Category: Cover

Bryce Dessner: I’m the Same Musician Wherever I Go

A caucasian man with a denim shirt and sport coat

Bryce Dessner is the first person we have ever featured on NewMusicBox who glowingly talked about both Paul Simon and Helmut Lachenmann. Like many of the most inventive creative musical minds of the early 21st century, Dessner does not compartmentalize music into different genres. However, it is clear that he has learned different lessons from his immersion into different kinds of music-making and that these lessons have made him a stronger musician, whether he is writing songs and playing lead guitar in the indie rock band The National, co-scoring the soundtrack for the motion picture The Revenant, or composing a double piano concerto for the Labeque sisters.

“I find scores to be a very advanced form of technology,” he opined during our hour-long conversation with him at the Archives of the New York Philharmonic immediately after a rehearsal for his composition Wires (for which he joined the orchestra on electric guitar for three consecutive nights in between their performances of Tchaikovsky and Sibelius). “With digital music, or sequence music, whether it be using Pro Tools or GarageBand or Ableton, or whatever, everything is based on patterns and loops,” he elaborated. “With a score, you see very clearly how to defy that. You can write across the bar and the sense of form is much more fluid and asymmetrical. In that way, in fact, I use score a lot in the band to create some of those details. We’ll write a song that’s basically doing the same thing for four minutes, but then I’ll look at it in a score and I’ll create patterns and motion in it that maybe would have been hard to see if I was just playing an Ableton loop or something.”

But scores can also impose limitations, as he then acknowledged. “Right now I’m in a season of needing to liberate myself from … that kind of isolation of looking at music and manuscript, and to be closer to instruments and to this idea of sound and the physical relationship of when I’m hearing notes played, I’m also feeling the bodies playing them. This physicality of music obviously translates the most when I’m on stage with my instrument. … So the balance of those things, maybe to capture that kind of lightning or that physical energy and then put it into a composition, has been something that’s really evaded me but has also excited me at times.”

Bryce Dessner has never been content to rest on his laurels. He’s always eager to explore something different. When he was asked by Sō Percussion to create a companion piece for David Lang’s The So-Called Laws of Nature, he wound up creating a new instrument for the members of that quartet to perform his visceral Music for Wood and Strings. Similarly, The National’s song “Lemonworld,” from their breakthrough album High Violet, was a by-product of Dessner messing around in the studio and tuning his guitar “all the way down until the strings were almost flub.” While he was composing Wires, the piece he performed with the New York Phil, he literally wrote himself “emails every day with large caps saying, ‘NOT ALLOWED TO DO THIS’” in order to try to “break old habits.”

“Part of why I’m drawn to doing this is because I’m still learning,” he explained. “I’m trying to be humble about my art and to be open to trying new things and also to say, ‘I don’t think I know.’ I’m dialing in deeper to what my true voice is and not being scared to try things.”

Dessner’s fearlessness about taking risks coupled with his openness to and fluency in so many different kinds of music have made him an ideal ambassador, not just between musicians from different backgrounds, but also with audiences. This has made him an ideal music curator, a role he has had at Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival in 2010, at the Cincinnati’s MusicNOW Festival, which he founded, since its inception in 2006, and most recently at a NY Phil Nightcap concert last month. Ultimately, the experiences that Bryce Dessner has acquired and now shares as a musician are valuable life lessons that can be applied to all human interactions.

“I’m happy to be a kind of diplomat if people need me to be,” he said. “I find when you come into a room with judgment towards someone who is different from you …, you automatically cancel out all kinds of exciting possibilities that can happen.”

Myra Melford: Freedom and Form

A woman in front of a dark mural

Like so many of today’s most exciting music creators, Myra Melford is not easy to categorize, although she is “happy” being described as a jazz musician, and that is how most of her music has been characterized and marketed for decades.

“Jazz is an inclusive music,” she exclaimed when she visited us at the New Music USA office in September. In recent years, however, she has also been creating compositions for so-called contemporary classical ensembles such as the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players.

“I understand that a lot of what I do works in the jazz context,” Melford elaborated. “Not all of it, but I identify as a composer-performer-improviser, which includes jazz, but isn’t limited to jazz in terms of improvisational music. And the longer I’ve been teaching in the composition program at the University of California at Berkeley, the more I feel comfortable in the new music community.”

She is less comfortable when she is labeled “avant-garde,” despite the cutting edge nature of so much of her work since the term has become saddled with tons of preconceptions that limit the music. As she explained, “When I get together with my students early on in the semester, it’s interesting to me that they conflate free jazz and avant-garde and that playing free jazz today will sound like it did 50 or 60 years ago. That’s what I think the problem is. Avant-garde to me has always meant someone in the advance of where the music is going, so it seems to me that there’s a problem if we don’t agree on what the term means.”

Melford is equally comfortable performing an Otis Spann blues tune with Marty Ehrlich, jamming in a completely free-improvisatory trio with Zeena Parkins and Miya Masaoka, or exploring more predetermined structures in the compositions she creates for her own ensembles, though most of the time these are also left somewhat open for there to be room for improvisation and individual interpretation.

“I don’t have a formal idea about what’s going to happen in any given order,” she admits. “It’s more like: I like this bit of material and that bit of material and that bit of material; let’s see, do they naturally flow together if I switch them around? Then usually I’ll have a pretty worked out draft of that material to take to a rehearsal and then I may make changes after the rehearsal. … If I have a very strong idea of what I want, then of course, I’ll put that forward, but if I’m still questioning how to do this or what would be an interesting way to approach this, I love getting input from the people I’m working with … I think what really makes it work is that the vocabularies of the people who play my music are so vast and can reference so many different things and are the kind of people who are adventurous and would get bored playing the same way all the time.”

Call it an “organic approach to composition,” which is how her one-time teacher Henry Threadgill described his process during their studies. Melford’s approach curiously also comes, albeit somewhat intuitively, from growing up in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

“I had been studying the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright since I was a high school student,” she remembered. “He had also referred to his own process of developing a building or an architectural project as organic, wanting the building to look as if it had grown out of the environment, blurring the distinctions between what was outside the building and what was inside the building. For instance, having paving stones inside the building that extended outside the building. Or the way he used windows and an open floor plan where one room flows into the next. These kinds of things really dovetailed with what Henry was talking about. You start with a cell and you create these permutations. Instead of forcing a form on it, or predetermining the form, you let the form grow naturally out of how the musical materials expand. So, for sure, that also contributed to this aesthetic that I was going to blur the boundaries between what was improvised and what was composed and would be looking for ways of creating form that allowed for a lot of freedom.”

Frank. J. Oteri in conversation with Myra Melford
September 13, 2019—1:00 p.m. at New Music USA
Video recording by Molly Sheridan
Video presentation by Alexandra Gardner

Tyshawn Sorey: Music and Mindfulness

A BIPOC man posing in front of a rehearsal hall door

Tyshawn Sorey’s music emerges from a vast array of experiences, communities, storytelling, and a deep engagement in mentor-mentee relationships. When I listen to his recent works Pillars I, II, III, and Everything Changes, Nothing Changes, I hear imagined worlds and sonic environments that are anchored in numerous histories and traditions. The detailed timbral designs within his compositions amplify a spiritual and creative focus in the music, asking the listener to employ mindfulness, to breathe, and to engage with spontaneity.

Sorey’s creative practice is multifaceted. His musical journey began as a trombone player in New Jersey where he listened to everything from be-bop to hip-hop and country music. He is in regular demand as a new music composer, writing for ensembles such as the International Contemporary Ensemble and the JACK Quartet. As a drummer, Sorey is a fixture on the jazz scene and can be heard performing with artists such as Vijay Iyer, Kris Davis, Marilyn Crispell, and Jason Moran, in addition to leading his own ensembles. Sorey has also developed a unique voice as a pianist and has played piano with artists such as composer/trumpet player Wadada Leo Smith and mrudangam artist Rajna Swaminathan.

Throughout his rigorous career as a composer and performer, Sorey regularly teaches and mentors other artists to support the creation of their own work. This practice has led him to become an assistant professor of music and African American studies at Wesleyan University. It is here, in his new creative home on the Wesleyan campus, that Tyshawn Sorey and I sat down to discuss his history as an educator, his latest works, and his thoughts about the word “improvisation.”

Tyshawn Sorey outside

Lucy Dhegrae: The Art and Science Behind the Voice

A woman with pink hair sitting and her reflection in the mirror.

In most of the world’s musical genres, the distinction between creating something anew and interpreting something that already exists is somewhat blurry. And in many folk traditions, there is a further blur between performers and audiences—in some societies, making music is just part of living and it is participatory and often non-hierarchical. Yet in Western classical music, there is a very precise delineation between the roles of composers, interpreters, and the audience and, for better or worse, this is a paradigm that most practitioners of new music have inherited. But just as distinctions between genres continue to erode in the second decade of our new millennium, there has also been a shift in our perception of what the particular roles could be for making music now and in the future.

“The best composers know what it’s like to be a performer and the best performers know how to improvise,” says vocalist Lucy Dhegrae, who is the founder and director of Resonant Bodies, a three-day festival of contemporary vocal music that takes place annually in New York City and which has now had iterations in Chicago as well as in Melbourne and Sydney, Australia. “Maybe those delineations were important for the time and maybe they’re helpful for some people, but now what I see in myself and Resonant Bodies artists and people I work with all over the place is that we just don’t care about all of those delineations anymore. … At what point did we start to structure it this way and start to exclude people, except that we were trying I guess to exclude people for financial reasons somehow? It’s not all necessarily nefarious, but it can have this exclusive idea to it.”

As far as exclusivity goes, calling Dhegrae the “director” of Resonant Bodies is somewhat misleading, because although she carefully curates the vocalists who perform on each of the concerts, she gives each of them full reign in determining what music they present to an audience.

“What I love in an experience with people is to know what they’re passionate about,” she gushes with contagious enthusiasm in a conversation at her Manhattan apartment only an hour after she flew in from St. Louis. “I would never dream of telling a singer, ‘Hey, you should do this specific piece. I want to hear you do that piece.’ Because you’re only going to get the second best thing from a singer that way, I think. But if you ask a singer, ‘What do you love to sing? What lights you up? Right now?’ Because it has to align with their life moment. Then things feel urgent. I want to hear your urgent music.”

Urgency is an important ingredient not only for Resonant Bodies, but all of the music that Dhegrae performs as a vocalist herself, whether it’s a something by singer-songwriter Joanna Newsom, high modernist composer Jason Eckardt, or composer-performer Gabrielle Herbst, whom she sang alongside for the premiere of Herbst’s dreamy opera Bodiless. Urgency is also what fuels her life’s mission: to be empowered as a singer and to empower other singers which, aside from a desire to make musical experiences fairer (“in Resonant Bodies we … always talk about being treated as singers versus musicians versus artists”), yields better performances, as she points out:

It’s really beautiful when you have that melding, where you’re coming halfway, and we see a really special part of the performer and a really special part of the composer. That to me is the best part of creating a new piece.

Curiously, in her childhood, long before she ever considered singing as a profession, Dhegrae wrote music and even won a contest for it. But she quickly got turned off when a teacher attempted to make her do a rudimentary composition exercise instead of trying to nurture her creative impulses. Perhaps an even more significant background for Dhegrae, however, was her pursuit of a pre-med degree simultaneously with studying singing as an undergrad. Though she ultimately did not become a laryngologist, which is the career path she wanted to pursue at the time, her deep study of the acoustic, physical, and medical science of the voice informs her approach to making music to this day.

“There’s one particular nerve that people talk about for the voice, the recurrent laryngeal nerve,” Dhegrae explains, “which starts in your brain, goes down, wraps through your heart, and then goes into your vocal chords. So literally your voice has to go through your heart first before it comes out. It has to come from your brain, through your heart, and then come out of your mouth. … I think that’s really an important metaphor, because your heart is naturally a part of how you sing. And we can’t deny that. That is a physical reality. So it’s not a metaphor anymore!”

Frank. J. Oteri in conversation with Lucy Dhegrae in her Manhattan apartment
August 19, 2019, 2:00 p.m.
Video presentation by Molly Sheridan

Juliana Hall: Pulled Into The Poets’ World

A photo of a woman with red hair sitting outdoors

For many practitioners as well as die-hard fans, contemporary music means ensembles or something electro-acoustic or perhaps, every now and then, a new orchestral work that sneaks its way onto a program of standard rep or a black box production of a new opera. But, as we try to show on these pages, new music exists in many more places than these, and it takes many forms—e.g. the enormous amount of new music being performed by wind bands and choruses. But what about the world of art song?

Music history and most recital programs emphasize the now nearly 200-year-old lieder of Schubert and Schumann. Folks who dig deeper will treasure other equally extraordinary lieder by Johanna Kinkel, the nearly 100 romances of Tchaikovsky, plus the mesmerizing mélodies of Debussy, Ravel, Reynaldo Hahn, Cécile Chaminade, Francis Poulenc, and so many others, including Americans such as Charles Griffes, Amy Beach, and even Charles Ives, who self-published a collection of 114 of his songs back in 1922.  All three of the primary protagonists of the Second Viennese School—Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern—were also prolific song composers. Among living composers, Ned Rorem, now 95, remains revered for his more than 500 contributions to the idiom.

But in today’s world where the songs of popular music are ubiquitous and contemporary music seems far removed from mainstream culture much of the time, contemporary art songs fall outside of most people’s radar. Yet tons of composers continue to find inspiration in setting lyric poetry for solo voice and piano. In fact, four volumes issued by a small independent publisher that were devoted to recent art songs contained music by 63 different composers.  Among the songs in those anthologies are poignant setting of poems by Emily Brontë and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow by Juliana Hall, whose music I first became enamored with through a 2017 MSR recording of her Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson song cycles featuring soprano Susan Narucki and countertenor Darryl Taylor.

Hall defines herself loudly and proudly at the top of the homepage of her website as an “American Art Song Composer.” Some composers might find such a description unduly self-limiting but, as we learned when we spent an afternoon with her and her husband David Sims in their home in northern Connecticut, Hall has given her almost completely undivided attention to composing art songs for over 30 years and is quite content to remain so focused.

“This is a place for me,” said Hall, “because I love poetry. I love the text. I love the drama. I love the theater. Everything that goes into one little song and makes a little world all of its own. And with the piano, you can make accompaniments that feel like you’re telling the story of the song also. With that and the voice together, you can make quite a world, and I think that’s why I started there and stayed there.”

Hall described how she first seriously got the composing bug when friends asked her to set a poem by Emily Dickinson for their wedding. In graduate school at Yale, where she had been admitted as a pianist, she studied composition with Frederick Rzewski as an elective and he was very supportive. Martin Bresnick, then the department chair, said, “I think you’re really a composer” and sorted out her paperwork so she could become a composition major. Still, she remained focused on writing songs.

“I hadn’t had all the background like studying counterpoint and harmony that the other composers had,” Hall remembered, “and I also didn’t have a stack of music like they had in their portfolios. But I knew that there was something with texts that I could connect with and that I felt like I belonged with. Things were kind of conspiring to keep in me text. And I think some of that was because I had this wonderful soprano friend at Yale, Karen Burlingame. Karen really wanted to do art songs. So I had a singer and I’m a pianist. … I think because everything was handed to me together, pianist and singer and they had these student concerts every semester, so I just kept writing and writing and they kept saying, ‘That’s a nice song.’ They were very encouraging. So the more I did it, the more I felt like I really did belong to this little world.”

An intrepid visitor who navigates through the enormous amount of music on Hall’s website as well as on her SoundCloud page will eventually discover a few short instrumental works for solo English horn, saxophone, cello, and piano, but she was quick to point out that even these pieces were inspired by her voracious love for poetry:

I knew a saxophonist that lived not too far from us—Carrie Koffman. She’s at the Hartt School. I said, “Could I write a piece for you?” I wanted to use Rilke texts, but I had stopped writing in other languages. So I thought, I can still use this poetry and not worry about the text because I would want to set it in German if I was going to write for a singer. So I could use these beautiful words once again and kind of use the saxophone as a singer. She could portray what was going on in the text.

But poems are not the only texts that function as Hall’s muse. She is also intrigued by the letters of various poets and has created fascinating song cycles from letters by Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Hall acknowledges, however, that setting letters requires a somewhat different compositional approach.

“With letters you have to give extra space,” she explained. “Or maybe go onto another thought that comes very quickly. When you’re writing a letter, you have a different way of communicating. And that’s the same with setting the song. You have to kind of go with her letter in the sense that you have to give it the time that it needs. There are a lot of instances where the music changes abruptly and that’s because she’s changed her thought. She’s writing to her friend. That’s the fun of those letters, but it’s also the trick of them, too, to still make it sound like a whole piece and connect the whole thing nicely.”

Having stayed focused on text setting for 30 years has given Juliana Hall an enormous amount of experience in writing extremely effective songs that are being championed by singers around the country. These songs are also starting to circulate internationally. It helps that she has a publisher, E.C. Schirmer, which has tirelessly promoted her music at conferences and to music libraries. And in the coming months, several more CDs will be released which feature her songs. There are also tons of ways to experience her music online.

“It’s only been like five years or so that things have started taking off,” Hall acknowledged. “I’ve been writing songs for 30 years. But for 25 of those years, I’ve just been working, working, trying to get better and better, so it isn’t all of a sudden. … The publisher that I have has been remarkable. They’ve just been really friendly and really supportive. I feel that they try to get it out there, and
they have been extremely careful in producing scores that reflect very precisely the music I wish to share, which is a huge gift. … Years ago I was up here writing songs and they wound up in the cedar chest over there. This was before the internet. … SoundCloud, the website, and Facebook have been pretty remarkable for me.”


Frank J. Oteri in conversation with Juliana Hall at her home in Simsbury, Connecticut
July 12, 2019—3:00 p.m.
Video Presentation by Molly Sheridan

Jeffrey Mumford: Creating a Different World

A photo of a man with a white beard against a brick wall

“I like to think that people could walk into one of my pieces, like you can walk into a painting or a video installation,” says Jeffrey Mumford, a composer who started off pursuing a career in the visual arts before music completely took over his imagination.

“I fully thought I was going to be an artist,” he explained during an hour we spent with him when he was visiting New York City for a performance last month. “I did lots of work in high school and I went to college as an art major. Then I got one of my paintings sabotaged. … I was working on it and then one day, there was white paint splattered all over it. Someone obviously didn’t like it. So I kind of ran to the music department for solace, because I was always interested in music anyway. … I came to realize that that was the best way I could express myself.”

Expression and, in particular, expressing himself his way, are paramount to Mumford, who has always rejected such binary polarities as atonality vs. tonality, Uptown vs. Downtown, or gnarly vs. lush. And he is particularly opposed to the belief that someone’s race, gender, or any other social categorization could or should determine the kind of music that person creates. According to him, “Being a black composer is itself a very subversive act because you offend both sides. You offend these people who in the white community think that you’re encroaching on their turf and you offend people within your own community, unfortunately, who think that you’re writing white people’s music. I think I write my music. I write what I hear. I have many influences. … There’s no one such thing as black music. … If you’re a black composer, anything you write will be black music.”

In Mumford’s lexicon, Elliott Carter, with whom he studied for three years, “is a Romantic composer.” Yet at the same time, growing up “hearing Sarah Vaughan singing made a big impression” on him. Mumford’s eclecticism and refusal to be typecast might explain why his music was presented on one of the earliest Bang on a Can marathons.

Part of Mumford’s strong desire not be beholden to any particularly stylistic silo is that he wants “to create a different world” through his music. A through line, however, that connects a lot of his creative work is its evocation of clouds, which has fascinated him since his youth:

I used to look out the window in the summer time. There were thunderstorms all over the place in D.C., and the sky would turn purple and green. And you’d see these masses of clouds splitting off and recombining. That was so inspiring to me. Then still thinking I was going to be a painter, I just wanted to grab them, bring them into my room, and play with them. But those images have never left. So musically I want to recreate this sense that you can create an environment that you can live in among these clouds.

Certainly the beautiful aphoristic titles of Mumford’s compositions—e.g. her eastern light amid a cavernous dusk or of fields unfolding…echoing depths of resonant light—evoke cloud imagery as well as poetry, and in so doing perhaps encourage a different kind of listening approach than if he simply gave his compositions the generic names based on instrumentation that so many other composers do, e.g. for the two examples cited above: Wind Quintet No. 1 and Cello Concerto.

But in addition to all of this ethereal inspiration, Mumford is also deeply rooted in humanism and wants his music to be a galvanizing force for making the world a better place and for people to think beyond simple answers. He was particularly passionate when he recounted the story of the Cleveland Orchestra premiere of the comfort of his voice, a work he wrote in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

An usher who’d been there for a long time came up to me and said, “Thank you for your piece. It wasn’t ‘We Shall Overcome’ again. It was much more complex because the man was so much more complex.” … With all due respect to “We Shall Overcome” and “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and the numerous other anthems that inspire our community, I wanted to write a piece that asked harder questions. Does that make sense?  Then this usher came up to me and said thank you. “This piece for me meant a lot, to hear that you took a different approach than a lot of composers have taken when given this opportunity to do that.”

Frank J. Oteri in conversation with Jeffrey Mumford at the home of Bärli Nugent in New York, NY
May 22, 2019—11:00 a.m.
Video Presentation by Molly Sheridan

Hannibal Lokumbe: Always Go With the Feeling

A BIPOC man with dreads, a dark shirt, and dark cap

For the past three years, composer/trumpeter/raconteur/poet/community activist/force of nature Hannibal Lokumbe has served as a composer-in-residence with the Philadelphia Orchestra under the auspices of Music Alive, a program which New Music USA administers in partnership with the League of American Orchestras. The culmination of this residency is Hannibal’s massive oratorio Healing Tones, which at the end of March received its world premiere performances featuring the Philadelphia Orchestra joined by two choruses and three additional vocal soloists.

Hannibal has had a long history with New Music USA and, before that, with Meet The Composer (which later merged with the American Music Center to become New Music USA). MTC supported the 1990 commission of African Portraits, Hannibal’s first large-scale work involving a symphony orchestra. African Portraits, a sprawling sonic adventure requiring blues and gospel vocal soloists, three choruses, a West African kora player, and a jazz quartet in addition to a large orchestra, has now received over 200 performances all over the country, a rare accomplishment for any contemporary American work let alone one that costs $4000 a minute to rehearse. So we have long wanted to have an opportunity to record a conversation with him about his musical career, his compositional process, and his sources of inspiration.

Our recent talk with Hannibal in Philadelphia was a 45-minute roller coaster ride that was part testimonial, part reminiscence, part philosophical manifesto, and part performance art, but all pure emotion. Many questions were left unanswered and others just led to other questions for us, some of which we probably will never be able to answer.

There was a lot to process in a very short amount of time. There were his extraordinary thoughts about Pangaea—“the spiritual land mass of humanity is music”—as well as his optimistic outlook on the future: “What our world and what our nation’s going through now is giving birth.  Birth requires some bleeding and some suffering.  But in the base of our brain is a certain knowledge, and that knowledge says that from this pain will come this treasure.” There were also tantalizing fragments of anecdotes from his storied life in music, such as taking Jimi Hendrix’s place after Hendrix died for a recording session with Gil Evans (“Gil … always saw things in a person that they might not see in themselves”) or giving advice to a young Whitney Houston (“Sister, whatever you do, follow the music.  Don’t follow the people. People will confuse you.”) Perhaps what was most poignant to me was a comment he made about why he creates such personal and idiosyncratic music:

“It would be a disgrace to my ancestors to try to tell someone else’s story, which I could not do.  I could emulate it. I could emulate Bach. I could emulate Brahms. I have the technical skill to do that, but it would be dishonest.”


Hannibal Lokumbe in conversation with Frank J. Oteri at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia
March 13, 2019—12:30 p.m.
Video presentation by Molly Sheridan

Bright Sheng: My Father’s Letter and Bernstein’s Question

Bright Sheng sitting in front of his grand piano

We’ve been wanting to talk with Bright Sheng for years, but given his teaching schedule at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and his commitments to participate in performances of his music either as a pianist or a conductor all over the world, he has been difficult to pin down. But when we finally met with him on Presidents’ Day in his pied-à-terre across the street from Lincoln Center, it proved to be worth the wait.

I have long been eager to talk with him about several of his compositions, particularly his works for the orchestra and the operatic stage which were inspired either by ancient folktales or extremely unsettling contemporary topics or a combination of the two. I wanted to know the back story of the work that put him on the map, H’un (Lacerations), which is a searing orchestral composition inspired by the Cultural Revolution he lived through in the People’s Republic of China. I was very curious about his sympathetic portrait of Madame Mao, one of that tragic epoch’s masterminds, in his opera of the same name, as well as his more recent hyper-romantic Dream of the Red Chamber based on one of the most celebrated classical Chinese novels. I also wanted to know why he claimed that his first opera, The Song of Majnun, which is based on a 12th century Persian love story, was in some way a response to the Tiananmen Square incident and his feelings that he’d never be able to return to his homeland.

But what I did not anticipate was how deeply Sheng is concerned about directly moving audiences in whatever format or style he is working in and how passionate he would be about sharing what led him to his aesthetic positions. An early epiphany was his being sent to Tibet during the Cultural Revolution years and discovering how important participating in musical performances was to people there even though they didn’t have enough food to eat. Even more impactful on him personally was a ten-page letter from his father, who had relocated to New York City while Sheng was still a student at Shanghai Conservatory, warning him not to assume he’d be able to eke out a musical career if he immigrated to the United States. But, perhaps what was most significant was his tutelage under the legendary Leonard Bernstein who lavished praise and disdain with equal aplomb.

My father was asking: “Why does a society support art, or a musician, or a composer? Why should society? The society needs food and needs people to fix their cars, but they don’t need a composer. Why is this important?” Bernstein asked the other side of question: “What is your responsibility as an artist if you asked the society to support you?” I think the answer is actually very simple. Your work has to reach the audience. You have to touch them emotionally. Touch their nerves. Touch their emotions. Then you did your work and can say, “Hey, support me.”


Bright Sheng in conversation with Frank J. Oteri in Sheng’s New York City apartment
February 18, 2019—12:00 p.m.
Video presentation by Molly Sheridan

Ellen Reid: More Than Sound

A woman sitting on a blue couch

“Would you ever say any concert is just about the sound?” Ellen Reid asked me when I met with her in Brooklyn a few days after the final PROTOTYPE performance of her opera p r i s m.

That question might initially seem odd coming from someone who defines herself as both a composer and a sound artist—someone who pays close attention to sound, whether it’s the careful spatial positioning of objects in an installation or slightly changing the instrumental forces accompanying voices to make listeners think they’re hearing different music. Yet that question made total sense to me after attending two live performances of her music the previous week—the aforementioned emotionally traumatic yet life-affirming p r i s m and the powerful, politically charged choral work dreams of the new world.

Although the music was extremely compelling in both works, it was clearly conceived to be just one of many elements that went into these multisensory experiences. In the realm of contemporary opera, audiences are now accustomed to watching a theatrical experience unfold that is every bit as significant as the pitches in the arias that are being sung, so in that sense p r i s m is not unique. (It is unique rather for the way that the story does not unfold in linear time, and how the music helps to skew the storyline’s altered chronology.) Concert presentations of choral pieces, on the other hand, are usually always focused exclusively on the composer despite the pedigree of the text being set. Yet Reid made it clear in her comments before the performance of dreams of the new world, as well as in our conversation, that her music was just one of the elements that went into creating this piece. For those pre-performance comments, as well as during the bow she took at the end of it, Reid was joined by both her librettist Sarah LaBrie and Sayd Randle, who served as the work’s lead researcher and dramaturg.

“We came up with the concept together,” Reid explained. “We were all involved in each other’s work, and I think that that’s a really honest thing that happens in the craft of making music. I guess in all performative mediums, but especially in more theatrical mediums with a story.”

Reid’s collaborative generosity is extremely refreshing and comes from an extensive background in composing for film soundtracks and incidental music for theater, as well as living for two and a half years in Thailand where she immersed herself in traditional musical practices.

“The amount of people that it takes to make a work of art is enormous,” Reid elaborated. “We have put a certain amount of weight on different parts of those things to make some of them seem more important, but they couldn’t happen without the other ones. … I think one reason that I’m really set on featuring my collaborators is that I’ve done a lot of work in other mediums where composers are not the first artist. … [To me,] it feels more like a constellation.”

Reid’s instinctive team spirit, as well as her awareness that sound always exists alongside other sensory stimuli, even informs music she creates that would otherwise be perceived as purely “instrumental” or “abstract,” words put in scare quotes here because they’re not particularly adequate descriptors for Reid’s output. For example, even when writing a piece for orchestra, Reid will write tempos a certain way based on her mindfulness of what the conductor will look like during its realization.

“I think there’s an element of choreography and theater in how everything is interpreted as a viewer,” she explained.

Reid seemed to imply that she would be composing for orchestra again in the near future, but since it had yet to be officially announced, she would not offer us any further details about the project other than to acknowledge that whatever she writes will inevitably be informed by the visual realities that occur during the process of a large group of people making music as a result of someone’s baton movements and/or hand gestures.

“It has to be. They’re front and center: a dancer conductor.”


Ellen Reid in conversation with Frank J. Oteri at the home of Sarah Baird Knight in Brooklyn, NY
January 14, 2019—1:30 p.m.
Video presentation by Molly Sheridan

Roberto Sierra: Globalizing Local Experiences

A man in a tweed jacket with glasses in Manhattan

Composer Roberto Sierra frequently likes to tell the story of how, when he was growing up in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, he would hear Pablo Casals playing his cello on television while salsa recordings of the Fania All-Stars blared outside on the street. Most of Sierra’s music—which spans numerous works for soloists, chamber ensembles, and orchestra as well as his massive Missa Latina—has forged a synthesis of these two musical realms. But the question of what kinds of music are local or global is more complex than it might initially seem.

Conceptually, one might argue, Western classical music is tailor-made for global promulgation since a score written in country A in year X could theoretically be rendered equally well by musicians in either country B in year Y or country C in year Z.  But, of course, thanks to the advent of recording technology well over a century ago, those folks in A, B, and C can now easily listen to each other.  As a result, any locally made music has the possibility of reaching a global audience.  In fact, the salsa Roberto Sierra was hearing in Vega Baja was actually recorded in New York City, whereas Pablo Casals moved to Puerto Rico when Sierra was a young child and lived there for the rest of his life.

However, as Sierra pointed out when we met up with him in a hotel room before a performance of his music in New York City later that evening, “the heyday of classical music is Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart, and I think they were still very much localized.”  But Sierra went on to explain how the elevation of certain repertoire has made it extremely difficult for the vast majority of composers.

It’s very difficult for any composer, even German composers nowadays, because you have to live with that notion of something that was great and something that is not able to be great anymore.  And for the others living in America, or in Latin America, wherever we are, we’re thinking, “Oh my God, we are outside of this canon of great masterpieces of humanity.”

But Sierra—who initially left Puerto Rico to study with György Ligeti in Hamburg in the late 1970s, went on to serve as the composer-in-residence of the Milwaukee Symphony in the 1980s, and has been a member of the composition faculty at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, since 1992—doesn’t bother himself with following a lineage or adhering to a zeitgeist. His piano concerto Variations on a Souvenir sounds like it could have been written in the 19th century while his Second Piano Trio uses a tone row as well as the strict clave rhythm but doesn’t really sound either dodecaphonic or Afro-Cuban.

I always thought and I always commented to other colleagues: You think Boulez is looking over your shoulder, and you’re waiting for his approval or disapproval?  In fact, these people do not care what you write.  If you’re writing something so that the powers that be will approve of you, composers do not; composers are self-centered!  They’re only thinking about their own stuff.  So write your own stuff.  …  I don’t even have Ligeti looking at me.


Roberto Sierra in conversation with Frank J. Oteri at the Park Central Hotel in New York, NY
November 13, 2018—2:30 p.m.
Video presentation by Molly Sheridan