Category: Conversations

Bora Yoon: The Weight of Magic


Although composers are always constructing new sonic worlds, Bora Yoon is super-charging that idea through her multimedia and site-specific works. She performs using her voice, her violin, an array of sound-making objects of assorted shapes and sizes, and live electronics, as well as with video projections to create immersive environments that, as she puts it, “transport people somewhere, and return them, hopefully changed from the experience.”

Her latest project, Sunken Cathedral, is not site-specific in the traditional sense, but rather involves the creation of a multi-dimensional artistic structure in a four-part, year-long rollout process from blueprint (audio CD) to finished structure in the form of a fully staged multimedia production that will premiere in January 2015 at the Prototype Festival. In between those two bookends are planned releases of a vinyl double album on the Innova label, created as a limited edition fine art piece, and a trilogy of interactive music videos designed for the iPad in collaboration with the Gralbum Collective. The idea is that each form of media will build upon the previous one, adding additional sensory input and engaging listeners and audience members in a different context, providing specific views of the project that can be experienced individually, or as a whole, in the same way that one might stroll around a space to take in different aspects of a performance. Sonically, Sunken Cathedral references a vast range of musical styles, from early music to industrial electronic to music concrète, speaking both to Yoon’s diverse musical identity and to the quickly shifting time we live in.

Yoon wanted to use the title Sunken Cathedral—already famously employed by Debussy, as well as by graphic artist M. C. Escher—because, like those other works, she says, “It offers the language to speak about the invisible—the architectural context, the idea of reflections in a binary world. That there are the actual things of reality, and there are the things that lie beneath the surface…and the idea of how we separate our worlds in that way, whether it’s day and night, or conscious and subconscious, or the physical world and the metaphysical world…and what happens when you explore the full circle of that.”

Yoon comes by her fascination with architectural sonic experience and cathedrals through direct personal exposure; since 2007 she has been a member of the choir at The Church of Ascension in New York City, and she cites her time spent singing in that space as a primary force of inspiration. “The more I sang at Ascension,” she explains, “the more I started to look up, and to realize that the church really is a metaphor for the body. That the arches are the rib cage, and the swells of the organ are lungs, and the idea that the invisible that we don’t see in the church, the Holy Spirit, is the idea of breath that’s inside us.” The sense of transport created with the combined horizontal and vertical nature of choral music, and the sense of ritual imbued in music intended for particular purposes and/or times of day and night, are concepts that have deeply affected her creative process.

The interdependence of conscious and subconscious is always on Yoon’s mind as she creates her musical worlds. She is entranced by sonic associations and triggers, often questioning why exactly a sound is interesting to her, what associations it might evoke, both for herself and for others, and the effects of layering sonic material from disparate contexts and of varying tempos. Her performances employ a large array of sound-making objects—in addition to violin and keyboard—such as bowls and assorted kitchen utensils, pieces of glass, small drums, glockenspiel, and cell phones. She feels strongly that as part of the performance experience the audience should be able to see where exactly the sound they are hearing is coming from and how it is being made, in order to take in the full sensory impression of the moment at hand. During performances, Yoon moves around the space, triggering sounds that are then sustained by looping electronics; starting a record player, kneeling to strike a metal bowl, reaching for an old flip phone that she amplifies through her vocal mic, all while singing melodies that build upon one another into a layered chorus atop cyclical musical twinkles, scratches, and violin tones.

“It does mean that I carry around the kitchen sink,” she admits, laughing at the image. “But I do feel that for as much as that is a huge pain in the ass, that’s also the same measure of how it will be magical, and why it will be otherworldly, and something people will remember. So I always tell myself when I am dragging around 400 pounds of gear, ‘This is the weight of magic!'”
Indeed, through her insightful working process and captivating performances, Bora Yoon is building a world of her own, one that speaks clearly to her identity, but that also invites others in to discover what they will. She creates an overarching sense of both the personal and the universal through the transformation of a space, and through the sensation of time spent within it.

Miya Masaoka: Social and Sonic Relationships


At the composer’s New York City apartment
May 13, 2014—11 a.m.
Transcribed by Julia Lu
Video recorded by Molly Sheridan
Video presentation by Alexandra Gardner

Nine summers ago, there were tons of sound-producing gizmos on display during the Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival’s “Homemade Instrument Day.” It was a fabulous way to introduce some really avant-garde music to a very broad audience. Perhaps the most mind-blowing thing people encountered that day was an installation by Miya Masaoka in which sound was somehow emanating from house plants. It was like some weird kind of Island of Dr. Moreau phenomenon. Yet it was also somehow both instantly engaging and musically fascinating as it unfolded over time. It involved a lot of brainy science—electroencephalography, data analysis, and computers—yet it was also extremely down to earth.
While it could have degenerated into a clever gimmick, it was much more than that because Masaoka manipulated the data from the plants to construct a very interesting sonic environment. But because it was all happening in real time, with a group of pots containing seemingly innocuous plant life, it became something much more than just a musical experience—it made the audience think about plants, and life in general, in a totally different way.

Masaoka has been making us look and listen to the world around us in totally new ways for decades. There has been a clear socio-political component to virtually everything she has done, but at the core level her work is ultimately always about finding new sounds. She first came to prominence in the Bay Area for her experiments with the koto, a multi-stringed zither which has played a prominent role in the court music of Japan for centuries. Though she was born and grew up in the United States, her Japanese family included traditionally trained musicians who were her earliest teachers on the instrument. While she initially immersed herself into gagaku and other classical Japanese repertoire, she soon found a way to make the koto a vehicle for a broad range of contemporary American music-making—bowing it, electrifying it, playing it in experimental improvisation combos, performing Thelonious Monk compositions and other jazz standards on it, etc. In so doing, she has made the instrument completely her own.
She has also done a great deal of sonic work involving the human body. She has created musical compositions using the brainwaves of audience members as well as data retrieved from participants via electrocardiograms. Her most provocative work has been a series of performance pieces involving groups of insects (bees, cockroaches) crawling over her own naked body; their motion triggering sensors attached to her which amplify the actual sounds the insects are making. Again, what could come across as gimmickry is viscerally powerful visual and sonic engagement, though admittedly probably not for the overly squeamish. (Although it isn’t to her in the slightest.) As she describes it, it is simultaneously politically charged and sound obsessed:

It’s the most amazing electronic kind of sound and it’s actually coming from a bug. Bees also have a very electronic sound component. But they were chosen not only for their sound abilities, [they were also chosen for] the idea of them maybe being individuals, maybe a colony. … I really wanted to understand and study their social relationships to each other. I’m not allergic to bees, so it’s okay. It was the idea of what the individual is, what our bodies are, and what the relationship is of our bodies to nature. It was searching for some kinds of clues to get closer to that. … Collaboration—whether it’s with insects or plants or people or musicians or the earth’s environmental sounds—is thinking about a sound world and how to enter somewhat of a psychological and sonic space.

In the last decade, Masaoka has concentrated somewhat less on performing and more on creating extended musical compositions for others to perform. She acknowledged when we spoke to her last month that her seeming shift in focus was partially a function of relocating to New York City and having a young daughter, but it’s also a way to channel her experiences and creative energy into larger scale projects that she would not have been able to perform on her own. And the results have been equally stimulating: For Birds, Planes and Cello, an all-encompassing sound-scape in which cellist Joan Jeanrenaud competes against a barrage of bird calls and airplane engines; and While I was walking I heard a sound…, an extraordinary choral piece involving three choirs and nine soloists spatialized in balconies which was premiered in San Francisco by Volti, the San Francisco Choral Society, and the Ensemble of the Piedmont Choirs. Last year, inspired by kayaking on a lake near the Fukushima Nuclear Plant, she completed her first orchestral piece, Other Mountain, which was performed by the La Jolla Symphony as part of the EarShot Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute Readings. But she’s still committed to performing. Earlier this season, she performed at Roulette in Triangle of Resistance, a new interdisciplinary work she co-created with filmmaker/videographer Michelle Handelman featuring a score she composed for koto, string quartet, percussion, and electronics, and in a couple of months she’ll be returning to the studio to record a new album of improvisations with Pauline Oliveros, who has been a long-time collaborator and mentor.
After spending a morning talking with her about her music and why she’s made the choices she’s made, I’m even more convinced that whatever she does will continue to push the envelope in ways that are both intellectually challenging and sonically captivating.

*

Frank J. Oteri: You’ve done so many different kinds of things musically, but people always want to have a tag line, a one sentence sound bite. “Oh, Miya Masaoka, she’s the person who experiments with the koto.” Or “Miya Masaoka, she’s the person who does the music with plants.” Or, “the stuff with bugs.” These projects are all so different from each other and don’t even encompass everything you’ve done. So I’m wondering in your mind if there’s any through line that connects all of these things, something that informs the choices you make and shapes your identity as a musical creator.
Miya Masaoka: Identity is kind of interesting—the relationship between the individual and whatever social context is happening, whatever interaction with the outside world. So it’s really this interior versus exterior relationship, which is something we don’t necessarily have control over. I remember when there were only a few of us calling ourselves composer-performers; it was actually before you could get degrees in such a thing. These terms are really fluid, in a sense, like gender or ethnicity. They’re really social constructs. For example, when I think about what it means to be Japanese or Japanese-American—before my relatives were sent to the Japanese American concentration camps, it was decreed that you had to have 1/16 Japanese blood. This was a definition for if you were Japanese or not, to go to the camps. And so this is what my parents had to contend with. I certainly don’t have to contend with these kinds of blood percentages to define identities, but certainly the idea of aspects of sound, and relationship to architecture, and how pieces are exhibited, or whether there are instruments involved and what the relationship is to performing on that instrument or whether you create music for other instruments—those things are also really fluid and they change from piece to piece. So for me, whatever is fascinating for me and what I am obsessed with at the moment, drives me to create the next piece. I don’t consciously shape an identity. That’s not been so conscious. I wish, in a sense, that things were more narrowed down and could be in a sound bite, because then it would be much easier to do everything in a world that’s sound-bite driven. But I can’t stop myself.
FJO: Sound bites are sort of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they help explain work to people in a fast, straight-forward way, which can be very useful, especially when there is so much noise out there. But in terms of wanting to create the next piece, or actually wanting to create any new work, it creates limitations if it doesn’t conform to the sound bite—you know, that doesn’t sound like what that sound bite tells me it’s supposed to sound like! So it’s a constant battle between how you establish something so people have some kind of grounding in what you’re doing and how you can grow from there.
MM: That’s true. I also like it if I can find a sound bite. That’s how we organize our minds and organize the vast amount of data that we have for so many artists out there. The next piece I’m doing is using three dimensional objects, sculptural objects, as scores. In some ways, it’s a departure from some things I’ve done, but in other ways, it’s not at all. Then I’m coming off of writing for full symphony. It’s completely different to go in towards making these objects as scores, or scores as objects.
A common thread is this idea of a sound and how to think about sound—whether it’s using forces of musicians or whether it’s thinking of sounds in more of a visual sense, whether the pieces are using kinetic motion or a physicality. Are these waves that interact with air to create a certain kineticsm that we experience as sound? How does it deflect off whichever reflective surfaces are there in terms of the architecture? That’s true whether it’s a concert hall, or whether it’s in a gallery space, or an open air situation. So I think this element of experiencing sound is probably the common thread, and how that can be conceived and perceived and achieved in different angles in different ways.
FJO: Now one of the things that’s been a very long-standing interest of yours going back to the beginnings when you first became active in the Bay Area new music scene has been working with the koto. I’m curious about how you first got involved with the koto and what attracted you to it. Obviously you come from a Japanese background, but you grew up in the United States, you were born in D.C., you spent many years in the Bay Area. There aren’t a lot of kotoists here.

Laser Koto

Miya Masaoka performing on the Laser Koto. (Photo by Lori Eanes.)

MM: Well, my cousin and my aunt played koto, and one of them studied in Japan. I grew up playing piano. It was definitely coming from the Japanese American history of trying to be as American as possible because of the camps and the whole wartime experience. At the time in the Bay Area, there were different Asian American musicians like Jon Jang, Mark Izu, and Francis Wong who were keen about Asian American music and embracing these traditional instruments. So going back to these instruments was something that was a part of what was happening. I became a part of that, as well as having it in my family.
I studied traditional koto, and I also started the Gagaku Society. Gagaku is imperial court music. I did that for seven years in the Bay Area. Our master was from Japan and he was working at UCLA. So we flew him up once a month to work with us. And those concepts of structure, and how sound occurs over time, and how it unfolds and kind of builds up a propulsion and momentum were some of the most fascinating kinds of principles that I still live by.
But a turning point for me was when I was invited to play with Pharaoh Sanders for a few concerts at Yoshi’s. From playing with him and improvising with him, I also got introduced to other improvisers in the Bay area, like Larry Ochs and Henry Kaiser. So then I began collaborating with them, and that opened up this whole other door to what they would call non-idiomatic improvisation, free improvisation and that kind of thing.
FJO: There’s an interesting essay you’ve posted to your website that you wrote back in 1997 in response to Royal Hartigan’s issues about taking a traditional instrument that’s in a certain context and recontextualizing it to make it your own. There has been a lot of debate about this phenomenon. These are cultural artifacts of a specific culture which perceives of them in certain ways. So some would argue that to use them in ways that are outside of that culture are somehow disrespectful to that culture. But I find it interesting that the people who make those kinds of arguments about traditional Asian instruments, and also traditional African instruments, don’t make them for European instruments. It’s assumed that western instruments are somehow universal, that those instruments belong to everybody. You can do anything you want, say, with a piano or violin, but you can’t necessarily do anything you want with a koto, or an mbira or a ney. To exempt the West from cultural specificity seems like cultural imperialism and is really disconnected from 21st-century American cultural experience.
MM: I think some of those arguments that took place in the ‘70s and ‘80s have been really superseded by the internet—concepts of appropriation and taking these cultures from developing countries or from non-western countries and that it is somehow disrespectful or impure. Plunderphonics has come and gone, and there’s access to so many different rare cultures that it’s become a moot point to a certain extent. But I think whatever you do as an artist, whatever choices you make, there’ll always be people who will have issues with things. Especially if you’re doing something new and something slightly different, you’re going to have people who aren’t going along with it. So, that’s fine.
FJO: In the age of the internet, it does seem like everything from everywhere in every time is fair game. At this point to say that you’re continuing a tradition, it begs the question, what tradition? We have access to all the traditions, and we’re not necessarily continuing any of them, and not necessarily continuing “Western classical music.” The term seems meaningless to so much of the stuff that we’re all doing at this point.
MM: Tradition is something that people can personally embrace, whether it’s a tradition of American experimentalism, or a certain kind of tradition of minimalism, or certain kinds of traditions of time-based work, or some kind of performance, or generative electronics—modular synthesis has its own tradition. So there’re all these traditions that exist that are very historical and very meaningful, and we can embrace them in various ways, as individuals, to make them meaningful for us.
FJO: You mentioned playing with Pharoah Sanders. One thing that has certainly been a very important tradition in the trajectory of American music is the music that people call jazz. It’s a loaded word in some circles, but it is a tradition and it’s a tradition that you’ve interacted with in some of your work, though not all of your work. I love the trio recording you did with Reggie Workman and Andrew Cyrille where you’re taking music by Thelonious Monk and completely reinventing it in a way that echoes traditional Japanese music, but that also really is jazz. It really does swing. It feels like Monk to me. So I wonder how you see your own music within the context of jazz traditions.
MM: Well, I grew up playing and listening to all different kinds of music and, of course, studying classical music, teaching myself folk music on the guitar, and studying flamenco music with a gypsy who lived in the town. Listening to rock and roll, listening to jazz—it’s really hard to escape that if you grow up in America. Jazz has this incredibly rich history of ways of being in music and ways of creating music. And I feel very lucky to have worked with some amazing jazz artists. And I continue to work with them.
I think at different times, there’s been a certain fragmentation and diffusion and at the same time a real boxing in of what jazz is into a kind of very boring and negative modality, which it certainly is not. I mean, the history is so expressive. It’s been so influential to so many parts of American culture. It’s had a rough patch, I think, and people like Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor have kind of gone through and made it to the other end of that, the narrow definition of what would be swing or how to define jazz. I’m hoping that that’s going to open up again.
FJO: So taking on Monk. Monk’s compositions are iconic jazz repertoire even though he was an iconoclast. He was never conventional in what he did with rhythm. What he did with harmony was also completely unique. You hear a Monk chord, and you know instantly that it’s his. Yet those pieces have become canonic of a certain era in jazz. So to take that on and to do your own thing with it is very brave in a way because people have certain expectations about what that is.

CD cover for Monk's Japanese Folk Song

The CD cover for Monk’s Japanese Folk Song featuring Miya Masaoka with Reggie Workman and Andrew Cyrille.

MM: Well, Monk did an album of Japanese folk songs, so I kind of did a version of him doing a version of Japanese folk songs. And then, like you mentioned, the rhythms are asymmetrical; they’re very spiky and they’re very interesting. It’s definitely very interesting repertoire to dig into. So I thought it was challenging and would be a fun project to do. It’s funny, when I go to Japan, sometimes I still hear it in some of the jazz clubs. They play that record; it’s wormed its way in.
FJO: You did another project that is probably even more clearly jazz sounding—What is the Difference Between Stripping and Playing the Violin?—which for me is definitely coming out of big band music, but it’s also referencing a lot of other things, too.
MM: That was a long time ago. But there was some jazz in there definitely, quotations from Duke Ellington and things like that. I had a big orchestra and I was doing actually something I made up that I called tai chi conducting where I would try to get the energy from the musicians. I used some of the Butch Morris sign language. I also invented some of my own at the time. There were people in that group like Vijay Iyer and Carla Kihlstedt, tons of incredible artists who were living in the Bay Area at the time.
FJO: The more non-jazz improvisatory stuff that you’ve done also in some way connects to jazz’s greater contribution to American culture—this notion of work that’s collaborative in some way, the idea that a group of people can participate in the making of something in real time by responding to one another. It’s not just one person’s vision—I did this piece and now you peons, here are the precise rules you need to follow. Rather you have a group of people who are listening to each other, and they’re responding to each other, and the work becomes what it is because of those interactions. No one necessarily knows what’s going to happen at the end. Something can become completely different from what you had initially envisioned it being.
MM: That’s true. I mean, you know, I’d definitely been open to what kinds of things could change and how that could be meaningful. I did this piece with Joan Jeanrenaud—For Birds, Planes and Cello. Joan was playing the cello and also listening and also looking at some graphic ideas of what to play while she was listening. This was a piece with basically an uncut film recording of the planes at the San Diego airport starting out at six in the morning, and slowly there would be more and more of them. And the birds were in these natural canyons so they were in this enormous kind of sound amplifier; the birds were so loud they sounded like they were being amplified artificially. Whenever a plane went by, they would start screeching with the plane, and then as time went on, there was just more and more sound and it built up to a structural climax with the schedule of the planes kind of dictating that. So in a sense, it’s a kind of a collaboration with the earth, the birds, and the scheduling and creating and taking these kinds of environments and finding some kind of coherence and structure and meaning from them.
FJO: What I find so interesting in terms of the whole sound bite phenomenon is that collaboration has been a hallmark of your work through the last several decades, but the people you collaborate with have been extremely different from each other. So, because of that, the music that results from those collaborations is always very different. I’m thinking of the trios that you were a part of with Gino Robair which can be very frenetic versus, say, your work with Pauline Oliveros, which is often much sparer and much more introspective. I’m curious about what makes you choose a collaborator to work with because obviously those different identities are both you since you’ve done both of those things. They’re both extraordinary, but they’re very different from each other.
MM: Collaboration—whether it’s with insects or plants or people or musicians or the earth’s environmental sounds—is thinking about a sound world and how to enter somewhat of a psychological and sonic space. And a spiritual place you could even say, like with Pauline Oliveros. We’re going to be going into the studio again in a couple of months, actually. She’s an icon, and I’ve been so honored to be able to have worked with her and to work with her in the future. To answer your question about sparseness or density, those kinds of things can be preconceived or not preconceived. Things with Pauline can be sparse or not sparse, or this or not that; it’s working towards a larger whole to a certain extent. There are so many parameters that are a part of getting there.
FJO: So in terms of choosing these collaborators, how do these relationships happen? Who initiates them?
MM: It changes, and it varies. This time this one with Pauline was initiated by Issui Minegishi, a player of the traditional one-stringed koto called ichigenkin. With Reggie Workman and Andrew Cyrille, there was someone from Germany who said, “Who do you want to work with?” I just named these two names and he got them. It really varies. I often do a lot of just working by myself.
FJO: There is that fabulous album you did of composition and improvisation which is almost completely solo except for the last track that has flute. Once again, from track to track, the music is extremely different. One solo project of yours, although perhaps you might not think of it as solo, is the work you’ve done with bees and Madagascan cockroaches. I find it remarkable, but I have to confess that I also find it unbelievably disturbing, and I think that that disturbance might be an element of why you did it. I’ve never experienced these performances live. I’m not sure I could. I’ve watched the videos online, and I had to stop the recordings repeatedly. It got through my skin, as it were. I felt like these insects were crawling on me.
MM: Well, that piece was about the Japanese American experience. Around that time, they had just come out with some new studies of DNA and the differences with gender and race; people were something like actually 99 percent the same. And it’s really this small miniscule amount that we thought we were different. So I was going back to the 1/16th Japanese that you had to be to go to the Japanese camps. So the idea of the naked human body, as it is, without these ideas being fostered onto it… These large bugs crawling on it, kind of just discovering the terrain, as if it’s for the first time, and seeing this as a blank slate. Now we can buy that or not, you know, in terms of blank slates, but the idea was just having a very kind of cold viewpoint of the human body as the canvas—that was the idea. And then taking the sounds of the bugs, and amplifying them, and making samples of them, and having them create the structure of the piece. So I would be sending an array of lasers over my body, and they would break the beams, and that would trigger the sounds of the piece. The sound worlds are based on their movements.
FJO: So how were you able to do this?
MM: I went to this amphibian store. At the time they were legal to buy and I bought 12 of them. Later somebody took care of them for me and would send them through FedEx to the different places that I would play in Europe.
FJO: But how were you able to have bugs crawl all over you? How did it feel? You don’t move at all during the piece; how were you able to get yourself into that zone?
MM: It’s the idea of the body being this passive canvas that society pushes things upon. And you know, you just do it. I mean, it’s discipline. It’s like anything else. It’s, you know, you just do it.
FJO: What were audience reactions like to that in different venues around the world?
MM: Well, that piece became very popular. It also got picked up by some kind of syndicate in Canada and played a few times. And these Madagascar cockroaches later became much more popular in lots of popular culture. This was before that happened. But, how things get received? I don’t know. I should probably pay more attention to that. I think at the time, people weren’t used to seeing anything like that. Some people thought it was interesting, and some people thought it wasn’t, I’m sure. I can’t have my ear too much to the ground as to how things get received or not received, because it can just get me in the wrong frame of mind.
FJO: I have to confess, before I experienced it, I thought the idea was sort of gimmicky, but then after looking and listening to it, though at times I found it really disturbing, it was also viscerally powerful. But I’m curious about what it means to you as music, because a lot of it is a visual experience, including what you were saying about the body being a blank slate. But it was conceived of as a piece of music, right?
MM: Yes, as a performative semi-installation with music, because that’s my background. I did these collaborations with cockroaches, but their sound sounds like white noise. It’s the most amazing electronic kind of sound and it’s actually coming from a bug. Bees also have a very electronic sound component. But they were chosen not only for their sound abilities, [they were also chosen for] the idea of them maybe being individuals, maybe a colony. I think it’s very fascinating to have a blur of something that’s a whole. Ants are that way, too, but ants don’t have the same kind of obvious sound possibilities as these other ones. I really wanted to understand and study their social relationships to each other. So a lot of pieces from that period have to do with inquiries into the nature of society and culture and politics and sound.


FJO: Now with the bees, there’s the added layer of danger. Cockroaches tend to make people flinch, but with bees you can actually get stung and be physically injured. Is putting yourself in harm’s way part of the aesthetic here?
MM: No, not at all. And I’m not allergic to bees, so it’s okay. It was the idea of what the individual is, what our bodies are, and what the relationship is of our bodies to nature. It was searching for some kinds of clues to get closer to that.
FJO: I found it very interesting when we were talking earlier on about collaborations that you included the insects along with your collaborations with some of the most iconic human musicians. But insects, unlike people, don’t necessarily create a work of art of their own volition, so it’s a different kind of collaboration.
MM: Well, from my point of view, I really try to give the cockroaches agency by having them crawl and their movements create the sound structure for the piece. So I really try to imbue a certain agency for them.
FJO: But they’re not necessarily cognizant of their agency. Or are they?
MM: I have no idea.
FJO: But unlike collaborations with other people which are the creative work of the entire group collectively, certainly work for which you’d all share royalties, you don’t have to share your royalties with these bugs! Ultimately, it’s exclusively your work as a creator.
MM: Correct. But let me tell you about these cockroaches. I would be in the hotel room with these cockroaches night after night, travelling with them, and they were in a shoebox. I stopped taking both males and females, because the males would just attack too much, constantly going after each other and fighting each other. So I ended up with just one male cockroach, and the rest females. But I would just watch the way they interacted with each other for hours and hours in the hotel room, you know, after the performance. They did amazing things—very, very tender things with their antennas to each other, really very dramatic, very erotic things. When they would have sex, the things they would do with their antennas were fascinating. And how they would manipulate each other for food, and keep food from certain other ones. The whole thing was just fascinating. And for me, it was also part of the piece in a certain sense.
FJO: Now, to take it to plants. One could argue that even if insects may not be engaging in the same aesthetic processes that you are in the pieces that you involved them in, they certainly have will. Most people don’t think of plants as having will. I think that what you’ve done with plants is particularly fascinating, because it’s trying to address the living qualities of these life forms that we take for granted.
MM: I don’t think of plants as having will, but I will say some plants are very different from each other, even in one species. Some will be very responsive and some won’t be. I use EEG sensors on leaves, so I can monitor activity, and some plants are really responsive. You can get good readings on the sensors from the ones that are semi-tropical with very sebaceous leaves. If they’re in the jungle, they have to think which branch am I going to have to wrap myself around. Aristotle said the difference between humans and plants is plants can’t move, and human beings can. But actually these plants in the rain forest can actually go several miles by living on the treetops, and then shooting roots down. When they want to go somewhere else, they kill the nutrients off and then they move and get new roots in another location. But there are these plants, of course, like a lettuce, that just open and close; they are kind of like a toggle switch. Other plants grow quickly, and their vines shoot in directions where it’s most beneficial for them. So there’s definitely a lot of going there. These root systems can be considered somewhat like a neuron center of some sort.
FJO: So how does this all translate into music?
MM: Well, they give off mini-volts, which is one millionth of a volt. They recently discovered that plants have ultraviolet sensitivity, which is something human beings aren’t even able to discern. There’s a lot going on there. But it’s like any kind of data piece, whether you’re taking the information from earthquake activity, or wind activity. But my plant pieces were in real time. Often data pieces are not. They’re just taking a splice of something that happened and then interpreting that data. It started from my taking data from people’s brains in concerts, going from brain-activated pieces to using plants’ data. For some reason, those pieces got farther along for me than the brain pieces.

Masaoka performing with plants

One of Miya Masaoka’s performances with plants. (Photo by Donald Swearington.)

FJO: But it’s another one of these things where, if one were to hear it without knowing how those sounds came about, what would be the difference in the experience? And this begs the question of where does the music lie in this for you in all of these pieces—the plant pieces, the insect pieces. What is the musical issue that’s coming out of it for you that led you to create in this way?
MM: Well, they’re very different in a certain sense because the ones with insects are taking the actual sounds of the insects, but the ones with plants are taking their relationship to voltage output. A lot of it is negotiating what’s going to happen, whether it’s an installation, or whether it’s something that’s an eight-minute piece that goes from beginning to end. That’s a challenge for those kinds of pieces, to take the data and to make it interesting. I guess there are different ways of thinking about data, how pure this relationship is to the scientific frequencies coming out or whether that can be interpreted or manipulated for compositional purposes. I always err on the side of artistic license to really take the data and then apply it so that there is some sonic interest and development and satisfaction.
FJO: So how do you know when these pieces end? What is an ending?
MM: For long durational pieces, I think there’s the question of my own attention span and the attention span of the audience, the perceiver, the listener. I’ve been to India many times and have experienced seven-hour concerts, as well as [extended] durational concerts by different composers, like La Monte Young. There’s something very beautiful about this kind of eternity and things going on and on, but I also like something that you can kind of experience and then you have to go back to the memory. Once the piece starts, you start listening to it and then you go back to the memory of what you listened to. It’s like reflecting upon whatever just happened in a time-based way. The last event that happened that was meaningful, maybe you return to that. And then there’s a new meaningful event. And then you return to that along the timeline. And it kind of goes like that. And after a span of time happens, you reflect on the whole experience, and find what was meaningful or satisfying, or maybe what was not. For me, there’s kind of a ratio of attention span plus time plus satisfaction equals end. I just made that up right now. [laughing]
FJO: That’s good! You were talking about using raw data versus manipulating it for aesthetic ends. Even though we’re now in the 21st century, we’re still playing all these games with binaries. It’s either this or that. Either it’s about structure or it’s intuitive. One of the things I was trying to think through for what could be the sound bite to describe your music is its corporeality. At the onset of our talk you described your interest in physical moving sound. There’s a physicalness to most of your music, much more so—at least it seems—than the working out of a rigid process. You do all these experiments, but they’re really about how sound exists in the world more than how it exists in your brain. Is that fair?
MM: Anything’s fair. I think that’s an interesting way of thinking, and that sounds like an approach.
FJO: Here’s where it becomes a loaded gun thing—a lot of recent debates about aesthetics contextualize creative choices in terms of gender. The argument goes that men like to create all these rules which result in highly structured pieces, whereas women are more intuitive and they respond to things. Reality is a lot more complex than that, but this binary is something used to explain, say, why there are no 90-minute symphonies by women composers.
MM: Even 40-minute symphonies, why aren’t there those? They don’t have to be 90 minutes.
FJO: Well, I can think of at least ten 40-minute symphonies by women, but I can’t think of any 90-minutes ones. But is this related to gender and is this kind of thinking an issue for you in your own music making? When we talked about identity before, we didn’t talk so much about gender. How important are those questions for you?
MM: Those questions are very important because they have to do with how we function in our social context. So that’s very important. Some things are just done out of necessity. I would often do lots of solo things, especially in the earlier days, because I didn’t have the funding and the resources to hire people. Then whenever I did get funding, the first thing I would do was create more structured pieces to include more people and hire them. That’s always been something that I’ve done consistently. And there’ve been scores and rules for all of my pieces that have to do with larger groups because it’s too unwieldy otherwise. I think that serialism was kind of an extreme, and certainly it broke down, not just for women, but for men as well, but still there are certain things that are very interesting about serialism. For me, it’s more a question of access, being able to have musicians and being able to get your work performed. These kinds of things are more important to me than thinking that this is generalized for this gender or for that gender, which really is not very helpful for anybody.
FJO: But one thing that certainly is helpful to someone who is creative, especially during one’s formative years, is being able to have role models. While there have always been women composers, they did not really have much of an impact on the greater trajectory of music history until composers of Pauline Oliveros and Yoko Ono’s generation. Before their time, the role models were pretty much all men. I know that Pauline Oliveros is somebody who has been very important to you as a mentor. And on your website you include a fascinating talk you did with Yoko Ono, who also created work that blurs the line between sound and vision and performance.
MM: I don’t consider her a role model per se, but she’s definitely been an iconic artist.
FJO: So who are your role models?
MM: Well, Pauline Oliveros, Kaija Saariaho, Olga Neuwirth… I get very inspired by visual artists as well, like Kara Walker, and writers.
FJO: Everyone you mentioned is a woman.
MM: Well, there are men, too, but they get mentioned a lot. I like to mention people who aren’t mentioned as much.
FJO: The person you chose as your life partner, George Lewis, is also an iconic composer and musical thinker. I’m curious about how having the central person in your life also be a creator has impacted your own work. I know that the two of you have collaborated in the past.
MM: Not for a long time. We have a really separate artistic life, I’d say. We buy different pieces of equipment, even if it’s the same a lot of times, because it just makes it easier. You have your equipment, and no one’s going to mess with it. And then when you need it, it’s going to be in the exact same state in which you left it. Those kinds of things are important. And we have different places where we work. But it’s so enriching, because when we do get a chance to sit down and talk about different things, there’s always something interesting to say. So, I really appreciate that part of it.
FJO: It’s interesting. You were such an important fixture in the Bay Area new music scene, and now you’ve been in New York City for over a decade. Since so much of your music is about the physical world around you, I’m curious about how being in a different place has affected the work you’ve done since you’ve been here.
MM: The work I’ve done here in New York is focused more on composition. I just finished this string quartet. But in some ways, it all somewhat follows a life trajectory to a certain extent, since I’m not in my 20s and 30s anymore. I’ve got a small child. There are these kinds of interruptions of life to a certain extent that affect things. The Bay Area was, too, but New York is such a stimulating place to be, so I love being here every minute.

Score excerpt from "Survival"

An excerpt from the score of “Survival”, part 3 of Triangle of Resistance. Copyright © 2013 by Miya Masaoka. Reproduced with the permission of the composer.

Triangle of Resistance

From the world premiere performance of Miya Masaoka’s score for Triangle of Resistance at Roulette on November 17, 2013: Jennifer Choi and Esther Noh, violins; Ljova, viola; Alex Waterman, cello; plus Satoshi Takeishi, percussion; Miya Masaoka, koto; and Ben Vida, analog modular synthesizer. Conducted by Richard Carrick. Video projections by Michelle Handelman. Direction by Brooke O’Harra.

FJO: You also recently wrote your first orchestra piece.
MM: It was a piece called Other Mountain that was performed by the La Jolla Symphony last year.
FJO: Is that something you’re interested in exploring more now?
MM: Well, the large forces of a symphony are a learning experience, and it’s also a very intriguing way of thinking, how the sounds from each individual instrument work together. It’s something new for me, and it’s been endlessly fascinating. I don’t know really where the future goes with that, but it’s really an incredible thing to be able to have done.

Other Mountain orchestral score excerpt

From the orchestral score for Other Mountain Copyright © 2013 by Miya Masaoka. Reproduced with the permission of the composer.

Dave Malloy: Singing for His Soul (Not His Supper)


At the composer’s Brooklyn apartment
March 26, 2014—11 a.m.
Interview and video presentation edited and condensed by Molly Sheridan
Transcribed by Julia Lu

Under the gaze of Broadway’s bright lights and imposing marquees, musical theater seems an especially tough game to play in New York City. Yet it also made the elaborate canvas tent erected in an empty lot on 45th Street to house the Off-Broadway production of Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 all the more magical. Here was a show that had beaten the odds without following the rules.

This was actually the show’s third location after a premiere run at Ars Nova and a transfer to the Meatpacking district. Inside, the audience got cozy around communal tables while gawking at the staged Russian cabaret setting, ordered drinks and food, and then sat center stage as the action of the show unfurled all around them. Its composer (who also played Pierre through much of the run) carried us through this story, a sliver of the weighty War and Peace, on rowdy ensemble numbers and heart-breaking sung soliloquies. The borscht was complimentary, but the critics were in love.

I actually first met Malloy not in this fantasy slice of 18th-century Russia, but in a small Ohio town sometime in the late ’90s, both of us financing our summers by playing in the pit orchestra for a production of West Side Story. It made the success he was now enjoying—including a 2013 OBIE Award, a 2013 Richard Rodgers Award for Musical Theater, and numerous “Best of” listings—personally exciting to see. But I was also curious to find out how the Dave Malloy I had known then, who was composing complicated chamber music for small university audiences, had grown into the performer before me. Dave, still as warm and open as I remembered, told me to come on over.

*

Molly Sheridan: Even though you took NYC musical theater by storm with Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, you didn’t actually start out as a composer with Broadway dreams, right? I get the impression that your back story is a little more convoluted.
Dave Malloy: I definitely grew up loving musical theater and watching the old films. I remember PBS would show The Music Man twice a year during their pledge drive, so my family would all huddle in front of the TV and watch that. I even did a couple in high school, but I was in the pit orchestra being a jazz pianist. Then, when I went to college, I was a composer, so I was writing serious, academic, classical, avant-garde music. I didn’t touch theater writing in college at all—I did summer stock, but that was just a gig. But looking back on it, I now realize that some of the pieces I was doing had theatrical elements. I was writing chamber pieces that had, like, a live chess game on stage. George Crumb was a big influence for me. A lot of his pieces have these theatrical elements. I did his Voice of the Whale—the performers are all masked and there’s the blue lighting. So I was definitely writing music with theatrical things in mind, but still not thinking about musicals at all.
I didn’t really get involved in theater until I moved to San Francisco and I was working at Amoeba Music, the giant, independent music store there. A colleague had heard that I played keyboard and he needed a keyboard player for some show he was doing at a small black box theater called the Exit Theater. So he asked me to do it, I said sure. I had just moved to San Francisco, so it seemed like a good way to meet some people. And basically through that one show, I made every connection that has brought me to where I am now. From there, I met the artistic directors of Banana Bag & Bodice, who I went on to write Beowulf with. And then Beowulf was seen by the people at Ars Nova and so then Ars Nova commissioned Great Comet. So the lineage all goes back to there.
MS: I was going to ask you about that move to the West Coast and its impact on your career, because the theater you did out there felt very relationship based, almost like a family. If you had come to New York versus going to San Francisco, things might have turned out quite differently.
DM: For sure. The theater scene in New York is so much more compartmentalized in one aspect and institutionalized in another way. I hear about young musical theater composers going through these lab programs and workshop programs and going to school for it. That just wasn’t my career path at all. In San Francisco, it was basically all centered around the San Francisco Fringe Festival, which we really don’t have an equivalent of in New York. The New York Fringe is very scattered, and there’s not really a community that builds around it. The San Francisco Fringe is a very tight-knit community. Or at least it was when I was there. You would do a show, and then people would come see your show, and then they would say, “Oh, I like you. Will you do our next show?” And I would say, “Sure.” When I was starting out in theater, I basically said yes to everything—every show that was offered to me, I said, “Sure, I’ll do that.” And even though some of the shows weren’t quite in line with my aesthetic vision, I was meeting people through that and just making those kind of networking connections. But in a very informal, casual, San Francisco way.
MS: Was there a defining moment when you realized, okay, this is where I’m going to focus as a composer?
DM: There were two of those. When I started out doing theater, I started out doing mostly sound design, and I was writing music for pretty experimental theater pieces. So it was mostly soundscape, electronic stuff, or stuff on piano. Then, little by little, I would write a song. In college when I was composing music, I didn’t really write songs at all. I wrote very much, you know, serious concert music. So I just started writing more and more songs.
The first watershed moment: I was with this theater company called Ten Red Hen, and our first show together was {The 99-Cent} Miss Saigon. We had done this literally zero budget version of Miss Saigon, but very non-ironically—embracing the material and telling the story, but we had a GI Joe [toy] helicopter [for the set]. Then for our next show, the artistic director wanted to do Bible stories through clowns. We started talking more and more that I should write more songs for this, and that was kind of the first time that I said out loud, “Oh, maybe I’ll write a musical.”

Malloy as Job in Clown Bible.

Malloy as Job in Clown Bible.

So Clown Bible was my first proper musical. There had been a couple other shows which could be called musicals, but in a very downtown, experimental theater way. But this was a really proper musical. There was a big first song, and everyone had a showstopper—all that kind of stuff. Then from that, I think that led to getting commissioned to do Beowulf with Shotgun Players. And that was the first big, big show for me. So that was the watershed moment, I would say, from Clown Bible to Beowulf.
MS: You are kind of a jack of all trades: composer, performer, sound designer. I would not be at all surprised to learn you ran the copies of the program at Kinkos right before curtain.
DM: I’ve definitely done that.
MS: That might be the nature of the type of theater that you are doing—when the budget is tight, all skills are on deck. But at this point, are you ready to give some of that multi-tasking away or is it hard to let go of having a hand in so many areas?
DM: It’s been harder and harder to hold onto that. As you start working with larger institutions, the work does get more doled out. One thing I’ve been trying really hard to hold onto is just doing all my own orchestrations, because that is something that is not at all commonplace in musical theater. Pretty much everyone farms out the orchestrations, which to me as a classically trained composer is mind-boggling. I completely object to that because I grew up studying Stravinsky and Bartók, where orchestration is half the battle—that’s where all the juice is. But I think in general, I am very hands on. I run my own website, and I’m constantly talking to the PR people about copy editing things in the blurbs. It’s just my nature. A lot of it is from starting out doing really low budget theater, where yeah, everyone does pitch in. I mean, the very first shows I did, we didn’t even have designers. There were five of us who did the show, and we ran all the lighting design, and all the sound design, and the costume design—we just created it all ourselves. So even that was a shift. There’s a lighting designer. I’m like, “So you just do the lights? Oh, that’s interesting.” When I was first doing theater, I didn’t realize that that was a separate person.
MS: Have you been in a situation where you have had to fight to hold onto the orchestration yet, either because of time or who you were working with, or does the nature of the shows you’re doing mean you can still call the shots?
DM: I haven’t really had to fight, but I have had to justify it. With new commissions when people ask about orchestrations, I’ve had to explain, no, this is something I feel very strongly about. I should be doing this. I think again, because I started out doing really low budget black box theater, I’ve always thought very economically. What is the smallest number of people that I can make this amazing with? So I tend not to think about big, 40-person orchestras, just because I feel like if you can do it with 20 people, that’s more economical, and therefore, better.
MS: Speaking of economy, as you were going through that list of shows, there was Beowulf, Clown Bible, and then we have plotlines about Rasputin and taken from War and Peace. It seems like you’re really attracted to these incredibly complex plotlines.
DM: I can trace that directly to Les Miz, which I totally grew up on and to this day absolutely love and adore. That’s a pretty complicated story—multiple threads, multiple characters. Also, when I was in school, I was a composition major and an English lit major, so I was studying literature and fell in love with Russian novels early on. I do love that complexity in weaving different stories together. I also love classics, things written 200-plus years ago. There’s always that really surprising moment in reading stuff and thinking, “Oh, my god. That’s exactly a thought that I had yesterday!” Just recognizing that the classics are modern in a way.
MS: Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 is actually based on just a small section of War and Peace, so you could develop other chapters and make it kind of your Ring cycle, but actually you’re now on to Moby Dick. You just can’t seem to let these epics go.
DM: I think Great Comet will be a part of two separate trilogies. So one is the Russian trilogy, which will be Beardo, which was a show about Rasputin, and then Comet, and then I’m doing a show about Rachmaninoff coming up in the spring. Rachmaninoff and hypnosis and how he wrote his second piano concerto under hypnosis. So that’s the first, the Russian trilogy. But then there’s also the great, impossible uber-long novels trilogy, which will be War and Peace, Moby Dick, and Ulysses. Ulysses is way, way down the road. But I’m working on Moby Dick now. I just really love the challenge of taking some mammoth piece of literature that has a bit of a reputation for being something that’s very difficult and that a lot of people are afraid to read, or people lie about reading.
MS: How do you approach a project of such scope? Do you have a “process” or is each project somewhat unique?
DM: In adapting War and Peace, or now I’m adapting Moby Dick, I start with the original text. So starting with Tolstoy, Melville. In both cases I found the complete text online and transferred that all into a Word document and then the writing of the text becomes this gigantic editing process down to an hour or two-hour long musical.

Malloy as Pierre in Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812. Photo by Chad Batka

Malloy as Pierre in Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812.
Photo by Chad Batka

Then I tend to just think a lot while walking. I take walks in the park and listen to music and just think a lot about theatrical things—what would be a cool theatrical thing to do with this section? I’m definitely thinking of the musicality and the theatricality at the same time. With Comet, it was very clear to me from the beginning that Pierre should be playing accordion, that’s the way that we’re going to know that Pierre is kind of in charge of the evening, and that ultimately it’s going to become his story because he’s the band leader and is kind of welcoming people in as the host. That’s a good example of something being both musical and theatrical. Then I’ll go to either the piano or the laptop. I tend to trade off; if I get stuck, then I move. I’m on the laptop programming beats and improvising on top of those beats, and at the piano, it’s a more traditional, looking for interesting chord changes and melodies and things like that.
MS: How do you deliver the scores to performers? Since you’re probably accommodating a variety of backgrounds and levels of training, are you giving them scores? Handing out recordings?
DM: I typically do both, and the demo always comes first, so if there’s time pressure or if I’m working with people who don’t read music then I know the demo is going be the more important thing to them. So I give a demo to them, and then eventually I’ll start writing out the music.
I definitely find writing out the music to be a bit of a tedious task because I write so improvisationally. A lot of times I’ll sing melodic lines, and then I have the hour of trying to figure out the rhythm of this one two-bar phrase. I’m finding out that I tend to actually write in a lot of polyrhythms, so I tend to write like three against two, and five against two, and seven against four, and that just like naturally comes out when I sing. But then, when I have to actually notate it, it’s quite irritating.
MS: As I was going through the tracks on your website, I definitely noticed that you’re often dancing the audience through much of these shows, to a certain extent.
DM: That kind of came about right after I moved from college to San Francisco. In college I was really absorbed in classical music and jazz and, like, ‘60s pop. And that was it. I actually didn’t know anything that was coming out at that time, so I had no idea what was going on in modern music. Then when I moved to San Francisco, I started working at this record store and just started hearing things that people were playing. That was when I finally started listening to drum and bass music, and that was the first time I heard Radiohead and things like that.
It reawakened in me that I love pop music. I love rock and roll. I love dance music. I love soul. That’s something that’s kind of missing from a lot of classical, avant-garde music—there’s no sense of beat. It’s often very sound scape-y. Here’s some orchestral colors and interesting harmonies, but there’s not that driving sense of something that you can groove to underneath it all. And so that’s when I started to get interested in ideas like, “What if you did take the harmonic language of Schoenberg, but made it dance a little?” So yeah, that’s definitely been a driving force in my music, to keep that dance beat going on.
MS: Your shows have been categorized with labels such as “rock opera” or reviewers make comments about the mayhem and the manic action. Point being, there is a lot of in-your-face energy to these productions.
DM: I think a lot of that comes from just loving the vibe of being at a rock show. And I think San Francisco has a lot to do with it because when I was in my early 20s, I was going to a lot of performances that were kind of coming out of Burning Man—these very communal performances in shitty loft spaces in the Mission, and so people were crammed together and there was very little division between performer and audience. That was something that was always very exciting to me. And I do love that sense of spectacle and the feeling of having some drinks with friends and breaking out into song. All that stuff is very important to me. I hate the experience of going to the theater and being very proper and being quiet and being in the dark. That wall that goes up is not so interesting to me. Sometimes it’s fine, but in terms of what I make, it’s not as interesting.

The audience for Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 is seated in the middle of the action. Photo by Chad Batka

The audience for Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 is seated in the middle of the action surrounding Lucas Steele.
Photo by Chad Batka

MS: You seem to devote a lot of time to sitting in the position of the hypothetical audience member. Ars Nova’s artistic director, Jason Eagan, told the Times that’s why he let you run a little wild while developing Comet, because he knew you were carefully considering that at each step.
DM: Right. That’s another theory, that you don’t worry about the audience and that the audience will come to you if it’s honest. Yeah, I totally don’t believe in that. I definitely believe I am there to entertain people. I am creating these shows so that people have a good time when they go out at night. I mean, hopefully they’re also thinking and feeling—so you’re talking about big issues and having cathartic moments. But I feel if something is just purely an intellectual exercise, to me, that’s something I listen to at home on headphones by myself. If I’m going out, I want to have a more communal experience. I’m going out into public for a reason, so I want to be engaging with those people, and that means both the performers and the rest of the audience. So I want to have experiences where I can be smiling at my neighbor and maybe clapping my hands and singing along with them in non-cheesy ways.
MS: There’s a lot of alcohol in your works, both consumed in the shows and present in the lyrics. But also sometimes the audience is served as well.
DM: The alcohol I think just goes back to that communal experience and wanting to have an experience with both the performers and the audience. Alcohol is a social lubricant; it’s why people meet in bars and go to parties and have drinks. I just love breaking that stuffy convention of what the theater is and instead making it more like a bar room, more like a beer hall. I’ve joked, too, that I need to do a show for every alcohol, so Beowulf was a mead and beer show, and then Three Pianos was red wine and Comet was vodka. So actually in the fall, I’m doing a show about bourbon, called Ghost Quartet at the Bushwick Starr, which will be kind of a ghost story involving moonshine and whisky. But yeah, then I’ll have to write a tequila show and a gin show, etcetera, etcetera.

Sharing a drink during Three Pianos. Photo by Ryan Jensen

Sharing a drink during Three Pianos, Malloy with Alec Duffy.
Photo by Ryan Jensen

MS: It’s an awesome show sponsorship opportunity, as well!
DM: Right. We hope so.
MS: Do you have a core group that you always go to when you set to work on a new show at this point—a think tank of sorts? Theater is so complicated, like opera, in that there are so many creative people at the table and those relationships can be complex and challenging, but also really inspirational.
DM: Over the years, I’ve definitely amassed a kind of collective of people that I love working with, the strongest being my director Rachel Chavkin. We are now developing four new shows together. So, she was the director on Comet and also on Three Pianos, and she and I just see so eye to eye on all of these things. And then performers, so many people came through Comet and so many of them were so amazing. So this Ghost show is all with people who are from Comet; they’re like old friends. There’s definitely a community that’s been developing, but it’s a pretty broad range of people that come in and out.
MS: Does it develop a sort of family dynamic then, and you have to go to group therapy with your disagreements?
DM: (laughs) No. I mean, honestly one of the great things about Comet, and I think this is one of the great things about Rachel, as a director, is that Comet was such a loving family. There was such an amazing vibe backstage, and there was not a lot of, or really any drama amongst the cast or amongst the crew. Rachel definitely fosters that—she thinks of her role as director as: I’m in charge of the vibe of this room. I’m in charge of how these people feel towards each other. And so making it a comfortable place for people to work and to be able to be open to each other is her mentality, which I love because I’ve worked with directors who don’t think that way. I’ve worked with directors who really just think about what’s going on on stage, and that’s all they really care about. Then you do get weirdness backstage, and you don’t get that communal sense.
MS: What are the pros and cons of you being the author of the show, but then also one of the principal performers? That seems like it might set up some challenges, a little like the boss being at the party. You’re one of the team, but you’re also running the show.
DM: I definitely try to keep a sense of humor about it. I really do value everyone’s input and feedback at all times. Because I’m not acting like a dictator, I think it tends to work. It’s difficult. If I’m in performer mode, then it’s harder for me to hear what the strings are doing. One thing that was really useful in Comet was we actually had understudies, so during rehearsal I could sit out and listen to things and put my composer hat back on and think, “Oh yeah, I really need to fix that oboe line,” which I wouldn’t necessarily have heard if I was singing at the same time. So that can be a tricky thing to balance for sure.


I think it actually drives my directors crazy, too, because it takes me a while to actually become a performer. In rehearsal, I’m typically acting more as the composer and orchestrator and co-music director in ways, so its takes me a while before I actually start acting. Acting does not really come to me naturally, so Rachel’s really good about pushing me to put all that to rest and to just become the character and do all those acting things that people talk about.
MS: I love the honesty of the resume on your website where you lay out what each show has taught you. And then the blog you kept through the early days while forming your music theater ideas—it was really insightful.
DM: So you read all of that? Or some of it? Shit. I do have this very old blog, as a part of my website. There are more contemporary posts as well, but there are definitely posts from 2004, 2005, when I was very much a young artist being very scrappy and starting out in San Francisco. I’ve looked back on some of those blog entries and some of them are quite embarrassing, and some of them are very much about being so poor and just having wild, romantic artistic visions, but not actually being able to execute them. There’s part of me that’s thought, “Oh, I should take that down. Now I’m more professional.” But then another part of me thinks, “Oh, this is actually like very honest. This was who I was and where I came from,” and I feel like that might be helpful to someone else.
There’s one particular post in there, which I remember I got a phone call from my parents about because it was about running out of money. I literally was so poor I had negative money in my bank account, and I was trying to submit a grant application and I was at the post office and I didn’t have enough money for stamps, and—yeah, it was just a fiasco. But I decided to keep it all up.
MS: Oh, I think you should! That particular post says so much.
In another post you mention getting theater critics out to your shows, but wishing music critics would come hear these pieces. Is there music that you’re not writing because of the path that you’re on now?
DM: I’m curiously not all that interested in music that exists without theater for myself. Obviously I listen to tons of music that is not theatrical at all, but when I’m writing things, I don’t have a lot of interest in just writing a stand-alone song or a symphony or something. It just isn’t where my mind goes. I feel like anything that I want to do musically, I can do it in the context of a theater piece and it will be even that much more exciting, because there’s all this other stuff going on with it.
Every now and then, I like to sit down at the piano and try to write just a love song or something, and those exercises are pretty futile. It doesn’t really work because I feel like I need to have the bigger picture in my head to make something compelling. The larger theatrical vision is what makes this exciting to watch, not just to listen to.
MS: Do those scraps of things end up in your other pieces, or do you really need the big, over-arching vision before you can begin?
DM: Sometimes interesting chord progressions or something that started out as just me fiddling around on the piano will work their way into bigger things. But I’ve never thought of a string quartet and then turned it into a piece. It’s always been the other way around. It’s very much always coming at it from the theater first.


MS: So I want to ask this question with a caveat that I read the post you wrote about making theater and making money, so don’t throw any rocks or anything. But as you well know, these questions about making experimental work while keeping the lights on in the hall are of course ongoing and worrying people in the field. Since you’ve had success in this area, how do you find that room and that confidence to be experimental inside the challenges of current economics?
DM: I guess a lot of what helps is that I’m not coming at it from an economic point at all. I’ve never written anything thinking this is how I’m going to make money; I’ve always just written things that I’ve wanted to write. Fortunately, some of those things have ended up having some kind of monetizable qualities and some of those things have turned out to be commercial in some ways. But some of them definitely have not. There are shows that I’ve written that will never transfer to an Off Broadway or Broadway run. I feel like if you’re going into it thinking, “I’m going to write a Broadway musical,” then, yeah, you might feel a lot of weight, that “it has to be this, this, and this. And it can’t be this, this, and this. If I’m going to write a Broadway musical, I’m going to make a lot of money off of it, so I need to do something that’s going to make a lot of money.” I just never think about it like that. That just happens, and has happened on a couple of pieces, fortunately, but it wasn’t the intent for writing them.
MS: Is that harder now, though, since you’ve had the success with Comet? Do you find yourself answering creative questions certain ways because of what you know now and what you’ve experienced?
DM: Whether subconsciously or not, I think all the pieces I’m working on right now, none of them could possibly be Broadway musicals. I’ve very deliberately chosen a bunch of new shows that are way more experimental and way stranger than what Comet was—probably in some senses to protect myself from attempting to write another Comet and failing. Instead, I’m attempting to write things that are the polar opposites of Comet. If I fail at those, it won’t be as bad.
MS: So you set yourself up intentionally?
DM: Well, I think I’ve not set myself up, intentionally.
MS: Well put. But you’ve removed that pressure then a little bit?
DM: Exactly. If I started adapting Anna Karenina next, that would be just such a colossal mistake, you know, because it would be too similar. So instead, I’m doing this chamber ghost story piece with just four people—that’s going to be super weird, and probably mostly in the dark.
I feel that the success of Comet has allowed me the room to be more experimental, and the room to try out things that I’ve always wanted to do because people have more trust in me now—I guess because I have a reputation from this one show. So that’s been nice. But I’ve definitely gotten calls from shows that were looking at Broadway runs and shows with big producers behind them, but none of them have been things that I’ve been very interested in. So I’ve said no to a bunch of things which could have gone on to be Broadway things, but it just felt artistically dishonest to say yes to them.
MS: That’s interesting because we began this conversation chatting about how you used to say yes to everything in order to build your career. So there’s a certain point where that switches over to actually learning to say no?
DM: Absolutely. That was a hard lesson to hear. It was only in the last few years that I have started saying no to things, just because now there are enough opportunities that I can only say yes to the things that I really, really want to do, or I can make up the things myself, instead of doing what other people are asking me to do. So that’s been a really nice shift.
MS: Are you still doing the GMAT teaching on the side?
DM: Sure am. I’m teaching this Saturday.
MS: Do they know about your double life?
DM: I try not to tell the students. Some of the other teachers have seen my shows. But yeah, I think it’s important to keep one foot in that door, you know. In case all this does fall apart, then at least I’ve got this teaching thing. I can still pay the rent.
MS: We touched on your published resume before and how you list some of the individual lessons of the productions you’ve been in, which I found really insightful, so what have some of the more formative lessons been for you as you went from saying “yes” to saying “no”?
DM: The first big thing I learned from Beowulf is always have a bass. At first I wrote Beowulf, and there was no bass. I thought the trombones would cover it, and that didn’t work at all. So we had to add a bass at the last minute.


But I have thought more about the forms of the traditional musical. That has been interesting to actually analyze that stuff and realize really good musicals typically do start with a certain kind of song that sets up where and when we are. The prologue song of Comet originally wasn’t in the show. The first song was just Pierre’s first song. Then we did two workshops with that version, and the constant piece of feedback was, “It took me awhile to figure out who everyone was.” I got so sick of that comment that I wrote the prologue out of spite. Like, fuck you, here’s everything laid out as basically as I can.


It ended up being a big hit. So that was a lesson—that these conventional Broadway musicals actually do have lessons to teach. There really is a lot of wisdom in those pieces. You can look at those structures and you can play with those forms, of course, but at the end of the day, probably Act I does want to end with everyone in a moment of jeopardy, so people are excited to come back after intermission.
MS: You once said that {The 99-cent} Miss Saigon was your favorite thing you’ve ever done. That may no longer be true, but what was it about that piece that meant so much to you at the time?
DM: What was fun about doing {The 99-cent} Miss Saigon—and I think this is a theme that’s come up through a lot of my work—is we were simultaneously completely embodying the story, and at the same time, ironically commenting on it. We are walking that really delicate balance of actually telling the story, and in some ways, slightly making fun of it, but really actually loving the story and really wanting to tell the story. That was a really important discovery. I feel like that happens in Beowulf, and that happens in Three Pianos, that happens in Great Comet—we’re loving this thing that we’re talking about, but at the same time, we’re viewing it from a contemporary point of view. It’s a little ridiculous that Sonya bursts into tears every five pages in War and Peace. That’s funny, and so we can comment on that, but at the same time, still love and treasure her as a character and treat her as a human being and not a caricature.

{The 99-Cent} Miss Saigon

{The 99-Cent} Miss Saigon

MS: I think what was fun about reading through a lot of those blog posts was that look back to when you were first getting started. You followed your own path, and you’ve produced great stories as a result of that. We’ve already established that cash and a Broadway dream are not the driving motivator for you, so what is?
DM: I think for me, creating musical theater is the closest thing I have to a spiritual practice. I think that when I’m performing something live, or even when I’m rehearsing something, or developing something, or even just sitting in the audience watching something that I’ve had a hand in, that’s the moment in my life when I experience the sublime. I experience transcending beyond worrying about rent checks and health insurance and dry cleaners and all that. I love those sublime, transcendent moments, and I find that they come to me through music and theater. They definitely come through the community, through performing with other people. Sitting at the piano by myself is nice, but it doesn’t give me the same kind of spiritual satisfaction of really communing with other people and bonding with them. That’s the thing I guess that drives me.
And it’s nice if money comes out of that, because then it allows me to live and do more of it. But at the same time, working a day job is a completely viable thing as well. It’s fine to have the two separate things: I’m going to make my money this way, and I’m going to have spiritual enlightenment this way. If they happen to end up coinciding, that’s amazing, but I don’t think that it has to.

Aaron Parks: Make Me Believe a Melody


Video presentation and photography by Alexandra Gardner

I first became aware of Aaron Parks when he was still a teenager. His mother handed me a CD featuring his trio at a gathering of the Jazz Journalists Association.  Called The Promise, the disc featured two originals and a bunch of jazz standards. Although listening to the recording was hardly a life-changing experience, Parks’s piano playing was already extraordinarily sensitive and his improvisations had a remarkable fluidity that sounded as if he had a lifelong immersion in this music. This seemed odd given that he hadn’t lived that long up until that point and that he grew up outside of Seattle in the final decade of the 20th century, a time when most of his contemporaries were into grunge rather than straight-ahead jazz.

But Aaron Parks, who recently turned 30, was not a typical kid. He was playing both jazz piano and classical bassoon by age 10. At age 14, he skipped high school to enroll at the University of Washington and, by the age of 17, he was named a National Merit Scholar and a Presidential Scholar in the Arts. Soon after that, he transferred to the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied with legendary pianist Kenny Barron and continued to record albums with groups he led, one a year.  Before his 20th birthday, he had released a total of four CDs, the most impressive of which was The Wizard, which consisted exclusively of original material performed by a trumpet/alto sax/piano/bass/drums quintet.

“There are a few of the songs from that record which I still really like,” said Parks when I spoke to him last month at his Brooklyn apartment. “In particular I really like ‘Planting Flowers’; that’s even in my current repertoire. I just pulled it out to give it a go again. [Ed. note: It was part of the quartet set he played at the NYC jazz club Smalls on April 2 and 3.] I feel mostly disconnected [to that music], but I look back every now and then. I smile to myself listening to those old records.  … In retrospect, sometimes I feel a little bit goofy about having all of those records out there. The whole child prodigy thing can be dangerous. When everybody around you is sort of telling you [that] you’re special, you’re like, ‘Oh, well, maybe I need to be special.’ It makes you feel like you can’t just be. You can’t just be a person. You need to live up to this idea of the story others have been telling you.”
So despite his very clear abilities and his artistic drive, he decided to sit in the back seat for a while after the fourth of these albums, Shadows (2002), which included a cover of the Radiohead song “Knives Out.” “I knew that I wasn’t ready,” Parks admitted. “I knew that I wanted to get some real experience. I could have kept on going and doing stuff as ‘the young piano guy,’ but I knew that I needed some more depth.”

What wound up happening is the stuff of legend. Trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard, whom Parks had met only briefly a year earlier, called him up and invited him to attend a live XM radio show moderated by Wynton Marsalis on which Blanchard was scheduled to perform with a group that also featured pianist Chick Corea. Parks skipped his Afro-Cuban Big Band rehearsal at MSM and rushed downtown. It turned out that Corea couldn’t make the gig, so Blanchard asked Parks to play with the group. He wound up being Blanchard’s pianist for five years, touring the world and releasing three albums on Blue Note, among them the 2008 Grammy Award-winning A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem for Katrina). Although he remained a sideman, each of these albums featured one of his own compositions.

“Terence was really interested in compositions from all the band members,” Parks remembered. “That became one of the hallmarks of that band. Most of the guys wrote music for it, carrying on the tradition of Art Blakey mentoring young musicians. That’s a trip because Terence is such a heavy composer.”

Aaron Parks playing piano

A pensive Aaron Parks at the piano.

One of the pieces Parks contributed to the repertoire of Blanchard’s group was “Harvesting Dance,” an unusual tune largely derived from the harmonies of Arvo Pärt Fratres. “I like these chords so I think I’ll take them,” Parks acknowledged. “I love Arvo Pärt; he’s one of the deepest. I listen to whatever crosses my path and whatever I feel some sort of connection to. I don’t really make distinctions between genres.”

That open-mindedness has led Parks to participate in a wide array of musical endeavors in the years since he left Blanchard’s outfit, working in groups led by musicians as diverse as guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, drummer Kendrick Scott, saxophonist Justin Vasquez, vocalist Gretchen Parlato, and Danish bassist Anders Christensen in whose trio he played alongside the late Paul Motian. Parks even appears on the indie rock album Dreams Come True, the debut studio recording by CANT, a group fronted by Grizzly Bear member Chris Taylor. But perhaps the most unusual project Parks has been involved with thus far is a collaboration with South Korean-born vocalist Yeahwon Shin and accordionist Rob Curto combining traditional Korean melodies and free improv; they are about to embark on a nationwide tour in support of their debut album Lua ya, which was released last November on ECM. Almost anything is fair game:

I like music and I like songs and I like sounds. … I like to put myself in situations where I’m a little bit out of my comfort zone. I do also want to have some sort of entry point to the music, though. I want to be challenged all the time, but I don’t want to only be challenged in my head. So music which is purely cerebral, or feels that way to me, I don’t tend to have quite as much of an attraction towards. But if it’s cerebral and I can dance to it, or it makes me feel something, there’s more of a chance.

All of these projects have also fed back into his own creations as a composer and bandleader in his own right.  Shortly after leaving Blanchard, Parks recorded an album of all originals for Blue Note called Invisible Cinema for which he assembled a quartet of guitar, bass, and drums in addition to himself (here not only on piano, but also on glockenspiel and mellotron). “Harvesting Dance,” the aforementioned Pärt-inspired piece, made a re-appearance here but in a completely new guise.  Another one of the album’s tracks, “Nemesis,” showed how deeply he had internalized the ambiguous harmonic language of Radiohead by that point. All in all, this first album as a leader in six years (since the last of his four youthful efforts) was worlds away from the mostly straight-ahead approach of his teens.

“I was pretty consciously trying to make something that didn’t have traditional jazz rhythms,” Parks explained.  “I wanted to try to find some sort of rhythm of our time. At the time I was making that record, I had been scouring blogs for tracks by indie rock bands and was hearing all these new textures and different ways of structuring songs aside from a typical jazz thing. People had been doing that for a long time in the [jazz] scene, but for me it was pretty much brand new and I was just discovering it.”
It would be another five years before an additional two albums got released under his name, two albums that are almost polar opposites. One, Alive in Japan, was simply a lo-fi recording of a December 2012 trio date at a club in Japan combining originals and standards that harken back to his roots. He has made it available for free download on Bandcamp where he states, “If for some reason you feel compelled to contribute something, consider donating to a charity in Japan (or elsewhere in the world), or buying someone else’s record with the money you didn’t spend on this one.” The other, Arborescence, is an introspective series of solo piano improvisations recorded in the extremely resonant Mechanics Hall in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 2011 and released two years later on ECM, a label treasured by audiophiles for its pristine sound.

“I was recording it with a friend of mine just to see what happened,” Parks acknowledged.  “They were just things that happened. We had the recording equipment up and we were there for a few days. I did all sorts of stuff while I was there: I played some of my pieces, I played standards, and I played a bunch of these improvisations—listening back to it, those were the things that felt the most as if they were being inhabited, like I was fully present for them.”

For Parks, being present in the moment of performance is ultimately more important than creating a great original melody or playing it back perfectly. It’s something he tries to do in whatever context he is put in. And it’s something he wishes more musicians would be given the opportunity to focus on in today’s overextended working environment:

One of the problems with the scene today is everybody is so busy doing so many different things.  Most people are pretty proficient at doing a lot of things; you can give somebody some music and they’ll read all of the notes and it’ll be great.  But then they’re onto the next gig. I don’t want music to just be information like that. …  There’s a focus on being an individual; you’ve got to do your own thing at all costs, being original so to speak. But they focus on that one particular side of what original means. Originality is not only creating something new, it’s also having authentic presence—being fully present in the interpretation of what you’re doing. … I want people who can play a part—inhabiting it fully—and make me believe a melody. I don’t want you to play the melody; I want you to sing it to me. That’s a rare thing.

Siren leadsheet excerpt.

An excerpt from the leadsheet for Aaron Parks’s composition “Siren” Copyright © 2009 by Aaron Parks and reprinted with his permission.

Juan Orrego-Salas: I’ve Written All I Have to Write


At the home of Juan Orrego-Salas in Bloomington, Indiana
March 1, 2014—5:30 p.m.
Recorded by Trudy Chan
Transcribed by Julia Lu
Video presentation by Molly Sheridan

Several years ago while rummaging through the shelves of LPs at the offices of Peermusic Classical, I stumbled upon a record called “The Contemporary Composer in the USA” which featured a Sextet for clarinet, piano and strings by a composer named Juan Orrego-Salas. There was something intriguing about it and thankfully the generous folks at Peer gave me the album. Upon listening to the Sextet, I immediately fell in love with the music and so was eager to hear more. The liner notes were not extensive, so I looked up Orrego-Salas in my paperback copy of the 1980 edition of the Grove Dictionary. The article there stated that he was born in Chile in 1919 and received his early composition training there, but he came to the U.S.A. to study with Aaron Copland and Randall Thompson in the 1940s; in 1961, he founded the Latin American Music Center at the University of Indiana in Bloomington. The most recent event listed therein—apart from a work list that went up to 1976—was his receiving various honorary degrees in Chile in 1971, which made it seem like he had moved back there. Having not heard about him before and not readily finding any more recent information, I was not sure that he was still alive. (At that point in time, Wikipedia was not quite up to its current content and accuracy level.) Later on, a few additional early pieces of his surfaced on old out-of-print recordings; a real find was an RCA “shaded dog” featuring two gorgeous song cycles El Alba del Alheli for soprano and piano and Canciones Castellanas for soprano with an ensemble of eight instruments.

The LP that started my search for Juan Orrego-Salas.

The LP that started my search for Juan Orrego-Salas.

Then in 2009, a music journalist from Santiago, Chile named Álvaro Gallegos, who was traveling around the United States to learn more about American composers, visited the office. We spent quite a bit of time chatting about music and I quickly learned that he was as passionate an advocate for Chilean composers as I attempt to be for composers from the United States. He started naming names of important Chileans whose music I needed to hear such as Leni Alexander and Gustavo Becerra-Schmidt (who was still alive at that time) and I cut in that I knew some music by Juan Orrego-Salas at which point I not only learned that he was still alive but that he was still living in Indiana. I stored that information in the back of my head, hoping to take a trip there to meet him as well as to learn more about the Latin American Music Center.

The cover of SVR's Orrego-Salas release

SVR’s re-issue of historic recordings of Orrego-Salas’s orchestral music.

In 2011, SVR Producciones, a Chilean record label that has done a terrific job documenting the music of national composers, issued a two-CD set of orchestral works by Orrego-Salas from rare decades-old recorded performances. It is an impressive document which includes the formidable First Piano Concerto and three of the symphonies. The Third Symphony was the last thing Orrego-Salas wrote in Chile before permanently moving to the United States and the Fourth Symphony was his first major work composed after relocating here. The similar, yet different sound worlds of those two pieces seemed like an interesting departure point for a conversation with Orrego-Salas about music and national identity if only I could find a way to connect with him. In January 2014, Juan Orrego-Salas turned 95. I learned that he was in good health and would be amenable to a conversation about his music, so I contacted Erick Carballo, the current director of the Latin American Music Center, to coordinate a meeting with Orrego Salas at his home in Bloomington which we planned for Saturday, March 1.

A day before the flight, Orrego-Salas called me, initially concerned that the time I had arranged to visit him was the same time as the Metropolitan Opera’s HD screening of Borodin’s opera Prince Igor which he wanted to see again since he had fond memories of the previous production of it he saw when he was nine-year-old. I did some math in my head as he was talking to me—that would have been in 1928! So I arranged to visit him later in the day and our in-person conversation turned out to be an even more amazing journey back in time. He spoke of his studies with Pedro Humberto Allende, Chile’s most significant early 20th century composer as well as his interactions with other important Chileans such as Pablo Neruda, Claudio Arrau, and Acario Cotapos. He described being invited to Tanglewood in 1946 by Aaron Copland along with a group of Latin American composers which also included Alberto Ginastera, Héctor Tosar, Roque Cordero, and Julián Orbón. He had some great anecdotes about Copland as well as other important compositional mentors such as Randall Thompson and Luigi Dallapiccola, with whom he came into contact when his Canciones Castellanas was performed during the ISCM World Music Days in Italy in 1949. He also mentioned his friendships with Irving Fine, Lukas Foss, Harold Shapero, and William Schuman. Of all of these people, he is the only one who is still alive, but he and his wife recently celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary and he is overjoyed by his children and grandchildren.

In the 1950s, Orrego-Salas was something of a cause célèbre in the United States even though he spent most of that decade back in Chile teaching composition, conducting a girl’s chorus, and writing music criticism for one of Santiago’s newspapers. Despite all of those distractions from his own composing, he created a series of major works that were premiered by the National Symphony in Washington, D.C., the Louisville Orchestra, and the Juilliard Quartet, among others. Particularly intriguing is the story of how he came to live in Bloomington as a result of representatives from the Rockefeller Foundation repeatedly visiting Santiago in order to convince him to return to the United States to establish a Latin American Music Center here which they would underwrite. Orrego-Salas refused to do so unless the center was based at an American university for fear that without such support it would cease to exist after the initial funding for it evaporated. Now, more than half a century later, LAMC remains an important part of the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. The main activity of LAMC has been the amassing of a huge collection of scores (one of the most complete collections of works by Latin American composers in the world) which are housed at IU’s William and Gayle Cook Music Library. But LAMC also presents concerts on campus and runs an annual competition for performers that results in commercially released recordings of Latin American repertoire.

Over the course of the many years that Orrego-Salas has lived in Indiana, much of it spent running LAMC and teaching composition, he continued to compose and his catalog spans some 126 works including six symphonies, seven concertante works, several large-scale cantatas and oratorios, four string quartets and tons of other pieces for various chamber ensembles, chorus, and solo voice. But he decided a few years ago that he said all he needed to say as a composer and is no longer writing music. He has contributed an extraordinary legacy both as a composer and as an advocate for composers from throughout Latin America. He is revered as a major compositional figure to this day in Chile, yet here in the United States he is insufficiently appreciated despite having lived here for more than five decades, having had his music championed by high profile American orchestras and ensembles, and being the last surviving member of a major group of American composers of the mid-20th century. His story is an important story in the annals of American music and one which is finally being told here.

Photo of Orrego-Salas's home

The home of Juan Orrego-Salas in Bloomington, Indiana. Photo by FJO.

*

Frank J. Oteri: I’m curious about the milieu in which you grew up: the environment, the music you heard, the first things you heard. You intrigued me on the telephone the other day when you said that you heard Prince Igor when you were only nine years old.

Orrego-Salas in 2013

Orrego-Salas in 2013, photo courtesy Lauren Keiser Music.

Juan Orrego-Salas: Yes, I did. A Russian, a Russian company came to Chile at that time. I was born in 1919, so it must have been 1928, let’s say, when I heard this. Not only Prince Igor, I heard Boris Godunov and Tsar Saltan by Rimsky also. And I was very, very deeply impressed. And my wife has heard me talking about that for during our life. So when she saw that they were showing [a Metropolitan Opera HD broadcast of] it today, she said, let’s go to it. She went alone because I was committed to you. But she came back after a while very disappointed, saying that it was a very bad performance. I’m glad that I didn’t go because I don’t want to be disappointed.
FJO: What about some of the other music you heard. I know from the LAMC interview you did a couple of years ago that you were already playing piano when you were four.
JO-S: Yes. My mother played a little piano, and she started teaching me piano. So I started playing a little. I remember Peer Gynt from Grieg, pieces from that I played on the piano. It’s as far as I can go back in my training as a musician.
FJO: I find it interesting though that from the very beginning you said that you really were more interested in creating your own music rather than to play someone else’s music.
JO-S: Yeah, having fun with the keyboard and inventing things. The thing that I remember very well is that my mother was very strict that I should practice every day [for] at least one hour. When she had to go to do something, she asked the maid to follow that I had been practicing for an hour. When she came back, she received from the maid, “Oh, he’s been very good. Over an hour, I think around two hours.” I hadn’t touched anything that I had [on the piano]; I had been improvising all the time. But the maid didn’t know the difference. See?
FJO: Now I’m curious, you knew about all this classical music. Your mother played the piano. You heard these Russian operas. Did you have a sense that this improvising at that piano was being a composer, that you were creating music and that this was new music?
JO-S: I never thought of that. I liked to do it, but I never thought that word composer. I don’t think it came so early into my lingo.
FJO: At that time, did you know of Chilean composers, or were you just hearing European music?
JO-S: No, I knew about Chilean composers because my father and mother were friendly with most of the composers active at that time. When the Chilean pianist [Claudio] Arrau came to Chile, he came to have dinner at [our] home. I met him when I was a baby, really.
FJO: So who were some of the composers you met when you were young?
JO-S: Well, one that became my first composition teacher, Pedro Humberto Allende.
FJO: He wrote some extraordinary piano pieces that are still played today.
JO-S: Yes, right. He was very well known in Chile and respected in Chile.
FJO: How old were you when you were studying with him?
JO-S: When I was studying with him, I was perhaps 12- to 14-years old.
FJO: How did your family feel about your composing original music?
JO-S: I don’t think that they were too opinionated about it. The only person that perhaps would have preferred my playing Chopin rather than my inventions at the piano is my grandmother, the mother of my father, because she played the piano. She played Chopin and whenever I went to visit her, she wanted me to sit at the piano and play something. And I played always the same Chopin prelude that I had learned with my mother and she enjoyed it very much.
FJO: But she didn’t enjoy when you played your own music.
JO-S: I never did try that. I never tried.
FJO: Now, in terms of knowing this word composer, by the time you were in your teens you were studying with Allende, who was probably the most famous composer in Chile then. So at that point did you have a sense that you wanted to spend the rest of your life writing music?
JO-S: I started feeling that very gradually. I think that it didn’t happen very specifically until I was a student at the National Conservatory. I joined Allende’s class and there of course I met other composers, young composers that were studying with him: Alfonso Letelier, René Amengual, and others. Then I started feeling myself sort of associated with the idea of being a composer, of inventing music. Because for me, a composer is the one who invents music.
FJO: At that time in the rest of the world, there were very different kinds of attitudes about what contemporary music should be. There were the experimentalists but there were also many more old fashioned composers who were still actively writing music that was being performed. Also, everywhere there were composers who wanted to re-invent classical music using their own country’s folk music idioms, like Bartók in Hungary, and to some extent Allende in Chile.
JO-S: Yes, yes, that’s right, or Copland in the United States, who became my teacher.
FJO: That’s much later and I definitely want to talk about that with you. But in terms of what music you were exposed to back in the 1930s, I’m wondering if you had much contact with the Chilean composer Acario Cotapos who had a much more experimental orientation.
JO-S: Oh, yes. We were friends. I’ll tell you a very funny thing. Cotapos was very nice and very humorous. One day we were having dinner with him, and my wife asked him, “Acario, how is it that being so nice yourself, you never got married.” “My dear, I forgot it,” he said. That was his answer!
FJO: So, in terms of the music that you wanted to write, did you see yourself more carrying on a tradition from the past, from Europe, trying to invent a music that was for Chile, or being some kind of individual experimenter who was forging your own personal path?
JO-S: I felt closer to Stravinsky. I was interested in the way his music was organized.
FJO: Did you want to study with Stravinsky?
JO-S: I never thought that I could study with Stravinsky.
FJO: So many composers at that time, when they traveled outside of their countries to study music, went to Europe to study. So many composers from the United States studied in France with Nadia Boulanger. But when you left Chile to study music somewhere else, you came to the U.S.A.
JO-S: Well, I came to the U.S.A. because of Copland. Copland had been to Chile and he had seen little things that I had written. So, he said, you should come to the United States. And he was my mentor in the United States.

Robert Shaw, Juan Orrego-Salas, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and Irving Fine


Juan Orrego-Salas (second from left) at Tangelwood in 1946 with Robert Shaw (to his left), Aaron Copland (standing), Leonard Bernstein (drinking), and Irving Fine. Photo by Ruth Orkin. From the Irving Fine Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress. Reproduced with the permission of the Library of Congress.

FJO: You were part of that very famous class at Tanglewood together with Alberto Ginastera.
JO-S: With Ginastera and [Héctor] Tosar and [Roque] Cordero…
FJO: You were all from different Latin American countries, so did you actually know each other before you came to Tanglewood?
JO-S: I knew Ginastera; we were friends already. Tosar and Cordero, also.
FJO: It’s quite interesting to me that in addition to studying composition with Copland, you were also studying musicology with Paul Henry Lang at Columbia…
JO-S: Yes.
FJO: You had also studied architecture.
JO-S: Well, the architecture thing is different. When I finished high school, my family said “Well now, which is the profession that you have chosen?” I said, “I don’t think I need to choose a profession because I have it already. It’s music.” “No, no, no,” my grandfather said, especially. “No, my dear. Music is very nice. We like you doing music, but that’s not a profession. You’re not going to live on music. You have to choose a real profession.” “What’s a real profession?” I said. “Well… law, engineering, architecture.” So I chose architecture, because I was interested in painting also. I did lots of watercolors. I was interested, so I entered the School of Architecture, and I wasn’t sorry because I started developing a sense that the relation between music and architecture was very close. So I became very much interested in architecture, and I completed my studies in architecture, and I became an architect, but I never practiced architecture except in designing a window for my house and things like that.
FJO: I heard that you built this whole house we’re in.
JO-S: No, I didn’t build it. This was pre-built, but I changed lots of things in this house.

An original watercolor by Juan Orrego-Salas

One of Juan Orrego-Salas’s original watercolors still hangs in a frame on the wall of the entranceway to his home in Bloomington, Indiana.

FJO: You actually gained notoriety as a composer quite early on. By the time you were 30-years old, you were already writing pieces of music that were published and were available.
JO-S: Yes. I thought I was quite lucky in that respect, you know. I don’t remember names very easily now at 95 years old. But I had met people from Boosey & Hawkes, for example. And they invited me to give them some of my works for them to administer. And there was an Argentinian publisher called Barry who represented by Boosey & Hawkes, and he picked a few things of mine, including my latest piece at that time, that was my First Symphony. Then when I was in England, I was in contact with Boosey & Hawkes, and they published a few of my choral works at that time.
FJO: You wound up having many pieces published with Peer.
JO-S: With Peer. Yes.
FJO: You were also getting significant international performances of your music. Canciones Castellanas was done during the ISCM World Music Days.
JO-S: In 1949 at the festival of ISCM in Italy, in Palermo.
FJO: That was only three years after the festival started again when World War II ended. So I’m curious how that helped your reputation at the time.

Orrego Salas LP on RCA

The first all Orrego-Salas LP, an RCA “shaded dog” with one side featuring Canciones Castellanas (pictured above) and the other featuring El alba del Alhelí.

JO-S: Enormously, because at that time, Dallapiccola was in Palermo where my piece was played and I conducted it, which was really, very audacious because I had never conducted. But the singer that I got was an Italian singer, and she encouraged me to conduct her. It’s a piece for seven instruments and voice. And, well, I did it. I think that Dallapiccola helped me a great deal because he was at the rehearsals. And he said, “Don’t do this when you are pointing. Be very relaxed. Don’t show him that he’s doing it wrong.” Things like that. He helped me a great deal in conducting that piece.
FJO: So in some ways, he was as important a mentor to you as Copland had been earlier, and there was also Randall Thompson.
JO-S: Yes, in many ways he [Thompson] helped me more than Aaron Copland. Copland showed me very useful things along his path of thought in music. But Randall Thompson gave me more freedom in conveying to me to do what you feel, what you think, what you want.
FJO: Nowadays, Copland is an internationally-known composer and a wide range of his music is still played, but Randall Thompson is mostly remembered for his choral music. Initially when I learned that you had studied with Thompson, I assumed that led to your own immersion in choral music. But he wrote so much more than that.
JO-S: Well, he was a teacher of Bernstein, also. And Bernstein I don’t think he wrote very much choral music.
FJO: But you went on to conduct a chorus.
JO-S: Yes, I was a conductor of the Catholic University Chorus [in Santiago].
FJO: The year after that ISCM performance, 1950, seems to have been a watershed year for you as a composer. In that year you composed both a really powerful piano concerto and a strikingly beautiful song cycle for voice and piano, El alba del Alhelí.

El Alba del Alheli score excerpt

An excerpt from the score of Juan Orrego-Salas’s El Alba del Alhelí, Op. 29 (1950)
Copyright © 1958 by Juan Orrego-Salas. All rights reserved. Published by Peermusic Classical and reprinted with permission.

JO-S: The Piano Concerto was a path towards going out of Chile because, at that time, Celibidache was conducting the symphony orchestra. And he got very much interested in my piano concerto, and he did it in Berlin with a pianist Helmut Roloff, whom I met years later.
FJO: So you didn’t hear him do it?
JO-S: No. I wasn’t at that performance.
FJO: For the most of the 1950s you were in Chile, doing so many different things in addition to writing music. You were conducting that girls’ chorus and you were a professor of music at the University. You were also the music critic for the newspaper.
JO-S: For Mercurio. It was a lot. I wish it would have been less, and I would have dedicated more to composition.
FJO: Except the music you were writing at that time was so interesting and was getting noticed internationally. You were doing all these other activities besides composing in Chile, but you were also getting important commissions, including many commissions from the United States. The Louisville Orchestra commissioned you. Your first string quartet was premiered by The Juilliard Quartet. Tanglewood commissioned your Sextet for clarinet, piano and strings, which is a phenomenal piece. I’m curious to hear what you think about all that music now, sixty years later.

Score excerpt from Orrego-Salas's 1st String Quartet

An excerpt from the score of Juan Orrego-Salas’s String Quartet No. 1, Op. 46 (1956). Copyright © 1963 by Peer International Corporation. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

JO-S: Oh, I wouldn’t—I would be very frightened to say that they were great because I always thought that even if I wrote a piece that I enjoyed very much, I could do even better than that.
FJO: So are there any pieces you wrote that you would say are your favorites, that you feel the most proud of?
JO-S: I think the Canciones Castellanas, the one we were speaking of, is a very favorite piece of mine. And there is a later piece for string orchestra called Presencias that I enjoyed very much.
FJO: I’d like us to stay in the 1950s for a little bit longer and talk about these major performances of your music in the United States that were happening while you were in Santiago. You finally wound up moving here. Was that in anyway related?
JO-S: No. It wasn’t my decision. It was a Rockefeller Foundation decision. I had been a Rockefeller Fellow years before. And one day, I was sitting in Chile, doing all the things that I did in Chile, and the American embassy called me and said that Mr. Harrison was coming to Santiago and he wanted to see me and meet me. And I said, “Who’s Mr. Harrison?” He was an historian, a member of the Rockefeller Foundation Board of Directors. So I met him for lunch. And he said, “The Rockefeller Foundation has just helped Maestro Ginastera in establishing the di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires. But that’s to train composers. We want to establish in the United States an institute to promote Latin American music, and to research Latin American music.” In other words, it has something to do with musicology, with performance, with everything. And I said, “But I’m a composer.” “Yes, you are a composer. And we want you to continue being a composer. So, we have to find a way that you do both things. That would be any how less than what you’re doing here in Chile.”
“And so,” I said, “How would it be?” “Well, we thought of establishing this center for Latin American in the United States in Washington as part of the OAS [Organization of American States].” And as soon as he said that I said, “No. I’m not interested. I’m not interested in working anything that had to do with politics, absolutely not! I have nothing against the OAS, but I don’t want the OAS associated with work of Latin nature.” “So what would you suggest?” “Well, if you want to establish an institution that would provide inter-research on Latin American composition and stimulate performances of Latin American music, do it with a school of music in United States, or a university. You have loads of them. You have Juilliard and Eastman, and so forth.” And he said, “You’re absolutely right. I’m going back to the United States and inform the board about your idea.”
So, he came back a week later and said, “Look, Rockefeller approved your idea, and we’re going to do an investigation of several universities who have important music departments, or schools of music, which would be interested in this. And I’ll be back to you.” It didn’t last more than a couple of weeks and he was back in Chile [again]. And he said, “We investigated thirty universities and we have five [possibilities], including Indiana [University].” And I was aware of what was going on at Indiana University because when I was a Guggenheim Fellow in New York, William Schuman had told me of this school and that it was growing and growing. Schuman was the head of Juilliard at that time. And he said, “If you don’t want to go back to Chile, I could write a letter to Mr. [Wilfred Conwell] Bain, who is the Dean, and I am sure he will offer you a position at his school. Do you want me to do that?” “Yes, do it. See what happens.” Well, I received an offer from Dean Bain, offering me a position as a member of the theory department at Indiana University with a salary that was less than what I was receiving in Chile, to the pleasure of my family who said that music didn’t produce more than architecture! So I said to Dean Bain, “Well, I’m sorry, I’m not interested in teaching theory. And the salary is not the one I am aiming to.” “So,” he said, “I’m sorry, but I’ll be back to you.” Well, he was back every year. I received a Christmas letter from him saying I haven’t given up the idea of having you here. So when the Rockefeller [Foundation] came with this idea, Dean Bain jumped and said, “We want him as founder and head of this Latin American Music Center and teacher of composition.” And that was what he offered me, with a salary that was at that time, decent.
FJO: So that first contact with Bain was in 1954.
JO-S: 1955 I think.
FJO: So for seven years you stayed in Chile doing all these different activities but at the same time getting all of these performances of your music in the United States. Were you traveling back and forth all the time?
JO-S: No. I didn’t travel after 1954-55, when I was a Guggenheim Fellow.
FJO: So you were just getting phone calls and letters.
JO-S: Yeah. My next trip to the United States was in 1961 when I established the Latin American Music Center.

Copland and Latin American composers.

Composers of the Americas (back row, left to right): Julián Orbón (1925-1991, Cuba), Juan Orrego-Salas (b. 1919, Chile), Aaron Copland (1900-1990, U.S.A.), Antonio Estevez (1916-1988, Venezuela), Harold Gramatges (1918-1998, Cuba), Roque Cordero (1917-2008, Panama), Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983, Argentina), (front row) Héctor Campos Parsi (1922-1998, Puerto Rico) and Blas Galindo (1910-1993, Mexico). Photo courtesy of the Latin American Music Center.

FJO: We talked earlier about identity and your teacher Allende introducing Chilean elements into classical music. You wrote all these pieces that continue in that tradition, but many of them were commissioned by groups for performance in the United States. Then you came to the United States. How much of your identity as a composer remained Chilean? How much became American?
JO-S: That I don’t know. I don’t know what to answer here. But I’ll tell you something. The Sextet was commissioned by a foundation in New York and that was arranged by Aaron Copland. And Aaron Copland arranged the first performance in Tanglewood. And I was invited to Tanglewood to attend the first performance. And I went there. And I’ll tell you a funny story. Aaron Copland was waiting for me in the station where you come from New York to Tanglewood. And he had reserved for me a room and so on. It was very nice to see him again. And he said to me, “Well, I’ll tell you, this afternoon you have a rehearsal of your Sextet. But I’ll have to pull your ears because you did a very naughty thing with the Sextet.” What did I do? I was very frightened, you know. “You end pianissimo. You should never end pianissimo a work at your age because you need applause, and they never applaud pianissimo endings.” “Well I’m sorry, because it’s written already.” Okay, he sat with me at the premiere, and when it ended, there was a big applause. I said, “I am sorry. You are right, and I’m wrong.” [laughs]

The last page of the score of Orrego-Salas's Sextet

The ending of Juan Orrego-Salas’s Sextet for Bb clarinet, string quartet, and piano, Op. 38 (1954)
Copyright © 1967 by Peer International Corporation. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
(Please note that the clarinet part is notated in C herein.)

FJO: There is something about that Sextet in particular, to my ears anyway that sounds very American, more than it sounds Chilean.
JO-S: I don’t know that. It sounds mine.
FJO: I’m curious to know more about composers in the United States you felt a strong kinship to at that time.
JO-S: I was a good friend of William Schuman. And Lukas Foss; we became very good friends, and I’m very sorry that he has left this world because he had lots of things to say still. Irving Fine was a very honest composer. And very critical with himself. One day he showed me a piece he had written for chamber orchestra which I thought it was wonderful. And he thought it was awful. And I couldn’t convince him. He was that kind of composer. Never sure of what he was. Harold Shapero was a very great composer, that is unknown now in the United States.

Shapero, Fine, Orrego-Salas, Foss, and Copland 1946

Harold Shapero (1920-2013), Irving Fine (1914-1962), Juan Orrego-Salas (b. 1919), Lukas Foss (1922-2009), and Aaron Copland (1900-1990) at Tanglewood in 1946. Photographer unknown. From the Irving Fine Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress. Reproduced with the permission of the Library of Congress.

FJO: The piece that you wrote right before you moved to Bloomington, the Third Symphony, also sounds to me as if it is in some way leaning toward a sound world that is somewhat akin to these composers. Do you feel that you and these composers were working toward a common language?
JO-S: I had never thought on those terms. Never. I wrote the Third Symphony and because I wrote it; there is no other reason to have written it. And the Fourth Symphony I wrote here.

Score excerpt from Orrego-Salas's 4th Symphony

An excerpt from the score of Juan Orrego-Salas’s Symphony No. 4 “De la respuesta lejana”, Op. 59 (1966).
Copyright © 1966 Norruth Music, Inc. Copyright assigned 2008 to Keiser Classical (BMI). International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission.

FJO: The Fourth Symphony has a similar sound world to your Third, but it’s also the earliest piece that I know of yours that uses 12-tone techniques, albeit in quite a unique way.
JO-S: The Fourth. The Fifth Symphony has never been played.
FJO: Really?
JO-S: I’ve written six symphonies. The Sixth Symphony was premiered last year in Colombia.
FJO: Wow. And the fifth has not been played.
JO-S: Hasn’t been played.
FJO: It was not commissioned? You just wrote it?
JO-S: I just wrote it.

Excerpt from the score of Orrego-Salas' 5th Symphony

An excerpt from the score of Juan Orrego-Salas’s as yet unperformed Symphony No. 5, Op. 109 (1995).
Copyright © 1995 Norruth Music, Inc. Copyright assigned 2008 to Keiser Classical (BMI). International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission.

FJO: Wow. Now the Fourth Symphony, I want to return to the Fourth for a little bit longer, because that’s really the first really major work you wrote as a composer based in the U.S.A. You said that you’re not really thinking in terms of identity, but I wonder if in any way being in Bloomington, which is a very different place from Santiago, if that in any way affected your mind and your thoughts about music, if it opened up another set of ideas for you.
JO-S: I think it must have. But I’m not self conscious of it. Not, not at all.
FJO: So what inspired you to explore 12-tone composition?
JO-S: I’ve used 12-tone music as an experiment, which I am not really deeply associated with. That’s why I have abandoned it, and come back to it.
FJO: But in terms of places, you’ve now spent close to 50 years here in Bloomington.
JO-S: ’61 to ’14…
FJO: By now you’ve spent more time here than you did in Chile where you are considered perhaps the greatest living Chilean composer. You are honored there as a hero. But so much of your music was actually written here in this country and yet you are not often spoken about in the history of music in the United States. To my mind, you are an American composer.

Juan Orrego-Salas with conductor Carmen Helena Tellez. Photo courtesy of the Latin American Music Center.

Juan Orrego-Salas with conductor Carmen Helena Téllez who served as director of the Latin American Music Center from 1992 to 2012. Photo courtesy of the Latin American Music Center.

JO-S: Yes. I don’t mind being an American composer or a Chilean composer, or an Argentinian composer. That’s an argument that we had with Ginastera several times, because Ginastera wanted to be an Argentinian. And he had a purpose of writing music as an Argentinian composer, which I never had in Chile. I think the only work that I wrote very self consciously using Chilean folk elements was a cycle of three songs that I called Canciones en estilo popular, songs in the popular style. Because they were based on Neruda’s poems on popular things.
FJO: So did you know Neruda?
JO-S: Oh yes. Very well.
FJO: And he heard your songs?
JO-S: Yes, he thought that he had no ear for music. He said he didn’t know the difference between the national anthem and the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven.
FJO: So you can’t really say how he responded to your music.
JO-S: No, I cannot. No composer in Chile can say anything about that.
FJO: Still it surprises me—which is why I thought it was very important for me to talk to you for this web magazine about music in the United States—that while you are a national hero in Chile, more people in this country are not aware of your music. And you have also had an influence on composers here, since you taught composers here for so many years.
JO-S: I’ve had American students—United States students—but I’ve also had Venezuelan students and I’ve had Argentinian students during my teaching here. I don’t know if there is a difference, unless they decide to do it. I’ve had a composer who for me is among my very best: a Venezuelan, who now is teaching in Michigan—Ricardo Lorenz. Ricardo Lorenz is a Venezuelan composer that for me it doesn’t sound Venezuelan, or Chilean, or American. He sounds Lorenz.
FJO: So for you that should be the goal for every composer, to sound like him or herself?
JO-S: Right.

Janos Starker, Juan Orrego-Salas and Charles Webb

Juan Orrego-Salas (standing on right) listening to cellist János Starker and pianist Charles Webb rehearse his music. Photo courtesy of the Latin American Music Center.

FJO: I’m curious about the music that you have written in recent years.
JO-S: Which are the recent years? I haven’t written a thing in about the last three years. I think I finished writing music. When I saw Aaron Copland for the last time, it was here. Sitting here. Perhaps in this chair. He had one of my granddaughters sitting in his lap. And I asked him suddenly, “Aaron, what are you writing?” He looked. “Nothing. I’ve written all what I had to write.” And that said a great thing for me. I know that Aaron had written everything that he had to write. And I was starting to feel that I had written also what I had to write. I had nothing more to say in music. I transferred the legacy of all my works, my photographs, my letters and everything to Indiana University. And they possess it now.
FJO: So what would you say now to composers who are on the other side of their careers, just starting to write music and trying to find themselves and to establish a career path?
JO-S: Be always what you are when you’re writing music. That’s perhaps the best advice that I can give.

*

Ed. Note: For more about Juan Orrego Salas and the founding of the Latin American Music Center, here’s an excellent interview he did with current LAMC director Erick Carballo in 2011…

Joel Puckett: Real Life Inspiration


“Write what you know” is a commonly heard piece for advice for artists, but composer Joel Puckett has taken to heart a slightly different version of this sentiment, which could be stated, “Write what you live.” He finds inspiration for his compositions from events in his own life, and is refreshingly open about the motivations for his pieces, which are often highly emotional. For instance, his work The Shadow of Sirius, a concerto for flute, flute choir, and wind ensemble, is about losing a child through a miscarriage that his wife and he experienced, and he says the process of “getting those emotions out in the music” helped him heal.

“It has to be about the things I’m feeling,” Puckett says of his musical output. “The music I write is a time capsule of how I was feeling while I was working on it. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I really can listen to these pieces and remember in some cases things like what I had for breakfast that day, a conversation my wife and I had… for me, the moments are right there on the surface.”

Those moments are most often created for large ensembles such as orchestra and symphonic wind ensemble, to which Puckett has always gravitated, generally preferring the “big crayon box” as a means to recreate the multi-layered textures he hears in his imagination. His background as a singer also informs his composing process, and recording his own vocal improvisations is the primary method he uses for generating musical material. During a three-year residency with the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra he composed Concerto Duo for brothers Demarre and Anthony McGill, on flute and clarinet respectively, which featured all the ensembles under the CYSO umbrella (that’s six different orchestras) on one stage. But while he loves creating beautiful sustained textures and webs of counterpoint through the natural reverberation of large instrument groups, he is also highly attuned to the individuals within those groups, and the practicality of what he is asking them to play.

Not a whole lot of people talk about the physical demands that are being placed on the individual—not the instrument—the individual who happens to be putting the instrument to their face. If you’re not thinking about the person, then the parts are just paint by numbers/Connect Four…. It’s not real music until you’re thinking about the individual. And if you’re thinking about the individual, you’re thinking about the fact that they have to breathe; how much air does it take to play this note? How much velocity does it take to do this? Am I really taking care of their arm, or their physicality in this passage if they’ve been doing four-string cross string arpeggiation patterns for eight minutes before that? It’s not a question of can they do it. Of course they can do it. But is it going to put them in the best position possible to succeed?

Puckett’s sense of practicality also extends to the business side of his musical life. He says the question he is asked most often is how he gets so many performances—hundreds each year—and he says that it’s essentially about making real connections with people who share similar musical interests and values. He has a firm grip on what he is doing, what he wants to do in the future, and those clear perceptions allow him to find the people and organizations that are a good fit for him and his creative work. His goal is to gather a community of people who believe in his work—and vice versa—that will enable him to continue to write the best music he possibly can, and to continue growing as an artist for years to come.

“Which of these Aaron Jay Kernises am I?”

Aaron Jay Kernis in his living room


A conversation in Kernis’s New York City home
February 11, 2014—10:00 a.m.
Video presentation and photos by Molly Sheridan
Transcribed by Julia Lu

When he was just 23, he was thrust into a kind of stardom that many dream of but few ever achieve. He reached one of the top levels of fame in a career which, at the time, rarely paid attention to someone so young—in fact, in a career that rarely paid attention to someone alive. He was aspiring to be a composer of orchestra music and it was the early 1980s. The name John Adams, whom he had recently studied with, had just barely started to register in the national consciousness. This was before the Meet The Composer Orchestra Residency Program was launched. Sure, Philip Glass and Steve Reich had already become familiar names, but it was certainly not due to orchestra concerts. But a major American orchestra played a piece by this young composer on a festival that was attended by critics from all over the country. The conductor of the orchestra attempted to show him who was the boss during an open rehearsal. He talked back. The audience ate it up and he became something of a cause célèbre. He was suddenly the next big thing, the person to watch.

He continued writing music and went on to receive a bunch of accolades for it. While still in his 20s, he was signed by one of the top music publishers. By his 30s, he was signed to a five-year exclusive contract with a major record label and he won the Pulitzer Prize. Not long after turning 40, he received the University of Louisville’s Grawemeyer Award, which is the single largest American award for composers. He was at the top of his game, so to speak. But at the same time that he was pursuing his craft and being successful at it, he decided to devote a significant part of his life to being a mentor to younger composers and help them attain the same kind of achievements that he has had. He founded the Minnesota Orchestra Composers Institute, one of the premiere programs for nurturing emerging talent, and oversaw its activities for over a decade. To this day he’s on the faculty of the Yale School of Music whose successful composer alumni nowadays seem ubiquitous.

He’s had a pretty complete life, so much so that later this month the University of Illinois Press is publishing a biography of him, a rarity for a living composer. But he’s only in his early 50s. What do you do with your life after all that? Where can you go from there? What’s life like after someone writes your biography? It’s a tough act to follow. But that is the conversation we were eager to have with Aaron Jay Kernis.

Kernis claims that his biggest epiphany after reading through the proofs of the book (it’s not an unauthorized bio) was realizing that there were connections between pieces he wrote that he originally felt had little relationship with one another. He thought he had abandoned post-minimalism in his youth. The angry angular pieces from the early ‘90s (like a symphony he wrote in response to the First Gulf War) also seemed worlds away by the time he was composing the vast soundscapes of the past decade. And how to explain how any of that related to the numerous laments he has composed for lost family members, friends, even John Lennon whose murder inspired a gorgeous rhapsodic piece for cello and piano, one of the earliest pieces of his that’s still in his active catalogue?

I did not have the reaction of wanting to flee but rather to explore that question of “which of these Aaron Kernises am I?” … For a long time I thought it was always a completely different direction, but now I see that there are circles; it circles back with new perspectives, new materials. … When I finished the book the first time, I thought about my newest work. Are these works related? Or are they something totally different? I don’t have the perspective yet. I don’t have enough distance from them to know quite where they fall on the continuum of cycling relationships. … I’m a different person than I was when I was 29.

But mostly he doesn’t worry about neatly sorting out these connections and just tries to balance teaching, raising a family, and writing music. When we visited with him in his cluttered apartment near the northern tip of Manhattan, where children’s toys freely mix with books and scores, he had just completed a viola concerto.

I have work time during the day and time with my kids at night. It’s very special time, unlike any other. And I don’t travel to performances as much, unless they’re premieres. I love to travel, but now it’s time to travel with my kids. Luckily I’m in a situation where I can teach one day a week and have the rest of the time to compose. It’s a full day. Sometimes it spills over to another day, or some students come down here and we have some extra time. But I try very much to fit it into one day. My composing time is really pretty sacred.

I’m glad he took some time out of his schedule to talk with us.


Frank J. Oteri: There’s a weird contradiction to your music. On the one hand, it’s very much of this time; many pieces are directly informed by mainstream popular culture. But, on the other hand, it seems to go against the grain of whatever our zeitgeist is supposed to be. Of course, to have your own voice, you have to fight against the zeitgeist.

Aaron Jay Kernis: But what is the zeitgeist? It’s always shifting, and it’s so large. That’s the thing about our time. The formative musical experiences I had were from college radio. And my worldview became one of just everything—‘20s jazz, minimalism, hard core, uptown stuff, lots of Irish folk music, all over the place. The idea of this multiplicity of possibilities was a great way to start. But the problem with that is that it sometimes makes choosing difficult for me, so I kind of move back and forth between things that continue to interest me.

FJO: But some things interest you more than others.

AJK: Oh, definitely.

FJO: So why are certain things constant recurring themes for you? You just mentioned ‘20s jazz, but ‘50s rock and roll and even disco have inspired you.

AJK: Right.

FJO: Everything figures in, but you eventually have to strip things away. It’s like you’re sculpting, chiseling at the musical universe to get at an essence, rather than adding to it.

AJK: Things appear and then they vanish for five or ten years. I’ve seen that very much with any interest I have. Actually, it’s kind of an interesting time now, because my daughter loves Top 40. So every morning, or pretty much any time she’s in the car, we’re listening to Top 40 together. I’m pushing her toward the independent rock stations, because I’m curious to see, in a language she’s most interested in, what cool stuff I’m going to hear. But mostly, any rock and roll, disco, or salsa influence appeared in a short period of time, and then pretty much has vanished and was replaced by the influence of jazz, which is a core kind of thing from my childhood. But I’m really curious about your provocation about not being of this time.

FJO: Well, one thing about your music that stands out is how so much of it revels in the long line and long forms. This is definitely at loggerheads with our era of limited attention spans and instantaneous gratification. I couldn’t imagine you on Twitter, for example.

AJK: And I’m not. You’re right. I’m not planning to be, but I have been kind of curious lately. I’m not really interested in poetry, but I am interested in looking for things on the internet, maybe on Twitter, to set as texts. I haven’t gotten there yet. I’m just kind of starting to see that for myself.

Photo of Aaron Jay Kernis in mid sentence.

FJO: I’m surprised to hear you say that you’re not interested in poetry.

AJK: Not right now.

FJO: Not now, but all your life, you have been.

AJK: Yeah, all my life. But I’m very interested in prose right now and things that may not have started as poetry, but that can be extracted and be poetic.

FJO: That seems very different from Dominick Argento’s reason for setting prose to music, which he says he does in order to not be straitjacketed by the rhythms of the text.

AJK: Well, that’s another reason I’m interested in prose, exactly. When I’ve used poetry recently, I’ve started to sculpt it more. Rather than being completely respectful of exactly what the poet has to say, I’ve started shifting lines around. I use text where I can do that and feel comfortable not using all the lines or the exact structure that was laid out.

FJO: That’s very interesting, because one of the things I’ve always noticed about your vocal music is how respectful you are of the texts that you set; you don’t even repeat lines. You let the shape of the poem determine the shape of the setting of it.

AJK: That was true maybe until the Third Symphony [Symphony of Meditations], where I had this enormous text. For shorter texts, I did pretty much respect the structure and the number of lines. But the [Third Symphony’s] texts were so large, and there were some lines I didn’t like, and it was ancient poetry. My friend Peter Cole, who was translating, was completely willing to let me do whatever I wanted with the text, and that was very freeing. So I just made my own version of the text rather than feeling that I had to respect its totality at every second.

Kernis Symphony No.3 Score Sample. Copyright © 2009 by AJK Music (BMI) International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. All rights administered throughout the World by Associated Music Publishers, Inc., (BMI) New York, NY Used by Permission.

A passage from the score of Symphony of Meditations (Symphony No. 3) by Aaron Jay Kernis.
Copyright © 2009 by AJK Music (BMI)
International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.
All rights administered throughout the World by
Associated Music Publishers, Inc., (BMI) New York, NY
Used by Permission.

FJO: So you’re actually contradicting the earlier you. You’re becoming another you.

AJK: Yeah.

FJO: This makes you and history kind of a tricky thing. Of course, I bring this up because there’s a book that’s just been written about you.

AJK: Right.

FJO: Biographers always look for a through line, to try to connect the dots and to get at the essence of a person. But perhaps now that there’s a book out about you, you want to rebel against that and be somebody completely different.

AJK: I read the [galleys of the] book through without being so concerned with making corrections. I wanted to just see what the through line of the book was finally. This was about a week ago. And, you know, I did not have the reaction of wanting to flee but rather to explore that question of “which of these Aaron Kernises am I?” [The book’s author] Leta Miller very consciously wanted to draw the body of work together, rather than having it broken up into different areas. This was also my concern. We all remember having reviews that frustrated or repelled us. It was always incredibly frustrating if a critic would say, “This sounds like nothing else in his work.” Of course, I knew that. In fact, there were three or four other pieces that clearly the critic didn’t know that were part of a group. Sometimes they were three years before, sometimes just the month before. There always have been groups of works of different types. I kind of do one for a while, and leap over that and do something else, and then find my way back in a circuitous way. But there’s been a transformation, too, that usually happens.

Kernis bio book cover

The cover for Leta Miller’s book, Aaron Jay Kernis, published this month by the University of Illinois Press.
(As a complement to the book, UIL Press has also put together an extensive webpage of audio links for many of Kernis’s compositions.)

FJO: In terms of how your work is part of history, it’s interesting to ponder earlier versions of music you have revised—because you’ve revised work.

AJK: Not that much.

FJO: Perhaps I should say reuse work.

AJK: Reuse. Yes. That’s true.

FJO: But I was thinking of one of your earliest pieces, the Partita for solo guitar, which goes back to 1981. You were 21 years old at the time. What did the 21-year-old Aaron Kernis sound like? Since you revised the piece in 1995, it’s hard to know. How much of that piece is the you of 21, and how much of it is the you at the age of 35?

AJK: Let me see if I can remember. It’s a three-movement partita. That was more of a revision. It was awkward. Some of the sections were too long. Some of the guitar writing wasn’t sustaining as much as I liked and it was kind of working against the instrument. In ’95, I wrote 100 Greatest Dance Hits, and at that time I was able to work with David Tanenbaum and tried to work through the issues in the piece. But the voice in that piece—one scale per movement with a lot of nested processes like numerical forms going on—that was a lot of who I was at 20 and 21. So I think that really does reflect me until about 1983, until I was 23. Then I’d had enough of that. That’s often how it is. I get to a point and then I want to go off in another direction. For a long time I thought it was always a completely different direction, but now I see that there are circles; it circles back with new perspectives, new materials. For example, one of the circles back was after a comment that Russell Platt made about a recent piece, Pieces of Winter Sky, that I wrote for eighth blackbird that in certain ways feels like a new direction for me. I’m not sure if it’s going to be a direction, but it’s certainly a new place to go. But Russell said, “Oh, that seems more like the old you.” The “old you” that he meant was the Invisible Mosaic II world, which was much more strongly dissonant, not really process-like in any way but more moment form. Pieces of Winter Sky is definitely a series of moments. But even in Mosaic, there was a process going on. It has a moment form and process form. So I see the relationships, but it felt very different. At 52, I’m a different person than I was when I was 29.

Photo of Kernis in his 20s

Aaron Jay Kernis in the 1980s. Photo courtesy Aaron Jay Kernis.

FJO: Has reading the book made you see those connections or is this something that you have always thought about?

AJK: Leta and I talked a lot about the connections through the whole process of [her working on] the book. As I said, that was really a major focus for her. What I’m curious to see as I reflect on this more is what the connections are that I don’t perceive. Are there patterns? Which patterns am I less familiar with and are they more revelatory? Are there any or have I known all this? When I finished the book the first time, I thought about my newest work. Are these works related? Or are they something totally different? I don’t have the perspective yet. I don’t have enough distance from them to know quite where they fall on the continuum of cycling relationships.

FJO: Well, something you definitely have distance from at this point is dream of the morning sky. You mentioned being 23 and suddenly the process wasn’t as interesting to you and you were doing other things. There are certainly older pieces of yours that are still in your catalog and that people perform. But dream of the morning sky put you in a public sphere in a way that nothing else had up until that point. Getting a piece played by the New York Philharmonic at the age of 23 was huge for you. I think it ultimately not only shaped your subsequent compositional career, but also your role as a musical citizen and mentor to other composers.

AJK: I agree.

FJO: In hindsight having had such an experience so early on definitely seems to have been the initial impetus for you eventually founding the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute many years later. It also seems like something that planted the seed for your ongoing role as a composition teacher. So what happened at that time that ultimately led you to a lifetime of wanting to provide that kind of compositional nurturing to other people?

AJK: There were a couple of aspects. One was that Jacob Druckman was a very supportive teacher to his students and he was very beloved by his students. He was very engaged with the music of his time and how students fit into what interested him, and what he saw was going on in music as a whole. Definitely that experience with the New York Philharmonic came about because of him, and I saw firsthand how such an experience could change one’s life. So now, whether it’s a recommendation for a commission or for a residency, I understand how important—public or private—these steps can be for young composers. For some it will make a big life difference and also an aesthetic difference; for others it will just be a step along the way. In Minnesota, when I was given an opportunity to help craft that kind of experience for young composers, it was on a much bigger scale over many years. But it infuses my teaching as well, and my view of young composers.

Photo of young Aaron Jay Kernis

A young Aaron Jay Kernis around the time of his breakthrough at the Horizons Festival. Photo courtesy Aaron Jay Kernis.

FJO: In terms of your teaching, I think there’s something that’s particularly practical about the training that people get at Yale, both from you and from the other people on the faculty there. A testimony to that is how many extremely successful composers have CVs that state that they went to Yale. Obviously, something’s happening at Yale that’s creating a recipe for composers to function so effectively in this field in terms of their practical skills.

AJK: There’s no doubt that they get some of that from what we relate of our experiences to them, real world suggestions about where to look, where to go. There are varying of degrees of entrepreneurship among the faculty but I don’t think by any means that it comes from the faculty all the time, or specifically from them. It’s an environment where these graduate students, if they’re so enthused, can get involved with the drama school or other productions around campus, and already find outlets for their entrepreneurial efforts. We certainly see composers who come in and they’re already raring to go to make concert series, to put together ensembles, to get involved in the theater world at Yale.

FJO: To bring it back to your experience as a 23-year-old having the New York Philharmonic perform dream of the morning sky: the other thing, besides serving as a model for your subsequent role as a mentor to younger composers, is that it placed you as a composer within a zeitgeist, for better or worse. The festival was called Since 1968, a New Romanticism? Suddenly there was this new label. Labels always simplify things and it definitely put your music in a context which it doesn’t completely fit in comfortably.

AJK: It never did. It was a strand in my work; it comes and goes. When I was writing a bunch of pieces using sonata form, should I have been called part of a new classicism? I don’t know.

FJO: Except when you were using those forms they were big and expansive, more like the way that the 19th-century Romantic composers explored those forms than the way, say, Haydn would have.

AJK: No. I definitely think it’s more toward the Romantic, looking both at the teeming inner world and nature and art and writing; the influences are very vast.

FJO: And certainly the long line, the idea of a long melody that grows and keeps developing—

AJK: I start with that for virtually every piece. Even if today I’m sitting down to write a short piece that is the antithesis of that. I’m always thinking of myself as wanting to create the long line through singing, through breathing; that’s the starting place.

FJO: Where did that come from?

AJK: I think it came from very formative experiences as a choral singer and the first lessons I ever had as a child. My mother started me with voice lessons, just completely out of the blue. I have no idea what inspired her to do that. I think she always wanted to be in the theater. She had a dream of herself somehow in show business. And so she started me at six or something with voice lessons. I learned to use my voice a bit, then choral music, then hearing Mahler, all kinds of ringing big bells, playing the violin, and long lines there. So it’s pretty central.

Cover of Cedille CD of Kernis orchestral music

Kernis’s love for Mahler pervades all of the music on a disc of his orchestral music featuring the Grant Park Orchestra conducted by Carlos Kalmar released on Cedille Records.

FJO: To take this back to teaching, this probably didn’t come from any of the people you studied composition with. I don’t really think of Druckman or Wuorinen as long line composers.

AJK: I don’t think anyone ever talked to me about that, no. I don’t have a memory of that being anything coming from any of them.

FJO: So what did come from them?

AJK: Different things from everyone, of course. My first teacher, Theodore Antoniou, was very important. He started me with kind of Hindemithian counterpoint and voice leading exercises, also some 12-tone row manipulation exercises, then a lot of looking at European avant-garde scores with extended techniques, both his work and the work of other Greek composers. And George Crumb, of course, was a great discovery of mine at 15. [Antoniou] always emphasized that if you’re writing for an instrument, the music you write should only be able to be played on that instrument. So he was always stressing the unique qualities of every instrument. I haven’t necessarily followed that all the time, but it was certainly an opening idea for a 15-year-old to really look at what the sonic and technical possibilities are that made each situation unique.

FJO: It’s interesting to hear about that from you since, by not following his advice and transforming your English horn concerto Colored Field into a cello concerto, you wound up receiving the Grawemeyer Award.

AJK: Well, of course, the cello version can’t be played on any other instrument. Though you’re right, and it’s both for practical reasons and feeling comfortable with, à la Bach, making various versions of pieces work on other instruments, sharing the love in a way.

Score sample from Colored Field (English horn version) Copyright © 1994 by Associated Music Publishers, Inc., (BMI), New York, NY International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

Measures 62 through 65 from the original version of Colored Field, for English horn and orchestra by Aaron Jay Kernis.
Copyright © 1994 by Associated Music Publishers, Inc., (BMI), New York, NY
International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

Score sample of the cello version of Colored Field. Copyright © 1994 by Associated Music Publishers, Inc., (BMI), New York, NY This arrangement Copyright © 2000 by Associated Music Publishers, Inc., (BMI), New York, NY International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

The exact same passage in the version of Aaron Jay Kernis’s Colored Field for cello and orchestra.
Copyright © 1994 by Associated Music Publishers, Inc., (BMI), New York, NY
This arrangement Copyright © 2000 by Associated Music Publishers, Inc., (BMI), New York, NY
International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

But that doesn’t work with many pieces. I mean, it’s not something I’ve done for more than maybe five or six pieces; it’s not an everyday thing. When I wrote Trio in Red, the clarinet part is a clarinet part. It uses the entire range and focus, just as Antoniou would have stressed, to make it special for that instrument.

So, that was Theodore. Then through Joe Franklin, I was exposed to Relâche and the Philadelphia new music scene—a lot of early post-minimalism and highly theatrical music. After that, [I studied with] John Adams for a very short time. Certainly it was really fundamental to hear Shaker Loops in a big loft space in San Francisco and to hear his first successes like Harmonium and Harmonielehre. It was just around the time that his life was really changing. But San Francisco didn’t quite match with my metabolism; I was antsy that it was so relaxed.

So I came back to New York and studied for a year with Wuorinen and just slammed into a confrontational way of teaching. It was scary. I was terrified for a number of weeks. I was like, before a lesson, “What is this man going to say?” I knew he was a master and it was a very important year. Very much to his credit, I think he saw that I wasn’t looking to study strict 12-tone technique and so we worked through other issues: structure and language to a certain extent. Very pithy, highly focused, and very important confrontations occurred.

Then Elias Tanenbaum—I already had all this stuff to process. Elias was a great teacher to be with. He was very supportive, but also—in his kind of needling way—he made me own up to what I was choosing to do and also recognize that the possibilities were large. Following that, rather than having specific techniques that they were imparting, the teachers from that point on were more generous in the sense of following what I was doing and making comments. After that point, I didn’t feel I had teachers that were trying to fundamentally change me.

FJO: So now that you’re teaching young composers, how do you balance the need to expose students to the wide range of techniques that you’re fluent in while making sure they don’t turn into clones of you?

AJK: As I teach for more years, the goal for me has been to learn more and more patience. At first, I came in with some expectations about what I was looking for. Over time, I just dropped those more and more. It’s about each student: the work they’re producing and what could be strengthened. It’s about what kind of exercises or tool-strengthening devices could be put in their direction that they can grow from, and trying—whether it’s over a half year or a year—to figure out more and more about who they are and what their work is doing and to help it be even more of what it already is.

FJO: In terms of who you are, your composing with long lines pre-dated any of your teachers, and it has stuck with you. Being very interested in process in your early years, on the other hand, is something that has slipped away, and you have grown more and more toward writing music intuitively. But intuition is something you really can’t teach. You can’t even teach it to yourself.

AJK: No, and it’s always so awkward to use that word because even if you’re using an absolutely rigid and unyielding series of processes that essentially make all the decisions for you, even then you’re using your intuition to structure those processes—unless you’re giving over choices to an external structure like the first computer that LeJaren Hiller used. Even so, intuition is always a part. What sounds good? What sounds good to you? What are choices where you think, “Oh this doesn’t quite work; I’ll change that to make it more internally satisfying”? So it’s always very difficult to talk about becoming more intuitive. But right now it’s true. My process feels quite different. I’m more interested in going where I don’t know what the next step is and how I get to that next step, rather than thinking, “Oh, I want to go here or go here. How do I go there?” It’s a different enough change and it’s frustrating to do that for too long; it gets very tiring actually. I can’t decide whether I want to go back to a more pre-compositional ordering of some elements or to play this out for a little bit longer. You have to be so alert at every moment to leave doors open and it’s very difficult.

FJO: When you say leave doors open, what does that mean structurally? Could you give me a specific example?

AJK: This is key to pieces like Winter Sky and Perpetual Chaconne and my new viola concerto, the last movement particularly, and even Color Wheel—that’s sort of where that began but I still had some big goals along the way. I’m very visual when I write. I’m seeing a path. I’m seeing a series of steps, or of textures, or coupled harmonies that are core harmonies, that I’m heading towards. In those more recent pieces I just mentioned, there is more a sense of a series of moments. There’s still a developmental long line in those moments, but a number of them were written as kind of blocks. It’s more an assemblage than writing in a through-composed way. So I’ll write things more out of order and not exactly know what’s the end, what’s the middle. It will develop out of—as I said—a kind of more intuitive process rather than an external idea of what was going to happen when it began.

1998 Photo of Kernis (left) and his wife Evelyne Luest with Kernis holding his Pulitzer Prize

Aaron Jay Kernis and his wife, pianist Evelyne Luest at the 1998 Pulitzer Prize Ceremony.

FJO: Everything we’ve been talking about has been really abstract. But one of the main things that’s served as a catalyst for pieces of yours throughout the decades has been responding to an external source, whether it’s history, current events, or something personal such as the death of your parents or the birth of your twins who’ve now been around for more than a decade. The Gulf War inspired your second symphony. One of the most heart-wrenching stories is the story you tell of your visit to Birkenau and how that triggered Colored Field. These extra-musical elements are often what draw non-composers into this music; it has emotional gravitas in a way that, say, a Symphony No. 12 does not.

AJK: Right. That’s something that hasn’t stopped, but the influences more recently are more internal and very personal. But all of the things you mention, all of the external reactions trigger emotions. And emotions then trigger sequences of ideas or ways of conceptualizing a musical form. That’s definitely what happened. I can still feel a relationship between the way I thought about big forms in Colored Field or the pieces that I consider the war pieces, and this emotional triggering of ideas and moods. Pieces of Winter Sky is crucial for me right now because it’s like those roughly 18 pieces were like 18 melancholy studies. I didn’t want to call the piece that. In fact, it almost reminds me of that black and white film that was done with Cage’s 101—you have what seems like an unchanging series of grays that are changing very subtly—or in the late work of Rothko. That was the experience of that piece, not looking at the sky when it was blue, but for days only a slightly changing gray sky. What would it be like to write different sections that reflected variations on that, how that affected me visually? The ironic thing is that it is an incredibly colorful piece, with all this metal percussion, and all this distinctive writing for each of the instruments, going back to what Antoniou said. Yet the experience of creating it had to do with finding differences in the similarity of a fairly unchanging picture.

FJO: But the medium you express these emotional responses in is this abstract form of music. You’re not writing short stories or poetry. You’re not painting the landscape. When people hear this music, they don’t necessarily get what’s in your head, especially what you were saying about a gray sky. They’re hearing all this color with the percussion. So how important is it for you that people get this? And how much do you feel people can get?

AJK: In the fall I had a performance in Princeton of Colored Field. Before and after the performance they invited a number of schools to bring their classes and expose the kids to the piece and to the background of the piece and to respond to it. I just got in the mail this incredible artwork and story writing that kids did through the experience of hearing Colored Field. It’s just amazing.

Art created in response to hearing Kernis' music by children 1 of 3

Colored Field by Shubha Vasisht (who last year was in the 7th Grade at The Hun School).

Art created in response to hearing Kernis' music by children 2 of 3

The Face in the Sky by Bailey Eng (who last year was in the 6th Grade at Montgomery Lower Middle School).

Art created in response to hearing Kernis' music by children 3 of 3

Bird’s Prey by Upekha Samarasekera (who last year was in 7th Grade at Montgomery Upper Middle School).
[Ed note: These three original art works were all created in response to hearing the Princeton Symphony Orchestra’s November 3, 2013 performance of Aaron Jay Kernis’s Colored Field by students attending nine different New Jersey middle schools through Listen Up!, an initiative of the PSO BRAVO! education program sponsored by the Princeton Symphony Orchestra. They were among a total of 36 art works that were part of the exhibition “Listening to the Colored Field” which has been shown at the Arts Council of Princeton and The Jewish Center of Princeton. All are reproduced with permission.]

FJO: Did they just hear the piece or did they also get a program note about it or some kind of pre-concert talk by you?

AJK: They didn’t get a talk from me. They might have gotten the program note, from the CD. But some of what I described as my experience is deliberately left incomplete. The thing that fascinates me most is to see the variety of responses to it. The responses could be completely 180 degrees away from what my original experience was. That doesn’t matter at all to me. I hope that people will have their own experiences and will feel something special or deeply; that’s the power of music for me. Hopefully it will allow people to recognize things inside them and maybe they can give voice to in words or maybe they have no words for it.

FJO: Paradoxically the fact that music does not have fixed meaning gives it even more meaning.

AJK: Exactly. Very well said.
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FJO: But because you’ve referenced synaesthesia in some pieces, you obviously in your own perception feel there is transference from one sense mode to another.

AJK: Definitely. The way I compose, too. Not all the time, but a lot of times, I’m just walking around and I’m not so much imagining notes. It’s hard to explain. It’s like I’m seeing textures. I think I was exposed early enough to Penderecki, Xenakis, Ravel, that those sonic worlds created a kind of visual relationship and a kind of emotional, textual relationship. I walk around and imagine things, but they’re not necessarily fixed notes, not necessarily tuned. It’s more like how I see shapes; it’s abstract. For a long time, I would come home and try to find a way to form those into something I could feel and grapple with. Now I’ve left that step out. I’m not drawing big structural plans out.

FJO: A lot of what you have written has been memorial music in some way. The earliest unrevised piece of yours I know is the Meditation in Memory of John Lennon, which is a gorgeous lament for Lennon. I can hear a through line from that all the way to your Ballad for eight cellos, and there are many other pieces of yours along the way that have this quality, too. Remembering the dead has brought out some of your most beautiful music, your most moving and most transformative music, at least to me. I find that an interesting through line in terms of what music can mean. I didn’t know your parents, but I have a sense of them somehow because of the music you wrote in their memory. It’s not a clear sense because music is abstract, but nevertheless there’s something in there that reached me and that can reach anybody who hears it and that makes it a more universal thing.

Hand written score sample from Meditation for cello and piano.Copyright © 1981 by Associated Music Publishers, Inc., (BMI), New York, NY International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

A passage from Aaron Jay Kernis’s handwritten score for Meditation in Memory of John Lennon for cello and piano.
Copyright © 1981 by Associated Music Publishers, Inc., (BMI), New York, NY
International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

AJK: The experience of writing those pieces was always very multi-faceted. In Lennon’s case, it was being around Central Park, being in very close proximity when it happened, and looking for both an element of the music of his that I loved and that affected me and finding some small way to transmit that in that piece. But any of those memorializing pieces have an element that is not necessarily one that people would hear, an element of what the importance of that person to me was in some musical way. I could tell you specifically what those are, but it’s richer than just that. There have been a lot of those pieces. My cousin Michael, who was just a few years older than me, died very young while the Trumpet Concerto was being written. And the Viola Concerto is also a kind of memorial; it’s not so much for anyone that’s passed away, but it’s about how we change over our lives, how things disappear and reappear, get together and get frayed.

FJO: Now in terms of the things that have shaped you, so far we have only talked about texts intermittently, but you’ve written tons of choral music and song cycles both for solo singer with piano and solo singer with ensemble. So text has been extremely important to you. And, when you set a text, that text already comes with its own narrative and set of emotions.

AJK: That’s a frame to hold the music.

FJO: At the onset of our conversation you were saying that you’ve started taking text and reworking it to suit your own needs rather than crafting music that will serve those text’s needs. I’d like to flesh that out a little bit more—what it means in terms of the kinds of narrative you’re hoping to tell using someone else’s words.

AJK: I’ve done this three or four times now. There’s a practical element where the texts are simply too long to set completely. Or I don’t like parts of the text. I recently did a setting of Psalm 104. That’s a huge psalm and I had nine minutes, so I chose the bits that I liked best and tried to knit them together so it didn’t seem like there was a huge hole.

One thing that made vocal music always a little easier is because the emotions are there [already in the words], and are something to respond to. And, as I said, it’s a kind of frame, a time frame to keep the whole work together that the text helps set. As my approach becomes a little bit less structured, it makes me feel freer to play both with musical form and more abstractly to not have a fixed container of the text as well. Another thing, too, is that I’ve missed having really successful collaborations with other writers and other artists. It’s something I really would like to do more in the future. In a way, this creates a kind of collaboration with the text. Even though it’s not with a person, rather it’s just taking a completely fixed form and making it more fluid.

FJO: Your mentioning collaboration with other writers immediately makes me think of opera.

AJK: Yeah, opera is something that has just eluded my grasp. The projects I had did not work out. They were very difficult, and at very difficult times also. For example, I had an opera for Santa Fe Opera. And it was not working with the writer, and in the middle of the process my mother died. Then a number of months later my father died. The kind of intensive pressure that was necessary to make that piece work in that situation was just too hard, so it just went away.

I’m not sure how this will happen yet, but I’m seeing more theater; I’m looking for playwrights. I want to keep open and not just sit here in my studio. In the future I hope that some collaborations will develop. I had a very nice collaboration with a choreographer last year, and I had at least one or two experiences with installations and that was great. I would love to do more of that.

FJO: In terms of doing things in order to put yourself in an uncomfortable zone—not having a structure, not knowing where it’s going to go, to go somewhere else. What would be maximum discomfort?

AJK: Maximum discomfort is different from finding your way without a form. The uncomfortable question is a different one, because the process of composing is always very difficult and no one is a worse critic than I am toward myself. Yet it can be extremely pleasurable when it’s going well, and when it’s purring along. I think I’m looking toward collaboration more with a sense of possibility, rather than a sense of creating more difficulty for myself, setting up invigorating challenges rather than wrenching challenges.

Kernis and his wife with their two young twins, one sitting on his lap, the other on his shoulders

Kernis, his wife Evelyne and their twins in 2004. Photo courtesy Aaron Jay Kernis.

FJO: Of course, the biggest challenge is balancing it all—the music you are writing, your teaching commitments, plus having a family, two young children and a wife who’s also a concert pianist. How do you squeeze it all in?

AJK: Well, it’s difficult. Some things have had to go. The thing that’s most clearly gone is concert going. I have work time during the day and time with my kids at night. It’s very special time, unlike any other. And I don’t travel to performances as much, unless they’re premieres. I love to travel, but now it’s time to travel with my kids. Luckily I’m in a situation where I can teach one day a week and have the rest of the time to compose. It’s a full day. Sometimes it spills over to another day, or some students come down here and we have some extra time. But I try very much to fit it into one day. My composing time is really pretty sacred.

FJO: Well I’m glad you made time to do this with us.

AJK: Me too.

keyboard of piano with pens and toy on top

This photo of the corner of the piano in Aaron Jay Kernis’s composing studio taken by Molly Sheridan during our visit probably shows the combination of worlds Kernis must navigate on a daily basis even better than our conversation did.

Marc Neikrug: An Outlet for Emotional Experience


At the apartment of Dr. Rock Positano in New York City
January 15, 2014—2 p.m.
Transcribed by Julia Lu
Video presentation by Alexandra Gardner

Although Marc Neikrug’s name is unlikely to come up when new music fans talk about the most prominent living American composers, Neikrug has had more high-profile performances of his music than most composers of our time. Most of them, however, have occurred outside the umbrella of the “new music community.” World famous actors such as Maximilian Schell and John Turturro have performed in his Through Roses, a dramatic monologue accompanied by a chamber ensemble which has been translated into 11 languages and presented in 15 countries. His anti-nuclear opera Los Alamos is the only American work ever commissioned by the Deutsche Oper Berlin. Other works of his have been championed by such well-known singers and instrumentalists as Susan Graham, Heidi Grant Murphy, James Galway, Lynn Harrell, and Pinchas Zukerman, artists who are not frequently associated with contemporary music.

Part of why his music has attracted the attention of so many of these “blue chip” soloists is that for many years he was a member of that exclusive club himself—a concert pianist who performed standard repertoire in most of the world’s major concert halls. For decades he was the recital partner of Pinchas Zukerman, with whom he not only toured extensively but also recorded with for many of the major labels. As a result of being in that milieu, Neikrug has somehow remained outside of the new music scene, but he’s perfectly O.K. with that:

I would rather have Jimmy Galway play my flute concerto than some person who can’t play Mozart or Bach or anything else, but only plays new music. … And those were the people I was around. … I saw them all the time.  I played other things with them.  I actually was never really in that new music side of things, and I always felt I was not taken seriously as a composer. It was like, “Well, you know, he’s not one of us because he plays Beethoven and Schumann.”  I was taken seriously by some very good composers who have always been very close to me. … But the kind of Speculum, etc. world, that was not me.  That was more academics.

Yet, stylistically at least, much of Neikrug’s music comes out of and is deeply indebted to the sound world of atonal modernism. When he was growing up, this approach to musical composition was all around him.

That’s definitely in my subconscious genetics.  … My mother was also a composer.  She studied with Wolpe … and she was very, very strictly serial.  She actually had this huge cardboard thing with her row written out 48 times and she would go from there.  As an infant, I was under the piano, so I heard that for quite some time.  Both of my parents were very, very new music oriented, so there were other composers around.  I knew [Leon] Kirchner from the time I was two years old.

But if the ethos of modernism was in his genes, it certainly seems to never have been in his soul, both in terms of what inspires the music he writes and the lifestyle he has chosen to lead. More than thirty years ago, he ventured away from all of the major urban centers and went to live on a Native American Pueblo in Santa Fe with Dolly Naranjo, a traditional potter whom he married. When he first relocated to New Mexico, he purposefully distanced himself from the music community, even keeping his whereabouts a secret from the people who knew him as a pianist and composer. It was his oasis away from everything. While he eventually got involved with the local music scene, eventually becoming the artistic director of the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival (a job he still holds), he has maintained this stance of being an outsider.

While earlier this season the Boston Symphony Orchestra performed his Bassoon Concerto and Yefim Bronfman played a new solo piano composition of his as part of a concert presented by the New York Philharmonic, Neikrug has grown more and more interested in creating pieces that will reach listeners beyond the concert hall. In 2010, a commission from the University of New Mexico’s Cancer Institute resulted in Healing Ceremony, an orchestral song cycle specifically created for the purpose of helping the healing process of people who hear it. According to Neikrug, studies done on listeners to this music have shown that it has reduced their blood pressure—hardly a typical response to a piece of new music.

I’ve always been communicative and dramatic. There’s a clear communication of music being used as an outlet for emotional experience.  That transmits to any audience.  … But I consciously made the decision that of all my pieces on earth, this one is certainly not going to be played at a new music concert!  I want this to have the physical effect on people that I intended it to have. In fact, I don’t even care if it’s seen as new music.

But of course it is new music, and Neikrug in fact acknowledges that everything else that he’s done—whether it’s coordinating concerts in Santa Fe or even performing and practicing Beethoven and Brahms—is done “as a composer.” What exactly he means by that made for a fascinating conversation.

*

Frank J. Oteri:  In the course of your life, you’ve inhabited several different musical worlds and you still do:  being a concert pianist playing standard repertoire in the milieu of blue-chip soloists, being in charge of a music festival, and being a composer.  Each of these worlds is pretty self-contained and often doesn’t see outside itself.  As somebody who has navigated between these different worlds for so many years, I thought it would be interesting to hear your observations.
Marc Neikrug:  I don’t feel—and have never really felt—differences in those worlds because I don’t wake up with three bodies.  I wake up with myself.  I understand that people who are not inside me, which is virtually everyone except me, see them as separate.  But for me, they’re not separate.  When I was 17, 18, I was studying conducting and playing the piano and composing.  Everyone, including my own teachers, said, “This is fine.  You’ll do this for a certain amount of time.  And then you will find that you have to make a choice.”  I never accepted that that was true, or inevitable, or anything else.  And it hasn’t been.  I think it’s more about the priority within.  And [my] priority within has always been that I do everything as a composer.  You cannot be a real, true, serious, life-long, dedicated composer without that being the first priority.  There is no other way.  So when I perform and practice Beethoven or Brahms or whatever, it’s as a composer who has to go play concerts.  When I run a festival, it’s as a composer. Anyone who would study the programming, which is the most important thing to me, would immediately say, “Wow, there’s a lot of new music here.”  Well, of course, because that’s my focus.  I’m a composer.  I can make a festival with music from the past three or four hundred years, but the way the programs are generated is from my perspective as a composer.
FJO:  When you talked about playing Beethoven and Brahms, you said, “I’m composer who has to go do a concert.”  That “has to” I thought was very interesting.
MN:  Well, I knew early on that I needed to make a living. Starting in the late ‘60s, there were no more parental allowances of any sort.  The choices for composers were either you became an academic or you did some kind of administrative role—there were always administrative jobs at recording companies or publishing companies—or you became a performer.  It seemed most natural to me to play.  I love playing all music.  So that became my job.  Now, the strange thing about it is—which is not at all strange, it’s actually quite simple—if you’re playing concerts on the level that I was, in every great venue that concerts are played in around the globe with huge superstar people, you are going to be playing for tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people more than whatever your pieces are being played for.  Therefore you’re going to become much more famous, much faster, doing that concertizing than you are being a composer.  But that was never how I felt it.  I was a composer and I had to [perform] to make a living, so that I had time to write my pieces.
FJO:  Of course, you grew up in a family of performers.  And your earliest compositions—or at least the earliest ones that you were willing to share with me, or the earliest that even survive at this point—were things that were played either by your father or that you played with your father.  So it seems to me that deciding to be a performer was kind of like deciding to join the family business.
MN: My mother was a great cellist, also.  She won the first Naumburg.  But she was also a composer.  She studied with Wolpe.  She wrote eight string quartets, an opera, 200 Emily Dickinson songs.  She was—bless her soul—really out of her mind; she never shared these pieces with anybody.  She didn’t care to hear them or have them played.  She just did this thing which was composing, and she was very, very strictly serial.  I mean, she actually had this huge cardboard thing with her row written out 48 times and she would go from there.  As an infant, I was under the piano, so I heard that for quite some time.  Both of my parents were very, very new music oriented, so there were other composers around.  I knew [Leon] Kirchner from the time I was two years old.  I had this seamless sense of performers and composers.  They were all together.  It wasn’t, “Here’s this world of people who play concerts and become very well-known and comfortable doing that,” and then, “Here’s composers and these other guys that only play that.”  It was all together for me.
FJO:  Yet your mother hid her compositions.
MN: It wasn’t exactly hiding.  I’ve spent a lot of money trying to figure this one out, on a couch like this.  She was just private. It was her endeavor, and she didn’t need the recognition whatsoever.  It wasn’t part of her nature to have any sort of recognition.  It just was what she did.  And, if you want to get wackier, she put down her pencil, or pen, or whatever you want to call it, the minute I started seriously writing music.  She never wrote another piece.  She said, “I know how to do it.  I work very hard.  But you have the talent.  I don’t have this talent.  I don’t need to do this.” And she started painting.  She studied here at the Art Students League.  She was, all around, a very accomplished person in different aspects.
FJO:  So it wasn’t like she instilled this notion that music is something that you do, but it’s private.
MN:  I didn’t realize that until much later.
FJO:  But, in terms of you getting your push to be in the world of performers, obviously growing up with musicians helped.
MN:  Well, there’s also a little bit of a dichotomy between them.  My mother was a real prodigy.  She played for the czar when she was six.  She had this almost iconic, terrible upbringing. On one of her birthdays, I think seven or eight, she asked her father if she could practice five hours that day, instead of eight, and he beat her because she asked.  So she was rather against my being pushed in any way.  My dad wanted to, but she didn’t let him.  So I didn’t have any push, but I never really wanted to do anything else, particularly. I was in this business when I was five years old. I knew the same kinds of people that I know today.  They were just grown up and I wasn’t.  Apparently at some age I looked out the window and I asked my parents, “All these people walking, where are their cellos?”  Because I just assumed they all had them some place.  So I was in this thing from the beginning.  I spent the first nine months of my life before being born next to a cello that was vibrating and being played, and listening to that; not only listening, but feeling all of that.  So I don’t think I had a lot of choice.
FJO:  Now, in terms of your saying “have to”—
MN:  It’s hard to play the piano.  It’s really hard.  Composing is difficult, but I don’t have the same kinds of problems.  To play at the level that people play, you really have to work and practice.  So I have to put in the hours of doing that. And the traveling is hard.  By the way, I’m kind of not doing it any more.  I got to retirement age, and I just don’t want to spend the time.  It was enjoyable.  It’s great once you’re ready to go out and play and the rewards are very different.  They’re so immediate.  You play and people cheer and they think you’re great.  And then that’s gone.  It’s very different for pieces.  It’s much more satisfying, but it’s delayed.
FJO: I want to go back to another thing you said at the outset, that everything you’ve done comes out of being a composer. I certainly see that in terms of the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival and how that has played out over the seasons.
MN:  Absolutely.
FJO:  Some fantastic pieces of music came out of that. But curiously, in terms of your career as a pianist, certainly in terms of what has been documented on recordings, there’s been very little new music.  The only new music that I’ve heard you play is your own.
MN:  I commissioned a pretty well-known Lutoslawski piece for Pinchas [Zukerman] and I to play, and we played that quite a bit.  We played a lot of Takemitsu.  We played Per Nørgård.  We played some of the composers that were particularly close to me. Yes, in terms of the CDs we did, it’s the complete Mozart, complete Beethoven, complete Brahms, complete Schumann, all of this.  That was what was significant in that very rarified world of playing in 2,000-seat halls, playing on the Boston Celebrity Series or in the Musikverein in Vienna, at least in those days. I think today it might be easier.

Zukerman-Neikrug CDs

With Pinchas Zukerman, Neikrug recorded most of the standard violin and piano repertoire for various major labels at the time (including Philips, RCA, and Sony) as well as a disc of his own music which was released on Koch international Classics (now E1).

FJO:  But I do think that traveling in that orbit ultimately opened certain doors for you, as a composer, that are very difficult for most composers to open.  Top soloists like James Galway, Lynn Harrell, Heidi Grant Murphy, or conductors like Lorin Maazel, who are not usually associated with new music, all championed your music. Perhaps it’s because they already knew you in a different context, as a concert pianist. Or am I just imagining all this?
MN:  When I was living here [in NYC] in my late 20s, I remember having a conversation with a publisher at Hansen who very specifically said to me, “Real, established success as a composer is when you’re played on real concerts and not new music concerts. Bartók is played on real concerts.  Stravinsky is played on real concerts.  That’s where you want to get to.”  In my mind, as I was saying earlier, it was all one thing to me when I was a child. I think I always thought I would rather have Jimmy Galway play my flute concerto than some person who can’t play Mozart or Bach or anything else, but only plays new music. I would rather have it done in Pittsburgh, and then taken on tour by Maazel, than in a single someplace on a new music concert.  And those were the people I was around. I think also I understand them.  I mean, I understand the mindset of these fabulously accomplished musicians, who don’t happen to have that curiosity about new music and are not going to go looking for which composers are writing what.  It’s what they happen to hear, or happen to know.  And I was there.  I saw them all the time.  I played other things with them.  I actually was never really in that new music side of things, and I always felt I was not taken seriously as a composer.
FJO:  Because you were a concert pianist?
MN: It was like, “Well, you know, he’s not one of us because he plays Beethoven and Schumann.”  I was taken seriously by some very good composers who have always been very close to me.  Takemitsu was one of my closest friends.  Olly Knussen is still one of my very closest friends. But the kind of Speculum, etc. world, that was not me.  That was more academics.
FJO:  Yet you sat underneath the piano as 48 row forms were being permuted.
MN:  Absolutely.  That’s definitely in my subconscious genetics.
FJO:  And you also had the imprimatur of a major publisher very early on.
MN:  Again, it was very curious. I was published by Barenreiter when I was 18.  That’s very strange. I had no idea what that even meant at the time.  Then later there was this incredible family, the Hansens in Denmark, who have the legacy of publishing The Soldier’s Tale. And they really had a kind of monopoly on serious music in Denmark.  They had the publishing house where every Scandinavian composer was being published.  They had a concert series they put on.  Then they had entire educational programs that they ran.  The matriarch at that time was Hanne Wilhelm Hansen. I was introduced to her by Daniel Barenboim because he was my friend and he said, “Marc is also a composer.  You might want to look at his pieces.”  So I had my first really serious publishing done there.  That was in the late ‘70s.  So I became friends with all of the Scandinavians, which happened to be an incredible group of composers.  Then they were bought up by Music Sales, and Schirmer was bought up by Music Sales, and these things kind of merged and I got to here instead of there.

Score excerpt from the Flute Concerto by Marc Neikrug

An excerpt from the score of Marc Neikrug’s Flute Concerto premiered and subsequently toured by James Galway and the Pittsbugh Symphony under the direction of Lorin Maazel. Copyright © 1989 by Marc Neikrug (ASCAP). All rights administered by G. Schirmer, Inc. throughout the World. Used with permission.

FJO:  I want to jump back to what you were saying about your music being outside the realm of Speculum Musicae and other established contemporary music groups, even though it gets done on these big concerts. I don’t feel like your music sounds like older music; you’re clearly writing with your own voice which is contemporary.  But might it be fair to say that the kind of music that fits best on a concert paired with, say, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, might not be the same kind of music that fits in best on an all-new music program?
MN:  Well, what I feel—and have always felt—is that the single most important thing for composers to strive for is their own voice.  There is nothing more crucial than your own voice.  You need to be able to listen to two minutes of any piece and say that can only be so and so.  I don’t care if it’s Mozart, or Brahms, or Ligeti, or whomever.  That’s crucial.  And I feel that my own path over these decades of trying to get there has always been very self-contained, very purposeful, and almost with blinders on in trying to get to what my sound is.  That long path has had me at varying positions in [relationship to] where the immediate trendy music should be.  In the ‘70s, I would [have been considered to be] on the not-extremely-experimental or revolutionary side; today, it’s shifted to where people are writing things which I find very old, or superficial, or simplistic.  I’ve never wavered.  I’ve had to find the path. I’ve experimented—a little bit more this, a little bit more that—but my voice has clearly been one path that I’ve tried to find.  I think the reason that it works in the context of these programs which aren’t for a new music audience particularly is that I’ve always been communicative and dramatic. There’s a clear communication of music being used as an outlet for emotional experience.  That transmits to any audience.  It doesn’t make any difference.  It’s more problematic if the audience is dogmatic.  It’s less problematic if they simply are there and they say, “Wow, what on earth is this gonna be?”
FJO:  Except, there is this classic story that so many composers have told me over the years that I’ve witnessed, too. You get an audience that is programmed to think that new music is something they shouldn’t like, and so they walk in with this attitude.  Whereas with famous name composers from the past, whether or not they like Beethoven or Tchaikovsky, they know they’re supposed to.  So those guys get a pass with whatever odd thing they may do.  You know, Tchaikovsky having a whole movement in five-four time.  He could get away with that.  He’s Tchaikovsky.  Beethoven:  a super dissonant chord in the Eroica at the end of the development section in the first movement.  But new music, no matter where it falls on the stylistic scale or even how beautiful it is, does not get immediately accepted by parts of the classical music audience, just because it’s new.
MN:  That’s absolutely true.  However, the Santa Fe experience is very important because it’s meant to be emblematic.  It’s meant to be showing how you do this.  It’s meant to make it possible for all of those organizations to see that this is an assumption which doesn’t need to be true.  The audience there went through this very interesting transformation.  It went from exactly that—from “Oh my gosh, what is he going to make us listen to?”—to “Well, you know, as long as we still get Beethoven and Brahms, I guess it’s O.K. that there’s a piece that’s in there that’s not,” to “Wow, that new piece was kind of interesting,” to “Wow, the best part of the program was that new piece,” to “I wonder what the new piece is going to be.”  That’s over a period of years, but if you look at the programs, they’re pretty much equally divided. We have 26 different concert programs and there is a new or newish piece on almost every single one of them, and our ticket sales have gone up every single year.  We’re selling more tickets.  We’re making more money.  It’s completely successful.  Everybody’s happy with it.  If people come for the first time, they’re somewhat taken aback with exactly the attitude you said.  But the local audience, which is not only local, but the audience that’s accustomed to it—I’ve heard say to them, “Oh, you must not be from here.” It’s taken for granted that that’s as it should be.  It should be everywhere.  I think Alan [Gilbert] is doing that.  He’s trying as hard as he can.  It’s not going to happen overnight, but it’s inching towards being acceptable that there will be a certain amount of new music that’s presented through the season.  Period.
FJO:  You talked about the choice of becoming an academic, having an administrative job, or playing music in order to earn a living.  You were born in New York City and you spent a lot of time here and in Los Angeles growing up. But you ultimately wound up in Santa Fe.  That’s kind of off the beaten path for a composer to some extent.
MN:  Well yeah, but that was an amazing, life-altering, fateful, meant-to-be-who-I-am-on-this-earth decision, which had nothing to do with the job.  Nothing.  It was one of those life imitates art because it came from Berlin actually.  This was the Berlin Opera saying, “Whatever you write next, we’ll do it. What do you want to do?”  And I said, “I actually have been thinking about a kind of anti-nuclear opera, and I think it has something to do with Los Alamos and Indians.”  They said great. I was living here and looking for a story, and I found the story but I had never been to Santa Fe.  Part of my story involved ritual, Indian ritual, and there are no books about Indian ritual, because it’s private.
Through a series of “this person knew that person, and that person called somebody,” I got a hold of a woman who worked for the Museum [of Indian Arts and Culture] in Santa Fe, and she knew a guy who was an Indian who would talk to me. I flew out there for the first time to meet him, and he wasn’t there which is, as I now know, rather typical.  But he knew that I might show up, and if I showed up, I should be given the phone number of a woman.  Then I met that woman, and she started helping me.  She had seven sisters, and so I had to marry one of them!  I fell in love with the culture I was trying write about and went for that.  I did not go there to run the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival; I didn’t care about the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival.  I went to live on a reservation, to marry my wife, to be with her family who are all incredible artists, and who have a relationship to art which is completely outside the realm of our profession—how we see art.  I loved that it was not about critics in a newspaper, that it was not about fame, that it was about actually who you were and being an artist.  So I moved, and for ten years I lived there and I never went to a concert.  I never went to the opera.  I never went to see my own friends who would come to play in the summers.  They didn’t know I was there, because this was my refuge, my peace, my nurturing, my place to be able to find who I was.  I would go out and play those damn concerts and come back.

The OrionQuartet's CD of Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival commissions

The Orion Quartet’s CD of Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival commissions features music by John Harbison, Chick Corea, and Marc Neikrug.

The whole festival thing was another total coincidence.  The guy who was running it happened to be somebody I’d known for 20 years.  I was with my wife in one of the pueblos watching dances, and I looked over and he was standing next to me.  He said, “Marc, what are you doing here?”  I said, “Well, watching dances.”  And he said, “I don’t understand.  What are you doing here?”  I said, “I live here.”  And he said, “Well, would you be a composer-in-residence for the festival?”  That was my first connection.  A year later he was leaving that job, and they then knew that I was there.  They didn’t ask me to do the job, but they asked me to advise them on whom to hire. I talked to them and told them basically what I thought they should be looking for and what I thought the problems were. I wrote down every single piece that they had done in seven years on paper and put it in order for myself.  Then I gave them a 45-minute lecture about what was wrong, and they said, “We don’t want to look for anybody.  Would you do the job?”  And I thought, whoa, I don’t know.  But again, the reason I took the job was being a composer.  I thought, I will do this like a composer would.  There are very few places like this.  There’s Aldeburgh.  And Henze had a festival in Montepulciano.  Takemitsu ran a thing in Tokyo for awhile. That’s about it. I thought, “O.K., I’m going to make this a place which will be an example for how you do this.  And how you get the new music to be an organic, integral, natural part of what makes it exciting.”
FJO:  It’s actually somewhat remarkable that your move to Santa Fe, as well as falling in love there and getting married, was the direct result of working on an opera for Berlin. But once you were there, the ten years that you spent there somewhat secretly, just venturing off to do piano gigs, was that somehow related to your own music as well?  What kind of music were you writing during those ten years?
MN:  It was that path that I’ve always been on.  I remember when I was a student, when I first was studying seriously.  My teacher was a very wise person, I felt and still feel; the lessons were about that.  He would say, “O.K., this is fine.  Um, this sounds like Bartók.  This sounds like Stravinsky.  This sounds like whatever.  These two measures are you.”  And I would think, “Wow, what is that?  What are those two measures of me?”  And the two became four, and the four became a page, and it doesn’t stop. With each piece I try and push, and discover, and not repeat things I know necessarily, but repeat them only as a place to take off from, and always try to push further.  Each time that happens, and you try things, and you find another aspect of what your voice is, you know, some little syllable in your voice, which you didn’t know was there before, that becomes part of your palette.  So the ten years there were that.  You know, one after another, writing pieces which were accumulating this vocabulary and making it my own, finding other corners of these sounds that were my sounds.
FJO:  You started saying something about the difference in what art means in the society you moved into versus what it means in our world of critics and concert halls. There’s also a huge difference in what these two different communities expect vis-à-vis the communicability and comprehensibility of an art work and what the role of an artist or artisan is in a society.  Your wife is a celebrated Pueblan potter. She is descended from a family which has consisted of potters for generations.  They are perpetuating a tradition rather than charting an ego-driven individual path. While they are creating things that are great works of beauty, the things they are creating are also useful to the community.  On a certain level, we consider it a badge of honor that classical music and, by extension, this thing we call contemporary classical music, doesn’t have explicit usefulness.  Instead the music is an end in and of itself.  You go to the concert to hear the music, not to commune with others or to have a personal religious experience, but rather to have an aesthetic experience of the particular musical composition you are hearing being played and the specific interpretation of it by the performers. Despite the pull back away from not caring if anyone listens, so many composers today still proudly say that they are writing music for themselves.  That’s completely antithetical to a traditional Pueblan view; indeed, it is antithetical to any traditional society’s way of making artwork.
MN:  It is equally antithetical to a traditional way of being a composer.  They did care.  They always cared.  It’s not conceivable that you didn’t care.  The problem was always and remains in the gap. I find it actually less irritating these days.  I find it more a testimony to how complex this artform is.  Where and what I mean by gap is it’s inconceivable to think about theater without new plays.  No one would accept that as a premise.  It can’t be.  Yes, there’s Shakespeare; yes, there are all these old things.  But there’s no way that there are not going to be new plays.  We need them.  Same with the visual arts.  All of them.  Film.  Anything.  The only place where there’s this seeming difficulty for the living audience to be as advanced is music.  It probably has always been, because we know from hearing about contemporary reactions even to Beethoven.  There was always a bit of gap, but I think it was probably less.  And over these centuries, it’s become more, and more, and more.  But there’s no way that they didn’t care.  Of course you care.  Because the whole sense of writing this music is: I’m a human being, this is what I’m feeling and this is what my feelings sound like; do you get it?  And the answer is: I have no idea what you’re talking about.  That’s bad.  That doesn’t make you feel good.  But I would go as far as to say that the most extreme, adamant composer who says, “It’s for me, I don’t care,” is thrilled when two or three measures that do resonate—resonate.  So I don’t buy it.  I think that’s defensive.
FJO:  I want to take this almost 180 degrees away then to talk about a very significant piece in your oeuvre, Through Roses, because the message that that very powerful piece gives is very disturbing:  that you can have an appreciation for great music and still be an utterly evil person who sends people to gas chambers.
MN:  Absolutely.
FJO:  That’s the kind of thing we don’t want to admit about this music.  We always like to say Mozart makes you smarter.  Or listening to Beethoven makes you a better person.  But Through Roses is all about how the Nazis loved that music.
MN:  What was amazing about working through that piece was that it goes even further.  If we look at different countries and different music, the epitome of great, iconic, classical music is German music.  It’s not French.  It’s not Russian.  It’s not English.  It’s Beethoven.  It’s Schubert.  It’s Mozart.  There’s an almost religious reverence for that music.  And it became almost a deflection; how can I be bad if I love Beethoven?  That’s what really fascinated me about doing that piece.
FJO:  In terms of your own life experiences, you had this idea of writing an opera about Los Alamos, but you had never visited Santa Fe.  So you went there, you got the experience, you did this thing.  You were born a year after World War II ended, after all the Nazi atrocities. So it too was not directly related to you.
MN:  Well, I went to school in Germany in 1964.  My conducting teacher was a man whom I was shown pictures of in an SS uniform.  The janitor at my school was in the Waffen SS.  This is ’64, we’re talking about 18 years after the war.  Everybody around me had been there.  I mean, anybody over 40 was effectively a mature person who took part in all this.  And I lived in that place for a while, so it was in my bones.  Then playing with Pinchas, I would go as far as to say that the real foundation of our career was in Germany and Austria, these German speaking countries.  We played hundreds and hundreds of concerts there year after year after year.  For 21 straight years, we played a recital in Munich—every year a different program.  That was my place, and I knew that audience.  I mean, I sat there and I looked at them, and every time I saw them, I thought, “Wow, would I be playing here then?  No, no way.  I’d be gone.  We wouldn’t be here.”  And we talked about that.  And that was almost a motivation.  It’s a power, you know.  I’m on the stage.  I’m playing your music for you better than anybody can play it.  That’s why you’re coming to these concerts.  So I had a kind of—I don’t want to say love-hate—I had a hate-hate relationship with that, with that place, which was rather deep.  And I think the piece got to a very profound level of that, in my experience.
FJO:  One of the most immediately striking aspects about Through Roses is the instant verbal comprehensibility of it, which makes it very different from an opera or in fact most sung music.  Whenever words are set to music, there’s this danger that the words will get drowned out. I wonder if your decision to write for an actor instead of a singer was to make sure that the words would be understood by the audience.

Score excerpt from Through Roses by Marc Neikrug

A score excerpt showing how text and music interact in Marc Neikrug’s Through Roses. Copyright © 1987 by Edition Wilhelm Hansen/Chester Music, New York Inc. (ASCAP). All rights reserved. Used with permission.

MN:  Well, actually it was a little different.  I had wanted to write a piece with that form for a long time.   There were two aspects.  One was yes, the comprehensibility—very important—but there was a second aspect which bothered me even more. I remembered quite clearly when I was studying and I first was writing songs that the general measurement you calculate for anything spoken, if it’s sung it’s three times as long.  And that’s generally how it is.  So if you think about opera, or even song, the communication of those words, or those phrases, is not in real time.  It’s slow motion.  What I wanted was to find a way to use the power that music has in an opera, but with real-time drama.

ThroughRosesCD

The world premiere recording of Through Roses featured the celebrated German actor Will Quadflieg as well as Pinchas Zukerman and Christoph Eschenbach.

That was the main motivation for the spoken word.  I didn’t know what the piece was.  Every four to six months, I would start thinking about that.  I’d spend half a day, or two days, or five minutes thinking what on earth would work.  Then I was in London with Pinky [Pinchas Zukerman]. We were playing concerts, but then he had some kind of a day with the English Chamber Orchestra, and I was in the audience listening to a rehearsal. Somebody was sitting next to me and pointed to a cellist and said, “You see that woman playing the cello. She played Bach cello suites in Auschwitz while people marched to the crematorium.”  And I thought, whoa, that is just unbelievable.  And I forgot it.  About three or four months later, I went back to my thoughts about what on earth the drama is where I could have instruments there that needed to be there, have a reason for the music being there and have it spoken. And I thought, well, wait a minute.  It clicked together and I knew instantly.  I knew that was the piece.  Then it took a while and a lot of research and meeting those people.  I found them here, holocaust survivors.  There was a place in Brooklyn.  I don’t know if it’s still there.  It was kind of an archive of cassette tapes of interviews with survivors.  And someone there helped me, I can’t remember her name, I wish I could.  She pulled all the cassettes of musicians. I would go out there and just listen to these stories, and then I asked, because they were all done anonymously, if I could meet some of these people.  They called the ones I was particularly interested in and asked them, and I went all over the city talking to these people.
FJO:  I imagine a very different process was in play when you were writing your second piece for chamber ensemble and actor, the piece about the extraterrestrial, which, unlike Through Roses, has comedic elements.
MN:  It was so strange because it took me, I don’t know, 30 years. Through Roses has been such a success.  It’s unique in its form.  I mean, there’s nothing like that.  I never could do another one, maybe because it was so perfect, just the togetherness of it.  And then somewhere, something struck me about this extraterrestrial and I just started thinking.
FJO:  So this didn’t come about through spending a lot of time at Roswell.
MN:  I’ve been to Roswell.  I’ve been to the museum and I like that, but no. It was a long process.  These pieces somehow take a couple of years of figuring out. I remembered stories about people who would talk about hearing ballgames from their teeth, which actually turns out to be possible given dental procedures.  Then I thought about Son of Sam, all these people talking about voices. Then I thought, well, what if there really is an extraterrestrial?  I got very interested in looking at us from outside, the context of looking at our humanity not being one of us.  If you’re not one of us you’d have to be a very smart dog, or an extraterrestrial! So it started with that and then: Why is he here?  What’s he up to?  He’s on death row because he killed his wife and ate her. At the premiere, my wife was in the audience, of course, and we brought our daughter, who is the great superstar potter of today.  My daughter’s sitting there, and she turns to my wife and says, are you listening to this?  [laughter] I love that piece.  I would love to write more of these things because I think they’re very striking.  But I have no idea what it will be.
FJO: One of your most recent pieces, Healing Ceremony, also has a great deal of extramusical elements which also make it a totally immersive experience also, but here it goes beyond the theatrical to something that is perhaps the source of the earliest theatre—ritual.

Healing Ceremony CD cover

Healing Ceremony was released on CD last year by E1 Classics.

MN:  I’ve come to learn from my wife that you need to accept things that happen as they happen and be comfortable with where your life is going instead of my normal manner, which is to try to control all of it.  That didn’t ever work.  Healing Ceremony had a very interesting genesis.  I have for a long time been interested in music and neuroscience and the real effects of listening on people—in their brains, in their bodies, and everything else.  I was approached by friends of mine who were very close to a fantastic woman who’s the head of the cancer center in Albuquerque. They had just built a new $100 million building, or were in the process of finishing it, and were starting to plan a dedication ceremony.  This woman asked me if I could write a piece for this ceremony, and instantly I thought of The Consecration of the House by Beethoven.  I’ll write a little overture, it’ll be the UNM Cancer Center Building Overture.  Then I started thinking a little bit, and I thought, well, wait a minute.  This is a cancer center; this is a place where people need to heal.  And I know that music has this power. I know that people who learn that they have cancer are not all familiar with music of any nature, they’re not all intellectuals, and they don’t suddenly think, “O.K., how am I going to heal myself?”  They’re faced with this sudden, incredible situation.
So I thought, I can write a piece where simply by listening for x number of minutes, it will take you to a space which is more relaxed, certainly lower your blood pressure, if anything, slow your breathing.  I can do that.  Any composer knows how to write slow music which puts you in a certain place.  Then I started thinking about what I know from 25 years of living with Pueblo Indians.  There are many rituals which take place, and most of them have a very particular structure which serves the purpose of grounding you.  And that has to do with a kind of meditating about place.  In fact, pueblos, if you see them from an aerial view, they’re laid out in four directions: north, south, east, and west.  There are four plazas in every pueblo facing those directions.  Going out from the pueblos, there are sacred places in each direction, a mile out, 10 miles out, 15 miles out.  The ceremonies have to do with contemplating direction from the north—clouds coming from the north—and from each of the others, but focusing really on your own central place.  That serves to ground you.  There’s no such thing as a real healing ceremony.  There are healing things that people do, and medicine men etc., but there’s not really a particular healing ceremony.  But if there were, I pretty much know how it ought to go.
So I spent a lot of time with one of my wife’s nephews, who happens to be a religious person, and we worked on making this ceremony, constructing it.  We did it in a very interesting way.  I wrote the words in English.  We would talk about them.  He would translate them into their language, which is a very beautiful animistic, nature-driven language.  And when he would translate them back into English with me, the sentences came out with this incredibly, beautiful, poetic form.  So we constructed the directions, and in between the directions, I wanted elements.  Because I thought air is quite obvious for healing and for putting you in a relaxed state.  Water is clearly the majority of what we are.  Earth was this grounding.  And then I knew that in the science and statistics of cancer recovery there is a huge difference between patients who have family support and love around them, and patients who don’t.  So I wanted to make the last one fire, but fire as a burning love, a nurturing love around you.  Then I thought of the music for this and I wanted a certain kind of ritualistic, Pueblo-based music for the directions to induce that kind of focusing.
FJO: At times it even sounds Mahlerian.
MN: I consciously made the decision that of all my pieces on earth, this one is certainly not going to be played at a new music concert!  In fact, I don’t even care if it’s seen as new music.  I want this to have the physical effect on people that I intended it to have.  Period.  That’s the purpose.

Neikrug-HealingCeremonyScoreExcerpt

A score excerpt featuring the final vocal lines from the last movement of Marc Neikrug’s Healing Ceremony. Copyright © 2010 by Marc Neikrug (ASCAP). All rights administered by G. Schirmer, Inc. throughout the World. Used with permission.

FJO:  In an interview with Charlie Rose, you mentioned that scientists measured audience response to this piece and that the blood pressure of people listening to the last movement went down 22 percent.
MN:  On average.
FJO:  That’s unbelievable.
MN:  But it’s actually very sensible, if you think about it.  This is not the only piece of music that would do that, obviously.  If you took something very famous, like some Bach chorale preludes or the Air on the G String or anything that has this tempo—60, that’s this machine.  It’s doing this in a way that slows your breathing. You come to the sound and you wallow in it; it puts you in.  I knew I could do that. Now, is that better for healing?  I would bet anything that it’s more conducive to be like that, than to be, “Oh my god, I’ve got cancer.”
FJO:  So if you know that certain things in music have the power to heal, or somehow elevate us to a better state physically and/or psychologically, why on earth would we want to compose or listen to music that doesn’t do that?  And if music can elevate you to this better state, it seems to follow that music can do the reverse as well.  It can make you agitated.  Worse, it can make you ill. Is that an implication here?  And, if so, what does it say about the state of contemporary music?
MN:  It’s science.  It’s not implication.  One of the first things I asked the first neuroscientist I started talking to was, “Does this mean that you can prove that rap music is bad for you?”  And he said, “Absolutely.  There’s no question about it.”  I think it gets back to the dosage.  A little bit of excitement is good.  You can’t just sit there and be a lotus blossom.  That’s not going to make for a healthy life, necessarily.  I mean, there is an immune system.  Kids should eat stuff from the floor; it will make them stronger.  There is all of this.  And the purpose of music is not only to heal.  The purpose of music, in my mind, has always been to commune.  There’s something about any music, like Mahler, which can tap into a level of profundity which is common to human beings.  And it is nurturing, because when listening to it you commune with that deep flow of humanity which we all share.  It reinforces being alive.  You know, I’m alive to drink wine and eat food.  But some people need more than that.  This is what music does.  It really is tapping into that deeper communal connection that all humans have.  And that has to do with excitement and being irritated, and even with pain, also.
FJO: You’ve talked about how living on the Pueblo and interacting with that culture and its very different experience of what art is affected you as a person and made you rethink what it means to create. It probably would not have been possible for you to create a piece like Healing Ceremony otherwise. Yet almost all of your music is still very rooted in the Western classical tradition. Your Flute Concerto is influenced by Indonesian gamelan music, but that seems to be an anomaly. And, as far as I know, the only piece of yours that specifically relates to your own experience on the Pueblo is your Pueblo Children’s Songs, even though the music you wrote for these texts doesn’t sound like Pueblan music.
MN:  Not at all. This was something Heidi [Grant Murphy] asked me to write celebrating the birth of her child.  I am very fortunate to have had not only my own children, but my own grandchildren, particularly my oldest one, whom I was in the room with when she was born; we bonded instantly.  Everyone in the family says, “Oh, that’s Marc’s.”  She has always been my child, and we have an incredibly deep and profound love for one another.  Actually, I use her name in the songs.  She’s Jade.  That’s my granddaughter. In the pueblo, they have the Indian names that come from a ritual which is done about six weeks or so after the baby is born, at dawn. The women—the mother, grandmother, and aunts—take the baby outside, and they name it.  The names come from, you know, a cloud passes:  Passing Cloud.  Or they see a bird, and it’s White Bird.  And there is a ceremony which goes with that.  You hold the baby, and you thank the sun for giving this life.  And you do it again in the four directions.  So I thought, what a wonderful ritualistic kind of moment.  I constructed this mini-song cycle by doing the naming ceremony in three different forms, condensed.  I asked the singer, first time do it facing the right of the stage, then facing forward, then facing to the left, face away from the audience once.  I asked my mother-in-law for songs she had sung to children when they were babies, my wife’s generation, and she gave me two; one was a lullaby.  I cry at that one, always.  It’s stunningly beautiful.  It’s for my Jade, and I just nailed it.


Marc Neikrug’s Pueblo Children’s Songs
performed by soprano Corrine Byrne and pianist Jocelyn Ho on April 16, 2013 at Stony Brook University

FJO:  But what’s interesting for me is while the melody really is gorgeous, there’s also this really sophisticated rhythmic thing going on in the piano accompaniment, a five-against-three pattern, yet it still sounds so natural.

Score Excerpt from Marc Neikrug's Lullaby, the fourth of his Pueblo Children's Songs

An excerpt showing five-against-three rhythms from the score of Marc Neikrug’s “Lullaby,” the fourth of his Pueblo Children’s Songs
Copyright © 1995 by Marc Neikrug (ASCAP). All rights administered by G. Schirmer, Inc. throughout the World. Used with permission.

MN:  If we go back about an hour ago to our talking about the audiences that come to hear Brahms, Beethoven, and Mozart, and then are confronted with my music, the reason it’s always worked is they don’t hear that complexity.  They hear the underlying communication or the underlying connecting to aspects of emotional contexts that they understand. They just hear something which actually resonates.  The complexity is irrelevant; it’s the same with any good music, actually.
FJO:  Has this piece ever been performed on the pueblo?
MN:  No.  Not knowingly.
FJO:  So I’m curious about how the rest of that community sees you. Do they know anything about your music?
MN:  No. I’ll tell you a story. I was connecting on a flight from Denver, and I saw one of my sisters-in-law on the plane.  There was a seat, so I sat down with her and I said, “What are you doing here?”  And she said, “Well, I had to go on a trip.”  I said, “Oh, where did you go?”  “I had to go back East.”  “Where?”  “Washington.”  I said, “What were you doing there?”  “I was helping them put up an exhibit.”  I said, “Really.  What kind of exhibit?”  “Oh, things I made.”  I said, “Where was that?”  “The Smithsonian.“ It didn’t matter.  What mattered was how her kids are, how I am. How am I feeling?  How’s life? They all knew I go off and I play concerts and I come back, or I write pieces and the pieces get done, but that’s not who I am.  Who I am is Marc in a t-shirt, and I’m nice to them.  They like me because I’m a good person.
FJO:  Yet even though you care so much about the audience and you want them to appreciate your music, it doesn’t matter to you that these people hear your music, these people whom you live with.
MN:  They love me.  It’s not their context.  Let’s put it a different way.  If they all regularly went to hear the symphony and they didn’t know my music, I’d be furious.  But that wouldn’t happen. This is humanity.  It’s one of the absolute lessons I learned very early on. I never saw anyone in this huge family of my wife’s ask anybody what they do.  We do that.  It’s almost the second thing that happens.  You say, “Hello, my name is dah, dah, dah.”  “What do you do?”  They never ask.  And I thought, “Wow, they don’t care.”  And they didn’t.  You know, they like the person, or they don’t like the person.  It goes back to the Germans.  Well, he loves Beethoven, so that couldn’t possibly be somebody who puts you people in gas chambers.  Wrong.  He’s a doctor; he must be a great person.  No.  Wrong.  A plumber can be a fantastic person, or that check out person at the grocery store.  So in that context, I want to be the best person I can be there in that community.  That makes me able to tap into my sources for the music.  And it makes the music more human.

Kamala Sankaram: Being One with the Performance


Video footage filmed by Spencer McCormick, edited by Molly Sheridan.

Like many music makers of her generation, Kamala Sankaram creates and performs work which is an amalgamation of a wide range of musical traditions. But at the root of everything she does, there is usually a strong sense of drama.  This narrative tendency has taken a variety of forms: it could be a chamber music piece that includes a theatrical component, like her flute and violin duo Slam or Bruja-Ha! for horns, strings and drumkit,  a wonderfully loopy score for Signe Baumane’s award-winning animated film Dentist, or cabaret-style indie-pop meets Yma Sumac gigs in clubs with her band Bombay Rickey in which the individual songs’ narrative arcs are exploited for maximum impact.

Most recently, she took on the most vaunted form of “dramma per musica”—opera—with Thumbprint, which was one of the highlights of the 2014 Prototype Festival. But both Sankaram and her collaborator, librettist Susan Yankowitz, wanted to create an opera which countered the ubiquitous female stereotypes within the genre—femme fatales or women who are ruined and ultimately die. Musicologist Carolyn Abbate’s 1991 book Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century had a profound impact on Sankaram when she first read it as did the real life story of a Pakistani woman named Mukhtar Ma’i. Mukhtar survived a gang rape and was the first such victim to file charges against her assailants; traditionally women so assaulted became outcasts, but she went on to found a school for women and is now an internationally prominent human rights activist. In Mukhtar’s inspirational transformation, Sankaram found the ideal fit for a new gender paradigm for opera:

We celebrate the submissive woman in opera. The tendency is that if the woman’s voice is too strong, we have to quiet it. Lulu has to die. Medea has to die. So it was really important for Susan and for me to show this woman who becomes very powerful in the classic sense of the operatic tradition. In the beginning of the show, her vocal part is contained to just the middle of the voice. It isn’t until she makes her decision [to report the rape] that she starts singing the more coloratura passages with higher notes; that was very deliberate.

Sankaram, however, is quick to point out that Thumbprint is about much more than that gang rape and despite the media’s recent focus on similar horrific incidents throughout the Indian subcontinent, that part of the world does not have a monopoly on violence toward women.

All of the Indian and Pakistani people who saw it thanked me first of all for being culturally sensitive but also for telling the story in a way that was moving for them and accessible to them. But this is not a piece about Pakistan, or a piece about Muslims or even, at its heart, a piece about rape. This is about Mukhtar’s experience and how it transforms her from someone who doesn’t have a voice to someone who has become a global force for women’s rights. That was something that was really important to me, that if people from that part of the world came to the show that they would not feel that I was wagging a finger at them or that Susan and I were saying, “Oh, this is a problem only among illiterate Muslims.” If you look at America, we’re not that different. Colleges don’t tend to go after football stars who have been accused of rape until after they have graduated and are no longer useful. So you have all of these girls who are doing everything they’re supposed to do: they do the rape kit, they go to the police. And still, nothing happens. So it’s not that we’re so different from India and Pakistan; we have our own culture that needs to have the silence broken around it.

Sankaram is clearly extremely aware of the power of opera to relate socially conscious stories to an audience and in Thumbprint she harnessed that power for maximum emotional impact.  While she was initially more inclined toward writing for musical theatre, that medium’s reliance on transitioning between songs and spoken dialogue began to feel somewhat formulaic and artistically constricted. Opera, on the other hand, seemed a more open-ended format.  However, she is fully aware that the works she wants to create rely on “being able to shift genre very quickly,” something which does not exactly sit comfortably with most opera companies and the singers who perform the canonical operatic works of the standard repertoire.

Kamala Sankaram

Kamala Sankaram, photo by Spencer McCormick.

In fact, finding singers who are willing to take Sankaram’s idiosyncratic musical journey has not always been easy. In her earlier, less conventionally operatic music theatre pieces, she has usually performed the lead role herself since she loves performing and can easily navigate between pop, jazz, rock, world music, and even Western classical singing techniques. When people who have heard her perform with her band Bombay Rickey ask if she’s classically trained, she shrugs her shoulders and points out “how else could I get those high Fs?” While Thumbprint didn’t require the same amount of musical multitasking as some of her other projects, since she wanted to have an entirely South Asian cast and the singers must navigate some Indian classical vocal techniques as well as Western ones, she found herself in the lead once again. As she puts it, Thumbprint is “still not ‘opera-y opera.’ I think of opera-y opera as something that is very straight-forwardly in the Western classical tradition and doesn’t really waver from that technique of singing.”

At the same time that she is immersed in her own multifaceted creative projects, Kamala Sankaram actively sings music by other composers as well—among them Anthony Braxton, Corey Dargel, Philip Glass, Fred Ho, Phil Kline, David T. Little, Matthew Marks, Tristan Perich, and John Zorn—effortlessly navigating material that could be completely notated, completely improvised, and anything in between. But she acknowledges something that is particularly satisfying about performing her own work:

There is something really satisfying about performing your own music, particularly when you’re singing, because it’s embodied on a kind of molecular level and so you’re one with the performance in a way that you’re not always when you’re singing someone else’s music. It can become like that over time, but unfortunately in new music we don’t often get the chance to perform things enough for it to really evolve to that place.

Andrew Norman: Empowering Performance


At the home of visual artist Charlotte Corini, Brooklyn, NY
December 12, 2013—1 p.m.
Transcribed by Julia Lu
Video presentation and text condensed and edited by Alexandra Gardner

For composer Andrew Norman, the process of composing feels like a tug-of-war between opposing forces. From start to finish, he is constantly questioning, and pushing back on his own ideas in his efforts to create meaningful musical experiences for performers and for audiences. Norman talks animatedly about the different personalities that whisper as he works—the “little Modernist guy,” the more laid-back, John Cage-y voice, and even the latent film composer, all of whom fight it out during the creation of a score. That sense of conflict can definitely be heard in the music: skittering, complex textures are slowly engulfed by gigantic, lush, chord progressions; or brash percussion chops off one lyrical phrase after another, never allowing a full melody to emerge. Despite these internal struggles with creativity, which he says have at different times in his life stopped him in his tracks, he also possesses a keen sense of playfulness, reveling in the visceral experiences of music making, and thoughtfully challenges performers to bring their own ideas to their interpretation of his music.

Norman, who calls his career “kind of old school” in that he writes primarily for orchestra and serves as Assistant Professor at University of Southern California Thornton School of Music, claims he loves writing music that sounds a little bit “sloppy,” and that is organized in unusual ways. Non-linear forms such as those encountered in video games serve as important sources of inspiration, and often he will embed an idea within multiple compositions, working it out in different contexts until he feels like it has developed completely enough for use in a large-scale work.

While Norman’s catalog might look a bit traditional at first glance, his attitudes towards orchestras and working with musicians are anything but. He views the orchestra as a community of musicians, rather than as a singular sound-making machine that must be controlled. Often he prefers independent, soloistic behaviors for musicians; he asks them to not fit together, which is quite the opposite of standard orchestra musician behavior. The secret to accomplishing such tasks effectively, he says, is all about the notation on the page, and about how musicians are asked to perform. His descriptions of the kinds of information he shares on the written page sound more like he is facilitating a large group discussion rather than a musical experience (“If you want a musician to make an ugly sound, you have to provide a satisfying reason for why it’s there…”), but the resulting music is energetic and sonically dazzling, as in his large-scale orchestra work Play. Learning to express as clearly as possible his musical ideas in a score, he says, is a lifelong journey, and it’s the motivation that keeps bringing him back to composing for orchestral forces.

*

Alexandra Gardner: Something that you said in our email communications was that musically speaking, you’re all about people. Your current primary interest is in performers, and specifically in their interactions with other performers, as well as methods of communication that take place between players and audiences. While it’s not a new thing for you, it hasn’t been addressed in interviews as much as your interest in architecture, for instance. So let’s talk about people.
Andrew Norman: Well certainly humans communicating with humans is not new in the history of music. I think there’s something about the ways in which music is made now—this sort of vast field of making music on computers, and making music electronically, and making music without people—that has entirely reframed what it means to make music with people.
I think a lot about what it means to write for people playing instruments, or people using their voices as opposed to the methods we have for making electronic music. With that the creator sculpts the sound himself, and it ends up being exactly the sound that she or he wants and what’s of course missing there is this level of interpretation. I’m not a very computer-oriented person; technology in some ways is still very foreign to me. I’m very slow with all of that stuff.In my 20s I was listening to a lot of electronic music and questioning what there was for someone like me to do, who is not oriented that way.
I even felt a certain amount of guilt in the fact that I wasn’t an electronic music composer, or that it wasn’t an element of my work. How can my work be new and fresh without that? I finally came to this idea that what is most interesting to me about the classical tradition is the idea of the written score, and this idea that composers don’t make the sounds themselves. They write down instructions for making sounds and then other people interpret those instructions. Really exploring that process is where my work has been going for the last several years. Also making sure there’s enough space in that written score for multiple interpretations. To me the heart and soul of written music is about creating something with enough depthand complexity, but also enough openness in it to allow for many different realizations. So that’s where I’ve been going. And that has also led me into really exploring this idea of human interaction in music. How can I open up that space on the written page for human beings to be human beings when they play music?
I think there’s a long tradition in our field of this super, specified score. And I think this also comes from a time when electronic music was coming into being and composers could then really start to think about the very particulars of sound, and be able to sculpt every single aspect of it themselves. That ended up as part of our notated tradition. Which is really great at times, but that sometimes leaves behind an element of what it is to be a musician. I was trained as a pianist in college, and aside from technical issues, what we talked about all the time in my lessons were ideas; how to have an idea about a written score, and then project it in your performance. And sometimes the way music is notated these days, it leaves no room for ideas. That’s sort of my frame these days; the creation of a score that leaves open that realm.
Of course then as the creator, I have to be O.K., with whatever comes out! There’s this whole lifelong process of learning what I need to specify, and what I don’t. What I’m O.K. with people changing, and what I’m not. In some pieces, for instance, the pitch doesn’t matter to me. For certain gestures, any set of pitches will do. And in that case, I don’t specify the pitches, or I allow people a certain amount of choice. And some cases it’s the rhythm; like this rhythm can be free and flexible. I feel like I’ve had a lot of good results from this. When you give good musicians the choice, they choose something good. And I really like that. It’s about giving people a framework in which they can have a very personal take on the music that I’ve written.
AG: It’s empowering to the performer.
AN: Yes, it’s very much about performer empowerment. I’ve spent a lot of time in the last couple of years thinking about what it is that I love about live performance. And what it comes it down to is that I really love seeing people make choices and taking risks on stage. I think there’s something very powerful about that. And that’s sort of what I’m trying to do in my own music: give someone the ability to make a choice on stage—to take a risk, to have a definite idea about the interpretation of a piece. If there’s any way I can get someone to do something slightly risky, or slightly spontaneous within the framework of a piece, I will always go for that. To me it’s interesting what a live human being can do that no amount of electronic sound and speakers and technology can do. Risk is something I’ve been trying to push myself toward. It’s also something that is slightly tricky with classical musicians, especially orchestras because they are highly risk averse. It’s just something in the field, this need to be totally polished and professional. So sometimes I find myself having to really encourage players to take the risks and do something that might fail on stage. It reveals a certain amount of humanity when you do that. And then the orchestra is no longer this perfectly polished, well-functioning machine, but it becomes more about this community of people.
AG: I like the idea of the orchestra as a community a lot. But when you’re working with an orchestra of 70, 80, or 90 people, how does communication work in that case? You can’t really have a conversation with every member of the orchestra.
AN: Working with orchestra is incredibly complicated, and it’s something that I am continually learning. I feel like it’s this life-long trajectory for me. I write for orchestras, and I’m continually trying to figure out how to elicit from them the kind of music making that I find interesting. A lot of it for me has to do with how you ask. That has everything to do with what’s on the printed page. For a long time, I was starting to feel like I had this real tension with writing orchestra music, like maybe it really wasn’t for me. In part that’s because I do like this kind of more spontaneous, more visceral, and even sloppy sort of music making. I also really value collaborative environments where you get to try to things out; you get to really bring out people’s personalities and figure how to make work in that way. And orchestra music is just sometimes so uncollaborative. It can be kind of a downer sometimes. But I finally figured out that what I love about orchestra music is that it’s really all about notation. And it’s about communicating ideas as clearly as you possibly can on the written page. I have to somehow communicate in the music that, for instance, here is the time to be sloppy. Or here’s the time to let go. Or this is what matters now. Orchestra musicians are incredible at grasping the context of what they’re supposed to do, and they’re very fast at assimilating things and knowing how to fit together, and they fall apart a little bit when you ask then to not fit together, which is sort of a lot of what I do.
So how to—within the context of the notation—get them to feel the freedom to do that is something I think about a lot. What it comes down to is about how the gestures are framed on the page; what words I use. I work a lot with string players to find non-standard sounds. It’s interesting that a lot of the time I’m asking for sounds that are very standard in the new music community. When I’m working with new music players, it’s like, “Oh sure, I’ll make that crazy sound. I’ll do whatever you want!” And then you work with orchestra players, and for some of them, this is not a skill set that they have. They’ve never made sounds like this. And there’s no time to work with like 40 string players individually.
So, it’s all about very clear language in the parts about how exactly to place that bow., how exactly to make that sound. And then you also have to convince them that there’s an intuitive reason for what they’re doing, that this sound is special and that it will matter. That to me is the trick with orchestra players: getting them to do these things, which are sometimes counter to the entirety of their training and skill set. You know, violinists have trained for years and years to make the most beautiful sound. How do you get them to make an ugly sound? And not just any ugly sound, but the ugly sound you want. It’s just this long learning process for me, and sometimes I fail. Sometimes they fail. Sometimes it ends up miraculous, but that journey is one that I am super invested in at this point.
AG: Usually, an orchestra is viewed as a single machine that must be controlled. As much as the community aspect is obvious, I don’t think most people, or most composers, think of it that way.
AN: I have this theory that there’s a whole long tradition in our field of treating the orchestra like a sound making machine which comes out of the 19th century. If you wanted to make sounds in the 19th century, you had to get people together to make those sounds. And that progressed over a trajectory of 150 years, and led to viewing the orchestra as the world’s ultimate sound-making machine.
But the interesting thing is that doesn’t take into account the humanness of an orchestra. Especially nowadays, you can get way more spectacular sounds out of a computer.You can put an array of speakers around a room, and get sounds to dance in three dimensions. You do anything you want with sound out of a computer. The orchestra has definitely been surpassed as the sound-making machine par excellence. But what hasn’t been surpassed about the orchestra is the amazing human potential it has. I mean, there are 100 people on a stage—how often do we get that many people making some collective statement? I think my approach to orchestration has changed a lot in the last several years, because it’s no longer about utilizing this vast color-making machine. It’s about thinking about line, and thinking about the interaction between people on the stage. I’ve talked to many, many orchestra players, and the trajectory of what they say is very similar. It’s always like, well, my instrument makes this cool sound and that cool sound. And there’s also this fun thing I can do on this instrument, but what I love to do is I love to sing. They all say that! Finally it occurred to me that there’s something very human about giving people a line. Give people some sort of thing that makes sense for them on their page, not just a pointillistic array of colors that they’re making but material that they can make musical sense out of, and that utilizes their personal, vocal singing qualities. It is definitely something I think about.
AG: That kind of interaction is a major factor in your piece Play, which was commissioned by BMOP.
AN: Yeah. I wrote this piece Play, which is a huge, giant, 47-minute long orchestra piece that is kind of a distillation of a lot of these ideas. One of the things I often think about is the big why of concert music. Often, when I’m beginning a piece, I get overwhelmed by these various why questions which just get bigger and bigger. And one of them is: why are these people on a stage, and why is this other person waving his arms and making things happen? That was one of the basic ideas I had about this orchestra piece. It’s exploring the idea that there is actually one person up there who is controlling everyone else; he waves his hands, and something else happens. Then taking a step back further, I was thinking about the composer kind of doing the same thing. The composer has actually written this thing down, which is causing this person to wave his arms in a particular way, which is causing the orchestra to do certain things on stage, which is then causing the audience to feel certain things, and do certain things. There’s this whole chain of cause and effect, and I kept backing up and thinking about the interplay between these various groups of people.
I came up early on with the word “play”, which I like. It has many meanings, one of which has to do with the interaction of various human beings playing with each other; playing their instruments in a very literal sense. But also playing as kids play. And then you could potentially extrapolate a slightly darker meaning out of play, which is that someone is controlling someone else, as in, you got played. Like that sense of a puppeteer who’s controlling a marionette, which can go very dark, very quickly. I love watching people play, and I’m very interested in the physicality of playing. How people look and move when they play is also a big part of this piece. This piece got recorded by BMOP, this fantastic orchestra that commissioned the piece. I’m a little bit sad that some people are only going to know it from this recording, because so much of this piece is all about live performance, about what is it to both watch and listen to an orchestra.
There are things you will only realize when you see it, about how different sounds emerge from different parts of the orchestra. Things about how people are moving when they play. Since I was a little kid I’ve been mesmerized by the movement of the string players in an orchestra, and I like to play with the choreography of bows within a string section. That took on a sort of level of meaning, which became very important to this piece. Play also for me has this reference to video games. I’m not a huge gamer, but there is something about the way games are structured and the way narratives are structured in a game which is very appealing to me as I think about form and music. Oftentimes there’s a non-linear way through a game. How to convey a story arc, or a general narrative over a span of time, but one that can loop back on itself, and that can take a circuitous route through the material. We’re very adept at processing these things from the ways we watch movies and TV these days. I mean, non-linear story telling seems to be almost a cliché in some of our other time-based mediums; the whole flash back, or flash forward, or cut to a parallel universe kind of thing. Why not in orchestra music?

Reproduced courtesy of Schott Music Corporation & European American Music Dist. Co. © 2013 Schott Music Corporation, New York (ASCAP)

A page from Play
Reproduced courtesy of Schott Music Corporation & European American Music Dist. Co.
© 2013 Schott Music Corporation, New York (ASCAP)

How do you suggest in a piece of music that the next thing that happens doesn’t belong there? And then furthermore, how can you possibly suggest, over the course of a long time span that maybe this thing actually belongs somewhere else, as part of a different story? Or to hear something random happen, and then 30 minutes later recognize that it has come back in a different context? I feel like this is really part of symphonic form. Beethoven does this all the time. Like the random event that has nothing to do with what’s going on right here, and then way later in the form, you get it. That whole idea of planting the non sequitur that is actually going to formally do something in the end is very old in classical music, but has for me elements of this whole non-linear narrative thing. So, that’s an aspect of Play as well.
AG: I love Level 3 of Play especially.
AN: Level 3 is supposed to be the piece without percussionists monkeying it up. Because the percussionists are the ones who are kind of controlling everyone else; turning things on, and turning them off. But Level 3 is supposed to be the orchestra locked in this moment of suspense, and then they gradually form the thing themselves, that they had been trying in all these various ways to get to before. And so finally, here’s a moment that is un-monkeyed. That was my goal with Level 3. So, finally we made it out.

Play hints page

The “hints” page from Play
Reproduced courtesy of Schott Music Corporation & European American Music Dist. Co.
© 2013 Schott Music Corporation, New York (ASCAP)

AG: In terms of structure then, do you work things out ahead of time, or do you wing it as you go?
AN: Oh man, that’s a tricky question. Generally speaking, I do two things with form. One is transformation. I love watching one thing transform into some other thing. I use cinematic metaphors all the time. It’s probably because I’m a failed, wannabe film composer. The idea of watching something happen within a single take is really magical. And then of course there’s the exact opposite, which is like the jump cut; having ideas cut off each other, and juxtaposing different materials to see how they can reframe each other. Those seem to be my two modes of operation. That’s enough to deal with for a long time. But generally speaking, because I’m also a very strongly narrative composer making long form instrumental music, I want there to be a sense of journey. There’s always a point here. I’m trying to say something, or make an argument. There is something that I want to have happen with the material.
So generally speaking, I come up with the “what is happening” moment—what I want to have happen first—and then it’s this process of backing up from that which is totally non-linear. I almost think like a playwright, or a novelist even. When are you introducing ideas, how do those ideas unfold, and how are they all pointing toward something? I’m sometimes worried that I’m so goal driven. It’s a very traditional way of making music; it’s very Beethoven symphony-like. We’re all pointing towards this. Here’s where we’re going. But that’s the way I think. Of course, what’s also interesting to me is when you take a wrong turn. A lot of my music is about taking those wrong turns and watching ideas form in the music itself. So it’s not like the music is this finished product of here’s my idea. The music is about the journey of getting to the idea.
My piece of music Try is all about one idea. I had that idea when I was writing the piece. That was my very first idea. It’s like oh, here’s the thing. And then it was like well, how do we get there? And then the piece itself became the journey toward that idea. Typically I know where I’m going. I often know where I’m starting, too, and there’s usually this moment in the first quarter of the piece which is always the last thing to come together. It’s usually that moment of the exposition; here’s the world. Here’s the material I’m working with, and I don’t know what that is supposed to accomplish until other pieces are in place. So it’s also very typical for me to have a mess of sketches on the floor. I’ll have a mess of material until like the very last second, right before the piece is due, and then all of a sudden it will go voop and it becomes a piece in like a day or two. And I’m like, how did that happen? Of course, I’ll go back and revise it all later. But really, I sit there with material in this non-linear web for a really long time. And then one day something magical happens that I don’t fully understand, and it starts to fall in place. Those days are so rare for me, but I kind of live for them because it’s just like: oh, finally, this piece is making sense.
AG: You’ve mentioned that a lot of your chamber compositions end up being sketches for bigger works. Was Try a sketch for Play? There are definitely similarities between the two pieces.
AN: For sure. I do this thing now where some pieces end up being sketches for bigger pieces, Sometimes I don’t even realize it! I think it stems from the fact that—this is going to sound stupid—I have a hard time coming up with material. It just doesn’t flow out of me. I feel like I don’t have—again this is going to sound bad—that many good ideas. So when I get a good one, I want to hold onto it and make sure I don’t screw it up. This actually was a huge issue for me in my 20s—not wanting to screw up pieces. I’ve had so many fabulous opportunities in my life, more than I deserve, and I just don’t want to screw anything up.
The desire to not fail was actually hugely inhibiting. I couldn’t write anything down because, you know, an idea changes when you write it. It loses something. It gains immeasurably in other ways, but it loses something. That process was really scary for me. Sometimes it’s really difficult just putting an idea down on paper. And I also have a lot of conflicting energies, you might say. Conflicting ideas. Sometimes, I feel like I inhabit a lot of strong opposites that are always telling me, oh no, don’t do that. You should do the opposite. Or, this is not good. You need to be this. It’s long and complicated, but to actually get an idea out is sometimes a huge struggle for me. All of this is to say, when I actually have ideas, and I’ve gotten them on paper, I sometimes like to work through them in multiple ways, because I can see multiple directions these things could go. And sometimes I’m too into my material and there is this sense of sadness that I’ve picked one way for it and not another. Three or four years ago I gave myself the permission to allow pieces to fail, which is huge.
It’s O.K. to write a piece that doesn’t work. It’s also O.K. to take that same material and try to find another context in which it might work. It’s a very common way for visual artists to work. But somehow in our field, we have this idea that every piece has to be a unique and totally self-contained world. I just don’t work that way. Play is a giant piece. It ends with this unfolding of one idea, this kind of melodic wedge that’s expanding out from a single note. I was obsessed with this wedge for like a year. I wrote this wedge into every piece that I wrote for a year. Every piece was slightly different in the way that it unfolded, and the pacing, and the instrumentation, and the effect of this wedge.
So finally by the time it came to putting it in an orchestra piece, I feel like I turned it upside down. I had played with it enough in my head that I was O.K. with the direction I wanted to go in this orchestra piece. The question then is: are the other pieces studies, or are they real pieces? I go back and forth on that one. And much to my publisher’s chagrin, I do withdraw a lot of pieces. I feel like my catalog is actually shrinking the older I get because, for whatever reason, sometimes the pieces need to be revised. And also sometimes, I think, well, I actually worked through that idea in this other piece, and I like that one better. But I’m working in series more than I used to. And I do like that.
AG: I feel like that the sense of conflicting energies definitely comes out in your music, but in a very specific and personal way. There’s a lot of beautiful, simple musical content rising up and enveloping very complex and more thorny material.
AN: Yeah, I was saying a little bit earlier that I feel like sometimes I get stuck in these very conflicting energies, or have very conflicting impulses. Part of this came out when I first got to college. Before then I was writing some big-boned, romantic, lush, long melodies. Kind of Samuel Barber, Rachmaninoff, big gestures like that. And then I was hit by a bunch of different strains of modernism, as many people are.
I’ve often felt that I’m totally torn in this respect. I have this strong lyrical or neoromantic tendency. I’m a huge fan of sweep. I like big things that are kind of epic and melodies that soar along and sweep us up, and also probably have that sort of film score-y elements that I like. But I like the exact opposite of that, too! Very austere and restrained modernism is powerful too. I feel like there’s this little modernist guy inside of me who’s like, the power of music is what you’re willing to deny your audience. I have a hard time just letting those two sides of myself co-exist. They are always fighting. And there’s kind of an outlier inside too. It’s like this little experimental Andrew. Like American experimental, kind of John Cage-y. He’s in there too, a little bit more laid back. But how do they all relate? When it doesn’t work, it’s like one or the other of these forces will shut me down. And that’s when the ideas don’t come out because one or the other has vetoed them. And this is sounding insane! But when it works, it’s really interesting, because I feel like then what happens is a tension in the actual music between these various forces.
I’ve come to recognize that this is actually part of what my music is about; different forces battling it out in the music. My music is somehow never O.K. with itself. It’s always battling. These tensions are very real for me and when the work actually makes it onto paper, they’re there. One of the things about my generation that I love, but also don’t quite understand, is that a lot of people are so good at being O.K. with everything. This has never been natural or easy for me. I have to work through these things. They’re very real sources of tension; like am I going to be Lachenmann or am I going to be David Lang, or am I going to be Leonard Bernstein? I get freaked out by those questions, and most of my peers are like, well sure, be all three. For whatever reason, I can’t do that.
AG: So the conflicting influences are not yet friends. It sounds like they may never be!
AN: No. No. Occasionally they are, but it’s just in my nature to see them like this and not let everything be.
AG: That must be useful for your teaching, to be able to tap into very different compositional energies, and also to perceive such things going on with your students.
AN: I do teach now, and these young kids are dealing with exactly the same issues. A lot of them have these very interesting voices, but they’ve never encountered the canon of 20th century music, and they’re all wondering how to deal with it. And that was exactly me. So sometimes our lessons are a little comical, because a kid has these big existential issues, and I’m like: great, so do I! We try to work through it together and it’s fascinating. Some people are very good at getting music down, and getting their ideas out. And some people are like me—a mess inside their heads, and getting things on paper is the most difficult thing. I appreciate the challenges of working with all these different people. When I was a student, I treated all my teachers like therapists. I was basically like: I’m a wreck. And they were very kind and gentle and understanding with me in trying to figure things out. And here I am, the therapist who still has all these issues! It’s trying to help these kids express themselves. Figure out what it is they want to say, and also how does that fit in with the world, and that’s tricky. Because for these kids who have been creating their whole lives, often that spark doesn’t change, but what changes when they’re in school is suddenly how that relates to the bigger world.
For some people, that doesn’t matter, but for some people, like me, that’s huge. But I’m hyper-sensitive to it in my own work, and I hope that I’m sensitive to it in the work of my students too. I’ll say one more thing about this, which is that composition in the university, or even in the conservatory has meant a very specific thing. It has some very specific values. When teachers teach, they impart their values to other generations. And then that becomes institutionalized and now that I’ve become part of this system, I am even more aware of what values I am representing.
Am I forcing my values on these kids? In a way that is unnatural. There are good things about the university system and in training composers this way, and the values and the skills that it preserves. But there are not good things too. I guess trying to recognize what is good, what is lasting, and what is valuable about this training is important, but also what needs to be changed. What needs to be perhaps opened up from the inside is something I think a lot about. And it is definitely more real to me now that I’m seeing these kids and shaping—even saying that words like freaks me out. I hope I’m not shaping them, but rather, trying to open them up.
I recognize that in a lot of ways, I have a very traditional career. It’s kind of old school, and I’m an orchestral composer. My music has sifted its way up through various forms of institutional judgment which, by the way, is something that I actually lost a huge amount of sleep over in the last decade—this whole idea that my music seemed to do well within the institution. It’s always made me, if anything, question what it is that I’m doing. Like am I really just writing music that is parroting back to the institution the values they’ve had for a long time? And maybe there’s actually something quite wrong with my approach if so many of the big old institutions seem to like it. You know what I’m saying? I do feel that very personally. I do spend a lot of time asking myself if I am being risky enough, if I am being transgressive enough.
I’ve certainly benefited from these systems in a way that a lot of composers in my generation have not, and that a lot of composers seem to regard with a large degree of suspicion. Gradually I’m in the process of making peace with this idea of what my career is. Yes, I have this kind of old school insider’s career. I’m working with big orchestras and classical music institutions that sometimes lack the adventuresome spirit, or the adventuresome audience of more small grass roots things that happen in our field. Finally it occurred to me that I could use this position to influence the system from the inside. To give a gentle nudge every once in awhile to the things that I think are important. Writing a Lachenmannian orchestra piece for some symphony in Iowa is maybe not the best way to go about it, but there is a way to get in there and say: hey, these are some other ideas that are kind of interesting and cool.
AG: What kinds of things would you like to see changed within an institutional setting?
AN: Well, in our generation, we talk so much about genre crossing, and all of this stuff, and trying to open up our field to other forms of music making. And, that conversation is—at this point—very familiar. I lived in Brooklyn for three years immediately previous to this, and now I’m in Los Angeles, teaching at the University of Southern California. The Brooklyn thing became so familiar to me—its values and conversation—that I kind of forgot that there are other branches of our field that continue to go on and propagate their own values. There are these things like complex pitch combinations. For some people this is like a thing. As in, good music has complex pitch combinations, and bad music doesn’t. The same could be said for rhythm or form. This idea of what is good in our field—that kind of took me by surprise this last fall. There are some more old school values—and I don’t want to say old school in a bad way—that are just different. They’re not the things I had been thinking about for a long time.
Personally, I see a couple different trends coming out of the conservatory and university training of composers. One is music that is incredibly polished. It just works super well. It’s all about a kind of slick professionalism when it comes to materials. Then I see more experimental, wild and crazy things, which are often a little bit rougher, and that seem to partake in maybe slightly bigger ideas. I kind of find something lacking in both. Where is the music that’s both really professional, with a really of high level of craft, but also is going to wow me with some big idea or some super creative way of thinking about notation, or music, or whatever, that I’ve never heard before? Where is the fusion? There are lots of different camps. We all know this. There are a lot of different ideas about what music is, and about what we should be doing. There’s got to be some combination, some way of training composers who are both wildly creative, and totally wacky and off the wall. Things that we’ve never heard before that are also accomplished to the highest standards of craft in our field. That’s what I want to see. Sometimes I think there’s too much of an emphasis on polishing and crafting, and sometimes there’s not enough. Maybe this is too dangerous for NewMusicBox. I feel like I’m going to piss people off. But…
AG: Oh, a lot of people would agree with what you’re saying.
AN: I feel like in the world of orchestra music, and new chamber music, people end up writing music like their teachers. And people end up writing music like the music that’s already out there. Where are the big ideas in our field? Where are the really creative original voices? I know with orchestras, there’s such a high level of information you need, and a high level of practical skills you need to even get an orchestra to speak. You just need so much training, and there’s so much to know, that we tend to just stop there, and ask, is this person a proficient orchestral composer? But we aren’t even asking, if they have that proficiency, what are they going to say with it? What original thing are they going to bring to it? It’s like we sometimes stop at: this is a good orchestra piece. They’ve successfully made the orchestra do what orchestras do. And I’m like: no, you have to take that level of technique and actually blow our minds with something that is new. Something that is original, and that’s what I find lacking in my end of the field. Of course, then you go into other aspects of new music, and you’re like: whoa, that’s such an amazing idea. That’s so unbelievably creative, where in the world does this come from? Often times when those kinds of people write for the orchestra, they fall on their faces because you need to know the range of a bass clarinet, and stupid things like that. I don’t know. It’s a balance.
Sometimes my heart hurts a little bit for the orchestra world, because I do feel like mind-blowingly creative people just aren’t writing for orchestra these days. And there’s a huge, huge list of reasons why that is. But it’s one of the things that I want to help fix. The field needs some really crazy innovators, and they’re out there. I know they’re out there. We just have to find them.
AG: Definitely, and that’s an important task. How does thinking about these issues mesh with your own personal musical goals?
AN: Right now, my goals have more to do with process than they do with product. I mentioned earlier that I have this very convoluted and emotionally intense process, and it’s kind of destructive in a way. It’s hard for me to get music on paper. I find it sort of personally devastating when I go through the process of those conflicting forces duking it out. So my goal right now is try to find a way to write in which there isn’t quite so much of that personal pummeling. To sit down and write in a way that is just a little bit more fluid, and a little bit more accepting.
It’s a very internal, very personal thing, figuring out how to get this process to be a little bit more fluid. I’ve talked to a lot of people about this and some of them say, well maybe this whole conflict thing is just who you are. This is part of your process. And I’ve come to accept that too, that this is probably going to be an aspect of how I make work for a really long time. But I do think there’s room for me to improve in just getting stuff out. Most of the time, I’m a rotten failure. I just am. Like nine days out of ten, I’m just a wreck about writing music. If I can get that ratio up—maybe two out of ten are great days, or three out of ten—that is how I measure my progress as composer. And it comes and goes in waves; sometimes I feel like I’m empowered, and I’m liking what I’m doing, and I’m into it. That’s amazing, and then I’ll go through long, long stretches where I’m not. It’s been tricky for me to deal with that as I get further along on the commission track of very slick professional orchestras and big names, and big opportunities. You don’t want to fail in front of, you know, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and their audience. It’s not a place where one wants to fail. But at the same time, I have to give myself the permission to fail, or nothing will ever come out. I have to also realize that those failures are on the road to some other thing. I’m getting slowly better at this idea that each piece I write is one stepping stone on a very long trajectory to exploring the issues that are interesting to me. It’s very, very important to me to create the best experience I possibly can for that audience, and for those players—to create a meaningful span of time for everyone involved. That experience I’m creating is only one out of many that are adding up to a life of creative work.
AG: It’s refreshing that you are so honest and open about the fact that writing music for you is an enormous struggle. I think a lot of younger composers especially are under the impression that if a composer’s career is going fantastically well, that he or she doesn’t struggle. In fact, the struggle can be much greater as the stakes get higher, just like you said.
AN: Yeah! I feel like there is something in our field, especially when you’re young, that you have to present yourself as being totally put together, totally 100 percent sure of yourself and your ideas, and that you like the music that you write.
It’s been wonderful to see what’s happened in the last several years with ideas of self-promotion, grass roots movements, and getting your work out there, and making it happen for yourself. If you don’t like the way the institutions are structured, make your own. And go find your own audience. I think this is fabulous for our field, the new bottom-up sort of approach.
But I do think that there needs to be a space where we don’t always know what we’re doing. I certainly don’t. Sometimes I feel like I have a strong coherent story that I can tell about my work, and sometimes I don’t. I think it’s an important message for everyone, that it’s O.K. to struggle and fail. It’s also O.K. to take a step back. I’ve done that many times in my brief career, of being like: I can’t be out in the world right now promoting my stuff. I need to be thinking about my stuff. I need to be thinking about what it is that I want. And I need to go through that internal process of re-evaluation, to work through my issues, and then eventually someday I’m going to be O.K. enough to broadcast that to the world. But what’s important right now is the thinking through the trajectory of my work without having to worry about how I broadcast that, and how it plays in the world.
I’m very much like a cave composer. Like I go in, and every once in awhile I come out with a piece, and every once in awhile, the piece is actually coherent and good. Then I go back, and… it’s a little bit old school for sure. It’s not this model of a composer being out in the world constantly. But it’s the only way that I can make work, so that’s what I do.
AG: It’s true, you are a quiet one! Everybody’s being pummeled all the time with: you have to do Twitter, you have to do this, you have to promote your work and so on. I’m curious what would you would say to a younger composer, like a 20-year old you who is being blasted by all that.
AN: I would say, if that’s your thing, and if you do that naturally, go for it. There’s so much you can do. But if that’s not your thing, don’t. And spend the time to really figure out what your thing is. I feel like there’s so much emphasis on promoting your thing that people forget to actually come up with the thing! Yes, selling your story is so important, but you need to have a good story to sell. You need to have an original story, and you need to go through that process of finding it. I would want to give young composers the permission to think, and to leave the world a little bit—to really inhabit a very personal space of making work. I also think there are lots of people out there who really are hungry for original work. We sometimes forget it when we look at all of the buzzy things in our field, and we look at who wins what prizes, and we look at who’s getting reviewed in what papers. We see who’s got the buzz, and who doesn’t. I think we do forget that there are a lot of people who are genuinely looking for that original voice out there. And those voices will be found.
If you’ve got something original to say, people will sit up and take notice. And I think that that has nothing to do with your presence on Twitter or any of those things. There’s a kind of rat race of competitions and stuff like that out there. But if you develop later, that’s fine. If you didn’t win an ASCAP award in your 20s, there’s hope for you in the future! The world definitely works differently now. Everything is shifting, and the old guard of power structures in our field is certainly changing. Maybe I’m an example of someone who is not out there in the world constantly, but people seem to know and value my work. I’m incredibly grateful for that.
AG: It’s not because of Twitter.
AN: It’s definitely not because of Twitter.