Category: Cover

Sixth World Symposium on Choral Music: Composers’ Forums



Minneapolis MN, August 3-10, 2002

PART ONE

ERNANI AGUIAR
DOMINICK ARGENTO
CHEN YI
R. MURRAY SCHAFER
DALE WARLAND

  1. The Appeal of Choral Music
  2. The Choral Symposium Commissions
  3. Experimentation and Choruses
  4. Composers Singing
  5. A New Romanticism?

PART TWO

MOSES HOGAN
LIBBY LARSEN
LINDA HOESCHLER

  1. Working With Composers You Commission
  2. Spiritual Connections
  3. The Meaning of the Text
  4. Setting Different Languages
  5. Barriers Between Composers and Performers
  6. Sage Advice for Emerging Composers
  7. Sage Advice for Emerging Commissioners

PART THREE

JORGE CORDOBA
ALBERTO GRAU
STEPHEN PAULUS
TOM HALL

  1. From The Bible to Blake
  2. Capturing the Rhythm of the Text
  3. Favorite Composers
  4. Nationalism
  5. Establishing a Compositional Voice
  6. Mentoring Younger Composers
  7. After The Premiere
  8. The Compositional Process

Edward T. Cone: Not Theory, Practice…



Frank J. Oteri visits the home of Edward T. Cone

Wednesday, January 22, 2003—Noon
Princeton, NJ

Videotaped and Transcribed by Randy Nordschow

FRANK J. OTERI: I first read your essays almost twenty years ago when I was in graduate school. They were a great inspiration to me because my life has been a divided life—somebody who writes about music and somebody who also composes music. I came across a comment when I was going through all your essays again, recently, from you essay “Schubert’s Unfinished Business” from 1984 where you said, “Criticism and composition are not necessarily distinct.”

EDWARD T. CONE: That’s right.

FRANK J. OTERI: I thought that was really interesting and I’d like to flesh out that thought. You’re known principally in the world as a theorist. All your life you’ve also been a composer.

EDWARD T. CONE: I don’t call myself a theorist by the way. I call myself a writer on musical topics. I don’t consider what I do theory, I mean, in the sense that theory has become something very esoteric, very precise, and of a self-enclosed world. I’m not interested in that.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, there’s an interesting thing in labels. I hate the word critic. In our society today “critic” implies negativity. You criticize something…

EDWARD T. CONE: It shouldn’t be. For me to be a good critic is a term of high praise. The best criticism isn’t necessarily negative. I consider what I do criticism. When I write, let’s say, “In Praise of Schubert,” I call that criticism.

FRANK J. OTERI: That’s the original meaning of the word. It’s a shame we sort of lost that word in our common usage in English at this point. Whenever people hear the word “to criticize” they say, “Oh, he hates criticism.” It means he hates being criticized….

EDWARD T. CONE: Negative criticism, of course!

FRANK J. OTERI: Yes! To get back to this original question, you’ve written about music but you’re also a composer. You’ve written over eighty pieces of music, according to the booklet notes on the CRI disc. That disc is a few years old, so there are probably a few more pieces now. How do you identify yourself primarily?

EDWARD T. CONE: As a musician. I mean, I’m also a pianist and started out as a pianist. I try not to categorize myself any further than that. It’s making music and talking about it. To get back to your original question—or original reference to what I wrote about composition and criticism not being necessarily opposed to each other—a composer has to be a critic. If he isn’t the most devastating critic of his own music, he’s not a good composer. Every compositional decision you make is a critical decision. You have to choose among several alternatives and you obviously negatively criticize the ones you don’t choose.

 

FRANK J. OTERI: In terms of how you divide your time—writing about other peoples’ music and creating your own music—do those two streams fuel each other? Do you feel if you’re writing about Schubert, let’s say, does that inspire you to then write a piece of original music, or vice versa?

EDWARD T. CONE: I would say more the vice versa. That is, my own music inspires me to look at someone else rather than writing about Schubert inspires me to write music. That would be less true, of course, of contemporary composers. For example, when I wrote about Roger Sessions that would often give me ideas. Not so much the writing about it, but the fact that you have to really study the music very closely to write about it that would give me ideas and inspiration of my own, but much less so in the case of a classical composer.

FRANK J. OTERI: You literally have to get inside the head of another composer to really write about that music. A choice is made a certain way, but it could have been done all these other ways; these are all the other paths that could have been taken. So I guess my question then is, when you’re writing a composition, if you’re so immersed in studying someone else’s music at some point, are you then in your pieces taking the paths that weren’t taken, that you would have taken, had you written the music you’re analyzing?

EDWARD T. CONE: Yes, but you see, usually when I’m writing words I’m usually not composing, and when I’m composing I’m usually not writing words.

FRANK J. OTERI: So there’s never an issue where you are working on a piece of music and there’s a deadline for a composition and also a deadline for an article? There’s never been an example where those two things are going on?

EDWARD T. CONE: Well there may have been, but I don’t recall.

 

FRANK J. OTERI: I came across a very interesting statement you made about how your music comes into being. You were talking about pieces you had written, not commissioned because you said that implies a fee, which was rarely ever involved. Pieces are often willed into existence by forces other than the composer. Someone gets asked to write a piece for certain forces, and then they get a fee, and then the piece happens, and often times that piece will be written for the commission and it will never be done again. It’s a strange way to midwife a piece of music. I wonder if there’s something wrong with the way that we give birth to music nowadays?

EDWARD T. CONE: From my point of view there never has been a really healthy relationship between music writing and the calling forth of music writing, the commissioning of it, since the days that composers were paid to be composers—as Haydn was paid to be a composer, as Bach was paid to be a composer, as in quite a different way that Beethoven was eventually paid to be a composer. From then on, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the composer became more and mor
e set adrift. Let’s face it, this is the situation that we’ve been in for many, many years and I don’t think it’s going to be changed. If you are asking about the health of the situation, I think Bach’s and Haydn’s situations were much healthier as far as composition is concerned.

FRANK J. OTERI: To take a look at it from another angle, I’m a composer and Randy is also a composer, and I don’t have commissions from orchestra X, let’s say, and I have rarely written for orchestra. The things I have written for orchestra have never gotten played. You’ve written over eighty pieces, and I know this one disc on CRI, there’s some music on it that is extraordinary. Your Serenade for Flute and Strings is an amazingly beautiful piece.

EDWARD T. CONE: Thank you.

FRANK J. OTERI: The disc has four pieces on it. What about the other 76 plus pieces of your music? I’ve never heard them, and most people have never heard them. I imagine that you wrote them because you wanted to write them, which is why I write the pieces I write, and my music rarely gets heard. But isn’t there something somehow wrong with that? All that work and nobody reaping anything from it…

EDWARD T. CONE: As a matter of fact most of the pieces on that disc were “called for,” as I said, I won’t say commissioned because they weren’t paid. They were called for, but as you said, they were played once and then they sort of disappeared. But let’s face it, wasn’t that what happened to Bach and Haydn, too? The only difference is that when Bach wrote a cantata for one week, he didn’t expect to play it again because he wrote another cantata for the next week. Haydn just kept churning out the quartets and the symphonies because each one replaced the one that had come before. Now, let’s say you get asked to do a string quartet. The quartet that asked for it will play it once. They won’t play it again and they won’t ask you for another quartet, they’ll ask someone else for another quartet.

FRANK J. OTERI: Right. I guess what’s happened though is those pieces that were written in the past that were assumed to be one time performances, kept the composer writing new work. We’re now in a situation where there’s all this repertoire that was created in the past that performers turn to first, rather than turning to the work of a living composer. Certainly, even in your own writing about music, a good bit of it, if not most of it, is concerned more with the music of the past than the music of the present. Is it so healthy for us to have such a focus on the past at the expense of the present?

EDWARD T. CONE: No, I don’t think it is. The point is when you say “at the expense of the present.” I would equally say it would be bad to focus on the present at the expense of the past. Certainly, we’re much more conscious of the past today than people of another period were. In the first place, we have reproduction, which they didn’t have, and the music of the past is much more available to us than it ever was before. I think in that respect we are now getting more like the situation in other arts, such as architecture, painting, sculpture, literature, where the works of the past were always around, when they were always visible or readable, and now we’re getting to that situation. I think it may be unfortunate that this has come just at the moment when contemporary music became much more disassociated from the public than it had been before. So that this is when you get to focusing on the past at the expense of contemporary music.

FRANK J. OTERI: Fault is probably too strong of a word here, but what caused that disassociation and is it reparable? Should it be reparable? Should the living composer be a more public figure in society?

EDWARD T. CONE: It depends on what you mean by public figure.

FRANK J. OTERI: Certainly, you think of Liszt as someone who was a public figure. Beethoven was a public figure. Wagner was a public figure.

EDWARD T. CONE: Well, Leonard Bernstein was a public figure.

FRANK J. OTERI: Very true.

EDWARD T. CONE: Perhaps more as a conductor than as a composer. I doubt that he would have been a public figure if he hadn’t been such a successful conductor.

FRANK J. OTERI: And also a composer for Broadway musicals.

EDWARD T. CONE: Yes. Who else is a public figure? Would you say Stravinsky was a public figure?

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah, to some extent Stravinsky definitely was. Stravinsky was also very visible as a conductor of his music and a frequent lecturer. I guess the closest thing we have to a contemporary composer at this point who is a public figure would be Philip Glass or John Adams, who are very visible, but really not quite in the same way.

EDWARD T. CONE: Yes. It seems to me that what is really the question here is the whole situation of music in our culture. Let me give just one personal example, which seems to me to illustrate what is wrong. And I say this not because I’m unhappy about it, I just observe it and think it’s interesting. I happen to have won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award twice for books that I’ve written, and a third time for a book that I edited. I’ve never seen this in any public organ, I mean non-musical organ. If anyone won a literary book award once, it would immediately be reported in The New York Times. If you won it twice it would especially be reported. If it were three times it would get a special article.

FRANK J. OTERI: What amazes me is that pieces win the Pulitzer Prize in music and are not recorded and are unavailable. Lewis Spratlan won the Pulitzer Prize two years ago for Life is a Dream but there still hasn’t been a staged production of the work nor has it been recorded. I think we’re at a point where, certainly with the media, concert music is extremely marginalized. There’s a whole generation of editors who aren’t even aware of it. This is why we created NewMusicBox, to create a venue to be able to spread the word about new music in America because the radio outlets don’t play contemporary concert music. For the most part the classical stations avoid it. The non-classical stations don’t know what to do with it. The newspapers hardly cover it. The New York Times is one of the few exceptions, but their coverage is on again off again as well.</p

 

FRANK J. OTERI: I want to get back to something you said at the very beginning of this conversation about why you don’t consider yourself a theorist. You were talking about how it had become such an area of specialization. I want to tie in the notion of how music theory came into being and whether you feel it has helped the appreciation of music or has hurt the appreciation of music?

EDWARD T. CONE: When we talk about musical theory
, we are talking about two distinct things. One is included in what we’d call undergraduate theory courses. As Sessions often pointed out, theory courses were not courses in theory; they were courses in musical practice. I don’t know where they got the word theory course. I know when I was in high school they used to have courses in theory and harmony. And it turns out that theory was simply how you construct scales, and harmony was how you put chords together. Theory was simply the background for learning harmony, which was always taught then instead of counterpoint. The point is, whether it’s harmony, counterpoint, orchestration, or whatever, it’s not really theory in the sense of “theory.” It’s musical practice. That is certainly not detrimental to music, but absolutely necessary to music. I think one of the unfortunate things today is the fact that a lot of institutions don’t seem to be stressing it enough, instead stressing pure creativity without any basis in practical exercises. However, what is now called Theory with a capitol “T” is really an abstract exercise of trying to build systems or categorizing systems that are already built. The great example of a theorist is, of course, Schenker, who took the practice of tonality and made it into an all embracing theory, a very narrow theory, but no less one that he felt embraced all possible works in tonality. In the same way theorists like Babbitt have worked with the twelve-tone system. When you read someone like Perle and Babbitt on their system constructions, you feel that it has less to do with the writing of music than in justifying certain approaches. I wouldn’t say this is detrimental to the actual production of music, but I think it’s something quite different from the actual production of music. Most successful music had been written in the spirit that Ralph Kirkpatrick expressed when he told Arthur Mendel—while they were discussing what you do about the rules of ornamentation in Bach—Kirkpatrick said, “I think what you do is learn all the rules and then play it as you feel it.” It seems to me that theory in its proper use is a guide to practice. It’s learning the rules, and then composition is forgetting them.

FRANK J. OTERI: That Kirkpatrick remark is very interesting… You mentioned Babbitt. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the pianist Martin Goldray who did a disc of Babbitt’s piano music for CRI, I guess about a decade ago?

EDWARD T. CONE: No, I don’t know that one.

FRANK J. OTERI: It’s a wonderful, wonderful disc. The playing is rapturous; it’s joyous. Ingram Marshall told me about this interview with Martin Goldray. He’d never studied the theories behind Babbitt’s music.

EDWARD T. CONE: He hadn’t?

FRANK J. OTERI: No, he learned the notes and he played it, and brought into this music so many insights that probably, if he got so bogged down in the theory behind it, he would have been terrified to do what he did with it. The notes were right. He wasn’t changing anything. It’s a wonderful recording that begs the question, should performers always be well-versed in the theory behind the music they’re playing?

EDWARD T. CONE: I think it entirely depends on what use they make of it. For example, I’ve played some of Babbitt. When I did, I would analyze it as closely as I could, sometimes with help from him. Then in playing it I always felt that this had to be simply submerged and become completely in the background, and that I would then play as if I were playing Beethoven.

FRANK J. OTERI: There’s a wonderful disc of Roger Sessions‘s piano music performed by Robert Helps where I almost feel like he is making Sessions’s music sound like Chopin. It’s wonderful. I guess the theory came back in when I was rereading your essay on Sessions’s sense of the melodic line and I had gotten that from that performance. But until I reread your essay again—I had forgotten because I read it almost twenty years ago—I never had gotten that from any of the analysis I’ve read about Sessions, but it was clearly there. In a way, performing a work is making some sort of statement of the analysis; it is a form of criticism of the composition. It is a way of showing the world what you feel is in that piece.

EDWARD T. CONE: Yes. I’ve written an article you may not have read because it came out in England in a book on piano playing, “The Pianist as Critic.” In it, I went into this whole point of view that any performance is a criticism of the work. It seems to me that a performance should be a criticism of the work, but should not be an analysis of a work. The analysis should have been done. The performance is not the analysis.

 

FRANK J. OTERI: To take the question to the next level, I’ve also recently read this essay you wrote called “Beyond Analysis.” I’d like to talk about music that can’t be analyzed.

EDWARD T. CONE: Well, such as what?

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, is there music that can’t be analyzed?

EDWARD T. CONE: [laughs] I suspect I would have to say that if ultimately the music can’t be analyzed, then it fails as music. That doesn’t mean to say that we can analyze it. It may take another generation to analyze it. For example, I’ve never felt happy about the third of Schoenberg‘s Three Piano Pieces, opus 11. I can’t analyze it. That doesn’t mean that someday somebody won’t analyze it in a way that I would find perfectly convincing, but I haven’t seen it yet.

FRANK J. OTERI: There was a charge levied in the 19th century that Beethoven’s fourth piano concerto was somehow beyond analysis.

EDWARD T. CONE: You see, we now know that’s not true. [laughs]

FRANK J. OTERI: But what about the indeterminate music of the ’50s and the experiments of Cage, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, people like that, and the more experimental things in electronic music in the ’60s and early ’70s? Is that music analyzable, and to what end?

EDWARD T. CONE: Take indeterminate music. You can certainly analyze it from the point of view of figuring out how it was produced and what the rules were by which it was produced, but it seems to me that’s quite different. Analyzing the way the music was written is
quite different from analyzing music from the effect that it has on the hearer, or that the hearer can grasp. That’s the only kind of analysis I’m interested in. I’m not interested in how, except intellectually as a sort of puzzle to see how the thing was arrived at. What I am interested in is how it sounds. That’s the thing, it seems to me, that separates Babbitt’s music, for example, from let’s say Boulez‘s when he was writing strict twelve-tone music. Boulez’s music is very easy to analyze from the point of view of learning the rules by which he wrote it. I mean, he’s specified those and you can trace it very easily. The problem comes in trying to make sense out of your impression of the piece as you hear it. In the case of Babbitt, it’s also equally easy to learn what the rules are by which he wrote it. But when you try to analyze it in terms of what you hear you get much more of a reward because, as he has always said, there was no substitute for close listening to everything thing that you’re doing. I have a feeling that the indeterminate people, on one hand, and the strict twelve-toners, the very strict ones on the other hand, come together in this. That is, neither one of them has any interest in what the ultimate product is going to sound like. Whereas Babbitt can point to construction strictly posited as Boulez or any other from that crowd, yet his final decisions are always dependent upon what his ear tells him. Therefore when you listen to it your ear can find some sort of sympathy with his ear.

FRANK J. OTERI: It’s so interesting that you say that because in general, the common perception is that Babbitt is one of those guys.

EDWARD T. CONE: I know, but this is quite wrong.

FRANK J. OTERI: Yes, I think so, too.

EDWARD T. CONE: Perle is the same way.

FRANK J. OTERI: Carter, as well.

EDWARD T. CONE: Yeah, but Carter, of course, was never a strict twelve-toner.

 

FRANK J. OTERI: We featured a webcast on NewMusicBox of the Pacifica Quartet playing all of Carter‘s string quartets. In that performance, there was stuff in that music that never jumped out before—it dances, it’s joyous. Many people’s common perception is, “Oh this is scary, frightening, complicated modern music.” I guess if it isn’t given enough care in performance, it can sound that way. I think a lot of the more complex music, the more chromatic and rhythmically complex music that was written in the 20th century, gets the bad rep that it has because a lot of the time it just gets played really badly, and people can’t separate the composition from the performance. Which takes us back to our earlier discussion, how do we birth pieces? If a piece is only going to get done once, how can you ever have a relationship with that piece if you’ve only heard it one time?

EDWARD T. CONE: I know, and that performance may not have been a good performance.

FRANK J. OTERI: And talking to Babbitt about this with orchestral pieces, it’s been a disaster.

EDWARD T. CONE: I’m sure.

FRANK J. OTERI: He’s almost never gotten a satisfactory orchestral performance.

EDWARD T. CONE: Really? Not even the last one, when Taub did the last piano concerto?

FRANK J. OTERI: With Levine

EDWARD T. CONE: Yes.

FRANK J. OTERI: That was the exception, of course.

EDWARD T. CONE: I would think so.

FRANK J. OTERI: In general, he even said that he has gotten better performances out of the Juilliard Orchestra.

EDWARD T. CONE: Better than the professional orchestras… I remember the first time I heard Sessions‘s Second Piano Sonata and it was Andor Foldes playing it. And it seemed to me absolutely incomprehensible. And it was only later that I realized that it wasn’t the piece that was incomprehensible, it was the performance.

 

FRANK J. OTERI: This leads us to another area. Is there music that needs analysis in order to be appreciated? You said that you don’t like the 3rd piece of the Opus 11 of Schoenberg because you were not able to analyze it.

EDWARD T. CONE: Well, no. I wouldn’t say I don’t like it because I couldn’t analyze it. I tried to analyze it because I didn’t like it. And I failed. [laughs] I wouldn’t say that my disliking it is the result of not being able to analyze it, I’d say my not being able to analyze it is a result of my not liking it. My attempt to analyze it was because I didn’t like it and felt I didn’t understand it.

FRANK J. OTERI: Is there music that you treasure and love but have absolutely no interest in analyzing?

EDWARD T. CONE: It depends on what you mean by analyze. Obviously, I can’t take the time to analyze every piece that I listen to and like. Let’s put it this way. Most of the music I like, I wouldn’t say all, I know when I hear it that if I tried to analyze it that it would be something I could successfully do. For example, I’ve recently been looking at some piece by Debussy, which rather baffled me for a long time. These pieces baffled me simply because I did not know why they went tonally where they did. So, on the other hand, I liked them enough to want to approach them and find out why they worked. There are a number of pieces like that that I just don’t have the time to look into that would be rewarding if I did take the time as I found out in the case of the Debussy pieces. It’s very rare that I find pieces like the third Schoenberg piece. I tried and I failed and I’m sure the failure is mine. Well, actually, I’m not sure the failure is mine [laughs], but I’m willing to accept the possibility that the failure is mine.

FRANK J. OTERI: When I have a negative initial reaction to a piece, my first assumption is that I somehow didn’t get it because, after all, someone brought this forth into the world. The composer made a series of choices that he or she believed in, and who am I to say this is wrong? Which reminds me of something else you wrote in your essay “Schubert’s Unfinished Business:” the essential act of criticism is appreciation not judgment.

EDWARD T. CONE: Right.

FRANK J. OTERI: It’s an attempt to figure out why something’s good, not why something’s bad or to cast dispersions. But the perception of what constitutes criticism seems to have changed in our lifetime.

EDWARD T. CONE: Well, that’s too bad.

FRANK J. OTERI: Do you read newspaper reviews of concerts?

EDWARD T. CONE: Oh, yes.

FRANK J. OTERI: What are your thoughts about the writing?

EDWARD T. CONE: In general, it seems to me that first of all the emphasis is usually on the performance rather than the composition. In either case, it’s always based on generalizations or on specific points with a remarkable lack of evidence. For example, you’ll read that a performance lacked energy. How do you specify that? What does it mean that it lacked energy? Does it mean that it wasn’t fast enough? Does it mean that it didn’t have enough rhythmic precision? It doesn’t mean a thing to say that the performance lacks energy!

FRANK J. OTERI: That’s interesting. I was at a performance recently and all the people I spoke with in the audience agreed that it lacked energy. How else could it be said? Everybody on stage seemed to be just going through the motions. They didn’t seem to believe in the music. Now that’s a very subjective reaction but it was one that everyone I spoke to shared. How could any of us know what was inside the minds of these players? Maybe they did believe in the music, but for some reason they were not making me or anyone else believe in it. And the same is true for writing about music. If you’re bringing that enthusiasm, there’s something missing.

 

FRANK J. OTERI: You taught for many years here at Princeton

EDWARD T. CONE: Yes.

FRANK J. OTERI: What did you see as your principal goal as a teacher?

EDWARD T. CONE: I would say that the principal goal was to get them to listen closely. Whether teaching them appreciation or history or composition or just plain counterpoint, it’s really to educate the ear so that they’re listening precisely and intelligently.

FRANK J. OTERI: You had a real mentor for this in Roger Sessions.

EDWARD T. CONE: Yes. That was always his point of view, I think.

FRANK J. OTERI: So what has been Sessions’ chief legacy to you as a musician, using that word once again as a general term to describe everything you have done in your life?

EDWARD T. CONE: First of all, purely in technical terms, he taught me the importance of sheer technique. As he put it, technique means being able to do whatever you want to do. And his idea of going through the drills of counterpoint and harmony and strict composition were exactly that: to give you the opportunity to try many things and experimenting in all of them but always with the intention of finding ways to do what you want to do. That, of course, is something that I can never thank him enough for. Because when I went to him I had all kinds of ideas, but I didn’t know what to do with them.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now, Sessions was a major force on the music department of this university for well over a generation. Is that influence still there?

EDWARD T. CONE: I couldn’t say. I’m really not close enough to the department to be able to say so. But certainly there’s no personal influence there because the generation he taught is now gone.

FRANK J. OTERI: Do you keep up with the music department at Princeton?

EDWARD T. CONE: Yes, but only at a distance. I feel it’s not a good idea to interfere once you’ve retired. I give a lecture occasionally. And I occasionally go to lectures, and most of the concerts, but I can’t really tell you much about the day-to-day activities that go on.

FRANK J. OTERI: At the beginning of our talk you said that you did not want to be described as a theorist because theory is so specialized. I still remember being in graduate school almost twenty years ago and in the middle of reading all these hardcore analyses of pieces, your essays were a breath of fresh air. In the middle of a discussion about a Brahms Intermezzo, you’d bring up Sherlock Holmes, or you would talk about painting. The study of music has become so rarified and specialized, and the general public doesn’t understand it. But this goes both ways. Many of the people who are studying music do not understand the general public.

EDWARD T. CONE: That’s one reason why I think it is important for musicians to get a good liberal education and it’s one of the reasons that I didn’t want to go to a conservatory. I think it’s very important that musicians learn what’s going on in all the other realms of artistic endeavor and cultural life in general. That’s one of the things again that was very important to Sessions. I’ve just been reading this new biography by Frederik Prausnitz and it makes it clear how so much of his earlier life was spent in Europe in the company of artists of all kinds and intellectuals of all kinds. I think that’s very important. And it’s too bad if the current generation is getting away from it.

 

FRANK J. OTERI: I wanted to talk with you about the duality of being a composer and someone who is an advocate for other composers. For me, the most interesting writers about music have always been composers. And ironically enough, the most interesting composers are the ones who have also written about other people’s music. I always like to respond to people who say, “Schoenberg killed contemporary music” by asking, “You mean Harold?”

EDWARD T. CONE: [laughs]

FRANK J. OTERI: The idea he promulgated about practitioners having a conflict of interest if they are writing about music, which is still widely believed in critical circles, seems antithetical to really insightful writing. It seems to be a conflict of interest if you’re not a practitioner.

EDWARD T. CONE: Which is why of all the critics that we’ve had in the 20th century in this country, the one who was always the most interesting, even though you disagreed with him on many things, was Virgil Thomson. I’m talking about professional critics, not people who write occasionally about music. Of all the professional critics, he was the one who always brought the point of view of a practicing musician.

FRANK J. OTERI: So are there negative aspects of being a composer and a critic?

EDWARD T. CONE: I think one thing that one has to constantly guard against is making generalizations and then feeling that one ought to apply them to one’s own music. If, for example, I had been writing about contemporary music at a certain period in my life, I might well have taken an anti-twelve-tone stance and then I’d have cut myself off from a very important influence on my own music because at a certain period I became aware that there was a lot that twelve-tone composition had to offer me and I began to use it in my own way. Although I never became strictly a twelve-tone composer and haven’t used it for
some time now… Nevertheless, it was very important for me. But had I been writing too much before that, I might well have taken a stand on twelve-tone composition. And once you put it in words, in print, it’s very hard to go back on. [laughs]

FRANK J. OTERI: It’s an interesting thing, getting to your own music now. You’ve written quite a lot of music but only a tiny bit of it is available on one CRI recording, the status of which is up in the air now…

EDWARD T. CONE: Yes…

FRANK J. OTERI: But it’s out there in the world, and presumably it will be out there again at some point as an imprint of New World Records. So in a sense your music becomes a part of the larger music history, which you’ve been writing about your whole life. Where do you see your music in this history?

EDWARD T. CONE: I couldn’t answer that, really…

FRANK J. OTERI: Where would you want to see it?

EDWARD T. CONE: That’s another question! [laughs] I would like to see it as contributing to trying to make sense out of the huge number of styles that became available in the 20th century and trying to put some sort of order into them, making connections between the best music of the past and the best music of the present. And I would like to hope that I’ve made some contribution to that.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, certainly, that Serenade for Flute and Strings is a gorgeous piece…

EDWARD T. CONE: Thank you. There’s one you see that was “commissioned” and yet the Contemporary Music Ensemble has never done it again.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, other ensembles should be doing it! It should be promoted to all the groups that attend the conference of Chamber Music America.

 

FRANK J. OTERI: In your essays on musical form you talk about the beginning of a piece and the end of a piece, and how do you ever know how to begin or end something? It is the most elusive question.

EDWARD T. CONE: As a composer I think it’s easy to know when something begins. I don’t think I’ve ever had the experience of getting a musical idea and feeling that it belonged in the middle of something. I’ve always been able to think fairly consecutively, so when I get a musical idea it begins something. How to end something, that’s more difficult. I think you tell how difficult it was just by listening to the music of Dvorak. Have you ever noticed how difficult it was for him to end a composition? You think it’s over and there’s another coda tacked on to that coda. Then you think that’s it and then there’s another little bit tacked onto that. The poor man never seemed to be able to come to an end. I think it’s a problem that all of us have, but at some point we have to stand back from it and say that’s it, I’ve said what I needed to say. It’s finished. I don’t know how you do it; you just have to know. That’s probably what makes a really successful form successful, where it ends.

FRANK J. OTERI: On that note, Thank you.

EDWARD T. CONE: Well, thank you.

Colonial Legacy: MacDowell Colony Executive Director Cheryl Young

Cheryl Young, executive director of MacDowell

Cheryl Young, executive director of MacDowell
Photo by B.A. King

Videotaped by Amanda MacBlane
Transcribed by Randy Nordschow and Frank J. Oteri

Beginnings

MOLLY SHERIDAN: Why don’t we start out talking a little bit about your history with the MacDowell Colony. I know you came on board leading the development department with your great work with their endowment and now you’re executive director of the colony.
CHERYL YOUNG: When I first came to MacDowell I hadn’t known very much about the place. I grew up in Massachusetts and had always been interested in the arts. When I heard about this position I decided it was time for me to move to New York because the development office for MacDowell was in New York and had been for many years. The executive director then, Mary Carswell, was fairly new in her position as well. She said [to me] that we have an opportunity to do something wonderful for this wonderful place. So I moved to New York and began to immerse myself in all the different aspects of the colony–it being not just for composing, but visual art, writing, filmmaking, and so forth. All the different arts that I enjoy were incorporated in one position, which really made it wonderful. We applied for a challenge grant and had gotten it–actually when I arrived we had already worded it–and we went about raising around three million dollars in the endowment campaign to meet that challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. That was very successful. The endowment at that time was only about three million dollars to begin with, so we had doubled it, which was terrific. Then we immediately applied for another grant from the NEA for winterizing the studios. That took us another leap forward, about another million and a half was raised for that. Then the [stock] market took off, so MacDowell is in really good shape financially. There are no fees for the residency program and that’s mostly because of people who believe in the whole idea that was started by Edward MacDowell.
MOLLY SHERIDAN: When I saw the PBS documentary that outlined the history of this place, it was really touching. I’m wondering if you could just summarize it…I realize it’s a ton of information. It all started with the relationship between this wonderful couple…
CHERYL YOUNG: There’s no question that, as they say, things are meant to be. Edward MacDowell was a visual artist as well as a composer when he was very young. He applied to study music and art at the same time and was accepted into an arts academy in Paris to study under a composer. He chose the composing route in the end. So he was abroad learning music but he was also taking in students. One of the students was Marian MacDowell who grew up in Connecticut. They fell in love and were married in 1885. They lived abroad a few years while he continued to study and work. Then they moved back to the United States living in Boston for a few years. He worked mainly on his compositions and they had a very, very simple life. Then he accepted a position at Columbia University as their first music professor and they decided to move to New York. One of the things that happened during the course of that was that Mrs. MacDowell said that she fell in love with a composer and not a teacher, even though he was her teacher. She really felt badly that he couldn’t devote more time to his writing and his music. So what they would do each summer is go up to New Hampshire and he would work on his music in the summer, as most professors do no matter what the discipline. She started to build him a separate studio because even when he was working in the house he was distracted by all the things that were going on in the household. She built him a log cabin a short walk, about a quarter of a mile, from the house. He would go out there everyday. She would pack up a lunch for him and he would go out and do his work. It’s where he was really able to focus on his work. He later became ill and they knew he didn’t have much time. One of the things they discussed is what they would do. What would she do with the rest of her life? What could they do with the studio they’d created for him? They decided to create this artist colony. It wasn’t a new idea, but I think it was new in that the programs that existed for short-term residencies were all sending Americans abroad. He was a founding trustee for the American Academy in Rome. Of course the idea there is a multidisciplinary one, as well as for artists to see another world and be inspired by another culture. One of the things he realized was that being in a community where you are learning constantly from other people is very inspiring for art and for creative purposes in general, but that there was no reason to leave the country to do it. You could create that kind of environment for the short term that you were in residence with these other individuals. He wanted to try that here. That’s what Marian MacDowell took on. They had their first artist in residency before he passed away in 1908. They had two artists come in 1907…
MOLLY SHERIDAN: The sisters?
CHERYL YOUNG: Yes the Mayer sisters. I think one was a sculptor, and one was a writer. They [the MacDowells] had actually built another studio at that point. The log cabin was used, but then it just took off. The founding of the colony itself we say is 1907. That’s when it was incorporated. Because it was a new model–short-term residencies here in this country–a place was built specifically for this. The colony model is permanent residence, where people would actually move to a neighborhood. Provincetown, Massachusetts is a very old artist colony, but people live there more or less permanently and the idea of community is a permanent community, or at least for most of the year. He just felt that the practical realities of needing to work and needing to have another life make it impossible sometimes to do that kind of thing. The idea that you would come for a month, or two months was really not something that had been done. Certainly building studios specifically for this purpose hadn’t been done. When Mrs. MacDowell went to her patrons and said, “This is what I’d like to do,” they said it was an insane idea. “It’s not practical! It’s a folly!” And she said, “No, this will work.” So she devoted the rest of her life, fifty years, to it. She started it in her fifties. She was a pianist, so naturally at the very beginning she was able to welcome quite a number of fine composers to come. She started a wonderful network of people who would nominate, that’s how it was done originally, by references.
MOLLY SHERIDAN: Did she continue to live there full time and interact with the artists?
CHERYL YOUNG: She did. She lived on the property in the farmhouse that she and Edward had purchased. It’s called Hillcrest and the studios are sprinkled on the acreage around the farmhouse. The immediate acreage she immediately started to expand and she bought all the property adjacent to it. She knew that she wanted the artists to have privacy so bought lots of land so she could build roads going out through the property. She herself designed the whole site plan, where to put the studios and so fourth. Originally, they used some farm buildings, but most were built. She went out and she raised money and got these buildings built. By 1930, by the time she had really finished what I call the startup phase and then the growth phase, she had about twenty studios built.
MOLLY SHERIDAN: What do you think her motivation was for all of this? Obviously this one woman, who had amazing tenacity if nothing else, has had a huge impact on American culture. You could look at the history of past residents and list off hundreds of works that have impacted American society and the world cultural community.
CHERYL YOUNG: That’s true.
MOLLY SHERIDAN: It’s just this one woman. What do you think about that?
CHERYL YOUNG: I think it was a sincerity of purpose. I think being around artists and knowing the creative process intimately as she did–watching Edward struggle through it, and she herself as a pianist–she knew how difficult it was to create something original and so forth. I think she felt there was not a support system for that process to happen. At the turn of the century, the government wasn’t as strong. It could barely take care of all the social causes out there. There was a whole movement of that period to try and improve society through universities, libraries, and academies of art. Just in terms of basic quality of life issues as well, like hospitals, health care, and education. She just felt this was part and parcel of that. She knew the only way to do it is for the individuals who care about it to take that responsibility on. It was very much a part of what I’d call the American experience of just doing it. She just gathered up people who were likeminded. Once there was a track record of a few decades, she was able to put out examples–this experiment will work. It wasn’t a vanity at all. First of all, she didn’t have money, really. They had a very small pension. So it wasn’t that she wanted her name on it, although I think she wanted Edward’s name on it to perpetuate his legacy. But he believed very strongly in this idea that artists can inspire one another through a multidisciplinary artist community. So she wanted his legacy to continue. It certainly wasn’t about Mrs. MacDowell; it wasn’t about her and what she could do. It was really about believing in the idea so strongly.
MOLLY SHERIDAN: As far as philanthropy goes, it’s pretty interesting. It wasn’t that she was pulling money from her own pocket.
CHERYL YOUNG: Right.
MOLLY SHERIDAN: Whenever she wanted to do something, she went out and got somebody else to pay for it. It was her idea, but…
CHERYL YOUNG: Well, she also concertized. She called it “concertizing.” She was a very good interpreter of his work, I’m sure that’s why they fell in love. She was so sympathetic and understood his music. So she would go out and raise money by holding these free concerts. It was very much grassroots. There were MacDowell clubs all over the country–especially with the tragic story, it definitely caught people’s imagination–and she would go out to Norman, Oklahoma and have a concert. Women’s clubs all across the country supported her, as well as sororities, fraternities, and the National Federation of Music Clubs. And she was very charismatic, as was he. I’ve been reading about his life recently because we’re preparing for the centennial, and people have called him a man of genius, rare in his insight and so forth. I think when you get two very charismatic people both together at the same point, there’s no question that something will ignite. It did certainly in the case of the colony. It really was the model for many to follow because once the track record was demonstrated, then others who wanted to do the same thing learn from the things she tried to do. She stopped and started. Not everything was a straight line. She had some ideas, or donors would come to her with ideas for an exhibition space on the property and she would try it. John White Alexander was a great painter, he was a friend of Edward MacDowell’s, and when he passed away his wife said, wouldn’t it be great if there were an exhibition gallery on the property of the colony for the painters to use. After a few years of doing that, Mrs. MacDowell said, this isn’t good having people on the property. So the gallery was turned into an artist studio. She created a pageant theater, an outdoor amphitheater, after a few years of having very spectacular outdoor festivals. She had commissioned works from composers for this pageant and it was a huge success in the town, but it took a whole year to plan. She said, “I can’t spend my time doing this.” This is getting in the way of the larger purpose of having the artist colony work. She had, what I would call, a true path. She would always go back to the mission after she discovered how it impacted that central mission. She was extremely intelligent in terms of fundraising, there’s no question. She understood what motivated people. She also knew that people were just looking for a solid place to put their wealth. In other words, that their investment would be spent wisely. She was always careful and practical, trying not to be too extravagant in some of the architectural ideas, and conserving funds. For several years she had a working farm and she fed the artists as well as provided space for them.
MOLLY SHERIDAN: MacDowell was the first of its kind in this country…
CHERYL YOUNG: Yes, in terms of being built specifically for that purpose. Yes, definitely. As I said, there was this whole movement at the time. I think there were others that started up and had failed. Yaddo had started up about the same time but because of the economics of the timeóthere was a recessionóthey didn’t really get going for another twenty years. I forget which year they actually had artists in residence, but it was sometime after.
MOLLY SHERIDAN: It probably influenced a great number of the others….
CHERYL YOUNG: Oh, it still does. We still get phone calls from people… (Laughing) “I want to start an artist colony and I heard about MacDowell all this time.” The Alliance of Artists Communities, which is the national association of residency programs, now has about seventy-five institutional members, many of them within the last twenty years. They all have a slightly different program or their own take on the central idea of a residency. They may be for women. They may be about involving community in art. They may be about environmental issues or social causes. Or they may only be discipline-specific residencies. There’s definitely been a renaissance. I just got back from the Res Artis meeting and there were two hundred programs across the globe. I think many of them are fairly recent. I was joking with somebody about how old we were and they were astonished to learn that we were founded at the turn of the century. I think we’re the oldest across the globe at this point, as far as it can be established. Again, I think that the fact that its privately funded, the idea that it’s in the country instead of sending people abroad, and that there’s no expectation of a product at the end of it are some of the hallmark ideas behind it. It has definitely taken off. People take that idea and expand on it.

The Application Process

MOLLY SHERIDAN: Could you venture a guess as to how many composers have actually spent time at MacDowell?
CHERYL YOUNG: Since 1907, there have been over 800 composers and that’s an awful lot considering the size of the field is very small although it continues to grow. And when you look at the range of style of those composers within that group of 800, it is a very diverse group of composers, especially now. I think that the world has opened up, even at MacDowell, within the field. The field is more welcoming to new ways of composing music. And now at MacDowell, with our panels that do the selection, we take between 20 and 30 a year. We have 13 pianos on the property, 8 of which are in studios. So at any given time we can have up to 8 composers. We tend not to have that many. It seems as though we have 4 or 5 within a group of between 20 and 30 artists. The variety is variable between jazz and atonal and whatever, all the different styles. And we have international composers as well. And we’ve changed what we ask for in the last ten years.
MOLLY SHERIDAN: What are some of those differences?
CHERYL YOUNG: We ask for a work sample and that’s the most important component in an application. The panels like to listen to the music, so you need a recording of your music. Most people will send a cassette or a CD. Some people will burn their own CDs. We also ask that you send a score. Some people don’t write down their music, so they would need to indicate that if they’re not doing that. And what the panel will do is listen to the music and sometimes read through the score. They can’t listen to entire pieces often. They’ll listen to segments of it. We ask people to cue it up to where they’d like the panel to listen. We used to say send a small piece, a chamber piece, and a large piece if that’s what you’ll be working on when you’re up there. We’ve now retreated a little bit from that, not to characterize it in any way. We don’t want to imply that we’re only interested in chamber works or operas or more traditional forms, so we leave it wide open. But it does help them understand where you are in your level of accomplishment and also in your level of talent. If you haven’t had any professional training and what they’re listening to is amazing, that helps them make a decision. It’s not whether you’ve been published. It’s never been that way. Half the people who go up there have never been before and for that half that has never been there before often it’s the first time they’ve had any type of residency. It’s because we’re well known and we’ve been around for so long, so often we’re the first place where people apply. What’s remarkable is that you’re able to get in, even when it’s so competitive. I think it is because the panels are anonymous, so even in the small world of composing where everyone knows everyone else, I think the panels feel they can judge the applications based on the work sample. And there is no limit to the number of times you can come. So you could come three years in a row, and in the fourth year you don’t get in and you think, “Oh dear, what could have happened?” Well, a couple of things could have happened. First of all, the panel could have changed. In the three years you were getting in, that was that panel because our panels rotate completely every three years. The other thing is the work. We ask you to submit a new sample each time you apply. You can’t get in with a past sample. You might have created a really great work three times in a row and the fourth time it just wasn’t as strong. And then the other variable is who you are applying against. If the pool is extremely strong, as it is in the summer when we get half of our applications… We get 1200 applications a year and half of them are for the summer session. When the pool is really strong, you’re odds of getting in lessen. What we encourage is for people to apply over a lifetime. If you don’t get in the first time, come back after one, two, three years… If you can, apply for a different session. If your life is such that you have more flexibility, apply for a session that is less competitive. It just increases your odds. In terms of references, we ask for references but to be honest I think a lot of people have access to references and the panels do not weigh them as much as they do the work sample. They may look at them, especially if you’re unknown, to see what the reference says, but I can just tell from the way the panels have been working all these years that they really don’t weigh them that much at all. What we really use it for to determine whether you’d be appropriate in a community setting and that’s really how the questions are worded. Would they be a contributor to the MacDowell community: personality-wise, work style-wise, and so forth. So some of the panelists don’t use the references at all. They don’t even look at them because they feel it should be based on the work sample.
MOLLY SHERIDAN: Are all the panelists you use necessarily musicians or is it a mix?
CHERYL YOUNG: The panelists are set up by discipline and some of the panels have a mixture of artists and people who are in the field. Says, writers and an editor or two. But for composing, it’s strictly composers. The panelists do not need to have been MacDowell fellows. We don’t just have an insular circle of people. But, again, because it’s anonymous, they really feel as though they can judge their conscience and we rotate the panel so there’s always a slightly different mix. And we have some safeguards in place. We have what we call an admissions committee, which is made up of board members in the field. They work to select the panel chairman and the panel chairman then selects the panel that would be participating. There is an approval process of checks and balances that’s always happening. Then, also we stagger the panel, so the chairman would inherit one or two panelists from the prior chairman, so it can’t really be stacked.
MOLLY SHERIDAN: It’s like the government!
CHERYL YOUNG: Exactly! We’ve been working at this for a very long time. I think we’ve got one of the fairest processes, if anything can be fair.

The Colony Community

MOLLY SHERIDAN: As far as the composers who are coming to MacDowell, a lot are first timers and others come back again and again and they are doing really great work and doing great work at MacDowell, they’re encouraged to keep coming back…
CHERYL YOUNG: Exactly, we call them colony hoppers actually. I think again, it’s the sincerity factor. There isn’t a support system for individual artists. There are very few ways for artists to support themselves in this country. And we’ve talked about it as a policy not to limit the number of times someone can come. We’ve decided that since we have so many slots–we have over 250 slots a year–that there’s really no need to limit the number of times a person comes and again it’s really to be supportive rather than to be exclusionary. There was an idea on the table for a while that it would be much more prestigious if we only gave it once. Some important prizes are only given once. But we’re not about making a MacDowell residency prestigious; we’re more about helping the artist, so again it’s that sincerity purpose. We really want to create a support system that works. And as long as people are doing high quality work, we want to support it. In terms of the balance of American versus international artists, again we felt that we were really an American artists community. But Edward and Marian MacDowell worked abroad. They knew how wonderful it was to have that different perspective of different cultures. Very early on she was bringing all these international artists to MacDowell. So that will always be part of the program. But we do feel that we’re here to support American artists. That’s our primary focus and I think it will continue to be even with globalization where you can go anywhere in the world and have a residency experience. I think that it’s good for American artists to meet other American artists even if it’s east coast, west coast, and people who aren’t plugged into what I would call the traditional fabric in the music world. People who are on the edge, outsiders, gain something from being brought into this community and really getting to know some people. It’s not really networking so much as it’s supporting each other. It’s not like business deals are being done at MacDowell because artists get their support from the outside more and more, from publishers or from the audience who are the consumers. The consumers aren’t in residence, so the networking is totally different. It’s not about networking to get your work published or networking to get a concert done. It’s more collaboration so that when you enter into the community you create some friendships and create a support structure that is personal and artistic.
MOLLY SHERIDAN: A lot of these artists come to this small, very positive place and they are from primarily urban areas.
CHERYL YOUNG: Right, right…
MOLLY SHERIDAN: Informally they’ll meet each other at dinner. Have formal collaborations actually started at MacDowell?
CHERYL YOUNG: They have indeed. Let me describe what MacDowell’s residency program does, and I think many residency programs are similar. What happens is that you are assigned a studio. We ask what kind of workspace you need and what your other needs will be when you are in residence. And some people live in the studios and some people are assigned a room in a residence. There are three small houses on the property with about eight bedrooms so it’s a shared residence. You can either live in your studio and work there, or you can find a wonderful experience in leaving your house and going to the place where you work. Many artists work in their homes. They have a little cubby that they work in or they work on the kitchen table. So, for some people, it’s actually a really wonderful experience to feel like they’re going off to a separate workspace. Breakfast is served at 7:30 in the morning until 8:30. Lunch is delivered to the studio. If anything can be a MacDowell signature, it’s the picnic basket that Mrs. MacDowell always made for Edward. She packed him off so he didn’t have to come back to the main house while he was working. And then dinner is a community dinner in the dining room. That’s the meal where all people meet who are in residence because not everybody gets up in time for breakfast. So, at dinnertime, you’ll be sitting next to all different kinds of people. We schedule it so that it’s staggered with people arriving and departing all the time. Then after dinner–usually it’s completely unscheduled, you’re really on your own, you can come and go as you please–generally what happens is that someone will have a presentation and so people might go to the library for a reading by one of the poets. It’s completely elective. People don’t have to go. If you’re working on a commission for the symphony and you’re on a deadline, you’d say, “I just can’t do anything. I’m gonna eat my dinner, have dessert, and run back to my studio and work.” But that’s when you really get to see what other people are doing. What that person you were sitting with at dinner is engaged in and you’ll say, “Oh my God, I didn’t know about your work. Your work is amazing. Tell me more about it.”

Collaborations & The People Behind the Scenes

MOLLY SHERIDAN: So this can lead to the beginning of formal collaborations…
CHERYL YOUNG: There have been some great examples of collaborations. One of the most famous is the Porgy and Bess story, which I like because they still have a connection with us because we are receiving the royalties for Porgy and Bess. What happened essentially is that Dorothy and DuBose Heyward met at the colony and she was a playwright and she read DuBose’s novel and she said, “This would make a great play.” And, apparently on the sly, she worked on it and transformed it into a play without his even knowing it, and then she showed it to him and of course he loved it. And then it was staged here in New York and it received great reviews and Gershwin saw it and said that it was terrific, and so it ended up being set to music and, of course, that collaboration took place outside the colony. But, just the way the whole thing transpired is a great example of how a work of art can be transformed by meeting an artist from a different discipline. The Heyward Foundation, which manages the estate, has been a consistent contributor to the colony, which has just been wonderful. Aaron Copland, who was very involved with MacDowell for a number of years as chairman of the board, created some of his best work here at the colony. I think that meeting other artists creates that ferment of possibility: taking different directions, to work with a choreographer or to work with somebody who sees something different in your work… Even with poets, the visual artists might say, “Gee, this would be wonderful to have visual art alongside these poems.” That happens frequently, but it’s never forced. Some people do apply together and they come and work on a specific project, but quite often, it just happens. It’s just part of the friendship process that takes place.
MOLLY SHERIDAN: That’s the creative side, but there’s also the practical side of these artists not having to make their own meals, not having to clean up after themselves…
CHERYL YOUNG: Well, we like them to clean up for themselves [laughs].
MOLLY SHERIDAN: Well, you have to get your basket back on time…
CHERYL YOUNG: You heard about the scolding if you don’t get your basket back on time!
MOLLY SHERIDAN: Practically, it takes about $150 dollars a day to provide for an artist there.
CHERYL YOUNG: It’s a little bit more than that now, but yes…
MOLLY SHERIDAN: So how many people are there working behind the scenes making sure everything gets taken care of?
CHERYL YOUNG: It’s a real operation and it’s more or less invisible. There’s a maintenance department of three and in the summer we add people because in the summer the grass grows faster. There are more people in residence and more light bulbs go out, things need to be painted and so forth. There’s a maintenance team of three in the kitchen staff, preparing all the meals and, in the summer again, we add more people because there are more people in residence. There’s a housekeeping crew that goes in and cleans. There are two of those most of the time and in the summer we add. Then there’s administrative staff: the admissions office that handles all 1200 applications and that number is growing. We’ve got two people in what we call fellow services, which is just helping people get acclimated and just facilitating their work. Sometimes someone will arrive for a residence with a broken leg and call us saying: “Gee, should I still plan to come.” After sorting back and forth how mobile or immobile they are, often they do end up coming and it just requires a little bit extra effort and we have this staff to make sure people can get around. You do have to walk back and forth between the main building and your studio unless you bring a car, but the walk we consider to be part of the whole MacDowell experience, especially in the wintertime when the snow is crunchy and the air is clean. And, of course in the summer when the days are really long, people will spend hours in the fields walking the trails. We do something called a town run. We’re close to Peterborough, which is Thornton Wilder‘s Our Town…
MOLLY SHERIDAN: That’s right.
CHERYL YOUNG: Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town at MacDowell. He also wrote an opera with Louise Talma, actually–a wonderful collaboration that took place here. They had a great friendship and they wrote an opera called The Alcestiad, which was produced in Europe but not the United States because it was a fairly expensive production. It just didn’t get off the ground. There’s an administrative staff in New York that does all the fundraising. There are four people in New York, plus there’s a board of directors with 60 directors, 14 committees… It’s quite an operation but what we hope is that it will be invisible to the artists. They more or less can go about their business and not have to think about all of this. The plant itself requires an enormous amount of work. There are 40 buildings and four miles of roads. We just completed a very large project to work on the infrastructure of the electricity, water, and utilities. The place is in terrific shape because of all the hard work of the staff and also raising all the money to make it possible.

Interacting With the Outside Community

MOLLY SHERIDAN: What was your relationship with Peterborough, which you mentioned is pretty close. I know that the idea is for the artists to be working there on their own, but is there an interaction with the community?
CHERYL YOUNG: The town has always been supportive from day one. Mrs. MacDowell was named Citizen of the Year in Peterborough when she was alive. We’ve always had a wonderful relationship with the town, but we’ve gone through periods where we’ve been more active or less active depending on the volunteers that we’ve had. But recently we established a program we call MacDowell Downtown where we have artists give presentations in the town of Peterborough. It’s voluntary. They let us know if they’d like to do it and it’s just started up. And then we also send artists into the schools in the local community. When people come, I think we really do try to make it clear that we don’t expect them to do anything but their work. It’s all about the process and whether anything comes out at the end of the residency is something we don’t talk about either. We don’t question it. You must send a project description so the panel knows what you’re thinking about, but you’re not held to that. You can do whatever you want once you get up here. And I think the fact that it’s a rural area and there aren’t a lot of distractions helps. The town is a lovely, little town. But people have cell phones now. It used to be that you’d only get mail; now you can collect your email at Colony Hall. So, you aren’t really shut off from the outside world. But, what people find is once they go up there, just the fact that they’re removed physically in the studio from the outside world changes their concept of time, changes the way that they work. And what we hear over and over again is: “You’ve changed the way I think about myself as an artist. I’m now going to apply everything I learned at MacDowell about myself, where I work, and what I’m capable of doing. I try to apply it at home.” And when I read those, that’s when I feel really good because I know it’s nearly impossible to make it last in a completely different setting. Some people have literally changed the way they work. Either they’ve stopped using email during the day or they try to apply some of the principles that have to do with time management in some ways. It’s also the fact that you’ve been given an opportunity and someone has faith in you. It’s MacDowell, but it’s really the panel, those peers who thought you were working on something really wonderful. In some ways, it’s an overwhelming burden to have all your obstacles removed. You go into that studio and you have no obstacles, so now it’s the moment of truth. Now you must do it. The only thing in the studio is a tombstone, a board that people write their names on and the dates they were there. And some of the studios might have Aaron Copland‘s name, or it might have Samuel Barber‘s name. You’ve got these names and all they’ve done is humbly sign these tombstones saying they were there and then all you’ve got is an empty desk or a piano.
MOLLY SHERIDAN: No pressure!
CHERYL YOUNG: No pressure at all!
MOLLY SHERIDAN: Is there anyone who can’t handle it, that feeling of being secluded and cut off?
CHERYL YOUNG: I think the seclusion thing has happened, absolutely. Some people have asked us if they could move closer to the main building. It’s not that far away, but if you’ve never been alone in a building before, you know, if you’ve lived in an apartment all your life, you’re not used to the silence. I think that there are some people who are blocked and it just can’t be cleared. They come the first few days and they’re really psyched and after the first four or five days nothing’s happened and they get very upset and might think this is not working. Often if they talk to just one or two other people who’ve had a similar experience, it breaks loose. Sometimes it doesn’t though and so we’ve had a few people say this is not working. I’ll tell you in the 15 years I’ve been involved with MacDowell, I’ve only heard about 2 of those and there’ve always been good related excuses like, “I’ve got a two-month old baby and I didn’t realize I’d miss him so much.” So, sometimes it’s just not to be and we tell them to come back another time. For some people, the residency experience is not the way to go. I think there are very few people it doesn’t work for though. I know I’m a believer, but I would also say that we’ve had 5800 artists come through and there’s only a handful that it really didn’t work for. Most of the time, because of the way the place is set up, there’s a way to work with it. There’s complete flexibility. So if you get lonely for New York, or home, you can go home for the weekend. The fact that there’s such a variety of people, if a personality clash has happened, well, you know, you can avoid them. There’s enough geographic space to do that. And, even if the evenings, if you choose not to participate in the presentations, there are enough people in residence where it may not even be noticed that you’re not coming. I mean, it’s noticed, but it’s not as if you’re relied on to be somebody else’s entertainment or friend. There’s collegiality and there’s an expectation that you’ll be civil but there’s no real expectation that you must do this or that. And there’s enough geographic space to do that. It works that way. If you’re looking at residency programs, these are all the different things to watch for: What do they really expect? Do I have to produce a concert at the end of this? How much time will I have to produce that piece? What will my workspace be like? What will the distances be between work and where I’m living? Will they be providing meals or will I have to cook? For some people I think one of the issues would be being able to leave if they have a concert that they’ve scheduled and it’s in the middle of the residence. How difficult is it or how expensive is it to get from point A to point B in the middle of the residency? And all the programs are different that way so you really need to look at them and find out what’s expected of you and what it is you need back in return.

Future Plans

MOLLY SHERIDAN: I’d like to talk a little bit about the future plans that you have for MacDowell Colony. Obviously you’re in good shape so it seems. The buildings out there are in good shape, financially you’re doing well, and you have new board members. But you were talking earlier too about how Marian MacDowell always came back to the mission after trying new things. Is there anything on the horizon that you guys are thinking about for the future?
CHERYL YOUNG: Right now all I’m thinking about is the centennial because 2007 will be the hundredth year of the residency program. I am thinking very much of the future in general: how we will celebrate that, and then what will be the platform for the next hundred years. What will be different for the next hundred years? I think probably one of the things that we really want to do is expand the program of stipends because right now we really award residencies, and that’s it. But for writers, for example, we received a grant from a foundation to give writers in financial need up to a thousand dollars in addition to the residency, making it possible for them to come. I’d like to expand for composing and be able to award funds to the composers who come, as well as the other disciplines. So I would like to see that happen in terms of just doing more for composers. I think that we have a wonderful studio on the table right now that’s been designed for interdisciplinary art. The idea being that it’s a large theater-like space. I think for sound artists or artists who really want to create in a space similar to a small black box theater or a large open exhibition area, for example, can get a feel for what that’s like. Certainly for collaborations it would be terrific. If someone was working on a music piece that also had slides, for example, this space could accommodate that kind of collaboration where they could actually try out different ideas. One of our first interdisciplinary artists was Meredith Monk. She’s wonderful in thinking of new ways to work, and working in teams. Sometimes she has come as an interdisciplinary artist. Sometimes she has come as a composer, depending on what her project is at the time. What is wonderful about the whole idea of interdisciplinary art is that you can really cross all those boundaries. I think more and more what I would see happening in the next hundred years is that composers are going to be able to expand the way they use music with other disciplines. Edward was an artist. He was a very visual person. I would love to see what he would have done with a multimedia software program with his music. I think MacDowell is really flexible. You can come as a composer and write poetry–happens all the time! And the poets are writing music! I think that flexibility will just continue and we’re just trying to provide better spaces and equipment to do that. Right now when I say we have pianos, that’s wonderful because it’s always been the primary tool. Now we’re seeing that all the composers are bringing their computers and they synthesizing music right there. That’s where I see the biggest change in terms of just how composers might be at MacDowell, trying to create a stipend program. Then also to create better spaces where they can really take off… Meredith is funny because she said, “Well, you know, I only need that small room. I just like to go and work by myself. Then I bring in the other people.” But I can see how some of the elements can all be brought together in a wonderfully new way that we can’t even conceive of. Where people come and go and are able to connect to the other world in a different way. Right now we don’t even chat in the studios. People have been, let’s just say, debating that for a lot of studios. I imagine it will take a few more years before MacDowell makes a leap in that direction, only because we still never put in phones. So I have a feeling that this will lag about twenty years behind in that way, too, resisting anything that’s going to interrupt the process.
MOLLY SHERIDAN: Because Marian MacDowell’s force of personality and vision was so much a part of this for so long–she ended up living just shy of her hundredth birthday–is there a spirit of Edward and Marian MacDowell still active?
CHERYL YOUNG: I think so. I think one of the reasons they landed in the Monadnock region because of this wonderful mountain. There’s already a wonderful beauty to the landscape, which I think is spiritual. In terms of the numbers of artists the kind of energy–a lot of people talk about the energy there, that they feel more energetic, alive, and open at MacDowell. Other thing is, again, we learned a lot from the MacDowells in terms of always coming back to that mission. The board is very much trying to keep that spirit and stay true to that. In terms of ghosts of the MacDowells and so forth, there’s the ghost of that desire to be supportive. People say there’s no negative energy here at all. There’s only positive energy. Suddenly the door will open and the breeze will blow in and it’s a very supportive breeze. That’s what you hear. They are very much present in that way. Actually the grave sites for the MacDowells are across the street on the adjacent property that we own and people make pilgrimages over there just to say thank you for having that vision and acting on it. A lot of people have vision and then they aren’t able to act on it. It’s wonderful that they persevered and really made it possible. Mrs. MacDowell said that if she’d had a child it probably wouldn’t have happened. She had a miscarriage and after Edward passed away she was really alone. The question was what would she do with the rest of her life. Instead of thinking I’ll just get married again and go through a romance again–she couldn’t possibility think of another soul mate–so she was able to devote all of her energy to it, and that is really what it took. She was fifty at the time. So when one thinks about whether your life is over, think again. You can start at any age. It’s just finding the energy and the optimism. Imagine the optimism of deciding to do something like this because in the 1930s a good portion of the colony was damaged by a hurricane. She had done all of this wonderful work. She had these studios built and they were all damaged, the trees were down, and it just looked dismal. And it just rose like a phoenix from the ashes. Literally all the artists who had been in residence got together and started fundraising campaigns for the place. That’s perseverance. It takes a lot of spirit to do that kind of thing.

A Moving Image of Elliot Goldenthal



Elliot Goldenthal

Thursday, January 9, 2003—6:00 p.m.
New York, NY

A Conversation with Frank J. Oteri

Videotaped and transcribed by Randy Nordschow

FRANK J. OTERI: More than almost anyone else who comes to mind, you are someone who is able to successfully divide yourself between these two very different worlds. I think it’s rather fitting that you’re sitting where you are, between a piano and synthesizer. It’s sort of a metaphor, in a way, for our whole discussion today. But before we plunge into a specific decision of where your career has gone, let’s take things back to the beginning. When did you decide you wanted be a composer and what did that mean to you at the time?

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: I suppose I was extremely young. Two-ish? Three-ish? Something like that. I was exposed to, possibly, Beethoven or Louis Armstrong, whatever. The sense of logic in the music was very attractive to me, like little bits of information that made up a whole. I remember being attracted to that as opposed to just melody.

FRANK J. OTERI: It’s interesting that you say Beethoven and Louis Armstrong both without even breathing between them. So, for you, from the very beginning there was really wasn’t a divide between so called Western classical music and America’s popular traditions.

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: No. If you listen to Louis Armstrong’s solos, without him studying Beethoven they’re very Beethovian. Again, there are little bits of motivic material that get developed in an effortless way, especially his early solos. In the Hot Fives and Hot Sevens you hear a huge amount of construction in his work. And then it just swings like Beethoven.

FRANK J. OTERI: Like “West End Blues“…

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: Yes, yes.

FRANK J. OTERI: But you then went on to study formally. You went to the Manhattan School of Music and became an official composer in the Western classical sense of what that means. I think it’s very interesting that two of your teachers were Aaron Copland and John Corigliano who are the only two composers in American history thus far—hopefully this will happen to you— who’ve won both the Oscar and the Pulitzer, two of the most prestigious prizes in America for film music and for concert music composition respectively, and both of whom lived in both of those worlds to some extent, although not as much as you do.

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: We all grew up within a three-mile radius, it’s really weird, in Brooklyn. Corigliano was my official teacher and I got to know Aaron very well in the last ten years of his life. He was very helpful with my scores and I had the great pleasure of sitting down next to him and reading through many of his scores really, really slowly. He was getting on in age and I wasn’t the best sight-reader, so it was the perfect tempo. It was a tremendous pleasure asking him questions about… okay we’re at this bar, what did you feel here? And there? It was a tremendous learning experience right there. As for John Corigliano, I studied with him for seven years, every Wednesday, privately. He continues to be my consiliere, so to speak, for any musical problems I have.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now, to take it a little bit backwards with a question, when were you first aware, in your training or as a child, about music in a motion picture as an entity in and of itself, separate from the film?

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: I’d have to say when I was a really little boy, four or five or something, these horror films from the 1930s would come on, like Frankenstein or Dracula, and the music would scare me completely. I remember folks saying to me that if you take the music off, it’s not frightening. You know, then the images just looks kind of silly, and they were right. I think that was my first childhood memory of how synchronization of music and drama work together. Then, of course, as a teenager there used to be a theater in Manhattan called the Thalia. Basically it was the only art theater. What was lovely about it was that you could see real cinema. Whether it was John Ford, Truffaut, Hitchcock, or whatever, you got to really learn about cinema. I became a cinema buff, and through that I was very excited about that very, very, very new art form.

Can you imagine being around for the very beginnings of opera within the first century of its development? Or anything else? I mean its very exciting that it’s such a new art form.

FRANK J. OTERI: So is that what you were initially driven to do? Were you thinking at time, even as a young person, that you wanted to write music for film?

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: Oh, yes. Absolutely. I felt that I could contribute in that medium. It’s what seems comfortable to me and others.

FRANK J. OTERI: But in the early years when you were training as a composer, certainly you couldn’t just turn around and write music for film and expect…

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: Well, sure you can.

FRANK J. OTERI: …So, were you working at that time?

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: Yeah, student films. Sure, I signed myself up at NYU. I put a note up on a bulletin board saying that I’ll do any score for free if they could pay for the musicians. I did maybe thirty or forty little five-minute films.

FRANK J. OTERI: Wow.

ELLIOT
GOLDENTHAL:
…and then learning with students the lingo of film, about editing, etc. You make a director, in the meeting that you have with him, very comfortable because you’re approaching it from the film side and not the music side.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now you were doing this at the same time that you were studying composition formally and discovering the concert hall repertoire…

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: Oh, yeah.

FRANK J. OTERI: … string quartets, and all these sorts of pieces. But there was a love for doing that as well. Did you see them as two separate worlds?

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: Oh, absolutely not. No. You have to use different muscles but you’re basically swimming in the same ocean. Every task has a set objective that you have to accomplish. Whether it’s an oboe concerto or whether it’s an opera or a ballet. They’re all so different in the way they’re approached. Think about Hindemith and his sonatas. You can see how practical he was in composing these sonatas. He took every instrument, very specifically, and wrote for it very effectively, as opposed to just writing music. Every task is different.

FRANK J. OTERI: Are there dos and don’ts for film music that don’t apply to music for the concert hall and visa versa?

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: I wouldn’t know. Because every time I think I know something someone comes along and does it right. I don’t know anything about dos and don’ts.

FRANK J. OTERI: Is there something you’d write….

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: (laughing) Don’t make people bored!

FRANK J. OTERI: (laughing) In either one?

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: No.

FRANK J. OTERI: Are there things you’d write in a film score that you wouldn’t write in a piece for concert hall?

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: Well, there are times in film music where you have to create tension, or you have to suspend time, and do it in a way where it’s completely unobtrusive. So much so that the content of the music has to be so spare that there can’t be much that is intellectual or bits of complexity. Sometimes at the concert hall you might want more to elapse within a timeframe, sometimes. But there are times when you still have to clear the palette for more dense information as well.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, it’s interesting because in the concert hall you don’t have a film image accompanying the music, so basically the music is all you’ve got. The music has to be one hundred percent of the sensory information to the audience members. Whereas in film your eyes are being activated, your ears are being activated, your sense of narrative flow is being activated. Lots of different parts of your brain are being channeled at the same time. Yet, there have been composers, yourself included, who’ve written really out-there, sophisticated, experimental music for motion pictures. You know this has been going on for over fifty years. Leonard Rosenman was writing twelve-tone music for film in the ’50s. Jerry Goldsmith wrote twelve-tone music for film…

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: Don’t forget Takemitsu!

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah. His film music is really wonderful…

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: Well, Takemitsu also is someone that you can really aspire to want to have a career like. At times his film music and concert music were indistinguishable.

FRANK J. OTERI: I think only now audiences in America are aware of just how much he contributed to films because a lot of those films did not get circulation in this country. We didn’t realize. We know these concert works of his. I think actually a lot of his work are getting attention now that he’s dead. This is the terrible thing that happens to so many composers; now that he’s dead his music is getting out there in ways that it never did…

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: It gives us composers something to look forward to.

FRANK J. OTERI: (laughing) For me personally it doesn’t sound like a good gamble, but….

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: Don’t forget Shostakovich. He also wrote over forty film scores. I mean tacky love stories, stupid documentaries. I mean he tackled a lot of dumb projects and he did it with grace and vigor. His music is quite captivating but it’s servicing the movies.

FRANK J. OTERI: And he actually had a theremin in one of his scores before Rózsa did. Everyone said that Rózsa was the first one to use a theremin in a film score….

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: That makes sense.

FRANK J. OTERI: It was a Soviet invention. Certainly after talking about Shostakovich and people of that earlier generation, the palette for writing for movies then was much different than it is now. It was really this kind of expanded post-Richard Strauss orchestra. Now, there are also electronics and world music influences. I know a lot of that figures in your own work. It’s even elements of rock, pop, rap. It’s anything goes. It’s not just so-called classical orchestral music. It’s all part of the vocabulary of writing for film. So in a way it has almost morphed into a separate genre whereas earlier in the century, film music was kind of a subcategory of orchestral music, to some extent.

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: To some extent. I think once the Americans started forgetting the European and the Europeans started discovering the Americans, interesting things started to happen. For example, in the 1930s and the early Berlin films you had a lot of German composers experimenting with jazz, bringing them into that— also in the French cinema, as well. I think post-World War II opened the floodgates for so much more experimentation, which also went along with the improvement of recording techniques. When you look at movies post-World War II like The Third Man for example, just using the zither with a cimbalom as the major component of the score. Some of the neorealist filmmakers, Rossellini, De Sica, Fellini, an
d Pasolini— the work that Morricone did with Pasolini is really startling, some of that early stuff.

FRANK J. OTERI: One of the things that’s so interesting about writing for film as opposed to writing for the concert hall is you’re dealing with fixed form. You can do things in the studio. You can create effects in the studio with electronics that you might not necessarily be able to pull off the way you want it to sound every time in a live concert hall setting. So in a way it kind of allows you more room. But, at the same time, it also constrains you because it locks the score— cues have to be a certain length of time.

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: I don’t find it constraining. I don’t disagree with you but I think both concert music and film music thrive on constraint and thrive almost on human accuracy that needs to be either reproduced on the spot or recorded. Certainly if you look at the scores of Penderecki, everything is clicked out according to seconds. It doesn’t have to be, but that’s his method. Even the desire for Beethoven to use the metronome

FRANK J. OTERI: Well it’s interesting. There are certain kinds of aleatory processes. You can certainly experiment with them using a stopwatch, as Penderecki does in his early scores. But you can’t really experiment in an aleatoric, free form way temporally with music that you write for film because you always have to be aware of what the music is supposed to be serving, I would think.

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: Well, I use a lot of aleatory techniques of writing in film. In the score for Alien 3, for example, I pre-composed the electronics using homemade samples and different sounds ranging from scissors to stretching strings, to clangorous sounds, etc. I basically had the electronic score. I had this orchestra score in mind, but not a typical European orchestra sound. I wanted the orchestra to sound like the musique concrète that was already recorded. In order to do that one had use a lot of aleatoric techniques; boxes with clusters of strings and smears across the page. You have to coax and coerce the musicians not be as logical as they would. So I found that technique very, very effective— with a click, aleatoric. Going from letter A to letter B, not counting measures. Just cueing in what the next event will be.

FRANK J. OTERI: Certainly working with classical musicians who are used to playing standard repertoire and putting a score in front of them that has weird aleatory notations or quartertone or eighth-tone notations is an uphill battle sometimes. When you’re dealing with a session musician recording a film soundtrack who is really not used to that sort of thing at all, how do you bring in some of these elements?

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: I usually record with orchestras like members of the New York Philharmonic or members of the London Symphony, for example. Many of the L.A. recording musicians came from that world. When you’re dealing with the London Symphony Orchestra or New York Philharmonic, they know. They know exactly what you mean. Sometimes you just go over to the concertmaster and very politely tell them what effect you want. It’s not just pick the stick up and go. Very often I’m going from section to section explaining what the technique is, what muting to use, what the aleatoric smudge on the page actually means. You know, things like that.

FRANK J. OTERI: So when you work through a film score and record a film score do feel you have more control of musicians than say an average concert hall composer would writing a piece and maybe getting three rehearsals if they’re lucky with say the Boston Symphony?

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: Absolutely. Absolutely. When my oratorio was played by the Boston Symphony with Seiji, who is so great, conducting the orchestra, then he went to conduct the chorus and the children’s chorus. Things were going at such a fast speed. There wasn’t the luxury of taking the piece of paper, going down in the middle of the orchestra. Every second— it’s like a war. Every second you’re counting down to the solemn curfew, so to speak, of when there’s no more time left and you have to put that concert on. It’s really, really scary.

FRANK J. OTERI: The clock is also ticking in film production though.

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: Yeah, but it’s different. It’s a little bit different. You have a little bit more… You want to get it right. The director is in there deliberating; thinking whether he likes the last cue or not. Listening back to it while you’re out there fixing. There’s a little bit more wiggle room usually in film production. Even though you have to accomplish a lot every day.

FRANK J. OTERI: It’s interesting. When people who come primarily from the concert world look at the film world, they look at it as this giant act of collaboration. There are so many cooks in the kitchen. There is the director, screenwriter, and producer, obviously the actors and the crew. It’s hard, maybe, to have an individual voice with all those other voices there. That’s a perception, it’s probably not an accurate perception because you’re saying that working with an orchestra seems even more that way, to a certain extent.

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: I think that it is an inaccurate analogy. I think it’s more like the workings of a fine restaurant where everyone has their own role, completely. It’s not a lot of cooks and a lot of chefs in one kitchen. It’s a chef and everyone else doing their job. The executive producer would be the guy that pays the guy that buys the food. That person who buys the food is real, real important. The person that delivers the food is real important. The actual executive chef, of course, is important, but you have the whole line. You have all the sous-chefs. The guys who cut the potatoes are important. The one that reduces the stocks. The people who clean the dishes— I know I’m being simplistic, but the maitre’d, the laundry that all the tablecloths go out to, every single thing is extremely important in the running of a great restaurant. But no one is doing the work of anybody else’s twice. There are not a lot of cooks in the kitchen, so to speak. That’s the way it is in a film production. The editor is sitting there. The director is there. The producer is there and the orchestra. Everybody has a well-defined role. So it is collaborative in a sense that composer and director work together closely; everybody else’s role just follows after that.

FRANK J. OTERI: In this restaurant analogy, what is the role for the composer?

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: Well, the role of the composer is yet another cog and piece of what has to be to make a successful establis
hment. I’d like to say it’s the actual ingredients. (laughs)

FRANK J. OTERI: (laughing) I was thinking maybe it’s the guy who makes the sauce!

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: Possibly. The person who makes the sauces, okay. You know, the analogy is not airtight. However, in terms of collaboration, I thought I was a little closer.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now then, can people in the so-called classical music world— that term is so dead. Anyway, I’m thinking of the concert hall world; the symphony orchestras, the chamber groups, recitalists. Is there something that we can all learn from this wonderful restaurant that is a great motion picture that we’re just not getting?

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: In the concert world?

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah. Why should it have been a battle with the Boston Symphony? Even though you got a great performance and later on the piece got a great recording—it’s a piece that has gotten a lot of circulation—but you used the word battle. You have a luckier scenario than most composers with a work like that. It shouldn’t be a battle.

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: Orchestras seem to put on two hats. When they’re working for a film production they seem to function business-wise, or personality-wise, less as an orchestra than as studio musicians. This is a delicate point. When an orchestra is performing as an orchestra, rehearsing as an orchestra, there’s a different mentality. Within the orchestra, any orchestra, there are many factions. People circulate their own newsletters within the orchestra that may oppose the conductor, or oppose the administration. There are people who don’t like to rehearse at eight, or nine. They like to rehearse at three. You know what I’m saying? It goes on and on and on and on—all the demands within the orchestra. There are orchestras that don’t want to play Wagner or Philip Glass because it hurts their arms. They don’t want to play this. They don’t want to play that. They get very finicky and they have their own personalities. The concertmaster might not like the work that they’re doing or might not like contemporary music. There’s a faction that hates contemporary music. There is not a unity in that setting for most orchestras. I have always found this. When they are working on a film it’s something different. They think differently. They toss all that aside and they’re just very helpful. Did you get what you wanted? Can we do any better? There is a great pride that takes over and fractionalization kind of disappears.

FRANK J. OTERI: That is fascinating. Maybe in the orchestra the “too many cooks in the kitchen” analogy does work.

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: Well, musicians have a lot of pride and they work very hard. Each musician has a world and universe of their own. They have their own students. They come from their own styles and their own musical cliques. It’s very difficult. Imagine, a baseball manager has just eighteen guys or something. Imagine being a conductor of an orchestra. You have all those personalities.

FRANK J. OTERI: The orchestra is a very large organization. Certainly with recorded sounds and with electronics people are creating film scores with many fewer people. Your breakthrough film score Drugstore Cowboy certainly doesn’t have a large orchestra. It works with electronics and does some really, really fascinating things. Is it necessary to have an orchestra to really flush out a film?

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: Obviously not. But on a movie like Interview with a Vampire or any of the Batmans I did, you need that orchestral tonnage. You need that, as Stravinsky called it, testicular weight. To give the audiences what they feel they deserve when they walk in. They want to hear that big orchestral sound that takes them for a ride. It really is sort of a carryover and a true extension of what people expect when they went to grand opera. It’s expectation. You see these giant cinematic images of heroism and it’s very, very difficult to provide what you need dramatically with a few instruments.

FRANK J. OTERI: There is something almost quaint and silly about seeing a silent film accompanied by an upright piano. Here you have this big chase scene (laughing) and they’re just kind of running up the scale and down the scale.

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: Every movie has its own, again, task. You have to say, what is this about? What do I have to accomplish here? What set of instruments? Whether it’s one instrument or no instruments or a large orchestra? What does it really feel like it needs? Sometimes it’s very, very mundane kind of reasons. It’s their studio. It’s a franchised movie. They need to make back a hundred million dollars so there’s a certain expectation that you need to fulfill for the audience at one point. Other times it’s an art house movie. It’s kind of unusual. You can really, really experiment. There’s not the crazy need to make back tons of money for the producers. The directors are less nervous and they tend to let you experiment more.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now, a lot of people go to these heroic movies with big orchestra scores. They hear that and expect that, as you said. But that might be the only time a lot of people ever hear an orchestra. These are people who don’t go to symphony orchestra concerts. Yet the sound of the orchestra is still a part of their lives. There are lots of people who say the orchestra is this antiquated dinosaur that is not relevant to America and that it is not relevant to the 21st century. But clearly it is when it’s in these film scores that so many people see.

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: Clearly it is. And they are being exposed to very avant-garde things in the orchestra that if they heard [the same music] in the concert hall, they’d just think it was really weird and they’d walk out.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, or they wouldn’t be in the concert hall to begin with. The argument that I use all the time is the people who are open to many of these new ideas are people the concert hall, for some reason, is not attracting.

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: That’s right. I couldn’t agree with you more and the orchestra is, indeed, part of their life.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now, something interesting you said about heroism wanting and need to have the big orchestra. Miklós Rózsa is a composer who’s music I’ve studied for years, both the film music and the concert hall music. One of the things he said in his autobiography is that when he was working on a score that was set in a specific period, he would go immerse himself in that period. Whether it was ancient Rome or, for example, he did this movie about Sherlock Holmes and immersed himself in Victorian-era stuff. Yet you hear the scores he wrote and they sound nothing like the music of those times. I know that you did the score of Michael Collins, which is a really great film about a historic figure. How much turn of the century Irish music figured in that for you? What’s your pre-composing process when you get the storyline?

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: In terms of Michael Collins, I met with Neil many times in Dublin before hand. After reading the script, I thought the challenge for me was that there was not a big female presence in the film. Ireland does have a big female presence. I thought of Bernadette Devlin and other people who were very, very important in Irish cause. I asked him if he’d let me record female chorus singing in the Irish language, in Gaelic. He said yes, it would be great to sing in Irish. I then thought of chorus and Sinéad O’Connor—she’s a compelling singer in that style—and orchestra. I said we’d take certain Irish instruments but not use them in an Irish way. I used uilleann pipes for example. I had these tone-rows that the musician was playing in different metronomic speeds. It was recorded at different speeds and manipulated. It’s almost closer to a late ’60s John Coltrane solo than Irish reels and jigs. That with orchestral punctuation was something that was preconceived. There was one tune in there, a waltz, that I thought was very proper and Edwardian; like the way the love story was set and the way costumes looked. Other than that, even in Michael Collins, there was some experimentation.

FRANK J. OTERI: With a score like Titus, where you’re dealing with an ancient Roman subject matter filtered through Shakespearean times, some how. What was your pre-composition process there?

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: It’s interesting where your composition ideas come from. There’s a print of a production that was done of Titus in Shakespeare‘s time. It shows people in Roman togas and Elizabethan costumes. That gave me, and also the director, the knowledge and license that even Shakespeare in Elizabethan times wasn’t going for a pure Roman idiom. Another thing is when I was in Rome looking for the locations, standing in front of the Colosseum, there were these two Roman guys dressed in red Roman outfits to have their pictures taken with tourists. They had a boom box underneath paying Elvis. Then you’d hear Fiats go by with rap music. At the same time you’d see a window open, and Puccini’s music was playing in there. You get the point that Rome today is probably exactly the way Rome always was, which was a collision of many cultures, a citadel of anachronisms. It’s possible to exist totally and consistently within an anachronistic world. That gave me the freedom but lead to certain disciplinary choices in the movie. For example, you have three generations. Titus’s music was mainly orchestral. He’s sort of the patriarch, a serious general—either percussive or orchestral. The music of Saturninus, a generation younger—it kind of felt like in the staging almost 1930s fascist— the music was also big band, twisted big band— very, very brassy, jazzy. The younger, younger generation, the two boys Chiron and Bassianus, their music felt like post-skinhead punk music. That felt very comfortable for them. The one consistent thing was to find what in practically every character is the great leveler. What we’ve found is almost all the principal characters found themselves in the position where they were begging for their lives or their son’s lives or whatever, on their knees, begging. Publius did it. Tamora did it. Aaron did it and on and on. I found a simple two-part contrapuntal melody that I call the compassion theme that works for each character when they’re in that similar situation. That binds everything.

FRANK J. OTERI: What is that two-part melody?

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: (sings part of the melody) It’s very chromatic. (sings the another part of the melody) It’s played with solo cello and solo viola. And the orchestra plays it. That happens consistently in the movie.

FRANK J. OTERI: Another question in terms of pre-composition things that go into something: we talked a little bit about the score to Alien 3. Clearly this was the third part in a series of films that involved other directors and other composers. I think Jerry Goldsmith did the score for the first of the Alien movies. You worked on several of the Batman films. Certainly Batman has a whole legacy going back even before the recent films. There are all kinds of people who did Batman stuff. In the first of the new batch of movies, if memory serves, there were a bunch of songs by Prince. The question becomes, how much does the earlier music that gets done for films that are sequels figure in you head when you’re going in to do the score?

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: Sometimes there are non-musical things that trigger off a score. In terms of Alien 3, it’s a sense of isolation, being a zillion miles away in space somewhere in some prison. You want to create that sense of isolation, that sense of despair, that nauseating feeling that you’re not going to come out of it alive. Certainly the earlier composers might have responded to those events. The second Aliens movie, I believe, James Horner did. It was very action motivated and so he responded to that. Each composer, of course, on the level of Goldsmith or Horner and myself, we respond to the drama and the action. We’re responding to what we see. We’re not responding necessarily to what those capable composers did before. When Elfman did his grea
t work on the other Batmans, I’m not responding to his work so much. I’m responding to what Joel Schumacher, the director, is bringing to the production. It had a sense of big heroic quality. It also had a zany quality that Jim Carrey brought to it that was not in the early movies. It had more of a flip, comic kind of attitude. So a composer responds to it. I don’t necessarily go back and listen to— as a matter of fact I try to avoid listening to it. I think what the audience wants is a fresh experience. Quite often people asked me about the Batman theme. Elfman wrote one. I wrote one. Really the one everyone knows is [sings a portion of the original TV theme] You know the TV one. We all know that.

FRANK J. OTERI: Theatre is a very different experience from both the symphonic concert world and the film world because there you have all this collaborative stuff happening the way you do in film a lot of the time, but it’s in real time. You’ve done a ton of work in theatre. It’s an area that is very important to you and you’re still doing a lot of work in.

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: I’m writing an opera now. That’s theatre. Last year we had The Green Bird on Broadway. My ballet was performed down at the Metropolitan Opera and San Francisco has just recorded it for Great Performances. It was done at the Garnier in Paris, the old opera house, this past year. Theatre has been one-third of the triumvirate that makes up my professional career, which is personal concert music, theatre, and film. Theatre is wonderful because you really have to roll up your sleeves and get your hands and arms dirty. You really have to get in there. You have to make it work. I did a lot of regional theatre works like the The King Stag at the A.R.T., which is still running now, since 1984. It’s touring the world somewhere. Whereas you go in there, you’re the only musician. You have the director, who happened to be Andrei Serban at the time, and a bunch of actors and you start from scratch. You might compose stuff, but you’re basically improvising with actors in a shut room for six hours a day until you have a theatre piece. You play all the instruments. You play the keyboards, winds, and percussion. After rehearsal you go down to the basement and put all the instruments away. You do everything. In a way, that type of theatre, where you’re at an instrument, there are actors in a room, then the director goes “go.” There’s no idea in your head, but you got to go. You do it right on the spot until it becomes something. I did so much theatre like that.

FRANK J. OTERI: The work that really put you on the map in an international way is Juan Darien. It’s such an unusual piece on so many levels. What is it? It’s not a musical. It’s not an opera. It’s somewhere in-between a concert work and a theatre work. It’s really your own unique form.

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: It’s a carnival mass! What it is, it’s taking elements that you’d expect at the carnival and elements that you’d expect at a mass. The elements that you expect at a mass are an attempt by high culture to express a religious event. In other words, you work real hard to get the fugue as beautiful as you can because you’re honoring God. What you do at a carnival is the opposite in a way. You want to compose music, or sing music, or hear music that is common and that thrives and derives from common events, so that people can feel that they’re enjoying themselves together. The collision of the carnival and the mass was something that in the story of Juan Darien— you have a set of collisions: the collision between human life and animal life, the collision between the church and the jungle, the collision between morals and miracles. It’s really a very special part of my life to have worked on that work.

FRANK J. OTERI: When we talk about your kitchen metaphor, it’s an interesting metaphor applying to this piece. In the wonderful kitchen that made Juan Darien, it’s the kind of a piece you could never imagine being on Broadway, per se. Broadway rarely takes those kinds of chances anymore, though they used to.

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: Medea is on Broadway. Simon McBurney‘s work The Chairs was on Broadway. The Green Bird was on Broadway. It happens from time to time. They don’t expect huge, huge returns, but there are very, very brave producers who do put really interesting things on Broadway.

FRANK J. OTERI: I’m thinking of the kind of labor of love that Music-Theatre Group was behind.

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: Music-Theatre Group, specifically Lyn Austin, was sort of the mystic main spring behind Juan Darien in the sense that she believed in it so much. She wasn’t even interested in hearing a preview or a workshop situation. She said, “Just do it. I trust you; just do it.” There are very few Lyn Austins around.

FRANK J. OTERI: There are so many elements at play in Juan Darien. Perhaps only a composer with your background could have written a work like that because it is all these elements at once. I am reminded once again going back to Rózsa‘s autobiography, which he called Double Life. In a way having a double life troubled him. He wrote this violin concerto for Jascha Heifetz. He wrote this piece that got played by Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. He wanted to get that recognition as a concert hall composer, yet he couldn’t get it at the time because there was this stigma of being a film composer.

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: I think the stigma should be less now. I can’t live my life thinking about those who want to stigmatize me. I think it was harder then because there was very much an expectation in film that the music had to be a watered down version of late-19th century romantic music. That’s honest. Even though Saint-Saëns wrote for film, believe it or not one of the first films. I think once people like Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Aaron Copland started working with their own voices and not necessarily mirroring or continuing those traditions. There wasn’t much difference between Aaron Copland’s tone poems and his film music. I don’t hear any difference between The Red Pony and El Salón México in terms of style. I think those lines got blurred and it was harder for Europeans to have to write that watered down 19th century stuff. I don’t feel that way because everything that I do seems, so far, to have been completely different from the last thing that I do. There’s not that much expectation for that genre.

FRANK J. OTERI: So can the music that you write for film have another life in the concert hall?

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: Perhaps. I had some concerts and they were very successful. They work in the same way as Beethoven‘s incidental music or Mendelssohn‘s incidental music. If you listen to it, quote unquote, cue by cue, it behaves in the same way that film music does.

FRANK J. OTERI: But it’s appreciated in the concert hall…

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: But it’s appreciated in the concert hall!

FRANK J. OTERI: A Midsummer Night’s Dream gets done all the time.

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: Right.

FRANK J. OTERI: To tie this all together somehow, there have been concerts, there are pieces that work, there’s certainly an audience for it. John Williams will do a concert of his film scores and it’s more successful as a concert than most symphony orchestra concerts playing music originally intended for the concert hall. Can film music somehow–I don’t want to use the word “save” because it sounds a little too evangelical–but can this world somehow help the concert music world which everyone seems to think is in a bad place right now?

ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL: That’s an interesting question. Yes, of course. Every orchestra should have a composer-in-residence. I think the composer-in-residence then should have some influence in pulling in other composers and interacting with other media. Let me end this by being somewhat dogmatic. This is basically directed towards critics and those who liked to stigmatize Rózsa or other composers and made their lives miserable. You out there in computer land, this is Goldenthal dogmatic time. This is it. Ten to fifteen percent seems to be the percentage of good art that comes out of this world. If you have to slog through the 19th century operas, there may have been ten thousand operas written. Then you start to get to some of the good ones—like the works of Goldmark for example, and you go eew, it’s awful. We only get the rarified stuff, the best Wagners. How many Rienzis do we see? How many Die Feens do we see? We get the best. There’s only one Mozart every five hundred years. You know what I’m saying? Everything else, if you add it all up and you look at it, is mainly garbage, like eighty-five percent garbage. That goes for art. Go and look at Pre-Raphaelite art if you want. You’ll get sick looking at the stuff until you come across two or three great paintings. It kind of levels out when you look at this stuff. With most art, fifteen percent floats to the top. Sometimes it’s even within a composer, that they aren’t as consistent as a Mozart, for example. Fifteen percent of the work they write might be really, really, really great. I think within film music, it’s been only a hundred years now, it’s really well represented in that you can find a good fifteen percent or ten percent which is amazing stuff that’s worthy of being studied in it’s original form as a film, that’s worthy of study in the classroom; it’s worthy of study and enjoyment on the concert stage, as well. There’s really remarkable stuff out there. There’s the Prokofievs, the Shostakovichs, the Coplands, the Bernsteins, the Coriglianos, the Philip Glasses, even some of the early Morricones, the Takemitsus, there’s also a great body of work out there that’s about to be discovered. The interaction between hip-hop, and music and rhythm and electronics is very, very, very exciting. Okay end of dogma.

Spaced Out with Henry Brant



Henry Brant explains Ice Field‘s many directions
Photo by Amanda MacBlane

Friday, October 4, 2002—2 p.m.
Copland House, Cortlandt, NY

Videotaped by Amanda MacBlane
Transcribed by Molly Sheridan and Frank J. Oteri

FRANK J. OTERI: There’s a lot of stuff to cover, but I thought we should start at the beginning…

HENRY BRANT: 1913?

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah.

HENRY BRANT: Well, I remember the First World War… I was born in 1913, but in the next year, 1914, 1915, I asked my mother why the oatmeal didn’t taste better and she said that the men who knew how to make the oatmeal were in France fighting the war and the men who are making this oatmeal don’t know how to do it very well so we have to wait until the others come back.

FRANK J. OTERI: You were in Canada then.

HENRY BRANT: Montreal.

FRANK J. OTERI: But your parents were originally from the United States.

HENRY BRANT: Yes, both from the United States and I myself am an American citizen and have been from birth.

FRANK J. OTERI: But you were born and grew up in Canada.

HENRY BRANT: Montreal, until I was 14.

FRANK J. OTERI: Why did your parents move to Montreal?

HENRY BRANT: This is always interesting to me when I think of it. My father is from Savannah, Georgia. When he was about 12, he showed some ability on the violin and he’d been to New York. But his parents thought, “Our son, he should have the best.” In those days, the best was in Europe, so he went to Europe and stayed there 10 years and studied with the best teachers at the time, including Joachim. He was one of the first American violinists I think to have done all this stuff. Ten years later, he came back to the United States and started looking for work and, of the various places he could go, Montreal seemed the most interesting to him. By that time, he spoke three languages fluently and he liked the idea that French was spoken there. He also liked the idea that it was a university town. So he went there and stayed 18 years.

FRANK J. OTERI: Did you grow up speaking French in the household?

HENRY BRANT: Because of the division between the French and the English Canadian communities, although the French always learned some English, the English community managed to avoid speaking French and I was sent to an English school. I heard it and spoke it a little, but never fluently.

FRANK J. OTERI: I once read somewhere that by the time you were nine years old you were already building your own musical instruments…

HENRY BRANT: I started to write down my intended music when I was eight. I also had piano lessons, but I was nothing special. There were children of four and five that were first class at that age, but I was just an average child playing indifferent piano. But I wanted to write music. I heard the orchestra at McGill University, which was my father’s students, and also theater musicians who played in movie houses and the effects that they produced were very puzzling to me. So I asked my father to explain some of them to me and he said he couldn’t! If you had better players, you could get different sounds. So, my first idea was that I wanted to write something that could be done by an orchestra like that, fifty players, no matter what they sounded like. I heard a lot of music in Montreal that interested me. There were especially Salvation Army Bands. They went all over the city. They played in hospitals and in schools and even in the prisons. I followed them around and I thought I wanted to write music for that too. Then we had excellent organ grinders, both the kind with pipes and the kind with piano strings. I enjoyed the sound of them very much. But I didn’t know until later that it was the out-of-tune shape they were in which pleased me so much. I heard that and also my father’s sonata concerts; he gave concerts of chamber music. There was one good professional string quartet in Toronto. Whenever they came, they practiced in our living room. At the age of twelve I wrote a string quartet that they played and that settled it. I was certain that writing music was superior to hawking a crate or other things that boys my age were expected to do. But this didn’t happen often. It didn’t happen every day. So I thought, we’ve got to have some way of doing this ourselves. So I got together with my friends in the neighborhood, some of whom played instruments, and for the rest I made things out of plumbing pipe and also stringed instruments made out of cigar boxes and other boxes. And that combined with a clarinet or two, sometimes a trumpet, was my first orchestra. Some of these boys could read music and some of them couldn’t, so I found ways of explaining to the non-readers what to do. I still do this in something I call instant music. So the answer to your question is yes, I did make such things and I already explained what I felt was my need to have them.

FRANK J. OTERI: Do any of these instruments still survive from back then?

HENRY BRANT: I think it’s been a long time since they’ve left this world!

FRANK J. OTERI: You were saying that some of your friends could read music and some of them couldn’t. Would you write actual pitches for things like the cigar box stringed instruments? I imagine these had rubber bands for strings or something like that&h
ellip;

HENRY BRANT: For the people who could read.

FRANK J. OTERI: So you tailor made it for the people you were writing for?

HENRY BRANT: It would have been impossible otherwise.

FRANK J. OTERI: You mentioned hearing the orchestra at McGill University and you mentioned hearing music at silent movies. What other music were you exposed to growing up?

HENRY BRANT: Everything that came to town. Big famous virtuosi played in Montreal as part of their tour. So these were concerts we went to and one of them was a concert of the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Stokowski. I heard that and I thought if that’s an orchestra, what do we have at McGill? And this enlarged my idea of what was possible. I heard that and I heard concerts by Rachmaninoff and Heifetz and Casals and other players on that level—Cortot was another one—and I considered it a point of honor. So after every concert I went and saw the great man and very few of them turned me down. Kreisler turned me down. He said, “I’m sorry my boy, I can’t.” Rachmaninoff just looked at me and said “…Right!” and I didn’t know what he meant but I finally figured out that I should send him something. So I sent a card to his hotel where he was staying and sure enough I got it back with his signature. I still have this collection. I have some signatures that my father got. I have Joachim’s signature. And some of them I got through older musicians. I have Ravel‘s signature. I forgot how we got onto this…

FRANK J. OTERI: We were talking about the people you heard growing up. The music you heard.

HENRY BRANT: It was pretty comprehensive.

FRANK J. OTERI: What was your first exposure to new music, to experimental music?

HENRY BRANT: Oh, yes. Well, one of the first was when the Hart House Quartet of Toronto came to our house. That same evening, the violinist Huberman was in town and my father persuaded him to come. So the first violinist of this quartet was Hungarian and he said ,”You want to hear some music that you’d hear in Europe?” And so they played Bartók‘s first quartet to the amazement of everybody present. Now, Bartók was about the same age as my father and my father said that in the early 1900s—Bartók was working then and so was Schoenberg and Berg and Stravinsky—he’d merely heard their names. He had a library of sonatas for violin and piano written mostly by contemporaries of his, people with names like Sgambati… These were esteemed composers and they were considered contemporary composers. Of course, Strauss and Mahler were known to my father, too. He played in orchestras conducted by them. But nobody doubted that these other conservative men were the contemporary composers. My father thought so himself, and this Bartók, he never heard anything like that and nobody else there had either. So I asked him what kind of music that was and he said modern music. And I said I’m going to write modern music and that was my start. Then my father recalled a classmate of his, a fellow violin student, Ernest Bloch, was a composer. So we got his sonata, which we considered really rough stuff—far out, wild stuff at the time. Besides that, it sounded to my father and his colleagues to be very ugly and human. I heard that and we learned to play together and I thought that settles it. So the question then was what kind of education should I have so I could become a composer of wild modern music. The word was in those times, that if you wanted to be a great wild composer like Strauss or Mahler, you had to have a solid background. Once you learned how to write solid music, perhaps you try to write something else. And there were many solid teachers in Montreal. Mostly Englishmen, English church organists, all of them Doctor somebody. So my father said, “Well, you’ve got to do that first. Everybody does.” He found out that Bartók had done the same, and as a teacher he taught strict counterpoint. So he said, “You’ll be no place unless you do what all your heroes have done.” So, it was textbook harmony and species counterpoint and I was terrible at it. I had three English teachers in turn and they all thought I was hopeless at it and I thought so too. My father was bewildered and he said, “How are you going to be any kind of composer, even the kind you want to be, if you can’t do what every composer has had to do for the past 500 years?”

FRANK J. OTERI: This is interesting then because from what you’ve just said about the instruments you were building and the sounds you were interested in, you were experimenting with music before you ever heard any so-called experimental music. You were doing this on your own.

HENRY BRANT: I didn’t think it was experimental. I wanted to write for a bunch of people, not just two or three, and I used what I had.

FRANK J. OTERI: So this idea of doing very large things was something that you had even as a child. Big, public music…

HENRY BRANT: That’s true, yes.

 

FRANK J. OTERI: When you did finally study composition, you studied with some of the leading experimental composers at the time, people like George Antheil, Wallingford Riegger, Copland, whom you studied with informally… What led to you meeting up with these people?

HENRY BRANT: Henry Cowell was what made it possible. He came to Montreal in the mid-20s and gave one of his concerts in which he played with his elbows and played inside the piano and things like that. He played at McGill University and shocked and horrified everybody, but my father liked him and brought him to the house and he immediately took an interest in what I was doing. He spent a lot of time with me. One of the things I showed him was Symphony No. 1, nine pages long. I wrote this because I’d heard that sick composers usually wrote masterpieces during their illness. I had an ear abscess and the only treatment was to stick a needle through it,
which meant a long convalescence, just the right time for me to write a symphony. I didn’t have many orchestral scores, but I had a German dictionary that had the first page of Beethoven‘s Fifth Symphony in score. My father got me a couple more scores and he had some from his student days so I thought, all right I’m ready to do this. Later when I showed it to Aaron Copland, he looked at it carefully and on one page he said, “There’s something very strange about this page…It wouldn’t sound at all bad if it were played!”

FRANK J. OTERI: This isn’t the same Symphony No. 1 that was recorded at some point?

HENRY BRANT: It was nine pages of homemade, 12-year old writing.

FRANK J. OTERI: Is that score still around somewhere?

HENRY BRANT: No.

FRANK J. OTERI: You got rid of it?

HENRY BRANT: No, I didn’t. In rattling around the country for the last 75 years, a lot of music disappeared.

FRANK J. OTERI: So Cowell introduced you to Wallingford Riegger?

HENRY BRANT: What he said to my father was, “Henry might amount to something. He’s got some talent and ability, but in this town he will do nothing. He will disappear. If you possibly can, get him to New York where there are people who can help him.” Now, my father took this very seriously and he said, “We’re moving to New York.” Just like that! That’s how I moved to New York. Once I got to New York, things happened very fast. A friend of the family knew Aaron Copland’s piano teacher, Clarence Adler, and I played for him. He said with piano playing I knew nothing, but with the kind of music I was writing I ought to meet a real modern composer and he’d arrange it. So he set up an appointment for me to see Aaron Copland and I played what I’d written for piano so far and he said right away, “You want to play this in two weeks at one of my concerts?” The Copland-Sessions concerts. After this, things happened quite rapidly, and I’d met most of the up-to-date, forward-looking, self-esteemed geniuses at the time. There weren’t so many at that time—if you’d met fifty that was the entire modern music active group.

FRANK J. OTERI: In terms of your studies with these people—with Copland it was rather informal.

HENRY BRANT: Yes. I went to The Juilliard School at the same time. I was able to get scholarships throughout. I discovered that the way to exist was to write one kind of music for The Juillard School, for my conservative instructors, and another kind for downtown where they really composed music. So I did these simultaneously and on one occasion, my Juilliard teacher, Leopold Mannes, met Aaron Copland and discussed me. And they discussed two pieces that seemed to be somewhat alike and Leopold Mannes said, “I prefer the one that he wrote for me.” And Copland said, “Well, the other one is the one that gets my vote.”

FRANK J. OTERI: Now, at that time, Riegger was one the first American composers, if not the very first, to embrace the methods of twelve-tone composition.

HENRY BRANT: Yes.

FRANK J. OTERI: Was that something that was an influence on you at that time?

HENRY BRANT: No. I’ll say two things. Riegger was one of the most active people in the so-called modern music establishment and my father was still worried about my lack of solidity, so he finally said to me, “Now, look, here’s Riegger. He’s no washed out radical as you consider others to be. He’s really way out there.” And I asked Riegger about this sort of thing and he said, “I studied the species counterpoint and I studied the textbook harmony and so has every composer I know of.” So my father said, “Do me a favor; study this stuff with him.” So I tried it again and it was a little different. It was German style. I preferred the French and Italian style that Mannes had learned in Italy and France, but once again, I was just terrible at it. So I finally consoled myself. I ran across the history of Beethoven’s studies with Albrechtsberger and other people and, although he was anxious to learn it, he too was terrible. So I said if he could be terrible, so can I. So it was worth absolutely nothing at all to me. I had a solid background with half a dozen teachers and if they all could be around now they’d say unanimously that they’d never seen a worse pupil in their lives. On the other hand, when I tackled an imitation of a contemporary style it was very different. I easily won all the Juilliard prizes at the time. Nobody could compete with me. Nobody could write a symphony. I wrote one there; it was never played. And long pieces of chamber music that were a mixture of the more conservative contemporary styles at the time and for concerts downtown, I wrote music as experimentally as I could.

FRANK J. OTERI: So, Riegger never taught you twelve-tone composition.

HENRY BRANT: I want to talk about that. I’d heard of it and by that time I knew Schoenberg‘s earlier music, the middle music, and tone-row music and I made up my mind about several things. One of them was never to follow a trend and this seemed to me to be an obvious, superficial trend. His premises were dishonest because the music that was written never followed it in any case. Not only have I never written a tone-row piece, but at one time I had a standing challenge to any composer. I’d give any composer five bucks who could tell the difference between two pieces that I wrote: one tone row and one not twelve-tone row. I maintain that you don’t have to go by the tone row to get music that sounds like that, just like Schoenberg didn’t have to. And nobody ever took me up on it.

FRANK J. OTERI: So you never wrote those two pieces?

HENRY BRANT: I did.

FRANK J. OTERI: So, you did write a twelve-tone piece!

HENRY BRANT: Hopefully to show that it could be faked.

FRANK J. OTERI: How did you come into contact with George Antheil?

HENRY BRANT: I was studying with Copland and I reached a point where I was bringing him a symphonic movement fully scored every week and they were in a sort of international up-to-date style of the time, such that was played at symphony concerts and European music festivals. So one day I brought him what I think was my seventh or eighth such piece and he said, “Your problem is that you don’t have any musical problem. Everything’s too easy for you. There’s nothing that you can’t do. You can write a symphony piece in a week and you do it all right. But there’s something missing and that something missing is that there’s nothing that’s really internally experienced.” So, the next week I tried to write something that was internally experienced. And he said, “I can tell that there’s the effort to experience something internally, but it’s not really there.” So I said, “How am I going to get this thing?” And he said, “You
must live. It’s clear that you haven’t had a personal life at all. And what composer can write without something personal that he puts into his music.” This had never occurred to me, and I said, “What do you suggest?” And he said, “Well, go off for a year and learn about life.” So I left his presence and thought, I’m a composer but I’ve got to learn about life whatever life is, and I bumped into George Antheil whom I’d met on previous occasions and who was very encouraging. He said, “What’s up with you?” So I told him that I’m about to learn about life and stop composing. He wanted to know how I arrived at that and I said, “Well, a mutual friend of ours, a composer, so advised me.” So he said, “You’re a composer. Your life is composing. How can you live if you don’t compose?” And I said, “I don’t know.” “How many pages could you write in a week?” And I said, “I don’t know. Maybe twenty-five orchestral pages.” “Could you write thirty-five?” “I think so.” “Come and see me next week and bring me thirty-five pages!” After, he became my teacher informally, and the idea was to write a lot—”Never stop writing, there’s no time to stop writing, you don’t know enough.”

FRANK J. OTERI: Now I find the connection to Antheil very interesting because he was somebody who was very interested in the idea of a musical composition as an event, certainly with a work like the Ballet Mechanique, and so many of your compositions much later in life are these big events. At the same time, Antheil was very influenced by jazz and a lot of your earlier music is influenced by jazz…

HENRY BRANT: So is my Pulitzer Prize piece.

FRANK J. OTERI: That’s true.

HENRY BRANT: Well, I got many things from him which were extremely valuable to me. And one of the things was in order to manage with composing in difficult times—and this was the Depression now—was to be able to write in many styles, both popular and formal and classical and the method of doing this I first learned from Copland. At the first meeting I had with him I think he said, “You must be very fond of Scriabin‘s music.” And I said, “I never heard the name, what is it?” And he said, “Go to the library and get as much Scriabin as you can carry and play nothing but that for a few weeks.” That was the method. I found if I wanted to learn any style the thing was to get hold of the printed music and spend time with that and that alone. That was my method and I still recommend it. And that was before there were many recordings and before the things we have and I recommend it to composers now, but none of them will. It’s a lot of work to do that. Antheil also impressed me because he was a great pianist. What a player, especially of his own music. I was studying piano with James Friskin and I’ve never been sorry for it because he taught me the music I wanted to know about: the German classics. He said once, “Sit down and play something for me.” And I said, “What?” And he said, “Some piece you like.” So I played part of the Hammerklavier Sonata. And he said, “It’s good. You’re a musician but that’s not enough. You have to play like a devil. You’re playing like a good boy. You have to play like a bad boy otherwise the audience won’t listen.” So I thought this over and he showed me very often what he meant. I’d have a few pages of something and he played them and then continued the piece impromptu, improvising the rest, and it was tremendous piano playing, showing what he meant by the bad boy devil side of playing and this I understood. I hadn’t understood the learning about life thing, but something mean and nasty and getting an audience upset, this became clear to me by the way he played. Now, jazz was something else. At first, I had my parents’ idea that it was sort of an evil practice that led to disease and debilitation and even death and only people who were either foolish or depraved had anything to do with it. And also I knew that it was something that existed in sheet music on upright pianos in parlors, but when I was fifteen I was sent to a summer camp and all the boys had scratchy little phonographs on which they played various kinds of jazz, mostly the sort of country-club, easy-going stuff, but also some Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, and when I heard that I thought I’ve got to learn how to do that. It’s just another style. It wasn’t so easy because the best kind of jazz wasn’t notated. Nobody knew how to notate it and what was notated, classically-trained musicians didn’t know how to read. Eventually, I solved this and now I can write things for a symphony orchestra and without telling them anything, just having them play what’s there, some jazz will come out. I don’t think I got this from Antheil. What I got was his violent way of playing jazzy parts in his own music. Violent, but not random, every time he played he hit something he wanted.

FRANK J. OTERI: It’s so funny now to look back at a time when jazz was considered evil music because now jazz has even moved into academia. The role that jazz had then is a role that rock music doesn’t even really have anymore in our society. I think that nowadays most musically trained people accept rock. I think the only thing that comes close is maybe rap music, hip-hop. A lot of people, including classical and jazz players, harbor negative feelings about rap. I don’t know what your feelings are about recent popular music.

HENRY BRANT: My view of it is quite different. I think that popular music in its instrumental form is in a crisis that the musicians don’t know how to solve. It’s evil is the evil of all pop music that we know, that you mentioned. The harmony is the dregs, the refuse of European music from fifty years ago and until they throw that out, every Goddamned bit of it, it’s going to sound like that. Also, although improvised jazz, especially its earlier form, did have something contrapuntal about it, most of what you hear now has none. It has harmony and the harmony is the harmony of corpses in my opinion. That’s its real crisis and for that reason, I take none of these styles seriously. And it’s serious because our so-called classically trained musicians learn nothing about jazz. There ought to be the best jazz performers teaching at Juilliard and everybody ought to learn that just like they learn Beethoven, Bach, and Chopin. And the inability to do that means the people who are the most gifted instrumentalists and conductors are embarrassed when they’re confronted with something that’s in a popular idiom of any kind and that is a serious matter.

FRANK J. OTERI: Juilliard recently started a jazz department.

HENRY BRANT: Well, there’s another side to it. Jazz musicians know nothing about how to construct. They construct as far as a chorus and then another one and another one. What they do is, when they learn how to make big kind of melodies, usually they abandon their jazz material. They’re intimidated by the tremendous weight of this formidable tradition and they don’t write jazz. The boys that do know the constructive thing never play in a
band and never learn to perform really well. They don’t take it seriously; they don’t even take their own kind of performance seriously, which is one of the things that I think is sort of a suicide. Many young composers don’t practice. Other people perform our music. If you don’t practice it means you lose the sense of what it means to make a note and make a sound. Well, there are some of my prejudices. In 89 years, I’ve accumulated a good many and they get more bigoted as time goes on.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, since you say that popular music is stifled because it can’t get past an outdated harmonic vocabulary, are older forms and instrumental combinations still valid for music being created today. Do you feel that there’s no point in writing a concerto or a string quartet? Could new things still be said in those tradition bound forms?

HENRY BRANT: It’s a very complicated and far-reaching question. For one thing, I feel that what is called “form” in music, very pretentiously, is very arbitrary. The whole tradition is based on absolutely nothing. The idea of writing 100 movements all of them in sonata form can be explained by musicologists who can explain anything. But you can make an arbitrary form and if you’re Stravinsky or Bartók or Beethoven or Bach you can make it just as convincing as the sonata form. I’ve made that test many times myself and, for what I am doing now, what makes the form is the room where the piece will first be played because that place will show where the groups of instruments can be. There are only certain places where they can be and that already dictates the continuity of the piece. It already says something about the way the piece is going to sound and that’s what I do. I go into the hall, look around, ask the stage manager and somebody from the fire department where I’m allowed to put players and I decide—already there are eight groups consisting of this or that type of players. That’s the form before anything else has happened, because those are the ingredients. Now, if you want to be sure that you will know exactly what’s going to happen then just have them all at once it is doesn’t matter where they are. But the whole point in placing them in certain locations is they should be able to articulate materials more sharply, more clearly, because of their position. Out of that will then come, “Well this one will be first and that one further along the line and then maybe there’ll be these three sections together, and that is form. All that form means is continuity. My hearing and memory are no worse than probably the average person. If I tell you honestly what I hear when you play me a ten minute symphony piece, whether old or new, I’ll tell you I don’t remember anything beyond the first two minutes. My mind wanders. Now if my mind wanders in that way, possibly other people’s do too, both people who are educated musically and people who aren’t. But you hear nothing about this. What do you remember about a new piece? You remember the beginning and you remember the end because they stop playing and it got louder there or softer there. That’s the form that most people remember; they do not remember the third variant of the fourth tone row in retrograde and its reverse form was hinted at. Nobody hears that; don’t let anybody kid you! I don’t hear it and it may be that I’ve got rotten perception but it probably isn’t worse than most people’s.

FRANK J. OTERI: The notion of music existing in space as well as time was a very radical notion when you first started doing this. Were there precedents for you?

HENRY BRANT: Yes, there were and I will tell you how I came up with it. I like music that is complicated. I like a lot going on because you have some chance of remembering it if there’s more stuff to remember than the alleged manipulations of material. In ordinary life it’s never simple. You’re aware of so many things and music has the advantage. It’s temporal, like ordinary experience. Well, I’ve never been a great fan of the simpler, cut down music with fewer things. It seems to me that’s arbitrary. It just isn’t true in ordinary life. Even now, look at the amount of things that are happening in this room both known and unknown to us and things that each of us is aware of. Why should music (I’ve figured after a long tortured cogitation about this) cut itself off from the experience of the most ordinary kind of life? It seems to me that since many different things happen, they should happen. My first experience was writing a very complicated texture and they were on the stage playing it all together. Well, to tell the truth, with more than ten linear parts, I didn’t know what was going on. I assumed they were playing the right notes, or approximately the right notes, but something was the matter here and the answer is: Don’t be simple; be pure. Abase yourself. One note is good enough… I don’t like that kind of thing. That is my temperament. So I thought there’s got to be some way to make complicated music intelligible. So that’s the whole thing. Now, usually the word form is given to you as the thing that makes music intelligible. I think it’s the thing that makes music unintelligible in the case of most music. And then, three things happened in about a year. I heard the Berlioz Requiem in Paris in the place where it was first performed. There were four brass choirs in the corner of the balcony and there were sixteen timpani in the middle of the floor and a symphony orchestra to one side of that and a chorus on the other side of that and I began to see that there’s a lot going on. He’s doing it harmonically because he despised counterpoint. That was one thing. Then when I was teaching at Juilliard, somebody told me about the music of Gabrieli which used to be played in St. Mark’s. So I got hold of it and saw that he writes for two, three, four groups of instruments, mostly brass, sometimes with voices too, and it is known that they were placed in different parts and I thought he put them in different places because he wants them to be identified in a different way. It’s not the same as Berlioz. I spoke to Stokowski about this about twenty years before all this. He’d been there in Venice and his idea was to try to play some of this Gabrieli in St. Mark’s and was told we can’t do this; the building has to be repaired. The police won’t allow it. This stuff is so out of date anyway; nobody listens to it. But he finally got permission to do this and he found out one thing which solved the one puzzle. All those Gabrieli pieces end with a place at the end where all of those choirs perform all at once and you hear a time lag every time, and what’s supposed to be sublime is sublimely out-of-tune harmony, a sublime messy ensemble. He found that no matter where you placed the groups, there was a time lag. So, I’m beginning to get some of this through my dull head and then I got a collection of Ives and it had a piece called The Unanswered Question
. It said there were actually three pieces being played at once in different parts of the hall by different instrumental groups and I didn’t believe it, so I played it with my students. Then I got a commission to write an orchestral piece. So I said I’ll do it. I waited all this time without knowing what I should do and then it became clear. All music is space music. Every piece of music is situated in some space where it’s being played and it couldn’t be played otherwise. There has to be a space for you to play your trumpet and a place for me out in the audience to hear it and for the sound waves to move and space for them to reverberate in the hall. Space is a convention. It’s set up in such a way that the performing part is over here and the listening part is over there, but it’s just as much space music as anything else. It then occurred to me that it might be possible to use the space more expressively, and that would be a much more natural way and so I wrote my first spatial piece. Before I wrote it, my gifted student Teo Macero, whose name is probably known to you, succeeded in producing a jazz concert at Juilliard for the very first time. He asked me if I’d mind if he’d do a special piece for five jazz orchestras, separated, each playing something different, improvisation as well as written music. So I said, “Teo, if you can make that thing go, go ahead and do it but I don’t see how you’re gonna do it.” [laughs] He did this. He brought in this piece and performed it. So that, I would say, is the first spatial orchestral piece along the lines I worked. Mine followed that by about six months and had no jazz in it.

FRANK J. OTERI: When you’re writing a piece like that, you mentioned going into a room and experiencing it before working on the piece. That’s very different from the notion we have of a composer creating music out of his or her head and completed on paper. There’s a real connection to the physical world in what you’re talking about that there really isn’t in the standard, abstract tabula rasa idea of how a work is created.

HENRY BRANT: That’s very true.

FRANK J. OTERI: So do you always write a piece keeping in mind the place where it will receive its premiere? And if so, how does that translate if the piece is ever done somewhere else? Are these all one-time deals?

HENRY BRANT: Fortunately, I’ve had a very practical musical life. I’ve had to do things that have got to be ready tomorrow and they’ve got to be playable. So I realized that that was what I want. I didn’t want to write complicated music that would require a lot of rehearsals and never get played. I admired Ives but I didn’t want to produce music in that manner. So it occurred to me that in order for it to be practical, the spatial aspect had to be transferable, within reason, to any hall and all my pieces say in the prefatory note, “If you can’t do this, then don’t play the piece. Do not attempt or presume to play it all from the stage.” This is very difficult to convince conductors of.

FRANK J. OTERI: When you’re working on a piece, you’re obviously not in the hall, so your memory of having been in the hall before you started working is what shapes the music. So, let’s say, if you’re thinking of a piece that has a flute over here in the left corner and a group of trombones in the right corner and maybe a piano hanging from the ceiling and a group of percussionists in the back of the hall. I’m just making this up…

HENRY BRANT: That’s O.K.

FRANK J. OTERI: Or maybe there’s a flute on the left side and another flute on the right side…

HENRY BRANT: No. I don’t do that. That’s like music in airports. That’s confusing. You never know where it’s really coming from.

FRANK J. OTERI: So you would always group the same instruments together in one location? You never have the same instruments in more than one location?

HENRY BRANT: No. That’s asking for trouble. If what you want is clarity and the directionality gives you that clarity, then you’d wipe it out. That’s the fault of Stockhausen‘s Gruppen, which he claimed was the very first spatial piece ever written and he didn’t know that I did the second one eight years before that and performed it.

FRANK J. OTERI: [laughs]

HENRY BRANT: That’s the trouble with spatial pieces that you may hear. I’ve written 112 for big and little combinations, up to as many as 400 and down to as few as 3. It takes a long time to learn how this thing works. You have to write a lot of pieces and make a lot of mistakes. Many composers give up after a few, half a dozen. They say it’s no good. You can’t make it work. Well, they can’t make it work. So, let’s take your spatial piece that you’ve given me. The next question is what should those trombones play so there’s a reason for them being in those places. First of all, they must be highly individualized so that they never play the same material. You don’t toss material back and forth in the way you’re supposed to with traditional orchestration. Keep the same material for each tone quality or the same kind of material. I’ve heard spatial pieces that were wrecked because the composer didn’t know that. So, once you’ve decided those things you know a good deal about your piece.

FRANK J. OTERI: These pieces are designed to work theoretically in a variety of places even though the result might never be exactly the same as the result in the hall it was originally intended for.

HENRY BRANT: I’d say it should be 85 percent the same plan. If the piece is written with enough care, it can stand that much punishment. But it cannot be changed so that there’s only 50%. I’ve run into conductors who actually have the presumption to change the position of some of the groups. One of them, a well-known conductor, said, “Well, I can’t hear this.” And I said, “It’s not for you to hear; it’s for the audience to hear. It’s for you to produce.”

FRANK J. OTERI: This is a problem with preserving your music on recordings because almost all recordings put all sound onto two speakers. There haven’t been a lot of recordings of your music. And, for better or worse, in our society today, recordings are the predominant way that music is transmitted and discovered. In fact, even I have to admit that most of the music I know I know only through recordings; most pieces I’ve never had a chance to hear live. You might say I don’t really know those pieces…

HENRY BRANT: Well, you know who decides the spatial arrangement that’s going to get on a recording. The engineer, not the composer… Who the hell is the engineer? Did he write the piece? Did he figure it out? Did he figure out a spatial plan? Did he participate in the performance? No, but he’s at the top of the totem pole. He’s very grand and the composer is some little worm that put this insignificant thing together. I apologize for the violence of my language but I’m long suffering. So, the first thing is this: My recordings of which you’ve heard, they sound good. They sound as good as anybody else’s recordings for one reason: I know more about orchestration than most composers. I’ve had more experience. I made something that has a good orchestral sound even if you take the space away. Nobody’s ever complained about how thin my music is on recording. Have you heard any of it live?

FRANK J. OTERI: Very little.

HENRY BRANT: Anybody who’s heard a piece of mine live will tell you, although you may find it satisfactory in some ways when you hear it in recording, something comes to you when you hear it live that recordings don’t even hint at. But without the recordings, I’d have nothing. At least with the recordings, there’s some interest in my music.

FRANK J. OTERI: Of course, there are now new technologies out there that might better serve to document your music. I’m thinking of something like 5.1 surround-sound DVDs, for example.

HENRY BRANT: It’s an engineer’s concept that aims at a generalized diffusion of the sound. That’s exactly the opposite of what I do. I want directional sound. I want it to come from there and nowhere else and I don’t want the illusion where you’re fooled into believing that something’s coming from so many places when it’s really only coming from one position. Also, the absolute insane disproportion between the role of the engineer and the role of the composer is to me absolutely destructive. A recording is, in my point of view, an engineer’s creation.

FRANK J. OTERI: So you don’t feel that surround sound would work for your music?

HENRY BRANT: I’ve heard the effects of it. There is some music—I was talking to Tilson Thomas about this—in which a generalized distribution of the sound all over is appropriate and there are some places where he told me he goes to some length to try to get that. This is a comparatively small area of expression in the western tradition.

FRANK J. OTERI: Using this same technology though, couldn’t it somehow be used for a different end? Rather than having the sound come from everywhere in all the speakers, couldn’t the speakers have more focused, directionalized sound so that, in essence the recording would be trying to recreate the spatial distribution you are doing in a hall?

HENRY BRANT: A recording could do that. The technology is fully capable of having sound coming from six real sources and not speakers picking up many sources mixed different ways. But it’s neither a composer’s concept nor is it commercial. Who’s going to make a set-up of that kind that requires six speakers in your living room? If it fits six, it does not fit five or two or three. They are very different things and that difference is a very simple matter to a composer.

FRANK J. OTERI: I know that you’ve said that you dislike amplification and electronic sound.

HENRY BRANT: Well, first of all, a loud speaker is a musical instrument with a tone quality of its own—a very poor tone quality! What we’re told is that it’s even better than the original in some ways, that it lacks the drawbacks of acoustic instruments and the imperfection of human performance. This kind of thing I can’t believe. Also, the organic constituents of the sounds that are electronically produced are vastly different, not a little different, but vastly, fundamentally different and they affect the nervous system in different ways. I’m sure that careful studies of this will show this and I think it’s very much my business to think about such things. I don’t have to think of them very much when I deal with live performers on acoustic instruments; I know I’ve got one thing and when I’ve got synthetically derived sounds I’ve got another. One is organic and the other one is not and you can taste it on your dinner table.

FRANK J. OTERI: So have you ever written for electronic instruments?

HENRY BRANT: Yeah. When I want microtones

FRANK J. OTERI: You didn’t feel you could write microtonally for standard acoustic instruments?

HENRY BRANT: I did and I still do, but if I want microtones, I want someone to press a key and play the note. I don’t want a slide in between unless it’s a whole concept that involves sliding. A friend of mine, a composer, told me, “We’ve got a Japanese thing here that will give you microtones, anything you want.” “Well,” I said, “all I want is quartertones to start with.” So I wrote this piece and I heard my quartertones, but I realized there was something the matter because of the way they combined resultant tones, which is not the way music acoustically produced would. So I’m the worst possible person to talk to about any of the new magical solutions for sound, recording, composers, and stuff like that. I can’t talk to many composers about this; they don’t know what I’m getting so excited about.

FRANK J. OTERI: What do you think of this whole notion of making music on the Web? There are now musicians who collaborate from different locations, in different rooms, in different cities, by being hooked up through the Internet, which creates a whole new realm of spatial music…

HENRY BRANT: It’s not very realistic. Who can hear music in different cities live?

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, of course, they’re hearing it through the speakers. [laughs]

FRANK J. OTERI: What you’re mostly known for is a heterogeneous music—different groups of people playing in different styles in different places—but some of my favorite pieces of yours are homogenous to the extreme, music for ensembles of the exact same type of instrument. I’m thinking of Angels and Devils scored for an ensemble of flutes. It’s nothing but flute sound. And then there’s Orbits, that 80-trombone piece!

HENRY BRANT: Nothing in my thinking is against music of one timbre only. Since writing Angels and Devils I’ve gotten the idea that, unlike the flute pieces which are only four and half octaves, the family should be extended with different instruments. My newest piece, the successor to Angels and Devils written 70 years later, has bass flutes.

FRANK J. OTERI: You were the first composer to get involved with the Violin Octet, which is supposed to be a real violin ensemble of eight identically designed instruments across the pitch range.

HENRY BRANT: It’s a more rational string orchestra. Carleen Hutchins built these instruments at my suggestion to fill the missing gaps. For instance, the instrument between the viola and the cello should have been there a long time ago and she made one and she finally made a very good one. Also, an instrument an octave above the violin so that you’re not playing the violin way up, so that things could be done with lower tension, and larger basses… With the trombones I was able to get four and half [octaves] at most. There I had all the sizes that are now made. It means that some of the most elementary things in music you hear for the first time—what harmony sounds with perfectly rational and natural layouts played in the same tone quality. Most of our music exists in five octaves, but mostly in the middle range.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now, you’re working on a book about orchestration, which you talked about with Molly Sheridan after you won the Pulitzer and I saw it on the table here. How is this book different than other books on orchestration?

HENRY BRANT: It’s conventional in some ways. I don’t take up spatial orchestra, which is so different a field and so elaborate that it wouldn’t meet the immediate needs of most composers. Most composers need to find recipes so that what they’ve got will first of all be clear and secondly have a range of timbres that they didn’t know about and a book that limits itself to that and says nothing about the mechanism of instruments and technique is going to be about five pages anyway. There are many examples, all of which I composed in a neutral style. Now, neutral style nowadays takes in a lot of ground. It has no quotes from any music of mine or anybody else’s. There are things I’ve written down over the last 50 years—whenever I heard something that was unusual I made a note of it.

FRANK J. OTERI: This was all done with a typewriter.

HENRY BRANT: I can’t even type I’m so far back in the Stone Age.

FRANK J. OTERI: You send email to people, don’t you?

HENRY BRANT: Yeah, but it’s put together by Kathy.

FRANK J. OTERI: As long as we’re talking about this and tradition and having a connection to other composers, I want to ask you where you feel you fit in the tradition.

HENRY BRANT: Do I have to fit in?

FRANK J. OTERI: No [laughs] and I’m glad that you don’t! But I’m curious about where you view yourself because I remember reading somewhere that you don’t consider yourself a maverick composer. I thought that was very strange because I do consider you a maverick.

HENRY BRANT: Tilson Thomas says I’m a card-carrying maverick and that’s suitable for musicologists or publicity, but when you get through it, what does it describe? I’ll go a little farther. I’m a maverick composer, Tilson Thomas says so. Also, I can do a rope trick. How many other composers can do that?

FRANK J. OTERI: I play with strings too! [laughs] Well, when you talked to Molly about the Pulitzer Prize you said that you were just starting to figure things out and now that you’ve got that prize, you’ve reached a new plateau. That’s quite an amazing thing for someone of your stature to say and for someone who’s been writing music for such a long time.

HENRY BRANT: You figure the number of mistakes I’ve had time to make and after every one I know a little more than I did before.

FRANK J. OTERI: Since receiving the Pulitzer Prize, have there been more performances of your music? More recognition of your work?

HENRY BRANT: Not in any widespread way… There have been enquiries about the works. But the problem is still that there are rumors about my music that prejudice many people against it. It is said, for instance, that a piece of mine can only be played once, in the place it was written for. It is said that my music is so difficult and complicated that it can only be played once in a while. That isn’t true. It’s no harder than anyone else’s music. If it were, it wouldn’t be played at all. I wouldn’t be the person really to answer that question. As a winner of a Pulitzer Prize, I’m not unique.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, the Pulitzer Prize has meant different things for different composers over the years. You know, Ives got it for a piece that he had written 30 years earlier and he didn’t even want it and he didn’t even attend the performance, whereas other composers get it earlier in their career and it really helped to establish them. Charles Wuorinen got it when he was quite young and Aaron Kernis got it in the last few years and he’s still a relatively young composer and so that sort of sent those composers into different places in their careers. So what can the Pulitzer Prize accomplish for Henry Brant?

HENRY BRANT: I couldn’t tell you. I think more curiosity about what that is. Before the Pulitzer Prize I was vaguely known, my name was, and I was vaguely known as a kind of minor screwball music. Now they say, “Well, let’s look at this minor screwball music.” That’s about it.

FRANK J. OTERI: You told Molly that you were working on an oratorio based on the poetry of John Muir, that this is a project you’ve wanted to do for decades…

HENRY BRANT: Well, that one has been superceded by another project which is going to be for five choruses and two pipe organs, in a church which really has them, and also orchestra and I will be working with my old collaborator Leonardo da Vinci. I think the name is Clouds, Wind, Water, and Air and it’s supposed to be about what’s still left of the planet while I’m here to write it. It may not be possible to write such a piece in the future except about the past.

FRANK J. OTERI: And what about the settings of John Muir poetry?

HENRY BRANT: Well, I’d like to do that too. I can’t do anything though unless I have a performance and a commission.

FRANK J. OTERI: I know I heard that you were interested in writing more pieces for the Real Violin Octet, the Hutchins Consort.

HENRY BRANT: Sure. I’d be delighted but it isn’t so easy for a so-called “maverick” composer to find work, to find a market for his product, that is to say. Anybody who wants my kind of spatial piece, well you figure it requires a big outlay of performers and a venue where the audience expects the kind of product I make. I suppose if somebody wanted me to write a piece in a known style or a conventional style, I’d do it if the inducement were sufficient because it’s easy for me to write in many styles, but it would be principally something to make life a little more comfortable and to make opportunities for other kinds of music that I’d be more interested in. I’d like to write film scores but the lowly and humiliating position of composers of film scores I know about through personal experience and at my age I feel that I’m not inferior to a producer or a director in what the music should sound like and the worst thing is that the editor has the power of turning the volume. He can say what the dynamics are. So it’s not an optimistic time, I feel, for expressive music. I mean expressive music that’s really good for the nervous system, that’s not a sedative and not an addictive-sounding drug, but something that really feeds the nerves. Whereas there’s a big market for sedative music of all kinds and, as you know, much effort has been expended especially in recorded music of new kinds and technologies.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, I’m glad at least that the Pulitzer committee acknowledged the great contribution that you’ve made and it’s wonderful that we got to spend an afternoon with you to talk about this music.

HENRY BRANT: Do you want me to indicate the space of arrangements for Ice Field?

FRANK J. OTERI: Yes.

HENRY BRANT: It’s a 20-minute piece for symphony orchestra and it has a pipe organ part played by me and improvised along certain carefully designed lines. Now let’s say we’re in the audience facing the stage and that end of the room is the stage (indicating opposite end of the room). So here’s the conductor (walking forward) with a stage where the symphony usually is arranged and the strings are all there just as they usually are. Over here (walking to back stage right) two pianos and next to them two harps and the timpani player, that’s a section. It’s not very far away from the strings. This kind of a separation I usually don’t take seriously but the music that they play is not going to be confused with what the strings play if I’m very careful with that. Alright, now the choir loft is around the symphony at that level and over here (indicates upper stage left) are the double reeds—the three oboes and the three bassoons—but against the wall behind the choir loft are the organ pipes so these double reeds will sound like a sort of nasal more human extension of the pipe organ and they did. All this happened as it was supposed to. All right. Now I’m the conductor facing the audience and in the second balcony up there and over here (indicates balcony, audience right) three piccolos and tree high clarinets, so that’s that sound isolated there. And on this corner here (indicates balcony, audience left) xylophone and glockenspiel. Now go back to the stage. Along this wall (indicates floor, audience right) in the audience—this had to be based on what Davies Hall in San Francisco could do and it’s a hall that has been rebuilt completely because the acoustics weren’t satisfactory—there are boxes right above the audience seating level. So about half way back low-pitched percussion instruments and here my wish to use families of instruments instead of just one of each were carried out. There were three orchestra bass drums in one box so you can get a sort of rudimentary melody and behind them but still not all the way to the back in another box, Caribbean steel drums which I use frequently. They’re excellent, but only the biggest size the big oil drum size and they have pitches lower than the timpani but real pitches and I have four pitches in those instruments. Then three Chinese gongs, big gongs… So I’ll see three bass drums, three Chinese gongs, and three of the lowest pitched steel drums. Sometimes the boss conductor, the principal conductor, has to turn around and cue these people up here (indicates balcony, audience right) and here (indicates balcony, audience left) and down there and one of the devices that I’ve used which I think is worth mentioning is non-coordinated rhythm. I realized very early if you try to coordinate in the same rhythm, in the same tempo, in the same beat, people who are all over the room will never get it. They can’t hear each other. They can’t keep together. So all I ask is that each group keep together with itself, though each group may be cued in sometime by the conductor. Well, it’s written in such a way that he’s doing something over here and he can turn around. It’s written so that this is possible (demonstrates). So everything is there except the second balcony and in this corner (indicates balcony, audience left) so that’s halfway here. And in this corner are the brass section with a few extras, 12 players and a jazz drummer, and a separate conductor and they play my idea of jazz which has no conventional jazz harmony but a lot of strange discordant polyphony in it. And now the organ pipes are up there but I have the console here (indicates stage right) so that I can see the principal conductor easily and he can cue me and also signal me in various different ways. The sound, of course, came from up there. So what have I got? I’ve got strings, double woodwinds, pipe organ, and this pipe organ has a thirty-two foot stop which means it has pipes thirty-two feet long and I used those without anything else very often. They create a sound that usually isn’t heard in the concert hall. I was told they had a 64-foot stop and I thought, 64 feet, that’s the height of a five-story building or something like that. They didn’t have anything of the kind. They simulated the sound with a mixture of other pipes and it wasn’t the real thing at all and just didn’t use it. Someday I’ll get 64 ft. I understand that they have such things. So that’s it. It’s my only piece for this combination.

FRANK J. OTERI: Wow, thank you. I wish we had the orchestra in here to hear it!

 

Concerto for Alto Saxophone with Nine Instruments  (1941) from Currents (Redwood Records ESCD-45)

The 3-Way Canon Blues  (1947) from New Amsterdam Singers: American Journey (TROY 108)

Hieroglyphics 3  (1958) from Henry Brant (CRI 827)

Kingdom Come  (1970) from Henry Brant/Kingdom Come*Machinations (PHCD 127)

Machinations  (1970) from Henry Brant/Kingdom Come*Machinations (PHCD 127)

Orbits  (1979) from Henry Brant (CRI 827)

Western Springs  (1984) from Henry Brant (CRI 827)

H. Wiley Hitchcock: Changing History



H. Wiley Hitchcock
Photo by John Bentham

Wednesday, November 13, 2002—11 a.m.

Conversation with Frank J. Oteri
Videotaped by Amanda MacBlane

FRANK J. OTERI: I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the differences between history, journalism, criticism, and advocacy.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: I find that they’re not all that different. I’ve been a good friend of composers and I’ve also been a good friend of critics. I judge them as I judge historians, testing the accuracy of the factual matter they give us. I welcome them because of their ideas and the creative aspect of their writing, just as I do historians. I recently had the occasion to write a review of Richard Crawford‘s new book called America’s Musical Life, almost 1000 pages of the history of American Music—and I realized that this is a new history. There’s an abbreviated version that will probably replace my own Music in the United States—a successful textbook, now in its fourth edition. Rich’s book is probably going to replace it because it’s a new history: it’s a history for the 21st century. Mine was for the last quarter or third of the 20th century.

FRANK J. OTERI: So what’s so different about it?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Instead of taking composers or pieces of music as the point of departure, Crawford’s book centers on the performance of American music. His concern is with America’s musical life, in terms of the performers of American music, the listeners to American music, the producers and buyers of scores, recordings, and tickets to performances, rather than just the music just itself.

FRANK J. OTERI: So it doesn’t really present a canonical list…

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: No, it doesn’t pretend to do that.

FRANK J. OTERI: So in that sense it probably won’t replace your book, so much as be a nice parallel to it.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Yes, in a way it’s a complement to my book, which is full of music examples and analytic comments. That’s where I’m at, the music for itself, less than say the sociology of music or biographies of composers, or things like that. I guess I’m oversimplifying by claiming that these various things that you are talking about, even advocacy, are very similar: the critic, the historian, who of course makes a new history every time he or she sets a pen or fingers to paper or computer, and the advocate—who has to advocate, I suppose either in words or in performance, or in some way or other, and thereby makes a selection, and thus suggests a graduated roster of preferences, which the historian does, too, and so does the critic.

FRANK J. OTERI: So then talking about this and what you’re saying about the new history being about performers and consumers, not so much about works, what is the responsibility of the musicologist to music? What is the goal?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Well, if by musicologist you mean primarily the historian…

FRANK J. OTERI: The historian, right.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: I think my goal as a music historian has been to attempt to reflect the music as it was experienced in its own time, primarily. Also to attempt to reflect what the composer thinks he or she is doing in such-and-such a work and to become, in a sense, a critic myself.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, in the preface to the 3rd edition of your American music history, you said that one of the goals in writing the book was to make people aware of our musical history in its totality as opposed to just being a footnote to European musical history.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Right.

FRANK J. OTERI: We have this problem in this country when we think of “classical music”—to use that hobgoblin of an expression—as being European music, as not being our own. And the other thing that your book did in your 1st edition which dates back to the late ’60s, probably there weren’t very many precedents for it at that point, was to deal with not just so-called classical music, in that sense, but also to deal with jazz and, I haven’t seen the 1st edition of the book so I don’t know if rock already figures in the 1st edition, but it certainly figures in subsequent editions of the book.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: OK. But we have to go back historically in a way to 1969 when my book was first published—Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction. A Historical, American English. (laughs) Not An historical, no, no! At any rate, at that time, and you’re absolutely right, there were few precedents. But Gilbert Chase had written his book America’s Music in 1955, and I learned a great deal from that book and I credit Gilbert in the introduction of my own book. But, much more than now, American music, to musicologists at least, was sort of a country cousin in the Euro-American tradition. In fact, I don’t even think that term Euro-American music was common; it’s commonplace now because when we think of our music intellectually, let’s say, we think about it, particularly classical music, as part of a tradition that began in Europe and was fed and nurtured by that tradition—but by now has developed way out of it: it’s a world of difference today from what it was thirty-three years ago.

 

FRANK J. OTERI: Now your book on American music came as a result of an entire series of books that was on the history of music which were designed basically, and I think largely still serve as textbooks. I know when I was an undergraduate they were the textbooks that we used in my music survey sequence. All of those books—the book on Baroque music, the Classical period, the Renaissance. What was interesting about the United States book was that it was the only book in the series that focused on the music of one particular country rather than a time period.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: That’s true, although officially there was also Gerard Béhague‘s book on Latin American music.

FRANK J. OTERI: But that dealt with a whole continent.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: More: the whole subcontinent of Latin America and the continent of South America!

FRANK J. OTERI: And that’s a book that had no precedent and no followers, there is no other book like that.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: No, exactly. And it’s out-of-print—regrettably, really regrettably…

FRANK J. OTERI: It’s really a shame. It’s a really good book. Now you were the general editor of that entire series. Did you initiate doing the book on the United States?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Well, it was put to me by the publisher, which was Prentice Hall. They said to me that they would like to get a series of books that could serve as textbooks on the history of music and how would I plan such a series? So the 11 books that were in the series were of my planning, as was the choice of the authors. Now, oddly enough, I had paid my dues to the American musicological establishment, so to speak, not by working in American music but by doing a doctoral dissertation on the French 17th-century composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier. But from the late 1940s I’d been teaching a course on American music, a one-semester course at the University of Michigan where I was teaching. And when I moved to New York in 1961, shortly thereafter, Prentice Hall approached me about this series. And I thought at first, of course, I will do the Baroque book, but I want a book on American music: who can I get for that? And I wasn’t sure whom I could get, and I finally decided, well, I’ll do it. So I did, and suddenly I was an Americanist!

 

FRANK J. OTERI: To take this history back even further to your first background in music, I was curious when I learned that your early work was on 17th century Baroque music. What led you to the interest in American music?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: My father. When I was a boy growing up near Detroit, Michigan, where my father worked, my father was crazy about music of all kinds—classical music, popular music, jazz (swing, of the time), musical comedies, you name it. The young Frank Sinatra I first heard at Eastwood Gardens, just outside Detroit, singing with Tommy Dorsey‘s band. My father took me into Detroit time and time again to hear music of all kinds, and to that is what I owe my first interest in American music. I grew up with it and it was my vernacular. I even helped organize and played in a little jazz band in school. We called it the Rhythm Wreckers [laughs]. I gave up playing jazz when I went to college, but kept up my work in piano.

FRANK J. OTERI: So you were a pianist in the jazz band?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Well, no, as a matter of fact I played sax and clarinet.

FRANK J. OTERI: Oh, wow! You don’t play anymore?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: No, I don’t.

FRANK J. OTERI: But you still play the piano?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Yes. I don’t practice anymore, but I noodle and improvise for my own amusement.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now when you came to do this book on American music, to take it back to 1969 again, what was the general reception, because there weren’t a lot of courses devoted specifically to American music at universities at that point?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Absolutely not! The composer Ross Lee Finney came to the University of Michigan after I’d begun my graduate study there. He immediately galvanized the place. By that time I had given up the idea that I was a real composer—although I’d composed quite a bit—but I was crazy about composition, new compositions, composers, and I sat in on Ross Finney’s weekly seminar for his composition students, by his permission—never missed a one of those. Ross was very proud that he had taught a course on American music at Smith College, where he had been in the 1930s, preceding his tenure at Michigan in the 1940s. And he played guitar and he sang to the guitar, mostly folk music, and we did a lot of talking about American music and its history and so on. In fact, he published a review of that very book of mine that we’ve been talking about. So that was one precedent—Ross’s course. Also there was a professor named Raymond Kendall with whom I studied when I was an undergraduate in the early 1940s, just before I had to leave to serve in World War II, and again as a graduate student at Michigan after the war. And in a seminar of his, I remember doing a term paper on film music for The Best Years of Our Lives, a post-World War II movie. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that film.

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah, I’ve seen it; it’s almost 3 hours long…

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Yes. In any case, Kendall interested me again in American music as an academic. So I had this encouragement. But they were very unusual, not perhaps unique, but very unusual.

 

FRANK J. OTERI: Now in terms of America’s music history—I remember when Kyle Gann‘s book came out a few years back, and Gann was involved in the most recent edition of your book, he wrote the last chapter…

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Right—in the 4th edition, which came out in 2000.

FRANK J. OTERI: Everybody said that the thing they found so surprising and refreshing about his book was that minimali
sm
, rather than being the last chapter was smack in the middle, because so much has happened since then. I’m going to say something that is almost the opposite of that about the 4th edition of your book. We normally think of America’s musical history as beginning with Charles Ives. Very rarely there might be a small chapter about things that happened before but then it’s straight to Ives. What I found so refreshing about your book is that Ives occurs halfway through your book! There’s all this stuff before Ives that most of us don’t pay attention to at all. And I think it’s part of this idea of America not really acknowledging that we have a musical history. There were a lot of fascinating composer before Ives. There were a lot of really inventive music done before Ives and that stuff gets done even less than recent American music.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Yes. I think especially in the field of popular music—I’m talking about pre-Ives popular music, which has now become a kind of folk music—it’s become a part of our vernacular upbringings. I was interested in Ives in the first place, in this connection, and I’ve maintained that interest in a big way.

FRANK J. OTERI: You’ve published a great deal about Ives.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Lots of publications, and I’ve just completed a critical edition of 129 songs by Ives, which is going to be published next year [as a volume of the American Musicological Society‘s series called MUSA—Music of the U.S.A.].

FRANK J. OTERI: So there are an additional 15 beyond the canonic 114.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: You are exactly right! At any rate, one thing that interested me in Ives and why I found him so interesting and worth a chapter all by himself in the history of American music is that he was really the first serious composer of non-pop music, let’s say, to find a usable past in American music, in earlier American music: the music of Civil War songs, band marches, dance tunes, and American hymnody. And he put them to excellent use, not only out of nostalgia for the early days but out of appreciation of the music. His father, of course, George Ives, encouraged him in this, as a musician himself if not a composer. So, yeah, there’s a lot of music back there.

FRANK J. OTERI: Of course, the other thing about Ives is that in some ways he was a pivotal figure on another level in that he was the first really major composer to be almost a complete outcast in a way. He was completely outside the musical establishment of the time and this whole tradition, I mean, we toss around this term maverick

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Yes.

FRANK J. OTERI: You know, the whole notion of outsider composers, there are examples of it, I mean Gann likes to say that Billings was an outsider and that Heinrich was an outsider, but not really in the same way that Ives was an outsider.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: No. Billings was by no means an outsider to the culture, to his own culture. He was an outsider, though, in terms of his independence of thought, claiming that he was a self-learned composer, and an outsider in his first publication, which was a book consisting of nobody else’s music but his own. He was a real outsider in that: that was a total first in American music.

FRANK J. OTERI: And that his music was not European. It didn’t follow the rules that the Europeans enshrined, you know, the proper way that voice-leading should go.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Right. Exactly.

FRANK J. OTERI: He did it his own way, but Ives took it one step further ’cause Ives was not only an outsider in terms of his music not having a relationship to European music, but it didn’t have a relationship to other American music, even though, ultimately, it did.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: It did.

FRANK J. OTERI: It’s a wonderful paradox…

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: It had very little to do with the so-called classical music, or as I prefer to call it the cultivated tradition of American music, it had little to do with that—but lots to do with other kinds of traditional American music, what I call the vernacular traditions of American music. Well, you know, it’s interesting: Michael Tilson Thomas put on this “maverick” series of concerts out in San Francisco a couple of years ago and I was looking at the program book and at the composers in it, and, yeah, they’re all the figures that we think of as “The Mavericks”: Harrison, Cage, then going back: Cowell, Ives, Heinrich, and back to Billings and so on. I’m interested these days, for my own personal reasons, in Virgil Thomson. Increasingly I am thinking of him as a maverick. Nobody thinks of him as such, but he was. For example, long before Copland turned to what he imagined to be folk music, Thomson was doing it out of his own roots in Kansas City, Missouri—his roots in white gospel hymnody, Baptist hymnody, American hymnody. In the mid ’20s he was doing that and by 1934 we had his opera Four Saints in Three Acts which was rooted in that music—and in that sense he was a maverick, before Copland and others turned to such music, in that populist, Americanist era of the 1930s, the Depression era

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, I would say he was a maverick on some other levels. This whole idea of getting people to come to his apartment and sit for a portrait and create a piece of music based on that.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Well, yes. [laughs] You see that larger music score on the wall over there? That’s Virgil’s last complete composition; it’s a portrait of me.

FRANK J. OTERI: Oh, wow!

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Yeah! It’s called Two Birds. When Virgil finished the portrait, which he did in his apartment at the Chelsea Hotel, he gave a little grunt of pleasure and surprise, and said “Look! It’s the end of the page and it’s the end of the piece. Now I’ve got to go pee. Here’s the score, and you can look at it, but you can’t ask me anything about it. [FJO laughs] Now excuse me.”

FRANK J. OTERI: So that was his last piece.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: It was his last completed piece, yes.

FRANK J. OTERI: Wow! How soon did he die after that?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Well, the portrait was in May of 1988, and he died about a year and a half after that.

FRANK J. OTERI: Has that piece ever been recorded?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: I don’t think it’s been recorded, though it’s been played. Jacquelyn Helin has played it in concerts; perhaps others, too.

 

FRANK J. OTERI: You write history and then time passes on, so the things that you don’t write about, the things that happen after you write the book, get left out of the history…

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Obviously!

FRANK J. OTERI: They’re not going to get written about, which is a tricky thing because it takes a while for a new edition of a book to be published and one of the things that I wanted to talk to you quite a bit about was the Grove Dictionary of American Music.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: OK.

FRANK J. OTERI: To this day, there’s nothing like it. But you know, a number of years have gone by and lo and behold, there’s a new edition of the official Grove

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: And of Jazz Grove.

FRANK J. OTERI: Right, but there is not a new edition of American Grove. But to take this story back to its beginnings, how did the American Grove come about?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Through the vision of Stanley Sadie, who was the editor of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the big 20-volume revision in 1980 of the old Grove’s Dictionary—an outstanding and unique and innovative version of the earlier editions of Grove. Stanley was the editor of that 1980 version, and to it he brought an ecumenical view of music, music all over the world, and all kinds and levels and emphases, including jazz and popular music, which had had no role to speak of in the previous Grove’s Dictionaries. Stanley considered American music important, and he turned to me to be the area editor for the Americas. I didn’t know much about Canadian music, so I got John Beckwith to assist me with Canada; and I got Gerard Béhague to assist me with music south of the border; my own editorial concentration was on United States music and I had a fairly free hand from Stanley on that. Some American composers had been in the New Grove of 1980, and he said, “Well, take a look at the articles on them and consider that this is now going to be an American music dictionary, perhaps of two volumes, and you can enlarge those articles and think about lots and lots and lots of other American composers and American musics of all kinds, and start planning your own dictionary.” And as you know, it ended up with 4 volumes [laughs], twice as long as planned. Fairly early on, it was clear that Stanley, who was British and lived in England, and Wiley, who was American and lived in New York, had a whole ocean between us, and we needed somebody in the middle, so we interviewed for someone to come in and be a sort of administrative interacter, and we happened upon Susan Feder, and she was marvelous. She was, as I’ve insisted ever since, the lynchpin of that dictionary. Within American music, we divided it up by letters for the various sub-areas. I was in charge of sub-area R (among others); that was for immigrant composers like Dvorak, Milhaud, Hindemith, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Bartók, Martinu, and so on.

FRANK J. OTERI: Miklós Rózsa.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Well, Rozsa was assigned to film music, a whole other area.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now the thing about that edition that’s so unusual is here you have essentially a British publication, devoting itself to being an exhaustive compendium of information about the music of one specific country outside of that country. Why didn’t we ever come up with the idea for an American Grove ourselves?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Probably because of that tendency on the part of Americans to think that they are not really quite as sophisticated or serious minded or they don’t have a history, they don’t have a historical background comparable to those of the European subcontinent. What Lou Harrison calls the northwest corner of Asia! [laughs] But I must point out that again Stanley Sadie was self-effacing and generous: he didn’t pretend to know anything about American music, so he came to me and effectively said, “Here…” He was working for MacMillan Company, Ltd. of course, which was in it for the money, and they thought they saw a market in America for an encyclopedia essentially of American music, thought it would be a big sales item … and this brings us back to the question, there’s this brand new 29- or 30-volume second edition of the big international dictionary. And there’s a new edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz. Why not a new one of “AmeriGrove”? Well, apparently it wasn’t as financially successful as they had hoped or planned or imagined. And so there’s never been a mention of a 2nd edition.

FRANK J. OTERI: And it was never issued in paperback either.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: No, no, you’re right.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, that…once again that leads to another interesting issue. Stanley Sadie, not knowing about American music, was very lucky to find you and to find Susan Feder and to find other people who were very knowledgeable about this. But when we let someone else write our own history rather than write it for ourselves, we face the problem of a lot of the information not being there and one of the things that I thought was so interesting about the 1980 Grove, which was obviously taken care of in American Grove and the revised new Grove that just came out—in the 1980 edition, John Adams wasn’t in there. You could say that his career was just starting, but he had already reached a level of recognition that a comparable British composer who was his age would have been in there just because they would’ve known about him, they would’ve known that this is somebody to include. Which raises the question—how do you get into Grove? Where do you need to be in your career?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Well, perhaps it was my fault if John Adams was not in the 1980 version. I can’t remember when I first became aware of John Adams as a composer. I think it must have been around that time. But remember: 1980 was the publication date of the New Grove, so essentially that dictionary was completed by 1978 or something like that. But I made very certain to get John Adams in AmeriGrove, in 1986!

FRANK J. OTERI: As well as John Luther Adams!

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: John Luther Adams! Good, I’m glad. [laughs] Oh! Maybe that’s why John Luther was so pleasant to me when he became president of AMC and showed up in New York from his native Alaska!

FRANK J. OTERI: So, where do you need to be in your career to merit an entry?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: It’s so objective…objective?? That’s an interesting slip!! It’s so subjective: it depends on who’s doing the selection and who’s doing the recommendations. You must remember that the big Grove’s Dictionary of 1980 had hundreds of authors—hundreds! And Stanley Sadie turned to American musicologists for all kinds of topics, not just American but in fact, most of the musicological articles on major classical music composers were by Americans. And, for the American Grove, there were a similarly large number of American contributors, and once Susan and I had decided on the subdivision into areas, we had about 15 to 20 of them, and we got area sub-editors for each of those. John Rockwell, for example, was our principle adviser on rock, both in the entries to have on rock and the authors to write them; at the time John was the major rock critic. Similarly, Edward Berlin, who did a doctoral dissertation on ragtime (by the way, still the best book on ragtime, now in its 2nd edition) was named as the area sub-editor for ragtime, charged with proposing players and composers of ragtime, and authors on entries on them. So, that was one way in which the dictionary was not a hegemony or a dictatorship of content, so to speak, though obviously it called on decisions by individuals.

FRANK J. OTERI: In a way though, with newer music, you’re acting a little bit as a fortuneteller, you’re acting a bit as a…maybe in 1980 it wasn’t so clear, or I take it back, 1978, maybe by 1978, Shaker Loops hadn’t even been composed yet.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Is that true? I was trying to remember the first time I heard Shaker Loops and also the Greek…

FRANK J. OTERI:Phrygian Gates was 1979, I think.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: O.K.

FRANK J. OTERI: And Shaker Loops was ’80. One piece of his had already been recorded though called American Standard.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: I don’t even know that piece!

FRANK J. OTERI: With that great middle movement “Christian Zeal and Activity”…

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Oh, yeah!

FRANK J. OTERI: It was a fascinating piece and it was recorded by the Obscure label that Brian Eno ran for a while, but that was the only thing on record. So maybe in 1978 it would be hard to tell that he was going to be such a major player.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Yes, I think so, exactly.

FRANK J. OTERI: And this gets back to what we were saying before. You write a book of history and then life goes on. What do you do with all the stuff that happens afterwards? Well, now they have this very impressive idea that the whole Grove Dictionary is on the Internet.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Yes.

FRANK J. OTERI: And theoretically they should be able to revise it regularly, add works lists so the works list doesn’t end with the publishing date, because a living composer is still composing theoretically. Yet, those changes haven’t happened because such an enterprise is so cumbersome…I thought it was really interesting, Melinda Wagner won the Pulitzer Prize a couple of years ago. She’s not in the new edition of Grove Dictionary. Well, she probably wasn’t visible by the time that went to press, but certainly now, having won the Pulitzer Prize, it could be added on the Internet, but it still hasn’t been after two years!

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Yes. But who’s going to add it? And who’s going to be paid—who’s going to pay that person to add it? Once again we come down to money—as Virgil Thomson taught us, you know! [laughs] Macmillan would have to pay somebody to write the Melinda Wagner article.

FRANK J. OTERI: I still didn’t get the check for the one article I wrote for Grove.
[laughs]

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Was your article printed?

FRANK J. OTERI: Yes. It was only $100. It wasn’t a lot of money, so, it’s not that big a deal…

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: That’s the exception that proves my rule! [laughs]

FRANK J. OTERI: So maybe they need to assign the article first and then worry about paying the person [laughs] I don’t really mean that, of course, but we need to figure out a viable solution to this problem, though, because these articles really need to be written and the economic impetus is not always there. But let’s get back to who gets in and who doesn’t get in. I found there are people who were in the American Grove who were not in the 1980 Grove.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Oh, yeah, lots of ’em!

FRANK J. OTERI: Lots. But some also didn’t make it into the new New Grove.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Well, see there again you’re switching now from something regional (the American Grove), because it’s more than national, the American Grove I mean. Canada’s in it to a degree—but it’s not like the Music in Canada encyclopedia—but there’s also Mexico and Latin America and South America. But now, with the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition, that’s the thing that’s expanded geographically to the whole world, so there had to be some reductions of national or regional representation; it wasn’t a case of automatically including everything that was in the American Grove. And by the way, perhaps I should make it clear that I have had nothing to do with all of the many spin-offs of the New Grove of 1980, only the American Grove.

FRANK J. OTERI: Were you at all involved with this latest edition?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: No, I was not. A former student of mine and her late husband—Carol Oja and the greatly lamented Mark Tucker (who wrote the new general article on “Jazz” for the big “Newer Grove“)—were the area co-editors for United States music. I think they must be credited.

FRANK J. OTERI: So, then I guess from your vantage point, Americans do have as fair a chance as anybody of getting into the Grove Dictionary.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Yeah.

FRANK J. OTERI: Maybe even a fairer chance because there was this entire edition devoted to America.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: I hadn’t thought about the “Newer Grove.” as call the big new 30-volume international dictionary, so I really can’t speak about this. I don’t have any really intelligent opinion about whether we, here in the USA, have a better chance than anybody else except for the influence of the country in general and the increased respect for American music of all kinds on the part of the British.

 

FRANK J. OTERI: In terms of the larger field of musicology, and you have served as president of the American Musicological Society, it was nice to hear that Grove chose a lot of American writers, not just to write about American music but also to write about major composers of “foreign” music as well. There’s a fear perhaps that as an American you get typecast as “that’s the person who can write about American music.” I’ve certainly heard conductors say, “I’m afraid of programming too much American music because then I’ll only get hired to do the concerts with American music.” So what is the responsibility, in your opinion, of American musicologists toward American music vis-à-vis the larger field of music history internationally?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Well, there, Frank, you’re asking me to suggest an ethical mandate, and I’m unwilling to do that. I think that the increase in interest on the part of American musicologists in American music is remarkable. I’m talking about the last 25 years or so. The increase has been immense and now you’re finding it even in the pages of that august journal, The Journal of the American Musicological Society. Ta-da! You’re finding articles on American music of all kinds and by all kinds of authors. One thinks of not just the likes of Richard Crawford, who’s been a pure Americanist, musicologically speaking, forever and nothing else, but you find musicologists like Chris Reynolds, who’s a Beethovenian and also a Renaissance music scholar: he is now working on an edition of some American choral music for MUSA, the Music of the USA series of critical editions. Charles Hamm, first recognized as a leading scholar of Guillaume Dufay‘s 15th-century music, has turned to major research on American popular song. You’re finding other musicologists also who paid their musicological dues, as I spoke of myself having done, as scholars of European music, turning to American music—and not just as a relief, necessarily, but as something worth studying musicologically speaking. So I don’t think it’s a matter of responsibility, it’s a matter of receptivity, by the musicological establishment, which has been created by a whole bunch of things, such as the publication of the American Grove Dictionary, the Institute for Studies in American Music at Brooklyn College, which I founded in 1971, and the Society for American Music begun in 1974 as the Sonneck Society (after Oscar Sonneck, the first important chief of the Music Division of the Library of Congress, and writer of a lot about American music). There have been all of these things to encourage the musicologists to say, “Hey, hey! Look!”

FRANK J. OTERI: You made an issue in the introduction to your book, that popular music very much needs to be taken as a part of our history. Jazz gets in there quite a bit, although jazz really isn’t really popular music anymore.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: No.

FRANK J. OTERI: And rock is slowly morphing into its own separate sub-genre of music, now that we’re in a sort of a post-rock world. This is another ethical question I guess, is there any music not worth studying at all? Is there anything we can ignore as a part of our history?

H. WILEY HITCHC
OCK:
Any music, if one gets interested in it, is worth taking very seriously, not only emotionally but intellectually and significantly as a part of life. It’s a matter of being interested in sound and music, and in the experiencing of sound as something other than a signal for action (like a siren, for instance). For me, no music that I can imagine is unworthy of attention. Whether it mandates attention by everyone is another matter.

FRANK J. OTERI: Do you have to love it to write about it?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: I should hope so!

Frederic Rzewski Visits America



Frederick Rzewski
Photo by Michael Wilson, courtesy Nonesuch

At Nonesuch Records, NYC
On John Cage’s Birthday (September 5, 2002)—1:30 PM

Videotaped by Amanda MacBlane

 

FRANK J. OTERI: You studied composition with a very diverse group of people whose music is very different from your own: Babbitt and Sessions, Randall Thompson, Piston, Elliott Carter

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: I never studied with Carter…

FRANK J. OTERI: The Grove Dictionary says you did…

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: No!

FRANK J. OTERI: But you did study with Babbitt and Sessions?

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: Technically, yes

FRANK J. OTERI: The first pieces of yours to gain wide exposure are so different from their music, but to this day, the notion of twelve-tone composition plays a role in your work and is part of your vocabulary.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: Hard to say. I was at Harvard in the ’50s and I had some teachers who were very important for me. Randall Thompson was one of the best teachers I ever had. I was in his counterpoint class at Harvard. I think in those days the school was most importantly a place where I came together with people like myself and I think that’s probably the most useful function of schools in general. It’s not so much a matter of studying in the sense that information is transmitted from one generation to another, but it’s where under the guidance of perhaps older people it’s possible to link up with people who are doing things similar to what you’re doing.

FRANK J. OTERI: Even younger people sometimes… Vaughan Williams studied with Ravel who was younger than him and that experience was very important in his development as a composer…

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: It’s complicated because of course the teaching of composition is still done according to certain time-worn procedures which really don’t make that much sense anymore. For instance, private lessons are something I find unproductive. So I try not to have private lessons. I try to have people in groups, for a number of reasons—one of them being the reason you had private lessons in the first place is that was the way that trade secrets could be passed from master to disciple. Mozart had secrets, and probably Beethoven had secrets, too. But there are no more secrets. So that particular forum doesn’t make sense…

FRANK J. OTERI: In a way, the whole process of academic training is about validation. Those are the composers with pedigree; the others are the great unwashed. Your career has been a challenge to that. You’ve always been about challenging authority and challenging hierarchy. So it’s interesting that you come from this illustrious academic background, studying with Babbitt who has certainly had so much influence on composition and composition training in America.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: Well, that’s something of an exaggeration. I don’t think any composer has ruled over anything in this part of the world. There’s not much power involved in musical composition. Aaron Copland, maybe, had a lot of influence, which he used in a good way. I don’t think composers have very much to say. It’s different than in Europe. In Europe, there’s a situation in which people in intellectual areas and cultural positions actually wield some kind of power and influence.

FRANK J. OTERI: Definitely, to this day, Boulez hovers over music life in France…

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: For example…But you don’t have that in the United States for all kinds of historical reasons. There are very few cases if any in American history where you can point to an intellectual or cultural figure who had some kind of influence in the same way that Tolstoy or Jean-Paul Sartre could be said to have held some kind of position of importance. Maybe Mark Twain is as close as you could get.

FRANK J. OTERI: It’s funny. It’s hard for me to see Mark Twain, who was such a cultural critic, as an authority figure in any way.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: In the sense of an American intellectual universally respected whose voice carried some kind of weight. But not really. You can’t really compare him with someone like Tolstoy who, when he spoke, masses of people listened. We really don’t have that here in the United States. So, I think if there is some sort of parallel, like what you’re describing, it doesn’t boil down to real power or influence. Take someone like Susan Sontag. Nobody in the United States really cares what she says or what she writes about. Occasionally she might offend some people. I don’t think any American president has ever felt offended by what some intellectual might say.

FRANK J. OTERI: Except for maybe Harry Truman who was really offended when Paul Hume wrote a bad review of his daughter…

[Rzewski laughs]

FRANK J. OTERI: You left America many, many years ago becoming an “expatriate composer,” whatever that means.
You describe a cultural life here in America where nobody wields cultural power, where it’s less hierarchical. And you’ve based yourself in Europe, which is so much more hierarchical. Yet, musically, maybe I’m wrong in thinking this, your life’s work seems to be about breaking down those hierarchies.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: I’m the last person to have an opinion on that [laughs]. I don’t know…I can’t think of any examples where I’ve broken down any hierarchies.

 

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, in trying to access where your music falls in the historical scheme of things, there was definitely a period at some point when your music was informed by minimalism. I’m thinking of pieces like Coming Together. But it was never really a pure minimalism in terms of what minimalism meant: a process where you don’t do anything else in the piece but follow the process. And certainly, your own unique approach to serialism, which you returned to in the 1980s in pieces like Antigone, doesn’t sound like any other music coming out of that particular systemic approach. I’m curious about how you apply serial techniques…

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: I find it difficult to say. I’ve studied this material and certainly have spent a lot of time with it and probably in many ways am still thinking of serialism.

FRANK J. OTERI: It’s interesting because serialism was originally designed to throw out the shackles of the tonal system and liberate us from it but it very quickly became a system unto itself which also had shackles that we needed to be liberated from.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: Well, system in a very large sense, maybe, yes. But in the same way throwing dice or consulting the I Ching or applying some kind of minimalistic procedures or using the collage technique, all of these things are systems. So serialism is just one system among many.

FRANK J. OTERI: So, when you write a work employing serial technique, such as Antigone, it’s not purely serial. At least it doesn’t sound like it is. I’m curious about how you constructed that music.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: It actually was written almost in the form of a diary. And of course it’s based on a text and the text has its own structure. It’s not a purely musical structure; it’s partly dramatic. I don’t think there’s time to go into it in detail.

FRANK J. OTERI: Your music has always been heterodox, polystylistic…

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: Yeah, I’ve heard that before. It’s probably true.

FRANK J. OTERI: So it interests me, given your stylistic inclinations, that you’ve based yourself in Europe which to our notions is so much more stratified.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: I can’t really say. I’ve thought about why I’ve done certain things in my life and I’ve come to the conclusion that there really is no reason at all. And I think that’s true of many people. One tends to make life-changing decisions…You fall in love. You get married. You make important decisions very often on impulse without thinking about it and for no good reason. And later you invent reasons to explain why you did what you did. I don’t know why I ended up living in Brussels. I just can’t say why something happened the way it did. I wish I could. But I can say how it happened. I went to Italy on a Fulbright in 1960 and I ran into Severino Gazzelloni, who was playing in lots of festivals at the time, and I ended up being his pianist for a while. And that way I got into performing in Europe. One thing led to another. I met my wife. We had children. I came back to the United States a few times. But by the time we moved back to New York in the ’70s, we had three children already. We were living in New York for five years with basically no money and it was not a good situation. So we moved back to Europe and things just developed that way. It’s true that probably it was easier and still is, as far as I can see, to make a living with new music in Europe than in North America.

FRANK J. OTERI: Why do you think that is?

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: I think there are many reasons for that, both having to do with the culture and the structure in which the culture is replenished and supported. The fact that in North America, people tend to live separated geographically and it’s an automobile-based culture so people don’t go to concerts as often as they do in European cities, and all kinds of reasons. I don’t know myself. But I do know that I play a lot in Northern Europe, especially, and have very few concerts in the United States.

FRANK J. OTERI: I want to get back to that meeting with Gazzelloni. Here you were a Harvard grad who studied with all these big names, and you came to Europe on a Fulbright and soon met up with David Tudor, John Cage, Christian Wolff, people who had a view of musical composition that people at the time believed was diametrically opposed to the serialism of Babbitt and his followers.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: Well, you might think so. Actually, there’s a lot more that these different currents have in common. I reflected on this subject in the last few years and I realized you have all these different trends in 20th-century composition and they seem to be different. But actually they have one thing in common, all these different schools, and that is that they’re all system based. They’re all based on systems of one kind or another: there’s the twelve-tone technique; there’s chance procedures; there’s minimalism… All of these have to do with some kind of gimmick or machine for producing music. The one thing that they don’t do, the one thing that composers in the 20th century don’t do, is to simply write down the tunes that are going through their heads. I think for quite interesting reasons, composers, unlike painters, poets, and so forth, have never seriously been concerned with exploring the area of the unconscious. There are no surrealist composers. There are people who are kind of cousins of the surrealists like Erik Satie, or you could point to early Schoenberg or Mahler or Morton Feldman. But there are no composers who, unlike jazz musicians or who like jazz musicians rather, simply explore stream of consciousness methods of writing. Composers in the 20th century tend to be more like scientists or mathematicians than poets. I think it has
to do with the fact that so-called serious music is still a descendant of sacred music. It’s secular, but there’s division between serious and light, which is very clear in music as opposed to other forms of expression. It’s still related to the division of sacred and secular. So composers are still very much a part of the Christian theological tradition, if you like. And so, the unconscious mind, and everything connected with it, is still, so to speak, anathema. And this is the area that interests me.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, one of things I’ve always found so fascinating about Cage is that although he was promulgating indeterminate music, he hated jazz.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: No, he didn’t hate jazz. In fact, there are some of his pieces that are definitely jazz-related.

FRANK J. OTERI: He made a great deal of comments that were disdainful toward jazz and the whole notion of improvising musicians.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: I know what you’re talking about but it’s not completely true. He and Tudor did a lot of improvising. They didn’t call it that, but that’s what it was.

 

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, during that time in Europe you also came into direct contact with some of the leading figures of the free jazz movement such as Anthony Braxton. You even recorded an album with Steve Lacy. Part of what separated you from all these other composers from the beginning is that in addition to being a composer, you were always a performer as well, a pianist.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: That’s how I make my living.

FRANK J. OTERI: And you frequently play the music of other composers, not just your own…

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: Correct.

FRANK J. OTERI: You’ve also recorded music by Tom Johnson and Henri Pousseur. I heard your recent recording of music by Cornelius Cardew; it’s wonderful…

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: I’m glad you like it.

FRANK J. OTERI: What started first for you?

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: Playing or writing? I think they started more or less at the same time. It was so far back that I can’t remember it clearly. I started playing the piano when I was four or something like that. I still have some notebooks of infantile scrawls from age five, so the two things went together from the very beginning.

FRANK J. OTERI: To have that physical tactile connection to making music, rather than just a cerebral one, perhaps guarantees that you’re not going to exclusively be a scientist, but also a poet.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: There was a time when I entertained the idea of going into science. I was interested in chemistry, astronomy… Still am! I try to keep up with new work in the sciences.

FRANK J. OTERI: But your approach to music is not exclusively a scientific or a mathematical one, it’s more poetic…

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: Oh no, I don’t know what it is. I just write down what’s in my head.

FRANK J. OTERI: I’d be inclined to group you with those composers you were grouping together before when you talked about musical cousins to the surrealists: Satie, Feldman

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: I would like to be in that league. I aspire to be in that league. I’m not sure I’m there yet.

 

FRANK J. OTERI: Recently I went record shopping and picked up a re-issue of an LP you were part of: Musica Elettronica Viva. An LP called The Sound Pool

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: Where did you say you found that?

FRANK J. OTERI: A great record store called Downtown Music Gallery. That record is quite a sonic experience…

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: That recording was a total accident. As I remember, this was a concert that we did. Well, you can hardly call it a concert, because it was Paris in 1969 and there were perhaps 300 people performing in this building. They were all over the place. And I think Alvin Curran happened to have his tape recorder going in the men’s room. There must have 50 or 60 people in that men’s room. And I think that’s where most of that recording took place. I don’t remember exactly. So it was a total accident.

FRANK J. OTERI: For me this recording raises the whole issue of the difference between a live performance and a recording. One of the things I kept thinking while I was listening to it is that while it was interesting, there was something I really wasn’t getting from the record. I wish I could have been there because I missed something from the record…

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: Well, you know what they say about the ’60s. If you can remember it, you weren’t there! But I can tell you about it…

FRANK J. OTERI: But even the name of the group, Musica Elettronica Viva, implies that it is meant to be a live experience. It was hard for me to hear what the electronics were on this record.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: The electronics were definitely there someplace, but whether they were in the men’s room, I rather doubt it. [laughs]

FRANK J. OTERI: Your music is so associated with the piano because you are a pianist. You have written so much piano music over the years and now Nonesuch has released this seven CD set of you playing your piano music. So I don’t really think of you as someone involved with electronic music but you were part of this extremely influential group with Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum, both of whom still work extensively with electronics…

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: I did quite a lot of work with electronics until my children started to grow up and then I had to make a choice. I couldn’t afford both. So all of my equipment I turned over to Alvin Curran who stayed in Rome when we moved back to New York in the early ’70s and that was kind of the end of my active involvement in electronics. I’ve been thinking of going back to it again beca
use now of course it’s cheaper and easier.

FRANK J. OTERI: The other people who were part of that group, Curran and Teitelbaum, are still very active. I just recently heard an album on New Albion of new work by Teitelbaum for electronically processed shakuhachi. Fascinating stuff, but a very different road than the one you took.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: That’s his specialty. He also does not have children. Neither does Alvin. I just couldn’t afford all of the expense and feed the children at the same time.

FRANK J. OTERI: That’s really food for thought. This taps into this whole idea of a live versus pre-recorded experience. Forgive me if I’m putting a thought in your head, it seems that for you music is first and foremost a live experience. I know we’re here at Nonesuch and one of the reasons we’re talking is because of this amazing, unprecedented seven CD set of you playing your piano music. But I get the sense that it is important for you to perform in front of an audience.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: Well, as I say, that’s how I make my living. But, on the other hand, a lot of the stuff I’ve done is meant for piano players. Not so much for an audience as for the performers.

FRANK J. OTERI: Certainly the extremely long piece of yours, The Road, four parts of which are on these CDs, which you describe as a novel, is analogous to something like the Well Tempered Clavier. It’s really a piece that’s meant to be played at home.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: That’s right.

FRANK J. OTERI: Who would sit and listen to this in a concert hall for seven hours?

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: Nobody. But that’s not important. Maybe a few people…but that’s not the point. I wanted to write something that was long enough, when it is finished it will be eight hours, so that very few people, if any, would cover the whole territory. The whole point of The Road, which is what it’s called, is that it is there when you turn on to it and it’s still there when you turn off of it. So it doesn’t have a clear beginning or an ending.

FRANK J. OTERI: For years in the Guinness Book of World Records the longest piano piece was Sorabji‘s Opus Clavicembalisticum, and then that was knocked out of the ring by La Monte Young‘s Well Tuned Piano which now lasts about 6 hours when he does it, but you’ve beat them both…

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: But this is nothing new. The Well Tempered Clavier lasts about 4 hours. And the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, but I guess it’s not a single work. The Mendelssohn Songs Without Words lasts a couple of hours. This is part of a long tradition.

 

FRANK J. OTERI: I wanted to talk with out about your piano music played by other pianists. Certainly a work like The People United Will Never Be Defeated has almost achieved the status of being a piece of standard repertoire in new music. There have been so many different pianists who’ve played it over the years and there are so many recordings of it in circulation: Ursula Oppens, Marc-André Hamelin…There have been a really wide variety of interpretations. And then there’s you—the performer who also plays this music. What is your feeling about sending this music out in the world and getting back all these other interpretations?

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: What do you mean?

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, it’s almost like a parent-child situation. You give birth to this music and then one day there it is—existing out in the world separate and apart from you.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: I see what you mean. Sometimes it’s a little difficult. Sometimes I have mixed feelings about that because sometimes I notice that the young guy gets the gig and I think, “Well, you know, why not me?” On the other hand, I can’t really complain if somebody’s playing the music well. I guess it’s all for the best.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, certainly even though you play all of these pieces yourself, some of them were written for others, like De Profundis, which was originally written for Anthony de Mare

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: Yes.

FRANK J. OTERI: That’s quite an intense piece…

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: Depends on who does it. When Tony does, it’s funny. When I do it, it’s sad.

FRANK J. OTERI: In both cases, it’s pretty intense. I’ve heard both of you do it. Tony I heard do it live as well which was really an experience.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: A number of people have done it and I noticed that all of the interpretations I’ve heard of that piece have been good. There’s something about the writing that’s a built-in safety mechanism against mediocrity. No conventional or inhibited performer will go anywhere near this piece because it calls for a considerable amount of courage to perform these things in front of an audience. So everybody who does play this piece has an original and creative approach to it.

FRANK J. OTERI: A great deal of your piano music is not virtuosic in the standard definition. It’s more virtuosic as performance art, if you will: the grunting and tapping, the whoops, singing, and so forth. It’s a really different approach to the notion of performance.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: Well, I learned a lot from John Cage. He was always an important role model for me and, of course, he was a master of this kind of thing.

 

FRANK J. OTERI: You’ve written for other instruments as well so I thought it would be interesting to talk a bit about groups you’ve worked closely with and not so closely with who have played your music. You’ve written several pieces for Zeitgeist, a wonderful ensemble based in Minneapolis. And they recorded these pieces. Now, they’re a rare example of a group that will really spend the time to get inside the music.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: It’s true. There aren’t too many groups like that, but there are some. I feel quite optimistic, actually. I think the
re are more and more groups of young performers. I feel like the avant-garde is now coming back. There was kind of a lull period in the ’90s when not much was happening. And now I have the feeling that the kind of 20 to 30-year-old generation is starting to get interesting again in experimental music. And that’s true all over the world.

FRANK J. OTERI: Getting back to working with Zeitgeist, how did their musical sensibilities inform the music you wrote for them.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: For a number of reasons, I wasn’t able to spend too much time with them so we weren’t in very close contact. But on the other hand, we kept renewing it. So I got to know them pretty well. A lot of it had to do with the nature of the instrumentation. Minneapolis is a place where they build steel drums, so that’s how I got into writing for steel drums because they happen to be particularly good at it. So that’s just a geographical accident I guess. But, certainly that conditions the choice of instruments, for example.

FRANK J. OTERI: What about writing for the orchestra? You’ve written six orchestral works over the years I believe.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: That many?

FRANK J. OTERI: I remember being at a performance almost 20 years ago at the New York Philharmonic. It was part of the Horizons Festival that Jacob Druckman coordinated. I’m still trying to remember the title of your piece, but I never forgot the piece itself, which I thought was really fascinating. But, to my surprise at the time, the audience reaction was so bad.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: I don’t remember that. [laughs]

FRANK J. OTERI: You were a piano soloist in that…

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: The Silence of Infinite Spaces.

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah, that’s the name. For me it was sort of a horrible and wonderful experience at the same time. When people were booing and loudly walking out, part of me thought, “Yeah! This is great!” As a teenager I felt this was the real punk rock, playing a piece that got all these subscribers mad. But at the same time it was really upsetting to get a taste of this orchestra subscriber culture which is so closed minded, where music has to go a certain way in order to be valid, and if you don’t make music that way you’re not making music in their mind. And as a composer this is upsetting, because it’s appealing to write in a large form for a whole bunch of musicians because it can sound really, really great, but there are all these other issues associated with it.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: What can I say? What kind of issues?

FRANK J. OTERI: You know, the internal structure of how an orchestra works and the whole subscription model for constructing an audience. Who goes to the orchestra?

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: I don’t. I certainly don’t. It doesn’t appeal to me.

FRANK J. OTERI: But there’s a lot of really great music written for this medium.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: But it is an anachronistic form. The social structure of the orchestra is really something inherited from 18th-century feudal society where the musician is not an artist but some kind of servant. Of course, this is something that shouldn’t exist. It shouldn’t be allowed! [laughs] My wife Nicole always thought that orchestras should be abolished. Maybe one should be kept, some kind of museum like they have some kind of gagaku ensemble in Japan just to keep the tradition going. And I sort of agree with that. I don’t see any reason orchestras should continue. They don’t do anything useful.

FRANK J. OTERI: But you’ve written six orchestral pieces!

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: Well, usually it wasn’t my idea. It was somebody who asked for it. And with few exceptions, I can’t think of any good performances of them. Mostly my experience with orchestras has been negative. No, I’m no longer really interested in it and I don’t have much to do with this form, it’s true. Some people do this very well, and that’s fine, but it’s not my particular forte and I’m not drawn to it and the orchestras in general are not drawn to me either. So, we have a very good relationship!

 

FRANK J. OTERI: How about publishing and recording? You took a very interesting stance that we did a news story about on NewMusicBox, the notion of “copyleft” as opposed to copyright

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: Yes.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now we’re in an era where all the record companies are all up in arms about the proliferation of file swapping. Everything’s going to be free and there will no longer be an economy to fuel the making of recordings. And, theoretically, scores can similarly be swapped, so what is a publisher to do? The models that have been the infrastructure for music are now at a crossroads.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: I have very little to do with music publishers and this is something that’s always puzzled me because I have spent most of my professional life doing new music, not merely my own, but other composers, yet I’ve had little or no contact with the world of publishing. I’ve felt that one of us must be wrong and I’ve decided it’s them. I can think of very few cases where music publishers are actually helping the cause of new music. In most cases they are obstacles to the dissemination of new music. And quite sincerely I can’t understand why anyone would want to be a music publisher in the first place! It must be very difficult to make money with new music. Why would anyone want to do it? I think it would be better if they just disappeared. Besides, today you don’t need music publishers, you can be your own publisher.

FRANK J. OTERI: I know so many people in that world who really are true believers in and crusaders for new music.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: Yes, I know, it has a symbolic value, which still carries a lot of weight. It’s somehow a form of prestige if your music is published by a well-known publisher. But as far as I can see, most of these people don’t do anything for the music. On the contrary, they just take the money and run!

FRANK J. OTERI: I think there are some important exceptions to this, not just publishers but record companies as well. Take Nonesuch, for example, putting out this seven CD set of your music. That’s a tremendous endorsement of you and your work. It’s atypical in our time or in any time. It’s a huge statement for them to be making. And I know it’s going to be lower priced than a seven CD set would normally be in order to reach more people. A lot of work on their part went into this. And that’s true for the other smaller labels that have put out your music over the years like New Albio
n
and O.O. Discs and CRI. And record companies are businesses so this is an investment they’ve made. But one wonders with what is going on in the record business right now, where this will be ten years from now…

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: I don’t know. I have never understood the music industry. I don’t know how it works. I know very little about it. I’ve had very little contact with it. I’ve done a number of things for various record companies. But as far as Nonesuch is concerned, this is the first time I’ve had a contact at a record company that has actually asked my opinion about certain things like: am I happy about the cover, and so forth. I’m very flattered by that. But I don’t know how it works. I don’t know what they hope to achieve. I’m just glad they’re doing it. I don’t know anything about the music business.

 

FRANK J. OTERI: Let’s talk a bit about the role of the composer in society. You’re an outspoken person about politics and have pretty firm opinions about music making. What should the role of a composer in our society be?

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: I don’t think there’s any “should.” You could say something about what composers have been objectively in terms of the world around them historically and I think that probably if it’s possible to speak about what the role of the composer is, as you put it, today, it’s probably not that much different from a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago. It seems to me that there it’s much clearer. If you look at the second half of the 19th century, you had what were called these national composers: Grieg, Smetana, Dvorak, and of course Wagner is the biggest one. And the role of these composers in my opinion seems to have been to express in lofty terms, with more or less impressive means like symphony orchestras, the national soul as it appears in the mythological history of the nation, the natural beauties of the country, and so forth. And I think that has not changed a great deal. So today, composers no longer write symphonic poems about national heroes but they still somehow express the aspirations of the national culture. Notice that whenever you see the name of a composer in print it’s usually accompanied by an adjective qualifying the nationality of the composer.

FRANK J. OTERI: Which is interesting getting back to you as an expatriate. Do you still consider yourself an American composer?

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: Yeah, sure. There’s no way you can avoid it. If you take somebody like John Cage who was certainly one of the most cosmopolitan figures in this field, he was still an American composer and I think there are very few people who can escape from that. This is something that you have around for better or worse.

FRANK J. OTERI: Certainly I hear it in some of your works directly, whether it’s the North American Ballads, or Jefferson, where you’re setting part of the Declaration of Independence. A composer from Finland or Venezuela wouldn’t do that or, if they did, it would be for very different reasons.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: Yes, I agree. But where does that take us?

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, if you’re still an American composer and you say composers aspire to their national myths, does your music aspire to a national myth about America? Should people be thinking about this when they listen to your music?

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: I don’t know. It’s true that probably a good chunk of what I’ve done has to do with some kind of local…Well, I did grow up in North America and I speak the English language. I’m an American even though I’ve spent more that half my life outside the United States by this time. I’m still very connected with this country’s culture.

 

From Rzewski: Antigone-Legend/Jefferson

From David Taylor, bass trombone

From A Decade: Zeitgeist Plays Rzewski

From Frederic Rzewski: The People United Will Never Be Defeated

From Rzewski Plays Rzewski: Piano Works, 1975-1999

A Virtual Conversation with Jaron Lanier



Tuesday, June 4, 2002—10:30 a.m.
Lanier’s Tribeca Loft, New York, NY

Videotaped and transcribed by Amanda MacBlane

 

WILLIAM DUCKWORTH: You’re both a scientist and a musician and you are probably most well-known for virtual reality. What interests me is which one of those talents came first?

JARON LANIER: You know it’s funny, sometimes a pattern emerges in your childhood that you find repeating throughout your life. When I was pretty small I had a mother who was interested in having a high-achieving child, just to put things very, very mildly, so I had this vague idea that I was supposed to be both a scientist and a musician, that those were sort of expected.

WILLIAM DUCKWORTH: Did you see those two abilities as separate or were they always together?

JARON LANIER: Well, they’re somewhat different in execution. It’s not so much that they’re different abilities, but they’re different disciplines, you know. Science isn’t so much a talent as a combination of passion and patience [laughs]. Science is a discipline. It’s a way of being passionate about something in which you have to somehow, against you own nature, take on the humility of actually listening to what the world tells you is working versus what is not working. That makes things sort of slow and if you can adjust to that, then you can be a scientist. And then with music, it’s about connecting to other people. Music is about reaching other people. But other people are worlds unto themselves and so the scale of the two endeavors is similar. In both cases, whether you want to frame it in those terms or not, there’s a kind of infective humility that you have to take on in order to be successful, really acknowledging what that enormous world out there is like. And even the most arrogant scientists or musicians who are able to succeed have somehow learned how to respond to this thing outside themselves with tremendous patience and that’s where they have something in common.

WILLIAM DUCKWORTH: So is it one set of abilities wearing two hats, as opposed to two very different kinds of abilities?

JARON LANIER: I think there are differences in talents between people, but those talents are of a very elemental sort. They aren’t really musical or scientific. They become musical or scientific when a person combines them with passion and patience and something develops. I think that the key thing isn’t so much having a particular talent, but finding some sort of match between passion and patience in order to bring out what everyone’s talents are. I don’t think there’s such a thing as a person who couldn’t be a scientist if that’s what they really wanted to be, or someone who couldn’t be a musician if that’s what they really wanted to be, but the way in which they’d be a scientist or a musician would vary according to their particular qualities.

WILLIAM DUCKWORTH: I know you went to college very early. I think you started when you were 14. What were you planning to be?

JARON LANIER: When I was first in college when I was young, I don’t think I had a plan. I wasn’t thinking that way. I wasn’t looking forward to some sort of affirmative accomplishment, but instead, I was looking backward at trying to escape a difficult circumstance. I wanted to find someway to live in which I could be less lonely, more understood or just less terrified. You know, I was really running away from things and less toward things. And perhaps that’s a form of motivation that I needed. I don’t know.

WILLIAM DUCKWORTH: But you didn’t see yourself going as a scientist or as a musician, you were just going to college?

JARON LANIER: Well, I always self-identified as a musician, I think, primarily. But what there was in southern New Mexico was a concentration of scientists and engineers because of the weapons programs. And very close to the little town I grew up in, Mesilla, there was a university with one of the finest early computer centers and a fine math department in the middle of nowhere supporting a missile range and an atomic weapons lab and a very friendly, open-minded collection of academics who liked the idea of weird local kids hanging out. And the number of local kids from that little dusty, out-of-the-way place in New Mexico that ended up having careers as mathematicians or scientists is extraordinary because of this odd circumstance. I happened to be very lucky, but I didn’t appreciate it at the time, of course. I had no idea that it was unusual.

WILLIAM DUCKWORTH: Was New Mexico State University the first place that you actually got your hands on a computer?

JARON LANIER: Absolutely. I was a late bloomer at computers. You mentioned that I started college early, and it’s true. But I was very anti-computer at first. I thought that computers were ugly, which they were and for the most part still are. I thought that computers were impure and that what one should be is a pure mathematician who achieves things through the powers of analysis and intellect and that computers were the weakling’s crutch, which they often still are. I mean, all of that’s true. It’s all real! So I think the way I got into computers was the way that most people do, because of economic necessity. There was a job in the math department doing something with a computer and it turned out to be an incredibly fortuitous thing.

WILLIAM DUCKWORTH: Did you teach yourself programming?

JARON LANIER: Oh yeah. There wasn’t any sense of teaching programming at that time, you were just expected to get it. But on the other hand, you have to remember, computers are hard to the degree that they’re large and so, in those days, computers were smaller…I mean a lot smaller, more than a million times smaller than the ones I am working with now. The size of programs that could exist were pretty small so it wasn’t really that hard. I mean, writing a small program isn’t that hard. Anyone can do that. It’s when they get big that it gets tricky and, in fact, if it gets really big then nobody knows how to do it and that’s what I’m trying to
work on now. So the little computers we had around then weren’t that hard to program. And we used these little punch cards, so there’d be these stacks of cards and you’d always lose them, and New Mexico’s windy sometimes, so they’d be flying.

WILLIAM DUCKWORTH: I remember that from Illinois. Running your cards on Thursday and getting the sounds back next Tuesday.

JARON LANIER: Right, right, right, right. Yeah.

 

WILLIAM DUCKWORTH: Wasn’t it about the same time that you hitchhiked to Mexico to visit Conlon Nancarrow?

JARON LANIER: Right. When I was a kid somebody played me a tape of some of the Nancarrow studies. If I’m not mistaken it was a reel-to-reel tape of an LP that was put out by 1750 Arch. I think it had all kinds of prepared piano and microtonal piano, maybe. There were 3 [Nancarrow] piano studies on it. I don’t remember which ones, but they were some of the more striking Romantic studies that have great special effects in them.

WILLIAM DUCKWORTH: Was it No. 21, Canon X?

JARON LANIER: No, I didn’t hear Canon X until later. And Canon X is a little bit more austere. I don’t remember, but it was three of them and I was so turned on by them that I couldn’t talk about anything else for months. I was just so enthralled.

WILLIAM DUCKWORTH: How did you meet Nancarrow?

JARON LANIER: It was another one of those lucky things. I just decided I had to meet this guy and somehow I got this notion in my head that I’d hitchhike to Mexico City and show up on his doorstep. And I did that in my teens a couple of times. Mexico in those days was a sweeter place. It was out of control, but it was more like Italy. The drug trade wasn’t this ugly murderous thing, so it wasn’t such an outlandish thing to do and there were all sorts of hippy kids floating through there. So I had my own little odyssey of showing up in Mexico City at his doorstep and then finding myself so in awe that I couldn’t speak to him. So here’s this weird American kid who shows up at this hermit’s doorstep, unable to say a word. So it took a while to establish why I was there, you know? It turned out, though, that Conlon was very interested in mathematics and well read on it and had been particularly interested in different kinds of infinity. So I finally told him, “Oh, I know about that,” and he said, “Come in, come in!” And we talked about all sorts of mathematical topics and Yoko, his wife, took care of me and fed me and I still was almost unable to speak to him. But then, you know, he took me to this sort of bunker…

WILLIAM DUCKWORTH: Behind the house?

JARON LANIER: Yeah, he had this bunker, this very thunderously resonant space filled with bookshelves. He ordered documents from all over the world and he was extraordinarily aware of everything. He wanted to be both worldly and isolated. Hearing his music in his space was just so thrilling.

WILLIAM DUCKWORTH: That must have been fantastic.

JARON LANIER: You know, I think Nancarrow also did something else. I think he plays a special role in intellectual history because you could say he’s one of the first artists and probably the first musician who confronted the problem of having achieved total control and total flexibility in some important parameter. In his case, it was in time. What do you do if you get to the point where you can do anything, where you can make any sound and you’re not pushing against the capabilities of the human player or the instrument or whatever? Of course, it’s an illusion because you’re still pushing against the ability of cognition to perceive something, which he is in his music, especially by creating these special effects. But there’s also the sense that he’s dealing with a level of freedom that no composer had ever had before and I think that that creates a sort of crisis. And it’s a very typical and endemic crisis in the digital age where you have this sort of flexibility that you didn’t have before brought about by computers. But Nancarrow was the first person to peek at that before there were computers. And in many ways, I think, he found a better path than anyone has since in dealing with that. What he decided to do was to come up with a very abstract idea of organizing time, like this idea of irrational time signatures and all these crazy things he did. And then, as he said, pushing against human cognition: Can you hear an irrational time signature? Yes, actually you can! So I think he found a way forward which was beautiful and I’m still astonished that he’s not better known.

 

WILLIAM DUCKWORTH: Who were the other composers that made a big impression on you? Who formed your background with music?

JARON LANIER: Boy, there are a bunch of them. Bach was the really early one. And then it turns out that I had weird parents out in New Mexico and they had a 78 collection of all kinds of stuff. So I had an Uday Shankar 78 of Hindustani music which was great and I had a 78 of microtonal piano music which was wonderful. It was Christopher Columbus. I don’t even know who composed it. It was an early piece for a quarter-tone piano.

WILLIAM DUCKWORTH: That was the Mexican composer Carrillo, wasn’t it?

JARON LANIER: I believe so. But then, when I was a little bit older, another one who just completely floored me was Harry Partch. The first Harry Partch I heard was an LP for a film called Windsong. That really excited me on many, many, levels: the notion of not just playing with a new tuning system as an intellectual exercise but really getting something out of it. I mean, God, he really got it. That thing worked like crazy. And then designing the instruments and the visuals of them and everything. I always wanted to meet him but unfortunately he died when I was about 14. In my hitchhiking adventures I did eventually find my way to San Diego and I met Danlee Mitchell and a few tim
es he let me crash in my sleeping bag underneath the Marimba Eroica. So I was able to get a little bit of a posthumous connection to Partch. But I would have loved to have met him. And I discovered Scriabin‘s late piano music and that, really floored me. I just adore the last 10 Scriabin piano pieces. In a way, I think he did something that was much more profound than anyone who came later, and with extraordinary emotion and extraordinary depth. There’s just so much in that music. There’s an unquestionable power to it. And for a pianist, it’s also an interesting challenge to play. It’s an exercise in ergonomic extremity. It’s not only that it’s hard, but there’s also this interesting communication that comes out of it. There’s this fusion of different elements. I’ve always had an affinity and fascination with that pre-revolutionary Moscow scene, so I’ve always been interested in Scriabin. And then, much later, I was able to meet both Leon Theremin and Nicolas Slominsky and compare their stories to get a sense of who Scriabin really was, and that was wonderful. As with Partch, I felt I was able to develop a little bit of a posthumous connection to him.

WILLIAM DUCKWORTH: What about jazz and rock? Was that influential?

JARON LANIER: It’s a funny thing, but because of the place I grew up I didn’t have as much access to them as you might think. Southern New Mexico is one of the odder spots in America in that, on the one hand, you have by some measures the densest concentration of scientists and engineers of any other place in the world. On the other hand, aside from them, the remaining people are the poorest people in America and the county I grew up in is consistently the poorest, or the second poorest, county in America. And nothing came there. The radio stations we could hear were usually from Mexico. There weren’t stores of normal sorts. It was very backward. A lot of American mainstream commerce and culture didn’t reach it until later. So I don’t think I was aware of jazz until I first moved to New York. I don’t think I’d ever heard of it, which might sound incredible, but really, there’s no particular way I would have. I don’t think I even heard of something like Frank Sinatra or any big band or any of that stuff. It just wasn’t around in my environment. Some rock’n’roll was and so I heard the Beatles, which was very intense stuff. But I was also rebelling, and since other people were listening to it, I tended to not want to listen to it. But I was pretty impressed by the Beatles. And once again, when something touches me I try to develop a personal connection to it. So with the Beatles, I have a side band that plays every now and again with Sean Lennon, John Lennon‘s son. And we play the piano parts on the Beatles’ records, so there’s a little connection and I have a feeling for what was going on with them. I still hear the Beatles as having this kind of luminosity, this feeling of awakening. Is it just because I and a bunch of other people were young at the time, or is there really something in the music that someone else would hear that has that quality to it? I don’t really know. I really have to say, when I first heard them, I kept thinking there’s so much in this music that is so good, but if only a few little things were changed it would be so much better and I still feel that whenever I hear it. I still feel like there are all these missteps and schmaltzy, stupid things and, you know, I still wish that a few little things were improved here and there. And I’m sure they would too, actually. I also had access to a lot of Mexican pop music. I heard a lot of polka and mariachi and other sorts of things happening in Mexico. The place where I grew up didn’t have so much of an African American or African diaspora quality; it was much more Mexican influenced. And I heard quite a lot of American Indian music.

 

WILLIAM DUCKWORTH: Am I correct that you got started as a scientist programming games for Atari? Is that more or less accurate?

JARON LANIER: Oh gosh, that’s a crazy story. Let me give a little prequel to that. As you mentioned, I started college early and when I was 17 I met somebody who was unlike anyone I’d ever met before. This was someone who self-identified as an artist. And you have to understand, in the milieu that I grew up in there were either impoverished peasants and agricultural people, or there were scientists and engineers who were either directly or indirectly supported by the weapons program. There wasn’t anything else. And I met this kid who said, “I’m a poet and I go to this art school in New York.” And the very notion completely excited me. I was, like, wow! And I decided that I had to drop everything and go to this place. So I went to an elite, self-obsessed art college in the New York region for a little while. But I flunked out and ended up in Manhattan playing in the avant-garde music world when I was 17 or 18. And that was when I first encountered the music scene. That’s when I met people like La Monte and Charlemagne Palestine. I used to play piano at the Ear Inn. I was a founding member of the Ocarina Orchestra that used to raid Wall Street with Ocarina music and all that kind of crazy stuff. Well, I was just around musical things then. And, somehow I got the idea in my head that the most important thing in the world was to play at these little, dumpy, downtown places like The Kitchen, the Ear Inn, Franklin Furnace and Phill Niblock‘s loft. To me, that was just the height of achievement and I was incredibly excited and I was totally enthralled to meet people. Anyway, I then confronted the fact that I did not have money. My family wasn’t rich at all and I was making a living playing in restaurants and I realized that it was just unviable. There was no way that I could survive in New York. And I started to get scared, so I went back to New Mexico, the place I knew, feeling sort of ashamed that I couldn’t make it in New York. So one day this hippy friend said, “Let’s take your car and go to Santa Cruz.” And I said, “Okay.” So we went there and I again tried to do what I’d done in New York, to see if I could make a living being a musician. And once again, it would be possible but it was really wearing me dow
n. It was very hard and I was getting scared. And one day I met somebody who was involved with computers in Silicon Valley and he said, “You know, you have a car. Why don’t you go to Silicon Valley.” And I went over there and I went to a headhunter with a resume of what I had done in the math department, what computers I’d worked with, and what my background was. And they looked at it and immediately I got job offers for salaries that were just beyond my comprehension. Just stratospheric amounts of money that I couldn’t even imagine. And most of them were for profoundly dull activities. But there was one at the bottom. This video game company was starting up and there weren’t that many people who’d had experience with making computer graphics much less interactive computer graphics, so I said, “Video games, wow, that sounds good!” So I took this job and suddenly was getting these huge checks every two weeks, which really astonished me. I just couldn’t believe it. So I moved to Palo Alto and I started making video games. I made a couple and it turns out I could make them freelance. So I started making my own. And I specialized in sound, so I made some of the first music and sounds for video games. And I had one called Moondust which was successful. I don’t know if it’s true, but there was a review in the Computer Music Journal that claims it is the first interactive music publication. It’s possible that it is. Suddenly, I had all of this money from this video game, so some friends of mine and I started building these virtual reality systems in the garage.

 

WILLIAM DUCKWORTH: When did you start combining virtual reality with music?

JARON LANIER: What happened was that during my 20s, this misadventure of having a company was so all-consuming that it set its own priorities and I had very little opportunity to really play with the stuff and enjoy it. But around ’91 or so, I realized that I had denied myself the opportunity to really enjoy the stuff on an aesthetic level, so I wanted to really do a piece of art with it. So there’s a conference called Siggraph, which is the annual computer graphics conference. It’s a huge-scale thing. So for the ’92 Siggraph—and at this point, I’m 31 or 32 years old—I did a live performance where I put on a goggle and glove and I went up on stage and inside a virtual world where I played on musical instruments that just existed inside the virtual world. The piece was called “The Sound of One Hand” because I only had one glove. It was ahead of its time and I think a lot of people were watching it and knew there was something to it. But they couldn’t quite understand what was going on because the whole notion of being inside a virtual world wasn’t familiar.

WILLIAM DUCKWORTH: You’ve written a lot on your worries about technology and the religion of technology. Do you have a similar worry about technology and music?

JARON LANIER: The problem I think is pretty easy to state. It’s that when you play a physical musical instrument or an analog electronic instrument one aspect of what’s going on is that you’re exploring your own mind and body, your cognitive feedback loop, how you interface with this world outside. And an interesting thing about that is the degree of depth there is to that interaction. That your sensory organs and your motor abilities are astonishingly acute, that your retina can be stimulated by a single photon for instance. But there are also remarkable failings in the human sensory ability. Evolution is a funny process that’s a mixture of blind idiocy combined with perfect optimization within that. So with our eyes, our retina is on backwards. The optic nerve connects on the wrong side of the retina and we have this big blind spot. So you have a retina that is sensitive to a single photon in the right conditions, but on the other hand there’s this big blind spot in the middle of it, so you have this amazing combination of idiocy and strategy and perfection and optimization. But because of that perfection and optimization, when you interface with the world, there’s a profound level of depth to it because the world is not a simple place. And what that means is that there’s this sort of never-ending adventure of exploring new ways to perceive and interact with the world and you have a process that really doesn’t run out. There’s always new ways to perceive the world, to match your own cognition to the world. There’s a philosopher named James P. Carse who distinguished between finite and infinite games. A finite game would be a single game of baseball, which has an end and there’s a winner and a loser. An infinite game would be baseball as a whole, which is infinitely renewed. There’s no end to it. So, when you’re playing a physical piano or a flute or even something like a Theremin—some analog device—there’s an infinity to the depth of subtlety that you can find and there’s no end to it. You’re exploring a configuration space that’s huge, to be more technical. But when you play within the context of a digital device, there are two dangers. One danger has to do with a kind of narrowness. A digital device can’t do anything unless it’s programmed. And every program embeds ideas about the world, so whenever you use a digital device, instead of exploring this huge infinite space, you’re running around inside a maze that was set up inside the nature of the program. And typically, because computers have gotten big and complicated, people can’t really write all their own software anymore, so at least to a partial degree, they inherit the maze that was set up by a programmer. Now it’s impossible for a program to foresee the nature of the maze because of the way software is. So there’s just this particular maze. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that, but a particular maze that you might explore in the context of using a digital device is going to be a much smaller order than the universe. So you end up in a cognitive game that’s tiny compared to the world of reality. And if you’re aware of it, it’s not necessarily a bad thing at all. For instance, when we use words we’re selecting a smaller game than reality and just by combining a relatively small number of words compared to the things in the world, we can have literature and poetry and all of these things. Having a small number of components isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s absolutely essential to be aware of it. And it’s worse than words in the sense that words don’t have fixed definitions. If you write a law using words, it’s still necessary to interpret it. But when you write a program and then use a program, there are mandatory constraints. There’s sort of a hardnes
s to the influence that the program you’re using as your creative basis has on you, and it’s less interpretive than other sorts of finite constraints. Now there’s a second danger which mixes with this narrowness which is that there’s a subjectivity of computers. I hope all of this isn’t too long-winded, but the problem is that in order to even appreciate that a computer is in front of you, you need to be willing to project onto it enough meaning to perceive it as functioning. And there’s a danger that this reflects back on one’s self. So, this is one of the things that I’m always ranting about. If you think of a computer as being like you, this sort of artificial intelligence approach, I think there’s a tremendous danger that you end up narrowing yourself. You end up making yourself stupid in order to be similar to however the computer happens to be at the time. And I think particularly in academic music circles, there’s a lot of music that’s exceptionally dry and meaningless, even for academic music, because of people being confused and turning themselves in to however the computer happens to be. So you see a lot of really, really dull and banal and sterile music. And it’s a double tragedy because it’s both a disaster for computer culture and also for music. So that’s something that I worry about a lot. When you play with a computer, you’re exploring the sort of maze-like grooves that are allowed by whatever the program is that you’re using. What you’re really doing is recycling whatever was put into the program and there’s really no new exploration. You’re not going back to something infinite to get new things. When you play with nature directly, when you play with analog stuff, you are going back to nature and discovering new things because of the vastness of it. So, there is this problem.

 

WILLIAM DUCKWORTH: Do you think that these limitations with computers being used creatively applies equally to music on the Web, or is that another world?

JARON LANIER: No, I think it is possible to do wonderful things with computers and music. Please don’t get me wrong. I do it myself. I hope I do so successfully. I’m more pointing out a special danger. Now, the secret to using computers well in music is to demote the computer. To not believe that the computer is some sort of entity—that the computer is playing with you, or that the computer is a collaborator of some sort. The computer is not a musician. The computer is not some sort of entity. The computer does not have judgment. It does not have taste. It does not compose. It does not perform. Drop all of that. Don’t anthropomorphize it. You have to hate the computer, you have to fight against the computer so that you don’t get snookered by the particular narrowness of the program you’re using. So, the better way is to think that the computer is a channel between people. You should think of a computer as a fancy telephone. You should think of it as something that creates a channel between people that’s mediated by these patterns. It’s a patterning device that connects people together and depending on the particular way it’s put together—it might be a virtual world device, or maybe it’s an audio device—that’s what it is fundamentally. If you think of it as an inert patterning device that connects people together, then it starts to make sense. And so I think when music is done on the Internet, because of the intrinsic emphasis on communication between people, it almost always turns out better than when computers are used in other contexts. Not always, but almost always. It’s usually much better. I think there’s been some really wonderful music on the Net. We’re just now at the cusp of the time where people are having decent enough Internet connections and decent enough computers that you can start to imagine some sort of new interactive community happening which could be really exciting and idealistic. If the courts hadn’t intervened, I think that Napster would have evolved past being just a way of sharing traditional music publications and turned into a music creation medium. I think that was already starting to happen and that would have been when it would have become interesting. And I can see various scenarios But I think there is a great cultural tragedy and it can’t be overstated how stupid the legal attacks on Napster are and to what degree the music industry was biting the hand that feeds it and destroying its own future. All these things will happen eventually anyway, but it’s terribly, terribly sad. I think there was a cultural moment that was happening there. But it’s hard to overstate how important that kind of cultural moment could be. I mean, if, indeed, Napster was about to turn into something that would be this interactive remix jam of some kind it could’ve created a new style, a new cultural center for people who are just growing up now.

WILLIAM DUCKWORTH: But there’s a distinction, isn’t there, between remixing and putting your own music up? Do you think that the Web is the place where that kind of music is going to go now? Are the new composers going to the Web?

JARON LANIER: I don’t know. Right now, there are enormous forces at work in a battle on the future of digital culture. Some of them are commercial, in that even though the dot-com thing was a bust there was still so much money put into it that people are trying to figure out something to do with it. And there are very powerful forces trying to coalesce it into something that’s more like cable TV. And if there’s success in that, it will be tragic. And just as some things were delayed by the Middle Ages, there might be some things that are delayed by commercial interests on the Internet. Another issue is the whole business of security and the nature of what that means now. And there are other problems that might come. Now it might sound like I am finding the usual bogeymen in government and industry, but that’s not true at all. There are problems in human nature that are shared. For instance, the spam problem is also something that can destroy the openness of the Internet and there is, as of yet, no solution to it. Then there are technical issues. I mean, the Web is a wonderful thing but the particular design of the Web is kind of unfortunate. The Web is a little bit like MIDI. MIDI is something that’s been wonderful; it’s allowed a lot of things to happen in music. And yet its fundamental design is so poor that it’s just a great shame. And the Web is similar. It’s wonderful that it’s there, that it was simple enough to spread quickly, as was MIDI, and yet its design is very poor. So I have a love/hate relationship with both of them.

WILLIAM DUCKWORTH: When you do something musical, does it have an Internet side to it, or is it irrelevant whether it’s webcast or not?

JARON LANIER: I’ve never done music specifically for the Internet. I’m not sure exactly why that is. I think part of it is that I love playing music for people. I love playing live and the Internet isn’t good enough to do that yet. It could be and, you know, one of my areas of research—this isn’t precisely science, this is more technological research—but there’s a thing called tele-immersion, which is a project that’s been running for about five years, I guess. And the notion to tele-immersion is to create the illusion that people in different cities are actually in the same room. So
it’s sort of a fancy version of virtual reality where you’re actually drawing in the real world at a distance instead of having a completely synthetic world. One of the interesting things about tele-immersion is if you were doing music in tele-immersion then you could have that feedback from the audience. You could have that experience of really connecting with people. I think tele-immersion is good enough for that. And that, in turn, changes the nature of the game of online music because you could start to have versions of Internet music that really did synthesize some of that quality of really seeing the people in the audience. But it requires what are, by today’s standards, extraordinarily expensive and elaborate devices on each side for transducing sensory motor information and then also extraordinary network performance between them and extraordinary computational ability. So right now it’s something completely beyond the pale. But someday it ought to all become cheap and possible.

WILLIAM DUCKWORTH: And is that the point where you would become interested in actually doing something musically on the Web?

JARON LANIER: Yes. I’d love to work as a musician in that medium, in some sort of tele-immersive network thing. At that point I think the Napster problem becomes solved. I mean, right now, just as a practical matter, if you’re a musician without a trust fund and you want to survive playing music, there aren’t all that many options. One option is to get into the world of jingles or soundtracks, but nobody likes that all that much. It’s really rough. Another option is to be a recording artist, but even the most successful recording artists have a very difficult time actually making money from the recordings themselves. It’s doable, but only a small number of people do it. And furthermore, if you look at the distribution of income in the recording arts, a very tiny number of people make a lot of money, and then a vast majority make no money, and there’s no middle class. And I think the middle class is where creativity happens. If everyone is so impoverished that no one ever hears about their stuff, then there’s no mixing and that culture doesn’t really happen very quickly. But when you have a healthy middle class, you can have democracy and that’s how we have culture. Now, what I’m thinking the future ought to be is anything that can be reproduced without the live action of a musician should be free. So all recorded music, I think, should be free. But I think musicians will be able to charge for tele-immersively performing for people around the world. And then you have the ability to get performance income without travel. And then I think you could recreate this middle-class commerce for music and that’s when things would be really healthy and interesting and I’d love to participate in that world. And I think it could come about. I mean, the cost of technology will make it possible. And then you can have not only tele-immersive music performances but, because the medium becomes a virtual world, new forms. There could be something that crosses live musical performance with theater, with video games, where you have live theatrical performances that include a level of production value and special effects and fantasy that you normally associate today with Hollywood movies, where the musician can turn into other characters while playing, and the audience can have roles within the performance. There could be an enormous range of exploration and I think that’s the synthesis where it becomes really interesting.

WILLIAM DUCKWORTH: Do you think that when we get to that point it will still be performer and listener or will the listener take a more active role in the creative process?

JARON LANIER: Well, my answer to this is that I’m going to draw an analogy to books. If you had a society in which people were either semi-literate, or perhaps they could read but they’d never had any experience with writing at all—how many books would be sold? Very few. A society in which people write at least a little bit, in which most people have gone to school and have written an essay and perhaps a short story, they have some sense of the experience. In that world, there will be more who discover they like writing and also there will be more good writers, but also there will be people who appreciate writing and want to buy books. So, we shouldn’t be thinking in terms of whether there is a distinct performer and listener, but we should be thinking in terms of literacy. We should be saying, if you have a society where everybody does something a little bit, then the people who do it with great passion and do it very well will have a greater audience and literacy rises. It’s one of these tides that rises all boats.

 

WILLIAM DUCKWORTH: You’ve been quoted as saying that you think the future first appears in music.

JARON LANIER: I think that might have been about invention and technology. Let me state that a little more carefully. Let’s say you want to be organo-centric, which means you’re paying a lot of attention to musical instruments. So an organo-centric approach to the history of technology would point out that there are an extraordinary number of times where musical instruments appear to have been the most sophisticated technologies in their time and place. I can give you a few examples. If you look to the origin of computers, the usual starting point is the Jacquard Loom, which was programmable to make fabrics. But it was actually a copy of programmable music machines, which were in turn extensions of pipe organ mechanisms. The two fancy machines in the Middle Ages were pipe organs and clocks. And of the two, the pipe organ was the one that involved the controlling of lots of little parts in parallel and really is the proper precedent for understanding the computer. And what’s intriguing is that throughout the history of the computer you had these figures who were also musicians. And there are a whole lot of well-known computer scientists with pipe organs in their homes to this day. Just off-hand I can think of Donald Knuth and Alan Kay and many others and obviously me, not that I put myself in their category, but there’s some kind of connection there. Other things… Guns. Well, where do cannons come from? The birth of modern artillery came from the idea of taking a church bell and turning it up on its side. But the underlying technology came from the desire to make big bells and preceded the use as a weapon. There’s a trope that says that it’s really weapons that draw technological progress, but so far as I can tell, you can make a case that it’s musical instruments. To this day some of the smartest people in signal processing, and some of the smartest people in computer architecture, are really motivated by making musical projects. It’s true in so many cases. I mean, the computer, as we know it today, was at least half-invented as a project for making musical things happen.

WILLIAM DUCKWORTH: Is that wh
y being both a scientist and a musician works for you?

JARON LANIER: I have no idea. I like to think organo-centrically about technology because it’s a very positive way of thinking about human nature. It’s so easy to be cynical about ourselves. We’re capable of such pettiness and such evil that it can be overwhelmingly sad. But it’s important to notice nice things about people, and one nice thing is that in so many times and places it seems as though the highest technology was meant for nothing other than to make delightful, highly communicative noises. And that’s astonishing. That’s a very dear thing. That’s why I have so many instruments.

WILLIAM DUCKWORTH: How many instruments are in your loft now?

JARON LANIER: I’m not sure. I think about a thousand.

WILLIAM DUCKWORTH: Can you play them all?

JARON LANIER: I can’t claim to always be in practice on all of them, but I’ve had experiences playing almost all of them. And most of them I could pick up and do something with that would be reasonable and worth using in something, I’d say.

WILLIAM DUCKWORTH: Did you always have that talent, or is it something you worked at?

JARON LANIER: I remember when I was a little kid my mom had a Viennese zither. It was my first ethnic instrument and I used to love it and try to find different ways to play it and experiment with it. So I’ve always loved instruments. But I don’t love instruments. A lot of people say, “Well, why don’t you invent your own instruments. Since you do engineering and all, you should be designing instruments.” And the reason I haven’t taken that approach is I don’t think of instruments that way. I don’t think of them as these abstract machines that give you certain capabilities that you wouldn’t otherwise have. Rather, I think of them as time machines and space machines to experience other people’s lives in a particular way. When you learn to play an instrument, you’re learning to move as someone else had to move, you’re learning to breathe as they had to breathe, you’re learning to think as they had to think. So there’s an operational way in which you’re able to make a cross-cultural journey that I think is particularly beautiful and requires a certain level of devotion. And it is entirely different from what you get from just reading something or listening to something and, once again, an interactivity and taking on a new identity—the sort of tenets of virtual reality aesthetics that should come to exist some day. So for me, when I learned how to play these instruments, I’m connecting with the people in a particular way. So I have some experimental instruments, but for the most part I have instruments that are from other cultures and other times and places or from the West, in different times and periods of my own culture, and this is the experience I really seek.

WILLIAM DUCKWORTH: I understand that you’re currently working on re-creating the music of the ancient world for the BBC and The Discovery Channel. How’s that going?

JARON LANIER: Well, you know, fundamentally it’s a commercial project, so it speeds up and slows down with random phone calls and financing events and it’s somewhat beyond me. But if all goes well, I will be creating guesses of what ancient music might have sounded like. And it’s art not science because there isn’t enough information to really know. I’m not the first person to do this at all. A lot of people have tried it. I’m just trying to base it on the available information which is wonderful. My first project is the music of Tutankhamen‘s court. Instruments exist from tombs and we can infer a lot about playing situations and what the function of music might have been. We know what the musicians looked like and what their affect might have been like from visual representations. And we can have a sense of tuning from wind instruments that are either represented or in a few cases survive. And we can look at living musical cultures that bear some relationship to it. And there are a few accounts of the music that have survived in one form or another, not precisely that period but of descended musics. There are all these various techniques. So you have a body of information and from there you have to apply imagination. So it’s a project creeping along. It’s already a couple years later than it should have been, but it will happen.

WILLIAM DUCKWORTH: Just one last comment. I understand that there’s a Polynesian island that’s issued a stamp in your honor. How did that come about?

JARON LANIER: I’m not entirely sure. One day people were calling me to congratulate me on my stamp. And it turns out the island of Palau issued a stamp of me and I have a particularly fondness for Palau because it’s one of the primary homes of the giant cuttlefish, which is a creature that I’m obsessed with. So I was very happy to be on their stamp and I hope to be able to go there soon to mail something using my stamp.

 

Come Along
Suling (Bali), Esraj (Bengal region of India), samples –Jaron Lanier 1:00
Khaen/Violin Duo #6
Khaen (Laos, Thailand) – Jaron Lanier; Violin – Barbara Higbie
The Story of Water Dancing in the Night Sky
Gu Zchung (China) – Jaron Lanier
Angklung
Piano, Angklung (Java and Thailand) – Jaron Lanier
Suite For Saxophone Ensemble
George Brooks – Musical Director, Soprano Sax; Steve Adams – Sopranino &
Alto Sax; Danny Bittker – Tenor, Bass & Bari Sax; Jim Norton – Soprano Sax;
Rob Sudduth – Alto & Tenor Sax; Bruce Unsworth – Bari & Tenor Sax
Tremolo Silence
Piano – Jaron Lanier
Circular Saw
Bowed Psaltery (Appalachia) – Jaron Lanier

First Words: A Panel Discussion About Reviewing Premieres



(left to right) Frank J. Oteri, William Littler, David Stock, Barbara Jepson, John Kennedy

2002 Conference of the Music Critics Association of North America (MCANA)

July 25, 2002
Hotel Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM

Transcribed by Amanda MacBlane

Panelists:
William Littler – Classical Music Critic, Toronto Star
Barbara Jepson – Classical Music Critic, Wall Street Journal
David Stock – Composer and Conductor Laureate, Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble
John Kennedy – Composer and Artistic Director, Santa Fe New Music

Additional Comments:
Margaret Barela – (Albuquerque, NM); Janet Bedell – Program Annotator, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra; Muriel Brooks – Retired Classical Music Critic; Dimitri Drobatschewsky – Former Classical Music Critic, Arizona Republic ; William Dunning – Music Critic, Santa Fe Reporter and Radio Announcer, KSFR-FM (Santa Fe, NM); Marc Geelhoed – (Bloomington, IN); Paul Hertelendy – Editor, ArtsSF.com and Former Classical Music Critic, San Jose Mercury News ; Johanna B. KellerFreelance Music Journalist and Former Editor, Chamber Music Magazine ; Nancy Lang – (Washington D.C.); James ReelFreelance Music Journalist and Former Arts Editor, Tucson Weekly (Tucson, AZ); Donald Rosenberg – Classical Music Critic, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH) and President, MCANA; Jim Van Sant – Classical Music Critic, The Absolute Sound (Santa Fe, NM); and Steven Swartz – Publicity Director, Boosey & Hawkes

FRANK J. OTERI: This panel was put together with the help of Don Rosenberg, the new president of our Music Critics Association, to really reflect the diversity of sides to the issue of covering premieres. I think it’s going to be a very interesting discussion, but I don’t want people walking away thinking there’s a right or wrong answer here. I hope that everybody walks away asking themselves more questions than when they came in, because that’s the point of this discussion and we’ve put together quite an illustrious group of people: John Kennedy, a composer and a conductor based here in Santa Fe who also writes very eloquently about music and I should say, in an effort of full disclosure here, he was recently elected president of the board of directors at the American Music Center, the organization that publishes NewMusicBox…

JOHN KENNEDY: Does that make me your boss?

FRANK J. OTERI: Hmmm, well, you’re actually on deadline for me right now [laughs].

JOHN KENNEDY: Yes, I am [laughs].

FRANK J. OTERI: So it’s a very interesting situation. To his right, Barbara Jepson, who writes for the Wall Street Journal and has written for The New York Times, among other publications, is a freelance classical music journalist based in New York who covers a lot of premieres of new pieces. To her right, David Stock, another composer and conductor based in Pittsburgh who has done a great deal of work for a variety of composers for a very long time.

DAVID STOCK: A really long time!

FRANK J. OTERI: Since probably before I was born, I think. And to his immediate right we have the illustrious William Littler who is also on the board of directors of the Music Critics Association. He is also the classical music journalist for the Toronto Star in Canada and also covers a lot of premieres of new music, but from the perspective of somebody who is not a freelancer, who is a daily critic, which is another perspective entirely. I want to open this discussion with a couple of quotes that I am not going to identify and then I am going let everybody speak to issues and I have a bunch of questions, but I’d like to try to keep it open form…but these are the quotes I want to read because I came across them and I thought they were very apropos to this discussion:

“Must then always new pieces be played? Only worthless compositions should not be heard again and the preference of the concert giver for such works is the only reason for the ill-mannered craving for the new. An artwork is new as long as it offers nourishment to our mind and heart. Many will prove unhearing to the old.”

And the other quote:

“So shrill and complicated that only those who worsh
ip the failings and merits of this composer with equal fire–which at times borders on the ridiculous–could find pleasure in it.”

That was a review from the world premiere of Beethoven‘s Eroica in the Berlin Musikalische Zeitung. And the first quote was from Adolf Marx, “Some Words about Concert Life, Especially in Large Cities,” (Berlin 1824). And actually, one last one:

“…the clarinets–if I’m not mistaken!–miscount and enter at the same time.”

That was from a review of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung of 1809. I bring that third quote in because I love the humility of it “…the clarinets–if I’m not mistaken.” Now, bear in mind, this is a world premiere and I think that that raises the quintessential question of this discussion–what constitutes the approach one should have as somebody writing about a world premiere, a piece they’ve never heard? And I would like to first take it from the perspective of the two critics who are at the table and then open it up to the two people who frequently get “criticized.”

BARBARA JEPSON: I think what I am going to say is applicable even if it’s not a premiere, but it’s a relatively recent work that hasn’t been performed in New York City… I do whatever it takes to complete the assignment in the time I have available to me. But I think it’s the way I approach it that makes it work rather then any specific tools I use, like scores or rehearsals or recordings. And my primary objective in covering a piece I haven’t heard is to enter the composer’s world, no matter what that world is stylistically. I just want to try to immerse myself in this person’s music. And to try to understand it from the inside out, and that’s hard, and I don’t succeed in doing that, but I get a certain way into a journey and then that is the basis upon which I write. Now, in terms of how I actually do that, more specifically, I like to get a score ahead of time and I like to do something that might sound weird–I like to look at the score just as an artifact. I covered an exhibition of scores a number of years ago at The Drawing Center: there were wonderful things by Earle Brown. They were just presenting scores as works of visual art and it kind of changed the way I look at a score. And so I just first like to look at it visually and see what impressions come to me. And then I start to look at it in the way I’m sure all of you look at it, in terms of: what is the harmonic language; and is there an instrument that acts as a catalyst in the piece, introducing new material or acting in opposition to one of the other instruments; whatever… I look more at the details. In terms of how much more I do than that, that’s where the time factor comes in. I should talk a little bit about how the stories I do for the Journal might be different from what someone on staff at a daily newspaper does. If it’s a piece where I’m writing on a single composer, then I really do try to get to the rehearsal, or if there is a performance tape; if, for example, it’s a New York premiere and I can get a performance tape from the world premiere, I do that. I have even listened to MIDI realizations even though they’re awful. But they do give you some sense of the rhythm. I like to sit at the piano actually and play through little snippets of parts in the score. That’s what I do if it’s a piece by a single composer. If I’m covering a new music festival–and in thinking about this panel, I think that my record was covering about 25 to 30 new pieces in 8 concerts in 1200 words. [laughter] And I assure you that I did not go to any rehearsals and I didn’t have time to do all the things I just talked about, but I did look at those concerts and some of the works were by composers who are very familiar to me. And I knew their idiom. I know their work. Others were totally new to me, so I spent more of my time with the ones who were unfamiliar and that included a program on turntables. I had never heard of the X-ecutioners nor had I heard their music and I realized that this was a whole area of this festival that I really did not feel equipped to evaluate, so I called up someone on the Lincoln Center staff who’s young and hip and goes to dance clubs, and I said that I needed some more information and she sent me a video on this whole phenomenon of the turntablists and it was extremely helpful. Then I went out on the Web and I bought some recordings and I wound up actually loving that program and I thought I was going to hate it. But those are some of the things I do. Let’s see if I’ve missed anything…Oh, well, again if it’s–sometimes I’ve written about a work that’s been written for a specific performer. In that case, I like to telephone the performer and ask them, you know, “What are the technical challenges of this piece? How does it treat your instrument, in your opinion? How does it compare to other pieces that you’ve played?” All those things…and that all goes back to this objective of trying to understand what the composer has done.

WILLIAM LITTLER: I think I would have to subscribe to everything that Barbara has said. Conductors are expected to behave like gods; critics are virtually expected to be gods. We always appear as the official record for history and the unfortunate thing is, we’re offering the first word and it is assumed to be the last word. I don’t think enough attention is given to the fact that what we’re offering is preliminary responses to almost any new work of art and we can’t be expected to buy into definitive judgments. On the other hand, we’re expected to be forthright, frank, and honest in our observations and the result is that the record of history tends to be the record of initial impressions, which is rather unfortunate. Nicolas Slonimsky‘s Lexicon of Musical Invective is just full of those made by composers as often as non-composers with the same record of accuracy, which is not very good. So what can we do to confront the situation? I was once in an argument with Harold Schonberg on a panel, in which he accused me of splitting hairs over what I believe is a distinction between reviewing and criticism. And anyone can review by going to an event and having a response to it, but the critical act from my point of view involves fitting the particular into a larger picture. Knowing, as Barbara said, more of the composer’s music in which to make sense out of the specific piece you are reviewing, for example. All this takes time, it takes effort and it’s an almost an impossible task to perform by the daily reviewer because we have so much music to confront and we don’t have the opportunity to know it as well as we would like to. So it’s a difficult task of being called upon to offer a judgment when we really are only witnesses, at this stage, to the art rather than judicial judges of its merit. Nonetheless we’re called critics. If we go back to the old Greek, the word really means an active understanding, but we’ve come to make it an act of evaluation. I think that the problem with our credibility is we are making that act, we are performing it, before we really have sufficient information to make the judgment. But if we’re on a daily newspaper, we don’t have more time, alas. We always, if we can, get a hold of scores. And some of us go to rehearsals, some of us prefer not to. Just apropos to that issue–which I think is an important one–some critics feel, and I think fairly, that when you go to a rehearsal you are watching an attempt to solve problems and your consciousness of those problems might affect the way you actually listen to the first performance. Brooks Atkinson, the drama critic for The New York Times, said he wanted to see artists’ solutions. He did not want to see their attempts to confront problems. So there…but we feel differently about that and we feel differently about how much information we need in order to make our judgment. Some of us feel we have to be part of the milieu. Clement Greenberg was an authoritative interpreter of the art scene, not simply because he was a brilliant man but because he knew the artists and he knew their thinking because he knew something about them. The complete evidence of one piece, one performance, doesn’t tell you the full story of what went into that composition and exposure to the artist in many ways, through his scores, through his thinking, through knowing, through sleeping with him or her–all these are sources of information.

[laughter]

BARBARA JEPSON: Are you advocating that?

WILLIAM LITTLER: That we all have to evaluate on an individual basis as to what’s useful to us.

FRANK J. OTERI: John, can you follow that? [laughs]

DAVID STOCK: I’m glad I’m not next!

JOHN KENNEDY: You’d like our perspective on preparing a premiere?

FRANK J. OTERI: I’d like your reaction to what you’d want a critic to prepare for in a premiere and then we’ll open it up because I’ve got a bunch of questions that will emerge from what everyone says.

JOHN KENNEDY: Well, the way Barbara described preparing for a premiere is beautiful and one would hope that that kind of care is exhibited by everyone involved in the premiere as well, you know, because ideally when I prepare a work for a premiere I love to get into the music as deeply as possible and, of course, we don’t always have the time to find all the mistakes in a brand new score and that sort of thing. But it’s interesting, I’ve been sometimes interviewed by journalists in advance of a premiere or a new piece and I’ll find that someone has done their homework and knows aspects of a composer that I haven’t had time to learn or might point out resources that have been very valuable to me because I am so busy learning the notes and figuring out how to get the piece executed as well as possible. But something that’s interesting to me in the post-concert review situation is it seems that there’s a habit in musical criticism of when we’re hearing music that is known to us, we really focus on the quality of the performance and, you know, how the performers realized the work and the bulk of the review is so often about that. And when you see a review for a premiere, the focus is almost exclusively on the music, as it should be, but so rarely then is the quality of the performance discussed, in part because we’ve never had an opportunity to hear it and compare it to another performance. But it’s sometimes frustrating to performers of new music because they’re not getting the credit that they deserve; sometimes they’re not even mentioned in the article, you know. A cellist who’s learned a fantastic piece, devoted hours to, in fact much more time than learning a piece of standard repertoire. And so, I think that’s a balance that in an ideal review would start to come forth: that more attention would be paid to the nature of the performance and even if aspects of the accuracy are not known, that there’s some sense from the energy and the vitality of it and the sense of assurance that’s present on stage.

DAVID STOCK: I just have to start off what I’m going to say by following up briefly on what John said. Until three years ago I conducted a professional new music ensemble–the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble–and over the course of the 23 years that I did this, I conducted, I don’t know, several hundred premieres, a lot of second, third, whatever performances, hundreds of new works and in all that–now I’m speaking from the performers’ perspective rather than the composer’s, which I’ll switch to in a moment–and in all those years there was only one time that anybody actually mentioned the performances! You know, Don Rosenberg criticized my tempo in Schoenberg. That’s old music but I was so happy that somebody even noticed. [laughter] Anyway, I will now put my composer hat back on and put away the performer hat. The most important thing for us composers, what we really want from you and your journalistic colleagues is very simple, it’s to be taken very seriously. Look, we all know that the general public that goes to symphonic concerts or chamber music concerts, they want to read about how the blah blah quartet or the blah blah conductor did whatever. But, you know, they’re not going to be able to do all that much to Beethoven. They’re not even going to be able to do that much to Mahler or Rachmaninoff. They’ll play it faster. They’ll play it slower. They might get a little bit louder here. They might get a little bit softer there, but the music is there, the essence of the music is there. Sure, we all know there are terrible performances, but it isn’t really such a big deal how the performance went if you really think about it–and we’re talking about the long term, O.K.? Does anybody really care what X conductor really did in 1946 on such and such a piece, when you have to really delve back into the archives to even know that conductor X conducted such a piece. But, if an important work was premiered in 1946, that really means something because the works have a historical legacy. Even the ones that don’t stick around, they have resonance. So, just by taking it seriously, by putting it in the proper perspective we composers, except those who do electronic music of course, are totally dependent upon performers. We love performers. I’m not lowering the role of the performer. I’m just, I guess, advocating balance between “Yes, the Beethoven Fifth went pretty well,” and “Yes, this new piece has such and such qualities,” or “It stinks,” or whatever. The second thing is that unfortunately, which makes me very sad, most of what you and your colleagues say about composers makes almost no difference. It’s terrible! I’m sorry. Probably some of you sense this. I’ve never heard of a composer whose career was made or broken by a couple of good reviews or lousy reviews. I could quote you a few of my lousiest reviews, but I won’t. We’ll save that for later. It makes no difference! That’s the bad news. You see, now understand, it makes it very hard for you to take it very seriously. With performe
rs it’s another story, you know, with young performers especially. A couple of good reviews in the right places and BAM! [claps hands], they’re off to the races. And you know sometimes it doesn’t actually do them any good, because sometimes their careers move much faster than they should just ’cause somebody said something nice about them in some important place. This doesn’t happen with composers. It just doesn’t. In the short run, I can’t think of anyone whose composer career went up or down because of it. It’s very sad. I hope that my saying that doesn’t discourage you from taking it seriously. I know that it seems like my second point contradicts my first point.

WILLIAM LITTLER: Yeah, it did.

DAVID STOCK: It did, but, yet again it has to do with balance, you know.

DAVID STOCK: When someone has taken the trouble to find out something about me or my colleagues and shows some care in the review, it means something to the composer. Who cares whether it means something to–you know, it’s not going to convince the Philadelphia Orchestra to take up Joe Schmoe‘s piece. It just isn’t. I wish it would, but…

WILLIAM LITTLER: Now, you’re assuming that we want this power.

BARBARA JEPSON: Yes. Yes.

DAVID STOCK: Of course not! No, no, no, no, no! I don’t assume it, but I know that, I just don’t want you to feel that because it isn’t as important as it is for performers that it’s not as important for the composer him or herself.

BARBARA JEPSON: But we’re not writing to advance anyone’s career…

DAVID STOCK: Of course not.

BARBARA JEPSON: …or to derail a career…

DAVID STOCK: Of course…that’s not…

BARBARA JEPSON: We’re writing to communicate…

DAVID STOCK: Yes.

BARBARA JEPSON: …to the readers.

DAVID STOCK: Look, we all know why you do what you do and it’s extremely important. It’s the effect that I’m talking about, the ripple effect.

BARBARA JEPSON: Yeah, yeah.

DAVID STOCK: The third thing that we really need as composers is something that is impossible under journalistic conditions for most writers in the United States and that is what I would call critical studies–taking another step. In Europe, there still are people, mostly either composers or musicologists, who actually do critical studies. They have time. They’re not on deadline. Maybe they’ve got a pamphlet coming out or a book or something and they can actually spend some time and really assess the long range of a composer’s work if he’s someone that has stuck around for a while. And ultimately, that kind of attention is infinitely more important for the lifeblood of the music than the daily review. First of all, on top of everything else, is the fact that pieces change over time, as you said. I’ve been astonished to discover that some of my own pieces develop a performance tradition…when I’m not there! I can’t understand it! Do they hear the tape and then…? I don’t know, you know, so if there are more people who had the luxury–and I know many of you wish you did–to take the time to study Composer X or Composer Y or Group B or Group C, you know, the downtown school, the blah blah school, the turntable school, and write about them in some depth over time, this would be fantastic. Of course, it’s not very likely under the circumstances that all of you work under.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, it’s very interesting hearing everybody at this table with their stories and what Bill was saying about The Lexicon of Musical Invective versus Barbara coming to turntable music and doing essentially a deep study because she had the time…

BARBARA JEPSON: It wasn’t deep.

FRANK J. OTERI: But it was deeper than one normally has the opportunity to do.

FRANK J. OTERI: I think it’s an interesting question to throw out for we who pass judgments on pieces of music–how often have you changed your mind about a piece of music that in print you have said one thing about? And I’d love to open this up to the audience. How many times…I’d love to hear some stories of changing your mind on pieces.

WILLIAM LITTLER: I’ve allowed myself to change my mind. For example, there was an opera with a libretto by Robertson Davies, our leading Canadian writer at the time, on The Golden Ass. And I was really quite unmoved by it and reflected that in my review, but I said, this is an important premiere, important people are involved, I’ve got to go back and take another listen. And I fully intended to write about it again and it turned out that I felt basically the same way the second time. This is a Harold Schonberg belief again, he said a piece generally for a sensitive listener makes its point and you can make a decision fairly quickly about it. And I know that there are pieces probably that I feel differently about–I remember writing as a child or in adolescence my opinions of certain compositions and with greater maturity I’ve understood those pieces better. I’m told John Cage said if you don’t like a piece of music, listen to it again. If you don’t like it then, listen to it again. Life quickly disappears under those circumstances, but you can understand his point.

[laughter]

JOHN KENNEDY: I’m not sure he followed his own advice, but…

[laughter]

BARBARA JEPSON: I’m not sure if I can think of an example. I probably will tonight, you know, at 2 in the morning.

DAVID STOCK: Don’t call us!

BARBARA JEPSON: I think what’s changed perhaps is my understanding of a certain context, of a certain idiom that maybe in the beginning I was less receptive to. The first minimalist composer that I ever heard was Philip Glass and this goes back many, many years and I didn’t like it. And he’s still not my favorite composer, but I actually do like some of his later works. Then I heard pieces by Steve Reich and John Adams and the list goes on and on and I liked them, so I think maybe, maybe more than one exposure to an example of a particular stylistic movement is helpful.

DON ROSENBERG: I wanted to talk about what you just said about your view of a piece changing. Sometimes I go to a dress rehearsal of a piece by the Cleveland Orchestra, a brand new piece, and I always sit there with a score at the rehearsal and that night I go to the premiere and I listen without a score. And I find that sometimes my impression of the piece changes remarkably from the rehearsal to the performance partly because in the rehearsal it’s a very
visual process. You’re watching what the piece looks like, not just listening to it, and when you get to the performance without a score you’re not watching anymore. Your whole being is devoted to hearing how the piece works, not in details but as an overall, unified composition. So I find it sometimes, I write about this piece in a very different way than I would have if I had just gone to the rehearsal and then written about it. Now, of course, we have a problem with deadline writing. How do you write about a new piece in 20 minutes, which we have to do sometimes? We have to go to the performance. We have to assimilate the language. We have to try to put it into some language that the general reader is going to be able to absorb. We have to be able to describe what we heard and sometimes very quickly. This year the Cleveland Orchestra did a new piece by Matthias Pintscher, the young German composer, and I had requested a certain amount of space because I knew that it would require a little more space. Well, at 5 o’clock the editor said, “Well, I’m sorry but the Metro section can’t take your review, so we need to take it in another section and you’ll have to write so many inches.” Well, it turned out that the performance was very long and at intermission I called and said, “I’m sorry, but I’m not going to be able to get this to you on deadline, especially since this is a premiere and I have to write about a premiere.” Well, they said, “Well, don’t worry, we’ve got you 6 more inches. [laughter] That meant that I had to write this review in 20-25 minutes, including the premiere. So it can be very difficult to do this. But, as Bill said, you have the impression really once you’ve heard it. You can give that preliminary impression right away. It’s not going to be cast in stone and even as you listen to it in further performances or recordings, your idea will change. But I do think that we have the responsibility to try to convey the flavor of the piece and have even some kind of opinion about it. It’s not easy to do that, but you can tell the reader whether something was very striking or something was very ugly or something was enduring. You want to go back and hear that piece. Sometimes you say that you may never want to hear the piece again. And you can do it. You have to do it on the basis of what you hear, unfortunately.

 

FRANK J. OTERI: Barbara made an interesting comment about hearing Philip Glass the first time and not liking it and subsequently finding minimalist pieces that she did like. It raises an interesting question. How are we judging something when we judge it? Are we judging it on its own terms? In art criticism–visual art criticism–there’s a very big movement to judge a painting by how it fulfills its own terms rather than necessarily your own view of it. But is that always an intellectually honest position? If you just simply don’t like that style no matter how good it is, how honest are you being to yourself or your readers if you deal with it that way in your writing. Obviously, you should be laying your cards on the table because maybe it’s unfair for you to be covering it if you don’t like that style. But it’s also dishonest to say if you don’t like something, that you know, “Well, this is a good piece of this.” I’m wondering, John, in your experience, you perform music of such stylistic variety and a lot of times somebody might not be familiar with that particular style or where it fits into the trajectory of new music…

JOHN KENNEDY: Certainly, as one of the arbiters sometimes of what gets performed and what doesn’t…I mean so many scores come to me by composers or from publishers, and I’m looking at what I’m going to perform and all my own tastes and dislikes are going to come in to it. I think, certainly in my own experience, I’ve evolved a lot over the years. When I was younger I was much more polemical about, you know, what music needed to be advocated stylistically. Now I feel like we are in such a sort of healthier place in our musical culture where the style wars are just so passÈ, no one cares about them. At least it doesn’t feel like the composers are so concerned about them anymore and it’s smooth…there’s a lot of fresh air in that regard.

DAVID STOCK: Except in Europe, where it’s key.

JOHN KENNEDY: Except in Europe. It is key. You’re exactly right.

FRANK J. OTERI: Except you know, interestingly enough, those battles don’t die that quickly as I discovered on our own forums on NewMusicBox. There are some very polemical posters who are in one camp or in the other and if you say something about minimalism, then all the serialist people come out and say, “Why are you covering this nonsense?” And if you cover serialism, all the people on the downtown side say, “Why are you covering all of this academic, mathematical stuff?” And the twain still doesn’t meet for some people. For us, covering this, entering into this fray, writing for a general public that might not even be aware of these stylistic wars and where things fit. We’re trying to make a context not where that piece fits in with that camp or with that style, but where it fits in in the larger picture of a concert that will feature, you know, a Tchaikovsky violin concerto or a Mozart string quartet and trying to make this bigger picture. Anything that’s new music, whether it is from one camp or the other, is new music to the general public.

JOHN KENNEDY: Exactly.

DAVID STOCK: Well, actually, it’s even worse than that because sadly after 90 years if you say contemporary music or new music or any of those words to your average B-flat concertgoer, he or she still thinks it’s, you know, atonal–whatever that means to them. You know, we’re still battling the Schoenberg 1909 battles all over. In their context, in other words, we who live with this stuff, whether we are composers or performers or journalists or whatever, know that time marches on. But your ordinary person who says that he or she loves Schubert or whatever, thinks that it’s still all like that and they have this instant response that is negative. New music in general has had very bad PR, mostly from its own doing, for a long time. Blame Schoenberg, you know, Schoenberg is allowed to answer for it in this regard. The Society for Private Performances is one of the most significant things to happen to music in the whole 20th century. It only lasted a couple of years but, boy, we’ve still got echoes of it now in ways that I wish it didn’t.

JOHN KENNEDY: You’re not exaggerating. We have a concert tonight at 8 P.M. and two people have called our office this week to ask if the music is atonal.

DAVID STOCK: Right. There you go.

[laughter]

WILLIAM LITTLER: Well, it’s your own fault. You’ve gone ahead of the audience and your language has progressed and developed at a faster rate than the audience is able to absorb. And remember, we don’t have to give lectures on music history now, but the commonality of musical language has broken down in the 20th century and it’s taken so m
any different directions and the amount of newness represented by each piece has increased to such a state that it’s difficult for the audience to know enough to be able to be aware of what’s going on. That’s the fact of the matter that we all have to live with. Now, there’s another factor too. You mentioned Schoenberg. He did, in that famous quotation, say: “My music isn’t really modernist, it’s just badly performed.” And the fact of the matter is the difficulty of it isn’t sufficiently addressed in rehearsal and so we often are hearing performances of music in which the music isn’t able to build its own case strongly enough because the resources haven’t been there to prepare it. Because it is more difficult to perform. So there are all sorts of complex issues here, but the audience cannot totally be blamed for the problem. It’s an aesthetic problem that is the result of the progress of the evolution of music.

DAVID STOCK: If I may respectfully disagree with something you said, the newness factor is gone. In other words, there’s really been nothing new in music since about 1964. I mean, the birth of minimalism

WILLIAM LITTLER: True, true. I was talking about the 20th century.

JOHN KENNEDY: Well, I respectfully disagree, but…

DAVID STOCK: Well, come on! I mean, there’s nothing really new stylistically that’s come down the pipe. There have been some modifications, there’s certainly some technological advances in the field of electronics but that’s the last new thing and that’s, you know, a third of a century ago. It’s more than that, isn’t it, now? That’s a long time for the newness factor to have gone away. If we’re talking strictly about concert music, O.K.? So I think that’s…that’s no longer as true as it once was.

FRANK J. OTERI: So what about that turntable concert?

DAVID STOCK: That’s what I said. Technologically there are some differences. Certainly the influences of rock and the more far out versions of rock such as the turntable people etc., have started to creep into concert music, but it is still relatively minor compared to the time from 1906 to 1964. I mean, the rate of change is way slowed-down.

JOHN KENNEDY: But the audience alienation to certain kinds of new music and what that means, and then how you have to write about it–it’s not just a result of the arc in evolution of music itself. It’s part of the habits that we have culturally, which include what constitutes a concert, what we wear, what the program should be, and how it should be listened to and how it should be reviewed. And I mean, it’s my dream that in my lifetime we’ll see an orchestra that will play new music or music from the last 50 years or 100 years and that for something different they’ll insert in the program something that is 200 years old by someone from a different culture, you know.

JIM VAN SANT: I’ve been listening for the last 10 days to a radio transcription of L’amour de loin and probably a lot of you have too. And at one point, the old phrasemaker, I do all kinds of dumb things about polishing up my rhetoric before I even know what I want to say–but I had to say to myself, I’m going to write that there is nothing in this opera that could not have been written after 1925. It was all written–the whole vocabulary, all the architecture, everything, was all ready to go as soon as Franz Schreker finished his most important operas in the 1920s, especially the Christophorus. And though I had to think to myself, “You old fool, that’s not what this opera is about!” And I don’t think it makes any difference whether the new materials of music stopped in 1964 or whether they’re still going on. Who was that marvelous anthropologist at Harvard who died prematurely about three months ago, his name leaves me?

WILLIAM LITTLER: Gould.

JIM VAN SANT: Stephen Jay Gould had some really interesting things to say on that subject and he would agree with those who say that new music, contemporary music, newly composed music is not popular because there really isn’t anything else new to say. I would disagree with that too because I am not as qualified as most of the rest in that regard. I think it’s the way materials are arranged. I think it’s the artfulness of the dramatic situation. I think it’s the text. I do think it’s the performance–big time. Gosh, what’s happened to Dawn Upshaw? She’s gotten a lot better. She’s singing in tune in this opera, it’s fantastic. These things–that’s just an abstract example–these things I think are highly relevant to our enjoyment of the piece and also to its validity. I don’t know that some of the very greatest top 10 names in classical music were always doing something new or using something new.

BARBARA JEPSON: Exactly. Exactly.

JIM VAN SANT: I think it’s how they use stuff. And I will respectfully suggest that if you do have time to get repeated exposure to a piece of music, that will present itself as one of the core elements to think about

BARBARA JEPSON: If I could just interject something the composer Paul Moravec said, he said, “In our time, we have an addiction to neophilia.” [laughter] And this obsession with the new, somehow that has been elevated above every other value in terms of assessing a piece of music. I think it’s certainly a valid thing to consider, but it’s by no means the only one. I mean, you can look, I don’t think Bach was considered new at certain points in his career. There were times when he was very old-fashioned and out-of-date in relationship to what his sons were doing and his sons’ contemporaries. And we don’t hold that against him now.

DAVID STOCK: I’m sorry, I’ve got tell you a great story about something that happened, gosh, this is already a long time ago. Roughly around 1966, right at the height of the “you gotta be new, you gotta be different” time, right? I was a graduate student at Brandeis University and a friend of mine was working as a graduate assistant in the electronic studio. Remember now, this is still early so we’re talking about razor blades and splicing, right? So a composer came from Israel to write in the Brandeis studio and he had this fabulous idea, he’s going to write a piece based on baby cries. So he goes in there and he has my friend, who shall remain nameless, a pretty good composer, he’s gonna help him with this piece and he tells my friend what he wants to d
o. He’s going to write a piece based on baby cries. And my friend says, “Gee, that’s really interesting. My last electronic piece was based on the baby cries of my daughter.” So the guy looked at him in horror, went back to his dorm, packed his bags, and went back to Israel. [laughter] Because somebody had already done a piece with baby cries. You see? There’s no point in doing it anymore.

WILLIAM LITTLER: But the history of criticism is the history of criticizing the new. It’s only in recent generations that we’ve been preoccupied with performance practice. And in fact to be a music critic was to be a witness for what was happening and to communicate that and I hope we haven’t lost that sense of priority. But because so much of what we review is not new, we tend to be oriented toward performance and I think some of our skills in appreciating the new may not be as sharp as they need to be.

DIMITRI DROBATSCHEWSKY: Do you remember, David, serving with me on a panel in Chautauqua?

DAVID STOCK: Yeah, where was it? Chautauqua, O.K. That’s where it was.

DIMITRI DROBATSCHEWSKY: There was an experience that we had together. This was a panel of music critics and composers–contemporary composers obviously since they were sitting on the panel and we were presenting to a very knowledgeable audience. Anybody who goes to a seminar in Chautauqua at least has the desire to be knowledgeable. They are not the average public. And during this panel a soprano was asked to perform a new piece–I don’t think it was yours but it may have been yours–imitating birds. Now, the soprano to begin with was not–she was not Dawn Upshaw. She was not good looking. She sang probably quite well, but the music she had to perform without any introduction to it was difficult to absorb to put it politely. And as she sang and it was over, people applauded politely and we were ready to pack up and go home. It was 5 o’clock and before we could really get up, a little white-haired gentleman in the audience raised his hand and said, “If I may please say something,” and we generously allowed him to say something and he started to tear into the performer and the composer in his high-pitched geezer voice. He went ahead, “How dare you insult me! My intelligence, my sense of aesthetics with this awful noise. How could you do this to me? How could you people allow this to be performed?” This was the reaction to something that was different and new. I don’t remember if we calmed the guy down or…

DAVID STOCK: Never, no.

DIMITRI DROBATSCHEWSKY: But it was an incident, which I have to–I do some lectures up there. I cite, I quote this incident because it’s very, very, I think, relevant, if nothing else.

JOHANNA KELLER: Well, I was just going to add a story when the L’amour de loin incident came up… An interesting anecdote about somebody with great intelligence and great ears changing her mind. It was when I was interviewing Betty Freeman recently, the great philanthropist who, as we all know, funded Harry Partch and Terry Riley and Steve Reich and very much in the modernistic and California end of things and that’s her favorite kind of music. She was telling me–she had been one of these funders for L’amour de loin–she had gone to the premiere and she said, “I really didn’t like it. The music was too soft.” She said, “It was too pretty. I really didn’t care for it at all.” She said, “But then I heard it seven more times. [laughter] Actually, I’ve become very fond of the piece; I see what she’s after.” And I thought it was a really interesting–Betty is very musically astute–but I find that’s a lesson for all of us because we’re all called to write about a piece right off the bat, but later, we may change our minds about it. We may find that an aesthetic begins to grow on us and then we begin to understand, keeping our ears open, even, you know. Here someone funded the piece, you know, but it was a very honest response to an aesthetic change and I thought, O.K., if you do listen to something seven times then maybe your mind does get changed eventually. It was an interesting story.

MURIEL BROOKS: I want to comment on that because I think the most successful compositions that I have heard an audience take to have been in concerts where the work was played twice at least with the composer talking about it in between. And I think one of the problems is even in performance–it was mentioned before–the performers have a great deal of trouble with some of these difficult scores and they even improve on a second performance and therefore both the critic and the audience has a better chance of understanding the work or at least coming to accept it. And I think this is one of our biggest problems. And I would also just like to say about this an anecdote that I did tell to David Stock before. I have a very close friend who is a wonderful composer and she was commissioned to write a work for chamber orchestra and chorus. She was very pleased there was only one other work on the program–Beethoven’s Ninth. And after the performance–and everybody didn’t like the program–and this was done by Paul Dunkel. I don’t know if any of you are familiar with him. He was with his orchestra in Westchester commissioning a new work for every concert and having the composer for a pre-concert lecture. So after this, I asked my friend, Ruth Schonthal, how she liked the performance because it went over very well and the audience enjoyed it. And she said, well, she wasn’t pleased and I said, “What was the matter?” “Well,” she said, “it was on this program with Beethoven’s Ninth so they had to spend more time rehearsing the Beethoven’s Ninth because more people would be familiar with it.” And if they made errors in her work, nobody would know, so rehearsals for her work are short-shrifted and that is a big problem. But on the other hand, many composers like Ruth don’t like to be part of a program which is all new music. They want to be part of the act.

MARGARET BARELA: A couple of things occurred to me because I’ve been having high energy conversations with performers that are doing new works and they always complain about that one–how can you possibly make a judgment on that if you’ve only heard it once? And one of the things that I say to them is that I may have only heard it once, but the performers have a real obligation in premiering a work because they have had access to the work. They are the ones who have to be convincing and project the piece in such a way that it goes across to an audience. And an audience wants to find a connection, going back to your point about neophilia. That’s probably one of the things people can’t identify with. They’re sacrificing content for newness and not thinking about having something to say. That’s a shift of values that I think over a period of time in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, you know, was simply the case. The second thing, there was a very interesting thing that happened in Albuquerque this past spring. They had only the second performance of Pierrot Lunaire in Albuquerque in the history of Albuquerque concert music and it happens that the man that was my piano teacher, who used to be a student of a colleague of Schoenberg‘s, performed both in the first performance in the ’50s and in this second performance. He made the comment that the first time they spent many, many weeks preparing for it. It was conducted both times, but the first time the person doing it had a real commitment to really putting the piece across and I remember, I was maybe 10 or 11 years old, and it had a huge impact on me. I just liked that dark stuff for some reason. But the second one was less satisfying for a variety of reasons. But my former piano teacher’s comment was, “You know, we didn’t have nearly the rehearsal time this time.” And I think maybe it’s because of union considerations about how much rehearsal time they can allot to different pieces, that they give short shrift to a lot of performances. And that doesn’t do a service to the music; it doesn’t do a service to the performers.

FRANK J. OTERI: How do journalists then respond to that? How do we in our role as people who are trying to make the field better address that issue? When there’s only so much space to allot to anything? And another thing that nobody’s touched on here that I wanted to get into: the situation where you’re covering a performance and, say, you don’t like it, but the audience did. Or, you loved it but it was clear that the audience hated it. Should that be something that’s part of your review? Are you reporting on the event as well as giving critical evaluation of what you’re covering? Now David wanted to get something in there…

DAVID STOCK: Yeah, I just wanted to ask all of you two quick questions. The first one was, think back the last, I don’t know, 5, 6, 7 years, wherever you were working. How often in those 6 or 7 or some such number of years has the same organization, symphony orchestra, chamber music, whatever, repeated the work in a future season? Once, twice?

JANET BEDELL: This is just something we’re starting to get into at the Baltimore Symphony–the sense that organizations feel, “Well, we’re doing our bit for contemporary music by commissioning, commissioning, commissioning.” When we start looking back over what we have commissioned it becomes clear that some of them are real winners. Some of the pieces that came up are really quite striking and really deserve a re-hearing and we’re just starting to think about it–and I think many organizations should be thinking about this–in this whole suite of repetition that we do of familiar repertoire, why not look back over recent commissions and bring them back. Bring them back quite soon and, you know, give the orchestra a chance to get better on top of what they did the first time.

DAVID STOCK: Can we see a straw vote? How many people remember this happening more than occasionally wherever you are? About 3 or 4. Yeah, yeah. My other question, which is much more complex in a certain loony way, is how many of you think that in whatever span of time you’ve been working in the city you are in that what you say about contemporary music has any direct effect on what actually gets played? Do think the orchestra or the chamber music society or whatever, pays attention?

PAUL HERTELENDY: I think perhaps a very strong arts organization with a very strong sense of goals and determination, they can be bulletproof as far as critiques are concerned. In a lot of areas, like where I live, I find that they are weak-willed enough that if reviewers jump on world-premieres and make them out to be rather negative experiences, the following year or the year after they’re not going to do any more commissions. And that’s one of the reasons why I think a lot of us write about new pieces in a somewhat more positive vein than the inner heart is telling us because we realize that these arts organizations are going to be intimidated and not spending the money on commissions in the future if they keep getting bad reviews.

JOHN KENNEDY: To answer David’s question, there actually is a young American conductor whose programming, if you look at the orchestra’s schedule, for the past 3 years now has reflected what has been written about in the Sunday Times without fail. And you know, to his credit, he’s reading the Sunday Times, but on the other hand do you want your only source to be Paul Griffiths, for instance? And so, I do think that there is the opportunity to help change the perception of what’s out there. Performers read the media. Performers try to find all the sources they can and, you know, the publishing houses just want to send you PR and you want to find other perspectives that aren’t part of the industry.

MARC GEELHOED: I think that one way that might increase the reaction and potential for a positive effect in new music is writing up previews of when a world premiere is coming and we’re talking a lot about reviewing the piece and everything like that but I think that one really positive way would be to say, you know, there’s a premiere coming, I’ve seen the score. It looks like it might be really great… I had a chance to see the score and listen to a recording of an American premiere by the Swedish composer named Sven-David Sandström who teaches at IU. They were doing his High Mass there and after I heard the recording, I was like: “This is going to be a really great thing!” So I wrote up a very positive preview of the thing and there was a packed house that showed up for the thing and people loved it. So, I think that that might be even more effective for getting repeat performances than a positive review.

NANCY LANG: In Washington, we have the Hechingers who provide funds for new works that are done regularly with the National Symphony. I think you have to recall that the Ford Foundation years ago gave grants for new works. I think what we need to do, if it’s possible somehow, is get corporations, if possible, to fund new works, more so than what is being done currently. Recordings are fine, radio is fine, but I think you need more money and I think that maybe that’s the source where we should go.

FRANK J. OTERI: I want to respond to something that Marc said which I thought was really interesting. The quotes that I read at the very beginning of the session are from a very interesting collection that the University of Nebraska Press just put out of critiques of Beethoven by his German contemporaries. It’s a whole collection of responses to the world premieres of these pieces. It was fas
cinating reading in preparation for this discussion because not only were they reviewing the performances, but often times they were reviewing the publications as they were published. If a score got released of a piano four-hand version of a symphony, there’d be a review of it. Now the world has changed a great deal. [laughter] Could you imagine coming to your editor and saying this new score has come out from Boosey & Hawkes or Schirmer or Presser or what have you and you would love to review this publication! You know, “I sat at the piano and I worked through it and the typography on this was inadequate at measure 54!” But this Beethoven book has articles by people saying this stuff! And I’m reading this thinking, wow, why am I not living then? (Well, you know, living conditions weren’t so great, but…) But, how do we deal with this so that music isn’t as new to us in approaching it and the preview idea is a very good one. Something that got raised at the end of the last session, which spiraled into our lunch conversation that I want to raise here… Often, when we’re covering something, especially in smaller cities, in smaller markets, we might be the only person at one paper covering that artistic beat, so what we say about that event is the only piece of documentation for that event and for a premiere this is particularly terrible. What could we do in terms of funding? I would say, yeah, it’s great to fund more performances of new music, but how about getting people and getting organizations to fund multiple reviews of performances so that we can engage the audience in a dialogue so that the audience isn’t just reading this as though it was word from on high, but so the audience would actually begin to listen critically as well and engage in the debate.

WILLIAM LITTLER: Well, I think we are coming up against a space problem in the realities of contemporary journalism. Anytime you do something, it means you’re not doing something else. Anytime you take the time to go a rehearsal as well as a performance, you’ve avoided going to another performance and what the critic finds himself or herself doing, is trying to be fair about the coverage of the field. And it means inevitably that what takes more time, which is the preparation to review new music, gets cut short because we have the other responsibilities as well. And I don’t see that changing if we’re dealing with the general press. Now what we really need is a scholarly musical press of consequence. The trouble is the funding for that sort of thing, given the number of readers that there are, is very hard to come by. And likewise, corporations sponsoring the new music, they’re interested in numbers and new music does not represent by and large, large numbers.

FRANK J. OTERI: Classical music in total doesn’t represent large numbers.

WILLIAM LITTLER: That’s right. So we have to be realistic, once again, in terms of our expectations. These things are desiderata but are they practical realities? Not likely.

BARBARA JEPSON: I actually think one of the best things that you can do to encourage repeat performances is to write a piece that has legs. I’ve now been covering new music long enough to see that there are some pieces that have legs and that there are some pieces that fall by the wayside justly. And I think that a sphere where this seems to happen more often than most is when a composer is commissioned to write a piece for a particular member of an orchestra and then if that piece–if it has those legs–is picked up by other orchestra members who bring it to the attention of their conductors and say, “Hey, there’s this great percussion concerto by Joe Schwantner, and Chris Lamb premiered it at the New York Philharmonic and you know, it’s been recorded by so-and-so and I’d like to do it here.” And there’s a certain politics in major orchestras where they try to feature their principal players, a few of them a season. And just as an example of that, Sofia Gubaidulina wrote a piece for two violas for Cynthia Phelps and Rebecca Young at the Philharmonic and that piece, I think, the Philharmonic itself has already performed at least 7 times, I think more. They’ve toured with it, they’ve repeated it in New York and I’m sure that other orchestras are picking it up as well.

FRANK J. OTERI: And it’s on the Masur set, so it’s recorded.

BARBARA JEPSON: Yeah, that’s right.

JOHN KENNEDY: I just wanted to say I think, you know, we don’t give our audiences enough credit sometimes. It’s like sometimes…we’ve been a little concerned with the whole subject a little bit and talking about audience reception of new pieces, and I tell you, I’ve done some very radical repertoire over the years and very rarely have people gotten up and walked out of a concert. It’s not the scenario that we had in Chautauqua some years ago. I just find that peoples’ ears are more open. Maybe I would feel differently if I was music director of an orchestra and I had to be concerned about those issues, but I think we can push the envelope and I don’t think we have to look at audiences with this sort of trepidation. It’s just music. It happens to be new. We were talking about funding for performances and composers. I’ve got a quote and we can guess when it was and who said it.

“The shifting scenes of our social and economic environments are so fluctuating, so crowded with heterogeneous influences, such a helter-skelter race of commercial jockeying, that it is very difficult to strike any bedrock economic or human relationships. Our economic system has fostered the productive psychology with such narrow limitations that no allowance is made for the leisure which is necessary for productivity in the arts. The problem of social and economic adjustment is doing more to destroy talented American composers than any other problems and of course its only solution will come when enough American individuals recognize that we cannot buy musical culture any more than we can buy a home environment.”

Roy Harris, 1933.

WILLIAM DUNNING: Yeah, I was thinking about–and I think perhaps it’s worth putting it in here–something called Asimov’s Corollary, which Isaac Asimov came up with several years ago at a science fiction convention, not unlike this [laughter]…

WILLIAM LITTLER: I’ve always wondered whether you knew where you wer
e, Bill!

WILLIAM DUNNING: I know where I am. I’m right here, where are you? [laughter] Ted Sturgeon is said to have said, “Ike, do you realize that 90 percent of the science fiction that is written” (and you may substitute if you want new music) “is crap.” And without missing a beat, Asimov snapped back and said, “Ted, 90 percent of everything in the entire universe is crap.” And that applies to music in that the crap of two centuries ago has been forgotten and tossed out.

FRANK J. OTERI: Except on classical radio!

DAVID STOCK: Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no! It’s all back on public radio. Oh, no! Oh, no!

[laughter]

JOHN KENNEDY: It’s those little pieces by the famous composers.

WILLIAM DUNNING: Except for the recent rediscoveries of music by PDQ Bach. No, if it hasn’t been, it should be perhaps. But the new music that’s coming out today, includes the 10 percent and the 90 percent and somebody has to sort them out. Now, to a large extent, that’s going to be history’s job and in 200 years the decision will have been made, but to some extent it’s our job. We have to point the fingers and say this is the good stuff, this is not the good stuff, and it’s a terrible responsibility, but we do have to do it.

STEVEN SWARTZ: I’m from Boosey & Hawkes and I’m here with the kind permission of Frank to be at this session. I’ve been the publicity person at Boosey for 12 years and one thing I’ve seen is the collapsing of outlets for criticism involving major markets from 3 papers to 2 papers; now you have 1 paper in most markets plus an alternative weekly and if we’re talking about getting a multiplicity of views, if we’re talking about getting different perspectives and a dialogue going, that’s obviously one of the biggest problems. Unfortunately, I don’t even know if there’s anything that can be done. The Examiner and Chronicle out in San Francisco…It’s been a problem for the future of new music simply because this last word thing is even more pronounced than it had been before, when there are fewer and fewer places to read about a new piece of music.

FRANK J. OTERI: I want to respond to something that Bill Littler said a little while ago that got left hanging: If you’re covering one thing, then you’re not covering something else. And this session’s called “How to cover a premiere,” but one of the interesting things in the new music world that I see from the several hats that I wear is that a premiere is somehow journalistically sexy, whereas the second or third or fourth performance isn’t. So an organization will commission a new piece knowing that they will get the coverage, whereas if they play a piece that is really good that was done 2 seasons ago, they might not get covered at all. There’s very interesting music group that was formed in New York City that’s sort of teetering, their concert attendance hasn’t been great and they haven’t been reviewed at all yet. American Accent… There’s also, Second Helpings… Anyway, the goal of American Accent was to do only pieces that were already performed. Nobody covered their opening concert. Nobody did advances or reviews. They asked me to give a talk at this thing and I did this Q & A with Ned Rorem and he got up there and said, “Why am I even here?” That’s Ned, but there was hardly anybody there. A great concert, with fantastic performances… It begs the question: Is our obligation to new music beyond the premiere? How do we engender that in our writing and in our coverage and how do we determine what kinds of pieces get covered when they are premiered? What kind of pieces get covered the second time around, the third time around? Where do we make that judgment call?

WILLIAM LITTLER: Well, we have two problems here. First of all, a newspaper is a news paper. What’s new immediately is what gets attention and so the premiere is what is new and that’s what we have to deal with, so I don’t–I think that’s a reality that has to be faced and it might be an unfortunate one but it’s there. But the other thing I’m thinking about is the title of Erich Leinsdorf‘s book The Composer’s Advocate. Now he’s speaking from the point of view of a conductor as being a composer’s advocate, but historically, music critics have been advocates for the composers they care for and they’ve been a kind of champion. It’s not so fashionable today. Most of our publications want us to be fair-minded. This is an objective that is hanging up there without anyway of being tangibly performed. But nonetheless we have largely given up this advocate’s role of standing behind a composer and saying: “Pay attention to this person and these are the reasons why…,” because it’s a kind of polemical exercise and some of us are afraid of being polemicists. We want to be fair-minded judges of the situation, but look through musical history and commentary and you’ll find that it’s full of the polemic and that the polemic is very exciting. Once again, passion, the word that was mentioned earlier today… Shaw said, “A review that is written without passion isn’t worth reading.” And we have to write from a point of view of belief. And the trouble is in our fair-mindedness, we’ll go to concert after concert of contemporary music and give a little attention to everybody in this democratic way and so we don’t stand behind a few and ignore the others, we try to distribute our attention. And the consequence is there isn’t a critical mass of attention given those who really stand out that perhaps ought to be given.

BARBARA JEPSON: May I speak to that?

FRANK J. OTERI: Yes.

BARBARA JEPSON: I agree with you that we should write with passion. I’m very frustrated with reading reviews that describe new music without evaluating it. I think that’s a must. I think there’s a little distinction. I think one can be fair and still be passionate or one can be fair and still say it stinks or it’s wonderful and I think the fairness comes in, for me, it comes in in not prejudging works according to their style but being open to the idea that there is good and bad in every style, whether it’s our favorite style or our least favorite. There are people who are writing in an excellent way in a style that may not be my favorite. And I actually had an example of that a year ago when I was asked to do something on a composer and the things that I had heard by that composer I thought were rather bland but I agreed to do the piece and I ended up really liking the premiere. So in the review, I mentioned that X, Y, and Z were accomplished but bland, but the piece that I heard I thought was really, really excellent. I discussed why I thought it was good even though it wasn’t my preferred harmonic language and, Frank, just to go back to your original question of how do you engender assignments or space for things that hav
e already been performed and are being given a second hearing? One of the ways I do it is if a recording comes out which is often two years after a premiere, that gives an opportunity to revisit the piece, and what I try to do is define something current that is going on and then in the same piece, not only talk about the current piece but also talk about the previous piece which I may or may not have covered. You can also do that if there is no recording. In the context of a piece on a particular composer–just give the context and single out, you know, these are so-and-so’s strongest works or just discuss the works that you have been taken by that have been performed once and never heard of again and at least you’re letting people know about it, whether or not it leads to anything.

FRANK J. OTERI: Once again this question of advocacy for specific composers, I would argue that there are composers that are on the radar of everyone in this room who have risen above this area–you know, certainly a John Adams or an Elliott Carter or a John Harbison. These are people whose every work gets covered. They have reached a certain level of critical mass where that coverage happens. I guess the question for everybody at the table, and I don’t think I’m being unfair when I say the people who are at this table who are composers, the two who are primarily known as composers, neither of you are at that level of national critical mass where anything you write will get covered and I guess I’d like to have you speak to that question of what you feel when you write a piece. What do you feel you should be getting in terms journalistic coverage for what you’re doing and why?

DAVID STOCK: Again it depends on what you mean by journalistic coverage. The only time that anything I had written didn’t get written about, it got bumped–an important New York premiere–it got bumped by a pop review or something. I never had the chutzpah to write to the critic, “Look, not for me, but for the soloist, could you please just send me a copy of what you wrote?” Because this was an important soloist who was really looking forward to this and it then disappeared. But I guess what I would really like would be–it has nothing to do with me personally–but what I said before, critical studies. They don’t have to be complex. They don’t have to go into every note the composer ever wrote or what she had for breakfast last Thursday, but just something that puts things in some larger context. We have wonderful composers out there who aren’t quite so well-known and somehow some of them rise above that level of “Well, we’ve sort of heard of him or her…” to the next level. And nobody quite knows how these things happen. One thing for example, one project I’ve been threatening to do for years and years and probably someday I actually will get around to, which is a much more important question and it’s the long-range one, or at least the medium-range one: I want to write to a lot of composers and I’d probably write to some of you as well and say, “Look, I want you to pretend we’re doing a time capsule and I want you to write, give me the names of 10 pieces or 10 composers or something that you are reasonably sure, that you’re willing to bet are gonna stick around for the next 50 years.” You know, when all is said and done, if we’re looking beyond tomorrow. That’s all that counts. If we’re not, if there’s no ongoing repertoire, then what’s it all about? All the composers might as well pack up and go home. I believe it is, you see, but I mean to ask people to sort of stake their reputations on it, I think might…We just went through an exercise like this in Pittsburgh which unfortunately I triggered because of overhearing a conversation with a friend in a restaurant. We were going to the symphony and I happened to hear my friend who was not even sitting at my table say to his friend, “I think that the Shostakovich 8th Symphony is the greatest post-modern symphony.” And I turned around and said, “What are you talking about? It isn’t!” And he said, “Well, name some.” I started naming–bing, bing, bing, bing, bing! And then I started thinking about it. So anyway, that led to a whole bunch of lists, which then led to one of your colleagues, Andrew Druckenbrod, asking all of us composers in Pittsburgh, just to pick out our favorite three pieces, whatever they were, of the last ten years which was many, many too few. It was hell! It was also very interesting to see how many correspondences there were that we all sort of agreed on some of the people who were, you know, the real thing. When…you’re talking about two different things. One is the immediate. What I really want, of course, is my work becomes well-enough known that it gets played all over and everything I write is a commission. Now, close to everything–does somebody want to commission my 5th Symphony out there that I finished a year and two weeks ago and I’m just waiting… [laughter] Anyway, so in the short run, that’s what we want, but in the long run, true critical judgment would be really nice and, of course, a lot of them are going to be wrong! Who cares? But to say this is what I think is going to make it and what’s worth sticking around. That’s what’s really interesting.

JOHN KENNEDY: I would just add that no matter what hat we wear or our profession in the field, we love music and we all have to be advocates of music at some level. I was thinking about this discussion of where we are in terms of writing about young composers. I forget what year John Rockwell‘s book All American Music came out, maybe late ’70s, early ’80s, but those were a collection of essays about contemporary composers. I think it did help the careers of some of those who were included. They became the BAM artists… And that kind of writing is more than just about music, it’s like cultural studies of where music fits into the way culture is changing and that kind of thinking is very, very valuable for performers and writers alike.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, I want to throw this in because I’m in a privileged position to be exposed to new music on an ongoing basis, with what I do on a daily basis. I always had this chip on my shoulder about advocating for new music, even before I got to the American Music Center. I knew a lot about new music and I knew all these pieces that were recorded and I went to all of these premieres in New York City, which has all of this activity. But then I got to the Center and I was like, “Yikes!” you know, the flood gates opened. There is so much stuff, more than 5000 composers that I had never heard of, a lot of whom were as exciting as the big name composers who do get the coverage all the time, who are on the radar all the time and I guess the last question I want to throw out, because we are kind of running toward the end of this thing, is how do we seek out those people who might not normally be on our radar; who aren’t always getting presented at the equivalent of Heinz Hall or Verizon Hall in Philadelphia or Carnegie Hall in New York, the folks who are bei
ng performed in the small galleries somewhere a little bit out of the way? How do we stay open to that, when we’re so busy–if we’re covering that, we’re missing something else?

WILLIAM LITTLER: The first thing that has to be said is that the decision isn’t always ours. It’s an editor’s decision, quite often, as to what is covered. So help me–if Pavarotti comes to town and there’s a concert of new music in a small gallery, the choice is taken away from me.

FRANK J. OTERI: He’s retired now, apparently…

[laughter]

WILLIAM LITTLER: You know what I mean and that’s the difficult situation that we have. And if we are to discover the new and the young emerging talents it very often means that we are not sitting in front a major recital by Ashkenazy that night. Those are the ongoing choices we have to make, and depending on the nature of our publication, they may be difficult or easy choices. If we are an alternative publication and the editor doesn’t care about what we write about fine; we’ll go out and forget Ashkenazy. I don’t have to hear another performance by Ashkenazy, fine as he is. But the point is if we’re dealing with a newspaper that deals in mass circulation, then we have to be aware of the mass. The editors certainly are if we’re not. So there is going to be that constant tension. It’s a misunderstanding on the part of the public by and large. Most critics would rather be listening to something new. It’s more stimulating. And yet we have other responsibilities that we can’t ignore. We are agents of publications that address large numbers of people and large numbers of people are often not interested in those small concerts that interest us. We can be selfish, we can be enlightened–it depends on how you define that act–but from the newspaper’s point of view we have to be responsible to their objectives at the same time and that’s a constant balancing act that’s not easy.

PAUL HERTELENDY: I think that’s kind of a misconception. Some quarters of the public feel that if we feature a performance of, let’s say, graduate students’ composition class given in a small hall at the university, we will discover the next Igor Stravinsky or BartÛk or whoever we care to name, and this is generally not the case. So the critic with the limited amount of resources and time and space in the newspaper is very dependent on performing arts organizations for seeking out talents or organizations which give commissions, which may not even be performing groups at all, to recognize certain people. And then in a venue which is reasonably presentable and reasonably professional or has a reasonable audience, it’s a viable venue and there we can look–I mean, you’re asking us to go through a haystack and find the one needle in there. Well, there may be one needle, there may be none, and we need help finding a lead.

JOHN KENNEDY: And so do the performing organizations often. Most of them are not very proactive about really making the base broad, you know.

BARBARA JEPSON: It seems like somebody should do a big commercial for NewMusicBox because that’s one way to…

FRANK J. OTERI: I’ll let somebody else do it! Conflict of interest…

DAVID STOCK: It’s wonderful. Everybody needs to read it every month. Was that good enough?

JAMES REEL: It’s really great. And they pay on time!

[laughter]

 

JAMES REEL: If I can just inject another pessimism here, I think that this whole effort is doomed with the egalitization of newspapers in the United States. Just take what you face in Toronto, what you face in Cleveland, and you’re lucky to have that. You’re lucky to have any problems at all because in the newspapers in the mid-sized and smaller markets, as the classical critics move on for one reason or another, they’re not being replaced. They may not even be replaced with freelancers from the university. I live in Tucson, which has a population of 800,000 or so right now, two daily newspapers there. Neither one right now has a full-time classical music critic or has any intention of hiring one. If they have anybody cover anything at all, it’s going to be what the editors there who don’t know anything about music of any kind, popular or classical, think will have the highest reader interest and that means, well, we’re obligated to go cover the symphony this month. So they send somebody who they know maybe to be an amateur cellist, who doesn’t know that much about music, doesn’t know how to write about music, certainly. And they go back, they go to the concert and to them Bartók is new music and they come back with a snide remark about how dissonant the Bartok was. And if they face music like that with such a low degree of sophistication, there’s no way that they’re going to be equipped to understand anything that’s truly new. And our problem here is the de-professionalization of our profession.

BARBARA JEPSON: I wonder if there is something that the Music Critics’ Association can do to reach those newspaper publishers and editors and change their minds?

DAVID STOCK: Coercion. [laughter] Can I one up you on that one if you don’t mind? I hate to say anything pessimistic but Don Rosenberg’s predecessor at the Pittsburgh Press got his job because–this is in the late ’50s or early ’60s–the previous music critic had died or retired or something and they said, “O.K., who here knows anything about music?” And so, a gentleman, a very nice guy whose name I will not mention, said, “Well, I played the violin in high school.” (He was writing for sports or something.) They said, “Ok, you’re the new music critic!” So he went to the symphony the first time and they were–remember this was 1960 give or take a couple years–and they were playing Daphnis and Chloe Suite No. 2 and he reviewed it as though it were a premiere and he didn’t like it, so it’s exactly what you’re talking about. Exactly, word for word. And that’s already 45 years ago, 35?

FRANK J. OTERI: I don’t want to end this on that note.

DAVID STOCK: No, no, no.

FRANK J. OTERI: Can we have a voice with a positive story somebody who hasn’t spoken? Well, you’ve spoken but you can speak again.

MARC GEELHOED: Well, I think that all music is new music to somebody out there and that if you present that in all of your reviews, that fresh, exciting aspect whether or not it’s fresh or exciting to you at this point, I think that that would even reverse the trend and might even raise interest in new music.

FRANK J. OTERI: Here, here.

WILLIAM LITTLER: You’d rather light a candle than curse the darkness.

[laughter]

FRANK J. OTERI: On that note, I hope we’ve raised more questions than given answers!

Problems Facing Music Criticism From the COMPOSER-TO-COMPOSER Series at the Telluride Institute


Estrada, La Barbara, Cage, Spiegel, Subotnick, Lockwood, Davis, León, Amirkhanian, and Johnson

Composer Participants:
Charles Amirkhanian
John Cage
Laurie Spiegel
Joan La Barbara
Tom Johnson
Walter Zimmermann
Morton Subotnick
Anthony Davis
Tania León
Julio Estrada
Jin Hi Kim
Ricardo Dal Farra
Annea Lockwood

Guest Participant:
Alan Rich

Friday, August 18, 1989, 9-11 AM

Recorded and transcribed by Laura Kuhn

  1. Various Types of Music Criticism
  2. Music Criticism in Europe
  3. Objectivity and Influence
  4. Capturing the Essence of Music in Words
  5. The Power of a Critic
  6. Critics and Cross Cultural Issues
  7. Criticism and Publicity
  8. Music Criticism, Politics and Marginalization
  9. Uses of Music Criticism by the Music Industry
  10. Polemical Wars and Camps Within Music Criticism
  11. Composers as Music Critics
  12. Avoiding Insularity