Category: Cover

What Is the Sound of An Artist Taking Action?

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By Molly Sheridan

Video produced by Randy Nordschow

In the countdown to the ’04 American presidential election, it feels as if the country is holding its breath.

Already overburdened by the complexity and tragedy of many recent global events, our eyes are turned to the war of rhetoric playing out between two candidates, both of whom claim that they are the only way to keep/get this country on the right track. But the Right lies, they say, and the Left is wishy-washy. We have been advised by all sides not to trust the media, but a 24/7 news cycle has heightened our awareness of the world World – Sudan, Iraq, Chechnya, bullets, bombings, starvation, and worse. Feeling overwhelmed and without recourse, we now face the nightly news with a kind of numbness, tragedy distilled down to the abstract “human cost”—as if it’s a line item on the world’s GNP spreadsheet.

The Dixie Chicks may have been the first musicians with enough fame to catch the cameras of CNN, but artists of all stripes have been compelled to speak to recent events. Perhaps not since the AIDS crisis rocked our community have composers been so collectively galvanized, absorbing the world around them and creating work that reflects that sensitivity.

With that in mind, I sat down with composers and performers making work that directly comments on the issues before us. Their perspectives are much larger than an election or a political party. History tells us they are often our Cassandras, the first to point and shout, “Look here! Wake up! Pay attention!” They do us that service; it is then our responsibility to listen.

***

Behind Closed Doors

Produced and edited by NewMusicBox

Anonymous

 

Ed. Note: Many jurors who adjudicate the various composition competitions serve anonymously, and even the ones who don’t are instructed to be confidential. So, in order to present a realistic and informative look at the judging process through interviews with people who have served on important panels, we decided to conduct a series of anonymous interviews. By not identifying our three panelists (and even going to the extreme length of hiding their faces and altering their voices), we hope to offer a real insider’s look at the evaluation process.

What we have unearthed is not earth shattering—there is no smoking gun or exposé of rampant foul play—but rather, these conversations will hopefully reveal the mindsets of some key people who have been involved in the process and help us to understand what leads juries on various panels to the decisions they ultimately make.

 

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Game Theory: A-list Game composer Andy Brick

At Brick’s home studio in Philipse Manor, New York
Wednesday, June 23, 2004—1-2 p.m.

Edited and Transcribed by Molly Sheridan
Videotaped by Randy Nordschow

Andy Brick
Last night I tried my hand at playing a video game for the first time in more than six years. Standing so far outside mainstream culture, I hadn’t fully appreciated the artistry that goes into creating the world these games inhabit—and by extension the long list of required writers, artists, and musicians who make the interactive production come alive.

But I couldn’t help but want to take a closer look after talking to Andy Brick, a composers whose name regularly surfaces as one of the premiere American artists working in this field.

A combination of factors let me to his studio door for a NewMusicBox chat. I had been reading that the gaming world was increasing in sophistication both artistically and financially, and that the music production was getting a piece of that pie large enough to hire composers and whole symphony orchestras. Gamers seemed unlikely to have conservative music tastes. Was this an untapped audience for the cutting-edge music currently created well under the radar of a mass audience? A compositional goldmine or a straightjacket? And could you actually make a living doing it? Of course, it turned out it was a little of all of that, but not quite in the ways I’d assumed…

—MS

The Next Phase: Steve Reich talks to Richard Kessler About Redefinition and Renewal

Monday, June 21, 2004—2:30-3:30 p.m.
Vermont

Videotaped and transcribed by Frank J. Oteri and Randy Nordschow

Steve Reich and Richard Kessler
Steve Reich and Richard Kessler

In July 1998, before NewMusicBox existed, Richard Kessler, then celebrating his first anniversary as executive director of the American Music Center, launched a series of conversations called “In The First Person,” by interviewing Steve Reich. Now, in July 2004, as Richard ends his tenure at the American Music Center, it seemed perfect timing to present a second conversation between Kessler and Reich, this time focusing on Richard’s tenure at the American Music Center—how he spearheaded the organization’s renewal and refocus and what that means for new American music.

—FJO

Steve Reich: So, how did life in music begin for you?

Richard Kessler: I think for the most part it started in junior high when I started singing in the chorus—just a regular junior high school in Rockaway Beach, Queens, with a 350-member chorus. Nobody could read music; it was all by rote. I spent two years in that chorus and it was the most amazing thing—the connection to music, the tradition. We had a traditional “repeater”, a piece that every year’s chorus would sing—it was “Every Time I Feel the Spirit,” a spiritual arranged beautifully by Gregg Smith. At the spring concert every year, chorus alumni would come back and just erupt with screaming after they heard it.

When I went to high school there wasn’t much of a chorus. It was a little choir with about 20 people in it. So I decided to learn an instrument. I picked up the trombone in the middle of the 10th grade and one thing led to another. I played in the all-city high school orchestra when I was in the 12th grade and then made my way to Juilliard. That was how music started for me in a serious way.

Steve Reich: After Julliard you became a part of the Saturday Brass Quintet. Can you explain how you got there?

Richard Kessler: You know, brass players don’t play much in the orchestra.

Steve Reich: Some do, some don’t. [laughs]

Richard Kessler: [laughs] To begin with, so much of the classical repertoire is missing trombones—and in some of the greatest works with trombones, you don’t play for the first three movements! In Brahms’s first symphony you do nothing but sit there for three movements and then in the fourth you basically have to come in on a soft, exposed high A that keeps all the principal trombone players sweating. So I just decided to start playing some chamber music. It’s a course usually at the conservatory: brass chamber music. I started in my first quintet at Julliard with Jerry Schwarz coaching us. Most people know him today as a conductor, but back then he was just starting out as a conductor and had been principal trumpet in the New York Philharmonic and also with the American Brass Quintet.

Outside of school, a few of my friends from different schools got together and we started this group. I was about, I don’t know, 18 or 19 years old. We just started playing gigs for fun; we played on the streets. You might remember in the ’70s in New York you could play on the streets. We used to play on the corner of 6th Avenue and 4th Street; we used to play on 5th Avenue in the 50s…

Steve Reich: Nice locations.

Richard Kessler: Great locations. It was an incredible thing because we made money, we learned repertoire—we played all the Bach transcriptions, all the Joplin stuff—and you could play for hours and big crowds would come along. Cute girls would come around and watch us play!

Steve Reich: There you go.

Richard Kessler: I’d go home with maybe 30 or 40 bucks in my pocket…

Steve Reich: …which in those days was something…

Richard Kessler: Yeah, and it was all from just playing music on the streets. They stopped that at one point. Mayor Koch ended it. To this day you really don’t see it…

Steve Reich: You see stuff in the subways but that’s about it.

Richard Kessler: And that’s an official MTA program, but on the street, forget it, it’s long gone and it’s a shame really. So we started playing for fun. There were five of us from different schools and we needed a name. We were just joking around and somebody said, “Let’s make up a name that has no meaning.” Brass players always come up with these names, you know, the Tower Brass, Epic Brass, Monumental Brass, Empire Brass….There’s something oddly monolithic about these names. So we decided that we’d have a name that made no sense at all. We were just joking around…the Saturday Brass Quintet. We ended up getting artistic management, ended up getting gigs, started touring nationally. We won the Naumburg Chamber Music Award in 1990, and you know only two brass quintets have ever won that award. We commissioned a lot of people, all sorts of folks, Pauline Oliveros, Anthony Davis, Elliot Goldenthal, Richard Danielpour, Ned Rorem, Joe Schwantner, and many others.

An interesting piece to that is how difficult it was to convince composers to write for brass. A lot just didn’t want to write for brass quintet, something I couldn’t understand then, because you’re thinking, “Well, we’re a great brass quintet. Why won’t they want to write for us?” I understand it now. How many performances will you get? How much will the commission be? We had talked for a long time about approaching you.

Steve Reich: I’ve hardly written for brass.

Richard Kessler: We never called you, but we got your name from soprano Cheryl Bensman. One of our trumpet players was good friends with Cheryl.

Steve Reich: This must have been back in the early ’80s.

Richard Kessler: Cheryl said, “You should call him, he’s really great.” We didn’t, but we all loved your music so much! I guess we couldn’t get up the nerve. We used to listen to Music for 18 Musicians while we traveled around the country touring in a van.

I had your number in my phonebook from about 1984, way before I came to the AMC. When I joined the AMC I discovered that nobody there actually had your home number, but I had had it for years in my filofax! [laughs].

Worth Fretting Over

Stephen Griesgraber, moderator

James Emery
Mark Stewart
David Starobin
Dominic Frasca
David Leisner

Friday, May 14, 2004
4:00-5:00 p.m. at the American Music Center

Videotaped by Randy Nordschow
Transcribed by Randy Nordschow, Frank J. Oteri, and Molly Sheridan
© 2004 NewMusicBox

Stephen Griesgraber, Mark Stewart, David Starobin, Dominic Frasca, and David Leisner
Left to right:
Stephen Griesgraber, James Emery, Mark Stewart, David Starobin, Dominic Frasca & David Leisner

Extremities: Maryanne Amacher

April 16, 2004—4-5 p.m.
Kingston, New York
Videotaped by Randy Nordschow
Transcribed by Molly Sheridan and Randy Nordschow
As someone whose entry point into the vast world of musical repertoire has mostly been through collecting records and since the most unusual and unique things are usually the hardest ones to hear live, Maryanne Amacher has always been something of an enigma to me.

A composer of vast, space-specific sonic panoramas at crushingly loud volumes, Amacher defies containment and commodification. When Tzadik finally released a CD of her music, I finally thought I was able to experience it. But actually, I hadn’t. Two speakers can’t really convey what she is doing in space and as an apartment dweller the kinds of volumes she demands would inevitably lead to an eviction.

Yet through listening and reading her essays on various subjects, especially her fascinating contribution to a panel on Cage’s influence where she spoke about creating a music that is somehow liberated from time, I felt compelled to talk to her. We spent only about an hour in conversation—the unfortunate time constraints of a reality based on schedules—but it felt like it could have gone on forever. And, in some ways, it will…

Sections:


The Role of Music


Frank J. Oteri: The work you do inhabits its own unique realm that is sometimes quite at odds with most of the presentational aspects we take for granted with most music: it’s really not meant to be listened to the same way in time, in space or in volume…So, how you feel about describing your work as music? How does it fit in with the history of music of the past and how it points to the music of the future?
Maryanne Amacher: Well that’s a difficult question [laughs]. Are you thinking of concert music?
Frank J. Oteri: I’m thinking of the role that music has had in society, the relationship people have to is as listeners, the context of concerts, recordings, how it’s assimilated, how it’s taught, how it’s learned, how it’s acculturated in different societies… What you’re doing seems to be somehow beyond that. Obviously it uses sound, tone, and timbre, but it’s doing something else.
Maryanne Amacher: I think I know how I can discuss that with you, but first I’m wondering if you’re thinking more of concerts because occasionally people react and say, “Oh, this is a real experience…” because of the staging and presentation. I guess it’s also because of the music, but I’m interested in making a very different situation for people. From the very beginning, I wanted to do experiential work. I was working with electronic means, therefore I could sit and observe various things. I could try to understand more about what was happening to my ears, to my body, all over.
I think I do music because I’m trying to understand. The ear-tones that I played for you are referred to as otoacoustic emissions. I heard those very early on when I was beginning to work, so I wanted to create a kind of music where the listener actually has vivid experiences of contributing this other sonic dimension to the music—the music that their ears are making. I’ve become very involved with situations like that. My approach is more like in science. This is not to say that music is not emotional and everything else. I sit and listen and I hear things, then I discover how I can expand them or increase them and try to understand them. I think of them as perceptual geographies actually. “Ways of Hearing”—how we hear things far away; how we hear things close. How suddenly in your head there almost is sound, continuing and continuing. It’s particularly effective after very strong sections with enormously long fades, but it has to be done in such a way that the sonic shapes are lingering in your mind afterwards.
I believe a lot of music, particularly as it developed from the past, was really a rearrangement of the figures of other men’s music—I’m not talking about sampling—but it’s just snatching little things and doing your own personalized sequence in time. Whereas, I think my tendency was to become much more involved in the so-called physics—I don’t like the word psychoacoustics—both of music and how our perceptual experience changes when sounds are just traveling around here and it sounds like it’s miles away, when it seems like it’s only in your head…
Frank J. Oteri: You studied with Stockhausen and he was certainly a forerunner of the work you do. He was one of the pioneers of having multiple speakers and later, he did a work that was an entire house, every room had different music happening on it.
Maryanne Amacher: I think I was fortunate in that the first electronic music I heard was in Cologne on multiple speakers. Being a fan of Varèse, I immediately connected to imagining the spacialization of sound, and then to have had the wonderful opportunity to study a little bit with Stockhausen, it was just incredible.
Frank J. Oteri: But at the same time, there’s something so human about the music that you’re creating and how people’s ears are responding. It’s so fundamentally human in some ways even though it’s all created with machines, with electronics. There’s something wonderfully contradictory and beautiful about that. This is somehow a music that could only be created in our lifetime. Maybe you could get strings or the human voice to do this…
Maryanne Amacher: Of course.
Frank J. Oteri: But that’s not what you do. Is that something you’d be interested in doing?
Maryanne Amacher: Well, of course I could but the advantage for me is I don’t care. It doesn’t matter to me that they’re machines or computers but I think what was of value was the possibility of being able to work this way, that you do sound explorentally—you could sit and listen and observe things, observe shapes.
There is a situation when you have architecture as I’m describing it—physical architecture, these larger spaces. It is a very communal thing and because of the dimensions of the space itself connecting to the music in the way it does, it creates a very liberating experience. I mean, people dance. It’s very different than if you’re in a small place or particularly if you’re keeping your seat.
Frank J. Oteri: There’s something sort of imprisoning about sitting in a concert hall and having to be quiet.
Maryanne Amacher: Well it’s not even that. I think it’s known that you actually experience sound better when you move, which also connects to dancing.
Frank J. Oteri: When you were playing your work for us you said make sure to move all around.
Maryanne Amacher: Yeah, and it’s fun to move your head and to kind of dance.

Aural Architecture


Frank J. Oteri: Some of the words you’ve used to describe your work are: architecture, choreography, and neurobiology. You’re really using sound architecturally. That’s sort of a different construction. Music historically and culturally seems to exist as a social behavior that occurs over time. What my ears are hearing seems more like a sonic architecture occurring in space rather than developing over time.
Maryanne Amacher: I actually do think of it more as an aural architecture. I think of it quite literally in terms of architecture itself. When I’m able to have the opportunity to make a large installation, I learn the acoustics of the place, and I can work in more than one room: I may have 6, I may have 4, I may have 7 rooms, or the entire structure. All of that began not because I had a fixed notion. Really it began because I hated loudspeakers. I was working in electronic media, so it was quite a contradictory thing. I was always interested in the spatial aspects of sound. I discovered that maybe if I put the speaker in there [points to the kitchen]—the way that you heard it from another room became much more rewarding. I could make a virtual meta-space, so you wouldn’t get the sense of these [gestures to a nearby loudspeaker] boxes.
Frank J. Oteri: In terms of the space that you’re creating for a listener, to some extent the listener creates his or her own space because there’s no predetermined path. If you have sound coming out of 6 rooms…
Maryanne Amacher: No, it’s like a sonic choreography. I have to think of the scenario, otherwise everyone would just walk around and the experience would not be vivid. Usually on a large work, I work there for three weeks. It’s like creating a narrative. I realized that there were sonic characters and they could appear and interact with each other.
It’s very interesting how people walk in a main space. How do they know something is part of the composition? Maybe you pass out something and half the people don’t read it. I might have something in a distant room that draws them to it. I’m always performing between these rooms. I still maintain that I like the intensity of this directness of performing, even though the installation is all the work that went in beforehand.
Frank J. Oteri: So what constitutes a performance? What is a performance?
Maryanne Amacher: It’s just me mixing. Of course there are visual elements, and the performance with the people, that’s what I’m talking about. I’m mixing live and I’m connecting with an audience rather than just having this on a hard drive.
Frank J. Oteri: And the mixing that you’re doing, you’re responding to the audience as they are there, so there is an element of improvisation to it, if you would? How much of it is predetermined?
Maryanne Amacher: See that’s when you get into this funny area. [laughs] Music is crazy… it’s insane. Of course I’m improvising. But I’m not improvising the notes.
Frank J. Oteri: Right. The notes are there, prerecorded.
Maryanne Amacher: Yes, or else I might be making them with samplers or something, but I’m not having the notes come out of my head. What I’m doing is, again, dealing with these perceptual degrees, degrees of sensitivity, degrees of intensity, and things like that. Not the notes because you can play something a million different ways.
Frank J. Oteri: In a weird sort of way you’re almost doing what a conductor does with an orchestra. Bringing out the woodwinds in a certain passage, etc…
Maryanne Amacher: Yes. I never thought of it that way, but it is like that because the basic music is in a way very raw. It’s nothing without the oomph. I mean I’ve come back from these works to where we’re sitting now and it takes me over a month to be able to even hear. I have learned what I’ve been able to learn because I have worked in these situations.

Perception


Frank J. Oteri: You formulate ideas in your studio before they ever have a life as a work in the space they are intended for. What sort of process generates the decisions that you make here about the pitch content, let’s say? We talked about pitches and they’re all done beforehand. Are there systems at play that generate the pitch content?
Maryanne Amacher: Well, I’m concerned with various tunings. That’s one thing.
Frank J. Oteri: Microtonal scales?
Maryanne Amacher: Sure. And I’m very interested in what are called second order effects in psychoacoustics, which are not the ear phenomena when you tune very close—when you do it with unison it has to be binaural or else you just get beats—but when the beats disappear and you get closer and closer to the 3rd or the 5th or whatever interval and it turns into a shape. I’ve always been very preoccupied with these different shapes, and of course I have particular frequencies I like, too. But it’s the shapes, when it gets really slow and huge, and you’re not hearing the beats but it is a beat frequency that’s producing the shape. It’s something that I’ve experienced, again, only because I work experientially.
I used to move from studio to studio always trying to tune these oscillators to get these things. [Sigh] They would drift and it was making me crazy. Once I got locked into the Queens studio all weekend and it was 98 degrees. After that I thought I was never going to do this kind of work again until I had my own setup.
Shortly after that it was great to read this article in Scientific American called “Auditory Beats in the Brain” [October 1973]. The author, biophysicist Gerald Oster, did many experiments and people experienced these different shapes as spirals… They perceived them in the experiments he made. It was really helpful to me. I later met him in New York.
Frank J. Oteri: Now, in terms of perception, most of the music around us these days—whether it’s commercial popular music or classical music, jazz, or even most experimental music—is created within a pitch grid of twelve-tone equal temperament and anything else is somehow alien. The ear can hear so much more than that, yet if you’re not acclimated to it, you might perceive anything else as indistinguishable or as being out of tune. Anyone should be able to hear a just interval like a pure 5th, a pure 3rd, or a natural 7th, an extraordinarily beautiful interval which hadn’t existed in most music until contemporary composers started using it again. How important for you is audience perception? Is it important to you that they hear what you’re hearing?
Maryanne Amacher: I’m not sure we always hear the same things, but I think what I was just talking about with pattern modulation, when you get these shapes, I think everyone experiences that. I don’t know if it’s so much a matter of everyone experiencing what I’m experiencing. But I would like it, whatever it is, to be vivid and have a kind of reality to it. It’s not based on some kind of habit. These are vivid experiences. Yours might be different than mine… I don’t think I could do it with two speakers. I don’t even like to do it with multi-speakers, with 15 speakers all around because all this direct sound loses a kind of magic.
Frank J. Oteri: In a book about John Cage that you contributed an essay to, you brought up something that I thought was so interesting about how music is packaged. We have this notion that everybody has to have the same experience of a pop song or a Mozart recording. You have a big audience that comes to hear a performance and they all should be hearing the same thing, but in fact no one hears the exact same thing. Each person is different and does not hear things the same way. As you said, a work of art, a painting, or a sculpture, is a singularity, only one of it exists. You might reproduce it in a book, but it’s not the work. Whereas with music, we have a notion that it’s reproducible. There can be 1,000 copies of a recording of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony or the latest Ricky Martin pop single, and they’re exactly the same. But the reality is much subtler than that. Each person has his or her own music and that is something that hasn’t really been addressed in the history of music.
Maryanne Amacher: I have no doubt that will be one part of music in the future. Today with all the customization and tailoring, you no longer have to necessarily think about music for millions. Music can be for millions, but it can actually be tailored for a specific individual. Just yesterday a chemist at UCLA who used techniques from nanotechnology took yeast cells and made a nanodevice which he used to discover that the cells produce sounds. It’s not proven yet. These were just yeast cells, which were supposedly emitting a frequency that could be heard. The frequency was about a C-sharp or D one octave about middle C. They’re very hopeful that if it’s proven, it could be very beneficial for health purposes. This connection of music to certain cells is basically what I talked about in the article about Cage. The person creating the music may eventually be able to create certain movements in the cells themselves. Living Sound, Patent Pending, which I made in 1980, was one of the projections.
Not too long ago there was a microbiologist in San Diego and he spilled this sample on a CD, a music CD. He didn’t realize it right away and he tried to put it in the player and of course it didn’t play. Because he was very clever he worked out this whole idea—which I can’t explain well right now—of the genetic detecting of the protein molecules, which is an expensive operation. These machines are like $300,000 in each lab. He was able to do that, maybe not quite as exact, but using this crazy technique and an ink jet printer that he got at a garage sale for $20. He wasn’t talking about it producing sounds, see that’s the catch.
I just made my first work in this futurist projection, which is really just quite fun. I didn’t have anything else, so I put my blood on the CD, and of course I put some sound. I called it Interactive Precursor, First Protein Modulation; I can show it to you.
Frank J. Oteri: Yeah, at some point maybe.
Maryanne Amacher: But then I thought more and more about it. Won’t it be fantastic because everyone says, “Oh, CDs. We’re just going to get everything from streaming live.” So this will be a great use for a CD. Then, you know, you can mix different things like our bloods and so on and see how that interacts with the music [laughs].
Frank J. Oteri: When we first came over and you were playing us your work, we heard it in a whole different way. In terms of the physical nature of different people responding to sound in different ways and it being a personalized experience for everybody, you discovered something very early on that’s been a very key part of your vocabulary, and this is this music for the “third ear.” As I listened I actually felt something. I felt my ear vibrating. It was startling. I felt it listening to the disc before, but I never felt it as strongly as I did this afternoon. It was a very intense physical experience. I think the only other time I’d ever felt it was when music had been too loud and it was painful. It’s something we’re actually taught to avoid. But this wasn’t painful. This was something else. It was actually rather the opposite of painful. It felt like my ears were being tickled. It is a very, very interesting phenomenon. How did you first stumble upon these sounds? How do you use them? Why do they do that? How did you get my ears to do that?
Maryanne Amacher: First of all it’s another one of those things that I observed very early. It was all part of this notion of perceptual geographies. In 1977, the theory was proven—even though this was postulated by Thomas Gold in 1948—that the ear actually emits sound as well as receives it. So there are laboratories all over the world dedicated to this. Now see, this is what I think is funny about music—none of us know this. What in the world are we doing? I mean really to compose consciously. I’ve been trying half of my life to get this program where I can really know that if I choose a second combination of tones that this low D-sharp is going to have a certain kind of timbre that my ear is making, a certain quality, rather than if I choose another one. I really want to know this, because this same low D-sharp of 77hz will sound from many different intervals. You know it’s a bit obscured by the timbres, right? But our ears are doing this all the time. So these things can be reinforced or they can be enhanced for a more vivid experience in the music you create.
Frank J. Oteri: You played us a QuickTime file of an organist playing the famous Bach Toccata and Fugue in D minor, with video of what it was doing to someone’s ear. The more voices that were added to that famous chord in the beginning, the more things started appearing in the ear as a response. So if this has been a part of all the music we hear, why is it that until I heard your music this afternoon, I wasn’t aware of it?
Maryanne Amacher: It’s just so strange about music. [laughs] I don’t know. I guess that’s what fascinates me with it because this is a very fundamental thing. And, not only that, in laboratories they test hearing this way and they test babies and you can actually listen to another person’s ear, even. These are called otoacoustic emissions or SOAEs. If you’re in a quiet enough place some people actually are able to hear the sound that’s coming out of another person and this is not stimulated by sound.
Frank J. Oteri: But this has never been part of the vocabulary. This is not part of the vocabulary of music in any culture, or at least not the conscious vocabulary as far as I know…
Maryanne Amacher: Not so true, I mean look at all the Tibetan and Mongolian people singing to make those results. I’m sure they know what they want to make and they have conscious effects. Maybe they don’t think about it the same way. It’s even speculated that in really vivid performances of, you know, concertos or what have you, people are bringing out some of these qualities. What’s exciting for me is because all this has sort of been subliminally experienced in our music, because of the complexity of the overtones and everything, it’s exciting to think of the kind of energy that could be released when it’s not suppressed anymore. Imagine an audience in a concert hall just creating this music that’s a part of the string quartet at the same time.
Frank J. Oteri: So there are certain combinations of frequencies and timbres that will do this?
Maryanne Amacher: Well, what I just played for you for example, is something that I just make intuitively. I don’t know actually what’s going on because you could listen to that, not that you’d want to, but you could listen to it for 24 hours or something and you’d still get the effect. The other kind of choice is what are called first, second, and third order difference tones. Now, we’re getting these all the time in electronic music and sometimes it sounds like you know a funny modulation or funny garble and you think it’s timbre. It’s not—your ear is doing that. Your ear is making a lot of these funny sounds. It’s not necessarily the electronics at all. But you know it’s quite a challenge because you would habituate. You would get the experience and then suddenly, you would become desensitized to it. You would know it. Part of the craft is how you would remove this if you chose to do that.

All-Time Music


Frank J. Oteri: I’d like to get back to your essay in the book about Cage after what you just said about listening to something for 24 hours. This is one of the things that really got me very excited about talking to you and there’s this quote that appears in that same essay that reinforced it. You wrote: “As the possibilities of all-sound music of the future were to Cage, the possibilities of all-time music are to me. In theory, years, weeks, days minutes, seconds will be possible.” So there no longer needs to be this notion of a piece of music, a string quartet that’s half an hour long, or a three-minute pop song, or a two or three-hour opera. Your music seems to exist beyond time; it’s not really about time, at least not in a metrical sense…
Maryanne Amacher: Not that kind of time, it’s more like the time in life when something appears and disappears and maybe you don’t hear it again for a half hour, you may not hear it for an hour. Suddenly a boat appears after five hours and it gets closer and closer, you know, and makes an approach. It’s time like that because we have the means now to do that.
Frank J. Oteri: But when you create a work you don’t think about whether something is going to last 20 minutes or 2 hours? Or do you?
Maryanne Amacher: Well, as a composer I am fascinated by this. I see what I wrote about in that article as really an expansion of even classical music, of phrase structure. We used to call it the elemental line. It’s like you’re trapped, one thing has to come after another. It was always my obsession to get out of the elemental line. I studied medieval metaphysics and I used to try to think of ways of making a macrostructure. Particularly, if you’re trained as a musician you do this or that because this is the right note to play and it’s all based on habit. I did a psycho-analysis of all my musical habits in order to try to stretch them. How you decide what comes after which is another arbitrary thing. It’s more effective with these after-sounds if you let the sound go completely out of the head, which could last eight minutes or longer. You know I once did that in a work with Merce Cunningham. It was such a glorious kind of experience…
Frank J. Oteri: Last season, as part of the all-David Lang concert at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre, Alarm Will Sound performed The Passing Measures which lasts for about an hour or so. At the end of the piece, the conductor stopped and didn’t signal it was over, and there was this silence for maybe two minutes.
Maryanne Amacher: …Oh, that’s beautiful…
Frank J. Oteri: After about two minutes somebody finally broke it by starting to clap. But for those two minutes, time stood still. That silence at the end I thought was the most stunning music I had ever heard live in a concert hall. And it was incredible because it wasn’t silence, it was a lingering uncertainty…I love David’s piece but for me the silence was even better than the piece.
Maryanne Amacher: Because you had time, and it is true. There is a part of timing when one thing ends and another thing begins that actually is another thing that as composers we should be probably more conscious of manipulating and controlling.

The Problem with Recordings


Frank J. Oteri: You played us some excerpts and they were these cyclical things that happened and we didn’t hear it in its entirety. Is it important to hear the entire thing?
Maryanne Amacher: Well I don’t know if it is on the CD. It certainly is in the actual hall. Some people relate to CDs better than me. I have a little problem with it.
Frank J. Oteri: Let’s talk then about live performances where people will go and hear this work that exists in four rooms. Does this work then have a beginning, middle, and end? Do people show up at a certain time?
Maryanne Amacher: No, they show up at the beginning. For a while I did another series called the Mini-Sound Series. It got more and more interesting the more I did it in different places because the idea was like television where the story continues the next week, and it was a fascinating involvement with the audience. It was not continuous music. We can make sounds go on for as long as we want. I’m more interested in making appearances and things like that.
The end you spoke of with David’s piece, I’ve experienced that a number of times, I mean with my own work.
Frank J. Oteri: So there is an ending, there’s an actual ending?
Maryanne Amacher: Oh, yes. My first work was doing more or less pure installation work with these City Links pieces in which I brought in remote sounds. I had microphones in different remote environments and brought up those sounds in the gallery or museum or wherever. It also involved performance. The sound was alive and it came through high quality telephone lines—people always thought I was playing a cassette. It was just hard for them to realize at that time that this was actually live sound. It was also very interesting to have more than one location and the kind of simultaneous synchronic things that would happen. You know, there are no laws.
Frank J. Oteri: Well, let’s talk about connecting to the music world. There is this CD out on Tzadik which is fantastic and it’s gotten rave reviews all over the place, yet somehow it doesn’t represent your work. To use a visual analogy, it’s only a photograph of it. We’re living in a society where recordings are the way people’s work gets transmitted. I’ve been to a lot of concerts, yet most of the music I have heard I have not heard live. I’ve heard it because of an LP or a CD or a radio broadcast or from the Web. It’s a blessing and a curse. It means that we can hear more music now than we’ve ever been able to hear anywhere. We have a wider vocabulary, but it’s also limiting because we only get these “photographs” of music…
Maryanne Amacher: Well, I think a lot of music is much more thrilling live. But it doesn’t bother other people making music. It’s just my thing because as I say I can’t even listen to my own studio when I come back from having wonderful architecture where I’m able to make my music. If I were doing just purely beat music, or even those ear effects, that’s only a question of playing them. But my music is so dense and has so many parts that to me it sounds like all these spirits are trapped in these boxes [gestures to a speaker] trying to get out and it sounds very harsh. Right now I’m very excited because I’ve never heard any of my music at the higher sampling rates and I think that will make a difference. It’s never going to be the same as architecture but at least maybe these parts won’t be so trapped and you’ll be hearing some of the dimension.
We were talking earlier about what I’m doing when I’m actually creating and of course I talked about the perceptual things, but it’s a mystery because when I go somewhere, like de Maastunnel in Holand, I had this music that I didn’t understand half of until I worked with it in the place. But why did I make it here? It’s a mystery, so what am I doing? It’s so dense because it has a lot of parts. Maybe my brain just can’t deal with it and I’m imagining the sound that I get when it’s in one of these architectures. I think that’s also what people do that enjoy some of this dense music on CD because they’re imagining, which in itself is very interesting because I would like to dream that I could make music that triggered another music in the listener’s mind. I think to me it’s almost more interesting than the music itself really.
Frank J. Oteri: A few years ago everybody though the hot thing was going to be 5.1 surround sound. Starkland asked a bunch of composers to write new pieces for 5.1 surround sound and they put them out on a CD. Pamela Z did a piece; Meredith Monk did a piece… But, in a way, if two speakers trap ghosts of your sounds in a box, 5.1 gives you three more speakers…
Maryanne Amacher: But still you get the dregs. A lot of people say you need over 20 or something like that. I don’t think I would like that. I wish you could just spray it. Just get into the ions, excite the ions.

Deerhoof: Rock’s Role

Sunday, April 25, 2004—10:00 p.m.

Videotaped by Colin Conroy

Transcribed by Frank J. Oteri and Molly Sheridan

Deerhoof
Clockwise from top-left: Chris Cohen, Greg Saunier, Satomi Matsuzaki, and John Dieterich
By Kinoshita Nobuyo

 

I was the only kid on the cul-de-sac who was tinkering with synths in junior high. Because I had a couple of keyboards and black boxes, other kids would ask me to play in their garage bands. Yeah, I played “The Camera Eye” and “YYZ” with some much older seniors, but I rarely accepted any of these offers. When I got a new Tascam Porta 05 four-track recorder and a Roland sequencer for Christmas, I couldn’t be pried away from my gear. I spent the next two years in my bedroom.

It wasn’t until 1998 that I made my real rock band debut. It wasn’t even close to how I imagined it would be when I was younger. Instead of Neil Peart’s mega drum setup, which included everything from two kick drums (why?) to tubular bells and every breed of cymbals known to man, the drummer used three simple pieces of bottom-of-the-line gear: a kick drum, a snare drum, and a ride cymbal… on occasion he used a bungie cord to attach a tambourine to the head of the kick drum-that was as fancy as it got. Together with an electric guitar player and a commanding lead singer, I rounded out the quartet with my amplified trumpet. This was Deerhoof. Well, at least for that one gig anyway.

Right now Deerhoof is singer/bassist Satomi Matsuzaki, guitarists Chris Cohen and John Dieterich, and Greg Saunier, an extraordinary drummer who proves you can do great things with two shabby drums and a cymbal. I met Greg while studying at Mills College where we were both composition majors, and John was in the electronic music program. Since Greg and I both leaned towards writing notes on manuscript paper (a rarity at Mills, believe me!), we talked insatiably about music. And while he writes for guitars, bass, drums, and voice, and I write for flute, clarinet, cello, and whatever, we’re still doing the same thing. Just coming off a grueling tour, Deerhoof has become an indie-rock critic favorite, so why is it that some of us in the new music community feel that rock music, or whatever you want to call it, is somehow lesser-than? This seemed like a good time for us to rekindle our conversation.

-RN

Also in May:

name

 

Opening up the box: Out of Time
Maryanne Amacher

name

 

Opening up the box: Does race matter?
Leroy Jenkins—Following his own inner beat

name

 

Opening up the box: Humor
Peter Schickele makes us laugh, seriously

Leroy Jenkins: Does Race Matter?

Friday, April 2, 2004—2-3 p.m. A conversation with “Blue” Gene Tyranny at Leroy Jenkins’ home in Brooklyn, NY

Videotaped by Randy Nordschow
Transcribed and Edited by Frank J. Oteri and Molly Sheridan

Leroy Jenkins
Leroy Jenkins
Photo by Randy Nordschow

Also in May:

name

 

Opening up the box: Out of Time
Maryanne Amacher

name

 

Opening up the box: Rock’s Role
Deerhoof

name

 

Opening up the box: Humor
Peter Schickele makes us laugh, seriously

Peter Schickele: Humor in Music

In the Kitchen with Peter Schickele (a.k.a. P.D.Q. Bach), Manhattan
Monday, March 15, 2004—1:00 p.m.

Videotaped and transcribed by Randy Nordschow

Peter Schickele
Photo by Peter Schaaf

 

Friends often tell me that I have no sense of humor. I don’t relate to stand-up comedy, I rarely tell jokes, and I usually don’t laugh at funny movies. But I love humorous anecdotes and I actually laugh out loud on an almost daily basis. Go figure. One’s sense of humor is difficult to quantify.

When I was in high school I went to a P.D.Q. concert at Carnegie Hall. I didn’t laugh. I didn’t think it was funny. I was too busy feeling that musical experimentation was being made fun of and being trivialized. But I missed the point.

Many years later, I came to love a disc of chamber music by Peter Schickele featuring the Lark Quartet. Schickele, the perpetrator of P.D.Q. Bach, was writing music that would not have been possible without minimalism, but which wasn’t minimalism. What was it? It was hard to describe. It felt informed by so many layers of musical history, past and present, popular, classical, every thing in between.

It made me dig up some P.D.Q. Bach recordings. Listening to them with the memories of Schickele the composer still engrained in my brain gave them new meaning for me. And, upon occasion, I even laughed.

Sometimes we all take ourselves a little too seriously. Enjoy…

-FJO

Also in May:

name

 

Opening up the box: Out of Time
Maryanne Amacher

name

 

Opening up the box: Rock’s Role
Deerhoof

name

 

Opening up the box: Does race matter?
Leroy Jenkins—Following his own inner beat

Steven Schick: Ready for Anything

February 16, 2004—11:00 a.m.-noon at the American Music Center
Videotaped and transcribed by Randy Nordschow

Last November, I went down to the World Financial Center to hear Steven Schick play John Luther Adams’s The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies. In all honesty, I really wasn’t sure what to expect. I’m a big fan of JLA’s music and have followed Schick’s performances since he was the percussionist in the Bang On A Can All-Stars, but the thought of sitting through a more-than-an-hour-long solo percussion performance in an uncomfortable seat in the middle of the WFC’s mall-like atrium, which periodically gets transformed into a hip new music venue despite the endless chatter of shoppers and people going home from work, was less than 100 percent appealing to me.

But during the course of the hour, time stopped, the chatter was drowned out, the chair floated away, the lone person on the stage playing sonorities of indeterminate pitch became an orchestra of timbre, melody, AND harmony. Or, to put it more directly, I was transported. I had to find out more about the piece, the composition process and how the performer brought it to life. I rushed to look at a score but the alchemical secrets locked in there remained hidden to me. I thought about talking to JLA about how he was able to pull this off, but on further reflection thought it would be even more interesting to talk with Steven Schick about how he pulled it off. As both a composer and a writer about music, I talk with other composers all the time and JLA is someone I talk with a lot already. The performer’s perspective here seemed to be the skeleton key toward a greater understanding of the process.
What happened, ultimately, was a conversation about what it means to be a percussionist and how that has evolved in our lifetimes. Without the baggage of standard repertoire or teachers steering them away from things that are “outside the mainstream” (read “anything new”), percussionists, whose entire repertoire save transcriptions has to be contemporary, are the foot soldiers of new music. And, as someone dedicated to spawning a whole new solo repertoire for percussion, Steven Schick is something of a five-star general. Just as composers have yet to exhaust the possibilities of writing for percussion, soloists like Schick are constantly finding new ways to bring it to life, whether it’s extracting harmonic riches from an air raid siren or realizing that the unique triangular shape of a Glenfiddich bottle keeps it from rolling away.
-FJO

Sections:


Hundreds of Instruments

Frank J. Oteri: Percussionists are the most elusive instrumentalists in music. You wear more hats than just about anybody…

Steven Schick: I think we’re elusive because we actually don’t have an instrument. Everyone else has an instrument. We have no instrument by virtue of the fact that we have so many. There’s not a single kind of object that defines us or focuses our activities. I mean, a percussionist normally would have in any given program between 25 and 100 instruments to play. In my studio in San Diego I have 500 or 600 different kinds instruments. So in the way that the pianist, for example, is defined by the physical object of the piano and the way that the piano focuses the performance practice of pianists and provides a link to a shared past with other pianists, percussionists simply don’t have that. Unlike pianists, we don’t know what to put on our coffee cups—you know the pianos have those wonderful back and white keys. The instrumental object as a defining mechanism is really absent from our practice.

Frank J. Oteri: It’s a problem, but it’s also a blessing. You don’t have the baggage that comes with confronting a singular object with a long history. Playing the violin has so much weight in terms of its repertoire and past virtuosos, but it’s open-ended with percussion. It can be anything you want it to be.

Steven Schick: A violinist who plays Elliott Carter still poses the question: What would Beethoven have thought about what I’m doing now? We don’t have that historical weightiness of the tradition. Of course it’s a contradiction in a way, because at the same time percussion is the most recent and poorly defined instrument, it is the most ancient and commonly understood instrument that there is in the world. Percussion traditions date back thousand and thousands of years—when the violin was a glimmer in somebody’s eye percussion had been around for several thousand years—so we have to deal with that part of it, too. We’re not just newcomers. In fact, it’s Western arrogance to think that percussion was a child of the 20th century because it was very much a child of the 20th century BC in a way. So we have to deal with both the rootedness of the tradition in ancient practice and the newness of tradition in the common practice of the Western Hemisphere.

Frank J. Oteri: You bring up the non-Western world…certainly in African and Indian cultures there were percussionists that were specifically identified with a specific instrument. In India, tabla players play the tabla and that’s it.

Steven Schick: Exactly. This is the fundamental difference actually when I think of what separates me from a tabla player. It is not so much the actions of playing, because the actions of playing a tabla—lifting the hand up and letting it strike the instrument—are not fundamentally different than the actions of playing a snare drum in a John Luther Adams piece, for example. But what is very different about our approach is that Western percussionists are by nature permeable. We are designed, as musical creatures, to absorb influences, to reconsider things, to come out with new solutions—no Western percussionists in the contemporary tradition would say, ‘You want me to play a garbage can? What? That’s impossible!’ No, this is what we do. But no set permeability exists, for example, in most Eastern percussion traditions. A tabla player would not dream of picking up a triangle because it might sound good at a given moment. No. It is a thing, the tabla, in a way that percussion in a Western mode of thinking has never been a thing.

Frank J. Oteri: How do you think it evolved that way in the West?

Steven Schick: I think it has a lot to do with the hierarchy and the construction of the orchestra. There is a kind of aristocracy in the orchestra. Timpanists, for example, have traditionally been vetted in that aristocracy and that’s why there is in percussion sections of orchestras still, especially in European orchestras, quite a clear demarcation when it comes to what timpanists do and may be asked to do and what percussionists do and may be asked to do. So percussion—now I mean percussion, not timpani—grew up in the 19th century orchestra in response to two parallel needs. One was to provide a series of noises that could serve to mark the major moments and important moments of tonal music. So a cymbal crash marks the arrival on tonic or a tambourine roll marks some sort of more exotic harmonic or textural moment. But as the orchestra grew, so grew the need for percussion, the arsenal of noises had to be larger and larger as the orchestra itself grew larger. We collected as a kind of lint around the back of the orchestra.

The other thing which percussion did in the 19th century was to stand for mental and emotional states, which were inappropriate for the other instruments. So if you’re Berlioz and you’re looking for something to describe a hallucinogenic moment in the Symphonie Fantastique, a beheading or something like that, whom do you turn to? Not the harp. You turn to the percussionists. So we gradually became associated with a kind of emotional periphery as well. When Mahler remembers his Alpine past he uses cowbells. When Berg wants to indicate Wozzeck being out of his mind with jealousy and homicidal rage, he uses a snare drum and gong roll. In addition to having a kind of stockpile of noises, we became associated with a kind of emotional otherness in the orchestra. So in the 20th century, those two things knitted together very, very neatly to produce a kind of willingness, first of all, to add, to be permeable to new ideas, and to expand the foundation of the art, as well as to engage in aggressive, or violent, or beautiful, or somehow, in one way or another, extreme emotional states of mind. This is what we grew up as.

Frank J. Oteri: The strange thing about the percussion sections of orchestras is that they sometimes even include instruments that are non-percussive. That is bizarre. It’s like Mikey and that breakfast cereal: “Okay, let’s give it to them. They’ll play anything.”

Steven Schick: Exactly. We’ll do anything. This is really the job description of a percussionist in the orchestra. Rather than list snare drum, triangle, and tambourine, you list everything but violin, viola, cello, etcetera. And this is what we do. If you play Satie’s Parade, you end up with a revolver shooting blanks, a typewriter, and a steamboat whistle, if I remember correctly. I mean, this is our job. A percussionist may not say no.

Frank J. Oteri: That steamboat whistle should really be in the woodwind section.

Steven Schick: You’d think, but give that to an oboist who has spent eight years at Curtis and you’ll find it quickly gets passed back to the percussionist.

Drummer or Percussionist?

Frank J. Oteri: What made you decide to be a percussionist?

Steven Schick: I just want to think about which story to tell you… they’re all true, I just calibrate them according to the moment. I’ll tell you all three of them really quickly. For one my mother, in her Iowa farmwife wisdom, saw fit to check the space next to drums on the sheet that was sent home from Wilson Elementary School when I was in the first grade because all the other instruments you had to buy, but next to the spot where it said drums there was a little asterisk that said you don’t actually have to buy a drum, just the sticks. She thought that this would be a financially prudent move to make for the eldest of five children. So there was that. When I was in the third or fourth grade there was a girl who lived next door who played drum set and she would practice in the early afternoon or late evening in full view of anyone who wanted to pass by. This is not very Iowan to begin with; it’s not very modest. But this combination of an awakening recognition of eroticism and this girl practicing the drum set next door was just a little too much for my 10-year-old circuits. That was absolutely riveting in a way. The final—and this actually happened—I grew up in a farming family in Iowa and I don’t think there was a lot of pressure to continue farming. I don’t think my father really liked to farm to begin with. But I remember this one day we were doing this utterly hideous job on the farm and it was hot, it was humid, and I fainted face first in the hog manure. It was all over. My dad came and rolled me over and as I came to I had a vision that I didn’t want to farm…and percussion was the only other thing that I could do. So I thought, well, I would be a drummer.

Frank J. Oteri: Now, this word “drummer” versus the word “percussionist.” Percussionists are somehow this classical music thing, separate and apart from drummers. Drummers play in rock bands and jazz groups. How is being a percussionist different from being a drummer?

Steven Schick: Well to me this distinction is purely a technical one. There was a moment—and I think you bring up something very true—when I was studying and in my early professional life when I would not want to have been called a drummer because it meant something that was more base, less refined, less sophisticated than being a percussionist. But I’m over that. This is part of the process of maturing because actually I think being a drummer is an incredibly noble and great thing to be. It’s not accurate to say that I’m a drummer. I play the drums, but I play a lot of other things. It’s simply more accurate to say that I’m a percussionist rather than a drummer. Sometimes if I’m sitting next to someone on an airplane and that person asks me what I do—and “percussionist” doesn’t get a response, it hardly ever does—then sometimes I say I play drums and other things like that. That sometimes works.

Frank J. Oteri: And then the next question is about what rock band you’re with…

Steven Schick: Well, there’s that. But if you actually get into a conversation with someone like that you go through: ‘What band do you play with?’ to ‘Oh, you’re a soloist.’ There is this moment where they’re trying to make sense of how could this possibly be. In fact, I continue myself to try to make sense of how this could possibly be! But then I explain that it is something like Stomp. I’m very grateful for Stomp. It helps me explain to people I sit next to in airplanes and when the airport security opens my bags and they see, you know, steel pipes and all sorts of horrible looking things, I can say that I do something kind of like Stomp and then they get it and let me go. Back to the point, someone who has no association with music (and the farther they are from music, the more genuinely they actually understand and get it), is intrigued by the use of objects which are generally not thought of as music instruments in a musical context. They are fascinated by the flowerpots, for example, in Frederic Rzewski‘s solo, To The Earth. They think it’s unbelievable that I carry around with me mixing bowls, empty whiskey bottles, frying pans and things like that, because I know I can borrow bongos and gongs, but I can’t get the Glenfiddich bottle, the triangular one that sits flat and has a nice high sound, and I can’t get the mixing bowl that makes a little glissando. So when they say, “So you carry you’re instruments?” and I tell them what I’ve got in the belly of the plane, this opens up an amazing connection to the activities that people engage in, in ordinary life.

Frank J. Oteri: I just have to know, who wrote music for Glenfiddich bottle?

Steven Schick: [laughs] I keep thinking of sponsorship! I use a whiskey bottle in two pieces: in Kaija Saariaho’s Six Japanese Gardens because she calls for a stone instrument and I figured glass qualifies, and I use it as one of the instruments of free choice in Roger Reynolds’s Watershed. A number of people have written for bottles and whiskey bottles sound better because they’re generally better bottles.

Frank J. Oteri: How did you come across this? You were downing a bottle of Glenfiddich one night and…

Steven Schick: I used the Glenfiddich bottle first of all primarily because of the shape of the bottle. I mean we use bottles quite a bit, that’s not new. James Wood has a big bottle parts in many of his pieces. It’s not that unusual. The problem is that you have to build special little cradles for them because they roll. I was in fact, as you guessed, getting close to finishing a bottle of Glenfiddich and thought, you know, that will be fabulous because I could put it on the stand and it will stay.

Frank J. Oteri: You definitely have to get sponsorship!

Steven Schick: Exactly. [laughs]

Frank J. Oteri: Taking it back to this percussionist versus drummer thing… You say you’re a soloist and people are shocked, and you’re even shocked by that. There really are no role models in so-called classical music for percussion soloists. There’s no Paganini, or Heifetz, or Horowitz of percussion.

Steven Schick: This is both a good and a bad thing. If this conversation had taken place in, say, the mid-’80s or so, than this was an unassailable virtue. In fact I think that both percussion solo music and music for percussion ensemble through the ’70s and mid-’80s really went a good distance towards creating a new kind of musician that would engage with this new kind of material. So you find a piece like Xenakis‘s Psappha, for which there is no corollary, a piece of freely chosen instrumentation with a novel notational scheme, an unusual approach to structure. We can’t find that in the violin literature, not even in Xenakis’s violin literature.

Unfortunately with the growing profile of percussion and the ability to export this idea into mainstream musical thought, there has grown an imitation of the Paganini model. So many percussion solo pieces the
se days and many percussionists are now seeking to reprise Liszt, but on marimba. This is a big problem to me. Now—and I really want to say this for the record—this is in no way a criticism of those people who are making careers now playing concerti. There are some very well known ones. Evelyn Glennie is probably the best known, and I think about David Cossin who is my replacement with Bang on a Can All-Stars who does a lot of stuff with Tan Dun. I want to clarify that this is not a backhanded slight at all to those people, but it does create a pressure to reproduce a model of making music rather than to create one. I think that is an unfortunate thing. I’m pleased to accept those kinds of invitations myself, and I certainly wouldn’t begrudge it to anybody else, but we have to wonder at what costs these things come.

Frank J. Oteri: The thing that is weird about the Liszt model or the Paganini model for percussion is, as you said in the beginning, there is no specific instrument, so you could never spend that much time with any one particular instrument to get that depth of intimate knowledge that such a technique would require.

Steven Schick: Well, there are people who specialize, for example, in the marimba, or the frame drum, and they actually are kind of naturally in the tradition of Liszt and Paganini. I think of the marimbist Robert Van Sice, or Glen Velez as a frame drummer—they really do that, and that’s what they should be doing. But a percussionist—the kind of flypaper of instrumentalist to which everything sticks—we shouldn’t be doing that.

Frank J. Oteri: As a young musician coming into this and having role models, who were your role models? Who were your heroes?

Steven Schick: It’s important to note that—and we’re just talking about solo percussionists for the moment—solo repertoire for other instruments grew up philosophically and aesthetically aligned with heroic images. So the piano as concerto soloist came of age with Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, where a heroic figure was central to people’s view of the world and people’s view of art; same thing with the violin, cello, and with everything. But percussion’s role model is very different. It grew up essentially in the 1960s. The very earliest solos are from the end of the ’50s. So most of the repertoire was a response to aesthetic and cultural issues raised in the ’60s, which is a very different kind of thing—suspicion of authority. A heroic view was antithetical to the aesthetic as opposed to central to the aesthetic. I think we have to understand that.

Now as a percussionist not yet elderly—I’m turning 50 in a couple of months—I, at relatively tender age for a musician, am about the oldest solo percussionist playing. In fact, I’m pretty sure that I am the oldest one that’s still touring. Many, many people are still playing concerts, but in terms of people—and I should be cautious since I’m on camera that I haven’t forgotten anybody—but in general, I’m kind of on the older edge of the percussionists.

Frank J. Oteri: Wow.

Steven Schick: So I grew up not having a role model. I mean there are people, Jan Williams, Raymond Des Roches in the United States, Michael Udow to some extent, Allen Otte to some extent. But Al is just a few years older than me so he was a role model as a sort of recent graduate at the time when I was an undergraduate. Those were my role models. Jan Williams was a young player when I was coming of age. We had to look elsewhere. To some extent to the Paganinis of other instruments. There was of course a very established tradition of playing percussion in popular music, so you could think about Max Roach, Jack De Johnette, and people like that or Ringo Starr. Those were people who had profiles. At the very early stages I thought about Max Roach and Ringo Starr, but I also realized that they were doing something really very different from what I wanted to do. I aligned myself much more closely with composers than I did with other players. I thought a lot about those people.

Frank J. Oteri: Well what’s so interesting about Max Roach, and by extension Art Blakey and Jack De Johnette, whom you mentioned, is that they are drummers who were bandleaders and composers, and from a European classical music point of view, you might have a violinist or, in early jazz groups, the pianist or trumpeter who would be the leader, but to let the drummer be the leader and composer, is atypical in Western music…

Steven Schick: I haven’t really thought about that, I think you’re absolutely right. I was really attracted to people who had a creative profile and not just a technical profile. I never ever wanted to be a part of an orchestra. I never wanted to be in a section anywhere. So it was always a question of what you could do that you hadn’t done before.

Training and Repertoire

Steven Schick: I remember when I was at the University of Iowa I used to walk around the hallways and I’d hear people practicing the Hammerklavier or the Bach Cello Suites or something like that and I envied this contact with greatness. I really envied this contact with something that was much bigger than we were. I would rue going back into my practice room and then bowing a brake drum or playing a mixing bowl underwater; it seemed pitiful. You’d have these little etudes and it was all about technique, a kind of physical level of accomplishment. It’s only a gradually growing realization that there is much more to playing percussion than simply negotiating the technical problems.

Frank J. Oteri: So what is the training for percussionists?

Steven Schick: It has changed, of course, since I was an undergraduate student in the mid-1970s, but largely it is a technical approach, which now has much better music to serve as a platform. In general I think the percussion education establishment both here and in Europe and Australia—those are the places that I know the best—is interested in good music and I don’t think that was the case when I was a student. But a place like University of California, San Diego, where I teach, is still very much an exception where we simply expect of percussionists nothing really different than we expect from graduate composers for example. You must create something that hasn’t existed. You’ve got to make something. That I think is pretty much a radical departure from the norm.

Frank J. Oteri: So composition is part of the process?

Steven Schick: Composition is not necessarily part of the process, although it is certainly an invited part of the process if somebody wants to do that. But I consider it from the standpoint of a performer: the act of commissioning, or the act of creating an environment in which new work can be born as a creative process as well. This is an absolute expectation of every student.

But other creative ideas could manifest. One student of mine, for example, just completely redid the Philippe Boesmans marimba piece Daydreams, which had an absolutely unwieldy and unworkable technological component. He remade it for his laptop and now everybody can play it. That’s as much as composing the piece because no one could have ever played it again, and now people can. People create and build instruments, they create video interactive systems—that’s really what the expectation is. No one really comes to me, at least in San Diego, to play the solo repertoire. I don’t want them to do that. It’s not new.

Frank J. Oteri: You talk about repertoire being a blessing and curse…Every pianist has to learn Beethoven’s sonatas, every cellist has to confront the Bach cello suites, but are there these must-do pieces for percussionists?

Steven Schick: Well, I think everyone would have a different idea as to what they may be or whether or not there is a sort of obligatory repertoire. I mean for me it was always “Wipeout” as a kid. It’s true if you’ve played drums in a band in the late 1960s being able to play the solo from “Wipeout” established your credentials as a kind of ‘Okay, you’re a player.’

What that consists of now it a little hard to say. In Europe very often, especially in Germany I’ve noticed, you still have to play Bach. Bach on the marimba is kind of a requirement. I think that’s a little unfortunate, I mean both for the marimba and Bach, but that’s my point of view. In San Diego we’ve had one piece which everyone has played—it certainly has not been an obligation but I’ve persuaded people to do it—?Corporel of Vinko Globokar, the piece for the body. Percussionists don’t have instruments, yet we have an enormous number of objects to hide behind. To me it was important to be able to study a piece that had no instruments except the body, to really see in fact that the true state of the percussionist is that physical action. Corporeal sensibility is essentially the most definitive instrument. I don’t insist on anything, but I try to persuade people to do it.

Frank J. Oteri: What are some of your favorite pieces separate and beyond what you would have students look at?

Steven Schick: Well, the repertoire is still very small. I did my first solo percussion recital—my undergraduate recital—in 1975. Between that and my first master’s recital a couple of years later, I played 75 perent of the repertoire for percussion solo. Psappha wasn’t written yet when I did my first solo recital. [laughs] It’s hard to believe now, but there was Charles Wuorinen‘s piece, Janissary Music, there was Stockhausen‘s Zyklus, there was King of Denmark by Morton Feldman—there were just a handful of pieces, probably 5 or 6, and I played almost all of them in the first two concerts that I did. Even now, some 30 years after that, the number is still pretty small, which just parenthetically puts us in a very weird equation: we have the thousands of instruments that we began this interview discussing, the performance practice for these thousands and thousands of instruments is still at this moment rooted in probably no more than 3 or 4 hours of solo music, period. It is an inverted pyramid in terms of how much material, how many sonic possibilities are available, and how much the language of percussion has been established by pieces.

Frank J. Oteri: There seems to be a certain mindset to the composer who would write for percussion. It’s so interesting to compare the granddaddies of piano music—Mozart and Beethoven, let’s say—to the granddaddy of percussion music, John Cage.

Steven Schick: Right, exactly. And we knew most of these people, you know, these were our friends. We were working with our friends to do this. So I think it’s a fascinating issue—why would a composer be interested in writing for percussion? I think there are two principal reasons. One is that by having a relatively small repertoire a composer has the option of making an enormous change and contribution to an important part of music. When Xenakis wrote Psappha he increased the size of the repertoire by 25 percent and it was such an important piece that essentially we haven’t recovered from it. I love Psappha, but it had its downside in that it put such a strong spin on the repertoire because of its relative smallness and the strength of that piece. The other thing—because a composer has to engage on very basic levels of sound, and notation, and architecture, and chor
eography—is that a percussion piece is not a given in the way that a cello piece is going to be a given for the cello. A percussion piece can be for two woodblocks or it could be for gamelan, we don’t know. The necessity to engage decision-making on such an amazingly basic level means that the personality of the composer is etched into the fine print of the music in a way that could not be the case with other instruments.

Nurturing New Work

Frank J. Oteri: Since there is so little repertoire, it really is about working with composers and creating new work. I was really eager to talk with you after hearing you play that amazing CD-length solo percussion piece that John Luther Adams wrote for you. It felt like a Well-Tempered Clavier of timbre.

Steven Schick: Yes, exactly right… through all the keys.

Frank J. Oteri: You went from instrument to instrument, with each timbre having a whole piece constructed around it. I imagine that’s unique in the repertoire…

Steven Schick: Yes it is… I want to take a little bit of a running start on this issue of commissioning because I want to make sure to say that I don’t think that it’s self-evident that the way to make new work is via commissioning. In fact, I think most creative percussionists end up creating some kind of improvisational or performer/composer apparatus for creating new work. I think I’m relatively an exception but I firmly believe, at least in my small position in the universe, my path is by commissioning. I’m not interested in composing. I did a little bit of it. I was really bad. I’ll save the world from having to listen to my music. So for me it’s commissioning. That’s a personal choice. I know a lot of people who are working in other kinds of areas and still doing very interesting things. For me the decision for how to commission or whether to commission was made by virtue of the fact that there was not enough music to play.

The John Luther Adams piece is a result of a kind of a midlife correction of direction. Five years ago, here in New York, I presented what was for all intents and purposes the complete repertoire for solo percussion on three consecutive nights of concerts. I played 22 pieces, everything that I thought was worth hearing. It was a very interesting experience because it allowed you, in just three concerts, to see what was there. And what was there was astonishing, but what wasn’t there was also astonishing. As a result of that and some sort of profound changes in my personal life, I began to think of what I was going to do with the 15 or 20 years remaining to me that I could really devote to the solicitation of new work and performance. I made several really quick decisions. One is that I was not going to be happy just playing a bunch of concerts. So that essentially led to my leaving Bang on a Can, which was a very, very difficult decision to make because I loved playing with them; I still regret it in some way, but it was taking so much time that I really couldn’t do the work that I wanted to do. I left Bang on a Can to make some time and then used that time to think about what it was that I was going to do. I realized that partly what I wanted to do was fill in the gaps or the repertoire that I had noticed as a result of the three nights of solo music that I had done. I think of the percussion repertoire as sort of a gapped tooth smile. The things that are there are fabulous, but there are things that weren’t there. At about that time I had gone to Alaska to play a solo concert at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. I had known John Luther Adams for a while. We hadn’t been close, but I liked his music and I thought, ‘I’ll commission John.’ We went up to talk about a 9 or 10-minute piece and we ended up sitting in his studio for several days drinking some absolutely extraordinary whiskey—although that wasn’t entirely responsible for the decision. A decision came as a result of that three day conversation with John, that what I really wanted to do was to lay down the gauntlet by commissioning four evening-length pieces that would address what I perceived as the shortcomings of the repertoire from an emotional and aesthetic standpoint. In other words not just to have pieces to tour with, because I could continue to tour with the pieces I was playing, but to look at what wasn’t there and find out if it could be filled in such a way that would really have an impact on people.

Frank J. Oteri: So what are those gaps and how are these pieces filling them?

Steven Schick: There are two pieces so far. John’s is the second of the series. The first piece in the series was La coupure by James Dillon, which was an IRCAM commission. It’s also about a 65-minute piece, which directly deals with the issue of memory because percussion is essentially memory-less. We grew up in such the recent past that we cannot look back for any kind of comfort or weightiness, depending on what you want to perceive it as, to 18th and 19th century performance practice. So we have a real problem with memory. Not with memorizing so much, but what memory means with percussion. What kinds of evocations are there when one plays a certain kind of instrument or another? How does the memory of the percussionist in performance differ from the memory of a violinist or pianist? So La coupure was about this issue of memory.

With John I wanted to follow-up on what I think of as the great American tradition of the terrifying event. We think of the music of Cage and Varèse especially—I think of it as having quasi-environmental characteristics. There are structures, constructions, environments in which the percussionist or the player feels small. You feel at the mercy of forces, which generally I think is a good thing. With Varèse it was at the mercy of these enormous and formidable noise constructions. With Cage it was at the mercy of a future that you could not adequately, nor could anyone, predict at any given moment in performance. So I thought there was this lineage—which James Tenney and many other people have continued—that needed to be explored in the context of solo percussion music. I thought John Luther Adams was perhaps the best person I could think of to do that. Could he create a terrain in which a percussionist could be lost, where the forces engendered and provoked by a given work of music were powerful enough to create its own weather system essentially? And I just knew that John would understand that kind of rationale and that was the genesis of The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies.

Frank J. Oteri: The remaining two?

Steven Schick: I’ve been talking to David Lang about writing an opera because I think that percussion has a close relationship with theater, with dramatic and choreographic concerns, but it has explored these things in very haphazard and certainly nonsystematic ways. We had talked for a long time about doing this, and we’re still talking about it.

Frank J. Oteri: So it would be an opera accompanied by a percussionist.

Steven Schick: No, a one-person opera for me as percussion soloist.

Frank J. Oteri: You would sing as well?

Steven Schick: Si
ng, or speak, or vocalize, and certainly move—sort of in the Partch tradition more than anything else. We’ve talked about a number of themes. We’re narrowing in on that. And then I’ve asked Chaya Czernowin to write a piece, which is the least well defined in my mind, but percussion music activates in an emotional sphere certain kinds of things much more readily than it activates other kinds of things. Percussion is capable of great beauty, but everyone shies away from that as provocation. So I asked her to write something that had strong metaphorical content. I don’t know what she will come up with. So that’s what I saw: memory, environment, theater, and emotional metaphor as the things that were the most missing.

Frank J. Oteri: The pieces that you’ve commissioned obviously can go on and have a life of their own.

Steven Schick: With any luck, yes. That’s the idea.

Frank J. Oteri: Is that happening at all with some of them?

Steven Schick: Yeah, I think with most of them. In fact I think all of them either have been or will have been played by someone else in the very near future, even the most personalized ones like Antiphony VIII that Kenneth Gaburo wrote for me. The way he composed the piece and the way he fine-tuned it in rehearsal with me made me think no one else would ever be able to play it but I think some other people have. The one that has gotten the most mileage is David Lang’s The Anvil Chorus. I’m sure that 500 other percussionists have played that. I’m constantly in receipt of questions about setup. Every week practically somebody will write me about that. I think there are probably 10 or 12 people who have played Bone Alphabet, which no longer surprises me. It’s such a hard piece I didn’t think that anyone could play it, including me. [laughs] I was always pretty sure that I couldn’t play it. But now it’s routinely played. That’s the idea; I never commissioned those pieces to have a career vehicle anyway.

Frank J. Oteri: I’m going to turn this question upside-down in a way. In your experience do you feel most composers understand how to use percussion?

Steven Schick: The answer to that is no. Most composers do not understand how to use percussion and that is precisely their advantage. When I commissioned Bone Alphabet from Brain Ferneyhough, his initial response was that he didn’t want to write a percussion for solo for me. I joined the faculty at UCSD, Brian was my new collegue and I had known him for many years, in Germany especially, and he didn’t want to write for percussion two reasons. The one that he said was that percussion had become a kind of calcified tradition: you know, there was Xenakis and son of Xenakis. He wasn’t interested in engaging that, but I respected that because I thought he was really right. The other thing that he alluded to was that he really didn’t know what to do. He didn’t really know what sounds to use and his music had been so specific on the level of sound. He said something to the effect of he needed to make instrumental music idiomatic so that it was unthinkable that this part could be played by any other instrument. So percussion, which has that sort of marshiness of definition, didn’t appeal to him. Yeah, the attacks were there but the sort of definition of sound wasn’t there. He was completely out of his league, and admittedly so when it came to deciding which percussion sounds to use. I think many composers are like that. So Brian, because he’s such a smart guy and such an interesting musician, came up with a way that would leave the instrumentation open to some extent, allow me to fill that in, in correspondence with what he was interested in doing. So by understanding his limitations he actually made something which was really fascinating and unexpected. I think most composers I really enjoyed working with have done that. John Luther Adams is a little bit the exception because as a former percussionist and as someone who has worked extensively with percussion sonorities, he knows what he’s going to get.

Frank J. Oteri: Do you have any specific advice for aspiring composers writing for percussion?

Steven Schick: It’s really hard to say, of course. I think it’s much more of a kind of a calibration of expectation than advice. There is a necessity to engage issues of sound which are givens in other areas. Issues of choreography, which are given in other areas, one must engage as needing composition, input, and structure. So the most satisfying relationships that I’ve had with composers have been actually where we really talk about what kind of stand a certain instrument will go on. How high would it be? Would you be able to see over it? What kind of profile would you give from the stage? Could you change a stick here or there? I steadfastly refuse to give a kind of checklist. I actually know many percussionists who do that—’My left hand can reach a minor ninth on the marimba,’ you know, ‘[I can] do this and do that.’ That’s an assurance that you’re going to get a certain kind of piece each and every time. I’d actually really like to be surprised.

Percussion and Pitch

Frank J. Oteri: You talked about beauty in the Czernowin, which raises the whole specter of melody. People tend to think of percussion as either pitched or non-pitched, having a precise pitch versus an imprecise pitch. We assume there are things you can do with percussion and things you can’t do with percussion. Do you feel that the imprecise pitch aspect of percussion has been something that has kept composers from thinking about writing for it?

Steven Schick: This is a distinction that we try somehow to find words for. I think we can agree to the issue of pitched and non-pitched percussion is an old-fashioned way of looking at things because percussion instruments have pitch. A tin can has a pitch. Now imprecise pitch is not a bad way of looking at it because sometimes those pitches are not very focused. Sometimes there seems to be a spread of pitch, but mostly I think the pitches are relatively focused even on instruments which you wouldn’t expect. A mixing bowl has a real pitch. The problem is that the pitches do not fall easily in a matrix of established language, so they can’t be treated.

So what do we do? The traditional way has been to say those instrument whose pitch has no utility on the staff are non-pitched and we use them as noises, which makes them automatically separate in individual cases. The great thing about pitched instruments like the flute, the oboe, the clarinet, and things like that is that they relate to each other on pitch. There is an enormous equivalency and correspondence, so that if A=B and B=C, then A can equal C. Just by virtue of speaking this common language you can get equivalencies across a broad range of timbre. Those equivalencies don’t exist in percussion, or they don’t naturally exist. I’ve really started thinking about all percussion as pitched. Sometimes those pitches have utility and other times they don’t.

An interesting thing, for example, is to take a piece like Ionisation, which is much debated because Ionisation is essentially a piece for noise and in the very end you have pitched material: you have the piano, you have the glockenspiel, you have the chimes. Why did Varèse do that? I bring this up because a lot of people thought Varèse did that to show by association that percussion is no longer this instrument of brute force. It wasn’t a blunt instrument anymore. It could correspond. It could exist in the same group as the piano, which is the kind of icon of respectability. So I asked Chou Wen-Chung what he thought about those pitched instruments at the end of Ionisation. He said immediately, ‘Look, they’re not pitched instruments, they’re just other kinds of noises.’ I thought it was fascinating, but then I began to think about it and I thought, ‘Well, no.’ I really feel in a way it was the opposite, that the snare drum was never a non-pitched instrument—that it acted as pitch in the context of all those other kinds of things. I think it’s really that their measurability, memorability, and utility don’t fall into the matrix of the staff.

Frank J. Oteri: What’s so interesting is that as you’re saying this, I’m hearing Ionisation in my head—and I’m hearing tunes! It does have melodies, throughout. What Chou Wen-Chung said about the end of it is interesting, because in a way there is less pitch content from the so-called pitched instruments. When the piano finally comes in, it’s playing chromatic clusters, but the snare drum in the beginning is a featured soloist with a clear line that is for all intents and purposes a bona fide melody.

Steven Schick: There’s the glock and the chimes to deal with, but I think you’re completely right. The piano at the end of Ionisation fulfills the function of the Hamburger Helper. It is the noise that binds everything together. It is the mushroom soup of the casserole so to speak.

Frank J. Oteri: To reference somebody else you brought up earlier: Harry Partch. When you look at the range of percussion pitches and then you have a piano locked into 12-tone equal temperament, you only have 12 notes to choose from, which really shows its limitations.

Steven Schick: Exactly.

Specific Techniques

Frank J. Oteri: We spoke a little bit in the beginning about timpani versus other percussion. Do you play timpani? Is that part of your arsenal?

Steven Schick: Yeah. I play exclusively whatever is available. [laughs] I play anything that you can hit. But I don’t play timpani and timpani per se. It’s been some 30 years since I played timpani in an orchestra when I was a student. I was recently asked to play the Carter timpani pieces. Well, it was a couple of years ago. At first I said, ‘No, no, no, no.’ I was asked to play them in Europe which is even worse because the timpani tradition and the way timpani is understood is much more rarified there, especially where I was about to play. I said, ‘No, you really don’t want to hear me do that.’ [laughs] They said, ‘No, no, no. We do.’ So I relearned—I played them when I was a student—a couple of them to play and I really, really tried to play them as I thought a timpanist would play. I was not trying to reinvent the timpani. I was not trying to lay some kind of new spin on the timpani. I was really doing my best. Yet the responses were almost uniformly, ‘Wow! Who ever thought you could do that with timpani?’ And I was really actually trying to play the timpani as timpani. So it was an experience that made me realize that first of all I’ve moved quite far from at least a kind of pure approach to timpani, but I really loved playing it.

Frank J. Oteri: So, do you have favorite instruments?

Steven Schick: No… It’s really a little bit like asking which is your favorite kidney. I can’t, not even under the umbrella of just a guess that I wouldn’t be held to.

Frank J. Oteri: Well, to tie it all back to the beginning, the thing that is so amazing is not just that there are all these different instruments in your arsenal, but each one has very different techniques. So getting something right on a snare versus playing a four-mallet passage on the marimba, versus that devastating thing that you did with a siren in John Luther Adams’ piece, those are such different techniques. They’re not related at all.

Steven Schick: But I treat them all in the same way. I mean the siren is a great example. I went to Alaska to record all of the source material and we rented a siren from Carroll Music. Every time I’ve played that piece I’ve used the same siren. The source material produced this wonderful halo of electronic sounds, but because it was the same instrument, I could find the same pitches. So the problem in that piece, and it’s really quite difficult to play, is to be in tune with the computerized sounds because if you’re not really on these long arches precisely, it loses its sense of being centered. That’s a technique which was refined and demanding but which no one ever studies. I didn’t take a week out of my undergraduate percussion education to deal with a siren. It’s just something you have to learn. But that’s actually how I approach all of those instruments. I know the snare drum because I grew up as a drummer. I play Georges Aperghis‘s Le Corps Á Corps with a hand drum—I don’t know how to play the hand drum. I just learned how to play that piece. I play Javier Alvarez‘s piece for maracas—I never learned how to play the maracas. It’s just that you learn how to use those tools in that environment. I don’t play the maracas as an instrument. I couldn’t sit in with a salsa band, but I can use them as a tool for that particular piece.

Frank J. Oteri: Now, we’re at a crossroads in our musical history—it’s not even a question of classical versus pop because ultimately that’s a meaningless division—but in terms of mainstream music, something that gets spread across the board, to something that is so marginalized it exists only within its own niche. It seems that with CDs disappearing and with everybody downloading music to their iPods, soon people are only going to hear what they want to hear and may never be exposed to something that is outside of that box. Whether what they are listening to is Morton Feldman, Haydn string quartets, or Metallica, it’s equally frightening. I want to put you back on that airplane where somebody asks you what you do. How do we reach out to people? The kind of things that you and other percussionists are doing have an immediate tactile appeal. If somebody talks to you about it, they’re automatically fascinated. “Wow, you play the Glenfiddich bottle?” That’s interesting. That connects to other aspects of life that you would not normally associate with music.

Steven Schick: I don’t have a ready and glib response except that I do think that is something inherent in the percussive tradition—perhaps in other instruments as well, I just don’t feel qualified to speak to them—something that communalizes the experience. You see a mixing bowl on stage and suddenly you think, ‘Oh, I can do that, too.’ Chances are you could. Most percussion music is pretty straightforward with sometimes even easy ways of playing it. Flowerpots. You know, all these kinds of things that connect to other parts of life. There is the metaphorical element of percussion. The fact that on an oboe you finger and blow through a double reed, but a percussionist hits, strikes, mutes, slaps, brushes, whisks things—these are motions that have meaning outside of music. We have a huge access to world traditions, which people understand in one way or another. The thing I loved about percussion and that I think is its most potent tool is its sense of opening up a range of experiences to a community’s desire for interface. We have that as a possibility. You are right. I think the iPod phenomenon is a kind of insularising. One understands why that might be desirable. As an active practitioner of percussion, I decided in this moment of midlife-correction that it was not my goal or my job to be a missionary to make sure that everybody heard percussion music. I think that a lot of people probably don’t want to and that’s fine. But I did realize that I wanted to offer a maximally complex and rich experience on one side, and accessible and interactive on the other side. That’s really what I’m after. I think from that standpoint percussion is really practically the ideal tool.