Category: Spotlight

He has also been an active player in the game, thinking deeply about the changes he wants to see in the field and dedicating his time and talents to putting them into action. Greenstein is by turns idealistic and pragmatic, motivated by a desire to challenge artists and audiences, but also to keep pace with economic and social developments. The latest example of these parallel drives put into performance practice is the Ecstatic Music Festival he has curated in New York City, which kicks off with a seven-hour marathon concert on January 17 from 2-9 p.m. at Merkin Concert Hall. By the time the 14-concert event wraps on March 28, 150 composers and performers will have contributed their creative voices to the effort through a series of collaborative performances that he hopes will have inspired all involved.

The changes Greenstein has witnessed in the field mirror wider global trends. “The world that we as composers and performers were operating in expanded exponentially,” Greenstein explains. “Now the conversation is with everyone and the possibilities are multidirectional. That does so many different things at once that it’s sort of hard for me to talk about. I don’t have an elevator pitch for this one.” And with so much on the table, it didn’t seem productive to distill our discussion down to a sound bite.

—MS

Judd Greenstein: My piano teacher at that time encouraged me, but I really didn’t get into it fully until I started writing hip-hop beats with my friend David when I was eleven or twelve. I would cobble together beats using an old Casio, sample the piano using a really crude recorder, and just make as many sounds as possible and overlay them. Then I got a 4-track, I got a professional synthesizer, and I really started writing hip-hop beats—I would say more earnestly than I was writing classical music. But I suddenly realized, “Oh, I can take the creative space that I associate with writing hip-hop beats and combine it with the space of piano lessons and turn that into something else.” And so I started writing classical music along the lines of Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, things I was playing at the time.

When I was fifteen or sixteen, I really started making the transition into writing scores at the piano and my piano teacher, Mary Jo Pagano, I remember she pulled me aside and said, “Do you want to actually be a composer?” I thought, “Yeah, I do.” She said, “Okay, you have to start working really hard.” [laughs] So I went to the library and took out scores and recordings and started studying all the late 20th-century masters—Stravinsky and Bartók to Carter and Boulez. George Perle, for some reason, was a big person for me at that time. Then that music started permeating my own, and I really felt like I was going to become a composer. But certainly the earliest, really strong creative pull came from outside of anything that would be considered the classical world, and eventually there came a point where I realized that I had maybe gone a little bit too far in one direction for my comfort zone—it was like my thirteen-year-old self was sort of saying, “Hey! What happened to me?”

MS: Why go that direction at all? At the time you were making these decisions, it wasn’t as if you needed to be a “classical” composer in order to be a professional, so what ultimately pulled you towards the kind of music that you wrote during that period and that you write now?

JG: As you get older, you start to realize that some of the things you thought you might do, you’re not going to do. For some people that’s “Be an astronaut!” or “Be a tennis pro!”, but for me, being a hip-hop producer was always something that seemed very on the table, even into my 20s. I still was writing beats; I still saw that as part of my identity. But eventually you realize what you’re good at and what you’re not good at, and the more you become good at something, the more—at least for me—it overtakes your creative space. The better I became at writing music, or at least the more experienced, I realize how inexperienced I was in other fields. But you’re right, in 1994 if I had had different friends who were more plugged into the Queensbridge scene, who knows? I could have been on Stillmatic. That’s pure fantasy, but I definitely would have said yes! [laughs]

I found out a lot of the decisions that I’ve seen people make come from a really pragmatic point, and then later on they justify it artistically. We don’t see these choices all the time; for me it’s pretty stark: I decided to go into classical music and not to go into hip-hop, but I think it could have broken a different way and, you know, we would be having a very different conversation right now.

MS: It’s obviously still very much a part of your world. Even your bio very neatly comes full circle from your early interest in hip-hop to writing your PhD thesis on the genre. But does that feed into the music you do write now or is this actually just a non-related musical interest?

JG: There’s no way that hip-hop is apart from my music because it’s something that I deeply care about and still listen to all the time. I wouldn’t for a long time have suggested that there was anything in my music that was about hip-hop and certainly there’s nothing on the surface that resembles the textures or techniques that you hear in hip-hop music. That said, there are a few things that I’ve realized over time are ways that I find success in my own music that are the same ways that I would find success when I was writing a beat. For example, I distinctly remember it being two in the morning in 1992 and I’m sitting there with, like, god knows what headphones on, waiting for that moment when I would think, “I could listen to this forever.” And I find myself doing that a lot—tweaking some pattern, some texture, whatever it may be in my music. Not the moments that are clearly discrete, clearly short term, but something that’s going to go on for a while, something that’s going to be with us and part of the rhetoric of the piece. The way I determine success in that has a lot to do with the way that I thought about hip-hop when I was growing up, even though the music sounds totally different. I’m sure there are other things like that as well, I just can’t really pick them apart from what I just generally think is good in music.

MS: What else shapes the music that you write, taking this beyond the hip-hop discussion. There are so many decisions a composer makes while working on a piece that the outside world has no knowledge of, so I’m curious about what shapes that work for you.

JG: My music is often very repetitive in certain ways and things not only come back but they stick around for a while once they’re in play. So I think somebody who listens to my music might be surprised to hear me say, “The thing that I’m trying to avoid most is something like boredom or any feeling of disinterest or a moment of something being used only as a rhetorical device or only in the service of something else that’s more important.” When I write, I’m constantly going back and thinking about the moment I’m working on in the context of everything that’s come before. I usually write from beginning to end, and afterwards I’ll see if there are places that need additional support, but I can’t think of a piece outside of the general conception that I have of it as an arc from beginning to end. I can’t think of a particular moment except in the context of what has happened and, when I make this decision right now, is it engaging me enough that I’m continuing my mental thread and I want to be doing this instead of hitting the “next” button on the CD or starting to daydream in the concert hall.

The greatest challenge I have as a composer is to remove the process that I’m in when writing the piece from the experience that I know I’m going to have listening to it. That’s something that I think I’ve gotten better at as I’ve written more music, but it still is absolutely the number one challenge because you know all the things that you didn’t do, all the tricks you didn’t pull, and all the things that you brought in and then decided to take away. It can be really tempting to allow yourself to remember the whole world of ideas that you surrounded the actual piece with when most of that actually ended up on the cutting room floor. If you do something three times, in your head you’ve actually probably done it a hundred times, and most of those different ways that you tried to work out the rhythm or the harmony never made it in, but, god, do we really have to do this a third time because haven’t we done this enough already? Well, no. In the context of the actual piece, we haven’t, but in your brain you’ve done it way more than enough and so that’s a challenge.

I need to want things to stay in play longer than they actually do. I want to be disappointed anytime something stops happening. If something changes, I want to make sure that the thing that happens is even more engaging, for whatever reason, than the thing that has just left. It’s an escalation up from silence. For me, the threshold of accepting a piece as worth making and even a moment as worth making has to be, “Is it worth changing from what was there before?” and I found that to be a pretty high bar.

MS: You work so closely with colleagues on projects like the record label New Amsterdam and the ensemble NOW, so does that then impact the actual composition of your music? I’m curious if that has bled into your conception of the work you’re creating and how that rubs up against that single author/brilliant mind/Great Man theory that we have historically held so dear when it comes to composers.

JG: I think it depends where you’re looking from. I really like the notion that composers can step out from behind the screen and be known as public artistic figures. It’s made the notion of somebody whose work is primarily in their head interesting to people. And that’s obviously been true elsewhere, but it’s not something that people thought about in terms of music more popularly. That’s just because the people who are most well known all stand on stage in front of you, but since that’s become less true even in the popular realm, I think the mental space of musical art has become more prominent in the public discussion. And that to me is a really wonderful thing.

What isn’t as wonderful is when composers treat themselves as merely producers of scores. That’s not very interesting to me. Someone once said a mathematician is a machine that turns coffee into equations, and since what I do mostly is turn coffee into notes and dots and lines on the page, it’s tempting to call composers that, but I don’t think that’s where the composer should end. I remember Charles Wuorinen being interviewed by this publication and he said—well, he said a lot of things I disagreed with—but the thing I disagreed with the most by far was when he said, “I don’t believe that a composer has any obligation to the world whatsoever,” and there’s a million ways I could critique that. First of all, people have obligations to the world, so, aren’t you a person? And insofar as being a composer is what you’re doing in the world, isn’t being a composer something that actually does have an obligation to the world? But there’s been this kind of myth in the 20th century, or at least an ethos, that the best way to be a composer is to forget that and to just write, apart from any constructs or constraint or context that you might find yourself in. But that’s never been true. Being Conlon Nancarrow in Mexico is a type of social constraint and so he’s not divorced from the world any more than I am, even though I’m enmeshed in an obvious series of networks. He is too, it’s just that they’re not as obvious and the way that they play out is perhaps less clear. He’s sort of ceding control over that in a certain way but he’s also claiming different kinds of control over the narrative that surrounds his work.

It’s a funny question, the notion of, “What is a composer’s responsibility?” and “What is a composer?” in terms of “Where does our role begin and end?” and “How much can we claim authorship as our own?”. Those questions all seem really connected to one another. Does it make sense for me to talk about my viola work Escape as mine when Nadia [Sirota] is the one who has brought it to the world and is literally the only person who’s ever played it? I never would’ve written it if I weren’t imagining Nadia actually playing it out in the world, so it wouldn’t exist. That may not be true for everyone. At the same time, there’s something that drives them to write, and it can’t simply be this mythical notion of composition as an end unto itself because there’s really no there there. Outside of making music for other people to listen to, I don’t think we really have any function at all, and so that’s the end of the story for me. Insofar as we’re enmeshed in a world with other people because that’s what gives us relevance, we have to start moving from where those people are going to be back to our own brains, and once you do that you’ve created a thread that I think dismantles the notion that we can ever be really alone as artists. Not that I would want to be anyway.

MS: And if it was a pop radio tune, most people would think of it as Nadia’s anyway.

JG: Right! Sarah Kirkland Snider has a record that has three different entities on it: it has her, it has Shara Worden, and it has Signal. Most people listening to it don’t really care. They hear Shara’s voice and it’s awesome, they hear this orchestra and they play great, and then something happened to make this music come into being. It doesn’t really matter to most people but none of the participants in that project I think would say that they could’ve done it without everybody else, Sarah included. And that has to be true. There is no score that could lead to the result that is the record of Penelope or any live performance involving Shara or Signal, so I just don’t really understand how composers can see themselves as a world unto themselves, but that’s also maybe just me.

MS: In the past decade, the biggest shift—or at least the most loudly talked about—to come out of the new music scene is the rise of indie-classical, and you’ve been at the heart of it. I’ve watched this as a journalist, but what does it look like from the inside, from an artist’s vantage point?

JG: The thing that has really changed, I think, is that the focus of the world that we as composers and performers were operating in expanded exponentially. It’s wide in terms of the conversations about music in different communities; it’s wide in terms of the spectrum of music that is being drawn from; and it’s wide in terms of the possibilities of what music might be placed in juxtaposition to it. So if you’re thinking about your album, or maybe more pointedly your composition, as only being in dialogue with the world of new classical music, then you’re really making music that has a very limited frame. The decisions you make are about conversations—that’s why you go to music school and learn about more and more music so that you can have a conversation with Schumann or Ligeti or Martin Bresnick, with whom I could have a literal conversation in our lessons but I’m also having a conversation with his music. Now the conversation is with everyone and the possibilities are multidirectional. That does so many different things at once that it’s sort of hard for me to talk about. I don’t have an elevator pitch for this one.

It’s challenging because you’ve taken off the safety that actually protects the world of classical music from everything else and it goes both ways. There’s this insulated world where if you write a piece and it’s performed on a new music concert, there is nothing safer in the entire world than that performance context. Anything can happen—we’ve seen it all. If it’s really good, great! If it’s really bad, well, we’ve all been to concerts, we all know that most of it is really bad, so whatever, who really cares? Practically no one is going to hear it. And the way that it’s going to be discussed is in the really wonderfully safe, broad context of your entire career. This piece is not the beginning and it’s not the end: this is your third string quartet or this is your work for oboe and harp. And that’s fine! Maybe you wrote a bad work for oboe and harp. That doesn’t mean people are never going to program your music again. In the real world of music, there are huge consequences to everything that you do and there’s a real possibility for people to actually hate it, say they hate it, say mean things about you, and put you in the bargain bin at the CD stores if you’re lucky.

It’s not like there was ever a moment when anybody said, “We accept the challenge of going out into the broader world of music.” It was more like a lot of us recognized that we wanted to be part of that larger conversation. We didn’t get into music in the first place because we were really attracted to the isolated world of contemporary classical music. We got into music because we had something that we wanted to say and then, upon becoming relatively good at staying it, we wanted that to be part of the broader conversation that included music from outside the classical tradition. Then you start getting into the economics of that and it gets really weird because you have multiple models coexisting at once. You have the “classical commission, rent a venue, plan three years ahead of time” kind of model, and then you have the “rock club, why don’t we put together a show, let’s go on tour and figure out what we’re going to do as we’re planning it” kind of model. The financial incentives are all in different directions and you have the really disproportionate support that classical music has relative to other types of music from public and private sources of philanthropy. So as you move closer to that place where you’re trying not to draw distinctions between different kinds of music because you don’t want people to draw distinctions about your own music, questions come up about why certain things should be supported or other things shouldn’t. And it’s the messiest possible thing in the world. Everybody’s kind of making it up as they go along.

MS: Speaking of frames, I want to talk about your curation of the upcoming Ecstatic Music Festival in New York. Reading through the line-up, it sounds like you made the city a very public mix tape. What were your guiding philosophies as you crafted it?

Supposedly there’s this big audience for adventurous programming or challenging ideas. I want to say, okay, if you really want to see where challenging ideas come from, it’s when people step outside of their comfort zones and are able to do the things that maybe they wanted to try but their artistic world didn’t allow them to. I can say from personal experience that when you’re actually asked what do you want to do, and you think about what you haven’t had a chance do, you start exploring areas that are really unfamiliar—unfamiliar in ways that I haven’t really felt since I was starting to be a composer. I’m asking myself different kinds of questions and I’m exploring areas where maybe I’m not as good and I have to become good in the process of doing it. I think there’s a lot of that on the festival.

I think that the notion of challenging art has really been cheapened. When people go to a show and they’re expecting something edgy and they get something edgy, that’s not actually a challenge. What’s challenging is when you go to a show and you don’t know what you’re going to hear; maybe the artists didn’t even know what they were going to make based on their prior work and they’re challenging themselves. You as an audience are closing your nose and covering your eyes and jumping into the pool because you believe that, based on just the artistic minds and personalities in play, something really interesting is likely to result.

The best composers, I think, are the people who constantly approach their scores with as much of that as possible. They think, “Okay, how can I really challenge myself perpetually to make something new.” And when we look at musical history, of course the people that we point to are the ones who kept reinventing themselves. All of my artistic heroes are the people who kept churning out new versions of themselves in the interest of constantly wondering what else to try on. And that could be Beethoven, but that’s also Bob Dylan or Neil Young. But there’s not usually the infrastructure for that to happen. There aren’t a lot of places that I’ve seen that allow artists to actually behave with that kind of freedom, so given the opportunity to curate something, I wanted to create an opportunity that artists would find compelling in the service of making work that hopefully audiences will treat the same way.

MS: In the PR for the festival you talk about mixing classical and non-classical for “the right reasons” and we talk ad nauseam about the end of genre. But what lines are still there and what lines do we want to be sure we hold on to?

Something like genre is never going to disappear; we’re always going to have it. We go to a concert because we need something from it. We listen to a certain kind of music because we need something from it. And so to the extent that genre provides us a way to satisfy those needs by identifying which music contains the things that we need, it’s going to be useful and we’re going to need something to do that job for us if genre disappears. I just think that there’s a way of doing it that allows for maybe just a greater efficiency in finding the things that are more closely aligned with what your needs are as a listener.

MS: It seems like the evolution of tagging and how we organize things online represents a naturally evolving system that will support that.

JG: I hope that’s true. It’s not to any real corporate advantage yet for people to remove the notion of genre. It’s still pretty fixed, and all the old infrastructure is still there. We’re still driving on the Eisenhower highway system. So a lot of what we do in the world that I’m involved in is think about ways to push at the infrastructure that’s already there and make it, if not disappear, at least serve the needs of people who are not cleanly operating within it. But it’s still there; iTunes still has a classical section. You can put in as many tags as you want, but the bottom line is that people are going to go to the classical section or they’re not going to go to the classical section. And it’s hard to escape those deep pits. Even the smaller distinctions that exist within genres: those are pits unto themselves, and they still exert a lot of force against the kind of smoothing, more specific, tagging kind of model that we would like to see become coin of the realm.

MS: Do you think that the pushback against these kinds of developments might come out of a fear that it’s all going to get so muddled that we risk losing differences that we value, and so there’s a border guarding that some fans are attempting? Or do you see other anxieties in the letting go of genre, from that perspective?

JG: It’s funny because I’m a hip-hop fan from the ’90s. I like some things that are happening now, but I know that I’m super conservative. It was funny when I realized this, and I was like, “That’s not hip-ho…Oh, no! I can’t believe I’m doing this!” I am sympathetic to the notion that when you don’t get what you think you need from a genre, it’s tempting to say that what you’re actually hearing is not of that genre anymore. It actually comes from a place of finding value in certain features of music. Classical music has this fear that comes from a probably right perception of diminishing fandom and also this weird hoarding of resources. There’s a lot of stuff that has happened inside the pretty walls that would never have happened if the gates had always been open, and to the extent that that’s true, I’m sympathetic to this notion of protecting things that wouldn’t otherwise happen. The problem is that I don’t think that’s really true anymore. I don’t think that there’s work that’s being sheltered from the marketplace that really has to fear the marketplace.

I don’t think that composers are typically making those kinds of “bar the door” arguments. I think it’s more typically classical music listeners who aren’t really thinking about the world of music broadly and they’re just afraid that something is going to disappear. The truth is that things are always disappearing, though, and things are always changing. We can’t live in a conservative world; we have to live in a dynamic world. The question is always going to be: In a dynamic world, meaning one that is constantly open to the possibility of change, who is making decisions about what change happens? I came to a conclusion that if it wasn’t going to be me and it wasn’t going to be my friends, it was going to be people who I thought shouldn’t be trusted with those decisions. I think everyone would agree that it’s super true for any of us and massive, faceless corporate entities that couldn’t care less whether music is good by any description or bad by any description besides how much money it generates for them. So, I can’t really separate questions of conservativism versus dynamism in music listening from questions that ultimately are economic and ultimately are about who is going to be making decisions of where money is spent and what work is promoted and what work people actually hear. If we don’t accept that, then we’re just going to be barricaded until the last moment when we realize that we’ve all actually died on the inside of the walls, and that’s no fun either.

A sonic adventurer, Bettison incorporates invented instruments into his music—he likes to call them “Cinderella instruments”—such as the “wrenchophone” or assemblages of found junk percussion. He also likes to experiment with combinations of unusual instruments like jaw harp, banjo, and recorder placed in ensembles alongside electric guitars, violins, and saxophones, not to mention conventional instruments that have been altered, retuned, or otherwise manipulated to extend their sound possibilities. In addition, one hears explicit references to musical genres beyond Western classical, such as the hints of Appalachian folk song and blues in the expansive evening-length work O Death, or the funk rhythms in B&E (With Aggravated Assault), recently released by Newspeak on their CD sweet light crude. The result of this multitude of influences is a diverse catalog of compositions evoking a wide-reaching musical world, from the filmy and delicate to the boisterous and aggressive.

This sort of multiplicity makes sense for someone who has moved around a lot. Born in Jersey, UK, to a Spanish mother and English father, Bettison began studying violin in London at age ten, and he says that composition took over his attention fairly quickly. After completing a master’s degree in music composition he spent three years in The Netherlands studying with Martijn Padding and Louis Andriessen, and then finished a PhD at Princeton. He has remained in the U.S., and currently serves on the composition faculty at the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University.

Bettison cites his years in Amsterdam as a pivotal time during which he began to discover his unique musical voice. “[Martijn] said, ‘You should always write the piece that you have absolutely no solution for at the beginning…. You need to make mistakes, and if you’re going to make mistakes you need to go down in flames. Don’t just screw up a little bit—really make it terrible. Have the guts to write a really bad piece!’ That piece of advice stuck with me…and it really freed me up to try out all these different things.”

In fact, searching for new sounds and the new expressive capabilities inherent within traditional instruments has become a primary force in Bettison’s work. He has a particular penchant for metallic sonorities, and a fascination with machines (especially in bringing out their potential humanistic qualities), which explains the often propulsive rhythmic force of the music. Actively collaborating with ensembles that he is writing for is also a mainstay of his compositional process. “There’s something so nice about working in close collaboration with musicians and getting their input, and sometimes they make some fantastic suggestions. These collaborations…really hopefully result in better music than would have been written otherwise.”

This experiential working style is another example of the hands-on approach Bettison brings to the process of composing. A learn-by-doing attitude combined with wide-open ears and solid compositional technique keeps the music coming, and the ideas fresh. Ultimately the occasional cognitive dissonance created by the rub of sound on sound and style on style is serving a purpose, rather than standing as an end in and of itself. Themes including death and transcendence, survival of the fittest, and the mental disturbances intrinsic to city living are a few of the narratives that inspire his inventive musical logic. It is music that not only peels away the layers surrounding the topics and gets to the core of the matter, but that can also reframe your view of multiple aural landscapes if you let it.

Christopher Campbell in conversation with Frank J. Oteri
Video presentation by Molly Sheridan

Christopher Campbell not only makes his own extremely unique music but he also helps make music by lots of other composers happen through his day job as the operations manager for Innova, the recording label of the American Composers Forum. So when he decided to put together a recording of his own music, it seemed perfectly natural for him to release it on Innova.

“It seems a little weird because I’m working on the album myself,” Chris acknowledges. “But I paid the admin fee and I paid the manufacturing fee. The artist comes to us and pays us a $3300 admin fee, which is a one-time up-front cost. We never charge anything more than that, except for manufacturing. You own 100% of the product: intellectual, print, all the rights to your recording. You’re basically hiring us to be a hired gun. Once you pay the fee you get into a distribution network with Naxos, all the publicity and the expertise of the label, and 100% of the profits. Whether you sell 10,000 records or five, all those profits are yours: digital, physical, what have you. Nobody’s getting rich, but my hope for these artists is that they have a revolving door fund where they invest in their career and the art they are making and can recoup enough to invest in the next project. By the time you have three or four records out, then it starts gaining momentum. Part of the reason I wanted to put the album out on Innova is I wanted to take a scientific look at it. Here is what we allocate per release. Here are the man hours that we can do on each release, the Campbell record is no different. To get a different perspective about how it runs through the pipeline from an artist’s perspective is a slightly different than an operation manager’s perspective.”

What is really different, however, is what he chose to put out: a three-sided LP! (That is to say, a 2 LP set one of whose LPs only contains grooves on one side; the other is left blank.) But releasing Sound the All-Clear on vinyl was much more than a clever marketing scheme at a time when CDs are being eschewed by many in favor of direct digital downloads because more and more music aficionados are rediscovering the joys of vinyl. Like many advocates of “long play records”, Chris contends that the process of listening to music on “long play records” allows for a more personal relationship with the music as well as more focused listening, despite the possible mechanical imperfections of the medium:

There’s something really sexy about vinyl; there’s something really cool about a needle going through grooves. When I was a kid, my dad played in jazz bands most of his life and he had a really big vinyl collection. It was almost this fetish object. Cover art’s huge and it’s immersive. It’s not this tiny package, it’s an art object. And subconsciously I think you treat something like that with more respect in a day and age where CD manufacturing is so easy to do. [My] music isn’t easy listening and it isn’t workout music. You can’t even bump it in your car really; it just doesn’t have that quality to it. But when you put it on a stereo system it sounds really good, I think. So I wanted to in some ways be a jerk and tie the listeners’ hands and kind of force them to approach it that way […] I know a lot of people don’t own turntables, so it’s available digitally for download and it’s available on CD, but it’s really built for vinyl; it’s mastered for vinyl. And you can hear the difference.

While it probably won’t work in a car, Chris’s tactile mood-transforming soundscapes could work in a club. No matter what format you hear it on—an mp3 download, a physical CD, or the vinyl LP for which it was conceived, the first sound you’ll hear is a needle dropping on a record. Ironically, as digital dethroned analog with its DDD claims of no noise, those same cracks and pops that CD advocates were so happy to be rid of were soon sampled and became ubiquitous in contemporary pop music.

“I find the popping and clicking and scratches really charming,” beams Chris whose texture-based music embraces such sounds. “It’s not sterile; it’s not an empty field. You start listening to the room sound and engaging the space differently.”

Beyond Sound the All-Clear being music conceived for the LP format, it is music that is conceived as a recording rather than for a live concert experience. In fact, a lot of what is going on, even though it is mostly created with acoustic instruments, would not really be possible in a live context and live performance is not something Campbell is even particularly concerned about, even though Sound the All-Clear is not electronic music per se.

I still notate everything, but in terms of the performance, the ensemble goes from three people to fifty people in a live setting. So we did studio stuff—we’d add or subtract and use different cues. Sometimes it would be me conducting, sometimes it would be working on visual monitors so players could see when to come in, almost like Guitar Hero, because a lot of the stuff is pretty arrhythmic, gestural, or based on breath cycles rather than one, two three, four […] And we miked virtually everything, just to get separation and clean sounds. It’s not an orchestral recording in the sense that everything washes together and it’s this big landscape; everything is isolated so that in post-production we could manipulate those colors with Logic and ProTools and all those computer programs.

Ultimately, the path he has taken is a direct by-product of his dual existence. While putting out a recording on the label where he works has helped him to better understand all the details of the process for every recording he services, Chris Campbell’s in-depth knowledge of the field has helped determine the artistic choices he has made as well as the contexts in which he hopes to frame his own creative work:

Why limit yourself to classical or new classical? That’s just a ghetto I don’t want to be in, frankly. It’s frustrating to spend a long time on a piece and then hear it once and have a hard time getting the recording rights to it. […] I love live performances, but my intentionality was to make an album and if it gets performed again in a live setting that’s kind of irrelevant in a way. Would it be cool? Sure. But would it be likely? It’s really hard for composers to get performances.

But don’t start getting the impression that Chris is in any way pessimistic. After all, would anyone but a starry-eyed optimist release a debut album as a composer on vinyl?

CD [manufacturing] costs have gone way down; this was expensive. But I’m a stubborn Scotsman! And I think there’s crossover potential, and there’s been success with the people who are interested in trip-hop. In some ways I think it might be easier for an indie rock hipster to appreciate the album more than a classical guy or gal, just because there’s a lot of psychological baggage about what constitutes classical music today. It’s for adventurous listeners, no matter how you want to genre-dice it. If you have hungry ears and are interested in new sounds, I think it’s a good record for that!

Lei Liang in conversation with Molly Sheridan

“It’s a burden to be an Asian-American composer these days,” Lei Liang says, good naturedly joking about the weight of expectation that goes hand-in-hand with being a part of such a high-profile cultural group within classical music. Following in the footsteps of composers such as Tan Dun, Chen Yi, Bright Sheng, and Chou Wen-chung, Liang was able to learn a great deal through their example, but he has also felt a particular need to find his own way and develop a voice uniquely his own.

He also has had to be cautious. “Although it’s a privilege to be able to inherit certain traditions from Asia,” he acknowledges that “it’s also a danger because for Asian composers, Asian traditions can be a prison. At the same time, as much as I love traditional, contemporary Western music, it can be a prison as well. In my case, I try to use my Asian background to liberate myself from a Western prison, and use my Western training to liberate myself from certain habits I have.”

It’s a method that he has relied upon as he has created an extensive catalog of chamber, orchestral, and choral works as well as music for stage and film.

Born in China in 1972, Liang grew up in Beijing, where he drew attention for his piano playing and compositional skill at an early age. He emigrated to the U.S. when he was just 17 years old, spurred by his experiences as a participant in the Tiananmen Square protests. Once in the States, he earned degrees at the New England Conservatory and Harvard University.

Coming of age after the Cultural Revolution, he says it was only after arriving in America that he was able to truly discover China’s history and construct a fuller picture of his cultural heritage for himself. He also remembers being shocked to discover the diversity of global musical culture. He says, “That’s something that I never had exposure to before, and it really opened my mind. It’s almost as important as new music for me. When you hear music that can be made out of all these things, you hear that music is such an endless world. There is so much possibility in making expressive things out of sound.”

In his own work, Liang began exploring what that variety of sound had to offer. There were the timbres and folk songs tied to his personal cultural heritage, which he continued to study through his interest in the preservation of traditional Asian music. But he was also sonically inspired by personal interactions with the sounds of the natural world that immediately surrounded him in Boston. He was comfortable exploring noise, and also fascinated by the power of silence.

These days, those points of inspiration continue to direct him. He has also found that he likes to work inside certain set limitations. “This is also something I learned from Asian music,” he explains. “Oftentimes an artist’s creativity is evaluated not by how many new things they can create but rather by how much power they have in transforming something preexisting. I limit myself to just a few pitches, for example. On the one hand, there’s a unifying force that brings all these things together, like a very tiny seed—one note, or just three notes. But on the other hand, I try to counterbalance that with a lot of different surfaces and explore the potential for such limited material to generate many different possible manifestations.”

These self-constructed puzzles artfully play out in many ways across his compositions, from the one-note polyphony of works such as Brush-Stroke for small orchestra to the unusual emphasis on breathing and the framing of silences in pieces such as Memories of Xiaoxiang for alto saxophone and 4-track tape. He explains, “I like extremely fast, extremely slow. I also like extremely varied surfaces and extremely limited materials. For me, only extreme things can be interesting.”

A bit of Liang’s professional restraint seems to melt away for a moment with this confession. “I like to see how far I can go,” he admits.

He has achieved this by literally taking that clear shell and packing a microchip programmed to produce music, a battery, some wiring, a switch, and an audio jack inside it. The consumer is holding not a recording of the piece in this case, but the means to generate a complete performance of it, on demand, with the flick of a switch.

Perich, who studied music, math, and computer science at Columbia University, sees the project as twofold. “It’s half super, super formal based on these mathematical ideas and theories of computation,” he says, skipping the numbers lesson for the moment. “At the same time, it’s sort of a social commentary about distribution, music stores, and creating something physical again that people can consume as an object and not just this ephemeral digital download.”

Not that he bares these new technologies, which have made the consumption of a diverse range of music so much easier, any ill will. In fact, a recording of his 1-Bit Symphony will also be made available for digital download “for the sake of practicality.” But he does seem to appreciate the cultural tension his object is set up to poke at, and perhaps relieve. While today original recordings can be produced quite professionally in basements and bedrooms everywhere, what excited him musically was not the open door to more, but technological advances that allowed him the chance to play with a whole lot less: an eight kilobyte microchip (retail value in 2010: $1.50). His file size concerns revolve not around the angst of audiophiles over diminished fidelity, but dwell on how to build an interesting piece of music using the simplest expression of electronic sound: what is possible inside the limits of 8,000 characters, a series of zeros and ones that contain both the software to play the music back as well as the music itself.

1-Bit Symphony by Tristan Perich released on Cantaloupe Music on August 24, 2010 Release Party August 20, 2010—7 p.m ($10) Roulette 20 Greene St (Between Canal and Grand) New York, NY

Though the listener is in effect starting a performance rather than a recording every time she turns on this little music box, the resulting 5-movement, 45-minute work is completely composed and will play out identically every time. Though the timbres may echo digital alarms and Atari games, the layers of tone and rhythm Perich has employed result in music that is captivating. Perhaps never before has there been so striking an illustration of that old adage about the whole equaling so much more than the sum of its parts.

Though the code remains the same for every album produced, it is true that the clock speed of each chip has slight variations which could result in playback that is slightly higher or lower in pitch from machine to machine—a fact that Perich gamely acknowledges is “just an artifact of the fact that the real world is hard to make precise.” The battery also means the object has a lifespan.

Perich says he was attracted to computer programming and composing at a young age and was supported by parents who took his artistic ambitions very seriously, but he was never interested in electronics coming into his music. He explains that “in a sense the computer being able to do anything and the history of electronic music as moving towards the ability to reproduce anything possible—and that’s sort of the promise of computer music—that didn’t really have any meaning for me. Where’s the shape in that? Where’s the texture? It doesn’t really have much of an identity.”

It took working with these extremely limited microchips on the 1-bit projects to convince him otherwise. “You had to write all the software for them from scratch. They don’t have an audio card; they don’t have a keyboard. You have to write software and download it onto the chip. But at that point, this microchip is an incredibly elegant representation of that software, so it kind of turns software from this thing that is very abstract into something that is much more direct, more physical in a weird sense.”

And in so doing it is art perfectly tailored to its time.

Ben Hackbarth in conversation with Trevor Hunter

No one ever crafted a violin or clarinet sui generis. Instruments since forever-ago have been fashioned from prior models, be they viols or marrow-sucked bones. They are suffused with not only sonic signatures but cultural meanings, with aural and visual components that most anyone can identify and understand. But the computer is a different beast; not as beholden to the history of craftsmanship, having no visual association beyond passive faces reflecting LCD glow, it provides a world of possibilities to the point of paralysis. It’s an issue that every electronic musician has to confront at some point, or at many points.

Ben Hackbarth, a product of UC San Diego now working at IRCAM in Paris, has never written music comprised solely of electronic sounds, but the medium is predominant in his music nonetheless. Much of his work—whether the solo vibraphone piece Open End or the large chamber work Crumbling Walls and Wandering Rocks—incorporates electronics not as a color or effect, but as a primary element.

Though a familiar element in his artistic output, electronics are nonetheless something that he struggles with conceptually. Computers may be capable of producing a near limitless range of sounds—but that very quality of novelty can rob music of any elements which bind it to our banal reality as concertgoers. “I think we’ve all had the experience where you listen to electronic music and sounds are very amazing, very effective—they’re stunning,” he says. “But they’re not necessarily meaningful. They don’t necessarily stick to us, and we don’t carry memories of them past the experience of the concert into other situations or other listening experiences.”

Hackbarth looks for a solution to his “meaning” problem within the properties of instruments that are historically well defined: drastically limit the electronic materials for each piece, and thus the possibilities, and segment the sonic space. In the initial moments of his music, Hackbarth creates electronic textures that correlate to instrumental sounds in a way that listeners can relate to: the sounds in the beginning of Open End mirror the sinusoidal signature of the vibraphone; the digitally produced percussive envelopment at the beginning of Crumbling Walls is easily differentiated from but closely aligned to the assaulted drums. But once given these roots, the electronics develop within the confines of their own system of rules, not those of the instruments they emulate. “I’m getting more interested in the engaging with the psychology of listening to instruments as being a platform of departure for electronic creation,” Hackbarth explains. “I want to draw a lot more attention towards this idea of the electronics being really close to something an instrument could do, but that’s somehow impossible.”

Hackbarth is a composer dealing with acoustically and electronically generated phenomena who is seeking out meaningful artistic experiences in new territories. The fact is that the process of exploring new sounds in an acoustic instrument—which usually involves breaking down the role it typically plays—and building up the walls of a newly cerebrated electronic interface are not terribly similar things. Rudimentary acoustic instruments have been around since the dawn of man; electronics are in their infancy, with no boundaries to play against. Hackbarth’s way of exploring within such lawlessness is to define strict limitations, which allow his dreams to sound. Experimental music is always a nebulous term and idea—but if that’s not it, what is?

Duane Pitre in conversation with Trevor Hunter

One of the best things about this gelatinous beast we call new music is that despite how impenetrable it might seem to outsiders, it’s a community that draws in people from all walks of life. Duane Pitre might now devote his life to long tones and weird tunings, but in his younger days he was flipping ollies and kickbacks as a professional skateboarder for Alien Workshop. While the skateboarding scene isn’t usually fertile ground for young composers, it’s no stranger to music in general—Pitre, like most of his peers, played in a band in those early days, first on bass before moving to guitar. But even then, his interests were drawing him towards a different realm. “My friend would look at me while were playing and say, ‘Come on, let’s move to the next song,'” Pitre explains, “but I would want to stay in that pocket of just creating this atmosphere, these sound collages. That was important early on—I didn’t even realize what I was doing. I look back on it now and think, ‘Oh, that makes sense.’ Way further back than I even realized I was starting the path that led me to here.”

His musical future was pretty much set once he heard his first music in just intonation, a tuning scheme based on the naturally occurring harmonic series. Pitre, who by then was creating ambient guitar textures using delay and reverb pedals, recalls thinking, “What effects are they using? What is this? What are these sounds? Because—it’s not right.”

But it was right for him. Pitre dove headfirst into the study of these weird sounds, an autodidactic feat that required some pretty intense fixating. “I get focused on something, and then it’s pretty much my life, for better or worse,” he explains. Origin, Pitre’s 40-minute long-tone work released earlier this month on Root Strata, represents his furthest explorations into those tuning schemes. Scored for a septet of microtonally tuned bowed guitars, Origin traverses several different realms and moods during the course of its five movements, based partially on the Hindustani idea of different music for different times of day.

Not all of Pitre’s works involve just intervals, however: his work ED09, released on Quiet Design Records, plays instead with the imperfection of intonation within a standard equal temperament framework. But regardless of the conceptual factors that go into the pitch selection, Pitre writes music that just sounds good. The tuning schemes he uses are not the ends themselves; rather, they serve to further open up the acoustic worlds that can be elicited from the instruments, creating a rich, meditative space for listening.

Pitre took that philosophy to heart with his curation of a recent disc on Important Records, The Harmonic Series: A Compilation of Musical Works in Just Intonation. When picking the music, Pitre explains, “It had to be in just intonation and something I’m really excited about. Sometimes that’s a fault with that community—’it’s in just intonation, therefore it’s good.’ No. Not to be rude or anything, but it just doesn’t matter. It’s just a tuning system.” On the disc, Pitre includes the usual suspects for a new music JI-compilation—Pauline Oliveros, Charles Curtis, Michael Harrison, and himself—but also some really out of left field and interesting works by people like R Keenan Lawler, a composer and guitarist out of Kentucky. Rather than just presenting a theoretical dissection of the possibilities inherent in the system, the pieces included on The Harmonic Series demonstrate the range of expressive possibilities in differing range of styles.

What all this points to—the works for large ensembles, the bringing together of different composers in compilations—is one of the other best things about new music: community. Pitre, despite having no formal training in music, has built up a sizable group of people in this esoteric little world who are completely down with what he’s about. That enthusiasm is basically generated by the man himself. “I’m from New Orleans. We’re all pretty nice—not to toot your own horn about being ‘nice,’ but we are,” he laughs. “So it’s about approaching everyone with good intentions from the beginning, and hopefully with some musical ideas that they would dig.”

You could call Shodekeh (a.k.a. Dominic Earle Shodekeh Talifero) a beatboxer or a vocal percussionist, if you want to feel a little more refined about it. But what the Baltimore-based musician seems to be more than anything is a chameleon, breathing out entire rhythm and bass tracks and blending them into a borderless range of performance situations. Armed with an attention-grabbing talent and a laid-back charm, he has shared stages with hip hop artists, ballet dancers, and jazz musicians all over the country. This summer he’ll take a bow with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Even Roger Ebert is a fan.

Shodekeh finds a very beneficial exchange of ideas in this promiscuous genre-hopping. “I like to be challenged,” he explains. “It pushes me more, as a person who’s looking to always up the ante in regards to my musicianship.” With no formal musical training, he admits that he may initially have been seeking validation from other realms of music, but these days he’s simply looking to push himself and others in their creative artistry. It’s a strategy he finds makes for a good learning experience all around.

Though plenty of young beatboxers find inspiration listening to the records of big-name artists like Doug E. Fresh and Rahzel (formerly of The Roots), Shodekeh says that the skills are just as likely to be passed on informally through a friend, a brother, or even a fellow beatboxer met by chance at a party. “Most of the time it’s a very organic, personal thing,” he says. “It’s definitely the kind of tradition where it’s one man’s journey or one woman’s journey. It’s kind of like learning how to cook just from hanging out in the kitchen with your mother.”

When the tricks and skills of the trade are mastered, there also seems to be a kind of magician’s ethics in play. In an interview, Shodekeh is careful not to “give away” the methods and ideas behind the signature sounds of other artists. He does, however, seem to take a particular delight in the informal and impromptu skill-sharing that can happen when your instrument is always available, whether that’s performing with new voices at an improv session or breaking down the fourth wall and getting the audience in on creating the beats.

In his own work, Shodekeh does not use any formal notation system, but he does point out how alphabet notation combined with some algebraic rules could convey ideas fairly efficiently. He does have pieces, in a sense, or perhaps what might be better characterized as cadenzas that he has composed and perfected structurally and can mix into a live performance, but plenty of room remains in his sets for improvisation and that’s a vital part of the equation in his mind. He explains that the approach “allows for a moment to really, truly exist. It’s just like a jazz concert. You have the springboard that’s written but you don’t know what’s going to happen in the middle, and that’s the beauty of it.”

Though he also loves the work he does now as faculty accompanist for Towson University’s dance department as well as at the American Dance Festival at Duke University, Shodekeh is hesitant to take his work too deeply into the academy and formalize in that way. “I think it can exist organically anywhere,” he says, “but I don’t like the idea of teaching it in an academic setting. Not everything has to be institutionalized.”

Still, education and experimentation are central to his work. Shodekeh’s most recent project, Embody, seeks to bring together a broad range of vocal artists under one umbrella and put what was once his more private pursuit of genre exploration front and center on the stage. A recent performance under this headline showcased a throat singer, an operatically trained vocalist, and of course Shodekeh’s personal brand of vocal percussion. He points out that “there is a lot of experimentation in beatboxing, actually a big part of it is nothing but experimentation. So I’m really interested in seeing how these realms can fuse with one another.”

His ideas for cross-collaboration don’t stop there. “I would love to see a professional whistler with a throat singer, or a beatboxer with a yodeler,” he suggests. “I think we all have a lot to learn from one another.”

Rick Carrick in conversation with Molly Sheridan

To be on the ball, to have your head in the game, to be in the groove: Whether you’re an athlete racking up points or a writer cranking out chapters, that channeling of focus is not just about product, it’s about self-satisfaction. The work is neither too hard nor too easy; the mind and body are completely focused and absorbed in the task at hand.

Though the concept is familiar, the psychology behind it—that state of “flow”—and the psychologist/professor most associated with its study, Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi, is probably a bit more foreign to most people. Csíkszentmihályi’s work spoke to composer and pianist Richard Carrick, however, and after long applying the ideas to his teaching, he realized the potential they had when it came to the composition and consumption of music—particularly very complex music for the concert hall.

While living in Tanzania during the summer of 2005, Carrick began work on what would become the first piece of a five-part cycle. “Every day I was writing these very different musical ideas,” he recalls. “They didn’t make sense with each other, and I needed to find a way to put them together into a piece. All of the techniques that I was comfortable with weren’t working, so I needed to come up with a new approach.”

That’s where flow theory came into play. Carrick looked for a way to create a fluid exchange between many different materials that would carry the audience through the piece without losing their attention. To aid in this process, he sketched out a series of what he terms “flow filters”: the gradual change of dynamics and tempos, rhythms that moved between active and passive, motivic material that shifts between clarity and ambiguity.

The techniques helped him find a way forward. “I like music that continues for a while; I like music that goes,” Carrick explains. “I like music that establishes a sound and lets that sound live and breathe and expand and contract and evolve and die. I’m not so interested in lots of disjointed sounds, in creating momentum through the friction of restraint or negation.”

Flow theory both helped him compose the work and resulted in music that served his audience in the way he was seeking. Carrick, who studied with Brian Ferneyhough, is no stranger to the complexity camp. And he acknowledges that the music he writes is very difficult to perform, “but in The Flow Cycle in particular, it’s not very difficult to listen to,” he says. An important distinction to him.

“In a way, I wanted to be very focused about leading the listener through the experience as opposed to putting up lots of barriers for the listener to go through. I wanted the music to go through all these places with the listener.”

Though the individual works can each stand on their own, the premiere of the full cycle was given earlier this month, presented by Roulette in New York City and featuring the talents of a small roster of musicians: Eric Bartlett (cello), Kuan-Cheng Lu (violin), Andrea Schultz (violin), Dov Scheindlin (viola), and Alex Waterman (cello). For Carrick, the performance was a milestone years in the making. On the surface, the cycle forced him to confront a very practical challenge: how do you sustain a musical idea over the course of an hour in an engaging way? Carrick had never completed a work of that scope before. But it was also a particularly personal project, something returned to in between the completion of other music, on his own schedule without a commission deadline looming over it. It allowed him to really dig into the ideas he was developing over time.

But at a certain point, he knew the work was completely finished and had nothing more to give. He attempted to revise the last section of the piece before the premiere of the full cycle, planning to add eight minutes to the end. When that didn’t work out, he decided on five minutes, then three minutes, then 30 seconds, and finally he struggled to add just two beats to the penultimate measure. Eventually, he gave up. “I said, you know, this cycle is over. I can’t touch it; I literally cannot go in there and mess with it. So it’s done. Of course I’ll be influenced by what I did, but I think the things that are going to happen next will be in a new direction.”