Category: Cover

Chris Thile: It’s All One Thing

A conversation with Frank J. Oteri
October 27, 2008—10:30 a.m.
New York, NY

Transcribed by Julia Lu
Videotaped by Randy Nordschow
Video presentation by Molly Sheridan

If it’s difficult to describe the music that Chris Thile has been making since before he reached puberty, that’s just the way he likes it. But even by his standards, the projects he’s gotten involved with in the past couple of years completely confound expectations.

Thile grew up in a household where music was presented to him on a level playing field, and he quickly got interested in all of it—except for classical (which to him sounded too much like “I’m going to talk to you now”) and pop (“the sound of making money”). By the time he started playing mandolin and singing in Nickel Creek (at the age of eight), he had completely absorbed influences ranging from mainstream country and hardcore bluegrass to a wide range of jazz and folk traditions, eventually creating a body of work that was somehow an amalgamation of all of these things. But toward the end of Nickel Creek’s run and in his subsequent solo career, his music has veered into terrains ranging from indie rock and almost full-out pop to classical and perhaps even avant-garde.

Now everything and anything is possible, and Thile voraciously seeks out new sounds from all possible sources. “The last Radiohead record gets listened to with the same filter that I’ve got for Simon Rattle doing Mahler Nine with Berlin,” he exclaimed during an early morning talk we had just before he had to rush out and rehearse with bass legend Edgar Meyer in preparation for the Carnegie Hall debut of their duo. A few days after that performance, I ran into him at the Metropolitan Opera where John Adams’s Doctor Atomic was being staged. “It’s all one thing no matter how different it may sound at first,” Thile explained. “It’s all melody, rhythm, harmony, and structure.”

—FJO

***

Frank J. Oteri: Most of the people we talk to for NewMusicBox tend to come out of the tradition of either classical music composition or jazz improvisation. But to a person, they pretty much all hate the words classical and jazz. Ultimately neither of these words says very much about the music.

Chris Thile: None of these words do. They’re arbitrary distinctions that have just sort of been sprayed on all sorts of music by people who know how to make money. It helps them sell things, I guess. But I meet very few accomplished musicians who are excited about putting any sort of a label on what they do. Not because they would love to be un-label-able, but just because it doesn’t really make sense.

FJO: That’s certainly true for the kind of music you do, going back to the very beginning. You were only eight years old when you started in Nickel Creek, but despite the music you were playing, you guys have adamantly said that you were not a bluegrass band.

CT: That’s just self-protection.

FJO: But you did describe the music as bluegrass influenced. So it does beg the question: What is bluegrass?

CT: Well, it depends on who you talk to. The very vocal bluegrass purists would say that it’s Bill Monroe’s band from this certain period. I don’t remember exactly when it is, something like the early ’50s. That’s real bluegrass. And only something that sounds exactly like that should be allowed to call itself bluegrass. I’m sure you find purists of that sort in any corner of the musical world, but I’m most familiar with those because they’ve been harsh with me throughout the years.

FJO: What I find so interesting, though, is that none of those classic early bluegrass bands sound exactly alike. The Stanley Brothers didn’t feature a mandolin, and on and on.

CT: You’re exactly right and, of course, neither was Bill Monroe adhering to any sort of tradition rigidly. So I’m not exactly sure what those sorts of people have to say for themselves when they consider how that music that they love so much came into being. It wasn’t that strict an adherence to what came before.

FJO: In one of Monroe’s early line-ups, before Earl Scruggs joined the group, there was even an accordion in the band for a while.

CT: Yeah. And they had a snare drum at the Opry a couple of times. It’s a matter of taste and the way you exercise that taste. And some people choose, I guess in the literal sense of it, not to exercise their taste, and not to develop it. “I like this right here, and I’d prefer for it not to change at all. This is what I like, and I’m not really interested in ever learning to like other things.” It gets frustrating when people get frustrated with you for not playing by those rules.

But I understand. Every now and then, I’ll get locked into the way musicians that I love sound. And they might put out a record that no longer fulfills that place that I’ve allocated to them. And temporarily—before I come to my senses and go, “Oh wait, that’s what I’m always doing”—I go, “Wow, I just want them to do that thing they did [before]. Oh, it’s so nice. Why are they doing this other thing?” But then I remember it’s because things change.

FJO: For you, it has constantly been about changing and evolving. The different projects that you’ve done since Nickel Creek have been all over the map. But to get back to these definitions—even though I know you don’t like them—when you were describing what bluegrass is, you were talking in terms of what the audience thinks it is. But on one of your records there’s a credit for a bluegrass guru—whatever that means—so you obviously have a sense of wanting to be a part of bluegrass.

CT: The bluegrass guru that you refer to was for How to Grow a Woman from the Ground, which was actually the first record that I put out with Punch Brothers. We had actually begun recording this big long piece that I wrote for them called The Blind Leaving the Blind. We’ve always been intuitive musicians. All five of us are not people who read first and this was all stuff that we were reading. And when we got about half way through that we realized that it had turned almost instantly into a band and not a project of mine. We enjoyed playing together so much and felt like we had something to say as a quintet.

So we cut this record How to Grow a Woman from the Ground which was more bluegrass-y than what I had done for awhile, and the bluegrass guru was Ronnie McCoury of the Del McCoury Band. It wasn’t actually me wanting the project to get any more bluegrass or the boys wanting the project to get any more bluegrass or anything, but just to make sure that we didn’t cut something that sounded like a caricature of bluegrass to a guy who knows about it. And so it was great. Occasionally he was like, “That there’s going too far; that sounds a little silly.”

FJO: So he reined you guys in.

CT: Every now and then. Yeah.

FJO: He told you to stop playing those 13th chords all over the place.

CT: Well no, it wasn’t so much that. I’m a Southern Californian. And then another guy is also from Southern California. Two of the guys are from Chicago. One guy grew up in Virginia; that’s Chris Eldridge whose father, Ben Eldridge, started The Seldom Scene. So he’s got cred; he’s legit, although The Seldom Scene certainly had experienced the slings and arrows of the bluegrass purists. But none of us really come by bluegrass honestly. So if we got something close, something that was pretty straight ahead, sometimes I think we could pop into something that’s like, “Oh yeah, bluegrass time.” And Ronnie McCoury could go, “Actually, you don’t need to go there.” Whether it was a certain kind of mandolin chop, banjo roll, or bass line combination, he’d go, “It’s a little overdone.” Or “This over here is nice.”

FJO: So to take it back to Southern California, what’s a kid from outside of San Diego growing up in the ’90s doing listening to old time music and bluegrass?

CT: The thing about my musical upbringing is that it was so mercurial. (Is that the word I want? I’m not sure if I’m saying it right. I’ve seen it before. I’m home-schooled, so I’ve seen a lot of words, but I haven’t necessarily heard a lot.) It was very difficult to pin down the sort of things I was listening to. My parents had spent tons of time in Southern California which is a melting pot of melting pots. There’s just nothing pure, nothing that really has recognizable roots any more. So the bluegrass that I grew up with was already pretty inundated with everything else, which is just how I related to music and have ever since then. I could really understand most of it, except for classical music and pop music. They seemed like distinctly other kinds of music to me. But all sorts of folk and the jazz thing, and the way people made distinctions in those areas, I just really never could hear. It all kind of sounded about the same to me.

FJO: So what did classical sound like, and what did pop sound like? And why are they not part of this?

CT: To me as a little kid growing up with folk music, classical music, regardless of whether there was singing or not, always sounded like, “Rawwwh, reawwwh, I’m going to talk to you now. Let’s have a conversation.” I’m sure it was just how it was being presented to me: powdered wigs and things. Maybe I also heard early on the sort of learned side of it or that there was a lot of thinking going on. And maybe I wasn’t used to as much thinking. But certainly in the bluegrass that I was listening to—guys like Béla Fleck—there was a lot of thinking going on. But it was just different. There was a wonderful fine arts high school in the little tiny town that I grew up in, and they always had really great shows. My parents tried to take me to some, and I remember just kind of doing impressions of what I thought it sounded like. I would just play nonsense and land on a big note. That was kind of what it sounded like to me.

And then from an early age I just felt like pop music was too big of a club. Even as a little kid I had this desire to do something that was a little different, at least in my perception. Pop music sounded like what I heard went I went to friends’ houses and watched Nickelodeon. We didn’t really have TV in my house, but if I’d go to a friend’s house and turn on the TV, there was pop music on the TV.

It took me awhile to tear down that bias. It was like there was this sort of this music of pure, honest intent. And then there’s this other stuff. There’s this music that’s full of itself. And then there’s this music that’s completely sold out. But I think those were my young perceptions.

FJO: So in your early perceptions, would country or rock be part of pop, or would they be part of this weird, murky middle ground that included everything else?

CT: I would probably put country with the sound of the TV music. But as a young kid, I loved commercial country music. The more streamlined the better, and the happier I was with it. We’d listen to it in the car. I don’t know, maybe it was just that the southern accents helped me out ’cause I’d listened to so much bluegrass. I got it, but there’s nothing I hate more now.

Something I still can’t really deal with is what I would perceive to be the sound of money making, the sound of wanting to make money. That’s a sound that I just can’t get into. Well, actually that’s not true, because there’s Britney Spears’s “Toxic.” That song is the sound of money being made, and by people who really understand how to make money. And they just did it so well. I guess music has to be evaluated based on the extent to which it accomplishes its own goals. “Toxic” was made to make tons of money and it did, and that I can actually really appreciate. I love hearing that song.

FJO: Well, as long as we’re talking about pushing boundaries, in your own work I’m thinking of some of the songs you wrote, like “Can’t Complain” or “Helena” from the Nickel Creek era, which are sort of inching toward country, maybe alt-country. One of them sounds like it is inching toward alt-rock, maybe even pop.

CT: Absolutely.

FJO: But then The Blind Leaving the Blind is sort of inching toward classical music. It’s an extended suite; it even has movements. And you said that you had prepared materials for it which everybody was reading from. So clearly those two ends that remained outside that murky middle ground—pop and classical—are both now fair game for you as well.

CT: It’s all one, exactly. It’s all one impenetrable bog. And that’s what I love about music. At this point, I am not evaluating anything that I hear any differently than anything else. So, the last Radiohead record gets listened to with the same filter that I’ve got for Simon Rattle doing Mahler Nine with Berlin. It’s freaking me out right now. This is an unbelievable piece of music. I couldn’t sleep this morning and the last movement of Mahler Nine finally calmed me down enough to be able to sleep again. And I love the last Radiohead record. And I think I love them [both] because the use of melody, harmony, rhythm, and structure appeal to me. But that’s what it all is, whether it’s a Louvin Brothers song or A Love Supreme. It’s all the same stuff. It’s all notes and chords and rhythms and a satisfying sense of structure. There are just lots of different ways to go about that. And I think that none is more valid than any other. Obviously no one gets it right every time. But there are people who get it right a lot of the time, at least the way that I look at it.

Something like “Helena”—I’m glad you bring that up, that’s one of my favorite songs that I’ve ever written—and The Blind Leaving the Blind is the thing that I’ve worked the hardest on ever. But it was, again, written with the same starting spot. “Helena” was a character study of me only without any sort of limiter. Like what I thought I was capable of if I just let myself go. I wrote lyrically for a little while having nothing to do with what actually happened, just exploring the possibilities of what it’s like to do what I did. And I’m kind of more interested in what I didn’t do and what could have happened. You know, that alternate reality, which is something that I think music is just so good at portraying. It’s transcendental, and that’s kind of the point.

FJO: You’re talking about the music and the lyrics as though they’re the same thing. Did they happen at the same time?

CT: With “Helena” that was definitely something that happened at the same time. I remember coming up with those chords and that melody and just singing the thing. I didn’t even mean to write it. There was a girl—Helena—that I met backstage at a concert while I was still married. The marriage was seriously dysfunctional at that point, and absolutely nothing happened between me and this girl, but all of a sudden there was just this like, “Wow, you seem really nice.” But it was off limits. No matter how screwed up, this is a committed relationship; can’t go over there. I don’t feel like my way of going about it is necessarily any more defendable than anybody else’s way of going about it. But I realized that if that if I wasn’t the kind of guy that I am, if I was of a different ilk, and I tried that because this is screwed up, the situation would have ended in something letting go to a very harmful extent. So the story evolved very naturally.

The Blind Leaving the Blind is taking that sort of thing, which I suppose is my most natural lyric/music combination songwriting process, and maybe giving it some more overview. It’s far more deliberate. I actually wanted to try and tell the story of my divorce and the aftermath, then the spiritual things that are called into question and then the appreciation for friends and family that it left me, which I think I hadn’t been paying as much attention to because the relationship was so dysfunctional. Musically I think the same sort of thing was happening. I had gotten into 20th-century classical music for the first time, and it stopped sounding like math music to me. I really started to understand that the breaking down of tonality was a logical step that was being taken. I’ve never totally gotten on board with the complete abandonment of it, because it seems like music evolves in a certain way and you need not throw [it all away]. I think Ives said, “I see no reason why I need complete tonality, but I also see no reason why I need complete atonality.” And I think that’s very, very wise. You need all of these things. And I think that’s what Ives was saying. Why can’t we just have all of these things?

FJO: Your tune for “Punch Bowl” is polytonal; it’s probably even more harmonically out there than The Blind Leaving the Blind.

CT: It is in a way. Especially because it sets you up to want something. The structure of Blind sets you up to be less reliant on tonality, even though Blind is totally a tonal piece. There’s no doubt about it. Maybe to a bluegrass fan it sounds real funny. I think bluegrass fans think it has more to do with Schoenberg than it does with Bill Monroe, which is so not the case. But, whatever; it’s fine. Tonality is in the ear of the beholder, I guess. But “Punch Bowl” is a song. I mean, it’s, you know, 3 minutes and 30 seconds or something like that. And it starts with a lick that gives you a hint that you’re going to have two [different] thirds throughout and, and that they will be used sort of interchangeably and simultaneously. But the texture indicates that you would be getting some pretty standard bluegrass tonality. And so when you don’t, I think it’s all the more jarring. And then there’s the subject matter. The point was to somehow represent musically the danger of party scenarios, especially if one maybe has no business being in kind of a reckless party scenario based on circumstances.

FJO: So, as far as the compositional process goes, you usually write these things where music and lyrics sort of happen at the same time. But then you still have to take what you’ve worked out on your own and make it viable in a group context. So it makes me wonder how the arrangements get worked out. How to Grow a Woman is credited to you, as opposed to the eponymous Punch Brothers disc which is credited to the Punch Brothers, even though it’s the same exact band. You started The Blind Leaving the Blind first and that’s really your own composition. So if anything, it seems like How to Grow a Woman should have been credited to the Punch Brothers and the other CD should have been the one credited to just you.

CT: Interesting. The thing is that How to Grow a Woman from the Ground was a practice swing. Punch was our first sort of definitive statement as a band. And that piece is written for a very collaborative ensemble. The piece is meant to bring [together] whatever five musicians might happen to play it and hopefully bring them closer as creative musicians.

I don’t think lines need to exist, but we could make a line between informal and formal music, informal being music that’s not written down typically and formal music being music that’s completely written down. I do feel like one thing that informal music brings to the party that’s really amazing is a sense of immediacy and urgency. I get that from participating in Sheriff Uncle Bob’s bluegrass jam, down at the Grizzly Bear. And I get that from going to a Radiohead concert. You know that this is happening right now, and it’s about right now, and I’m involved and participating right now. Therefore I both listen and interact very much as a participant, as a co-creator even. I watched Radiohead a couple months ago in San Francisco with 110,000 other people who had all paid to be there. It was an amazing scene. I think each of those people felt like they participated in that concert as co-creators. That’s one of the things that makes that band so good. They enable their listeners. Their fans feel switched on in that capacity, as creators.

I don’t think that classical music has been as good at that, recently at least. There’s a huge chasm between the composer and the musicians, even, to say nothing of the audience. The musicians actually have very little to do with the music that they’re making, right down to the dynamics and the slurs. If you’re a violinist, your bowing is quite possibly being dictated by the composer, which is all fine. I understand the need for control. I mean, I’m a control freak, and I always have to be fighting that side of my musical personality. I have a band who keeps me very honest on that front, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I do feel like things could be a little different. Maybe there could be less of this dividing line between formal and informal if the musicians had a little bit more say in the actual music being made. You know, I think back to the Brahms Violin Concerto, which was written for Josef Joachim, right? I think that Brahms would send the score to Joachim and he would make all these changes and send it back—you know, “This is crap over here,” “I want to do this kind of thing over there.” He had a huge impact on that piece and no doubt played it as a co-creator. I imagine that was very exciting, and I think that probably, overall, there was a lot more of that. And then you go back even further and the performers were expected to be able to improvise, or at least write their own cadenzas. You can imagine how nice of a spin that would put on that sort of music. A buddy of mine played me one of Mozart’s piano concertos that Beethoven wrote a cadenza for. Can you imagine what it would have been like to hear Beethoven play a Mozart piano concerto? That would have been just an incredible night of music making. The more that you can diffuse the intensity of one guy dictating the music for every one, the more the audience can participate in the act of creation that’s taking place.

FJO: Now you’re in the middle of a tour with Edgar Meyer, and Mark O’Connor joins you for some of it as well. All of you are very strong-willed people. So where’s the give and take there? All the stuff on your new duo album with Edgar is credited to both of you. Would some of those things have begun as your piece? Some his? What was the process?

CT: Generally one guy had some kind of a start. They’d be of all shapes and sizes. There’d be something that was basically done, that just needed the basic stamp of approval of the other guy. And then there was some stuff that was just a vague idea that probably ultimately got obliterated by the collaboration and turned into something way different than the original idea. Those are typically the most satisfying experiences, because you start with this germ of an idea that actually turns into something lovely and different and bigger than you. Again, that’s that idea of transcendence. That’s what all of this is about. We all know our little corner of the world, and I think music for me is the easiest way into somebody else’s corner of the world, to see what it’s like to be this guy. I’ve gotten so much of that from Edgar. Over the years, he’s been so generous with his time and knowledge and has treated me with so much respect. I would feel comfortable asking him just about anything, no matter how stupid it may sound, just because Edgar would still think I was a decent enough musician to hang out with.

FJO: All through the history of Nickel Creek, you guys always played with a bass player but there was never a bass player who was an official member of the band. And now you’re in this duo with a bass player.

CT: Right—with a bass player who is definitely an official member of the duo. That situation with Nickel Creek I think came because my dad was the original bass player, and I think it’s very difficult to replace one’s father in any capacity. We looked around for someone to make a full partner, and it just never felt quite right. Maybe if we had happened upon Mark Shatz earlier it would have come down that way, just because Mark is such a great player and such a wonderful guy. I do think that you can’t replace your dad in a band, but Dad just couldn’t keep doing it because he’s a family man. Nickel Creek really started to take off, and there was just no way for him to be with my two little brothers and my mom and to be in a band that was really starting to happen.

FJO: It’s interesting that you started out playing music with your father and now you’re playing with somebody who’s also from an earlier generation, yet you’re still able to be equal somehow.

CT: I think that’s a testament to the generosity of Edgar’s spirit, musical and otherwise, in that he really likes this setting; he feels comfortable in it, and is willing to open himself up to a very, very equal collaboration. I do think there’s something very homey about it to me, because I grew up playing with my dad. So bass and mandolin duets are ground zero for me, square one. It’s what I feel most comfortable playing, just mandolin and bass. There’s tons of space, too, just on a practical level: mandolin is up high; bass is down low. And the way Edgar plays, the bass is an incredible sustaining instrument—he uses the bow and it’s gorgeous. And the mandolin is kind of an attack instrument. So they balance each other out. It’s a really nice situation for both of us. And we have a lot of overlap, but not like a musically incestuous amount of overlap. If you get two people whose backgrounds are too similar, then you’re not going to have that transcendence. It’s not going to be more than the sum of its parts. Edgar has a substantial background in formal music, and mine is predominantly in informal music, but our interests really sort of meet in the middle of that. You know, again, I think that there need not be a divider between the two camps. Not to paint in too broad a stroke, but I think that’s the foundation of our collaboration.

FJO: So a final question. There are three mature Nickel Creek records, and they’re all on Sugar Hill, which is essentially a bluegrass label.

CT: Essentially, yeah.

FJO: So first you released music which is not really bluegrass on a bluegrass label, and now you’re recording music which in some ways is more clearly bluegrass derived, at least in terms of its instrumentation, for, of all labels, Nonesuch.

CT: The label-less label.

FJO: Nonesuch started as a classical music label specializing in early music and really hardcore contemporary stuff and then became branded with recordings by the Kronos Quartet and composers like John Adams, Steve Reich, and Gorecki. And then they started putting out albums by Wilco and Stephin Merritt. All of those people are now your label mates. So even though you yourself might not put a label on what you do, other people will. And perhaps by being a Nonesuch artist, the label they’ll give you is “new music”, whatever that is.

CT: Right. The great thing about Nonesuch is that tons of my favorite records are on Nonesuch. I always looked at it as a place where you could go and be defined by your work and not by other people’s work, or so it seemed to me. You’ve got guys like Reich and John Adams and Kronos, and when I started to pay attention they had just signed Wilco. And they’ve got Randy Newman and Brad Mehldau, who’s one of my favorite musicians in the whole world. There are just a lot of tremendous artists who are most at home not having a home. So it just feels great to me to be here. There’s encouragement to just see whatever that idea is that I just can’t see past. Whatever it may be, regardless of how commercially viable it is, they always seem to encourage me to just take that to the mat to figure out what’s there. They were so helpful with The Blind Leaving the Blind. I was just so nervous to even finish it and put it out, and they were really helpful. I don’t feel the pressure to do any one thing. I think they feel the same way about it that I do: That it is all one thing, no matter how different it may sound at first. It’s all melody, rhythm, harmony, and structure. That’s all it is. There are just different ways to put it together.

Fred Ho: Turning Pain Into Power

A conversation in Ho’s Greenpoint, Brooklyn apartment
October 8, 2008—4:00 p.m.

Transcribed by Julia Lu
Videotaped by Randy Nordschow
Video presentation by
Molly Sheridan

Few creative artists seem to be as completely rooted in the present than baritone saxophonist, composer, and bandleader Fred Ho. And Ho’s artistic vision has remained remarkably consistent over the past quarter century.

Ho’s music-making grew out of his personal struggles against the marginalization he experienced growing up as a Chinese American in suburban Massachusetts as well as the domestic violence he suffered through in his own household. He found a powerful role model when he encountered the Black Arts Movement and the Black Liberation Movement as a student in the late ’60s which ultimately codified his own aesthetic sensibilities and led him to the creation of a unique amalgamation of traditions spanning musical theatre, jazz (a word he eschews), and Chinese folk music.

An assertive but affirmational political agenda is the cornerstone of all of Ho’s music, which encompasses solos, compositions for his own ensembles, and his first orchestral work—a concerto for baritone saxophone and orchestra which he recently premiered with the American Composers Orchestra. A significant portion of his output has been a series of multi-disciplinary spectacles involving singers, instrumentalists, and martial artists. Ho describes these works as “popular avant-garde works” that can appeal to fans of “Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Xena, the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and the Ninja Turtles.”

Inside Pages:

Talking with Fred Ho about his own music is a sprawl through a wide range of topics, spanning history, sociology, socialism, and feminism. Like his music, it is a multi-faceted yet always impassioned journey.

Maria Schneider: Navigating Comfort Zones

Maria Schneider in conversation with Frank J. Oteri
At Schneider’s apartment in New York, NY
October 1, 2008—4:00 p.m.
Transcribed by Julia Lu
Video presentation by Randy Nordschow

Maria Schneider is an exemplary role model for composers who want to have their cake and eat it too. She writes music chock full of complex rhythms and elaborate counterpoint, but crafts it in such a way that the end result sounds simple and totally beautiful. On first listen, it’s hard not to be immediately seduced by the almost child-like (her word) prettiness of her melodies. But repeated encounters reward listeners with a profound emotional and intellectual experience.

These rewards are probably why she has done so well as a touring and recording artist and a DIY publisher. The second and third pieces of that eaten yet still had cake, is that she is able to make the music she wants—music for her own 18-piece orchestra, which is very expensive to tour and record—on her own without a trust fund and without relying on grants. In the world of musical genres that are usually deemed non-commercial and unremunerative, she is a flourishing venture capitalist thanks to her relationship with ArtistShare, a new business model for a recording company in which the recording artist must raise all the money to make a recording but retains all the rights and most of the profits.

Maria’s triumph has been critical as well as financial; she frequently tops the polls for best composer, best arranger, best large ensemble, and best recording, and her self-produced album Concert in the Garden was the first recording sold exclusively via the internet ever to win a Grammy. She is also able to market and sell scores of her music online, even as Music Minus One renditions.

Inside Pages:

Part of what has made Maria Schneider so appealing to audiences of all stripes—both the non-practitioners who love her melodies and the musicians and critics who voraciously study everything she does—is the radiant charisma of her on-stage persona. But she doesn’t actually play an instrument publicly; when she appears with her orchestra, she herself describes her role merely as “a focus” to “bring everybody’s energy to the same concentrated point.” Maria’s humble, down-to-earth take on her own music and the secrets of its success came across time and time again during our conversation, which encompassed discussions of her childhood in a small Minnesota town, her discovery of jazz and contemporary classical music, and her willing to challenge comfort zones, both her own and others which has sometimes led to difficult decisions she’s had to make that have kept her orchestra going strong for the past 15 years.

—FJO

Ultimate Concept: Deconstructing Matmos

M. C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel in conversation with Molly Sheridan
At their home studio in Baltimore, Maryland
September 14, 2008—3:00 p.m.
Recorded by Trevor Hunter
Video presentation by Randy Nordschow

Shortly after their relocation from San Francisco to Baltimore, Matmos (a.k.a. M. C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel) played a show at The Red Room, a small performance space where Charm City’s fiercest experimental improvisers regularly present concerts. Fifty-some people packed themselves in, and the duo took their places behind computer monitors and tables piled with audio circuitry.

But it began with roses. Two co-conspirators picked up bouquets and, with microphones near, beat them against a tabletop. The red petals flew out in rhythmic protest. For those who had previously only heard “Roses and Teeth for Ludwig Wittgenstein” on CD, suddenly the curtain was pulled back. Though perhaps the evening’s most colorful moment, it proved only the beginning of the sonic fun.

Matmos sits at an interesting intersection where musique concrète, experimental improv, electronic, and pop sensibilities freely rub elbows. Schmidt and Daniel are masters of building music out of seemingly non-musical elements and ideas—a rat in a cage, rhinoplasty, the life of Patricia Highsmith—and the theory behind their work often reads like a twisted science fair project. But while the curious are free to dig through the ample supplementary materials Matmos shares with its fan base as to the how and why of what’s been done to create each track, the rest are welcome to simply hit play on the stereo. The music may be built on a library of intent, but you don’t need to know anything about that.

Inside Pages:

 

In their hands, experimental music also often grooves. It’s a dangerous proposition: for some, the work is uncomfortably weird; for others, it’s never quite weird enough. It’s also proved to be a somewhat dizzying career path: In the midst of playing shows for hundreds, they caught Björk’s ear and spent a year as part of her touring entourage, suddenly playing for crowds of thousands.

We caught up with Schmidt and Daniel shortly after they finished a summer tour in support of their latest disc, Supreme Balloon. Venturing down into the basement studio where they were already at work on their next project, we arrived wanting to know their recipe for making music.

We left wishing we could be in their band.

—MS

Rhys Chatham: Secret Agent


A conversation with Frank J. Oteri at the Hotel Newton, New York City
August 14, 2008—2:00 p.m.
Transcribed by Julia Lu
Recorded by Randy Nordschow and Trevor Hunter
Video presentation by Randy Nordschow

Paris-based composer Rhys Chatham was back in his hometown of New York City last month for what was being touted as one of the most significant musical events of the year—the American premiere of his Crimson Grail for 200 electric guitars. (It had been on my must-check-it-out calendar for almost a year.) Originally composed for 400 guitars performing in a cathedral, Rhys sized down the piece for its U.S. debut, which was to occur as part of an outdoor concert at Lincoln Center on a triple bill along with a set of music by French medieval polyphonist Perotin and a multimedia realization of E2-E4, a 1981 composition by krautrock pioneer Manuel Göttsching of Ash Ra Tempel which presaged techno.

Contrapuntal chants and trippy psychedelia are actually great counterbalances to the music of Rhys Chatham which lies somewhere between the realms of American postclassical music and punk. A protégé of Morton Subotnick, La Monte Young, and Tony Conrad, Rhys found himself in charge of music at The Kitchen, a Downtown music mecca, at the age of 19. While he beams about how hearing Terry Riley for the first time converted him from a post-serialist to a minimalist, a bigger epiphany occurred when he first heard The Ramones at CBGBs. Rhys soon got himself a guitar (from Robert Fripp, no less) and traded performances in small Downtown music venues for gigs in clubs like Max’s Kansas City. Fans there reacted to his overtone-saturated noise by throwing beer bottles at him—because they liked it! He also returned to his gig at The Kitchen and invited in bands like Sonic Youth and Swans.

Since then, Rhys has forged a unique musical path that is part rock, part contemporary classical music, yet somehow neither. Despite being based in France for nearly 20 years, he remains an American original. Unfortunately due to a severe rainstorm, Crimson Grail never happened, but luckily on the day before the concert was to have taken place we got to chat about his music and his life over glasses of “delightful white wine.” Life in France has changed his outlook but not his music.

Inside Pages:

—FJO

Gloria Coates: Beyond the Spheres

July 11, 2008–3:00 p.m.
At the home of Catherine Luening
Video presentation by Randy Nordschow
Transcribed by Julia Lu and Trevor Hunter

Have you heard of Gloria Coates? Despite having a career that has spanned five decades, two continents, and 15 symphonies, she remains a largely unknown quantity on these shores even after years of success in Europe. It would seem, however, that the Atlantic tides are turning. A rash of CD releases on the Naxos label have helped her music achieve greater exposure, pushing her name into major publications in print and online. More U.S. performances have yet to follow, but with all the recent attention it may be inevitable. However, an in-depth look at the creator of all this music, the most prolific of female symphonists, was still sorely lacking.

The volume of recordings on which Coates’s music appears—17 by last count—signaled that here was a truly significant body of work. In addition to the 15 symphonies, she is the composer of numerous additional pieces for orchestra, 9 string quartets, 15 songs on texts by Emily Dickinson, 5 pieces for choir, musique concrète, a cantata, and dozens of chamber works. Yet despite the wide range of music in both instrumentation and chronology, there is a consistent and original vision behind it all.

For Coates, artistic expression is a spiritual necessity. She has great interest and significant participation in painting, architecture, theater, poetry, and singing—but it is through composing that she taps into a wellspring of abstracted emotionality that the others cannot reach. Or perhaps abstracted is not the correct term, as it would seem that Coates is merely being oblique about what the inner, personal meaning of the music is to her. Whatever the veiled expressions of her work may be, there is an undoubted emotional richness present, which if not concretely knowable is at least viscerally felt by the audience. Canons constructed of quartertones and glissandos evoke gloomy instability, but also unearthly beauty.

NewMusicBox managed to catch up with Coates on one of her infrequent visits to New York. She opened up about what it means to be an American in Germany, a woman in classical music, and a modernist with minimal materials. In the end, however, Coates is content to let the art speak for itself; she stands apart, a painter of colors and tones.

—TH

Sections:


An American in Munich

Trevor Hunter: The bulk of the last 40 years of your life has been spent in Germany. What has living there meant for you, in terms of your identity?

Gloria Coates: In a way it’s very difficult for me to be in another culture. I’m like a juggler, balancing two balls, and I can’t focus too much on either one, but I’m able to stay objective because they’re both up in the air. I would say it makes me stronger as an American because I’m longing for my roots. Also, one can see one’s country more objectively because one is away.

As far as being in Germany, I love the old masters like Bach—my favorite—and I love Beethoven. I can never walk down a certain street without thinking, for instance, “this is where Mozart wrote Idomeneo.” So it’s exciting to be in a country that has these wonderful composers and this base of knowledge, because I think it goes through the culture. You have more classical music on the radio, you have people on the street who know about composers and are interested even in contemporary music.

TH: If the population is more aware of classical music in Germany, how do you think being there has affected your music?

GC: By living in Europe as an outsider, which I’m considered there, and having had many performances, I am truly a working artist. I don’t rely on teaching, and I’ve been able to earn my living since 1983 from my music. But this is very rare even for a German composer.

I would say maybe the seriousness of the people in Germany has affected my music. It’s a different social climate. One has longer stretches of being alone, and that might have affected my music somewhat because one goes more into oneself. They say in Germany that I’m very American, and here in the U.S. they’ve said I’m very European. Others say I’m sort of in the Atlantic. I don’t analyze it; I simply express myself.

TH: You’ve written a lot of symphonies. In fact, near as can be seen, you are history’s most prolific female symphonist. Is that a label that means anything to you?

GC: I wasn’t even sure until the seventh that I had written any symphonies. I never set out to be a symphonist.

TH: What made you decide that the previous six were in fact symphonies?

GC: Many of my pieces had technical names, like Music on Open Strings. I also had another name for that piece—more audience friendly—Three Ages of the Samurai. When I came to what today is called Symphony No. 7, I couldn’t find a name. I had something like 54 instruments going simultaneously. It was complex, serious, and used various techniques I had developed through the years. I then decided, well, maybe this is a symphony. Then I thought, if this is a symphony, then what about those other pieces with various names? Then I went back to them. However, I didn’t name all the pieces symphonies; only the ones that had three or four movements, that were serious and substantial in content, and that had two or more names.

When [the record label] CPO brought out symphonies one, four, and seven, they selected Dr. Giselher Schubert, director of the Hindemith Institute, to write the liner notes. I thought, “Oh my heavens! Maybe they’re not symphonies, what am I going to do?” Dr. Schubert telephoned me, “I understand you have seven symphonies. I had no idea you had written symphonies.” Then I told him that I just thought that the seventh was a symphony, but I wasn’t completely sure. He had the scores and analyzed them. I was relieved when his booklet notes were published, for he accepted them as symphonies and used Mahler’s definition of a symphony as his criteria. Other German musicologists wrote in their criticisms similar statements such as Brembeck in Fono Forum, “These are true symphonies, of that there is no doubt.” That made me feel much better.

Voices and Movements

Trevor Hunter: Music on Open Strings, composed between 1972 and 1973, was appropriated eventually as your first symphony and was premiered just before your 40th birthday at the Warsaw Autumn Festival. But it was written five years prior to that.

Gloria Coates: It was an unpaid commission for a chamber orchestra in 1972. I went to a rehearsal of the piece and realized that it needed a conductor. The orchestra refused having one, in spite of the fact that I found a young Polish conductor who wanted to do it. I took the work off the program. I waited five years before it was finally premiered. Even then, the premiere had problems, for the orchestra did not want to do the scordatura that was required in all the instruments—one of the movements had the musicians retune the strings in a cascade of canons. I had written in a mosaic pattern of the instruments which built to a climax, and they pointed out that playing on the open strings, they could not crescendo the opening. The day before the final rehearsal, I had the idea of loosening the bow hair and tightening it in the rests which might create the crescendo when played. I needed to check out my idea. Looking out of my window at the old Paderewsky Hotel at 5:00 a.m., I saw a man with a case. I was on an upper floor, so hurried down the winding flight of stairs and found him. It was a viola case and a musician was waiting for a bus to take him to Krakow. With the help of the night doorman, he understood my problem of having to try out the crescendo with the bow. It worked. Thus, the piece was performed as written. It turned out to be a breakthrough. Throughout the papers of Europe it was cited as one of the three high points of the festival.

TH: That premiere was in 1978 at the height of the Cold War. Even living in Munich, you lived on this border of East and West. And you were the first commissioned American at the East Berlin Festival.

GC: Right. Somebody from East Berlin heard Music on Open Strings in Warsaw and asked me to write a piece for the East Berlin Festival.

TH: But it must have been quite the experience, living almost on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

GC: There was always unease in the air–especially in Munich, because that was the spy capital of Germany, and the Russian rockets were targeted on Munich. I went back quite often to Poland. I was there three times for the festival, and then East Berlin. I was invited to Russia for the First International Festival for New Music in the spring of 1980. It was very exciting actually; there were orchestras from all over Russia. Leo Brouwer was there and had a composition done which was very modern. Nicholas Slonimsky was there, too, and his nephew had a ballet performed. I met Alfred Schnittke there, and other avant-garde Russians who were not performed then. But our American composer who then was head of Juilliard, Peter Mennin, had a symphony on one of the concerts I attended. It was beautifully done. After Peter Mennin came forward for his bow, the whole crowd gathered around him, and suddenly he was lifted up into the air and onto the shoulders of this group and carried out of the hall with the crowd following. I’ve heard of this happening, but I’ve never seen it before. It was really an exciting experience to be there.

After this festival was over, there were articles that came out, and I asked someone if I could write one for the United States. They answered, “Oh no, it’s being taken care of.” I did write an article for Musica, but it’s the only one of its kind that came out. The others stated that this festival was only for propaganda purposes, and that there was nothing contemporary on the festival. This wasn’t true at all.

In 1970 I told some German friends that I thought the Cold War would be over in about 20 years, and that the [Berlin] Wall would fall. My reasoning behind this theory was that the people who were involved in World War II would be old or gone, and the young people would come to power. That’s exactly what happened. They are the ones who marched through the wall and brought it down. I think it was a very heroic thing to have done, because they came with their families, little children and wives, walking through that wall; they could have been shot down at any point.

TH: Do you consider yourself to write music that is in any way political? A number of pieces bear dedications having to do with major world events like the fall of the Berlin Wall or September 11.

GC: The fall of the Berlin Wall was a major event and changed the course of history. It had been a war of nerves, and the dramatic coalescing of many factors ended it. Symphony No.7 is dedicated “to those who brought down the wall in peace.”

Another work that leans towards politics is a cantata, WWII Poems for Peace, that I wrote in 1972 with texts by women who were writing during World War II. It was done many times during the peace movement, although I had a totally different motivation when I wrote it. I took tours for the American Army in Munich; one tour was to Dachau. During that time, I had a commission to write a chamber work. I used texts by four women writing during WW II; two German and two American. Of the Germans, one was the third-grade teacher of my daughter, who had given me a little poem she had found in a newspaper during the war, “Rinne, regen, rinne auf den Sand und auf die Steine, rinne allerwegen und weine,” which translates to “Run, rain, run on the sands and the stones, run everywhere and cry.” I used that as an aria, and her note to me as the recitative. The other German was a lady with a pension who helped us when we first arrived. She had taken care of children during World War II in the Berlin underground. Her husband had died in a concentration camp. She wrote a very beautiful poem which I used, “Young Widow”. Then I found two American poets writing during that war and superimposed them between the German poems.

My Musical Landscape

Beyond the spheres that
Orbit our sun
Across the stars
Through black holes that
Lace the inner realm,
Shapes like dippers, kites and
Strings of pearls–

Sounds that echo–
Crusts of dried
Orbs
Whizzing, whirling, twirling,
Crashing,
Swirling through
Timeless space in
Circles round, oblong and
Elliptical–

Through the
Vortex of my
Singing Soul
Transformed from
Sounds and
Shapes of
Shadows
Shimmering
Into my
Nowanights
Day–

Nowadays
Transformed to
Musical Calligraphy.

Gloria Coates
October 2002

TH: You’re most well known for your symphonies and string quartets, but you’ve actually written a great deal of vocal music. What is it that attracts you to the voice? Is it the means of conveying text?

GC: Well, I’ve always sung. I used to sing on radio programs when I was three and four. If it weren’t for stage fright, I’d probably be a singer, and I might not have composed as much. I still know several operas and literature for the voice, and I’ve taught voice privately. I think that when I compose even orchestral music, the expression comes from an ur schrei (primitive cry) which comes from a deeper part of me in singing. This is the origin of my use of glissandi.

TH: When you set text, is clarity important to you?

GC: With some songs that are lyrical, the text is important. However, I use the voice in other ways that express the text’s meaning without any vocal clarity. It can become a part of the texture, color, or rhythm in a work and not be understood except a syllable here and there perhaps. This is true for the Leonardo fragment and Indian Sounds. The Emily Dickinson songs use the texts in various ways. Even the general colors are derived from the text.

TH: You’ve set 15 of Emily Dickinson’s poems. What attracts you to a text?

GC: Those songs were written over a period of more than 30 years. I’ve always felt a spiritual kinship with Emily Dickinson. At the time that I started with “I’m Nobody,” there weren’t that many Emily Dickinson songs written. Now there are hundreds, maybe thousands by American and British composers. It seems that when somebody dies who’s close to me, and I need comfort, I find reading her poems gives me solace. Then suddenly something touches me, and I can write the music. There is an exchange with her poetry.

TH: You’ve sung your whole life and you know all this vocal literature, but you’ve never written an opera.

GC: That is what I should have done at the very beginning, and I’m not sure why I haven’t. I started writing an opera based on “Fall of the House of Usher” back around 1962. And then I thought, “No, I’m not ready,” so I went back to writing chamber pieces and orchestral music. I felt I had to really be ready. Now here I am, and I’ve written still another libretto, and I have other librettos that I’d like to use, but there has been no time for opera.

TH: Have you written many of your texts?

GC: Some. I began writing music using my own texts and poems as a teenager, but that didn’t really work for me since I didn’t feel I wanted to reveal my inner feelings that directly. Eventually I clothed them in expressions by Emily Dickinson, Mallarme, Paul Celan, my daughter, Leonardo da Vinci, and Native Americans. My own poetry is private, but sometimes I have used this form of expression as I did for a book by Peter Sheppard. He asked me to write a chapter about my musical landscape in composing. I condensed it into a poem.

In 2004 I created a musical text poem from Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union Address which was performed in the Great Hall of its origin 150 years later.

TH: You mentioned how in Germany there was no women’s movement when you arrived there. Did you ever feel like your gender was a barrier to your success as a composer?

GC: I had a German-American Music Series from 1971 to 1983, subsidized by the Munich Ministry of Culture and a grant from the Ditson Fund of Columbia University. I played many American composers and also women composers on this series; I think I presented one of the first European performances of Joan Tower’s work in 1972, a flute solo called Hexagons. I also presented an electronic piece by Ann McMillan. There weren’t many German women composers at that time. I never felt personally at a disadvantage because I already had had performances in the U.S., and there were no problems in Germany. I enjoyed being a pioneer in promoting women composers and performers. Sometimes I would hear jokes made about women composers, but that ceased as they proved themselves. The movement in Germany started around 1978, and women’s groups formed that were able to get financial subsidies from the German government. This created a type of ghetto at first. I felt the women should integrate and not separate. I disagreed with their separateness philosophy, and therefore was not very active in those organizations. In a series of radio broadcasts for the WDR Cologne on music called “Open House Broadcasts,” and other radio invitations, I played as many recordings by women composers and American composers as I could find on my visits to the U.S. In time, women composers became part of the concert world in Germany, as did American composers.

From Theory to Practice

Trevor Hunter: I found a reference to you using a male pseudonym at one point for an electronic composition.

Gloria Coates: Yes, I’ve used William Fischer, which was the name of my great-grandfather who was a painter. The electronic music for me was so far away from this inner ur schrei that I didn’t really feel I should include it in my work.

TH: But there was enough interest that you composed eight electronic pieces in the ‘70s.

GC: The pieces were mostly using live electronic music or animal or bird sounds; using water, slowing down tapes, and what one does without a studio in the living room. I was happily experimenting with the sounds.

I was working with my voice creating multiphonics and using a modulator paired with live electronics and laser beams for visual patterns. Together with Ulrike and Dieter Trüstedt, we demonstrated this at Darmstadt the summer of 1972. We had great success; hundreds of people came to hear us. It is recorded at Darmstadt in a discussion that the vocal multiphonics were thought to be ugly. No one at Darmstadt had heard of anything quite like it. I didn’t want to continue, so we broke up the team in 1974.

A commission in 1978 from the East Berlin Festival was for an electronic piece, and I used live animals, insects, and birds which I recorded in the Bavarian countryside, along with machine sounds; it was an ecological piece.

TH: In a lot of your orchestral and chamber music I can almost hear an electronic texture, with the glissandos, microtones, and differing layers.

GC: After working for one or two years so intensely with the electronics and microintervals, my interval perception became keener. There was much more space in between the quartertones. Thus it might have influenced my orchestral music.

TH: You’re one of the few composers that I can think of who really gets away with using lots of microtonal elements in your orchestral music. It’s not something I would expect most orchestras would be willing to take on, but you seem to have no problems. For as strange and difficult as many of these things sound, there’s a lot in your notation and your scordaturas that makes these things perhaps more feasible than they would be otherwise.

GC: I remember studying composition in Louisiana with a very good twelve-tone teacher, even though I was rebellious against twelve-tone music. But one important thing that he said was to always notate your music in such a way that people can play it on short notice, because you’re not going to have much time for rehearsal. And that’s what I always did. I never found other composers who were notating the way I was, and I always had my eye out for a more beautiful, ornate system. Although my notation is not very beautiful and ornate, it’s simple and it works. It gives clarity to the music.

TH: The fact that your notation is so simple is kind of appropriate to me, because your musical structures themselves are not that complicated, often maintaining a singular idea throughout the whole movement or piece.

GC: Otto Luening once said he sees the movement as a whole before he writes it down. This is not minimal music, and I am not a minimalist, although some of my music has minimal qualities in that it is reduced in some way. Each piece I write is different, depending on what I am expressing. My latest string quartet, String Quartet No. 9, is the opposite of this concept. Various sections are strung together and over one another. Alexander Tcherepnin once said that you can tell the greatness of a composer by the way he’s able to weave together sections of music. His music was created in sections. Much of my music is contrapuntal. In this style, it can sweep a movement, but it is not minimalist. I spent a few weeks on three notes of a canon. The result looked simple, but the resolution was complicated. My music is often like a mathematics problem with only the solution given.

TH: That Tcherepnin quote reminds me of a La Monte Young quote used by Kyle Gann in the liner notes to one of your discs. He said, “Contrast is for people who can’t write music.”

GC: It’s probably a minimalist idea.

TH: Sure. But I can hear that in your music.

GC: Perhaps it is related to my reducing material to a minimum. I often like to take very few colors because that allows the imagination more freedom. Jack Beeson once said, “If you limit your ideas, you’re freer.” But you have to first have an idea, so you have to be in a good frame of mind because one is not always creative. Then, too, contrapuntal music has fewer contrasts naturally.

TH: To most people’s ears, the most distinguishing feature of your music is probably the glissandos. How did that develop?

GC: Unlike in the past when our, let’s say, division of listening had to do with horses or walking, we now are either driving or flying. I think that’s also why the glissando is there—because I hear it and I experience it all the time. The sound of a car slowing down or speeding up, planes, machines of all sorts, even computer noises and other machines such as vacuum cleaners, mixers, and elevators sound in microintervals. Then, too, microtones are present in our speech, and they are present in nature as in bird songs and animal voices, or thunder, or even trees falling; so our ears are sensitive to microtones.

The first piece I wrote with glissandos was in 1962 when I was studying in Louisiana. This was a string quartet in which I used all glissandi in a contrapuntal form. My professor said, “I don’t understand what you’re doing here. Do you call this music?” I explained that the glissandi went to specific points and a form was created. And he asked, “Why have you written this?” And I answered, “Well, it’s music. You can play it.” Then he said, “Yes, you can,” and he chuckled and asked, “but who will ever listen to it?” Then I thought, well, I’m not writing necessarily to be heard. I stopped writing those glissando pieces for about six years.

In 1962 in Louisiana, no one had heard of Penderecki’s music, but he might have been working on similar things then in Poland. Ideas often happen simultaneously, which seems to give them more validity. A few years later in Europe—perhaps it was because my music didn’t look good enough, or because I didn’t have any publisher, or because I was a woman, an American, in a foreign country, I don’t know—but at first my music using glissandi was not taken seriously.

My scores were not elegant, but simply notated. When I was in Darmstadt for the multiphonic vocal demonstration in 1972, I asked several teachers there if there was anyone with my technique that used a better notation system. Because of my questions, a seminar was devised with Theodore Antoniou as leader to investigate new notation methods. After a long search, we found no composer with my glissando method and objectives; not Xenakis, Penderecki, Lutoslawski, nor Ligeti. I left Darmstadt feeling somewhat hopeless. Now I realize that the notation is very important if you have something new or individual to express. It is primarily through this notation that the idea is recognized.

My music using glissando structures has been plagiarized a few times. The last movement of Music on Open Strings and the second movement of my third string quartet that have been copied. The best way I could guarantee that these glissando structures were mine was to use them in various new pieces. When I modified them in various ways, I discovered one could create a structure in music and then use it as a sort of musical element such as a scale, but it would be in three or more dimensions. I began doing this in some of my later works.

TH: Based on many of your answers to these questions, I get the impression that you place a very high value on originality. Why is it such a virtue to you?

GC: I think it’s part of being American. I remember Harvey Sollberger once saying that music is a long chain, and the Germans say this too. And I believe that, especially if you go back to Mozart or Bach or Beethoven. But I think that an American way of thinking is that creativity springs in giant leaps.

But I must add that in Europe and Germany in particular, originality is valued and considered a very important part of creativity. The Germans admire the music of Cage, Cowell, or Feldman for example, because of their originality. If one writes in the style of Webern or Shostakovich or Hindemith, their music is not highly valued since the composer has no voice of his own. Many composers who are not original are often on the lookout for new ideas which they can use to further themselves. This is always a danger for the young original composer. However, even if he is sometimes robbed, he will have more ideas and the robber will not.

TH: Is this part of why you’re self-published?

GC: Oh, I’m sure. I’m very hesitant to give my scores out, and I usually know who’s performing the music. There have been problems by living in Europe because the publishers there refer me to publishers in America, who refer me to publishers in Europe, so I’ve had this circle going around. I finally stopped trying.

Reality in Abstraction

Trevor Hunter: You’ve had some success as a visual artist, having had to your credit some ten solo exhibitions and more group shows. When did you start painting?

Gloria Coates: Oh, I think at the same time I started in music, maybe when I was three years old. Even in grade school in Wisconsin, sometimes my paintings would go on exhibit to other classes and other schools. But I was also singing. I never really thought about my career, I just simply enjoyed the arts. I remember as a girl scout when I was ten years old, there was an arts badge, and we had to find the correlation between the arts. And it was exciting for me to do this. I found color, rhythm, line, form, mood, and many similarities.

There’s a pastel in the Wisconsin historical society that I did when I was 13. What I was doing then with pastels is very much what evolved in my paintings and music—already the direction was set when I was very young. As I got older, my art remained a spontaneous joy. But for me, composing was more serious and important. I could paint much more quickly, because visually I saw the results in my mind’s eye and realize the form and structure very easily. In composing I could also see what I wanted to express, but it was more abstract and took time to write out all the notes; and with the time needed to unfold an idea, circumstances might change in either my thinking or surroundings, and then the form might change as well. This process is more detailed and time dependent compared to painting.

This (see video above) was painted in 1974. It has similarities to what I was doing intuitively at age 13. That style that I had kept evolving on its own. I didn’t lead it. One sees many details. If we take a contrapuntal part, it would be here [points to painting]. And there’s always a counterpoint. I paint very quickly, but it might take months before that expression comes out of my subconscious. Painting has a freeing effect for me. I look at this painting, and I can see it with all its detail, although I would not try to do the same thing in my music. Seeing a painting I had done would give me courage for the patience needed for the long time that it would take to write out the musical compositions.

TH: I was playing a colleague some of your music, and I had given him no background information. Midway through he turned to me and asked, “Does she do any architecture?” He could hear the lines and the structures in your music.

GC: That’s true, I did study architecture. I went to Cooper Union Art School and at that time, I was either going to major in architecture or in design and painting. However, my life still revolved around music, and I needed the time for my musical studies which were more important to me then. I took a leave of absence from Cooper Union, thinking I could always come back to complete the painting or architecture. But I never did; my life took various turns, and I left New York. But I kept painting, and I always had an interest in architecture. In composing I use the various elements of painting relating to color and architecture, relating to form; I am aware of a certain sensitivity to balances and relationships.

Although I can never generalize about my various pieces because every piece has a different expression, and every expression needs another form, another structure, and other colors—but some of the string quartets are more related to architecture. The architecture is primarily in the form, and perhaps also in the expression of the piece—and if I’m designing something like a large mirror canon in glissandi, that must have the architectural standard of form and content. It sometimes takes weeks to put it together, for one can meet a snag.

TH: Do you see any parallels in the evolution of your visual art and your composing?

GC: I would say yes, because in some of the later paintings I have various elements of reality within the abstraction, and I have done the same thing in the past 10-15 years in the music. The music is still abstract generally, and so are the paintings.

TH: But again, even though they’re abstract, they come from a deep personal expression.

GC: Yes. I’ve never written my autobiography, and I don’t think I can. It would be too complex. In a way, my music is my autobiography.

Christopher Rouse: Going to Eleven

Christopher Rouse in conversation with Frank J. Oteri
Recorded at Rouse’s home in Baltimore, Maryland
February 8, 2008—6:00 p.m.
Transcribed by Julia Lu
Videotaped by Trudy Chan
Video presentation by Randy Nordschow

When most people think of the music of Christopher Rouse, the first thing they probably think of is how loud it is. Some years back there was even a notorious story about an orchestra musician who threatened to sue Rouse for subjecting him to such high decibel levels on stage. Ear-splitting volume is more commonly associated with hard rock than classical music. Rock was a formative influence on this Baltimore native, who as a child was immediately drawn to early rock and roll before his mother turned him on to symphonies, but he quickly grew most fond of raucous 20th-century fare from Prokofiev and Stravinsky. Once he found his own voice as a composer, the visceral power of rock influenced an over-the-top compositional sensibility which has manifested itself in his two powerful symphonies, numerous concertos, and a massive Requiem which finally received its world premiere last year. His brand new Concerto for Orchestra, which Marin Alsop will premiere at Cabrillo this summer, also promises to pack a wallop.

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But not everything Chris writes is completely in-your-face. At the 2007 Chamber Music America conference, the Calder Quartet played haunting strains of music sometimes at the threshold of audibility. In that crowded hotel conference suite you could hear a pin drop. Everyone stood still, including me. I came in late but had to stay until the end to find out what they were playing. When I learned that it was from the Second String Quartet by Chris Rouse, I was mildly stunned. That a composer I had known for years and had come to admire for his raucous percussion pieces such as Odoun Badagris and Bonham and the intense Second Symphony could also write music as subtle and fragile as this completely made me rethink his music. I pored over scores and was startled by how meticulously detailed they were—even the most cataclysmic passages.

Luckily, after many years of casual banter, I finally had a real in-depth musical discussion with Chris over dinner later that year. While sipping Black Russians—Chris’s favorite drink, which is somehow fitting considering that it is mellifluously sweet and also packs a wallop—we discussed everything from how great the band Moby Grape is to how Regietheater has destroyed opera. We realized we had a lot of common ground. By the end of that evening, I convinced him that when we finally could schedule a time to record a conversation for NewMusicBox, we should do it over Black Russians and be equally unbridled. So one Friday night in February, that’s exactly what we did. Our heated conversation, like Chris’s music, was effusive and multi-tiered. Like Nigel’s amps in This is Spinal Tap, it seemed to “go to eleven.”

—FJO

June in Buffalo

[Ed. Note: This month, NewMusicBox shines light on June in Buffalo, one of the most vibrant summertime festivals dedicated entirely to contemporary music. We are pleased to feature an interview with artistic director David Felder and articles detailing the vital role the festival plays in fostering composers at the very beginning stages of their careers. —RN]

Inside a university dormitory, a smattering of young composers gather, huddling together various chairs and couches in order to create a makeshift lounge-like environment. Someone throws a string quartet on the boombox, but nobody really listens, opting instead to socialize and drink beer. Besides, their ears have been saturated by contemporary music all day long, and well into the evening—in the form of masterclasses, one-on-one sessions, concerts, and rehearsals. This is the June in Buffalo that I experienced ten years ago, so I was delighted to see similar late-night hangouts, heart-to-hearts, and ping-pong matches taking place inside the dorms at last year’s festival.

No, I wasn’t participating in the festival this time around—I’m no longer a “young” composer by any stretch of the imagination. I was hanging out in the dorms because I asked June in Buffalo’s artistic director David Felder if I could entrench myself with the student composers in order to collect some editorial fodder. Believe me, the déjà vu factor was a bit overwhelming at first, but I quickly slipped right into the diverse mix of young composers who were already halfway through the rewardingly grueling week.

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While the conditions of the dorms and the late-night activities haven’t changed much over the years, the cast of characters at the festival had. Each year, composers with a good amount of name recognition are invited to mentor the twenty-or-so younger participants. Back in 1998 during my first visit to June in Buffalo, I had the privilege of sipping whiskey with Vinko Globokar as we discussed which types of squeak toy parts work best lodged inside trombone mouthpieces; chatted about installation art with Kevin Volans; got my music dissed by Mario Davidovsky; and in turn, I ignored Donald Erb all together. And that’s what June in Buffalo is all about: a multiplicity of opinions and aesthetic approaches implausibly united by everyone’s unquestionable passion for the art of modern composition. It’s not about holding hands and singing “Kum Ba Yah.” But those open to such an experience will probably glean more wisdom from the festival than those more inclined to stick with what they know. And from judging from the crop of students in 2007, they seemed genuinely eager to hear what the faculty composers—David Felder, John Harbison, Steve Reich, Roger Reynolds, and Charles Wuorinen—had to say on all subjects musical.

There is no singular way to define the June in Buffalo experience, and with over 500 composers having gone through its rite of passage, there are exponentially more anecdotes, triumphs, dramas, failures, and gossip to build an entire mythology around. But one of the things that energizes the festival is its lack of anything quintessential; instead there’s always a palpable sense of discovery in the air.

—RN

See Me, Hear Me: A/V Circa 2008

Video presentation by Randy Nordschow

Although the synthesis of visuals with music is a practice perhaps as old as music itself, the recent collaborative activity in this venture is overwhelming. Economics and technology have allowed for the democratization of audio/visual (A/V), increasing its prevalence in many music communities. From small clubs and warehouses to hallowed concert halls, A/V is becoming so common that much of the audience scarcely regards it as its own entity. But while it continues to permeate all manner of music, much of the activity remains, on the whole, an underground phenomenon worthy of an in-depth look.

Music, despite its temporal nature, has always had a degree of permanence beyond the arts it collaborates with. Music written for a ballet often exists separately from the choreography, but not vice versa. Film soundtracks can sell millions, but a film without its soundtrack is naked. Even the most incorporative of traditional forms, opera, is classified as a musical production before a theatrical one; and while the visual elements change with each new production, the score is rarely touched. Experiments with static visuals and changeable scores most often seem to be confined to drug enthusiasts who own a copy of The Wizard of Oz.

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To a degree this aural sanctity still exists within the burgeoning A/V world, but the separation of parts becomes more problematic. Which isn’t to label the whole scene as monolithic; the differences in approaches within the genre are more pronounced even than those in the chamber music world. But on the whole, if one can even generalize within this field, A/V takes the synesthesia of aural, visual, and physical elements to a whole new level.

Feasibly capturing an accurate snapshot of this scene is a challenge greater than the already formidable task of merely understanding it. Thus, the NewMusicBox team embarked on one of its most ambitious projects to date by interviewing four distinctly different artists in the field on two coasts within the span of a few short weeks. The overlap in the approaches of the featured artists was minimal, and all participants had a great deal to say. If there was a common thread to their efforts, it was this: As music continues its trend of trying to be everything, the musical art that actually does encompass everything will take on more significance.

– Trevor Hunter

Gabriela Lena Frank: Identidad compuesta

Conversación con
Frank J. Oteri
5 de febrero de 2008—5:00 p.m.
En la casa de Joanne Hubbard Cossa
Transcrito por Julia Lu
Traducido al español por Ulises Solano
Video presentación de Randy Nordschow

(The original English transcript of the conversation can be found here.)

La primera vez que me encontré con Gabriela ocurrió por pura casualidad. Estaba caminando en la novena avenida en Manhattan y vi un nuevo restaurante peruano. Mientras ojeaba el menú para referencia futura, Olga Mychajluk, quien trabajaba en ese entonces para G. Schirmer, salió por la puerta y exclamó: —Estoy cenando aquí con una de nuestras nuevas compositoras, Gabi Frank. Tienes que conocerla.— Desafortunadamente, ya yo había cenado, de manera que la conversación no pasó a nada más que saludos.

Pero no mucho después empecé a oír algunas piezas de cámara de Gabriela, y particularmente me había llamado la atención un cuarteto para violonchelos llamado Las Sombras de los Apus. Sabía que iba a tener que tener una conversación más profunda con ella en el futuro, pero haciéndolo suceder literalmente tomó años. Por alguna razón, nunca pudimos sincronizar nuestras agendas. Cada vez que ella visitó Nueva York, yo andaba fuera de la ciudad, y cada vez que yo visitaba el Area de la Bahía (San Francisco) donde ella vive, ella se encontraba en algún lugar atendiendo un estreno, o de viaje en Perú explorando sus tradiciones musicales.

Pero como la suerte lo quisiera, su maravillosamente compacto Cuatro Bosquejos Pre-Incaicos para flauta y violonchelo había sido escogido para ser presentado en concierto de apertura de la conferencia de la Asociación Internacional de Centros de Información Musical del 2007 en Wellington, Nueva Zelanda, en junio pasado; el cual yo sabía que iba a atender. Tan pronto como el Centro de Música Americana supo que su música había sido seleccionada, nosotros nos dedicamos a buscar la manera de traer a Gabriela a la conferencia con nosotros para que ella pudiera escuchar la presentación, y conocer personas de centros de información musical de todas partes del mundo. En aquella ocasión, Gabriela y yo habíamos seriamente contemplado tener una entrevista cara a cara para NewMusicBox en Nueva Zelanda. Hubiera sido una fecha bonita para publicar la dicha entrevista en estas páginas, pero en retrospectiva la idea fue un poco más que ambiciosa.

Así que estamos como en el principio, tratando de hacer esta conversación una realidad. Mientras tanto continué escuchando más y más de su música de manera que habían muchas cosas más de las que quería hablar con ella. Cuando nuestra conversación finalmente sucedió, como usted lo leerá, tuvimamos muchas cosas que decirnos.

– FJO

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