde pianist in the press, very little of that “good for a girl” kind of characterization.

MC: Oh, they did. And I got a lot of questions, “How does it feel to be a woman doing this?”, etc. In a way, it might have worked in my favor, because, well, for one it made me more noticeable. There’s always been a strong scene in Europe with women improvising musicians, but over here there weren’t so many. And then Myra Melford came along, another white woman pianist playing contemporary music, Geri Allen, who is black. And it almost seems silly to talk about these things in a certain way, except that a lot of gender and racial issues are coming to the forefront now, and I think it’s maybe good that people talk about them.

As time goes on, it does feel like, okay, we’ve been there. But the thing is for anyone who was alive in the ’60s, that’s still an issue. Especially any African American person or non-white person who grew up here, that has to be an issue. There are a lot of African Americans who feel that white people have stolen their music and want to control their music, so there is this extreme negativity happening when in fact there are a lot of white musicians who just have total respect and love for black music and want to be part of that spiritual landscape and don’t want to control it at all. So it’s very delicate. Just like I’ve learned from Bach and Mozart and Ligeti and all of that, I’ve equally learned from Coltrane and Anthony Braxton and African folk music and stuff like that. So where do you draw the line on these things? There is a lot more that has to be clarified and talked about in this.

I always thought that the area of improvised, free jazz, free music, was pretty much not dealing with these issues, because it didn’t seem to really matter if you were white or black or whatever, a woman or a man. I always felt totally respected. And I’m wondering if that’s changed these days somewhat. I can’t tell you exactly why, but I just kind of have this sense that it has, that people are getting a little more defensive. I’ve actually heard at least one white European musician who wanted so much to belong to the scene and to play with African American musicians and after being kind of brushed off a certain number of times, he said, “Forget it. I play white music.” So there are a lot of issues moving in both directions. And you can’t deny and forget about history, and I think no white person, no matter how sympathetic they are, can ever understand what it feels like or felt like to grow up black or non-white in this country.

When I was in high school, the civil rights act still hadn’t been passed and I went to an all girls school in Baltimore, Western High School, and I’d say ¾ of my friends there were black. And I would go to parties at their houses and be the only white person. I didn’t really think about it, and I don’t think they did either. We were just friends. But after school, there were places we couldn’t go to together to get some ice cream or something, so we’d have to walk for blocks and blocks to get to an integrated place where we could all go in.

The civil rights act was passed my last year of high school, which is kind of dating me—it was 1964. I remember that day we all went to this café across the street from Western High School, which up to that day had been segregated, and we sat down and that’s really still very strong in my mind how pissed off the people who worked there were that they had to serve the black women also. They threw the knives and forks down on the table, and then after they had set the table we got up and walked out. And that was only 40 years ago.

MS: Going back to the issue of gender, I wondered how much that was influenced by the way that you played. I don’t want to say you were aggressive, but maybe it wasn’t an obviously feminine sounding sound?

MC: Or not what people think of as feminine sounds. Maybe. I frequently got the “compliment”—it was meant as a compliment—that “Oh, you play just like a man! You sound like a man. If I closed my eyes, I wouldn’t know it was a woman.” And I used to feel flattered when they said that because I thought, okay, that means the music sounds strong and all that. I mean, I have never been a militant feminist or something like that, maybe because I always felt accepted. I always did what I wanted to do. I’ve wondered sometimes, if I had been a man, if I would have been possibly respected in a different way or offered more work. More than one person has said to me, “Oh, if you were a man you would be this or that, or playing here or there!” And then I found myself starting to wonder, well, could that be true? I don’t know.

MS: It doesn’t seem to have weighed too hard on your thinking, though.

MC: Well, I’ve done a lot of what I wanted to do. And the people I’ve played with, I’ve never felt it was an issue one way or another that I’m a woman.

MS: When you look at the arc of the music that you’ve created, there is a point around the millennium, when to external ears—or at least the people who were publishing reviews about your playing—your music took a radical shift. And it doesn’t seem like that’s how it really felt and sounded to you, so I wonder if you would walk us through that arc.

MC: What happened was in 1992 I went to Scandinavia for the first time, and I heard some Scandinavian musicians play and it touched me very much. Some of this kind of beauty and Nordic sound and tenderness opened up something in me that I had really kept hidden because I was trying to be really strong all the time. Even when I played romantic things I played them with a lot of energy. So suddenly this other sound entered into my consciousness and it resonated with something in me that I had not allowed to be expressed. So in a way playing with them and kind of getting into their music became a way for me to express this. And well, if you haven’t done something ever, or you haven’t done it for a long time, I think you’re naturally going to be interested in that aspect of things for a while. At a certain point a few years ago, I felt the pendulum start to swing back. So I never felt like I just changed everything and gave something up, I just felt like another dimension was being added, and I paid more attention to it for a while because it was really interesting to me because I hadn’t really been there before.

MS: What do you think kept you from expressing those things prior to that?

MC: Well, first of all, I was younger. When I got into this I was 28, and the energy aspect of things is what really appealed to me. Also, I’m an Aries, and I tend to like to play things fast. [laughs] I like to play Bach fast and see how much I can phrase it within that fast tempo. I just have fun doing things like that. So it wasn’t so much that I didn’t let myself do things as much as that it wasn’t part of the picture. I did write some sort of beautiful, romantic pieces, but I would always keep them hidden. I would think, “Oh, I could never play that in a concert. I have to be pure and a kind of disciple of Cecil Taylor. This is my statement and that’s what I have to do; I can’t do this other stuff.” And then at a certain point as I got older I thought, “Well, who says I can’t do that? If that’s something I really want to do, I should do it.” So basically I just got older, and not as kind of fanatic about how I thought I should sound or what my place in the music would be.

MS: That said, was it nerve-wracking for you at the beginning to expose that part of your playing?

MC: It was a little scary. I didn’t know how it was going to be received, and I know for a fact that some of the free jazz elite, particularly in Europe, had a lot to say about it.

People have a lot invested in their identity—okay, this is who I am and she’s part of this and I play with her, so if she goes off and starts doing this other thing, how does that reflect on me? That’s what I think is behind it, because otherwise why would anybody care?

MS: Was this feeling what you mean when you talk about “deep lyricism”?

MC: Yeah, I was playing lyrical things before, but they tended to be more abstract and, you know, I wouldn’t let myself sit down and just play a beautiful melody. I would have to mess it up somehow. Everything I did I would have to mess up—mess up in a good way, trying to do it creatively, whereas now sometimes there will be a beautiful piece I’ve heard or something I’ve written, and I’ll just play it as it is. Maybe improvise on the feeling of that and end that improvisation by just playing that piece, straight.

MS: You’re well known as a frequent performer of Coltrane’s Dear Lord, and that’s often the way you end performances. And there’s nothing aggressive or “messed up” about the way I’ve heard you present that. Is that just a little piece that you’ve carried with you for some reason?

MC: That’s one of them. Another one is After the Rain. And now there are others. I have to play things that speak to my heart, and how they come out nobody can say. I can’t say from one time to another. Sometimes if I play After the Rain, I’ll just play it straight, other times I’ll insert an improvisation in the middle where it just goes wild and then comes back again. But it’s not really planned out. Sometimes I’ll have the idea to do something a certain way, and it just won’t work; it’s almost as if the music wants to go somewhere else. I’m trying to make it go here and it’s trying to go there. So part of what’s happening is letting go and letting what wants to happen, happen.

Sometimes it’s still very wild, but one interesting thing is that in the old days I would play mostly wild stuff and have some lyrical stuff, and people would never remember the lyrical stuff. Never. Even if I thought 1/3 of the concert was that. Now that’s switched. Now if I play some very lyrical, beautiful things and then play a lot of other just free, roaming, some of it fairly wild rhythmic stuff, people will not remember that. They’ll remember the lyrical stuff. So, I would just say don’t have any expectations. And me, too. Don’t have any expectations.

Transcribed by Trevor Hunter
Videotaped by John M. McGill
Video presentation by
Molly Sheridan

Curiosity is probably the most important virtue in any modern creative field, and from all appearances Tyondai Braxton has it in spades. Although NewMusicBox was ostensibly at his band’s rehearsal space to interview him, Braxton started grilling us as soon as we walked in the door. Everything was interesting: Elliott Carter’s music, Pierre Boulez’s pugnacity, early Buchla synthesizers, what Roger Reynolds is really like in person—all sorts of cabalistic minutiae that many in the field take for granted as being overly specialist or dull. “It’s all fascinating to me because I feel very disconnected from the ‘composer world,'” Braxton explained.

Which is itself a bit curious, considering the circles he’s coming from. The son of Anthony Braxton, Tyondai emerged from the Hartt School of Music with a degree in composition, which usually qualifies someone for automatic induction into the “composer world.” But rather than dive headfirst into grant applications, Braxton instead shaped himself as a solo performer. He held audiences captive with just his voice, a guitar, and a henge of effects pedals, throwing a blanket of sound over listeners while he sat cross-legged on the ground (and later, on a raised platform built by architect Uffe Surland van Tams). His abilities were first chronicled on his 2002 debut album, History That Has No Effect, followed by a split LP with Parts & Labor called Rise, Rise, Rise. And then, when he was pretty much already a critical darling, he found even greater recognition as vocalist, guitarist, and keyboardist (often concurrently) for Battles, an unambiguous rock band that takes the prog route in accessibilizing nerdy, complex music.

In this way, Braxton, along with artists such as Andrew Bird and Dirty Projectors’ David Longstreth, might be the best indicator of a trend of university-trained composers who are more likely to find their best successes at rock festivals than gilded concert halls. The rich layerings Braxton can unleash are studied perhaps, but definitely basking in the visceral energy of rock music. But if he feels disconnected from the composer world now, it’s not going to last. Still interested in shaping complex sounds while growing past the solo setup that he used for so many years, his new album Central Market utilizes a novel setup to fill out his timbral palette—the Wordless Music Orchestra. It’s a bold move, since orchestral music isn’t exactly the hip new thing (yet), and those instruments can certainly lay bare one’s technical gaps; but Braxton pulls it off. His compositional style might place him within the context of several “isms,” but what’s actually remarkable is how atypical the results are. He’s not aping existing compositional trends, especially with regard to the blending of instruments and electronics, so much as creating a bizarrely logical extension of what he was already doing.

What’s interesting is that despite being more popular already than just about any composer can hope for, Braxton doesn’t speak of having arrived; moreso one gets the sense that he’s always in development, never one to rest on his laurels. It’s the product of a curious mind, and it’s above all exciting to think about what new areas he might explore.

-Trevor Hunter

Trevor Hunter: Your new record Central Market is sort of a coming out party for you as a composer for orchestra after being on the scene for years as a solo act, and then with your band Battles. But you studied composition at the Hartt School of Music in Connecticut. Did you gain any experience writing for big ensembles there?

Tyondai Braxton: I did. My senior thesis was a piece for large ensemble: strings and two choirs, with three movie projectors running a cut-up version of Ghostbusters. I turned Ghostbusters into this edgy, weird film noir thing, and then we played this really futuristic Radiohead-meets-Ligeti kind of piece behind it. It was overly ambitious. It was an absolute success in the sense that I learned how to put these things together, and of course it was an absolute failure in the sense of it being my first time, and I didn’t really know what I was doing.

But I never wrote for a straight-up orchestra in school. At the time it just didn’t interest me; I really was diving into my electronic music, trying to flesh out my wingspan with my whole solo setup. But I loved rock music, I loved being in bands and simulating orchestral textures without the actual instruments. Because at the time, especially going through school and learning at a conservatory, I associated that music with a dead era. And it wasn’t until I was able to get out from that that I started to realize that it could be re-assimilated in a way that made sense for me.

TH: But it’s one thing to realize that you could write for orchestra and another thing entirely to have a serious desire to do so. It’s certainly not easy. Why are you so into it?

TB: Well, my music for my whole life has been simulating a larger sound; I work a lot with loops and effects to create this contrapuntal, multilayered simulation of what I could imagine a group doing. Central Market was an opportunity for me to realize it in a way that has a new dimension to it, a new color. I love orchestral music. Orchestral music isn’t just for the establishment—as composers, it’s up to us to reclaim some of that music for ourselves.

I feel like we’re living in a time right now where all music and the boundaries between these different genres and the politics between music doesn’t really make sense any more. I feel like that’s kind of been blown open—in the past 30 years, but especially now. You know, the change in the millennium, iTunes and downloads, bands giving their records away for free—I feel like it’s just a new era of sharing, and a new era of absorption that previous generations didn’t have access to because of the technology. But I feel like all of these things are reasons to investigate music that—maybe it did have a predefinition before of how it can be used and who can use it, but I don’t feel that that applies anymore. And that’s just the politics of it—sonically, who wouldn’t want to use the orchestra? You can do so much with that sound. I find it incredibly exciting.

TH: There’s definitely something about listening to a sound that rich, and that large, with so many different musicians.

TB: I remember it clicked for me when I played with Glenn Branca in Hallucination City for 100 guitars. John Cage once got up from one of Branca’s performances and said, “I have to leave, this guy’s a fascist.” But there’s a part of me that loves that fascist vibe in Branca. Hallucination City is 10 rows, there’s 100 guitar players, 10 guitarists to a section, and I remember we were out there playing, and you felt like it wasn’t you, it felt like you were in this community. Literally, in my row of 10 people, we were all in this together, and we were playing these chords in unison, and we happened to be at the center of this ensemble, and I remember there was a section where we had to tremolo on this low G chord, and suddenly the whole group started tremoloing on G, but in pockets—Wharton Tiers is behind us playing drums, and suddenly your whole section would erupt with a G, and then somewhere behind you, and somewhere in front of you that same G would be answered, two rows that way, and four rows that way. Dwoosh! Dununun…. DWOOSH…dununun. But it wasn’t a rhythm, it wasn’t like an obvious call and response. So you’re just playing, it’s like you’re running through the forest, and then you hear these pockets of explosions come up simultaneously. And right there, I was like, this is the fucking coolest thing about music. It’s the community sense. And that’s what I want to achieve as a composer. It’s not about me. I don’t want it to be about my “cool riffs” and my “hip effects”, you know? I want it to be this world that I can create where people can all work together to create a universe. And that is the shit.

TH: I’m totally with you there—I played in Rhys Chatham’s Crimson Grail last year, and again coming up this year. Of course it’s fun and rewarding to perform in general, but to play with 200 other people is a different experience, a whole other feeling entirely.

TB: And that’s what draws me to an orchestra. That’s what draws me to simulating these mass amounts of sound, is the communal aspect, and the teams of it. I love teams. So that to me is one of the most exciting parts of having a large group of people, and composing in general.

TH: That explains the desire to write for such a large ensemble, but when did you actually start writing the pieces on Central Market? Did you write them all at the same time?

TB: Well, no. “Platinum Rows”—that’s the central piece on the record, it’s the longest guy—I started writing him right as my band Battles’s last record, Mirrored, was being finished up. While we were writing that record I started to kind of find myself and realize, “Oh my god, I want to start writing really large scale orchestral pieces.” I started writing it then, but then I had to take a break because we ended up touring for like a year and a half; it was just non-stop craziness and focus on the band. I had to kind of put all the stuff away for a little bit. But it took me maybe about a year to write “Platinum Rows”, and then honestly I was like, “I want to have a record around this.” So I wrote the other pieces around it just to fill it out. Except for the last two tracks [“J. City” and “Dead Strings”], those are older.

TH: So it just felt like those two fit with the narrative and everything else.

TB: It felt like they fit. Those songs came directly out of my solo setup, but because of that they’re very limited, basic kind of songs. Which is cool, but I wanted to blend that world with my new orchestra universe and see how they fit. And also, symbolically, I didn’t want to abandon that whole way of working.

TH: Does that mean though that you’re transitioning away from your solo shows? Central Market is a solo album, but there are a couple dozen people on it. Your first solo album, History That Has No Effect, was—with a couple exceptions—just you and your guitar, creating these massive sound structures.

TB: The best thing about that was the constraint involved. Where you have no choice but to try and find options based in this world that you’re working in to simulate these sounds. There’s no other way around it. I didn’t want to use a computer, I wanted to have everything done live, so I appreciated those constraints and I learned a lot from them, but at a certain point those constraints kind of turned against me. I kind of bore all the fruit I could have got out of it, and then the question was how do I proceed?

I haven’t played solo in about a year and a half. Mostly because of the schedule with the band, but also because—I mean, I’ve been doing that for 14, 15 years? And I felt like I’d really gone as far as I could go. I didn’t want to stop, but at the same time, I was like, “I gotta move on from this. I gotta go to the next level.” I do love that format, and don’t totally intend to abandon it, but I couldn’t go on the way that I had been going on.

TH: But as you said, the elements of you and your guitar are still on the new record. It’s recognizably you. Did working with the orchestra change your approach to your own instrument at all?

TB: Well, when I was testing out examples of Central Market‘s music before the whole orchestra was there, I’d hear someone play an instrument and to me it sounded like the first time someone had ever played the instrument in my life. I’d hear it, and I’d say, “Oh my god, this is fucking beautiful! I’ve gotta write for it!” Suddenly I’m looking at their instrument, and I’m looking at my guitar, and I’m thinking, “Aw, man.” Because I’ve been relegated to my instrument for such a long time. But the great thing was, now after working with all of these instruments, I’d come back to the guitar kind of refreshed, wanting to incorporate some techniques that I heard other instruments do in a way, like, “Aw, man, that would be cool to hear on guitar.” So the guitar suddenly for me isn’t so sacred, it’s not this building block of everything now. Now it’s just another sound.

TH: But what’s interesting is that this transition for you has led to this interesting hybridization in your style. Obviously there’s the orchestra now, which might lead someone to call it “classical” or “new music”, but your background from the solo stuff is this—I don’t know, experimental rock?

TB: The great thing about definitions like “new music” or “experimental” or “rock” or anything is that it doesn’t—I mean, maybe “rock” is a little more predefined in pop culture, but what does “experimental” mean? It doesn’t really mean anything. And even more vague, “new music”. Sure, I’m “new music”, that’s fine with me. It doesn’t mean a thing, so that sounds good to me. Any artist that’s alive today and has multiple influences directing the way that they’re writing will tell you that you can’t sum them up so easily with one definition; and let me stay that course and say that too, in the sense that as a human being living now in 2009 with all that is able to be absorbed, I kind of happen to put it in this fashion right now. So I leave it to you guys to kind of define it, in a way. I think the easiest way is to say it’s a summation kind of music. It’s a new music based on the absorption of history, and of what I’m interested in now, and what’s budding on the horizon. Yeah. Summation music. That sounds pretty cool.

TH: This whole “categorization” question gets bandied about a lot, though. For whatever reason, it’s important to a lot of people.

TB: Well, as a composer, it’s the last thing you want to discuss; but as a listener, it’s important to me, too! If someone asks, “What kind of music is that record?”, I don’t give a three sentence explanation. I say, “Oh, it’s like this rock band that’s good.” It’s like two different hemispheres of the brain. But as a composer, I think categorization is dangerous in the sense that it marginalizes a lot of the attributes of a piece by summing it up into one thing, and the bad thing is that if people were aware of the depth of some of these musics, they would realize that there’s so much more to it, and it’s so much more exciting than what it’s presented as. But categorization is good in the sense that we have a means of communicating about these different types of music. Especially if someone is really interested in music and is just starting out and trying to find their way, a five page thesis might be kind of alienating.

TH: But going back to this issue of hybridization and making your own niche: Maybe because you’re coming at this from a different angle than most people who are trained to write for large ensembles, you’re not following a trodden path or community in terms of how to use the orchestra—especially concerning the blending with effects and guitar and voice. What was the process behind realizing that sound?

TB: Working with the orchestra, I knew it wouldn’t be a good idea to construct these sounds and record them myself and then just take the entire orchestra and plaster it on top, because it would be two different realities. I recorded the orchestra section by section—violin 1s, violin 2s, violas, double bass, woodwinds, and brass—and I approached it in a segmented way because that’s how I approached the recording of my sounds.

I don’t use MIDI to create my music because it’s too cold, you can’t get a feeling for it. I hate hearing MIDI horns or MIDI anything to create something, because you have no idea what the feeling is going to be. So I would simulate a trombone or a trumpet with a mute by having an auto-wah, and have the auto-wah very sensitive, and then with distortion I would fade up the sounds of the guitar, so it would be like Wah wah waaaah! So it would sound like a douchy kind of horn thing. And the sound of it, it’s a funny approximation of it, but it’s also imperfect. But it sounds real, you know? As stupid and dumb as it sounds, it actually sounds cool. So I’ll play, and I’ll make these sketches with my toys here. And then once I find something that resonates enough, I’ll record the sketch into Pro Tools or Logic and orchestrate it. And that’s kind of the way I work. So I had the record pretty much mapped out before approaching the orchestra, and then we went into the studio and just had them go in one section at a time, and go for it.

And seriously, anything but MIDI. And then the funny thing is, I’ll use some of these effects as placeholders for when I record it, and then I’ll say to myself, “Well, I’ll really use this instrument.” Then as time goes on, I’m like, “Well actually, wait, this sounds pretty cool.” Hence the kazoos. I was like, “Kazoos, all right, this will be trumpets, okay?” What respectable man would have a kazoo on his record? Not me. And then, well, skip a couple months ahead, and these kazoos sound fucking awesome, I want to keep this, and I’ll have horns doing different parts or doubling the kazoos sometimes.

TH: Aside from a transition toward a new way of working and the inclusion of the orchestra, there’s also some recognizably different elements in this record compared to History. For instance, there’s a much strong rhythmic element now. Is that from your experience working in Battles?

TB: Absolutely. That’s the thing—with my solo setup, I’m simulating large groups; I’m simulating this, I’m simulating that. In my imagination, I’m like, “Oh, this is what it really is.” But with Battles, it’s literal that now I’m actually playing with people. Now I get to once again reconnect with playing in bands, and know what it means to have this kind of counterpoint, and these kinds of decisions that have to be made with other people as musicians and as people. All these things kind of inform the way that you work with sounds, too—not just the sound itself. The personality of the person. What x person says, how they want to approach this thing. Suddenly that relationship is very important in composing. So with that new information, I’m kind of reapproaching the solo stuff that I was only synthetically creating. So now I get to actually try with these instruments what I’ve learned as far as interaction with the band.

TH: Then I would imagine everything you’ve done on your new solo record is going to come back around and affect what you do with Battles.

TB: Yeah, it is. I wish I could answer more in the sense that I wish we had more content that I could tell you about; it’s still very new right now, we’re just starting this new record. I feel great having done Central Market and having this behind me, and now using what I learned from that back now with the band. The funny thing is though, being that I’m one of four, we each are master songwriters in the band. So, in a way, I have to minimize my ideas, and have it fit into this framework. So there’s always some new challenge back and forth. It’s not so easy to just take everything and go, “Oh cool, all right guys, now we’re going to have an orchestra on the next piece. Now you do this, and you do this.” It’s not going to be that simple. But the intuition that I gained from doing this record I think will be very important in the way that I approach my way of working for the new record.

TH: Something that hasn’t changed much over time, as you’ve pointed out, is your love of loops. It’s a technique that seems to align you to these traditions—at first I thought of Steve Reich, but even more than that—and especially now that I’ve heard them orchestrated—I would say John Adams.

TB: I love John Adams. My girlfriend bought me tickets to Doctor Atomic for my birthday, and that fucking opera is amazing. It’s awesome. That guy gets a lot of flack, man, he’s like the Aaron Copland of our generation—not to disrespect him like he doesn’t have his own thing, because he does, but I’m just saying that’s the role that he plays. But I love his music, and his use of repetition is just another tool; he uses it when he wants to, and then throws it away when he doesn’t want to. And I appreciate the role that it plays in his music.

TH: Is your looping technique a product of the influence of composers like Adams, or more the technology you’re working with?

TB: Truthfully, I do believe it began more as a product of the technology I was working with. When I first started doing loops, it was like a party trick that I’d show my friends. I did not at all approach it as this serious thing. And then as time had gone on, I realized I found something interesting about it, doubled with the fact that I didn’t have to rely on anybody, I could just do this myself and I could build this world myself without having to wait for band practice,—that’s when I started to get excited. And now, as I’ve gotten older and I’ve gotten more serious about composition, it kind of works in tandem, where you start to look at other composers who have used loops and see what they’ve done and try to incorporate other people’s ideas and see if you can make them your own in your own world.

TH: A big influence that was mentioned in the press release for Central Market is Stravinsky, which I can definitely hear in several of the tracks.

TB: Yeah, I actually kind of regret that press release, because it actually puts a little bit too much emphasis on Stravinsky—but I love Stravinsky, and he really was instrumental, especially for “Platinum Rows”. I timed the opening of his piece Song of the Nightingale—I think it’s like 20 seconds long, and just the breadth of that opening is so sick, like, I gotta copy at least the timing of it. I never actually copied his music per se, but the feeling in his decisions insofar as how long something develops and how long something is released, that was very informative to me.

TH: That brings up something interesting about time; you’ve done some things that are relatively lengthy—A Sentence is Worth a Thousand Words from your first solo record, History That Has No Effect, is something like 18-minutes long in three movements—but still, compared to classical music, the timings are much more compressed.

TB: To be honest, the one thing I learned after doing this record is that I have absolute ADD. I jump from one thing to the next because I get bored, and I like that kind of collage feeling. I’ll critique myself and say that I do wish I had let some parts settle a little more, and even get boring a little more before they moved on. I do like the hyper-compressed vibe, and it’s energetic, but timing-wise, I definitely said to myself, “Okay, next time I know what I want to do.”

TH: One thing I’ll definitely say about Central Market though is that it very successfully avoids an easy pitfall; I hear a lot of orchestral pieces that try to add electric guitar, or Hammond organ, or whatever, and it always sounds like an accessory—

TB: Right, it sounds like two different dimensions at the same time, I know.

TH: But you managed to avoid that.

TB: Well, I was very conscious of what kind of subtlety is involved in combining these two worlds in a way that makes sense, especially with electronics and orchestra—especially using pre-programmed, very slick sounding synths against these very organic sounding instruments. I’ve never heard work that feels real to me in a way.

I think it also had to do a lot with the recording process; we treated the acoustic instruments in the same ways that we treated the electronics. For instance, we recorded the string section in a very dry room, and then instead of adding reverb, we actually took the summed content of a section of the orchestra and sent it through this really nice PA in this gallery at the studio. So we re-recorded the instruments in the orchestra through this huge PA, and then we’d use that same PA to throw electronics through too, so the environment is very homogenized. If you don’t record anything direct, and then have an acoustic instrument slathered on top, it’s two conflicting environments and any audience member can say, “Oh, that’s weird.” You know, you don’t have to be a master listener to be able to feel something off there.

TH: Speaking of audiences, I noticed that you’re engaging them in a bit of programmatic way, with a narrative. The press release makes reference to Central Market being a metaphor for the global economic collapse.

TB: Oh, yeah. I think that’s a funny statement. I’ll say this: my way of working sonically and aesthetically has a lot to do with polarity. I like polarity. I think that the only way for positive to move forward is for negative to move forward at the same time underneath it. That ying/yang just gives so much of a wider spectrum. And that’s why I like the title of the record, Central Market—I like alluding to two potential ways of defining it. On one hand, on Central Market, I was actively referencing the opening scene in Pétrouchka by Stravinsky, the Shrovetide Fair. Whimsical land in St. Petersburg, dancers coming in the scene, and puppets come to life and start dancing. Sounds great. And then on the other side, yeah, with what we’ve all been going through, when the word “market” comes up these days, I don’t think of a store. I think of a global economy. I just like the play from fantasy to reality. When we think of a market right now, we think of—almost on the Wagnerian scale—of catastrophe, in this case financial collapse throughout the world. And both of those subjects in tandem I think create an interesting kind of picture. And musically, I think it’s interesting—the very first piece, “Opening Bell”, could be the opening bell like when you open the door to the market and the bell rings and it’s like a little candy shop, or the opening bell of the stock market in the beginning. And then it just slowly turns from naïve and optimistic to cynical and dark through the record. And again, just a suggestion. You don’t have to think it’s that way.

TH: But in that way, the pieces add to each other. They’re related. It’s not, in other words, a singles record.

TB: Exactly. Warp asked if there was a track that I should give at first to everybody, and I chose to give the second track, “Uffe’s Woodshop”, because it’s kind of exciting and it’s very busy and torrid. But I have to admit the second I did that, I regretted it, because that’s not what the record is about. It isn’t about a piece, it’s about the entirety. I know in our iTunes generation people are just going to buy a track and say, “Oh yeah, this track’s cool” or whatever—at least I hope they do—but really, it should be listened to from front to back. That’s how I imagine it.

TH: You never know, people might download it—legally or not—along with the rest of album as well.

TB: It just sucks when your pieces are movement-based and it’s fragmented, where it gives the listener the opportunity to say, “Oh, what’s this new album about? Oh, this track?” And they’ll download “Unfurling”, which is just like this drone piece. Which I love, but I wouldn’t characterize that as the statement I’m trying to make necessarily. It’s the composite statement. So that’s the only trouble. I should have released the whole record as one track; then I wouldn’t have had that problem.

TH: So, considering all the nuances that went into the recording, the integration with effects, the quasi narrative of the composite piece, et cetera, can you actually play this stuff live?

TB: Yeah, I think you can play it live, but it would take a bunch of people. I want to play it live. I won’t be able to do it by the time the record comes out because right now Battles is writing a new record, we’re kind of knee-deep in it, but the hope is to do something close to the end of the year, or more realistically the beginning of next year sometime. I tried to map these ideas out beforehand, thinking to myself that I want to be able to do this live, so I can’t do something that’s so crazy that it’s outside of that ability. But I will admit that one fear that I have in mixing a lot of these different worlds is getting a balance between the instruments where you’re not losing the strength of the electronics. A lot of the electronics have to be louder, because it reacts to the space more when they’re louder, but then they would dwarf the orchestra. So it’s definitely something I’m thinking about as far as live performance. It can and it will be done.

TH: You have a new piece, Pulse March, for Bang on a Can’s Asphalt Orchestra, and you’ve already had a string quartet played by Kronos. What was that experience like?

TB: It was incredible. It was a great learning experience; I had never written a string quartet before. I arranged the second track of Central Market, “Uffe’s Woodshop,” for them to play as a string quartet. And it’s great because they played it as part of a larger set of theirs which totally blew my mind open on what I thought was possible for a string quartet to play these days. I mean, the Kronos Quartet is unreal. The first thing I said to David Harrington when were done was, “Do over. I demand a do over. You have to let me write you another piece. Just watching you guys do your thing, it’s like a masterclass.” And it was great watching them do my piece; it was such an honor. But at the same time it was like, okay, cool, next time I know what I’m going to do. I wouldn’t do it like that, I’d do it like *snaps*. I’m psyched to start doing that kind of stuff, just writing pieces for different groups.

TH: Would you be into doing a crazy, huge, ambitious project like Hallucination City?

TB: Sure! Yeah, sounds good to me. Just give me that grant money, I’ll work it out. But yeah, Battles right now is going full throttle, and once this new record is done, I’ll have some time again to do my thing. And, yeah, I want to do another big project. I want to build off what I’ve done, and do something bigger and more thorough and more interesting.

Transcribed by Julia Lu
Videotaped by Trevor Hunter and John McGill
Video presentation by
Molly Sheridan

For over a decade I’ve wanted to do a talk with Gunther Schuller for NewMusicBox. But which Gunther Schuller? As a composer, I’ve long been fascinated by how he was able to turn a 12-tone row into something as non-dodecaphonic-sounding as his Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee and wanted to learn more about his seemingly alchemical use of mutes in his Brass Quintet No. 2. As a jazz aficionado, I’m grateful for his reconstruction of Charles Mingus’s Epitaph and his orchestration of Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha, and I’ve long been awestruck by the seeming omniscience of his two exhaustive volumes of jazz history—Early Jazz and The Swing Era. Like many readers of these books, I’ve also been immensely frustrated that no third volume was ever published. And as someone simply curious about music history trivia, I wanted to learn more about Schuller the French horn virtuoso who is the only person I can think of who worked with both Toscanini and Miles Davis.

Then there was Gunther the conductor, who has championed so much contemporary music over the years, and Gunther the record producer and music publisher, whose advocacy for a wide breadth of music first turned me on to the atonal piano preludes of the early 20th-century Russian avant-gardist Nikolai Roslavets, the concert works of film composer Alec Wilder, a charming string quartet by forgotten maverick Louis Gruenberg, and Lewis Spratlan’s remarkable composition When Crows Gather, as well as the amazing jazz vocalist Mary LaRose.

If I had my druthers I would want to talk to Gunther for hours, days even, but he’s way too busy for that. Eighty-three years young, he’s still hopping from train to plane to conduct, lecture, compose, arrange, and engage in scads of other things, and he remains notoriously difficult to pin down. Luckily I knew where he’d be the first Monday of May—at the American Music Center’s Annual Membership Meeting and Awards Ceremony to receive AMC’s Founders Award. So we met up with him in his hotel room at the Hotel Pennsylvania early the next morning.

As luck would have it, that hotel was a frequent destination for Gunther in the 1940s—he’d go listen to all the big bands play there every night as soon as he was done playing in the pit orchestra for the Metropolitan Opera. So being back there again served as a trigger for tons of memories. As one of the few musicians who crossed racial lines in pre-Civil Rights America, when big bands were identified by their race as much as the music they were playing, his reminiscences are particularly poignant. But perhaps even more startling for me was learning the story of how he was unwittingly forced into the Hitler Youth as an eleven-year-old boarding school student in Germany. Ultimately every question I had for Gunther led to answers that resulted in my wanting to ask ten additional questions. But after two hours, he was on a train to his next destination.

—FJO

***

Frank J. Oteri: One of the many, many roles that you’ve had in music has been as an educator. You’ve taught at many of the most prestigious universities and conservatories. Your books have been incredible pedagogical resources for people, and many of your compositions, in addition to being aesthetically important, have been pedagogically significant as well. But ironically, you yourself are self-taught as a composer.

Gunther Schuller: And I’m a high school drop out. I have no degrees, no diplomas, no nothing! I dropped out of high school at age 16 because I was ready to be a professional, and as people know my debut concert as an orchestra player was with Toscanini and the New York Philharmonic. That’s starting at the top. I’m very fortunate.

Gunther Schuller in the 1970s; photographer unknown

But I have always wanted to share my acquired knowledge, and it’s pretty vast by now in so many areas of music. Of course, teaching is one way of doing that. Although that started sort of minimally; at first, I was just teaching horn at the Manhattan School of Music. Then I started coaching chamber music groups and suddenly I was becoming well enough known as a composer that I was hired by Yale. Next came the New England Conservatory, then Tanglewood, and then of course hundreds of university visits and lecturing and all of that. And I’ve been very happy doing this teaching, training, or whatever you want to call it, because I have had so many incredible learning experiences myself. I’m still learning. I’m the eternal student. And I feel I have to share it. But the one thing about teaching I learned is that it is just about one of the most exhausting things you can do; it’s even physically exhausting. I was in denial about that for about 30 years. If you’re just sitting and talking, how can that be physically exhausting? But it is. It’s probably because you drain out all of your acquired knowledge and a certain kind of energy is expended in doing that. I find it more tiring than doing physical work in the woods.

FJO: Well, in addition to sharing the knowledge, you also want to motivate and inspire the people that you’re sharing the knowledge with, which gets back to how unusual it is that you were self-taught given your subsequent career trajectory. There was no individual person who was a mentoring teacher for you?

GS: No. But I had, on the other hand, quite a few mentors in all sorts of different areas at different times. I’m very lucky that way. And when I met someone whom I suddenly realized was a great important person, I liked to get to know him. I didn’t want to exploit this person, just learn from him. It just was natural, and I was ready for these people. Sometimes there are situations where you meet someone and they want to give you some information and there are people who can’t receive it. But, boy, was I ever ready, every time, whether it was someone like the great conductor Dmitri Mitropoulos or some of the people I played with in the Cincinnati [Symphony] Orchestra. There were some orchestra musicians who had come from the old country where my father came from and who had played in the Berlin Philharmonic with Furtwängler. They were marvelous artists. I learned so much about the history of music and performance through people like that. I’m proud of the fact that my appetite for knowledge was so voracious that I seemed to be always ready for what anybody wanted to offer me.

FJO: But I imagine there was lots of music in your household. Your father was a violinist in the New York Philharmonic.

GS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I always could quip that I heard music in my mother’s womb. I was destined to become a musician. But it’s more than that. My two sons are now the sixth generation of musicians, so we’re building a little dynasty here. We know about all this now that to some extent, not always, one is genetically disposed to these things. And that certainly seems to have been true in my case, although very interestingly it wasn’t until I was eleven, and that’s rather late, that I had any interest in music of any kind. Performing, composing, whatever it might have been. And that’s very strange. Again, as you mentioned, since I had this musical background, I mean, I heard music every day of my life practically. Somehow I wasn’t interested. Yet when I finally became interested, then my parents told me, “When you were four or five years old, you would sit in the bathtub and play with your rubber ducks, or whatever, and you would sing the whole Tannhäuser overture imitating the trombones and the violins and the clarinets. You would do amazing things, but it seemed never to take.” They even mentioned when I was in Germany once as a baby, I was sitting on the potty and they had a phonograph on, a windup phonograph, and it was playing Roses From the South by Johann Strauss, and I started to conduct and sing. So there was this thing in me all the time. But why it never wanted to manifest itself in all those young years from, let’s say, three to eleven, I have no idea.

FJO: You also lost your left eye when you were eleven.

GS: That happened in Germany. My parents had sent me to a private school in Germany, and I had this accident with my eye there that precipitated my return to America. Suddenly they get a telegram that I’m in the hospital with my eye gone. In those days, there were no airplanes yet—this was 1937— so my mother took a ship. Of course, that took seven days to come over. There was some music in that private school. It was a marvelous school by the way. Talk about mentors. I am so fortunate. I went to two of the greatest schools one could possibly ever go to. One was that one in Germany, a chain of private schools, mostly for foreign children. And St. Thomas Choir School here in New York on 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue. But anyway, in the school in Germany they had a certain amount of music and every morning, once we got out of the shower and had done some running, we went into a room and we sang two Bach chorales every morning. They’d hand you a chorale, maybe one of the most familiar—Ein’ feste Burg, you know—and we would read these. Now it’s a long time ago, and I can’t quite remember why it is that we all could read music. Me included. But I remember the other thing that sort of intrigues me, since I then did become a musician who loves inner voices, is that I always wanted to sing the alto voice even though I was a soprano and was supposed to sing the top line. Somehow my harmonic sense, whatever that was and as limited as it was at the time, wanted me to explore that inner voice.

FJO: You were probably too young to realize what was going on as an 11-year old, but Germany was a strange place to be in 1937.

GS: Oh my God, yes. Well listen, it got very strange in my case because, of course, Hitler came in in 1933. I went there first in ’32, but by the time I left, I was drafted into the Hitlerjugend, believe it not.

FJO: I never knew that.

GS: It was the most amazing experience and of course Hitler wasn’t supposed to do that. These private schools were supposed to be off limits, but he never stayed with any treaties or agreements that he ever made, and so suddenly we were all in brown uniforms. All of us kids from China, from Brazil, from everywhere. Ridiculous. And then the commandant, who was a sadist, beat the shit out of us once a day just for practice. And I got alarmed. I wrote my parents and said, “What’s going on here?” And they couldn’t believe what I was writing them. They thought maybe I was fantasizing or exaggerating or something, but anyway they eventually inquired and were told yes, the school had been taken over by Baldorf von Schirach who was the head of the Hitlerjugend. So it was a good thing that I got out of there. But those are not experiences every child has.

FJO: By no means. Well it’s interesting that your father was a string player. I don’t know about your grandfather or your great grandfather, but you gravitated toward the French horn.

GS: My father certainly tried me on the violin and piano, and I showed absolutely no talent for either of those instruments, which disappointed him. Once I became interested in music, I went to the flute first. When I came back from Europe, my parents took me to Carnegie Hall all the time. So one day I was up in the fifth balcony with my mother listening to a concert, and I saw something way down there on the stage that glistened and shone. I didn’t quite know what it was, but I said that I wanted to play that instrument. It turned out that this was John Ahmens, a Dutch-born flutist; he had the first gold flute. Most flutes are silver or wooden. But in 1935 George Barrère, who was sort of the Rampal of the 1930s, had a platinum flute made for him for which Edgard Varèse then wrote a famous piece, Density 21.5. Ahmens was so jealous of all the notoriety that Barrère got because he thought he was a better flutist than Barrère. So he got himself a gold flute. As silly as this all sounds, that’s how I became a flutist. And I loved the flute, but after awhile I got a little bored with the literature of the flute. It turns out to be somewhat limited, even in the orchestra. For example, Mozart very often didn’t use a flute.

Gunther Schuller as a young French hornist, ca. 1940s

Anyway, one day during an intermission my father was talking with one of his colleagues who happened to be a horn player, the fourth horn of the orchestra, and he said I was getting bored with the flute and had no talent for the violin and piano. “Well,” he said, “Try horn.” His name, by the way, was Robert Schulze. He was one of the two main teachers in New York, and he was at the Manhattan School and Robert Franzel was at Juilliard. So if you wanted to have a good teacher, those were the two. So about four weeks later, Schulze comes over to our apartment in Woodside, Long Island, and he has a cigar box and a horn, and he says, “Stand over there by the wall.” You know, I was about 20 feet away and he’s looking at me. I could tell he was looking at my lips, my would-be embouchure, and said, “Ah, I got it.” He went to the cigar box and there were about 50 mouthpieces in there. He rummaged around, and he picked one mouthpiece, and he gave it to me. He handed me a horn, took the mouthpiece, stuck it in the horn, and he said, “O.K., you hold it like this. Now play.” And he didn’t direct me, you know. I said, “What do I do?” “Well, just put it to your lips.” He wasn’t showing me. He wanted to see where I naturally would put this mouthpiece. So I did this and I went pfffft, and out came the most beautiful F, a fifth below middle C—not a fart, not some groaning sound, just this very nice decent long tone. “Oh,” he said, “my God, what a talent.” Well, that’s the beginning of how I became a horn player. And two years later, I was already a professional at the very highest level. So I must have had some talent, you know.

FJO: That’s not an instrument most people just pick up.

GS: Yeah. I know. That was fascinating to me. I loved the horn, and when I gave it up in 1963, I cried for three days. I still miss it very much.

FJO: So you never play it anymore now.

GS: No, you can’t play any instrument part time, or even for fun, let alone the French horn which is a very difficult instrument. It requires endurance. Right now, I can pick up a horn and play a few notes, but it’s pretty wobbly. And the muscles are all gone.

FJO: Yet once upon a time you were playing for the top orchestras, you were even in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. I imagine the way you learned all of the standard repertoire was from your experience in the Met Orchestra and before that in Cincinnati. I imagine you were also involved with a number of premieres of new music at that time. So I’m wondering what turned you from a player into a composer.

GS: Well, it’s the other way around. What I forgot to mention is that the first thing I wanted to do was to compose, not play an instrument. Usually at age eight or nine, somebody wants to play a trumpet or play the piano. I wanted to compose. And so I started doing that. I still have some scraps of things I wrote when I was 11 or 12, big goose egg notes, ridiculous stuff. I just learned by myself, and I started collecting records when I was 13—classical and jazz.

I couldn’t afford to buy scores, but I began going to the 58th Street library, which was the second biggest music library in New York City. The other was at 42nd Street. But at 58th Street, you could take things out. And so, every week, while I was studying at the Manhattan School of Music with Mr. Schulze, I would stop off at 58th Street, and I would grab about ten scores—everything from Sibelius to Stravinsky, to Mozart, Bach, whatever—and I’d devour these and listen to the recordings, as well. Then bring them back and bring home another batch of ten.

I had this voracious energy and appetite, and so I learned very quickly, all by myself from the source, which is the score, and performances—and I soon learned, by the way, that you can’t trust all performances. Then of course, later when I became a player, I learned the music from the inside, sitting in that sound—I mean, the experiences I had, almost all the time! For example, the first time I played Othello was with Fritz Busch; this was in 1947 or something like that. I don’t know if you know Othello. It starts with a huge, storm scene, and I could feel the boards of the pit vibrating; the music was coming into me—this immense sound; I get goose pimples even as I talk about it. What I’m talking about is a tiny example of how one can acquire a deep, intimate knowledge of music by performing in it. Particularly at such a high qualitative level and how much you can learn if then you set your mind to doing that. A lot of my colleagues were sitting there fairly bored playing Othello for the 912th time. But I never got bored with any opera, no matter how many times I played it. I was there to learn. People ask me who my teacher was. Well I didn’t have any teachers. But my two teachers were the scores and playing in orchestras. And you asked about contemporary music. Of course that came very quickly. It turned out that I had of course immediately a keen interest in contemporary music partly because I’m a composer, and through collecting records. I bought all the modern recordings there were. And soon I became known as the horn player in New York who could play the most difficult horn music in contemporary music.

FJO: I’m curious to learn about how you first heard 12-tone music. This is not the kind of thing that was getting played much at the time.

GS: There wasn’t all that much 12-tone music played, especially by the orchestras, until Mitropoulos came along. And that was in 1953 or something like that. He played so much Schoenberg and Second Viennese School and all kinds of 12-tone music from Europe. Not just 12-tone. He felt that that music was being neglected in America. He thought this was very unbalanced programming and so he put that right. And we all got to hear this great music of Berg and Webern and Roger Sessions and so on. Of course, he finally paid a price for all that because he lost his job. The audiences complained too much: Too much contemptible music. But I feasted on all that. Where modern music, maybe not 12-tone, but atonal or complex music, polyphonically complex, so on, was played a lot was on the contemporary music concerts like the ISCM and the League of Composers and the Composers Forum. There were a lot of those things up in Miller Theatre at Columbia University. And when there was a horn part that seemed to be difficult and leapt all around and hard to hear, they got me. I just loved playing all that. And I learned a lot from it.

FJO: I’m interested in learning why as a composer you gravitated toward that music. What led you in your inner feelings to want to write music like that?

GS: I’ve thought about that many times, and I still don’t know that I have an absolute complete answer to that. But I realized that through my love for Wagner, and the harmonically most advanced of Brahms’s music, and then the turn of the 20th-century composers including Ravel and Debussy and Szymanowski and Scriabin and all these people who were breaking through functional tonality into new territories, I loved all of that. And then I discovered, quite soon, that after free atonality came this 12-tone thing. I’m not obsessed with the idea of 12-tone, per se. For me, in fact, I wish we would just abandon that term because it causes a lot of prejudice and ignorant commentaries. I would prefer some generic term like high chromaticism, full chromaticism. But to get back to the beginning of my sentence, it was Wagner’s chromaticism as it appears finally in the Ring and in Tristan—I played in Tristan something like 725 times. And so it’s that led me towards the atonal region. Then eventually to 12-tone, because I saw that it was a wonderful organizational system which can almost inherently or automatically—if you have a certain amount of talent—bring an inner coherence to your music. It doesn’t guarantee it, but it provides that possibility. Of course, I first wrote non-12-tone atonal music. But here’s the other part of me. I don’t deny that I’m a 12-tone composer. Some people deny it because it’s a dangerous thing. Some people will hate your music. But I loved Stravinsky equally. I always say the two greatest composers in my youth were Schoenberg and Stravinsky. And Stravinsky wrote The Rite of Spring, which is still probably the greatest masterpiece of the 20th century, and Schoenberg wrote Erwartung, which is the other one for me, and maybe the Orchestral Variations. But as I mentioned, I could probably rattle off some 17 other turn-of-the-century composers who were all mentors at a distance for me, particularly Scriabin, Szymanowski, Delius, and Rachmaninoff—he is one of the greatest composers, even though he was anachronistic. There were a whole host of composers exploring new territory like Milhaud and Honegger. I just feasted on all this stuff. So I am a big composite of all of that, with Stravinsky and Schoenberg as the principal activists in my music.

FJO: In terms of the music you were exposed to as a player, you also played in the pit of Broadway show orchestras.

GS: Yeah, I did that in the summers to make some money because the Metropolitan Opera didn’t operate in the summer. I played Annie Get Your Gun¸ Song of Norway, and Peter Pan and I substituted in a lot of shows when some horn player was gone, or took a vacation or something. That was great.

FJO: But you never wound up writing anything for Broadway.

GS: No, I wasn’t particularly interested in that. I was always very serious about music and composing and to me, you know those idols, Beethoven and Mozart and Bach, that’s what it was for me. I’m famous for being involved with jazz and ragtime, so I have nothing against lighter music per se, but it wasn’t something that I wanted to do for myself. I wanted to write music that is not written in any way to entertain someone, even though I hope it will be entertaining and all of that. I hope people will like my music, but the first thing was to write something hopefully, if your talent permits it, that is original and deep in all of its expressive capacities and that is well put together, and that makes a statement—music that has an idea. We have a lot of music nowadays that’s very well put together and that goes on and on and on, but there’s no substance. There are not enough musical ideas or a musical ideal which generates a piece like one or two musical ideas in a Beethoven symphony generate the whole piece.

FJO: So you don’t think there have been any Broadway shows that reach that level.

GS: I think West Side Story does, of course, and South Pacific. There have been some very good ones. By the way, I think Song of Norway was a wonderful show. But that was all Grieg’s music. So I’m not in any way putting that down. But you know, my father loved operettas, along with all the operas, and he played them when he was in Germany as a youngster. He played thousands of operettas by Lehar and all those famous Viennese operetta composers. And I love operettas, but it’s something of a sort of lighter category that’s not as demanding, not as challenging in any way, either in the writing of it or in the perceiving of it. I don’t want to sound snobbish or elitist, but I just didn’t have the time to also bother with that.

FJO: Yet interestingly you got very, very wrapped up in jazz. I’m curious about how that happened. You said already that when you were 13 you started collecting jazz albums.

GS: When I came back from Germany, I began to hear jazz on the radio. It was inevitable living in New York because there were at least three or four or five stations that played a lot of jazz. And even all the network stations played some jazz at least once every day. And that was at 11:15 at night. On all three networks, after the news at 11:00 which was 15 minutes in those days, the bands came on, and so I heard all of them: Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Count Basie. I heard all of this while I was doing my homework. I also listened to classical recordings on WQXR and WNYC in those days.

But one night I had an epiphany that changed my life. I was doing my homework, and I turned on the radio, and there was Duke Ellington. It must have been in 1941 or something like that, maybe even earlier. Mind you, I had heard Duke Ellington’s music before, but this time it just hit me—the extraordinary beauty of the sounds, the perfection of the playing and the perfection of these little miniature compositions that he wrote. They were all three minutes long. Later he wrote big suites and so on. And I sat there. I had put down my homework. I said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, I gotta listen to this.” And I listened for the 15 minutes and it just hit me. It overwhelmed me. And I said, “My God, this is great music. Why do people talk so bad about jazz?”—including my father and lots of people I knew. “Oh, jazz is low music, vulgar music, cheap music,” they’d say. So the next day I happened to say to my father, “Dad, I heard some music last night—Duke Ellington. You ain’t gonna like this, but in the hands of the greatest practitioners of jazz, that music is as great as Beethoven’s.” Wow, he nearly had a heart attack. He eventually got over it, particularly when he saw that I became kind of successful in jazz as a player and composer and conductor and so on. But anyway, I still feel that way. I’ve said that now ten million times, because it is actually true. It’s just that the music is different, although they’ve now come together also through the Third Stream and all of that.

So I began studying Ellington’s music through recordings and transcribing his music because I wanted to see what it looked like on paper. Then I spread out to all the big bands of that time, including the many wonderful great white bands like Woody Herman. I used to be right here in this hotel [the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City] I don’t know how many times a year listening to Woody Herman playing down in the ballroom. This was one of the biggest hang outs for big bands in those years. That’s later on, with my wife and everything when I was playing with the Metropolitan Opera. After the opera, after five hours of Meistersinger, we would go to the clubs and hear Charlie Parker or Dizzy Gillespie or Duke Ellington, because all of Broadway was just one jazz club after another. And 7th Avenue, there were something like 18 jazz clubs between Times Square and 53rd Street. It’s all gone now mostly. But anyway, that’s how it all started. With this one moment where this music hit me so hard that I said that this has to become a part of my life. Of course, I wanted to play jazz on the [French] horn, but the horn had only just begun to sneak into jazz. Very few bands had a horn. They would have one—Harry James for a while had one player. Claude Thornhill had two horns—but since I was very generously occupied at the Metropolitan Opera, although I thought of maybe leaving and playing in the jazz orchestras, I did not do that. But I sure listened to all of that and then got involved in the freelance jazz recording world in the New York studios. There were three of us: John Barrows, Jimmy Buffington, and me. We were sort of the three pioneers of jazz horn playing. And Julius Watkins, who was a black player.

FJO: You wound up playing with Miles Davis on the Birth of the Cool sessions, which is one of the landmark recordings in the history of jazz.

Gunther Schuller with Charles Mingus, 1979

GS: That happened actually through the fact that I met John Lewis in 1948, whom I had already greatly admired. This is when he working with Lester Young and Sarah Vaughan, before he founded the Modern Jazz Quartet. He was everybody’s favorite accompanist, and I had a lot of his recordings. He was very classically oriented, and later had studied at the Manhattan School of Music. Anyway, I wanted to meet him and I finally did and he introduced me to the whole jazz world. There is a wonderful thing, or there was, anyway—I don’t know whether it still exists today to the same extent. The inner circle of jazz greats is a kind of closed world and you don’t get in there very easily. The jam sessions and the cutting contests were an arena; if you survived there and came up in the ranks, you were fine. But what usually happened is that one of those people in the inside would discover somebody and then would say to the rest of them, “This guy’s alright. He’s one of us.” And that was it, whereas in classical music you had to take an audition. But here, once you’re sanctified, so to speak, you’re in. So that’s how I became so involved with every great jazz musician that was active at that time. I never actually worked with Charlie Parker because he never worked with the horn. And I never got to conduct any of his music. Parker’s music wasn’t conducted until the album with the strings. But I sure became involved. And then when jazz developed into extended forms and larger instrumentations, then there suddenly was a need for a conductor. J.J. Johnson would write a big multi-movement piece with 27 tempo changes, and it wasn’t enough to just stomp off and say, “Here you go, boys.” You had to manage all of that, and suddenly I was the only one who was actually a conductor. So I got involved that way and, of course, as a composer and eventually as a publisher.

FJO: But to rewind the history a little bit. Very early on you wrote an amazing big band chart, Jumpin’ in the Future, that didn’t get recorded until decades later when your son conducted it. But this was arguably the earliest atonal jazz piece, a fascinating convergence of your two growing musical interests. I know that in the ’50s you wrote an article about Cecil Taylor in which you stated that there really couldn’t be 12-tone jazz because you can’t really improvise with 12-tone rows. I don’t know if you still believe that. That was 50 years ago.

GS: Well, yes and no. Here’s the thing. If you’re speaking about strict 12-tone, at any given moment—and a moment in music can last three, four, or even ten seconds—you will present all the 12 notes in some form: horizontally, vertically, harmonically, melodically, whatever. To do that in improvisation is not really possible, although it has been tried. You fall out of the system, so to speak, especially in a fast piece. And if you’re playing some almost generic jazz runs or licks, and so on, you can fall so easily into those and then suddenly you’re playing three notes that aren’t in the row the way they’re supposed to be, you know? I’m making this as simple as I can make it.

Gunther Schuller composing at home, 2006

But in fact much has happened in the last six years through a disciple of mine named Ran Blake. I once told him about the 12-tone row that I’ve been using. I’ve been using the same row since 1976. I’ve now written 41 pieces with the same row. I said to myself right away when I started on this, if every piece starts to sound alike, forget it. But they haven’t. In fact, every piece sounds amazingly different. I could go further on that to show what a big thing that is about 12-tone. But anyway, I told Ran Blake about it and finally he said, “Listen, write it down for me.” Even though he doesn’t really read music, he has really good ears and he has now been using my row and has taught all of his students at the New England Conservatory to use my row. But they do not do anything you would call strict 12-tone organizationally. So yes, they will take that as a theme and use all of it, or parts of it, or segments of it in their improvisation. But there’s as much 12-tone in their improvisation as there is the row. But anyway, it’s something that I really hadn’t anticipated. And now all these folks in jazz are using my row, like Joe Lovano. They call it my magic row.

FJO: Is that the Beethoven fragment row? Is that the same row that inspired your Piano Trio and the Third String Quartet?

GS: Oh, all of them. Of course, when we talk about 12-tone, we have 48 transformations of the row. That’s four different versions and 12 transpositions, so that’s an awful lot of material to draw from. I’ve done this so much now, it’s automatic. I don’t have to look at anything and I hear it. I could probably improvise on it.

Unfortunately 12-tone music and atonality are associated by most people with ugliness, harshness, nastiness, dissonance. Dissonance is a dangerous word, and I wish it would be abandoned, because now in this modern world, consonance and dissonance have really lost their original meanings. They remained very meaningful for two or three hundred years. I would rather like to use intensity because minor seconds or major sevenths are more intense intervals than major thirds. And I would like to use chromaticism, because the ultimate goal for me as a composer, and this is my definition of 12-tone, is to achieve the highest total chromaticism that can be done within those limits.

FJO: To try to connect this back to your essay about Cecil Taylor, as well as your involvement in both jazz and in 12-tone music, is that 12-tone involves organizational principles which determine key aspects of the music which is why it’s very hard to improvise using that sort of pre-compositional control. I find it so fascinating that on the one hand, you’re drawn to this music that is very much about pre-compositional control and on the other, music that is about abandoning control through improvisation. Those are two fundamentally irreconcilable things.

GS: Yes. But this is me again. I’ve always wanted to be very open and very wide-ranging. It’s just in my genes. I did not want to be stopped from exploring or getting involved with things, even if they were from opposing camps. That’s why I was a kind of mediator between the Stravinsky and Schoenberg camps. I always wanted to bring things together or open up the range of things. So for me, these are really not opposites. They’re just different sides of the same coin. And the main thing about any of this is just do whatever you’re doing at the very highest, creative, imaginative quality, so it’s a work of art that makes a statement and contributes something meaningful. Tonality, atonality, 12-tone, this kind of music, that kind of music—those are all just labels which are basically meaningless until somebody tells you what they mean. There is no system, no method, no school, no technique which guarantees that you will write a good piece or a great piece or guarantees that you will write a bad piece. The systems have nothing to do with it. It’s the individual creativity and talent of the creator that makes something worthwhile whatever the system is. People say that there’s been so much bad 12-tone music written. That’s true. But look how much bad tonal music was written over the centuries. Music that’s all long forgotten.

FJO: You’ve also written music that’s outside of all of these systems, like the Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee which flirts with Arabic-sounding music and uses microtonality.

GS: That is a 12-tone piece; however, of course for the Arabic movement I had to go out of that, though not entirely. It’s Tunisian music, basically, which I studied but the background to all the Tunisian stuff is still 12-tone, because all the harmonies are 12-tone.

FJO: I also find it interesting that for that piece, as well as a much earlier piece you wrote after seeing a Matta painting you saw at MoMA, visual art has been another very big source of inspiration for you.

GS: Well this is the other thing that I forgot to mention. Earlier in my youth I mentioned that I was quite uninterested in music. What I was interested in was drawing, design, and painting. Everybody thought I was going to become a painter. I mean, I did thousands of drawings, everything from crayon to oil, watercolors. I first started doing a lot of nature drawing and so on. And that’s still all in me. I’m an avid art lover, and I even have a pretty good collection of things.

So I realized that I could learn from the painters just as, especially around the turn of the century, the painters learned from the composers—especially in the French school, the Impressionists and vice-versa. And I saw Kandinsky and Schoenberg. Kandinsky was quite a musician and Schoenberg was quite a painter and that one could translate certain visual forms and terms into musical forms. Take a tone poem like Til Eulenspiegel. There’s no one in the world who would know it’s about Til Eulenspiegel unless Strauss told you. Whereas certain shapes and forms in a painting, one can translate. And that’s what I did in the Mata and in the Paul Klee pieces. So that’s been a fascination with me. And that comes from my boyhood love and the museums I was taken to in Germany and with the St. Thomas Choir School. We went at least once a month to either the Metropolitan or the Frick Museum.

FJO: I want to go back to something you said very early on here about transcribing Ellington and all the scores that you had taken out because you wanted to see the music in addition to hearing it. Does that tie into your relationship with visual art and wanting an analog for shapes? Is music for you as much about seeing as it is about hearing?

GS: Yes, and I would go even a little bit further than that. I think every score is its own work of art. Every page in a Beethoven symphony—the way it’s printed and the shape of that page and what is visually there on that page is a beautiful thing in itself.

Gunther Schuller Immersed in a Score Photo by Stephanie Davis

Just a minor point, but I think that’s the case. I studied scores. I wasn’t sitting in a classroom listening to a teacher telling me what I should learn about Wagner’s Ring or Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. I was doing it myself, so I really looked at every fly speck in every score. With Duke Ellington’s music—I mean, I have very good ears, I could certainly hear what was going on—there was something that made me want to see what that looked like. I figured that it would look very much like a Brahms chamber music score, you know, a small group. The only difference was that there were no strings. And in terms of the way it’s notated, it’s finding the same thing. But that also refined my ear, doing all that transcribing. I started when I was 17.

Now let me tell you something. I was the first to transcribe entire jazz works. What had been done was to transcribe a trumpet solo by Bix Beiderbecke or Louis Armstrong and they would appear in Downbeat magazine or in some books, as jazz books began to be written. But no one had ever transcribed, or had even thought of transcribing, a whole 17-piece band. And I also transcribed the drum parts. Of course, half of that music was improvised. That’s the nature of jazz, so this was an enormous learning experience. How did these great improvisers achieve this miracle of a perfectly made two-chorus statement that is a composition itself within the larger composition? I had to see what that looked like, because I could relate that to all the other music that I had looked at. And it seemed to me just about the same. Or just as good.

FJO: Of course, what happened as result of your transcribing all this music is that many others have also embarked on transcriptions, and there’s now this whole body of written material for a music that was not originally written down. And now it can be studied as repertoire.

GS: There have been tens of thousands, especially through the Smithsonian. For a while I led the Smithsonian Jazz Orchestra, and we created a lot of transcriptions of things that had not previously been transcribed. You’re right, there’s a huge repertory of that earlier music from the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s into the moderns—Stan Kenton, Woody Herman, and beyond that. I even transcribed some Cecil Taylor things with Buell Neidlinger. That wasn’t easy, because of some of Cecil’s clusters and the wild things he does at the piano, which by the way, is not 12-tone at all. It’s just atonal. And it’s terrific. But anyway, it was also a tremendous ear training thing for me. The toughest in a way was always Ellington because the orchestra plays in such a perfectly balanced way that sometimes you really cannot tell whether that’s a second tenor playing that or a trombone. It’s so blended. It’s amazing. And the other thing was that recordings sometimes are deceptive, because not every recording gets everything in the balanced way that it was actually played. Jazz recordings generally were on a very high level. I thought mostly better than classical recordings, but of course, it’s a smaller group if you have 16 instruments. But sometimes there were things, certain acoustical phenomena and acoustical illusions that happened in a recording, where suddenly a muted trombone note, one note, would sound two octaves higher. It’s just what the microphone did to that sound.

FJO: The other thing that has been so valuable about your work in transcription is that it then in turn has informed your own compositions. I’m thinking of the last movement of the second brass quintet which has these wonderful mutes. That’s obviously coming out of the experience of transcribing all these jazz recordings, figuring out how these sounds were made and then doing something very different with it.

GS: I used just about every mute known to man in that piece, including the bucket mute. One of the great things about jazz is that these black people who were so poor they couldn’t even buy their own instruments mostly had hand-made instruments or second-hand instruments. I know of players who wanted to play the violin who made themselves a violin out of a cigar box and a gut string. So now these people invented all these mutes that came around in jazz: the Harmon mute; the Solotone mute; the bucket mute; the plunger; etc. There are at least seven different mutes and then you can put mutes on top of mutes. Ellington, for example, specialized in putting the Harmon with the stem out, into the bell and then putting the plunger over it to varying degrees. That’s a whole new range of magical sounds. I was so fascinated with that I began to use it in classical compositions. And more and more players in classical orchestras got adept at using these things.

FJO: That evolution in playing technique has made a tremendous difference in the kind of music composers can write for winds. And you’ve taken full advantage of that. You’ve written some fantastic pieces for wind ensemble. You don’t even miss the strings.

GS: My definition of a good wind ensemble piece is if it sounds like a full orchestra including strings, even though it doesn’t have any.

What’s interesting about composers is that we composers and great chefs are alike. We mix and blend things with notes and sounds and they do it with ingredients, but otherwise we’re doing the same thing. We take these diverse things that are available and put them into something—in their case, tasting very good; in our case, sounding very good. It’s amazing.

FJO: You have been such a driving force in both classical music and in jazz for well over half a century. In the 1940s and ’50s, you were completely immersed in every type of music that was going on at the time. But you’ve been a very vocal critic of rock music and other musics that have happened in the last 50 years or so. And there are tons of composers now who are doing things with rock which seem to be share a direct kinship with the Third Stream initiatives you were involved with. So this would seem to be a kind of music making that you should be sympathetic towards.

Gunther Schuller with Ornette Coleman at the American Academy Members’ Dinner, 2000; photo by Dorothy Alexander

GS: Well it’s not true that I was against it. That’s been a misunderstanding. I was against, or I was very dismissive of, a lot of bad rock. But my God, my best friend was Frank Zappa and I hung out with Jefferson Airplane and The Association. And, in fact, for years I gave lectures on all the pop music that existed at the time, including country and bluegrass and all those other things. It’s just that anything that is a sort of lowest common denominator quality made for a mass public and only for that is music that I just can’t be very excited about. So much in the most primitive kind of rock and roll is just repetition of one little three-note idea which they probably stole from somebody else anyway. And then you repeat it 56 times. Now that is not great composition.

One thing that I have always also said about rock and roll and rock music, especially in its early days, is that it was often very great social commentary and protest music. It isn’t that any more as much. Rap has now taken that role. And some of that is offensive. Some of it is bad. Some of that is great. So I have an open mind about this, but again, I back away from all of those statements and say now wait a minute. Ultimately the greatest art creations in painting, in literature, and in music, we know what they are over the centuries. There’s Bach, and there’s Beethoven, and there’s Rembrandt, and there’s Shakespeare, and Hardy and Joyce and all of that. What I guess I have trouble with is when someone is trying to tell me that the Beatles maybe amongst the best that ever was; that this is art of the level of a Mozart. That I can’t digest. So that’s my opinion, and I don’t know that anyone could prove it to me; I’d be an avid listener to see how that might work.

FJO: But you do feel that way about Louis Armstrong.

GS: Yes.

FJO: And Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.

GS: That’s right, even though that is ultimately also somewhat limited compared to the St. Matthew Passion or Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. But yes, it’s on that same level.

FJO: But hold on. You said to your father that Duke Ellington was as great as Beethoven.

GS: Yeah, that’s right. But that’s Ellington, because Ellington is the greatest composer in jazz, besides being an incredible pianist, band leader, and arranger. Now Louis Armstrong was a fantastic improvising trumpet player. He was not a composer. He did some pretty great composing as an improviser, but it’s not at the level of the 2,000 masterpieces that Duke Ellington wrote. One has to keep all of these things straight and balanced and in proportion. I will say that the craft and the skill and the talent and the imagination in the best of The Beatles is at a very high level, but I can’t quite get it up to Rembrandt or to Beethoven; I don’t know.

What I think is very great and fortunately no longer neglected music is the great ethnic musics, the vernacular musics from all over the world. There are marvelous musics going back thousands of years in Japan and India and China and Africa. I think that music is cleaner and purer and greater than a lot of the commercial music because it comes out of the people. Let’s face it. Rock and roll, hip-hop, rap, and all of that, that’s pretty much a commercial enterprise and those folks know that if they do a certain thing, they will sell 200 million copies in the first week. They know that. What I know is if I write a pretty damn good piece, if it gets performed, if it gets recorded, we might eventually sell 5,000 copies in three years.

FJO: I’d love to reach 200 million people.

GS: I would too, but that will never happen. And that’s why we have something we call popular music. That is for a mass public, and that is fine. But in human beings there is this capacity for a higher level of art, whatever the art form is, that will always have less recognition, and less support than what is more broadly accessible. If you make the music very easy and simple, you’ll get a bigger audience; there’s no question about it. There’s even a big difference between homophony and polyphony. If you write a nice little melody with a nice little accompaniment, boy, you’re in. But if you now make a polyphonic, contrapuntal thing, you lose half your audience right away. I’ve analyzed this all my life. And I’m smiling as I say all of this. I’m not complaining about anything. It’s just that when people try to pin me down about whether I happen not to like this or prefer that, it isn’t that simple. For every intended work of art—be it a rock piece or whatever it is—I look at its quality as it was created. I have a pretty analytical mind and I see the good things, and I also see the things that are very commonplace. There’s nothing wrong with commonplace, except don’t try to elevate it to the level of the highest art. I think we have to keep these things straight to some extent because you get very confused, especially in a world where everything is publicity and selling and labeling and promoting. Man, you can sell the most unbelievable crap and make a million dollars with it. We live in a dangerous world where anything can be made to sound better than it really is and sold. And I think some of us just need to be on guard about all that. But, you know, we all live together.

Guillermo Scott Herren (a.k.a. Prefuse 73) in conversation with Trevor Hunter
April 21, 2009—11:30 a.m. in Brooklyn Heights, New York
Videotaped by Molly Sheridan and John M. McGill
Video presentation by Molly Sheridan
Transcribed by Trevor Hunter

The release of One Word Extinguisher in 2003 was a landmark in Guillermo Scott Herren’s career. It was the second album created under his Prefuse 73 alias, which followed his previous project Delarosa & Asora but marked a serious stylistic shift. One Word and its companion CD of outtakes, Extinguished, proved Herren was not only a skilled experimental producer and ambient artist, but an innovator of a freedom in music not unlike jazz. Many of the pieces were casual and relaxed, with melodies emerging and then disappearing into the flow. Each would leave a light imprint on the cerebellum, just deep enough so that on the next listen you might be able to feel that familiar beat coming around ten or twenty seconds before it arrives.

Herren has a knack for finding the freedom and openness he longs for in music while exercising a good deal of restraint. Beat loops usually imply a sort of prefabricated structure, but for Herren the beats are just one of the sonic materials at hand. The freedom is in the composition, the flow and layering of the ideas. Perhaps the best example of this structure is with his latest project, Risil, a “band of 1,000 alternating members with a core of 13.” You may describe Herren’s role in the group as composer—he’s sculpting and directing the group, treating the independent players as sound sources. Certainly this parallels the structure of something like Anthony Braxton’s groups, which follow his graphical scores. The same notion of loosely harnessing unbridled sonic creativity is a common thread throughout much of Herren’s work.

Perhaps one of his biggest struggles is found in the way his identity has been thrust on him by outsiders, even as he works to uncover it for himself. He spent years wrestling with the perspectives attributed to him, as compared to those he was experiencing day-to-day as a developing musician. It wasn’t long before this MPC-tapping producer was critically diagnosed (yes, as in diagnosed by a critic) as a schizophrenic rapper’s wheelman with ADD. Even in those early days they must have been turning a blind eye to his folk-laden Savath & Savalas project, but now with the emergence of Diamond Watch Wrists and Ahmad Szabo, the media’s persistence in describing Herren’s mindset as confined to the styles of the Prefuse project is clearly a bit myopic.

Herren’s other projects are nonetheless routinely compared to Prefuse and often criticized on the basis of whether or not they stand up to Prefuse’s reputation. Luckily for Herren, he is often just too busy to digest what people are saying about his last venture. He’s already moved on to the next. This year sees the release of four albums: Prefuse 73’s Everything She Touched Turned Ampexian, Savath y Savalas’s La Llama, Diamond Watch Wrists’s Ice Capped at Both Ends, and soon the debut release from Risil. On top of all that, he does mixes as favors and takes on production gigs with contracts based more in philosophy than on finance. One needn’t look much further than his blog to understand just how prolific he is.

In the midst of his torrent of recent releases, NewMusicBox caught up with Herren at his apartment/studio in Brooklyn Heights. In the course of a two-hour conversation that covered everything from the role of Prefuse 73 in his career to the state of the record industry, Herren revealed that no matter how far or in what direction he stretches, in the end it’s always about cutting-edge sound.

-John M. McGill

To Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate, it seems perfectly natural to compose orchestral works which combine traditional musical material from the Chickasaw and other Native American tribes with such old-fashioned formal devices as fugues and sonata form. The Native American part comes from being taken to pow-wows and other Native American gatherings by his Chickasaw father. But his father is also a concert pianist, and hearing his father play the classical literature while growing up also explains Tate’s affinity for the machinations of the standard repertoire: “By all standards, I am conservative in what I do. I am influenced by a lot of composers from the past, and I love being in that particular flow of tradition. It’s just a personal preference, no more than that.”

Even the idea of such a synthesis is hardly radical, for as Tate is quick to point out, non-indigenous materials have been used by Native Americans for centuries and over time those materials have become a fundamental part of their own culture:

Two things that Indians are known for the most are beadwork and horses, neither of which is originally from here. It was a huge boon for Indian country to have a horse, so we became incredible horsemen right away. And beads replaced traditional quill work. Indians are now world famous for beadwork. We have very famous contemporary Indian painters, and they are using the classic Western materials that are not aboriginal to this country at all. And you won’t read any American Indian literature in our native languages; it’s all in English.

In fact, Tate is not even the first composer to attempt a synthesis of Native American and Western classical musical conventions. The acknowledged father of such music is the Cherokee and Quapaw composer Louis Ballard (1931-2007). And long before Ballard, a group of non-Native composers, who called themselves Indianists, attempted such fusions with varying degrees of success, although Tate believes that “their importance in American Indian composition is nil.” Tate’s biggest hero is the Hungarian-American Béla Bartók—”the first ethnomusicologist that was aware of his own folk music; he did it so naturally and so joyfully that I felt the same impulse to do the same thing from where I come from.”

Nowadays there are active Native American composers across the United States, and the American Composers Forum even has a program, First Nations Composer Initiative, to specifically nurture such work in all genres. Tate is thrilled to see all this activity, “One thing that is really cool is that Indians are involved in all those genres of music. For the last 30 years, Indians have been involved in all kinds of different rock forms and also different multi-cultural collaborations.”

Ultimately, despite Tate’s self-description as a “Chickasaw Composer”, he admits that such an appellation connotes his ethnic origin and not the sound of his music: “If you’re from that country and you’re composing music, well then you’re that country’s composer—fill in the blank. Honestly I think that by billing myself as ‘Jerod Tate, Chickasaw composer,’ I’m treading very dangerous territory. I do want people to be interested in the fact that I’m Indian, but I also want them to be interested in the fact that they think I’m good. That’s what I’m hoping. At the end of the day, I want people to come out and to just simply say, ‘I think he’s a terrific composer.’ I mean, who doesn’t want that?”

Transcribed by Julia Lu
Videotaped by Trevor Hunter and John McGill
Video presentation by Molly Sheridan

On a whim nearly 25 years ago, I bought a salsa LP, which at the time was a genre of music I knew virtually nothing about. The record was Tiempo Pa’ Matar, a 1984 album by someone named Willie Colón. I had no idea who Willie Colón was or what the significance was of that album. But I do remember listening to it and thinking that it didn’t completely sound like what I imagined salsa would sound like. Something was different, but I couldn’t quite figure out what.

A few years later I became friends with Orlando Fiol, an extremely versatile pianist who was then playing in the salsa band of his father, Henry Fiol. I asked Orlando what salsa records I should buy. He immediately recommended Siembra by Willie Colón and Ruben Blades, and for that matter any of the earlier Willie Colón records which featured singing by Hector LaVoe. There was Willie Colón again. Within a couple of weeks I had gotten a hold of Siembra and several of the Colón-LaVoe albums—The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, La Gran Fuga, and one that quickly became my favorite, Lo Mato Si No Compra Esta LP. (The English translation of that is “I’ll Kill Him If You Don’t Buy This Record” and the cover features Willie Colón holding a gun to someone’s head.)

Every one of those records raised more questions than it answered in my attempt to get a grasp of what salsa was. Colón seemed to be changing the rules with each album, but I soon started to realize that was the point. His very first record, El Malo incorporates jazz and soul. On La Gran Fuga, traditional West African drumming and a Mexican fiesta enter his sound world. On Lo Mato there’s some really crazy chromaticism. Good Bad Ugly has prog rock moments. Tiempo Pa’ Matar breaks with tradition by featuring women in the call-and-response choruses of the songs (what salseros call “singing coro”) instead of men. And Siembra, with its conjuring of Weill and Brecht, a wide variety of sound effects, and a seamless metric modulation from disco to salsa, completely defies shorthand description.

For Colón, all of these ingredients can be viable in salsa, but putting all these musics together was a way of making a statement that was as much sociopolitical as it was musical. And as a result of his putting all these ingredients into this music, salsa evolved into one of the most exciting and unpredictable genres of American music. While some have decried salsa as a nonexistent genre that’s just a hybrid of Cuban music, salsa is a conscious amalgamation of musical elements from Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Domincan Republic, and beyond, that could only have happened in a place where people from all of these places lived together—here in the United States. And Willie Colón has been this music’s most versatile practitioner for well over 40 years. In fact, the sophistication of Colón’s compositions and arrangements, as well as his instrumental solos (on trombone and bass trumpet) and vocals, matches what we treasure in the realms of contemporary jazz and post-classical music.

Over the last decade, though, Willie Colón has been musically silent, getting involved in politics and other causes. Happily, while still actively pursuing a wide range of extramusical endeavors, Colón decided to return to the recording studio and create a brand new album, El Malo, Volume II which continues to mine new territory—some of the new songs incorporate reggaeton and one track could best be described as musique concrète. So it seemed the perfect time to talk to him about his five-decade career of musical innovation.

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Martin Bresnick and Lisa Moore in conversation with Frank J. Oteri
October 21, 2008—10:30 a.m. in New York City
Transcribed by Julia Lu
Videotaped by Randy Nordschow
Video presentation by Molly Sheridan

Having a conversation with Martin Bresnick and Lisa Moore is like a roller coaster ride. It’s fast-paced, full of sudden curves, and always keeps you on the edge of your seat. When I visited them in their Manhattan apartment a few months ago for one of NewMusicBox’s typically hour-long chats, I wound up staying there for several hours and I barely managed to get a word in edgewise. But I was nevertheless thoroughly engaged the whole time.

That engagement came from witnessing first-hand the creative fuel that they both derive from their relationship with each other—Martin freely admits that his compositions have changed as a result of Lisa being in his life, and Lisa’s current approach to playing the piano is also very much informed by Martin’s sensibilities. Ironically, both were fully formed and shared a common aesthetic before they came together, which makes quantifying their symbiotic artistic evolution somewhat difficult.

In both cases, their open-mindedness was a by-product of both transformative life experiences and powerful yet nurturing mentors who helped them shape their individual artistic identities. In the case of Martin, growing up in housing that was part of a socialist experiment in the Bronx and eventually heading to California to study with György Ligeti forged in him a compositional openness that could equally embrace both academia and maverick experimentation. For Lisa, involvement in theatre as well as music in her native Australia and subsequent exposure to the interaction of Gilbert Kalish and Jan De Gaetani at Eastman led her to an equally open aesthetic as a performer, an aesthetic that enabled her to simultaneously be the pianist for the Da Capo Chamber Players and the Bang on a Can All-Stars and which continues to inform the interpretative decisions of her subsequent solo career. These formative foundations ultimately set the stage for their willingness to be influenced by each other.

—FJO