Category: Conversations

Caleb Burhans: Inner Voices

Posted on August 14, 2013 by Frank J. Oteri - Conversations, Spotlight

It might seem surprising—given all of Caleb Burhans’s accomplishments within multiple musical scenes as well as his notoriety—that it would take so long for a disc devoted exclusively to the musical compositions to be released. Yet when we spoke with him in late July, it was on the very day that Evensong, the first CD to have his name on the spine, was released on Cantaloupe Records. It was also just a few days after his daughter Fiona was born: “It’s rather insane; they’re obviously the two hugest things in my life thus far.” That’s saying a lot for someone who has appeared on stages ranging from Carnegie Hall to Madison Square Garden, has had works performed at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall as well as the Darmstadt International Music Institute, and was the subject of a New York Times profile nearly five years ago.

But after our conversation, it became clear that Burhans does not particularly seek the limelight, preferring to be—as he put it—“a cog in the machine” rather than “standing out front.” This attitude informs his approach to being a performer (he’d “rather play second violin or viola than first fiddle for the most part”) as well as how he creates material for most of his more popular music-oriented endeavors, such as itsnotyouitsme, his ambient indie rock duo with guitarist Grey Mcmurray, which has released three albums thus far. But the rarified world of notation-based music is inherently a non-collaborative process and its denizens expect compositions to come from a singular auteur. Yet while others might feel that writing a fixed score for other musicians to play is a very different process from creating music with others either in real time or in a recording studio, Burhans doesn’t draw distinctions between these modalities and is able to make music effortlessly in each of them. At the same time, however, the lessons he learned from his immersion into so many different kinds of musical experiences have also made him extremely meticulous about the material he puts out into the world, whatever the genre. So for him Evensong had to be far more than merely a collection of music works he composed over the past decade; it had to cohere and flow from track to track as an album.
While being open to such a broad range of stylistic aesthetics, both as a co-creator and as an interpreter could have yielded a compositional voice that is all over the map, Burhans’s approach to the music he commits to the page is remarkably singular and almost austere in its sonic purity:

“I made a conscious decision when I was in my early 20s to write the music I write now. … Because I have so many different outlets for playing different styles of music, I decided that at the end of the day I want to go home and write music that I want to listen to and create on my own. Because I do get to play some really thorny contemporary music and free jazz, when I go to write I want it to be very pristine and very simple.”

Simple, however, is something of a misnomer. Admittedly—compared with a great deal of contemporary music—a typical Burhans score looks relatively straight-forward on the page and a performance of it sounds relatively simple, but appearances can be deceptive. While pieces like his 2005 Iceman Stole The Sun or oh ye of little faith (2008), both scored for chamber orchestra, are largely created from cycles of repeated phrases, the musicians often stress different beats from one another and the various phrases frequently begin in different parts of the measure resulting in an ambiguous sense of downbeat. (See score sample below.) While in his Magnificat and Nunc Dittimus, both for treble voices and organ (2004), the voices mostly move in parallel motion with one another (in Nunc Dittimus they’re actually mostly in unison!), they often go against the rhythmic flow of what is being played on the organ. And then there are the glissandos that permeate all of Burhans’s music and give it a heightened sense of instability. When musicians pull it off it comes across as otherworldly, but doing so requires a high level of concentration as well as musicianship—an attention to subtle details, particularly pitch and rhythmic clarity:

“I’m very, very specific about everything. One of my pet peeves is that people think of glissandi as portamentos and so they do them at the last second; a glissando should last the entire duration of a pitch it’s coming from. I used to write much more dense microtonal music, but I got fed up with having to play pitches for people and say, ‘This is a sixth tone.’ I found that very inaccurate; it would never be the same across the board from player to player. But I found that if I say glissando from this note to this note within this duration, that’s the only way you can actually control that. … I’m very rigorous about keeping things precise…
“It can kind of put me in a bad position with some new music ensembles. When they have a million pieces to learn, they’ll see my piece and think, ‘Oh, It’s in D major and in 6/8—all right, fine; we’ll play through it once.’ Then they get to the concert and totally mess it up, either play it out of tune or forget a repeat. I get that; I’ve been there before. It looks simple, but it takes a different type of focus.”

One of the things that has helped Burhans get what he wants from performers who play his music is that he is so active as a performer himself, so there’s a lot of mutual empathy. As he acknowledges, “Being on the same page with someone else can really open things up not just in terms of execution but also in terms of interpretation.”

But it goes much deeper than that. Three of the seven tracks on Evensong feature Alarm Will Sound, a group he helped found and which he remains very much a part of. Another three feature the Trinity Wall Street Choir, a group he sang with when he first moved to New York City and in which his wife—soprano Martha Cluver—still sings. In fact, the only group featured on the present CD with which Burhans does not have an almost familial relationship is the Tarab Cello Ensemble, who commissioned his lush The Things Left Unsaid which they perform on the disc. But, of course, as an active violinist and violist (plus he also played cello as a teen), Burhans is completely in his element working with string players.

The week we spoke with him was definitely an auspicious one, but the best is undoubtedly yet to come. Aside from a series of eight caprices for electric guitar he created espressly for Mcmurray more than a decade ago that clock in at approximately 90 minutes in total, Burhans’s compositions have tended to be smaller scale. Most of his pieces hover between 5 and 15 minutes. But given his love for the Anglican choral music tradition and his adeptness at writing for voices, a large scale work for chorus seems inevitable at some point in the not-too-distant future. He also expressed interest in writing a full length concerto for itsnotyouitsme and orchestra, an activity that would bring some of the disparate parts of his musical universe even closer together. It will certainly be worth the wait.

oh ye of little faith... (do you know where your children are?), page 7

Page 7 of the score of Caleb Burhans’s oh ye of little faith… (do you know where your children are?)
© 2008 Burning Hands Publishing (ASCAP). Reprinted with permission of Caleb Burhans and Good Child Music.

Carman Moore: Curiosity Is the Strongest Engine

Posted on August 1, 2013 by Frank J. Oteri - Conversations, Cover

A conversation at Moore’s home in New York City
June 13, 2013—3:00 p.m.
Transcribed by Julia Lu
Video Presentation by Molly Sheridan

Back in 1994, people started playing “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” a game in which people try to figure out how anyone who has ever appeared in a Hollywood film connects to the actor Kevin Bacon. If there were a music version of such a game, it could very well be “Six Degrees of Carman Moore” since Moore—in a career spanning decades—connects to everyone from Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen to John Lennon and Aretha Franklin.

As a music critic for The Village Voice (a job he started in the 1960s while still studying composition at Juilliard with Luciano Berio and Vincent Persichetti), Moore was the first in an illustrious line of composers who covered the contemporary music scene for that paper—before Tom Johnson, Greg Sandow, and Kyle Gann. In 1968, together with Kermit Moore and Dorothy Rudd Moore (who were husband and wife but not related to Carman), Noel DaCosta, and Talib Rasul Hakim, he founded the Society of Black Composers (SBC). During its brief three years of existence, SBC produced an eclectic series of concerts and lecture tours which helped to establish the careers of several important African-American composers, including Olly Wilson, Wendell Logan, Adolphus Hailstork, and Alvin Singleton, who has remained Carman Moore’s lifelong friend. (In 2005, Moore wrote the text for Singleton’s choral work TRUTH.) In the early 1970s, Moore wrote lyrics as well as the string arrangements for a solo album by Felix Cavaliere (from the rock band The Young Rascals); a song Moore wrote with Cavaliere, “Rock and Roll Outlaws,” appeared on an album so titled by the British group Foghat. Moore’s own music first received a huge amount of attention in January 1975 when successful premieres of two orchestra commissions were performed by the San Francisco Symphony and the New York Philharmonic less than 24 hours apart. The following month, Dell published a book by Moore about the iconic blues singer Bessie Smith.

In the 1980s, Moore’s Skymusic Ensemble—a group which evolved out of years of informal improv sessions at the legendary Judson Memorial Church in New York—toured everywhere from Geneva to Hong Kong, including a stint at Milan’s La Scala Opera House to perform Moore’s score for a dance choreographed by Alvin Ailey, Goddess of the Waters. Throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, Moore wrote music for many noted choreographers—including Garth Fagan, Anna Sokolow, Donald Byrd, Elaine Summers, Cleo Parker Robinson, and Ruby Shang—as well as film scores for several PBS documentaries. Moore’s elaborate Mass for the 21st Century, first presented by Lincoln Center Out of Doors in 1994 in a performance featuring Cissy Houston (Whitney’s mother), has since been presented at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Cape Town, South Africa. Among Moore’s most recent pieces is the Concerto for Ornette (inspired by Ornette Coleman’s harmolodics) which the New Juilliard Ensemble premiered, with Coleman in attendance, in September 2011.

Yet despite this broad and impressive range of accomplishments, Carman Moore—unlike Kevin Bacon—is not a household name. In fact, many people are unaware of him even within the contemporary music community. Part of this might have to do with the fact that when Moore was first coming up the ranks, the uptown vs. downtown battlefield was all ablaze and Moore wrote music that was somehow too downtown for uptown as well as too uptown for downtown. He also unapologetically embraced jazz and pop and every possible hybrid musical style. As he explained when we spoke to him in his cramped but homey apartment in an old building smack in the midst of all the high-rises that litter the Lincoln Center area, musical “crossover” does not have to be a by-product of opportunistic marketing, but is an authentic response to the world we now live in:

I think the concept of crossover is key to the American experience. It’s just not only in crossing over the Atlantic and the slave ship, but it’s just happening all the time. Living in New York City, you’re constantly listening to somebody else’s language and looking at somebody else’s face, looking at mixes. And it’s hard not to be amazed about some of the results of that. The only thing I can tell people relative to that is the things that seem to be crossing over, make sure you know where they are crossing over from. So it also takes you back to the study of roots of all kinds. You keep finding yourself plunging back into the beginnings of worlds.

Another reason that Moore might not be better known can be traced to his own reticence to walk down the traditional career paths that composers take. By nature, he’s a non-joiner. He’s never signed a record contract or a publishing arrangement. He has also not been particularly adept at self-publishing and self-releasing his own work. As a result, very little of his music has been publicly available. At the same time, away from the perpetual scrutinizing gaze of official arbiters of taste, as well as fans who sometimes deem every deviation from an established stylistic pattern to be a misstep, Moore’s music has been able to evolve on its own terms.

I don’t have much follow through. I think I must have been avoiding it. At the end of the performance in San Francisco, a Deutsche Grammophon guy showed up backstage and put a contract in front of me. And I swear to god, I didn’t sign it. I’ve thought about that ever since. Maybe it’s because I was a child of the ‘60s, I just didn’t trust being famous in that way. It actually may have helped me to not get locked into whatever it was I was doing at a particular time. … I did have the sense that a lot of the people I was writing about as a critic had gotten trapped in having a fandom that expected them to keep writing the same way. They didn’t seem to be able to dodge that bullet. I just didn’t want that to happen. I could have gotten stuck writing gospel in symphony orchestra pieces or something, I don’t know.

However, Carman Moore has begun making a more conscious effort to get his music out into the world. Downloads of recordings for many of his compositions are now available through his own website. In August 2009, former Maine state politician and jazz bassist Kyle W. Jones presented the first Carman Moore Music Festival on the remote Swan’s Island, located off the coast of Maine. But the latest edition of the festival will take place in New York City at the West Park Arts Center (October 18-19, 2013). Highlights include a repeat performance of The Quiet Piece (which premiered in May 2013) and a brand new dramatic song cycle about the wide-reaching effects of child abuse called Girl of the Diamond Mountain, which Moore composed jointly through improvisation with Danish vocalist/lyricist Lotte Arnsbjerg. Perhaps now that stylistic hybrids and a DIY sensibility have become par for the course for many of today’s most successful composers, Carman Moore will rightly be seen as a true pioneer of 21st-century American music.

*
Frank J. Oteri: In your autobiography, you say two things about being an artist which are somehow contradictory, yet also complimentary. You assert that an artist is a rebellious individual, someone who strikes out on his or her own path no matter what people think. At the same time, you speak to the importance of an artist being a force for bringing society together.

Carman Moore on the Street.
Photo by Lotte Arnsbjerg.

Carman Moore: Beneath the surface, what the creative artist does is bring society together to think in a new way. I have a piece in my Mass for the 21st Century which is called, “I Want to Think in a New Way.” I don’t know if it was sour grapes, but we just came through a period in music composition when many composers were totally happy to chase away an audience that would get and love what they’re doing.
Once I was in my teacher Luciano Berio’s place over in New Jersey and Karlheinz Stockhausen was there, so I interviewed him a little bit. I was writing for the The Village Voice at that point. And I said, “What would you do if people started to really like your music and really understood it and really got behind you?” And he said, “Well, I’d have to rethink myself. I wouldn’t like that at all.” Berio, on the other hand, didn’t have that problem. He was really fascinated with the Beatles and their being popular and what that meant. And that they were writing really good music. I mean, anybody with ears could hear that they were really musical and that something was special happening there. So he did some variations on Beatles pieces for Cathy Berberian, who was then his wife. He thought it was sort of fun. Stockhausen went on to explain that he had sat in stadiums with the Hitler Youth where everybody was singing the same song and enjoying singing together. That really put him off. I think he was really torn.

FJO: Of course Stockhausen witnessed firsthand how popularity and conformity led to one of the worst horrors in human history. Which is why, as you make clear in your book, that it is just as important to be a rebel as it is to bring people together. That reminds me of something else you wrote: “Everything society at the time said I wasn’t supposed to do, I had to try. Everything I thought society had already decided about me because of my race, I had to subvert.”

CM: Well, the whole business of trying things out was just mainly about me trying to gain some self-knowledge. I grew up with a family that totally adored me. My grandma just couldn’t get enough of me. I lived in Elyria, Ohio, and she lived in the next town five miles away—Lorain, Ohio. Somehow I’d get on the bus and go down there to visit her, and I would walk onto her porch, and she’d say, “There he is. I worship the very ground you walk on.” I hadn’t done anything. So I was used to that, to just being appreciated. I didn’t encounter a lot of race prejudice, but I knew it existed and I had read about it. There were fables around, spread by white culture, like black people could not run distances. Obviously before I was born Jesse Owens had already proven that black people could run sprints. And then the Ethiopians and the Kenyans showed up. So I wanted to try some things that are supposedly identified with white people, like tennis, just to see if there was some reason I would not be a good tennis player just because I was black. I was curious about myself relative to the world.

FJO: And you’re still playing tennis, and you’re apparently pretty good at it.

CM: Yes and I have won championships. But I’m not great anymore; I have sore knees after I play for a little while.

FJO: This curiosity about who you are relative to the world ties into your involvement in music as well, because at the time there were also certain assumptions about who played certain kinds of music. There was definitely a supposition, at the time you were first getting involved in music, that if you were African American you would be involved with jazz and not with classical music. And while your music certainly debunks any definition of genre, it is not really jazz.

CM: Right. Truth to tell, my mother was a marvelous classical player, but she also played boogie-woogie and Duke Ellington’s pieces a lot. She just loved them. And she talked about Art Tatum. But she played classical music on the radio. She’d play the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on Saturday afternoons. It sounded great. So by the time I was aware that I was supposed to be doing something, I was already doing something else, you know. I was already totally enamored of so-called classical music. But I love jazz.

FJO: But while you immersed yourself in jazz as well as classical music, you never identified as a jazz musician.

Louis Armstrong (left) and Bob Thiele (middle) with Carman Moore (right)

CM: No, because I actually never learned an instrument that I could [play jazz on]. I learned the trumpet a little bit, but they needed a French horn player in high school. So I took up the French horn. And cello. The literature was very specifically classical, so I just followed that where it led. I studied at Oberlin Conservatory, which was a few miles away. I took lessons there in French horn from Martin Morris, who was the second chair in the Cleveland Orchestra, and cello lessons from someone whose name I can’t remember anymore, who was a student there. And I studied conducting with Cecil Isaacs. So I went into that music naturally. It wasn’t an example of my deciding to try classical music because I’m not supposed to. I was already there.

FJO: What about writing music criticism? Back then, and even to this day, most of the people who are writing about music in this country are white. That’s actually true for jazz as well as for classical music.

CM: Yeah.

FJO: I find it fascinating that there was such an “anything goes” attitude in the early days of The Village Voice. What a different publication it has become today! But you became their first new music critic, long before Tom Johnson, Greg Sandow, or Kyle Gann, which I think a lot of people today are not aware of. I’m curious to know how that happened.

CM: My first touch with The Village Voice was entering an annual poetry contest that they had. I was studying at Juilliard. So I entered a couple poems in there, and Marianne Moore was one of the judges. I won second place. At any rate, I went to the Voice, and I said, “You don’t have anybody writing about new music here.” And so they said, “Would you like to?” I mean, they weren’t paying anybody anything serious, so I said, “Sure, I’d really love to start.” And so I started. I found that it was really exciting writing about music because that way I could study music all around town and go to concerts for free. One of the first things I did was write an obit on Henry Cowell who had just died.

FJO: At that point Leighton Kerner was already there.

CM: Right. But he just wrote about opera and the regular fare. So I started with just new music, but I started adding other things. Popular [music] was really happening. So I said I’d like to add that. And jazz. So I started a column called “New Time” in which I’d just write about whatever I wanted to.

FJO: So they weren’t covering pop music at all at that point, or jazz?

CM: Well, not that I knew of. They started covering pop music sort of informally during the time I was there. Richard Goldstein and Robert Christgau had started seriously writing about popular music.

FJO: But that was also after you were already there.

CM: Right.

Carman Moore’s studio set up, like most composers nowadays, includes a digital keyboard and a computer. Photo by Molly Sheridan.

FJO: What’s also interesting about your stint at The Village Voice is not only were you the first person to write about new music there, you were a composer of new music who was writing about it. At that time, people like Harold Schonberg at The New York Times said that if you wrote about music not only should you not have a public career as a musician, you also should not be friends with other musicians. There was a strongly held belief that there were too many conflicts of interest. You would somehow taint the objectivity of your criticism, as if criticism could ever be objective. So did you find any conflicts in being on both sides and how did you handle them?

CM: I certainly thought about it a lot. Of course Robert Schumann had done it a hundred and whatever years previously. But I think it held me back a little bit, because I wasn’t as aggressive about pursuing my career as a composer as I might have been if I were hard put to get some things done. But very soon I even reviewed pieces by some of my Juilliard teachers. It was sort of a challenge to just react to a piece, take some notes, be good at writing in the dark, and then just put on the blinders and write and see what comes out. I didn’t pan any of my teachers. But I would choose something in a concert that I liked better or say, “I have a problem with this,” or “I didn’t really get this.” Hugo Weisgall had an opera called The Stronger. I didn’t love the opera, but there were a couple of arias that I liked, and so I spoke about them first, and then trashed the rest.

FJO: I can’t imagine you trashing anything.

CM: Well, I didn’t really.

FJO: But to play a Harold Schoenbergian devil’s advocate here, might you have written bad reviews of pieces by your teachers if they hadn’t been your teachers?

CM: Well, I might have been a little more negative. But truth to tell, my teachers were Luciano Berio, Vincent Persichetti, and Hall Overton, who was my first teacher. And I loved their music. So I didn’t have any problem there.

FJO: What about people who might be potentially performing your music?

CM: I didn’t worry about that much. I wrote for the Voice until about ’75 or ’76 when I really got tired of making the deadlines. I got lots of performances during the ‘70s. I was getting more performances than I really had time for. So I didn’t send things out much. It was many years that passed before I even understood how much composers typically send their stuff around. But as a result of reviewing these people, one of the really great things that happened for me as a composer was I was just able to try out my own sense of my own work against all this stuff I was hearing. I was hearing everybody’s work, not just in contemporary classical music, but in jazz and pop and everything. And I discovered the fascination—which I still have—of getting into somebody else’s mind. In other words, being a listener and turning myself over to the composer and to the musical experience, and letting it have its way with me. I would just take notes on how my listening experience was going. Then once a year, in my column, I would always remind people that I am just a listener who has a lot of experience. I encouraged everybody to go listen to music, to turn themselves over to the experience, and then respond. That is criticism, as far as I’m concerned.

Carman Moore’s upright piano is littered with scores of composers he deeply admires such as Haydn and Debussy. Photo by Molly Sheridan.

One of the reasons I enjoyed being a music critic was just that experience of taking that voyage into somebody else’s way of thinking. Now I think it scares a lot of people because they think that they’ll get kidnapped mentally and never come back. But I like the idea of seeing where somebody else is coming from, and how they got to these notes. Now very often, in my criticism of somebody’s work, it’s clear that they got there fraudulently. But fraudulently means that they just were afraid to let me really hear what they would really like to do with this material. Or they just wanted to impress the listener with how much they know and how complicated they can be. And it ended up that their music would sound like a mess, even with some people of talent. It’s like a novelist who has a few obviously really potent and interesting characters that they force to behave a way in which those characters would not behave. So a lot of my criticism was simply judging that.

FJO: But overall it seems that most of the criticism you wrote was positive.

CM: Well, when I decided what I was going to hear, I didn’t go to something that I sort of suspected was going to be a mess and would waste my time. So in that sense, I also was being my own ideal listener. A listener wouldn’t choose to go to hear something that they think is going to be crap. Usually, when I would go to something that I would think I would not like to hear as the result of somebody else saying, “Oh, you gotta hear this thing,” I’d go and be disappointed. Maybe that was their thing and not my thing. But it is quite possible that you could start getting it after a while.

FJO: This brings us to that loaded word—crossover. Nowadays, among most people in the critical community as well as others who are—for lack of a better term—the gatekeepers in the music business, that word is mostly used as an insult. It is pejorative. If something is labeled crossover either it lacks authenticity or it comes out of a really cynical commercialism—a crass attempt at appealing to different markets without really understanding any of them. But for you, the word is all-encompassing and all-embracing. You use it to describe your ethnicity, because your ancestors were Native American and European as well as African. You also use it to describe your own music, and it’s even the name of your own autobiography.

Carman Moore, Joel Sachs, and Ornette Coleman at Juilliard following the premiere of Moore’s Concerto for Ornette.
Photo by Pearl Perkins.

CM: I think the concept of crossover is key to the American experience. It’s not only in crossing over the Atlantic and the slave ship, but it’s just happening all the time. Living in New York City, you’re constantly listening to somebody else’s language and looking at somebody else’s face, looking at mixes. And it’s hard not to be amazed about some of the results of that. The only thing I can tell people relative to that is the things that seem to be crossing over, make sure you know where they are crossing over from. So it also takes you back to the study of roots of all kinds. You keep finding yourself plunging back into the beginnings of worlds. For example, tap dancing apparently was a mix of Irish step dancers with ex-slaves laying out railroad track. It was just an African-American rhythmization of things that the Irish guys were doing. It happens all over the place. In the ‘60s, some of my African-American pals were saying white people don’t have a right to be playing this music, they’re not playing this music right, whatever. It’s crazy because if it’s authentically produced, authentically composed, and authentically put out there, it’s fascinating.

The opening page of Carman Moore’s The Mystery of Tao for string trio and synthesizer.
© 2001 by Carman Moore and reprinted with his permission. Click image to enlarge

FJO: It’s interesting that both your own music, as well as what you wrote about music, has been so concerned with breaking the barriers between styles and labels. Some people claim that it’s basic human nature to put labels on things in order to understand them better. But I would dare say that putting labels on things is a particular trait of people who are in the business of writing criticism—whether it’s music criticism, art criticism, or literary criticism. All these names of movements come from somebody writing about them and giving them names as a kind of shorthand. Then the marketers run with it. If you like this, you’ll like that. But, of course, if you’re writing “new music” or writing about “new music,” all that means is that it’s new. The term doesn’t connote any particular pedigree. But people have always made assumptions about pedigree, especially during the late ‘60s within the realm of what we call—for lack of a better term—contemporary classical music. That was the heyday of uptown vs. downtown.

CM: I covered both sides and I actually wrote in both styles, just to see what it felt like partly. I actually used to live at what was called the Judson Student House, which was connected to Judson Church, which is still on Washington Square. It was a wild time to be there. Among other things, I had the key to the church, and they had a big organ up there. I used to go there and just sort of improvise with people. I started forming my group, the Skymusic Ensemble, from some of those first things. Some people were just banging on bottles and stuff like that. I discovered that you could just take off and you don’t have to have a tune. You don’t have to have chords or anything. You just sort of find the music. I later discovered that it’s better if you write some things down, some guide posts.

The first page of the manuscript score for Carman Moore’s Righteous Heroes: Sacred Spaces.
© 1987 by Carman Moore and reprinted with his permission.
Photo by Pearl Perkins.

Then I was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic to write Wild Fires and Field Songs which is, in effect, a three-movement symphony. That was after having interviewed Pierre Boulez. We got into discussing improvisation, and he said, “You wouldn’t invite somebody over to watch you take a piss, would you?” That was what he had to say about improvisation as such. But at any rate, I wrote that piece virtually at the same time as I wrote Gospel Fuse, which is a work for gospel quartet. The lead singer was Cissy Houston when we did it with Ozawa and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. I was just finishing that and the Philharmonic wanted to commission me to do this other piece. They’re worlds apart. And I just loved that. That was really exciting. Of course, Gospel Fuse was a crossover piece, because it was a two-movement work for symphony orchestra and gospel quartet.

FJO: That was the piece that was originally supposed to be done by Aretha Franklin

.
CM: Exactly. But I think there were people around her—I call them goons—who wouldn’t let her pick up the phone. I needed to be able to go back and forth with her. So at any rate, I kept composing, and finally—talk about crossover—Peter Yarrow [of Peter, Paul & Mary] popped up in the class I was teaching at the New School downtown; it was an orchestration class. He didn’t come to it very often, because he was always on the road. But we became good friends, and he was good friends with Seiji Ozawa. So at any rate, that commission came about through that. And then I told you about the Boulez one. It’s not 12-tone, but it invades his world of sound. I just really love the challenge of doing that over here, and doing this over there, and trying to make them wonderful.

It turned out that Gospel Fuse was scheduled for one day in February, and then I was called not long after that and found out that the New York Philharmonic had scheduled Wild Fires and Field Songs for the very next night. Now, the odds against that are infinite. So at any rate, I finished the two pieces and started rehearsing. It suddenly occurred to me that I could bomb on two coasts at the same time! I could just be clearing the tomatoes off my face from San Francisco, and get a fresh batch in New York City. But they both turned out really great.

FJO: Taking into account the time differences, you had only about 19 hours to get back to New York from San Francisco.
CM: I also had to be at that last rehearsal in New York. So that was a red eye flight back to just go to the rehearsal. So I was a mess, but it was beautiful.

FJO: No tomatoes?

CM: No tomatoes. No, no, no, no. Kudos! I had become friends with John Lennon and at the New York performance he showed up in the lobby before the performance with May Pang, who I think he was sort of going with at that time. Then Yoko Ono shows up from the other direction with this guy. I was with my then wife. And there the six of us were, in the lobby downstairs, just before the beginning of this concert. And John said, “Do I look okay? I’ve never been to one of these before.” He had this sort of black suit on. And I said, “You’ve never been to a symphony concert before?” “No.” He had an “Elvis Lives!” button on and I said, “I think you’re gonna enjoy this.”

FJO: You also played music with John Lennon, too, right? But none of it got recorded.

CM: There was one evening I wanted to interview Yoko for I forget which album of hers. So I brought my little cassette recorder in. They were living in the Village at that time; that was just before they moved uptown. At any rate, I put my recording device down on the table. It definitely was not one of these digital items of today; it would run out at a certain point. So she and I were talking and talking and talking, and he would break in every now and then, and say, “Yoko, you know, the man’s trying to help you. You know, don’t turn everything into bloody circuses.” Because she said, “Why don’t you take the page and cut it down the middle and put me on this side and John on the other.” So that went along and, of course, John is passing a joint. I wasn’t paying any attention. I was just trying to be polite. Well, I was more than polite by the end of that thing. I got all my stuff down and the tape recorder ran out. And he said, “Would you like to jam?” I said, “Sure, right.” They had two rooms—it was sort of like a loft space, but it was on the ground floor: a great big room in the front, then a great big bedroom. He had a pump organ there. He got out his acoustic guitar, sat on the bed, cross-legged, and off we went. I remember it was great music. But, obviously, even if I had wanted to record it, I had run out of tape.

FJO: I’ve known you and have known about your music for years, but the thing that keeps amazing me about all these stories—you being the first person to write about new music for The Village Voice, you having premieres by the San Francisco Symphony and New York Phil conducted by Ozawa and Boulez less than 24 hours apart, you jamming with John Lennon—is that despite you having all these connections to people who are household names, you yourself are not a household name. Yet you connect to all these things that are central to the story of music of the past century. You could say, “O.K., people who write contemporary classical music are not household names any more. We’re no longer living in the era where someone like Aaron Copland would be on the cover of Time magazine.” But your music embraces so much more than that, so that’s not it. It’s somewhat provocative to ask why that is, and it’s probably something you can’t answer. But it just seems to me, given all these anecdotes, that you ought to be much more famous.

CM: I’ve thought about this a lot. I don’t have much follow through. I think I must have been avoiding it. At the end of the performance in San Francisco, a Deutsche Grammophon guy showed up backstage and put a contract in front of me. And I swear to god, I didn’t sign it. I’ve thought about that ever since. Maybe it’s because I was a child of the ‘60s, I just didn’t trust being famous in that way. It actually may have helped me to not get locked into whatever it was I was doing at a particular time. But that’s a question I have wrestled with ever since. Then when I started the Skymusic Ensemble, a lot of my work couldn’t be played by anybody else but them.

FJO: But in that era there were many composers who primarily wrote music for their own ensembles to play, and they gained quite a bit of notoriety from it—Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Meredith Monk. Even to some extent Charles Wuorinen and Harvey Sollberger forming the Group for Contemporary Music was a do-it-yourself initiative and actually helped get their music out there. Also self-publishing and releasing your own recordings was definitely an ethos that started in the ’60 and lasted throughout the ‘70s. You were certainly part of that generation, but back then you didn’t really release much of your music. That same ethos is pervasive once again nowadays, and thankfully now you’re actually releasing a lot of your music.

Alvin Singleton (left) with Alex Shapiro (middle) and Carman Moore (right) in 2011.
Photo by Norberto Valle, Jr.

CM: I’m finally getting there. Somebody who’s been helping me a lot is Alvin Singleton. He’s a marvelous composer and a dear friend of mine.

FJO: In the last few years there has even been an annual Carman Moore Music Festival.

CM: There’s a friend of mine who is not only a bass player, but also a lawyer and a state senator from Maine, who is just nuts about my music, so he has been doing everything he can to foster it. He’s the one whose idea it was to have a Carman Moore Music Festival. I would never think of doing a thing like that. But it’s about to happen again and there will be several pieces done on it. This time, two days of this will happen in New York City. At any rate, I’m very excited about the music I’m writing right now. I just did a piece called The Quiet Piece for the Skymusic Ensemble with a guy doing Tibetan singing bowls plus a marvelous dancer.

FJO: I’m very eager to see and hear those live performances. I’m also very excited about the recordings that are finally becoming available of a lot of your earlier pieces. For years the only music of yours that was available commercially was one piece that had been released on a Folkways compilation in the 1970s and another piece on one side of a CRI LP. And Folkways and CRI were hardly commercial labels.

CM: I know. I recognize that this has been my path. My path has been avoiding things, and that’s all I can think of, because fame has avoided me. Over at the Philharmonic, they have portraits of every composer [they’ve worked with] going back to Tchaikovsky. I happen to be in between John Cage and Charles Wuorinen! I’ve gone back to listen to some of that early stuff, and I’ve said, “Wow!” But I do remember having been such a perfectionist at that time that I wouldn’t let anything come out that wasn’t, not only written perfectly, but performed perfectly. It was a big mistake. I could have gotten world famous easily, any time in there. I recognize that now.

FJO: Terry Riley’s story has many parallels with yours, I think. He did sign a contract with a big record company. Columbia Records put out two albums of his music and another one with John Cale. But they wanted another record and then he resisted the career path. He ran off to India to study classical Indian singing, to become a disciple rather than a star. But at that time there seemed to be only two paths. There was either the downtown do-it-yourself path of starting your own ensemble or the uptown path of teaching at a university and making connections to ensembles and larger institutions that way. But you taught also. You had your hands in all these different things, and yet you somehow remained an outsider, which goes back to the very beginning of this conversation—doing it your own way instead of doing things the way others say you should.

Carman Moore in Central Park.
Photo by Lotte Arnsbjerg.

CM: It may come out of that mindset. Who knows? I mean, I did have the sense that a lot of the people I was writing about as a critic had gotten trapped in having a fandom that expected them to keep writing the same way. They didn’t seem to be able to dodge that bullet. I just didn’t want that to happen. That’s the only sort of conscious thing I can think of relative to that. I could have gotten stuck writing gospel in symphony orchestra pieces or something, I don’t know. I feel I’ve lived a lot of different lives. I’m fascinated with many paths. My curiosity is probably the strongest engine running inside me.

FJO: Well, you know, there’s another part to it, I think, as well. It’s interesting that you didn’t bring this up, but I’m going to. I mentioned Terry Riley because I also see a commonality in terms of his egolessness. There’s a lack of a drive in a way that I think comes from a sense of community, the other part of that original dichotomy between being an individual and then being a part of a community. You also actively collaborate with other composers. You’ve written lyrics for other people’s music. You mentioned Alvin Singleton. You did the libretto for Truth. You did lyrics for a whole album by Felix Cavaliere from The Young Rascals. You’ve been willing to take a more back seat role, not that writing lyrics is a back seat—some people identify with lyrics more than music and there are famous lyricists—but getting famous as a lyricist doesn’t seem to have been your motive in those collaborations.

CM: I’m very sure of myself. It’s the truth of the matter. But I’ve thought about this question a lot. I come from a large family. There are eight children. I’m the oldest. I very often had to just make sure everybody else got fed. I had five sisters. So I may have been taught to make sure that everybody else got their stuff before I come in because I might step on somebody.

FJO: So in terms of paths to take, what to do, what not to do, do you feel you have advice to offer other composers?

CM: No, because it depends upon what you are capable of. The key thing, I think, is to find some way to figure out what you’re capable of relative to what you’re trying to do. There are a series of things people should find out about themselves as they emerge, and therefore they should try out things that they don’t know about, because those are the roads that you need to go down. So there are two roads: One is to go down the road of your strengths, the other is to go down the road of your weaknesses and see what that sounds like. And don’t pretend.

One thing I discovered while composing early on was that there were stretches when I’d be composing, I’d write something and listen to it, and I’d get embarrassed. But I discovered soon after that, that those are the important parts. That’s you. When I would feel embarrassed, I was in a situation in which I was not defended. I was sort of hung out to dry. As I came up, those two schools—the uptown and downtown—were strong. And they sounded and behaved in particular ways. As I was writing my music, I was aware of this. And of course, because of being a critic, I heard everything, so I knew what people were doing. But there were stretches in which I just didn’t sound like either of those things. Those were ones in which I was slightly embarrassed about it. Maybe this is not very professional, but I would go ahead and write it and have it performed, and see what it sounded like. And that was good. So I say to emerging composers and to people who want to compose: When you hit one of those spots, check it out. It may be because you have no business writing that, but it may be that’s your voice.

Carman Moore at home making brownies in his kitchen. Photo by Pearl Perkins.

Paula Matthusen: Attention to Light

Posted on July 17, 2013 by Alexandra Gardner - Conversations, Spotlight

The work of composer Paula Matthusen draws attention to the way sound and space interact with one another. Her use of light within performance settings plays an important role in focusing the audience’s listening experience, and in creating a sense of space. Whether a composition is realized as an electronic installation or written out in a score for performance by other musicians, the physicality of whatever sounds may be involved—and specifically how they behave within a given context—are always important considerations.

Matthusen’s installation works often involve hand-built electronics in addition to extensive computer programming; she says that she enjoys the sort of “inefficiency” and “Pandora’s box” nature of the results. She likens soldering to knitting, explaining, “I like the repetition of it. I like the heat. I like the smell. It’s fun to see something physical come to life like that.” Her instrumental works, which are specially tailored to the personalities and abilities of the performers for whom they are written, also have a handmade aspect to them.

For portable, eight performers walk around a darkened space wielding flashlights as well as vintage suitcases fitted with radio receivers and transmitters that produce sound based on the location of the performers relative to one another. In nacht nacht nacht nacht nacht nacht nacht, three performers crank away at music boxes while four others strike matches, offering glimpses of the unfurling paper rolls and providing counterpoint to the fragile music box tones.

Given Matthusen’s aesthetic inclinations, she’s the ideal person to teach composition through an experiential approach involving listening, creation, and performance. The Experimental Music class at Wesleyan University (where she is an assistant professor of music) is the very same course that Alvin Lucier taught for over 40 years. (No pressure!) Matthusen actually considers Lucier to be one of her musical heroes. Her 2012 composition for the Bang on a Can All-Stars, the ontology of an echo, features field recordings from inside the Old Croton Aqueduct that were created by re-capturing recordings of the performers in a manner consistent with Lucier’s I am sitting in a room.

Flying in the face of what she calls the “cultural fantasy” of synchronization, the sense of pulse in Matthusen’s music is often irregular and broken. Events line up (or don’t) based on organic structures that are set rolling and allowed to run their course. By stepping aside and allowing the music to unfold naturally, she finds satisfaction in the resulting creative discoveries. “It’s a matter of being open to something that is completely surprising,” she explains, “but then also being aware enough to be able to appreciate when it actually happens.” By reveling in the small details and rough edges of her musical landscapes, she creates musical environments that heighten perceptions of the ephemeral nature of sound, and ensures that surprises can be found at practically every turn.

Stacy Garrop: With a Story to Tell

Posted on July 1, 2013 by Molly Sheridan - Conversations, Cover

In the garden at the Church of the Ascension
New York, New York
April 17, 2013—2 p.m.
Filmed, condensed, and edited by Molly Sheridan
Transcribed by Julia Lu
Poster image by SnoStudios Photography

Stacy Garrop is a composer of remarkable balance and discipline. Her composition catalog neatly covers all manner of ensembles, and her subject matter has ranged from Medusa to Eleanor Roosevelt. She may not be one to aggressively sell her music at cocktail parties, but she won’t shy away from cold calling performers from her desk the next day. She teaches her students to identify their weaknesses and figure out how to manage them. It’s a lesson she applied to herself first, pinpointing personal composition hurdles and designing neatly efficient ways to combat them.

When we met during rehearsals for her choral work Love’s Philosophy in New York this past April, she moved between performance preparation with the singers in the Church of the Ascension sanctuary and on-camera conversation in the venue’s garden courtyard, fielding questions about her music and her career with an easy confidence but a notable lack of pretension. Those character traits are perhaps what attracted her to the Midwest, where she now makes her home. Though raised in California, her education brought her to the University of Michigan, University of Chicago, and finally Indiana University. She eventually settled in Chicago, where she now heads the composition department at the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University.

Stacy Garrop is also a composer with stories to tell. The role of narrative—whether indirectly or overtly applied to the final composition—is a central factor in her typical working process. In it, she had found a way to shape and chart the sonic image she wants her music to ultimately project to the world beyond her studio.

When all is considered, Garrop appreciates that it’s a mix of many factors that have contributed to the music she makes and the success she’s achieved, but ultimately it hinges on what she is willing to do for the work herself:

I think you not only have to have the discipline to write and to get back to people and to be on top of your website, but you also have to be disciplined about chasing down opportunities. You can’t just sit back and think that maybe a publisher will do that for you, or maybe your recording will get out there and, miraculously, everyone will want to do the piece. I just don’t know if one competition or one recording or one piece can change your path all that much….In general, these careers are slow building. They’re one step at a time, and you have to be organized to make that happen.

They are steps Garrop keeps taking. The evening following our interview, the Voices of Ascension performance of Love’s Philosophy won her The Sorel Medallion in Choral Composition.

***

Molly Sheridan: You’ve spoken often about the place of narrative in your work, so I thought we might begin by discussing how important that is in terms of your working method, and how vital it is for you to communicate that to the audience. Are you demonstrating that storyline to them in the music and the program notes, or is that simply a private part of your own working process?

Stacy Garrop: As a composer, I’m both a visual and auditory person. The visual part likes to see a story in my head—like a movie, basically. It’s not that I’m a movie composer, because I’m far from it, but I feel like if I can tell myself a story, and have myself follow that story as I’m writing, then that narrative will help me guide the shape of that piece. Sometimes I think it’s important to the audience: If it’s about Medusa, I want people to understand that Medusa is going from being lovely to being hideous. But other times the narrative is just mostly for myself. So I have a piece called Frammenti which is basically five miniature movements, but each is based on an abstract idea. For me, what was important was the narrative within each movement—Is it going to get louder? Is it going to get softer? Is it going to get boisterous?—whatever those characteristics were. In that case, I don’t care if the audience gets it or not. That’s not the concern of the piece.

MS: I heard you speaking about the working process surrounding Becoming Medusa in a promotional video, and you mentioned sketching it out and thinking about it narratively in a way that I would imagine a novelist might. What is your working process in that case?

SG: I do like to use charts a lot. In years past, especially when I was working on Becoming Medusa, I had a picture where she was half beautiful and half ugly. I put that up right in front of me as I composed. But I also have a line graph that basically shows tension along the y-axis and time along the x-axis. If it starts with Medusa being ugly, because it’s a foreshadowing, then I’ll have a big spike on my chart and that might say “introduction.” Then I get to the A material, and the tension is now very low. So I can track and write out the form of the piece before I actually start putting notes down. But usually I try to put a few notes down—at least get motives, some idea of what I want to play with. Then that starts to suggest more and more of a shape to me. Usually by the end of the first couple of days, I have the shape down, and more often than not, when I go back and look at it [after the piece is done], I’ve actually attained that shape. Earlier on, I wasn’t so good at that. But now I seem to be doing much better.

Garrop explains the graphs she uses while composing.

MS: What are you actually thinking about when you’re in that very, very early process and you’re making shapes and charts?

SG: The worst part of composing for me is the beginning of a piece. I can’t get settled. If the apartment is messy, I have to clean it. I feel like I have to get my mind in order. And if there’s anything distracting me, I’ll use that as an excuse to run away from the paper. But what I have learned over the years is to just get myself to sit down long enough to brainstorm on a blank sheet of paper—not even manuscript paper, just written ideas about what I want for the piece. So for Medusa, I wanted to tell the story that she starts off the piece as a beautiful woman, who then taunts a goddess. Then the goddess turns her into the gorgon that we know. That’s a slightly different story than the Medusa that we know about from the movies. That gave me enough to say, okay, this is what I’m going to do in words. Now I can sit down at my keyboard and start just noodling around and see what kind of ideas I can come up with from there.

MS: Because your attraction to words is coming up again, why not use words? Why use music to tell these stories?

SG: Actually I’ve started to try to write short stories. I take the El to and from work every day in Chicago, and it’s about a 45- to 60-minute train ride. I absolutely love science fiction short stories, so I started trying to write them. It’s really hard to have that kind of control over words. I have that control, I feel, over music, but not at all in words. So right now it’s a really fun, but kind of scary, side venture. I did try writing poetry much younger in my life, until I discovered Edna St. Vincent Millay and then realized I had nothing on her. That was pretty much it for my poetry days.

MS: But you do feel comfortable writing music?

SG: Yes, once I get past the problem I was describing about not knowing how to get started. Another thing that I do to really help with that is I have what I call a “minute a day” challenge: Every day when I’m starting a piece, I have to write a minute of music. It doesn’t have to be good. It doesn’t have to be bad. It just has to be a minute of music. And that way I feel like at the end of seven days, I’ll have seven minutes of music that I can choose from and start to say, “Okay, that’s a good idea over here, but that’s terrible”—and we just throw that part away. But that gives me some choices. Usually I start that within whatever genre I’m working in. So for instance, right now, I’m working on a piece for the Lincoln Trio, and I’ve been looking at a lot of piano trios. I’ve been looking at Joan Tower’s Trio Cavany and Aaron Kernis’s Still Movement with Hymn, which isn’t actually a piano trio. It’s a piano quartet. But I’m writing a 25-minute piece, and both of those pieces approximate that length. So I’m looking at their ideas, and then I’m brainstorming about what it is that’s important to me that I want to put in there.

MS: You’ve mentioned that you’re a visual person, and I know that somewhere you said that your studio was the mostly brightly decorated room in your home. What do you like to surround yourself with when you’re doing this work? You mentioned pictures and charts, but is there more to that visual comfort zone for you?

SG: My husband and I finally were able to get a condo. It was really great because we’ve been in apartments for so long where you can’t put any paint on the walls. So I painted my studio purple. Then, in addition to that, I went to a lot of colonies back when I was in my early 30s, and I kept meeting all these artists. That’s where I really started getting the visual interest going. So I started collecting pictures, both from trips I was taking and from colony experiences. I also began trading CDs of my music with other artists at colonies. So I’ve had visual artists draw pictures for me or paint something, and all the artwork I’ve collected is sitting on one whole wall of my studio. I also go to a lot of art expositions and things like that. I mean, I can’t really afford the art itself, but artists tend to make these little postcards that have a picture of their artwork, so that goes up on my wall, too.

I also have done pottery for ten years, and I feel like doing pottery helped me think about process in a whole other way. It’s the same thing I got out of going to artist colonies where you sit down with a filmmaker or a writer, and you talk about their process. Then you start to see, wow, they’re using a different language, but they’re also talking about how you get from point A to point B and in a way that’s convincing. Pottery has also taught me a lot about patience. If you are at all trying to force a piece to happen, you’re going to nudge the clay, and then it’s going to be forever ruined. So I think that kind of patience actually has helped me back in the composing world: To just take a deep breath, do my thing where I write a minute of music a day at the beginning and know at the end of that week, I am going to have options. I think all those things are processes that let me know that I don’t have to go with my first impulse. I can really take my time and find the ideas that I feel very strongly about.

MS: That’s a very tactile thing to engage with, too. I suppose composition can be, depending on your working methods, but it’s not quite the same thing.

SG: I think composing is such an isolated thing. Obviously, we have our concerts with performers and all that. But the creation itself, the process for me is sitting in a room by myself, working at my piano. So to be surrounded by 20 other potters and hearing all these conversations going on as you’re trying to work, it’s the utter opposite experience of being a composer. Also, it teaches you that it’s okay to mess up. I think we all get to a level in our careers where we feel that it’s scary to mess up. If we mess up, someone’s going to notice and they’re going to write a review that isn’t positive. In pottery, I feel like I can just mess up all the time, and no one will ever know. I just stomp it back down into a lump of clay and try again. So it’s given me some freedom that I don’t have in the musical world.

MS: What is your musical background? You were a pianist originally, right?

SG: I did play piano, although I was never very good. I can admit that. I sang in choirs starting in third grade and all the way through my master’s. I absolutely loved singing in choirs. I was an alto, and I think that’s why I write such good, juicy bits for altos in choir pieces, because I always felt like we got cheated. I also played saxophone in marching band for three years in high school. So I started off doing all that, but then in my junior year of high school, there was an AP music theory class. The teacher was a jazz trumpet player, and he said one night to go home and write a piece of music. I’d never before thought that anybody wrote music. I was pretty naïve as a kid. I’ll admit that, too. I mean, I know I was naïve because I thought all the history had already been written. But in this case, the minute he said go home and write a piece of music, it was like this door opened that had always been shut. Suddenly there it is and you’re looking at a whole new room, and all these colors are there. I just didn’t want to leave it. So, after that assignment, I just started writing more and more pieces. Then a friend of the family hooked me up with a composer in the Bay Area, and I studied privately with him for the rest of high school.

MS: Voice is obviously something you’ve spent a lot of time with, but overall something that stood out to me about your catalog is that you’re a very balanced composer. You have all the bases covered. It’s a very neat though broad package.

Garrop with the the Capitol Quartet after the premiere of Flight of Icarus March 2013

SG: I think that was maybe more a result of the schools that I went to. The first was University of Michigan, and they had a really good percussion program and very strong saxophone program. That’s also where I saw composers writing for orchestra and I began experimenting with string quartets. I went to the University of Chicago after that. That was a research school and I really didn’t have as many performances. I discovered that I was probably a happier person if I’m at a performance school. So, I got my master’s, and I went on to Indiana University. They had six orchestras, choirs everywhere, and, once again, they had a strong saxophone program and a strong percussion program. So that really helped open some doors that otherwise I might not have considered. All the saxophone writing I had done is because of the saxophonists that I met, especially Christopher Creviston who is teaching now at Arizona State University, Tempe. We were students together at Michigan, and he asked me to write a piece. Fifteen years later he found me and said, “Do you remember this piece?” And from there, that’s led to a commission with his current group, Capitol Quartet, for saxophone quartet.

But I do feel like I try to be balanced. I want to have orchestra, choir, and chamber, and in particular within chamber, I want to have piano trio and string quartet and saxophone music at all times. I really do want that kind of diversity. The problem I feel like is that there are certain pieces I want to be writing and I’m not necessarily getting the opportunities to yet. For instance, solo piano. I can’t believe out of everything I’ve done, I only have two solo piano works. There was one more at one point, but I didn’t think it should last the test of time so I destroyed it. But other than that, it really is quite funny that I’ve gotten this far without more solo repertoire.

MS: I was curious about another aspect of your works list because there is one piece from ’92 listed in your catalog, and you can the count on one hand material from the late ’90s, and then this huge body of work explodes from there. I’m trying to do the math on your age and where you might have been at that point in your education. Did something concretely shift for you in there, artistically or circumstantially?

SG: It’s funny you noticed that because I feel like, as a composer, I have a sliding scale of what I think works. I call it seeing the holes. When you’re writing a piece, you think it’s perfect. You’re thrilled. Maybe four to five years later, you start to see the holes in it, and realize, okay, that’s not as strong. Maybe it can be two years. But as I was going through school, I was changing and evolving so quickly, that the seeing-the-holes period was only about six months to a year. It really started lengthening after I finished my training or was getting close to finishing my training in Indiana. So what I took out were almost all the student works.

The reason why the one from 1992 is in there is because it’s my first string quartet. I didn’t want to eradicate it. I’ve gone on and I’ve written three more string quartets, and you can’t call something number two if there’s no evidence of a number one. And honestly, for a student piece, it’s not that bad. So I’m okay with it being out there. Actually, that piece helped get me onto a concert series that helped change and shape my entire career. So it’s not bad to have these student works out there, as long as you’re okay with it getting performed. There have been a few other pieces along the way, like the piano solo I mentioned. It took about a year to realize that it wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on, and I should just remove it from my catalogue. So I think for me, the test of “Am I getting better as a composer?” is, “Do I have less of that happening? Is my catalog staying steady, or am I taking things out?” So at this point, I think I’m doing pretty well.

MS: I was wondering if that was the direction you were moving or if there was a danger you could just become increasingly hypercritical of yourself.

SG: I’m really not that worried about it. There are certainly a lot of areas that I’m very comfortable in now, like the chamber world and the choir world especially. Orchestra writing is always a little trickier because you try to get the balance as well as you can between the woodwinds, the brass, and the percussion and everything, but it takes going to the rehearsals to really start to sort out what’s really going on. But I feel like now, if I know I’m writing badly, I stop myself much sooner. That was my mistake years ago. I wouldn’t do that one minute a day trick, I would just go with my first impulse and, more often than not, I knew along the way that something was wrong. But it was too late. The commission was due, etc. So, what I’ve done is start each piece with just brainstorming for a week. No pressure to just delve into it. That really helps, as well as having a big buffer zone on commissions. If a commission deadline is, let’s say, September 1, I will actually have that score due a month or two before that in my own calendar. Then I have the pressure that I need to make the work happen, but if I’m unhappy with the piece, I know that I’ve got the time to fix it.

Garrop lecturing about various Chicago artists and their websites.

MS: Every time I speak with you, I take away the impression that you are a very disciplined person, both in building your career and making your art.

SG: I feel like going for the doctorate really teaches you how to organize your head. I think that’s the biggest thing anyone can learn going through school. All the time I’m telling my students, you have to figure out how your mind works, and then figure out where your strengths are. If you know where you’re weak, like you’re a procrastinator, you’re going to have to work around that. So I feel like for me, the challenge of all the years of school was figuring out all those issues, so when I graduated, I could really hit the ground running as a professional.

In addition to being organized, as much as I can be, I took on some campaigns earlier in my career. So I wrote a choir piece. I would cold call 30 choirs, and I would send out a recording and the score. I did campaign after campaign like that, but they paid off. It only takes one person programming that piece to then lead to four more commissions. So I think you not only have to have the discipline to write and to get back to people and to be on top of your website, but you also have to be disciplined about chasing down opportunities. You can’t just sit back and think that maybe a publisher will do that for you, or maybe your recording will get out there and, miraculously, everyone will want to do the piece. I just don’t know if one competition or one recording or one piece can change your path all that much. I mean, granted if you were to win something like the Pulitzer or the Grawemeyer, perhaps. Or even the MacArthur. But I think in general, these careers are slow building. They’re one step at a time, and you have to be organized to make that happen.

MS: You don’t strike me as a particularly aggressive self-promoter. So, for you to have started cold calling ensembles in such a strategic way is unexpected. Where did the idea even come from?

SG: The funniest part is that growing up in California—not that California has anything to do with it—I was just very laid back and shy. I guess in my undergrad years, I learned to make friends with musicians. But it wasn’t until my doctorate that it finally hit me: If I was going to take control of my career, I had to do it myself. No one else was going to do it. There was one defining moment where I put this all together. I was staring out my window and realized I could keep staring out that window forever, or I could get off my rear and start making phone calls and get a recital together. And I went with option two.

The campaigns though, I think it’s because I watched too many people in academia who had wonderful music, but it wasn’t getting out there anywhere. And I would ask, “Well, what are you doing about it?” And they would say, “Oh, you know, just getting it published,” or “Just getting it recorded.” It didn’t seem like that was the best strategy for me. I would need to start to push it out there further. I didn’t go to any East Coast schools, and I wondered perhaps if I had, if maybe some more connections would have been presented. But nonetheless, I felt like, okay, I can do this. I just looked at Chorus America, ACDA, the North American Saxophone Alliance. You look at some of these big websites and see who their members are. Chamber Music America is a particularly good one for that. Actually, I did a campaign in the last year or two using Chamber Music America. I got [a list of] all their member string quartets and piano trios, and I sent them all information. This time through email, since now it’s become more acceptable.

MS: You have written a lot of text-based or text-inspired pieces, which makes sense to me considering your narrative interests. It surprised me when you said Edna St. Vincent Millay’s work squashed your own poetry ambitions, because you’ve actually set a lot of her work!

SG: It started because one of the very first artist colonies I went to was the Millay Colony in Austerlitz, New York. While I was there, I was working on a piece for saxophone and piano called Tantrum, but I came across a book of her poetry, of course, and thought, since I’m here, I should give it a whirl. I began reading her sonnets, and they were just so eloquent—14 lines long and having a rhyming verse, but still relevant today. I just thought, okay, I would love to do some massive project, where I set—I think I was aiming for originally about 30 of her sonnets. As the years went on, I think I wrote one sonnet set per year from 2000 to 2006. I got around number 17 or 18, and I finally had to call it quits because a very wise conductor, Christopher Bell of the Grant Park Chorus in Chicago, said to me, “You should really set something other than Millay. You should have more in your portfolio.” And he was right. I was just so thankful that he was blatantly honest with me. Composers need to hear that honesty every now and then. And that’s when he said, “You really have to get past the Millay and move on.”

It’s been really tempting to try to go back and finish the project. I had actually paired up a bunch of sonnets into particular sets. So there’s a set about love, and there’s a set about war, and so on. Maybe someday I’ll go back and visit that. In the meantime, I’ve done other big projects involving text. One is The Book of American Poetry. That’s about an hour of music, and it’s four volumes of poetry. Each volume contains five poems by five different poets. I set the first ten for baritone and Pierrot ensemble, and the second ten are for mezzo and Pierrot. But then I’m also making piano arrangements of all of them.

MS: You’ve done that in a few places, right, offering options on work to give it a broader life?

SG: Yeah, I wrote it for Pierrot ensemble because it was for the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. They had a competition, and I won and they said, “Okay, what do you want to do?” I said, “I want to do a Book of American Poetry.” Once they understood the scope of my project, they were on board. But then I discovered that it’s really hard to get Pierrot ensembles together elsewhere with baritones. So to give the piece more life, my husband is doing the piano arrangements for volumes one and two, and I did the arrangements for volumes three and four.

I’ve done it the other way, too. I wrote a piece called In Eleanor’s Words, about Eleanor Roosevelt; that’s a big song cycle. It started off as a piece for piano and voice, but then David Dzubay at Indiana University and I were talking, and he said, “I’d love to have you come out for a residency. What pieces would you like to have done?” And I said, “How do you feel about an orchestration of In Eleanor’s Words?” So that’s when I created the larger version. That’s also when I discovered that it’s much easier to go from large down to small than it is from small out to large. At least for me it is.

MS: In all these examples of your interest in stories and setting text, it strikes me that these are not your personal stories, but very often items of historic importance or mythology or poetry. What about that speaks to you so strongly?

SG: I wish I knew. I mean, some of these things happened because of commissions. In Eleanor’s Words was a commission by Tom and Nadine Hamilton. They’re residents of Washington, D.C., and they commissioned a piece in honor of Tom’s mother who had been in public service all her life and who liked Eleanor Roosevelt. Since I teach at Roosevelt University, it made sense to put it all together, and what do you know? Out comes a piece. I think that it’s easy for a composer to just see what the flow of the commissions are and to just go with that, whereas if you really have your own agenda, you have to start to force that every now and then. So in the case of the Millay sonnets, I felt so strongly about that project. When I did that cold call many years ago, where I sent out my music to 30 choirs, Volti in San Francisco was the choir that answered. They not only performed the piece that I sent them, but they commissioned three or four others over the next decade and many of those were the Millay sonnets. I said to them, “I want to do Millay. I want to do this big cycle.” And they said, “Great! Let us help you out.” So it’s great to have commissions, but it’s also great to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve and make sure that you work that into your commissioning schedule, if you can.

World premiere of Garrop’s Songs of Joy and Refuge by PEBCC’s high school mixed voice choir Ecco, conducted by Clifton Massey on March 23, 2013. Photo by Don Fogg

MS: Where did you get this business sense? It seems like you have a really smart way of approaching your career, and I’m curious where you learned this.

SG: I don’t really know. I think part of what happened is I saw how other people handled their careers. For instance, there was a guy at Michigan when I was there. He was very talented musically, but he also had this incredible gift to be able to walk up to anybody and sell his music to them, to basically say, “Hey, I’ve got a performance tonight. You should go hear it.” He would walk up to performers he’d never met and hand out his music. I tried to emulate it, and I just felt sick to my stomach. I couldn’t do it. It was not in me. About 12 years ago, as I was getting out of school, I just made the decision that if it took me a little longer to have a career, then that’s the way it was going to be. I’m not the person that’s going to be really in your face all the time. So that’s where I started getting very good at campaigns, and getting good at having a web presence, and doing a lot of business through email. If someone emails me, I answer within 24 hours. So all those parts put together I think eventually started to fill out the bigger picture. Sometimes I do wonder, maybe my career could have moved a little faster if I’d been a little bit more aggressive, but I would not have been comfortable doing that.

MS: Yeah, but on the other hand, you clearly have found what does work for you.

SG: Right, but I think it took all that experimentation back in school and trying to emulate the behavior of others to realize, “Oh, I can’t do that,” or “Okay, that worked.” I think it was observing that really helped me figure out what I wanted to do.

MS: Very early on you mentioned specifically that you’re not a film composer. I was curious about that. For as diverse as your portfolio is, and as much as you love exploring storylines, I don’t believe there are any film scores or video games in it. In a way, that seems like it would be a natural affinity, but you stayed away from that.

SG: It’s not so much staying away as it is that I really haven’t stumbled across the opportunity yet. I have to admit I know a little more about video game music than I should. My husband plays these games, and I realize the music is getting quite, quite advanced. I would love to go into writing movie music, but I’m in Chicago. I’m not on the right coast. Although I do think it would be hard for someone like me. The things that interest me the most in music are form and tension and relaxation. So if there’s not a strong formal structure, then I’m not happy with the piece. What can be hard about writing for movies is that you’re constantly having that formal structure ripped out from under your feet. If you have to extend it by five seconds or they don’t like a theme that you wrote and you have to rethink it overnight—that can be hard if you’re used to having final, set structures that you really feel good about. So, I’d love to explore it someday, but you know, sometime in the future. Not any time soon.

MS: You mentioned not being on “the right coast.” How important is Chicago to you? What made you decide to build a career and life for yourself in that place?

SG: People used to say to me when I was in school, “You should pick your last school carefully, because that might be where you end up.” And I thought, “Ha-ha, that’s really funny!”, but I actually did end up in the Midwest. All my schools just circled the Midwest area.

I feel like Chicago has been really good for me. In the last 15 years, maybe even the last 7 years in particular, there’s just been an explosion of ensembles. So we have new music ensembles. We have choirs. We even have a new opera company that has formed. It’s a great time to be in Chicago. So for someone like me, it’s been a perfect city to not have to go to New York—no offense to New York. It’s a great place to visit, but I’m more of a Midwesterner I would say at this point.

MS: That’s interesting because you came from the West Coast, right?

SG: I’m from California, and I have to admit, every time I go home and visit it’s like, “Why did I give this up? It’s so beautiful out here.” The weather is nice almost the whole year through. But I think at that time, there weren’t enough composition teachers in the West Coast area. Almost all the schools I looked at were in the Midwest or on the East Coast. I have also really enjoyed building a composition program at Roosevelt University. After going to two very large performance schools where there’s a faculty of five or six people, it was a little bit surprising to go into a program of just two people. But that also allowed me to shape it a lot faster than I probably could have if I had been at a major performance school. So my colleague Kyong Mee Choi and I have really tried to focus on giving opportunities that you might not get in a regular college setting. We bring in people like Timothy McAllister, the saxophonist from Prism Quartet, or Timothy Monroe, the flutist from eighth blackbird, and they do workshops with our composers. They sight read the works; they give feedback. We have a competition, and they choose a couple winners and perform the pieces on concerts at Roosevelt. We do the same with Gaudete Brass Quintet—all the students have to write little fanfares. We’ve been having the Vector Recording Project with the orchestra, so students don’t just get a piece read, they actually get it professionally recorded.

Particularly with continually rising costs for a university education, I’m asked by prospective students about the value of a college degree as a composer. In looking back over my own training, I couldn’t have learned all the skills I needed to outside of a university music school—my high school music training had been weak, and I had many, many skills to acquire before I could call myself a composer. I feel that attending a university as an undergraduate is very important to one’s development as a composer, as you get a complete, well-rounded experience over the course of a four-year program. Depending on what you wish to do next, you may have enough skills to exit straight into the real world and carry out a career, or it could be that taking the time to get a master’s first will help you obtain even more skills that you’ll find useful. People who wish to teach at a university need to earn a doctorate in order to have the credentials schools are looking for when hiring, but if you’re not planning on doing so, perhaps you don’t need to go any further if you’ve developed your skills far enough. So it is important to start thinking about what it is you truly want to do when you graduate. Is it to teach? Write music for movies? Start a new music ensemble and write music for it? Investigate what skills you need to attain your goal, and work on developing those skills while still in school so you’ll be ready to hit the ground running when you get out. Play to your own personal strengths. Hopefully you’ll discover a path to a career that will make you feel excited, enriched, and rewarded.

I think a lot of schools are coming around to the fact that they need entrepreneurship programs, and Roosevelt at the moment doesn’t have one yet, but I believe they’re moving in that direction. Nonetheless, I know a lot of us have integrated ideas into our courses. For instance, in my composition seminar last year, all my students had to get into groups of three or four and create new businesses. They had to have a mission statement, a five-year plan, a ten-year plan, and then had to have a website up or something to show that this is what they do. It was really exciting for me to see just how creative they got. It really taught me that they want to be able to put this together before they leave. A part of my job is to really give them professional opportunities that hopefully bridge the gap as they’re leaving the school. They are starting these conversations with professionals. They know how to build their own website, and how to write their own CV or how to go knock on doors and hand out scores. I’m hoping that gives them an edge—that they have not just the compositional skills, but when they walk out the door, they have the business side somewhat already going. Hopefully that will increase their chances of being successful.

MS: How do you make enough room for your own music and your own career in the midst of that work?

SG: It can be a bit of a challenge. I feel like I have to choose my commissions very carefully in terms of when I write what. This past fall at the very beginning of the semester, I wrote one choir piece, and then I wrote a piece for two trumpets and piano and then two art songs. That took me up to probably mid-January. Then I started a piano trio, and that was my downfall, because I got all those short pieces done while teaching—it doesn’t take as much concentration to do a six-minute piece here, or a five-minute piece there. But to do a 25-minute piano trio while teaching, especially during audition season, I learned I’m not capable of that. So that’s one thing: Strategize your year. The other thing is I don’t go into Roosevelt all five days. I try to go in just four, and some lucky weeks, I may just get in three, depending on how many meetings we have. But I find I’d rather work longer days downtown so I have a full day to compose when I’m off. I’m not the type of person who can just turn around after a long day of teaching and somehow have energy left to start composing. I can answer emails. I can send out scores. I can do that other business work, but I can’t actually be creative.

MS: Do you need a specific time of day or routine, or do you just need an actual day where you don’t have to separate the administration from the creativity?

SG: It is better if I just have a whole day, or a week, or a month, or a year. I think that’s why the art colonies were so fantastic, because it removes you from paying bills or anything else. You just sit and you compose all day. I have an 88-key synthesizer, but it’s right next to my computer. So if my computer is turned on and dinging at me as email comes in, then of course you stop composing. I’ve learned I have to just turn everything off. Pretend nothing else exists and just get myself into the space. I mentioned earlier, I think starting pieces is always the trickiest for me and I do a whole thing where I have to straighten up the condo and all that. But once I’m into the process, it’s really quite comfortable to move in and out of it. So I can get up and answer an email, or go get the mail, or whatever, and then come back and be right back into the piece wherever I left off. And that usually lasts up until I finish the piece.

MS: You mentioned the period when you were going to a lot of those colonies. Is that something you had the freedom to do just because of where you were in school or is that something you expect you’ll do throughout your life?

SG: I think I started going to colonies because one of my teachers, Claude Baker from Indiana University, said I should take a look at them. I applied to a few, and I actually got into the ones I applied to. So that’s when I just strung them all up in a row and colony hopped for the year after I finished my coursework but before I’d actually finished the dissertation. One of these was the Banff Center for the Arts in Canada. Another one was the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, where I got to meet Aaron Jay Kernis and we worked together. Then there was the MacDowell Colony and the Millay Colony, and other ones in between.

That’s where I just finally put it all together. When you’re in school and you’re reading books, you’re writing papers, you’re certainly obtaining the knowledge, but you don’t necessarily know how to apply it yet. I felt like that was the first time I learned how to take all that information I’d been collecting and apply it in whatever facet I wanted to. So for me, it was a really great eye opener. I think it gets harder though as you get more responsibility to be able to carve out the kind of time that you really need to go to a colony. I seem to have stopped going for the moment, and that’s fine. Maybe someday I’ll feel the need to go again, but I also have a home studio situation now, which is pretty quiet and which works very well. That hadn’t always been the case in past years. That was another reason to go to these colonies—to have the space and time where I really wouldn’t be disturbed.

MS: You’ll have to go back to the Millay Colony and finish the settings; it’s the perfect application.

SG: Well, that’s just it. When I started the whole process, I had no idea I was going to compose all these sonnets. So I really want to go back and actually write the final sonnets up there. That would be really cool. I think they have a policy where they don’t want people to return, but they do have these small residencies in January, where you can just go with maybe a specific project. It’s not necessarily the actual colony stay. So what I need to do is get my act together and put in an application for that particular type. The thing I regret when I went to the colony is that you’re supposed to get a tour of Millay’s house. It’s left pretty much intact from the day she died. But the day that we were supposed to go, the caretaker’s wife went into the hospital. So part of me feels like I want to go back and get that tour, man. I want to just confront whatever ghosts might be there and just say, “I set your poetry. Don’t be mad at me.”

MS: For as interested in narrative as you are, as a listener, I’ve never felt overwhelmed or emotionally manipulated by that aspect of your work. Instead it’s like being a third-party observer. Is the audience in your mind when you’re composing and is there ultimately a reaction you’re looking for, that you’re listening for in the lobby after the performances? Or is that not a part of your process?

SG: I think there have been moments where I’ve been genuinely concerned how an audience might react. Most of the time I’m not. I think that my language tends to be more accessible than not, so I guess I’m kind of lucky that way, or I’ve made the choice to be that way. But there’s a moment in my String Quartet No. 2, the third movement called Inner Demons, where you’ve heard four themes presented in a scherzo-trio form, and then they all begin to mix together and it’s chaos for about a minute straight. I was panicking before that first performance and wondering if people were just going to tune out or get disgusted. Will anybody do the ultimate “stand up and storm out” thing? When it premiered, I did see a lot of heads turn and people look at each other at that moment. But it passed. They all got through it. The rest of the quartet finished, and it turned out to be, I think, the strongest movement of that piece. So I feel like it was a really good risk to take. Sometimes you just have to not worry about how the audience is going to react.

What is interesting, though, is a lot of times people won’t tell the composer what they really think, but they don’t know who the composer’s husband is. So, there’s been many times where my husband has been circulating in the lobby after and he’ll just hear bits of conversation, and that gets hysterical. So that’s how I really get my feedback. It’s nice when people come up who are supportive, but I would love to occasionally get someone who says, “This part was great, but this other spot didn’t do as much for me.” It’s great to get past that first level and say where’s the feedback? I really need to shape this piece into something stronger. Because I do feel like the first performance is really just a debugging session. It’s not a perfect piece by any means. I’m lucky if I get it 95, 96 percent right. And it’s the second performance where you get it to about 98, 99 percent. And finally, by the third performance, that’s where I think it should be completely settled.

MS: Do you have any reservations about doing serious editing after the first performance?

SG: I will absolutely do it if it needs it. In the case of Becoming Medusa, it was [originally] a minute and fifteen seconds longer than it now is. There’s a minute in there, and another 15 seconds elsewhere, where I just felt that this is not doing anything for the piece. It’s wasting time, and it’s taking away from the rest of the moments. So I had to butcher it, but I think it made for a stronger piece. It is hard to do; it is hard to face up. I think it can also be harder the longer you wait. There’s a piece right now in my repertoire, and it needs a revision, but it was written so long ago now that it’s hard to rip apart. I’m no longer there as a composer. I don’t know what was important to me necessarily that I want to preserve, and what things I should put in that are important to me now in the re-write.

MS: Considering that evolution, when you look back, do you feel like the career that you’ve had so far is the one that you expected to have, either when you went into undergrad, or when you left your Ph.D. program? Have things turned out the way you expected?

SG: I guess the funny thing about me is, I knew I wanted to be a composer, but I didn’t really know what that would be. I knew I wanted to be successful, but I didn’t know what that would be. The one thing I was sure of is that by the time I was 30, I would be married and have kids. I turned 30, and I wasn’t married, and I didn’t have kids. So the one thing I was so sure about did not happen. In a way that freed me up—anything’s on the table. I can go out and do anything I want. I’m not sure if I’ve really attained all the success that I thought I’d have at this point, but I’m very happy with what I have achieved so far. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have more goals, and I have plenty of projects that I want to be doing. So I’m not quite where I want to be in the future, but for as little as I knew when I was getting out of school, I think I’m doing quite well.

D. J. Sparr: Playing Well With Others

Posted on June 19, 2013 by Alexandra Gardner - Conversations, Spotlight

Composer and electric guitarist D. J. Sparr draws energy and inspiration from interacting with other musicians. “That’s why I compose,” he says, “to get to the point where I can be actively working with other musicians.” A full schedule of composition commissions, performances of his own music and that of other composers, and educational residencies ensures that he gets his fill of that vitality.

Sparr grew up playing electric guitar (à la Eddie Van Halen), but put down his axe for a time during studies at the Eastman School of Music. Then, inspired by the composer-performer faculty members at the University of Michigan, he started performing again within the realm of classical music. He has since performed the music of Michael Daugherty, Paul Lansky, and others, as well as his own compositions, such as his electric guitar concerto Violet Bond, written for the California Symphony where he currently serves as Young Composer-in-Residence.

Beyond the electric guitar, Sparr has built a varied catalog of works for chamber ensemble, orchestra, and vocal music. His short-form opera Approaching Ali, commissioned and recently premiered by the Washington National Opera, is based on the book The Tao of Mohammed Ali by author Davis Miller, with a libretto by Mark Campbell. It tells the story of a writer at the brink of middle age who visits his boyhood hero in person in an effort to rekindle the spirit and enthusiasm of his youth. This poignant and charming work could serve well as an introduction to opera for people of any age or background.

Educational outreach is a substantial part of the composer’s work with the California Symphony, as it was during his three-year residency with the Richmond Symphony’s Education and Community Engagement Department and while he served as a faculty member at The Walden School. He takes cues from the performance and creativity workshops of Michael Colgrass for his own educational work, employing exercises such as drawing graphic scores and conducting on the spot. “It’s fun to work with kids, and it’s nice to get to know them,” explains Sparr, “and then some of them show up at [my] concerts, so it’s pretty cool.”

Early on in his composing career, Sparr found that what he needed to realize his own artistic goals was not located in Los Angeles, New York, or other large cities, so he left the urban landscape, moving first to the mid-Atlantic coast, and then to Richmond, Virginia to build a life that focused on the more basic needs of, as he puts it, “shelter, food, and writing.” He continues:

The combination of finding the people who support you, writing as much music as you can, and being as nice to everyone you meet as you possibly can, including being happy for their successes—there’s a saying that “A rising tide lifts all boats”—is really the key to making it work. And the composing world looks pretty great right now.

With Approaching Ali under his belt, a new large orchestra composition in the works to wind up his California Symphony residency, and a debut CD of his chamber music works coming out on Centaur Records later this year, it looks as if Sparr is reaching musical high tide. Hopefully his electric guitar case is waterproofed.

Robert Carl: The Time Keeper

Posted on June 1, 2013 by Molly Sheridan - Conversations, Cover

At the composer’s home in Hartford, Connecticut
April 19, 2013—1 p.m.
Filmed, condensed, and edited by Molly Sheridan
Transcribed by Julia Lu

Robert Carl’s music, to my ear at least, has always felt like the work of a particularly sensitive sonic observer of the world. Originally a student of history before he refocused his efforts into music, his interest in time, memory, and space are veins running through his compositions, his work more given to conjuring imagery than narrative plot. And whether inspiration is mined in the wake of a seascape or travelers on a speeding bullet train, the resulting music tends to carry a distinct organic beauty and rich, encompassing depth.

Read the keynote address delivered by Robert Carl at the third annual Westfield Festival of New Music, presented by the Westfield State University Department of Music on March 3, 2013.

Currently chair of the composition department at The Hartt School, Carl acknowledges an aesthetic genealogy that nods to names such as Ives, Xenakis, Shapey, Cage, Kramer, Ruggles, and Rochberg. But for a long time, he says, he felt like a late bloomer scrambling to catch up, something of “a spy in the house of music.” For whatever anxiety that might have caused him, he immersed himself in this world at all sides—a voracious listener dedicated to composing, performing, teaching, and writing about the music that has filled his head and encircled his life. This work has provided him with opportunities for insight yet somehow without the pressure of it second-guessing his muse. When the work calls for it, he simply puts that experience on the shelf.

I tell my students that one of the things that you have to do is to create forms of creative self-delusion when you write. You can’t think too much about the weight of history, or about the weight of the field, which is even worse, especially if you’re young. … [I]f you have an idea for a piece, and you believe in it, then at a certain point that piece becomes the only piece of music that’s ever been written. Honestly, I can feel that when I’m writing. I mean, thank god, I’m inventing music! And of course, it’s a delusion. Of course, I know it’s not true. But you can feel it in a certain deep way.

Ultimately, it’s a delusion that has allowed Carl to explore the great global diversity of musical experience while also providing a level of clarity and space to communicate in a voice distinctly his own.

***

Molly Sheridan: Your artist statement opens with the line, “My work has always been concerned with time.” That has a certain poetry and also concrete applications to music, of course, but I thought we might start by digging into what that really means to you and why that’s such a powerful focus in your work.

Robert Carl: It’s changed over time. I think in some ways the initial impulse was because my first love was history. All through my childhood and adolescence, I thought I was going to be a historian. That, of course, has to do with time and the sense of the past being present. So this feeling for the co-existence of all sorts of different moments in time has a certain poetic quality to me. Earlier on, I think I wanted to evoke that with different types of music and historical periods. There was more of an element of, well, never literal pastiche but a sort of intersection and looking for connections between very different types of musics.
With more passage of time, it became a little bit more abstract and at the same time elemental for me. I think part of that was just digging deeper into music and finding its own world. Of course, one thing about music is that it is time reconsidered, because when you have counterpoint, you’ve got different things going on at once to begin with. You’re going to have returns; you’re going to have premonitions and echoes of things that have happened. So long as you have memory, then that sense of it being a dialogue between events that happened at different places in time in the unfolding of the piece is also going on. Music embodies this in a very rich way. That was always there for me, but over time, it became more visceral.

I think the key was encountering Xenakis. I was not a private student of his, but I was in Paris for a year and just stumbled on his course at the Sorbonne. It turned out to be about six or seven people in a seminar room once a week, which was great. It was basically him describing his music. One semester was sieve theory, which involved stochastics and it demanded calculus, which I had in high school and actually passed, but I’d forgotten everything. I took notes the whole way through diligently. I still have them and if I really wanted to relearn calculus, I might get something out of it. That was sort of a loss. But the other semester was group theory, which essentially had to do with envisioning the form of a piece as a geometrical solid with points on it, then putting it into rotation and comparing where a point was at one point to where it was after the passage of time and putting these into different parameters of the music. In a sense, it was creating a form which was the envisioning of this object, almost this sculptural form, but from different perspectives in time. I started to see a connection, I guess, between time and space. That was for me the thing that blew my vistas open. After that, I think in some ways my music has become much more interested in space and spaciousness. Long sustained tones, big registral separations, large gestures—that’s sort of a surface metaphor for what I’m looking for. I mean, I also love pieces that now and then are incredibly dense, but it feels like the space of the piece is big enough to accommodate that density. The very fact the piece is as rich as it is and yet doesn’t seem clogged was a thing that I really felt was to be aspired to. That’s another way of getting at space. And, of course, it has to do with the way you play around with time. They go back and forth like that.

MS: That doesn’t really necessitate that you use particular sonic combinations. You might say technology would be an attraction, but you wouldn’t necessarily associate that interest with the flute, or the piano, or the orchestra, or any one thing. Are you particularly attracted to a sound world as a result of this?

RC: It’s a really interesting question. I admit, I’m very drawn to the orchestra. In some ways there’s not as much engagement there as I would like, but that has to do with practical things. But let’s redefine that a little bit: Orchestra. Let’s talk about large ensemble—a large sonorously and timbrally mixed ensemble. That, I think, is something that I’m drawn to precisely because it gives you yet another dimension to explore in space. All through my life, I’ve made electro-acoustic music. It’s not my primary profile, but every three or four years it seems I make an electro-acoustic piece of some sort. Now it’s almost exclusively using Max/MSP. If I have a particular idea I’m interested in that I want to explore, it’s a great sketchbook. I’ve been able over the years to make pieces that now and then open up possibilities, not just technologically, but actually in terms of compositional practice that will then work their way into other pieces, as well as being in these pieces.

When you start to combine electronics with the chamber orchestra, for instance, the sound can be as big as you want it. I have a piece that I just finished which has a fixed media part. It’s sort of a white noise Bolero called The Inevitable Wave. It’s essentially a ten-second wave that was stretched to ten minutes, and it has an accompaniment from the chamber orchestra that’s based on spectral analysis of the sound file. It’s sort of a tsunami, and that was the point of the piece. The thing is, though, that just having this interaction between those two sounds, it becomes a really satisfying blend. You can’t really tell what is what anymore. So in that sense, large ensemble with sort of a symphonic bent and an electro-acoustic component, that’s where I’ve found myself more drawn. But I’ll write for anything. I’m a gun for hire.

Score pages posted on the walls of Carl’s office

MS: Considering that, I’d actually like to read a quote to you, if I may. It’s from Kyle Gann in response to your Fourth Symphony. He writes, “I think it’s taken Robert a long time to clarify what is truly Carlesque in his music amid the Ruggles-like angularity (his dissertation was on Sun-treader), the Ivesian layering, the Rochbergian style schisms, the Shapeyesque pitch usage, and it’s been exciting to hear it emerge ever more clearly in each new work.” That’s a really neat and evocative packaging of your influences. But is it a true catalogue? And is it one that you still carry?

RC: Now we’re talking about aesthetic genealogy. I do think in large part that Kyle is hearing me pretty correctly there. I think the one thing that he’s not including is the Xenakis influence that I was discussing earlier. What actually has become more and more clear to me over the last five or six years in an overt way is the importance of Cage. When the centennial happened, I was actually shocked. It just didn’t occur to me that it was coming. But it gave everyone a chance to look and listen to the work, and really see it in context as a whole. The body of work is incredibly inspiring as music, and I think the permission that it gives to explore anything, and to go in any direction that you want to, has been a nice little shock or goose that I’ve gotten at this age. I think that’s now a part of my framework.

The composers I studied with were very important, and I didn’t always realize what the importance was. I wanted to study with Rochberg. I wanted to study with Shapey. I stumbled onto Xenakis, and it was extraordinary. But my first teacher was Jonathan Kramer at Yale. I mean, I’m interested in time, right? When I was a sophomore and starting to take lessons with him, I had no idea that this was his prime scholarly and intellectual interest. So I think I carry him in me too, that way.
But I think Kyle’s basically right.

MS: I know you consider yourself to be something of a late bloomer when it comes to composition. How did those teachers influence the path in music that you ended up following?

RC: Shapey was in some ways the only composer whom I felt taught me concrete technique. Anyone who came in as one of his students had to take a short course, basically a series of exercises where he taught you to, more or less, write his music. Of course, you’re immediately chafing at this. It was very entertaining—it was a highly personalized riff on serialism without it dealing with note count at all. It was mostly gesture, motive. He always talked about wanting something to be a graven image, as though an idea was written in stone. And he wanted to convey ways of doing that, and then developing it.

What it did show me was that you were able to take a sound, an idea, and then keep playing with it—the way of constantly reviewing a sound, a little bit like I was saying Xenakis performed, but in this case on a micro basis. He was able to give ideas for how you could continue to maintain the energy in an idea. If you do that in one line, and then you do it in another line in a different way, hey, you start to get counterpoint! So I felt like writing a phrase and creating counterpoint were the two things that I got from him. George Rochberg was a master of many different techniques. Interestingly enough, I look back on those lessons and I feel more like it was a constant kind of moral education and philosophical debate that was going on. He was always considering the fate of the world—what the flute does here, what does that mean in terms of Western civilization? I’m totally exaggerating, but he took it very, very seriously. Shapey was just much more nuts and bolts. I mean, he was a visionary—he was part of that head banging, post-Varèsian mindset, very macho in that way—but at the same, it all came down to the notes, whether they worked for him or not.

You asked about late blooming. Well, I had written a little bit of music at the end of high school and taken piano for a few years. When I was in elementary school, I quit and started back up toward the end of high school basically because I had an amazing French teacher who at one point decided just to give us a thumbnail sketch of the history of classical music from his record collection. That got me going. I got to Yale and I was a history major my entire time there, but I took a lot of music courses. I did get a real musical start at that point.

After I turned 50, I started feeling like I may have caught up. Up to about then, I felt like I was constantly scrambling to try to catch up on what I didn’t know. Of course, there’s always a million things you don’t know. Given. But I sort of became a composer, I think, before I became a musician. I was writing music before I had this fluency in musicianship and a confidence in musicianship that now I feel I do have. It took a long time to get there, and in a way, I felt almost like a little bit of a spy—a spy in the house of music. In a way, academia was right for me because I’m pretty verbal—I write, I like ideas—and those characteristics were things that helped to sustain me while I was working to compensate for that weakness.

MS: At what point did the electronics enter into this picture of you as a composer?

RC: When I was an undergraduate at Yale, I took the electronic course. It was actually Robert Morris, as I remember, who taught that. That was still when we were in the late years of analog electronic music. It was a studio in what used to be the ROTC building. There was a room that was dedicated to that, and they had a big ARP. They even had a spring reverb that was about as big as that wall over there where you could turn a crank to determine the amount of reverb that you’d get on the sound you were producing. So, it was actually something that, from the very beginning, I saw as kind of co-equal with any other type of composition that I did.

In Chicago, the first year I was there, I was Shapey’s assistant; I did the electronic studio afterwards. At the time, it was basically one of the doctoral students who would run the electronic studio and would show anything to any student who was interested. They had a Buchla, so I got to know another analog system. Things still hadn’t changed over. When I got to Hartt, basically within the first year or so, they got a Synclavier, which was a white elephant of a system that was like a predecessor of MIDI. It was a dedicated workstation. It actually had synthesis, and sampling, and sequencing, even a certain degree of re-synthesis and spectral analysis built into it. It was a kind of visionary thing, but—at least my experience with the one that we had there—it was always breaking. But I had electronic music experience, and so I had a conceptual framework, so they said, “Okay, you’re going to teach this course.” And indeed, the person who was originally going to teach it had a health issue, and I was brought in about four weeks into the semester and had to learn it on the spot, which is a situation that all of us know from a certain time in our lives when we have to just do things like this.

So, that became a kind of transitional wave into digital electronic music. I was never doing really hardcore programming, but the thing that I actually yearned for was finally met by Max, because there was a system where you actually could program things of enormous sophistication. I’d always been drawn to algorithmic music, in the sense of a strict process that will open up vistas that you couldn’t imagine otherwise, and finally that was possible. Though there’s plenty of stuff that can be very, very frustrating in terms of the object-oriented programming that you do, at the same time, it’s not all code.

Actually, in the course that I teach, just about two days ago I put a patch up on the screen. I said, “Everyone, okay, so this is your score identification. What piece is this?” And they were looking at it, and then one of says, “It’s I Am Sitting in a Room.” They saw it. They could read the patch like a score in terms of the process. That’s the sort of thing that I have dreamed of for a long time, and now it’s possible. I’m nowhere as sophisticated as a lot of people who work with it, but it serves a purpose for me.

MS: In your studio upstairs, you’ve posted the pages of scores that you’re working on up on the walls. They’re all in line, waiting to be performed or presented. There was one piece that caused you to mention that “as soon as I’m done, it’s done.” Was that one of the electro acoustic works?

Scores waiting to be performed or presented

RC: Oh, I said I was going to record it. No, it’s actually that piece on the piano there, which is a set of bagatelles after Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird—which I know everybody else in the world has done, but since I actually live in Hartford and I actually go by [Wallace Stevens’s] house almost every day on my bicycle, I feel like I still have some rights to deal with it. I’ve always wanted to write a bagatelle set, and this became the way of doing it. I’m going to go into a studio and record it.

MS: Well, that leads neatly into discussing the influence of your being a performer of your own work on your own work.

RC: I’m an incredibly modest performer. I don’t mean modest in the sense of being shy or anything like that! My relationship with the piano has always been problematic. It’s ironic, because I think I have a bunch of pretty substantial piano music that I’m happy with. But thank god I have known through my life incredible pianists who can realize it, because I could never do it in a million years. I lack stamina—physical but also mental in terms of concentration. Great performers can go into that present moment where you’re playing the music, but you can actually see just as far ahead as necessary so that you can keep on top of it. I perform enough to know that, but everything that I have that I do perform myself, especially on the piano, is cannily organized to disguise my weaknesses and emphasize my strengths. If nothing else, it is a testament to me as a composer that I can do that and it sounds enough like real music that it can fool people. The pieces that I can play—and I have a little portfolio of them—they’re modest in terms of what the demands are. They’re maybe advanced intermediate. I can do it because I wrote it, so I don’t have the conceptual leap of going into somebody else’s world. Anyway, now that I’ve trashed myself as a performer, what I will say is that it’s incredibly important for me in terms of musicianship, in terms of just engaging in the act of making music and knowing what it is from the inside in a visceral way. I think it gives me much greater understanding of performers so that if I’m going to give them something really difficult, then it should be worth their while when they master it. If they master it, and it still feels grungy, then they shouldn’t have done it. I would like it to be sort of an athletic rush, if you can get it.

There’s a piece on the CD that’s coming out called Shake the Tree, which is for piano four hands, and John MacDonald and Don Berman do it. They are astonishing. I originally wrote the piece thinking, “I’ll write a piece for John, who is a dear friend, and I’ll make it so I’m playing the lower part. It will be easy for me, and I’ll play with John. Won’t that be fun?” Well, after about one minute of it, I’d already written myself out of that picture. I thought, “Oh my gosh, this is the most difficult piece ever written.” It is demanding, but they take it and they eat it for lunch. But what I got back from them was that they got a rush from it. So if I can do that, then that’s great. I think that does come from some degree of me forcing myself to sit at the keyboard and practice and constantly make mistakes.

Carl at the piano

The other thing is the shakuhachi, which again, especially in terms of traditional literature, I’m not sure I can for me even use the word “play” and “shakuhachi” in the same sentence. I have a very close, dear composer friend, Elizabeth Brown, whom I admire enormously as a composer and who I revere as a shakuhachi player. So if I say that I’m playing the shakuhachi, well, I’ve written music of my own that uses it. She’s actually played it. I know enough about it to write something that might feel as though it comes out of that tradition, but of course it has nothing to do literally with the tradition. The best thing about shakuhachi is that it’s really beginner’s mind because I’ve never had any expectation of being able to play at what would be a professional level for the traditional literature. At the same time, the shakuhachi [community] has a great attitude, which is sort of like, well, it doesn’t really matter what you play. Did you get the breath right, you know, did you breathe? So it has this nice compensatory thing that takes you outside of definitions of technique that you get very much in the Western classical tradition. It can be very meditative. And it gives you different systems of judgment.

MS: Meditative, yes, but your shakuhachi piece on From Japan did not make me feel like I was getting a massage at a day spa. You weren’t borrowing clichés, this wasn’t an instrument that you didn’t really understand added for color. The entire collection of pieces seemed to showcase not a particularly programmatic or narrative instinct, but perhaps more of a fundamental fascination with the sounds around you. I don’t know if that’s an accurate judgment of your creative impulse—you can correct me on that if I’ve misinterpreted—but I feel like it’s coming from a careful-listener perspective. What is it that gets you fired up?

RC: You’re right about listening. I listen to a lot of music. There are some composers—and I fully understand and sympathize with it—where too much music is like too much information. You just don’t want to be overwhelmed by other people’s music. I understand that. Yet, at the same time, I just get so much pleasure from listening to lots and lots of different things, all the time. It gets me thinking. It gives me ideas. It keeps challenging assumptions. The composer who is essentially my granddad, or great granddad, aesthetically is Charles Ives. One of the things that above all I love about Ives is that there’s no composer I know who went further in finding essentially seemingly irreconcilable things that he reconciled, or he made them live together. He found a way for things to get along together that shouldn’t. I find that a really noble and wonderful thing, and in a way, it’s kind of democratic and idealistically American. It’s really an aspect of the better qualities of this culture.

Of course, I have another life as a critic. I got involved in it a pretty long time ago—at the time, it was like, wow, free CDs! Well, of course, that doesn’t have the same cachet now that it did then, though I still have a certain fondness for the artifact. But in a way, it helped keep me in touch with what was going on—not only in New York or in the States, but worldwide, which was very, very useful for me as an artist and also as a teacher. I’ve constantly been listening to music, and I somehow never get tired of it. That doesn’t mean I like it all, though I think I like it more than many people. If there’s something I really hate, I probably won’t review it. I’d rather be an advocate for things that I find satisfying or interesting.

You were saying that you don’t hear a particularly programmatic aspect to my music. I think that’s true. What I would say is that what motivates my music often is instead what I would call an iconic or imagistic quality. Not in the sense of Impressionism, though there will be things that can be like that, but if there is a motivating image for the piece, either in its form or in its character, I feel like I can then run with it. The piece for string orchestra I’m working on right now is a commission for the Wintergreen Festival, which is in Virginia this summer. I’ll be doing a residency there. It’s a set of variations that are a response to the fact that I’ve been in rocking chairs all my life. That’s an image—it’s basically sort of an inhalation/exhalation between pairs, a kind of large-scale rocking. Images like that can get a piece going and often they can be rather naïve, but they often end up embedding themselves in the piece so that they affect more of the structural aspects of it than things that are absolutely on the surface.

MS: In addition to your work as a critic, there’s also the book on Terry Riley and I’ve read a few of your lectures. Your career encompasses a lot of deep thinking about music that you’ve committed to paper for public consumption, in addition to the notes you’ve written.

RC: It’s great if anybody’s looking or listening. I think that’s a legacy of the side of me that might have been a historian.
The Terry Riley book was a chance to combine several different approaches to musical thinking and writing. It was a strict history in one sense. It had a lot of research and also oral history, but combined with analysis. I said, okay, I’m going to try to prove that you can actually do a serious analysis of this piece, which has always had this kind of hippy-dippy reputation. Totally unjustified. Obviously it’s endured and people see, I think much more now, just how wonderfully put together it is. At the same time, you could do an analysis of the score outside of time. Then you could compare it between performances, so you can see the different possibilities of it. Then there’s aesthetics—what are the ramifications of this type of music, the fact that this type of music is surviving and is actually ever-increasingly influential. All of that is incredibly stimulating for me.

I’ve always admired composers who were also writers. As problematic as he is, Schoenberg remains a remarkable force. Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music is just such an elegant little book. Essays Before a Sonata by Ives is cranky and it’s almost like your daft uncle who’s writing letters to the editor. And yet at the same time, it’s absolutely brilliant. For all of those composers, their way of thinking about things was influenced by writing.

MS: That being said, and that being fantastic—being immersed in the community and keeping on top of things, advocating and writing books—how do you keep the weight of that much history and music from becoming a cause of paralysis? How do you keep it from burying your own music?

RC: I don’t know. That has never really felt like much of an issue for me. Part of it is that over time, I do feel as though the music I’m writing is ever more my music. I tell my students that one of the things that you have to do is to create forms of creative self-delusion when you write. You can’t think too much about the weight of history, or about the weight of the field, which is even worse, especially if you’re young. Yes, there are tens of thousands just like you out there–go to it, good luck! You have to find ways of not being paralyzed by that. I think one of them is that if you have an idea for a piece, and you believe in it, then at a certain point that piece becomes the only piece of music that’s ever been written. Honestly, I can feel that when I’m writing. I mean, thank god, I’m inventing music! And of course, it’s a delusion. Of course, I know it’s not true. But you can feel it in a certain deep way. I will say that over time, I’ve felt like I’ve been making more and more discoveries for myself, and that sense of personal engagement and invention keeps its fresh for me. I don’t feel like I’m recycling.

The sense of history, important as it was for me, I did feel early on could be a trap in terms of writing music that was about the music I liked. I wanted to try to find a way to write music where it was truly its own self. It asserted itself, and I was basically the person who was cultivating it like a farmer. I plant seeds, I watch the crop grow, and I harvest it. That’s what I feel like I’m doing now. Kyle’s quote from earlier: anyone can look and can see all sorts of influences and DNA there. We’re all a mixture of other things. Our personality is not something which is ever fixed. Who we were a week ago is already different from who we are now, so there is this constant mutation that’s going on in everything that we do. So I’m not talking about having found some sort of absolutely essential core, but at the same time, I feel like there is a practice I have discovered, that I can return to and find some satisfaction. In that sense, it is a little bit like doing something like gardening. You can do this thing that is very elemental. It’s in the nature of being human and being in the earth. There’s nothing very special about it, but you’re still doing it to the best of your ability. And there’s something very special about it when doing it.

MS: I want to go back to your Westfield keynote. There was a line about common practice versus a commonality of practice. I wondered if you’d unpack the thinking that went into that a bit, because that integrates a lot of broad observations.

RC: When I say I think there’s the potential for an emerging common practice, anyone who hears that will think I’m just insane. The standard line is that, look, we have more types of music now than we have ever had before. Of course, that’s absolutely true. But it’s interesting in that, for instance, over the period of my life, I have gone from there still being a kind of cachet to classical music, which was then more or less wiped out by the predominance of “popular music.” Now what I see is that in fact the monolithic quality of popular music itself is fragmenting into a huge range of different niches.

At the same time, lots of things that have traditions are classicizing themselves. You can have somebody who is in maybe the post-Radiohead school, who sees themselves in a lineage that goes back to Radiohead and the Beatles and that sees this as a very concrete set of techniques and aesthetics, attitudes and expressive tropes. That is basically like any tradition, and yet we have many, many of these. So it sounds like, again, I’m digging myself into my grave right now, but as things get more fragmented, at the same time, no single thing is controlling it anymore. There’s more room for cross-fertilization/hybridization. That’s why I’m talking about commonality of practice. I see more and more dipping and borrowing—going back to that idea of reconciling the irreconcilable—from different approaches, techniques, and traditions. What comes out of it is ultimately an increasingly synthetic music where people who are involved in one type of music have less difficulty dealing with a different type of music than they used to. I see it in students. They might be in a metal band, but they’re really interested in the math rock aspect of it. That then takes them into serialism. Of course, with the communications technology, everything is linked. So there’s this sense of the whole intellectual environment that you live in now being a series of connections—a kind of net, rather than being anything straight lined or boxed off. That is becoming much more common intellectual practice—and I’m using the term intellectual in a very, very broad sense.

MS: You’re talking about “my students” and what the kids are doing. Do you feel like your music is part of that?

RC: You know, I would sort of think so. I don’t want to try to assume any mantle of youth or hipness, which would be kind of disgusting, but I feel a great empathy and stimulation from what I see going on in different generations. And I’m not trashing my generation when I say that. I mean, certainly composers who are in my generation—if I mention anyone, and I leave somebody out, it’s going to be unfortunate, but I’m just going to choose two off the top of my head. Elizabeth Brown, who I mentioned before, I think has an amazingly synthetic attitude toward different instruments, different world music traditions, and a deep knowledge of the classical musician that comes from her being a freelance flutist in New York for decades. All of that gets all mixed into her music in a really subtle and beautiful way. John Luther Adams—I’ll say this, he’s the only composer of my generation whom I’m envious of because I feel he actually beat me to doing in his music what I wish I could have done. Of course, I didn’t go live in Alaska, so I couldn’t have written this music. It’s a totally different personal story, but the vision that’s in his music is something that I’m deeply moved by and, as I say, creatively envious of. So there are two composers in my generation who I think are doing this sort of techno-aesthetic synthesis already, very, very well. And there are many, many others. So it’s a thing that’s happening at every generation.

MS: I also think it’s often easier to talk about changes in the field, and apply that to people who are still obviously developing. Sure, some people then get down in their trenches, but you don’t stop paying attention and developing just because you’re 40, 60, 80 years old. Even Carter kept evolving.

RC: You know, Carter is a great example, because to be honest, there are all sorts of pieces from all [of his] periods that I love. But Carter really took off when he turned 80. The music became so playful. There was a piece for wind ensemble that was almost static, like the Carter Feldman tribute. He stayed open, I think, in his own way.

I’m of a generation that really came of age musically in the ‘70s. One of the myths is that up until recently there were hardcore conservative serialists who were in control of everything, and then it was broken down by either minimalism or post-modernism, or some combination of those. There’s of course some truth to that, but the thing was that when I was a student, there was no dominant –ism already. There were more distinct -isms than there are now. But frankly, the dominant one, I didn’t encounter. Maybe it’s because I chose teachers who were pretty wacky and maverick-ish in their own way.

In my generation, there was always a lot more freedom and liberty. Now I will say, just go maybe ten years back [from my peers], you hear a lot more stories from composers about how if you didn’t toe the line in this or that way, you wouldn’t get a job or you would be denied all the prizes. Yet at the same time, how does that explain the existence of Ned Rorem, who has been quite successful his whole life and has never shied away from writing exactly the type of music that he wanted to write? There’s always a little bit of exaggeration of it being a life and death struggle between different aesthetics. But there’s no doubt that it is much more fluid. It is much more hybridizing. It is much more fragmented now than it was before.

MS: Reading your technical discussions of some of the explorations you are doing in your own fragmented area, particularly your application of overtones, I kept thinking quietly to myself, “yes, but it’s so beautiful!” It was interesting to reflect on your private inspirations and public outcomes.
RC: What it is for me is actually finding something that is natural. Here’s the thing, which inevitably becomes kind of controversial: On the one hand, we’ve always had a kind of essentialist argument about tonality. Bernstein, in the Norton lectures he gave at Harvard, talks about how there’s a grammar of music that’s fundamentally tonal. Of course, this can really rile everybody up because it can be easily used as a kind of club to force us into an essential kind of musical conservatism. So I’m skeptical of that. I wouldn’t want to give up Atlas Eclipticalis for that if I had to, okay? At the same time, I wouldn’t want Atlas Eclipticalis to rule, you know?

My feeling is that over time—and it comes partly from spectralism, it comes just as much from composers like Henry Cowell and Ives—there are ways of looking at acoustical phenomenon of sound and using that as a model to create sounds on different scales. I don’t mean scales like modes, I mean different scales of size. Hierarchies. And what you can get from it actually is precisely that beauty. It is also about space. You get the proper amount of space between the notes, both horizontally and vertically. I think that’s why this practice that I pursue feels satisfying to me, and doesn’t feel like it’s over-intellectualizing. It doesn’t feel like it’s forcing us into too cerebral a trap. As a matter of fact, it’s just the opposite. It feels like it kind of frees me up. The analogy that I use is basically a jazz one. I teach myself my own changes so that then I can improvise on the page as I’m writing. That’s really what I feel like I’m doing with this. So in that sense, if you find it beautiful, great. But I think that’s actually a by-product of the approach rather than something that’s being done despite it. It’s not so much like I feel like I’d better be rigorous in some way so people won’t laugh at me. No, this is what allowed me to dig deep enough to get to what I was looking for.

Troy Herion: Sonic Imaging

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Frank J. Oteri - Conversations, Spotlight

The concluding work on coLABoratory, the American Composers Orchestra’s April 5 Zankel Hall concert, was an extremely effective symbiosis of music and film called New York: A City Symphony by Troy Herion. Throughout its roughly fifteen-minute duration, audience members occasionally gasped or laughed—not a frequent occurrence at a performance of contemporary classical music. I know I was at the edge of my seat for most of it. And at the end, the audience gave the most resounding applause that I had ever witnessed following an ACO performance. So was that reaction due to the music, or was it because they were watching a movie? Ultimately, it was a little bit of both.

Admittedly, it is not out of the ordinary for films to make us laugh or cry or to keep us completely riveted as we anticipate what will happen next. But often part of what makes the cinematic experience so effective is the musical soundtrack that accompanies the visual images we are watching on the screen. The most celebrated motion picture directors were extremely aware of this and chose the composers they worked with very carefully—think Eisenstein and Prokofiev, Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, or Federico Fellini and Nino Rota. In more recent times, it would be difficult to imagine Stephen Spielberg’s adventures being as quite as epic without John Williams’s exultant orchestrations or David Lynch’s narratives being nearly as creepy without Angelo Badalamenti’s deceptively serene harmonies. Peter Greenaway famously cut his films to the music that Michael Nyman wrote for them and, in that reversal of the usual process, further solidified the painterly quality of his work. Directors from silent era icon Charlie Chaplin to horror filmmaker John Carpenter occasionally created their own music for their films, further heightening how crucial the sonic element was to their particular cinematic visions, and French nouvelle vague pioneer Jean-Luc Godard’s approach to sound in his films has been so idiosyncratic that he has been frequently dubbed a composer in his own right as well.
Troy Herion, however, approaches this creative fusion from the other direction. When we visited him in his Brooklyn apartment, a pair of vintage keyboards immediately caught my attention as did piles of CDs. Other than an extremely well-crafted table, a large provocative painting on the wall, and an art object that was a cross between a camera and a can of soda (a gift from a friend), there was little evidence that this was the pad of someone who made films in addition to making music. Largely self-taught as a filmmaker but heavily trained as a composer (he has an MFA from Princeton and is currently enrolled in the Ph.D. program there), Herion’s interest in making movies grew directly out of making music. It was a way to further extend the possibilities of what music can be:

I definitely think of myself as a composer first. I’m a composer who works with sounds and images. I’m learning the techniques of a filmmaker, but I work 95% with the instincts of a composer….I start with the musical impulse and everything else comes from that, even though they end up affecting one another. If I have a musical impulse that makes me think of an image, then I capture that image and it’s different from what my imagination was. So the real image will then change the music that I originally thought of and it becomes this feedback loop….By doing it myself, things stay in this intuitive state….But I think that music can be really anything. It’s an attention to a certain type of balance, a certain type of consonance and dissonance of material….Anything can be a musical appreciation; it’s how we direct our attention.

The first large-scale manifestation of Herion’s concept of “visual music” is his Baroque Suite, in which a group of dancers filmed in a series of tableaux that evoke Baroque-style paintings is fused with similarly Baroque-inspired music, albeit scored for a band including synths, electric guitar, and drum kit. As a result, although its five movements sport such period titles as “sarabande” and “gavotte” and were derived from these centuries-old dances, the work feels very contemporary, particularly in its sonic kinship to neo-prog rock. A signature device in Herion’s musical language that comes directly from his immersion into filmmaking is to subvert expectations by playing with people’s familiarity with various musical genres.

One of the things I ask myself—I’m critiquing my work as I go forward—is, “Do I care what happens next?” Even though I don’t know what happens next yet. This is something that I think that makes syntax very important. If you’re working in a style, you have an expectation of what will happen next. But if you don’t have any syntax from a previous style that people have already become accustomed to—Baroque music or classical music or rock music or whatever it is you are using—you have to generate your own, generate some sort of momentum so people can predict what’s going to happen next and then you can divert or fulfill that….I’m influenced by cliché almost. I look for opportunities to set up a cliché on purpose. I’ll try to make something almost boring. Boring is when you know what’s going to happen next but it takes too long to get there. I try to find that point right before you tune out, but you have an extremely strong projection of what’s going to happen next. At that point I feel like I have a common experience with the audience, and that’s when I like to twist it. And I think that resembles a joke, but it’s really something that holds your attention.

Despite Herion thinking of himself as a composer who makes films, some of his recent films have featured the music of other composers. He and his girlfriend Elan Bogarin fashioned what could best be described as a music video around the pianist Michael Mizrahi’s recording of Marc Dancigers’s The Bright Motion. The Dark City, a poignant rendering of the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy (also created in collaboration with Bogarin and which was featured in The New York Times’s Metropolitan Diary), used Franz Schubert’s music.

“I’m interested in advocating for music,” Herion explains. “It was really exciting for me to take Marc Dancigers’s music and Michael Mizrahi’s playing and create a film around that that was interpreted by a musician and composer—I felt it was an analysis of the music visually. While I didn’t generate the music, I felt that I was very close to the music and I put on my composer hat [to think] about the deeper meaning of phrases. Those are the details that are often not prioritized by people who are just filmmakers and not musicians.”

New York: A City Symphony is clearly the most ambitious synthesis of his musical and cinematic ideas thus far. For him, the visual and sonic elements form a seamless whole and are really not intended to be experienced independently. Even his use of the term “symphony” is multidisciplinary. Though the term carries significant weight in music history and Herion’s symphony calls to mind such elaborate programmatic works as Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique or—closer to our own time and place—Michael Daugherty’s Metropolis Symphony, Herion is also very mindful of the tradition of “city symphonies” made by filmmakers around the world since the 1920s:

Using a term like symphony I realize is a loaded term. It means a lot of things in the musical world and I sacrificed a little bit of what it means in the music world for what it means in the cinematic world. A city symphony is a whole genre of filmmaking. Why did filmmakers in the 1920s call their films symphonies? Was it for the epic quality of their films, because they were associating that with the term symphony, or was it because they were trying to conjure a musical interpretation?

The other tradition that Herion had to make peace with was New York City itself. Originally from Philadelphia, he’s only been living here for the past three years. At first, being a relatively recent transplant made conveying New York City seem too daunting a task, but eventually his enthusiasm for his adopted home took over and it shows. New York: A City Symphony captures simultaneously the overwhelming grandeur and non-stop energy of this town in ways that only a handful of other pieces of music do—scores by Gershwin and Bernstein, perhaps, or Charles Ives’s Central Park in the Dark.

“I was nervous when I was making the piece,” Herion confesses. “I’d go back between being very confident—that’s a really great shot, I nailed it—and then another part of me would be like, ‘How dare I comment on that! I’ve only been in New York for three years; I don’t have enough New York cred to get into the dirt here.’ But there is a whole culture of New York which is immigrants. Everybody’s an immigrant to some extent. So I focused on the idea that anyone is a New Yorker as soon as they get here. Nobody cares how long you’ve been here. If you’re taking up space, you’re a New Yorker almost. And the other thing I tried to focus on was how impressive New York is when you haven’t lived here so long that it starts to melt into the common experience. It’s spectacular to your senses—the architecture, the sounds, the activity; it’s almost maddening if you pay too much attention to it, so it’s in our interests to tune it out a bit. But I tried to say, ‘Let me keep this heightened awareness for as long as possible.’”

That heightened awareness of visual images as well as sound and how these two sets of sensory information can feed off each other makes Troy Herion’s creations some of the most interesting “music” I’ve heard (and seen) in quite some time.

Arlene Sierra: The Evolution of Process

Posted on May 1, 2013 by Alexandra Gardner - Conversations, Cover

Conducted at The Yale Club in New York City
April 2, 2013—11 a.m.
Filmed, condensed, and edited by Alexandra Gardner
Transcribed by Julia Lu

The music of composer Arlene Sierra is significantly focused on creative forms of process. Whether structures from the natural world such as beehives or flocks of birds, or human-made maps of war game strategy, sturdy foundations ground the musical content of her works for orchestra, chamber ensemble, chorus, and opera. She uses these phenomena as inspirational stepping-stones, not to create a “story” for a composition, but rather as a way to harness raw musical materials and determine their eventual shape and progression. “If you look at the natural world,” Sierra explains, “You have predators, you have prey, you have plants, you have different living things all trying to find and keep their place and survive in relation to all these other things that have other goals. How does that relate to music? Well for me, it was a very interesting way of mapping relationships between different instruments.”

Sierra grew up studying piano, and later discovered how fulfilling composition was through her involvement in the Technology In Music and Related Arts program (TIMARA) at Oberlin College, where she was a student. “Electronic music was a way of getting ideas down, manipulating musical materials without having to worry about notation,” she says. ” For someone who studied piano, and didn’t study composition, that was really a relief and a wonderful opening to ways of manipulating sound and making new things without all the business of getting the notation right.” She very quickly got the notation right and has been composing for varied instrumental ensembles ever since, including the New York Philharmonic, the Seattle Symphony, and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Upon completing her doctorate at the University of Michigan, she spent a two-year stint in Berlin, and after that moved to Britain. She now lives in London with her husband, composer Ken Hesketh, and their baby son, and serves as senior lecturer and director of the MMus program at Cardiff University School of Music in Wales.

During our hour together, Sierra spoke animatedly about a new chamber opera she is creating along with three other composers for soprano Susan Narucki, the differences in working with American and European orchestras, her approach to teaching composition, and her recent return to electronic music. She maintains a dizzyingly busy schedule of composing and teaching activities. As she put it, “Like a fish, you have to keep swimming!”

*
Alexandra Gardner: You just spent the past week at the Yellow Barn Festival in Vermont, workshopping a very interesting chamber opera project. Shall we talk about that first?

Arlene Sierra: Okay. So I’m part of a collaborative project called Cuatro Corridos, which is a chamber opera inspired by the soprano Susan Narucki. She’s a distinguished contemporary music soprano, currently at UCSD, who I’ve had the privilege of working with before; she recorded some of the settings of Neruda for my first CD. She had the idea of putting together a chamber opera with four composers, each writing a scene for four different characters, all part of the same story. The story is about human trafficking on the Mexican-American border. Each character plays a part in the destruction of a crime ring where young women from Mexico were trafficked into the U.S. and used as prostitutes by the undocumented workers in strawberry fields outside San Diego.

I’m doing the character Dalia. Lei Liang is doing another character, as are the two Mexican composers, Hilda Parades and Hebert Vázquez. So among the four of us, four different points of view on this story are put across. It’s all sung by Susan Narucki. It’s an amazing vehicle for her, as well as an opportunity for us. My character Dalia is the one character who is complicit in this crime ring. She started out as victim, and then married one of the criminals, and became the madam basically—the woman who kept the girls in line and forced them to be prostitutes. She starts off making excuses for herself, saying, “I was like them. You know, I used to be an angel.” And then she says, “But I’m a devil, and I’m going to hell.” All of this is in Spanish; beautifully written by the poet and novelist from Mexico, Jorge Volpi. He really brings out the complexities of the characters. Dalia was forced to be a part of this, but like many victims, when they’re given power, they become abusers, and so she’s acting out things that happened to her. And the way that she psychologically makes peace with this, or doesn’t, is a really interesting part of the scene that I’ve written for her.

I was drawn to this character. She’s the oldest, the most complex, and the most conflicted. She’s like the main character from my grand opera, Faustine; an older woman who is obsessed with what she was when she was younger, which I think taps into so many important issues today in terms of how women see themselves, and how society sees and treats women. So this very rich, very conflicted older character is really interesting to me.

AG: So the monodramas will be presented back-to-back in an evening-length concert?

AS: Yeah, it’s an evening—about an hour-plus of music. And each scene is presented separately, but they are going to be knitted together with video and projection of the text, so it will be fully staged. The ensemble is really interesting. The instruments are piano, guitar, and percussion, plus the soprano. So it’s sort of a mini-percussive orchestra. It makes me think of Boulez’s Marteau Sans Maître, because it’s kind of that alto range with the guitar and the mallet-oriented percussion instruments; it was decided that marimba would be a part of it specifically. It also helps that Steven Schick is the percussionist, so we’re all sort of invited to write as much as we want. Though it’s a limited number of instruments, it’s pretty unlimited in terms of virtuosity. So that’s exciting. Aleck Karis is a Professor of Piano at UCSD and a distinguished contemporary music specialist, . And the guitarist, from Mexico, is Pablo Gomez, an excellent player as well. It’s a very unusual instrumentation, but I think it gives the project a sense of place and a very particular color. To hear what the other three composers have done as well as me, of course, with these instruments is really interesting too, because it’s a very challenging group to write for. I think we all dealt with the challenges in our very own individual ways. Also, we all have a very international point of view on issues of borders, where one’s place is, how one deals with oppression, views of different countries, and things like that. But the power of the story, because it deals with current events and with crimes that nobody really knows what to do about, and something so emotive and so horrific really… it’s just a very powerful piece. I’m really, really excited to be a part of it. We presented a workshop performance at Yellow Barn just this week, and we had a chance—the four composers, the four performers, and our writer—to work together very closely and really try out a lot of things. The premiere will be in San Diego in May.

AG: Did you find any big surprises when you were working out the material? Maybe things that worked better than you thought, or less well than expected?

AS: Oh, yes. Well, it’s a new thing for me; I’m trying to figure out how to make this absolutely gorgeous soprano voice become terrifying and nasty. So, I talked with Susan about different ways that she can alter her voice so that she can translate herself from Dalia’s angel of the past—her remembered self—to her current self who’s this ugly old demon, basically. Of course, Susan will never be those things, but to make her voice have something of that quality, especially when she starts to reveal the awful things that she’s done to keep this crime ring going. It’s poetic language, so it’s not too explicit, thankfully. I don’t think it needs to be, but she just says, “I brought these girls to heel. I discipline them.” And you know, it’s a really shocking thing to hear, especially from a character who says, “They’re so beautiful, and I used to be like them. I was innocent. I had no malice.” It’s the perfect opera aria, because you get a real transformation of character. You get a moment to really look into the soul of a very disturbed person. It says something about the composer, maybe! [Laughs] But you have to admit, writing opera, you want these kinds of characters. You want this kind of drama. And as a composer, it is the richest challenge to what we can do musically to make these layers come out of a character.

AG: So how does the soprano feel about having to alter her voice in that way?

AS: Working with a soprano like Susan—I mean, she can do anything. I thought that being low in her voice would be harsher, but we’re going to think of more mid-range ways to get a kind of nasal, witchy voice. Because the thing is, it’s not just what the voice can do. It’s also what is comfortable and workable over the arc of a big piece, which has a lot of virtuosic stuff in it. So you want to get a sound that is different, but isn’t going to irritate the voice. It’s a learning curve.

AG: Does this piece employ any of the process-oriented things that have inspired you in other works, such as concepts of game theory and natural selection?

AS: Yeah. It’s an interesting thing to consider because when you’re writing a dramatic piece or a vocal piece, something to do with poetry, obviously that’s what the piece is about. And that’s what you’re engaging with. But you also want it to connect with your other work. I think for any composer, once you’ve written a few pieces, you have your technique. You have the way that you write. And as much as you want to change it and make it more versatile—and hopefully you do—that’s a challenge in the interest of keeping writing. You want things to be consistent from piece to piece and to be part of the same language. So what I’d done with the character Dalia in this piece is to focus on a part of the text that has a kind of physical connection. Dalia talks about these young women as flacas potrancas. Potranca wasn’t a word I knew before, because it’s specific to a region I’m not so familiar with. But what the phrase means is “skinny fillies,” which is kind of interesting because she’s this trafficker. She’s seeing young women as animals, you know, she’s trading them. It’s a funny phrase, but it’s also a very harsh phrase. And then also these women, these fillies, are trying to run away. They’ve escaped, and that’s the point of the story. So I thought of this kind of nervous, sort of galloping music that had a physical sense of what that phrase is, and of what these women are. They live in this harsh, horrible, physical world, which is about their bodies, and about trying to escape the abuse of their bodies. So the sense of running, of nervousness, of escape, is a big part of the piece.

Also, the aria that I’ve written is for this criminal woman who’s been caught. So she’s in the situation of extreme nervousness where she’s confessing. She’s making excuses. She’s reflecting. So the music has this very nervous sort of dotted-rhythm kind of energy about it. In that way, it relates to some other music that I’ve written which has been about combat, which has been about the natural world, which has been about physical creatures in environmental space. That had something to do with the way that I was able to construct the instrumental music of this piece. But the vocal music is really all about the text and about the characterization. I think that’s what keeps composition interesting—that we can switch from instrument to vocal, from objective to dramatic, and try to make it part of an individual voice.

AG: So in the case of Cuatro Corridos, the story is obviously the primary point of inspiration. Could you give an example of how the other ideas you’ve focused on in the past—about combat, the natural world, etc.— manifest in a piece?

AS: A big part of how I work is applying extra-musical ideas to musical structures. The extra-musical ideas that I’ve been most interested in in the last few years have been connected to two disparate, but actually quite related things. One is game theory, and the other is natural selection and evolution. Connected to game theory is also military strategy. Basically, what they have in common is the idea of agency—different points of view: different characters potentially, but not necessarily, having different interests and different goals, and having to interact. If you look at the natural world, of course, it’s full of that, too. You have predators, you have prey, you have plants, you have different living things all trying to find and keep their place and survive in relation to all these other things that have other goals. How does that relate to music? Well for me, it was a very interesting way of mapping relationships between different instruments. Sun Tzu’s Art of War is a book of inspiration for me for different pieces. For my piece Surrounded Ground, I read a part of Sun Tzu which describes a situation where a large army is being attacked by guerilla fighters. The idea of Surrounded Ground is where this army is: They are on the ground, and they’re surrounded by agencies that know the ground better than they do.

I was commissioned to write Surrounded Ground for sextet—for piano, clarinet, and string quartet. And interestingly, as a companion to the Aaron Copland Sextet from 1933, which is an interesting piece in terms of mixing his kind of more approachable style with more cerebral aspects of his work. So when reading Sun Tzu, I thought about the string quartet in this ensemble as the large army, and the piano and the clarinet as the guerilla fighters. Not because I needed a story, but because in thinking about instruments and about the way that they relate, obviously you have a mass of four instruments that are homogenous, that sound perfectly together, that we associate as something completely free-standing. And then we have these two outliers. Thinking about how they relate got the piece going for me.

It was a really useful way of tackling this mixed ensemble. It was also a way of adding a layer of drama that wouldn’t exist otherwise. If I had written a piece that was like Copland’s—just a pure sextet—it would be about motifs, rhythms, and colors. But there’s a dramatic edge to thinking about a piece as being about agencies in conflict, about being surrounded and escaping. It gave a sense of urgency, a sense of drama, to the music that I wrote. I wouldn’t say that the piece is about anyone winning or losing, and it doesn’t have a story in the way that Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique has a story.

Mind you, I think you can listen to that piece and enjoy it without knowing the story, and I know a lot of composers from his time up to now have private programs that they don’t reveal. I guess I’m more candid about the process and the inspiration for my pieces, but I have to tell you very honestly, it’s not a program. There isn’t a set ending. There’s no hero. It’s something that helps me write, because I set up a process of different relationships, of conflict with or without resolution and the types of motion that go with those sorts of musical ideas. For me, it is a way of organizing, of mapping, of writing types of music that interact.

AG: I think it’s a really interesting way of dealing with your raw musical materials. It’s a good example of one way to approach composition, and of course it demonstrates that there’s more that can be done to generate material than to just think about pure melody, harmony, and rhythm. I have visions when you talk about this approach to composing that are like, for instance—imagine a comic book scene—the tuba taking down the flute in performance! Ka-POW!

AS: Funnily, I have a piece like that! It’s the horn and the trumpet beating out the woodwinds and the strings. Game of Attrition is my “Darwin” piece. It was written for the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth in 2009. What Darwin describes in The Origins of Species is not just the things that most of us learn in school, about how natural selection means that the best adapted creatures will survive where maladapted ones perhaps won’t. It’s also about different kinds of strength evolving that allow different species to survive. What he makes very clear is that there’s a competition for each tiny strata within every environment. So if you eat only seeds, you have to compete with everything else that eats only seeds. It’s very specific in terms of the levels of competition that go on in the natural world.

I was commissioned to write the piece for chamber orchestra, and I thought, well, you can map that onto instruments by thinking about tessitura. So if you had a viola versus a clarinet, versus a horn, versus a marimba, they all live in that same strata of “alto-ness,” where their strongest ranges are. So who would win? And what does winning mean? Who’s louder versus who’s more agile? Those are interesting things to consider. The piece is a succession of competitive duos where instruments of the same tessitura are kind of battling each other. Finally, the last battle is the strings versus the brass. And of course, you’d think the brass would be the loudest, but they run out of air. The strings don’t run out of air. So it’s a kind of counter-intuitive ending, that the strings get the last word. Setting up these conditions, this way of thinking, got me the structure of the piece. It wasn’t that I decided that the strings had to win because I love the string instruments, or that I really had to finish the piece with a particular chord on the strings. It was something that emerged from my process; by setting up patterned music where there are different gestures with instruments vying against each other, the brass are just not going to last as long as the strings. So that was the ending that evolved from my Darwin piece.

AG: I like the idea of questioning the meaning of “best adapted.” It’s not always the biggest, or the most colorful, or even the strongest. It might be that tiny little brown bird over there…

AS: Right! And what we were from? A little mammal that survived in the undergrowth when the dinosaurs were disappearing… not the most promising start.

AG: Exactly. So okay, this is clearly a very personal approach that you bring to your work, and that has shaped your musical identity. We were chatting before this interview about creative authenticity, and I’d love to know more about what the notion of “authenticity” means to you personally.

AS: It’s interesting how identity is important for a lot of artists. I think there are a lot of different ways to interpret that. For some colleagues, it’s about maybe music that they heard as children. Or about music from a country that they feel connected to, or were born in and then have moved away from. Or feeling that their music needs to fit into a cultural or national idea of identity. For me these issues have always been pretty complicated. Like a lot of Americans, my background is very mixed. I have a Latin American surname. Spanish is my second language, not my first language. I think having a voice as a composer, having a point of view as an artist, is deeper even than that. That thinking of one’s roots, one’s identity in terms of geography or nationality, is perhaps a little stereotyped, or potentially can be. So if I say I’m half Puerto Rican, you know, am I obliged to be using Puerto Rican music, or writing music that is like composers who are from Puerto Rico?

I don’t think so, because my experience is very different from theirs. My connection is to New York, really, not to Puerto Rico. I have really affectionate ties to New York and to Ellis Island even—I know which of my ancestors went through there. And I’ve actually never been to Puerto Rico (though of course I’d love to visit)! As an artist, there are so many other things I’m interested in. I love Latin American culture. I love the Spanish language. I’ve set it a lot of times, including in my most recent project. But I’m also interested in visual art; I’m interested in science; I’m interested in dance; I’m interested in the natural world. I would be interested in these things no matter what country I grew up in, no matter what my first language or second language happened to be. I think what makes us individual is that combination of interests and how that filters through us as individual artists, rather than some external pigeonholing of what it means because you’re from this country or that country, or this state, or that city. I think I’ve had an opportunity to reflect on this, too, because I’ve been living outside the United States for a long time now. I moved to Berlin in ’97, and to London in ’99, so I’ve basically lived my whole professional life as an ex-patriot. That makes me more affectionate toward things from home. Thanks to travel and technology and professional opportunities, I’m really engaged with music in the U.S., and I feel that I’m an American composer. I was born in America. But that’s not the limit of what I am as a composer. And I think it helps my work to stay open and to not think of my identity as being limited to one country.

AG: Since you’ve been living in the U.K. for a long time now, are there differences between the musical worlds of the U.K. and the U.S. that you’ve found surprising? Obviously, the U.K. is a smaller, more condensed scene. Everybody really does know each other, I imagine.

AS: Yeah. And they’ve all known each other since they were twelve, that’s the other thing, because they have music schools for children.

AG: If everybody else has known each other since they were small, how did it feel to enter into that scene as an adult?

AS: Starting off in a new country—and I found this in Germany, as well as in the U.K.—is very interesting. The first thing people identify with is nationality. So as a composer, if you say, “I’m an American composer,” well, that has very clear preconceptions to our European colleagues. So, do you write like Copland, or do you write like Phil Glass, or like Elliott Carter? You know, it’s that limited and that divergent. But then you dig a little bit, and you find that actually a lot of colleagues on the other side of the pond have a very nuanced view of American music. Certain American composers are done a lot in Germany, and others are done a lot in the U.K., and maybe they aren’t done so much here. So it gives you a very open point of view of what American music is. Outside of the U.S., you don’t have the divisions. People don’t really understand that this composer is the exact opposite of that composer. They’re all seen as just more American composers. In a way, it’s easier to forget about the polemics when you’re abroad. You’re not arguing the same issues. But if you want to work abroad as an American composer, I think what you have to convince people of is that you’re going to stick around. There are so many American students who come for a semester and then go back home, or come for a year on a Fulbright or something, and then go back home. It was even articulated in Britain—it was, “Are you sure you’re going to stay?” Yes. I am staying. It’s showing that you have a role to play, that you are engaged with the music and with the community where you live. That’s important for any composer anywhere. For me starting out in London, I went to every new music concert; I got to know people. If I thought a piece was terrific, I introduced myself to the composer—especially as a young composer, getting to know senior composers and seeing if they’re teaching at a festival. If I thought their piece was terrific, well, I’d try to go to that festival. Just getting to know people in a very sincere, simple way. If you like someone’s music, well, talk to them. See what they’re about. If you don’t like someone’s music, no problem. You know, next.

It was a really nice way to get started in London, because I had finished all my studies. I was starting to develop my own voice and have my first opportunities, and I was in a place where I could do so away from the arguments of the places where I studied, and around a lot of other people who were from other places. I think London is maybe even more like that than New York, but it’s certainly similar to New York in that everybody there is from somewhere else. I met a lot of Russian composers, French composers, Polish composers, Czech composers, as well as British composers. We all mixed, and we were all at the same festivals and doing the same master classes and things. Being American was just another point of view. And it was an advantage to have that to talk about and maybe disabuse some people of their preconceptions of American music, too.

AG: Since you are quite focused on large musical forms, what has your experience been like dealing with orchestras and opera companies and big institutions in the U.K. Is there, for instance, more rehearsal time for orchestras? Are they structured very differently, or not so much?

AS: As a composer—as a younger composer, particularly—dealing with big institutions, I think we have a lot to do, treading carefully, to make sure that our work is well represented without losing sight of the fact that institutions are full of people who are working very hard on a billion things. So when I work with orchestral players, anywhere, I’m very respectful of the amount of time they have, and what they have to do to get, you know, nine concerts on in five days—the sorts of things that professional orchestral players do. I think my experience working with large institutions helps me to be as efficient in getting my ideas across as I possibly can be; to be as clear with my notation, articulate in my way of describing what I want, as I can be. Because they don’t have time to learn all the nuances that I may be dreaming of, and they certainly don’t have time to know all the really neat ideas I was thinking about when I came up with that phrase. They might want to know if we have a few drinks afterwards, in a post-concert talk, or whatever, but the players’ business is to execute something as well as possible in the shortest amount of time, because that’s what they’re given. It’s not their fault. It’s just the way that things are scheduled. So, our job as composers, in my experience, is just to get our ideas across in a way that people say, “Oh, I get it.” Play it. And talk about it afterwards. Talk about the nuances and the ideas with the conductor, and with the audience, and put things in your program notes. There’s a big difference between what a big institution can do with their schedule, and what a small chamber group can do with their schedule. You have to be respectful of the circumstances, and tailor what you want and what you can expect of people accordingly.

One of the things I’ve learned about working in Britain is that there’s a kind of national pride in sight reading ability over there. The British are famous for being incredible sight-readers. What this gets you is a fantastic first reading of a piece. Then things can dip a little, and then they get better again. But the thing about working with people who can read like that is you’ve got to make sure your material is absolutely clear, because it really makes them very angry to be tripped up by something silly that you’ve done. So that efficiency, that sense of professionalism, is sort of a sense of pride; this player can look at any number of nested tuplets, any number of quarter tones, special effects, and all sorts of things you can think of, and play it. It’s wonderfully liberating in some ways because a lot of new music techniques are expected there that were not so expected when I was a student working in the U.S.

So there’s a kind of level of expectation that yes, oh, you’re a composer. You write new music. You can do these things. I found that very liberating. At the same time, there’s the expectation from players that if you’re going to ask me to do this, you better get your point across perfectly. If I’m going to read it perfectly, you have to give me something to read perfectly. That gave me a sense of a new level of professional standards. Also, I was very impressed when I first moved to Britain, because students start working professionally much earlier. So while composition students in their early 20s in the U.S. were writing student pieces for student groups, in Britain they’re already expected to write for professional groups. And they are already expected to have that level of technical ability and professionalism. It’s quite intimidating at first, and it really gave me a sense of the reality of professional life. Because I had just finished my last graduate degree, and I was meeting people a few years younger than me who didn’t have as many degrees as I did who were producing absolutely polished new pieces. And they were thoroughly professional.
I think in the U.S. we’ve been catching up the last few years. There’s a sense now that you really want to know who you are and make your way as a composer as soon as you really can, and there are more institutions and competitions and things in place to help you do that. But when I first moved to Britain, I was really amazed at how much those things are a part of the infrastructure there. I think it has some disadvantages, too, because you don’t maybe know as much about your point of view at age 22 as you do at age 32. I do think a composer’s voice needs time to develop. But that level of professionalism in terms of creating legible parts, knowing your notation, understanding the instruments, getting across to players clearly and respectfully what you want them to do, and knowing that they can do the things that you want them to do—those are all things that any composer needs at any age.

AG: I think it’s worth mentioning that a British composer was one of the forces that brought you to the U.K.—your husband, Ken Hesketh. Those of us who are coupled up with people who work in different fields are always curious to know what it’s like being married to another composer. Do you discuss your pieces with one another while you’re working on them? Do you listen to music together?

AS: Sometimes, yeah. We’re almost exact contemporaries. I think our partnership has been helpful in that we grew up in different countries, in different education systems, and in different musical education systems. It’s been very interesting to compare notes and talk about the advantages and disadvantages of things that we were exposed to as we were growing up in music. The British have this incredible choral tradition, for example. But I also learned a lot about jazz and a lot about Latin music, as well as the words to old standards and things like that, which is a kind of American music education that Europeans don’t really have. So, it’s been nice to get a perspective on what is different and what is valuable about what you have compared to a contemporary in another country.

Living with another composer who’s just as busy as I am is very, very helpful because we spur each other on. It’s really about having that implicit encouragement that creative work is serious, and it’s time to do it. It’s been really helpful actually, especially when I was finishing my degrees; I was engaged to somebody who was already getting his first commissions and working on the highest level. It just made me think, you know, I got those degrees for a reason, so I could be as serious, as professional, as this colleague is. It helped me to make a strong start professionally, where I might otherwise have been tempted to slack off for a few years and think, oh, I’m done with all that coursework and it’s time to relax. So as a result, I’ve written a lot of music, and not done a lot of relaxing! It’s also helpful in discussing professional issues, professional problems, but I think this is a larger point—that if you’re writing your first commissions, or in your first teaching job, or talking for the first time with publishers and agents, you really need to talk to colleagues and compare notes on these things, because they’re hard and you want to get things right. You want to develop the good relationships and stay away from the less helpful ones. If you have colleagues that you confide in, who you can be really honest with, that is an immeasurable help.

So if you can’t fall in love with and marry a composer-colleague, I would say stay close to your favorite classmates, the composer-colleagues that you knew coming up. Do that anyway. I mean, I do very much like to stay in touch with people I was in school with, in festivals with, people I got to know through the first steps of professional life. Even if we were only in the same place for one month one summer, and that summer was ten years ago, hey, there’s a lot to reflect on and talk about. Those connections are personally rewarding. Whether or not they lead to more work or whatever, you’ll see, but that’s not the point. The point is the connection and having that common ground, and having that professional advice and encouragement.

AG: Speaking of school, you both hold teaching positions, but at different institutions. You mentioned earlier that a composer’s voice needs time to develop. How do you see your role in guiding that process through teaching composition?

AS: Teaching can be such an important part of how we start to compose. I don’t know how many composers feel like they were taught to compose. I’m not sure it’s something that you can teach—at least in the most important context, which is the creative impetus. You can’t give that to somebody else. But then I find with lots of students, everybody’s got ideas, but it’s how you execute them. If you can’t bring them to fruition, then you’re nowhere. So, I’ve been teaching for about eight years now, and I think teaching has become more interesting to me as I’ve done it longer because I’m trying to help students to make their ideas into pieces and that’s a really hard thing to do the first few hundred times! I mean, it’s so hard for all of us starting pieces, even if we have a lot of experience. But I do feel that teaching is important to me in terms of helping students to realize their ideas—giving them ideas to work with that can become their own. Giving them the space to figure that out, and giving them encouragement without telling them how to do something. I like to give a rather light touch with my advice when I’m teaching. To give a sense of direction, rather than to say, this is the way it must go. Because I feel that my music belongs to me, and students’ music has to belong to them. What is this for if it doesn’t feel owned by the person who creates it?

AG: You say you have a light touch when giving advice. What is that like?

AS: It’s really tricky. I ask a lot of questions about what they want to have happen next. Or at least what sort of affect they’re after overall. Or what they see the piece doing—whether it’s to do with how the instruments are being used, or what the architecture is over time. I like to give options, because when I look at a musical idea, I can always see several different ways that it can go. A student may not see that. That gets easier with experience. I really enjoy giving students a lot of options that they can then manipulate and make their own in a certain way. So I love to say, “Okay, you have this idea, well, if you take it this way, then you can do this. If you take it that way, it will be more like this. Come back next week and show me what you’ve chosen!” Because they’re not my pieces. They’re their pieces. I’m just excited to see what they come up with and, hopefully, how individual it is. I really try to give them technical help to write like themselves—really objective advice on how to use musical materials and how to make them work.

AG: I know that it was the study of electronic music that first started you on the path to composing, but once you got involved in writing for acoustic instruments, the electronic music dropped off.

AS: After a childhood of playing the piano, I actually started composing through electronic music. It was a way of getting ideas down, manipulating musical materials without having to worry about notation. And for someone who studied piano and didn’t study composition, that was really a relief and a wonderful opening to ways of manipulating sound and making new things without all the business of getting the notation right. So my first pieces were musique concrète pieces, as well as pieces for analog synths and digital synths. I was part of a wonderful major at Oberlin called Technology In Music and Related Arts (TIMARA), where basically we were shown a Moog one week and digital programming software the next week. Each week we were shown something new and told to figure out how it worked, or helped to figure out how it worked. Then the assignment would be to make a piece with that thing, whatever it was. It was a fantastic training ground, not just in terms of technical matters, but also as a composer, because this is essentially what we do all the time.

If I’m commissioned to write a piece for an ensemble including a cimbalom, or a piece for two string instruments, or for a singer and guitar and percussion, basically I’m taking those machines, figuring out what to do with them, and making a piece. It’s just a way of being really flexible, using your resources, and making something new with them. So the creative side of how the TIMARA program worked was really useful, basically every week figuring out how to make a new little piece. The one thing that made it stop working for me was when the concerts came around, because the concerts were sitting in the dark and somebody pressing play. While it was interesting to sit around and listen, I had played piano from the age of five, and played in competitions and all sorts of different kinds of ensemble things, and I just missed the excitement and suspense of performance. I realized that the classical music love that I had for all the instruments and orchestral music—that I had to marry these two things. I had to use the manipulation of sound and get that energy of live performance together somehow.

It just meant I had to learn a lot of stuff super fast in order to learn how to notate my ideas: how to deal with sophisticated rhythmic notation, how to orchestrate, and how to handle harmony. I took lots and lots of (hugely useful) counterpoint, which was like getting my teeth drilled, but I did it. These are all the tools that a composer needs if you want to write for classical instruments. And that’s what I’ve basically done for my whole professional life—writing for everything from solo pieces to full orchestral pieces, to grand opera scenes. I’ve written about half an hour now of a grand opera (grand opera just meaning singers plus orchestra), as well as works choral, large chamber, small chamber, including all sorts of instruments that I had never played, that I’d never had any contact with before, just learning what they could do for specific projects as they came along.

So in thinking about a return, I’ve been asked many times, would I consider writing for electronics, but I just couldn’t figure out how. I think I was afraid of the dark room, and pressing play, and sitting there again, and just having that kind of anti-climactic sense of the performance. But now I have a new project coming up which is for three pianos: two pianos plus a digital piano—a Disklavier—and those instruments will be combined with digital processing, samples, and percussion, and so I’ll have three incredible pianists will be also using percussion and electronics to create other sounds that I will have set up for them. Two pianos is already like an orchestra, as far as I’m concerned. Plenty of notes for sure. And with the Diskavier, basically you get three pianos plus, because the Disklavier is basically a player piano that you can also play at the same time. Urban Birds is a piece I’ll be composing to tour in the U.K. and U.S. next year, with Kathleen Supove, Sarah Nicholls and Xenia Pestova—it’s a really great way to bring these international soloists together, and we’re all really excited about the project. For me it’s an ideal way of getting back into electronic music, following on from having written a lot of big acoustic pieces over the last few years. It looks like this will be my orchestral-electronic piece – more news soon!

AG: I’m so glad to hear that.

AS: Thanks. Me, too. It’s all about performance, and about pianos, so it’s kind of a return to my roots in that way, too, you know. And it will be fun to watch. That’s what I’m excited about.

AG: Well, I think that over the years it has become so much easier to integrate electronics into performance, and we don’t really need to worry so much about the dark room, or staring at two (or sixteen) speakers, with no performers in sight.

AS: They’ve become more and more interactive over time. It’s really true.

AG: Do you have very specific long-range goals for yourself as a composer, particular projects that you aspire to? For instance, I assume that you are interested in creating a full-length opera.

AS: I wouldn’t be a composer if I didn’t love all the old forms, you know? I never wanted to be Beethoven or Mozart, but I love the old genres; those collections of instruments, those sounds. But it’s also the appeal of creating really big, monumental works. I think about genres like opera, and large-scale orchestral pieces, as climbing Everest. Why do you want to work in those forms? Because they’re there. Because other composers have done them, and when you find your own voice, you think, yeah, what would my voice and my style look like in this huge wonderful form?

So yeah, it’s a kind of creative ambition, of course, to make larger and larger statements. I’m working on Faustine now—that’s a long-term grand opera project. I’ve had some wonderful support along the way, most recently with New York City Opera. But how that’s going to end up in terms of where it’s produced and by whom is something that has yet to be seen. You need the patience of Job for this stuff. That’s okay. I’ll look forward to writing Faustine and having that staged in the next few years. That’s a big one. The concerto form is something else I really love. I’ve written a piano concerto. I’d like to write a cello concerto as well as a violin concerto.

But this new large-scale electronic project is really something I’m excited about. I would do more with electronics if I could keep doing it on that kind of scale, so maybe ensembles with electronics. I like doing more with the keyboard, with the piano, because that’s where I come from. That’s what I’ve done since the age of five, so writing for amazing pianists is just a thrill. They can do all sorts of stuff I could never do. I love that. I’ve worked a decent amount with choreographers So I’d like to do more of that. And I have a series of new scores for two films by Maya Deren that I’m planning. I made a score for one of her films called Meditation on Violence, which was premiered by Lontano in London last year. It was a beautiful film of a kung fu master doing exercises that turned from something very peaceful that looks like tai chi, to something really combative. It fits very well with my work, obviously. She worked in the ‘40s and ‘50s principally, and is one of the first important American women directors of avant-garde film. She created these beautiful quasi-feminist surrealist films in black and white. What I hope to do is create new scores for a few of her films, using chamber music genres. So a string quartet, a woodwind quintet, various mixed ensembles, all playing live with each film. That’s something I’m planning over the next few years.

AG: It all sounds great.

AS: Thanks! Yeah it’s lots of stuff. Like a fish, you have to keep swimming!

Marcos Balter: Hyperactive Unity

Posted on April 17, 2013 by Molly Sheridan - Conversations, Spotlight

There is an arresting, high-voltage energy that often infuses presentations of Marcos Balter’s music, and an obvious fascination on the part of the composer with exploring new sonic possibilities while keeping the human element—the living, breathing performer—center stage. While the roots of these influences are clearly reflected in Balter’s own personality, putting too much emphasis on his Brazilian upbringing and the Portuguese accent that lightly colors his rapid English would be a mistake.

“I’m a Brazilian composer, I’m a gay composer, and people always go for those things as if they are the really crucial, defining elements in my music, when they’re really not,” Balter explains with a mix of understanding and frustration. A composer born and raised in Rio de Janeiro who currently calls Chicago home, he appreciates the American interest in how where you come from shapes the music you write. In his case, however, growing up in a diverse metropolitan city offered him a broad slate of experiences, and the hallmarks of his own music are much more personal.

“As you can probably tell, I’m a very hyperactive person,” Balter concedes with a knowing smile. “I’ve always been very energetic and doing one million things at once, very fast paced in general in life. And when I look at my music, I see that. I see that sense of—unity. It’s that one thing sometimes, but if you look very carefully, it’s one billion things within that one thing.”

As a young conservatory student, his musical passions “were very well behaved,” he admits, with a special affinity for the keyboard composers he was studying as a pianist. Composition was also already a “very natural act to me,” coming almost hand in hand with learning to read and write. In 1996, a piano scholarship to Texas Christian University brought him to the States, though his educational focus was ultimately on composition. Study at Northwestern University followed, and he is currently the director of the music composition program at Columbia College Chicago.

During his first years in the U.S., he found that his music became a little more conservative before he rebelled—a reaction, perhaps, to the education he was receiving, which he found stiflingly dogmatic. “I think that sometimes the least interesting thing about my music is how it’s made,” he clarifies. “If you want to know about that, that’s great, and you can do all kinds of crazy analysis and find out some fun stuff. But to me the most important part of music is still the emotional connection between the composer and the performer, and the performer and the listener. The rest is secondary.”

Considering how closely Balter likes to work with the musicians who play his pieces, that primary consideration carries particular weight. “I really see the act of composing as a collaborative act. Even when you’re composing by yourself, not talking to anyone, you’re still working with that entity, you’re still working for those people.”

In Balter’s case, however, that person often is in the room at certain points in the process, offering feedback and demonstrating possible sounds and techniques. In the case of his extensive work with the musicians of the International Contemporary Ensemble over many years, he’s writing not only for respected colleagues, but also very good and trusted friends.

“That’s why I love working with them. I know that when I walk into a rehearsal, that the rehearsal is still a workshop. We’re still debating ideas; we’re still negotiating things.” And that, he argues, is an essential step in the artistic process that he’d be foolish to overlook. “Things change considerably when they leave the paper and they reach the performer, and for me to not acknowledge that and make that part of the creation of the art work is insane.”

He also counts on that feedback to keep him pushing forward in his own art. In one extreme example, during the creation of his Descent from Parnassus—inspired by Cy Twombly’s painting The First Part of the Return from Parnassus and written for ICE founder and flutist Claire Chase—Balter sent his first sketch of the piece her way. “She called me back, and she said, ‘That’s not it.’ And I was deeply offended! I was mad at her. I’m the composer; you shall not tell me if it is or it isn’t—I’ll know!”

A step back and some reflection offered new perspective, however. “Within four or five hours, the coin dropped, and I looked at this sketch and thought, ‘She’s absolutely right. This is not in any shape or form what this painting is about.’ I called her back and I said, ‘You know what? Let me give it another shot; let me try to process things differently here.’
“Within 72 hours, I had Parnassus.”

That openness to exploring new paths and changing direction on the fly is why Balter considers himself at heart an experimental composer. “I don’t know where I’m going. And I actually think that if I knew, I would have stopped composing a long time ago,” he admits. “So no, I don’t know what’s going to happen to my music next year, I don’t know what’s going to happen next week. And that’s the beauty of it; that’s the excitement of it—it’s the not knowing. If I knew everything, I could write a book about it and be done.”

Neil Rolnick: Seamless Transitions

Posted on April 1, 2013 by Frank J. Oteri - Conversations, Cover

A conversation at Rolnick’s home in New York City
March 11, 2013–2:30 p.m.
Transcribed by Julia Lu
Video Presentation by Molly Sheridan

Neil Rolnick is extremely soft-spoken and self-effacing, but for over 30 years he has helped to create a much changed musical landscape in the United States in terms of musical aesthetics and the application of technology in concert performance. Next month he will retire from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York, where he has taught since 1981, founding the institute’s influential iEAR Studios shortly after his arrival. Yet Rolnick’s attitude about musical composition is the antithesis of an academic approach. While he deeply respects and loves a lot of modernist 20th-century music, he realized relatively early on that his own mind didn’t work that way.

Studies with Darius Milhaud at Aspen and Fritz Kramer, a musicologist based at the Manhattan School of Music, gave him his initial grounding in the fundamentals, but as a Harvard undergrad he chose not to study music and took literature classes instead, playing in rock and folk bands in his spare time. A conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, his earliest jobs after getting an undergraduate college degree were as a community organizer and counselor for teenagers in Vermont and as a hospital worker in Wyoming, where he got fired after attempting to unionize his co-workers. This was around the same time that commercial synthesizers first appeared on the market, and Rolnick was totally entranced by the possibilities of electronic music. So he went back to school, first studying with John Chowning, the legendary pioneer of FM synthesis, at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), and then later at IRCAM working alongside Pierre Boulez, whose musical worldview was less than simpatico. According to Rolnick:

It was like dropping into a history book. . . . Then I got there and realized that they’re all real people, just like you and me, doing things that they feel are right, and I’m actually capable of saying, “Well no, that’s not the right thing for me. No, I think some of those ideas are not O.K.” . . . They had designed the first digital synthesizer at IRCAM, and [Boulez] called me in to ask what I thought should happen with it. And I said, “Oh, well, it’s obvious. You should make this available to 15-year-olds.”—I was 30 at the time—“They will do things that you can’t imagine, and things that I can’t. This will be what they learn to make music on, and it’s going to change everything.” And he said, “No, no, no. It should go to Luciano [Berio]. It should go to Hans Werner Henze. It should go to Karlheinz [Stockhausen] and to Jean-Claude [Risset].” Those were the people who were going to make real music on it. And it didn’t matter really what anyone else did. And I said, “Wrong,” and he said, “You’re just too American.” And of course what I suggested is what Yamaha did. And I think it did change everything. . . . In fact, the stuff that I built at RPI was in direct reaction to what I saw at IRCAM.

Despite his deep immersion in technology, the human element has always been central to Rolnick’s music. He emphatically claims that he has never composed a piece of music that did not involve a live interpreter in its performance. (He acknowledged that he has done a few studio compositions to accompany live dancers.) And, as soon as it was possible to do so, the electronic components of his pieces were realized in real time as well. The way Rolnick has handled this aspect of the music has evolved along with the technologies he uses—ensembles featuring electronic instruments alongside acoustic ones, processing acoustic instruments electronically in real time, using laptops in a performance. But whereas there are detailed instructions for other musicians to perform whatever he asks them to play—whether precisely notated musical phrases or improvisation—the electronic component to his music has proven to be elusive to convey to others.

Perhaps an even more important human element to Rolnick’s music is the fact that many of his compositions have been a direct by-product of his life experiences—whether mowing the lawn for the legendary architect Walter Gropius, being overjoyed when his grandchildren moved into his neighborhood, losing the hearing in his left ear, or his extensive travels to places ranging from the People’s Republic of China to the Former Yugoslavia. Now that he is retiring from teaching, he’s hoping to have more time to spend with his grandchildren as well as to travel, but above all, to keep making music. Given his track record thus far, it will be very exciting to hear what he comes up with next.

*
Frank J. Oteri: In the booklet notes for one of your CDs, you made a statement that really resonated with me: you claimed that music, for you, was ultimately about communication. I thought that would be a great place to begin our conversation, because I’m curious to learn precisely what that means to you. How can you ensure that your music is communicating? Is some music more communicative than other types? What qualities make the music communicative?

Neil Rolnick at work.

Neil Rolnick: It has to do with putting things that really stick in people’s minds and that they can identify with into the music. The big jump for me had to do with having studied lots of 20th-century music and feeling like it was very important to be deep and difficult, but then realizing that my mind doesn’t really work that way. I seem to have a knack for writing melodies that stick in people’s ears, and after lots of studying that made me very embarrassed. But I figured that if I can express what I really hear, get it down on paper, and have it be played, that’s really the best that I can do. So communicating is really about being honest about what my feelings are, honest about what my ears hear, honest about what comes out musically, directly from heart and mind.

FJO: What’s interesting about you describing writing what you’re hearing in your head is that a few years ago you lost most of your hearing in one ear and it has changed the way you think about how other people perceive things. As somebody who is so sensitive about sound and hearing, that experience has fundamentally changed the way you hear. But you’re still writing music, and I personally don’t hear a before and after.

NR: I don’t think that there is, except there are some noisier processing things that I tend to do now that I didn’t do so much before. But that’s such a teeny-tiny change. I think the interesting thing is that it didn’t change the way that I hear in my head; it changed the way that I hear what’s outside my head.

FJO: There’s a wonderful passage in your piece Gardening at Gropius House where all of a sudden there’s this cluster that comes in. That sounded to me like the din you have described that you now hear all the time in your left ear.

NR: Yes, more or less. It’s partially what I hear in my left ear. It’s the din, but it’s also sort of symbolic for me—a distilling of this kind of modernistic reliance on texture without really having a melodic and harmonic content that compels me, this counterweight, which I don’t entirely discount because I really love some of that music.

FJO: I’d like to talk more with you about your relationship to modernism, but before we do, I’d like to know more about these recent pieces, which are essentially about the perceptual idiosyncrasies that distinguish experiences for people. You created a piece about your own experience of hearing loss and how you’ve dealt with it, MONO Prelude, but then you took it further in Anosmia, which is about other people’s sensory irregularities. To bring it back to wanting your music to communicate, how is it ever possible to know if something is communicating when, as you have explored in these recent pieces, everybody hears, sees, smells, tastes, feels differently from each other? What you are trying to communicate to others might not necessarily be the way they receive it.

NR: What I’m trying to communicate is what it is. What they receive in terms of how they hear, how they smell, how they see, is going to necessarily be different and that’s actually what’s so fascinating to me. The thing that I came away from this experience with is this realization that all of our perceptions are really different. MONO Prelude, the piece in which I tell the story of losing my hearing on my left side, is kind of the beginning of the frame. A project which includes scenes from the MONO pieces and Anosmia will hopefully be a whole evening with lots of emphasis on seeing as well as listening, framing how our different perceptions work and how our senses are never the same. I’m kind of picturing it as a staged oratorio or a non-linear opera. I’m talking to a director, Caden Manson, who has a group called Big Art Group, about working together.

FJO: What about the other three senses?

NR: Well, they’re in there. I haven’t figured out how to make them work in a performance situation, but I’m interested.
FJO: There are things that have certainly been done with wafting scents.

NR: I’m not sure that they really work. Taste and touch are things that I could imagine figuring out a way to do online where you’re not dealing with a proscenium situation, but rather where you come into peoples’ homes. People take their computers to bed to read; you know, you get very intimate with people. At that point, I can easily imagine really thinking about involving senses.

FJO: That’s so interesting because with a computer you can see any image and hear all music, but there’s no such thing as digital wine. And there’s no such thing as digital perfume, either. And then touch—

NR: —There are people working with haptic interfaces where you can have something that is a surface which is a lot of little points that can tell how strongly you press against them. I’ve seen some demonstrations of things like that. But at the same time, I don’t think that the digital-ness is really so important. The fact that we get these cool little pictures on our phones is as important as the fact that they’re ubiquitous and that they really do reach into the intimate parts of your life. So that’s much more interesting than this sort of high-tech aspect of the sound or of the sight. It’s more the fact that it comes into your life and your life is where you touch, where you smell, and where you drink stuff. It’s a connector. That to me is much more interesting than that you deliver it all through the screen.

FJO: So you’re willing to let other people have their own experiences rather than trying to control what experience they’re having?

NR: I don’t know that you have much choice. People have their own experiences. You may try to control everyone’s experience, but that’s ultimately not very successful.

FJO: So to take it back to that Gropius piece—I love the essay you wrote about it that’s online. What a phenomenal story! There was a whole generation of people who felt that they could and perhaps should change the natural order—whether it’s a wildly growing lawn, or how pitches are organized, or how sentences are constructed, or how colors combine on a canvas.

NR: And I think for anyone who’s going to be a musician, or a composer, or a poet or writer, or an artist of any sort, some of that is there. Right? Because otherwise you’re not doing anything. Even John Cage finding chance procedures. Although he said he’s not really controlling anything, he’s doing something; there is some result. There is some control—some arrangement for something to control something. At the same time, what Gropius was interested in doing was taking this field behind his house and really making it into a formal garden. And I, as a 19-year-old student who was his gardener, thought that the field was much more beautiful than the gardens he had around his house, or the dorms he had built at Harvard, or anything else. So why would I take this natural harmony and beauty and mess it up?

Neil Rolnick in Paris, 1977

I had a similar musical experience when I was a graduate student. I spent a year and a half working at IRCAM. I was working with Boulez closely, and also with Berio, Jean-Claude Risset, and Vinko Globocar; it was like the heart of European modernism. When I left, it was partially because UC Berkeley said if I wanted to get my degree, I better come back because they weren’t going to give it to me from Paris. But it was also partially because Boulez finally said, “You’re too American. You should go back to America.” At first I took offense, and then I thought, “He’s right!” They had designed the first digital synthesizer at IRCAM, and he called me in to ask what I thought should happen with it. And I said, “Oh, well, it’s obvious. You should make this available to 15-year-olds.”—I was 30 at the time—“They will do things that you can’t imagine, and things that I can’t. This will be what they learn to make music on, and it’s going to change everything.” And he said, “No, no, no. It should go to Luciano. It should go to Hans Werner Henze. It should go to Karlheinz and to Jean-Claude.” Those were the people who were going to make real music on it. And it didn’t matter really what anyone else did. And I said, “Wrong,” and he said, “You’re just too American.” And of course what I suggested is what Yamaha did. And I think it did change everything.

FJO: What’s interesting is at that point in the development of electronic music, there really were two electronic musics. There were these laboratories at universities, research centers like IRCAM and Stanford where John Chowning, whom you also had worked with, has discovered the FM synthesis algorithm—really high-level scientific inquiry. And then there were pop musicians who played on synthesizers, like the Moog and the Buchla, which had recently become available on the commercial market. And for them, it was gear that enhanced their sound world. They created some weird, odd sounds that weren’t heard before, but it wasn’t really about scientific inquiry; it was about making something really cool.

Rolnick with his gear in the mid 1980s

NR: It actually started out as scientific inquiry with Moog and Buchla because they were working with analog machines and they were trying to figure out how to do it. The work I did when I was a student working at Stanford, with Chowning and Andy Moore and other people there, was with computers; you had to run the math to figure out what really happens when you do FM synthesis in terms of being able to put out the equations. But when I finished that and finished IRCAM and got a job in 1981—the one I’m just leaving at RPI—the first thing I did was go out and buy a synthesizer. And I bought some analog stuff. I think I bought a Prophet-5 and some things. Then someone told me about the Synclavier. So I sold my analog gear and got a Synclavier for about ten thousand dollars; I convinced the bank that it was like investing in a violin. It was going to gain value, and boy was I wrong. But I got the loan and I had a job. Some of the people that I had worked with at Stanford came out to visit me and they saw this Synclavier, and they said, “Well, this is just a toy. You can’t do everything on it.” Because on the mainframe computer at Stanford, we could do everything. And my response was, “What I can do is practice on this. I can use it every day. I can spend hours practicing, just as though it were a violin or a piano or anything else. And so even though it can’t do everything, I can do a whole lot more with it, because I can really get to know it.” Again it’s that it sort of has an intimacy because it’s in my life on a daily basis.

FJO: You had this interest in communicating that goes all the way back, and you had this desire to get to know an instrument intimately, but you also had a fascination with studio electronic music which doesn’t exactly seem simpatico with those other things.

NR: I have two memories. One is when I was in college or shortly after college, playing in rock and roll bands, and listening to a recording and the tape being stretched. We’re all sitting around listening and then, all of a sudden, it gets really strange. And I was fascinated. I thought, “What’s going on here?” What I had played was interesting, but then what I heard back was completely different. I didn’t major in music in college—I was a literature major—but I played in rock bands and folk dance bands all the way through. Then I worked at different things, including being a rock musician for about four years, and then went back to school and was formally introduced to electronic music, and it was just the easiest thing I could ever imagine doing. I completely got how to do it, and I could immediately go in and make things happen that seemed fascinating and interesting. I was always a pretty bad piano player; I can play a bunch of instruments pretty badly. But as soon as I started working, first with analog electronics and then computers, it was just like, oh right, this is what I’m supposed to do.

FJO: You mentioned playing rock and folk. I also remember reading somewhere that your earliest musical memory was hearing Western swing—after all, you were born in Texas. So there was all this music going on in your life. But you weren’t really immersed in classical music. Then, all of a sudden, you were in an academic environment doing really heavy, experimental music. Now, many years later, you’re writing for orchestra and writing for string quartet, sometimes even without electronics. So you’re coming at it from having done these other things, rather than returning to it.

NR: Well, there’s a little place in the middle there, when I was—I don’t know—14 to 17. I studied with a music teacher who lived right around the corner from here, up on 187th Street and Fort Washington. His name was Fritz Kramer. He was a musicologist at the Manhattan School; he gave lectures for the Philharmonic on Wednesday afternoons. We lived in Connecticut, and I would come in and spend all Saturday with Mr. Kramer. We would do a piano lesson, 16th-century counterpoint, 18th-century counterpoint and chorale harmonizations, listen to Hindemith. I would do exercises in Hindemith-like counterpoint. And I would have to do imitations of whatever I was playing in the piano lessons—Bach fugues, Mozart sonatas, and what not. Then I would have to do 12-tone exercises. And my grandfather got me a small subscription to the Philharmonic, so I had to do an analysis of whatever I was going to hear at the Philharmonic.

The last year I did that, that summer I went and studied with Darius Milhaud at Aspen. So I had done some folk music before that, but I got really immersed in this heavy-duty music theory that sort of took over my life for about three or four years, then went to college and had an extended case of adolescence and played in rock bands a bunch. I had to learn to play simply, which really was the difficult thing. And then when I went back, it was sort of like “Which world am I in?” I remember when I played in rock bands thinking, “Well, that stuff I did with Milhaud and with Mr. Kramer—no one listens to that, no cares about it. It’s just all this heady, high-brow stuff. Being able to play in clubs and festivals where people bounce up and down and really obviously dig what you’re doing—that’s what it’s all about!”

But then I said, “Well, O.K., what do I really hear?” I was much more interested in something that was more intellectual and more challenging and more interesting to me than what I was doing with rock bands or with jazz groups. But I feel like I don’t really fit in the classical music world either, in some ways, because I think a lot of people listen to my stuff and say, “Oh, well that’s just like jazz, you know.” There’s improvisation sometimes, and there’s beats, constant rhythmic things. I guess that’s what I think about when I am communicating, it’s just a matter of saying what I really hear. Forget about the ear that doesn’t hear.

FJO: Yeah, we’ll get back to that later, but let’s stay with your earlier experiences a bit longer. You had these role models. Milhaud was a really solid composer who had a firm grounding in the Western classical tradition—counterpoint, sonata form—and he wrote tons of string quartets and symphonies. And the guy who did these composition exercises with you was also completely entrenched within old-school classical music.

NR: Absolutely.

FJO: But you abandoned that path. Instead, you do the rock and jazz thing and don’t even major in music as an undergrad. But then you decide to go back into music and so you work with John Chowning and then Boulez. That seems to me like the other extreme.

NR: I’d been living in Vermont. I was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, and I started out working in a hospital in Wyoming, where I got canned for organizing hospital workers. Then I moved to Vermont, and got a kind of community organizing/counseling job with teenagers there. I was playing in rock bands this whole time. Then I met a guy who was the local music teacher; he organized the school chorus, and they did plays and musicals. And I thought, “Gee, that’s what I want to do.” I tried to be a counselor. I tried to be a mechanic, or a taxi driver, or a carpenter. With all of these things, I discovered that if I really particularly wanted to do something crafty, like being a carpenter, it’s going to take me five or six years to really learn how do any of that really well, anyway. And, if I was going to take all that time, I might as well do what I really wanted to do, which was to be a musician. So I thought, “O.K., well, if I go back to school and I get a degree in music, then I can move out in the country and you know, teach at a high school or something, and that would be great. That would be wonderful.” So then I went to Berkeley and got swept up into all the interesting new music things that were happening in the Bay area.

Then I got this opportunity to go to Paris and work at IRCAM, and it was like I was dropped right in the middle of all these things I had been reading about from the time I was in high school. It was like dropping into a history book. I remember reading Boulez articles when I was in high school and studying Stockhausen. It never dawned on me that since they were the people that I read about in books that I could actually reject things that they did. Because that just wasn’t an option, you know. Then I got there and realized that they’re all real people, just like you and me, doing things that they feel are right, and I’m actually capable of saying, “Well no, that’s not the right thing for me. No, I think some of those ideas are not O.K.”

Neil Rolnick in the late ’80s, photo by Gisela Gamper

In fact, the stuff that I built at RPI was in direct reaction to what I saw at IRCAM. IRCAM was really based on the idea that there is this great musical tradition. Someone once asked if I was going to hear Boulez here because he was probably the last musician who saw himself as directly descended from Wagner, through Debussy off into the great future of contemporary music. But I really feel like music is about communication. It’s about doing something. It’s not about making great masterpieces. It’s about making music for people. I’m much less concerned about the great masterpiece problem, and much more concerned about making events happen, where people listen to music, and making music that people want to listen to.

FJO: At the same time, I wouldn’t sell you short; you’ve written some really terrific, formidable pieces that deserve to be widely appreciated.

NR: Well, I hope so, and that’s actually one of the things that I really am hoping that I can do now that I’m getting rid of academic life for myself—to really focus. I have a lot of pieces that I really like and that I feel should have much bigger audiences. And I have a lot of pieces that I’m intending to write, that I think should have bigger audiences. Even though I’ve been very productive all the time I’ve been a teacher, now that I don’t have to be a teacher, I think that I can maybe be productive on a level of getting the music out more.

FJO: To take it back one place before we bring it more into the present, one of the things that I found so striking about your earliest pieces—I’m thinking about Wondrous Love (the trombone piece for George Lewis) and Ever-Livin’ Rhythm—is that even though you were writing pieces with tape, there was always a live performer as a part of it. You didn’t do these tape pieces where you go to a concert and you’re sitting in the audience looking at just the two loudspeakers.

NR: I’ve never done that. At the very beginning, I wrote a couple of pieces like that, but they were for dance—one for Margaret Jenkins and one for a friend when I was in graduate school. It’s never made sense to me, that idea of acousmatic music where there’s no connection to what’s making the sound. It just isn’t interesting because it seems to me that when you play something and you make something, you want to have someone say, “Here is my gift. Here is what I can give you. And it’s beautiful, I believe it’s beautiful, and I hope you’ll think it’s beautiful also.” That requires a person, and so every time someone has tried to get me to do something like that, it’s not interesting to me. And I thought that from the very beginning. The first piece that I wrote with the computer was a percussion piece, Ever-Livin’ Rhythm, and it was about making a virtuoso. It was kind of thinking in terms of what would Zyklus be if Stockhausen could hum a melody? So there was all this sense of how to really make a virtuoso percussion piece that had one person playing–there were 42 instruments—and yet make it work. A lot of the early pieces took melodic material from other things and this actually used material from a recording of Ba-Benzele Pygmies from Central Africa that had an interesting nose flute hocketing rhythm. I used that as the basis for it. But it was something where you hear the rhythms, and you hear the melodies, and there’s the spectacle of the person playing it and making it work. I always think of electronics and technology as being a little gloss of magic on the sound. We all know that you can get anything out of loudspeakers, right? You can make any sound that you want. But if you have a live player, and the speakers are doing something that just makes it so what the player’s doing isn’t really possible, then that’s really kind of exciting for an audience.

FJO: I think there have been several important moments of transition for you. As I said to you before, I don’t really hear a before and after in your music as a result of your hearing loss, but I do hear a before and after between those early pieces and the pieces Real Time and À la Mode that were released on LP by CRI in the 1980s. I want to talk about that LP a bit because the cover is so striking.

NR: It was one of the very last CRI LPs.

FJO: CRI was a label that tended to have pretty staid covers. Sometimes, there wouldn’t even be a picture on the cover, just the names of the composers—usually three different composers. And maybe if you knew one of them, you bought the record for the one you knew. But here was a record of just your music with a picture of you on the cover in a suit, wieldng an AX-Synth and sitting on top of a fake, oversized piece of cake.

NR: Yeah. Cheesecake. I’ve always felt humor is important, not taking yourself so seriously. One of the wonderful things that I’ve always loved about John Cage is that he was always smiling in his pictures. You know, you had Schoenberg, who was always frowning and looking very serious. And then you had Cage, who always had this big, silly grin on his face. You don’t have Shakespeare plays without Falstaff. If you’re going to really reflect life, you’ve got to have some humor. It’s too much to have without humor. That’s why we have it. So there’s that. And then it’s also using graphics and colors to frame what I’m trying to do. Real Time and À la Mode are an interesting pair of pieces because they’re where I got away from using samples of other people’s melodies and said, “I can just make my own up, and it’s O.K.” I started doing that with these ensemble pieces and then actually moved into doing that with electronic pieces and pieces with all sorts of different kinds of groups.

FJO: There’s another aspect to these pieces which is different as well. In the earlier pieces with electronics you had an acoustic player performing in real time with a pre-recorded tape of electronically generated sounds. But in these pieces, the electronic sounds are happening live alongside the non-electronic ones. Eventually you would find ways to integrate what the performers on the non-electronic instruments play with the electronics by having those performers trigger the electronics or having the electronics alter those acoustic sounds in real time. That’s a very different way of thinking about electronic music.

NR: Well, it all comes from the idea of performance and communication. I can play electronics as well as anyone. I can get on a stage and play things now using a computer or whatever, and feel like I can give as a good a performance as anyone can. And so it puts me in the place to communicate. One of the things that I learned when I was playing rock and roll and jazz was that it was great to be able to sit in with the band and have your role that you played. But at some point, if you really were trying to communicate your own ideas, you had to be able to get up and do it yourself without all the support. There was a point, I guess around the time that I did À la Mode and thereafter, when I did a bunch of solo pieces, some of which I still play now—things like Balkanization and Robert Johnson Sampler—and a bunch of others that I don’t play so much anymore. I could just go give a concert where I get up and play. Doing that really helped me define what my musical ideas are. Because if I can get up and do it, that’s what it is. I’m actually making it happen.

Neil Rolnick: A Robert Johnson Sampler performed at EMPAC (Troy, NY) on Feb 27, 2013.
FJO: Another part of it that I think speaks to how performers/interpreters of this music have evolved over time is that in the really early days of this stuff, you’d have the ensemble or the soloist who would do his or her thing—they didn’t touch any of the electronics—and you’d have the tape that’s playing those sounds. The next step is having players who are doing their thing, and you’re doing the electronics live with them. Then the next step is you’ve got the group and then you’re manipulating their sounds in real time. You’re affecting their sounds as well. But then the final part of that is working with players who are comfortable doing the electronics as per your intentions. They can do it without you.

NR: Well, there’s a before-ness in terms of setting it up for them. I have to make the stuff that processes them. But in the iFiddle Concerto that I did with Todd Reynolds, we actually set it up so that he controlled it. That was great. He’s going to play Gardening in Gropius House for the recording of it we’re doing in June. We haven’t really talked yet about whether I’m going to control things or he’s going to control things. So that’s a discussion that we have to have. The trade off is that while I actually love to give all the control over to him and let him play and switch things using foot pedals that I can set up, I also want him to be able to put his full focus on playing the violin. So I don’t know what the answer will be to that. But that’s always a sort of an interesting question to me.

The other thing I think about is how all of what I do is really about live performance. So when I croak, no one gets to perform this anymore. What happens? I’ve taught a lot of people, but I’ve really never taught anyone how to do what I do. So, I don’t know the answer to that one.

FJO: How much of the details of the electronic components in these pieces—which I imagine can’t really be conveyed via noteheads on staves—is actually notated? Is there a system?

NR: There is nothing notated. Well, not quite nothing. There are notes to myself—move to this preset, that set up—but what the things actually are is stuff that I do and I’ve never figured out how to notate it. So for all the big ensemble pieces and large pieces with single instruments or small groups, everyone else’s part is completely notated in great detail, but my part is just little numbers. I know how to do it, so I’ll do it. But I have no idea how to notate it; I’ve never figured it out.

FJO: Well, that’s not completely true because you sometimes include improvisation in your pieces.

NR: But it’s notated as it needs to be. Things go from places where I give some sort of parameters and just say, “Go!” to things being minutely notated. I’m very comfortable notating them as much as I need to. But I’ve never figured out how I notate what I do, so I don’t know what happens with that.

FJO: In terms of control versus lack of control versus improvisation: when you do the electronics for a piece versus somebody like Todd manipulating it himself, how much leeway does the performer have to manipulate sounds in a way that’s different from what you had originally envisioned? Because it’s not precisely notated.

NR: It’s pretty much the same kind of difference you would have in a completely notated piece. There’s phrasing and how you shape the gesture—I’m usually pretty clear about what I want the sound to be, or the overall gesture to be. Todd is the only person I’ve worked with who can do the manipulation all by himself. I’m pretty directive, but there’s some flexibility. Overall I kind of think my job as the composer is to tell everyone what to play, even if that means improvise some here.

FJO: There’s still something of a leap of faith involved in how performers will interpret what you tell them to play, as you point out in the program notes for the piece you wrote for Bob Gluck. You actually called it Faith, riffing on the double entendre since he used to be a rabbi. When you give a piece to somebody else, especially one that is somewhat open-ended, you’re kind of hoping they do something that’s in the spirit of your intentions.

NR: Well, that’s an interesting piece. There are two different kinds of processing that go on in it. One is that he plays and I process the sound; I do it all live on my computer. Then there are some sections where I give him a little controller which I’ve set up so that he can bring different synthetic sounds up and down, and he can trigger and play different loops and fade them in and out of each other. Then he’s supposed to be playing some on the keyboard, too. When we worked on that, it was a matter of me giving him directorial advice in terms of thinking about it as phrases and gestures; don’t think about going three or four minutes without stopping, make a phrase, explore one of the particular things I’ve got in there. You can select different ones each time. So he developed a way that he plays it. I’ve also done the piece with Kathy Supové and with Vicky Chow. They all play it really differently. Kathy really gets into the improvisational parts with the controller, completely different from Bob’s approach. And I like them both. I don’t have favorite children. But they’re really dramatically different. It’s partly because Bob is very enmeshed in the world of jazz; he plays a lot of jazz stuff and just did this book on the Mwandishi period of Herbie Hancock. Kathy is sort of more in the new music and free improvisation world. I don’t think any of it makes it any less of my piece as long as I’m comfortable with where they’re going with it.

Neil Rolnick: Faith, performed by Bob Gluck (piano) and Neil Rolnick (laptop computer) at EMPAC 2/16/2010.
FJO: But you said that you feel it’s your job as a composer to tell them what they’re doing, whether that means play these precise notes and rhythms or improvise here for a designated length of time. But you’ve also played alongside other improvisers in a more open-form type setting; I’m thinking of the group Fish Love That, which sounds very different from everything else I’ve heard that you’ve done, because it is a collective thing rather than just you.

Neil Rolnick’s Fish Love That: “Calypso” featuring Neil Rolnick, Todd Reynolds, Steve Rust, Andrew Sterman, Ron Horton, and Dean Sharp performing during a 1998 recording session for the Deep Listening CD. Video by John Jannone.
NR: That was a really interesting period. I initially got the group together that became Fish Love That to do a project called Home Game in the early ‘90s. Then I went away and spent about six months in Japan and got involved in playing with some traditional musicians there, and was suddenly feeling this lack of improvisation in my life. When I came back, I got the group together again with the idea that we would just meet once a month on stage and play. And that’s what we did. We started out doing monthly things at the old Knitting Factory, and then we moved to HERE and we kept it up pretty regularly for about, I don’t know, four or five years. Everyone brought pieces in. I brought pieces. Todd [Reynolds] brought pieces. And Andy Sterman would bring pieces in. So it was this slightly amorphous thing, but it wasn’t the main thing for any of us. It was just something that we all enjoyed doing. I really wanted it to be everyone’s, but then Todd and Andrew at several points said, “You should just be doing stuff of your own. You should be putting together this group to do your own work, instead of whoever’s work. Actually that would make more sense.”

The other thing that was happening is that I was working on a music theater piece for that whole five years with a group in midtown that supposedly produces things that go off-Broadway and Broadway. So at the same time I was writing this very tonal, directed stuff for people, many of whom couldn’t read music because a lot of Broadway people can’t. They just learn it all [by ear]. It was about the discovery of a drug that makes you feel like you’re in love and want to act on it. And how much money you could make on that, putting street drug dealers in competition with big pharma. The book and the lyrics were written by a friend of mine, Larry Beinhart, who wrote the book that the movie Wag the Dog was based on. He’s a quirky, wonderful writer.

Neil Rolnick’s desk in his New York City apartment which looks out toward the George Washington Bridge.

I was also doing stuff at RPI. But that kind of all came to an end when I moved to New York City in 2002 and took very seriously the idea that what I want to do is just forget about this group that I’ve been trying to maintain and forget about the theater thing, just take a deep breath and say, “What do I want to write?” I had some money from a grant and I actually contacted a bunch of people that I had wanted to write for—Kathy Supové, Joan La Barbara, Tom Buckner, ETHEL—and said, “O.K., I got this money. You want a piece? If I write a piece, will you play it?” That’s kind of where I took the direction to what I’ve been doing ever since.

FJO: So the theater piece never happened.

NR: No. It had a lot of staged readings. It was a wonderful experience. I would love to see it happen. I think it’s a really cool piece.
FJO: Did you finish the music?

NR: Not only did I finish the music, I finished two or three times the music. I probably wrote about 50 songs for it, and it maybe has 20 in it. I keep trying to figure out places where I can get that done. But I also don’t know that I ever want to get into a situation where I’m not in control of the music, as was the case of developing this thing where there were group meetings. Does this piece work? Does that piece work? As we worked through it, I felt like the music got dumber and dumber, and less and less interesting. But it would be interesting to me to go back and try to make that really happen.

FJO: On your own terms.

NR: On my own terms.

FJO: So it was all straight-up musical theatre songs with a pit orchestra. No electronics?

NR: No electronics.

FJO: We keep coming to these places in your career where there’s a before and an after. This might sound utterly ridiculous, but I was aware of a before and after in 2002 because up until then you were Neil B. Rolnick and since 2002 you’re just Neil Rolnick. I’m particularly attentive to this kind of detail since I obsess over my own middle initial, so I have to ask you about it.

NR: That’s right. That’s because you don’t call me Neil B. Everyone calls me Neil. I got the feeling that I was just being pretentious. Again, it’s this feeling that what’s important is really directly communicating. At that point I also started referring to what’s going on in my life in my notes about the music: my grandkids being born, my feeling about being in New York City. That’s what’s important; that’s what I’m spending my time thinking about. I think that whatever you spend your life in comes out in what you write; at least for me it does. When I first moved to the city, I wrote a piece called Uptown Jump, and it was about the fact that my daughter and her family, including one grandson at that point, had moved from Brooklyn up to Washington Heights. So they made an uptown jump, and it changed my life in terms of interacting with a new generation in my family.

Rolnick’s grandchildren are always present at his workstation.

But that’s why the “B” got dropped. At a certain point, when I moved here, I said, “O.K., from here on, it’s real. No one calls me Neil B. Everyone calls me Neil.” I’m 65 now. I was 55 then. The move here was a lot about saying I wanted to start pulling away from academia. If I don’t put my full energy into making music, when the hell am I going to do it? This is my time. I think what I’m doing now is making another step in that same direction, saying, “O.K., I’m crossing my fingers that I’ll be able to keep eating and keep putting a roof over my head.” Assuming that I can make that work, I should be able to spend the next however many years I’ve got making as much music happen and writing as much music as I can imagine. And at least at this point, I feel like I can imagine a lot.

FJO: A big challenge that could have gotten in the way of this, but actually hasn’t gotten in the way, was what happened with your hearing.

NR: I don’t think it’s in the way. You know, I would love it if I had my hearing back in my left ear, but everyone has things that challenge them, whether it’s physical or perceptual things, relationship things, or money things. There’s no prize for having problems. We all have problems. There’s only what you can do to react to them and grow out of them and make them into something positive in your life. I’d rather it didn’t happen, but stuff happens. I feel like it expanded things. I feel like the loss of hearing made me really have a whole new perspective on how we perceive the world. I never really thought about how different our perceptions were. I’ve built this whole piece that I hope will actually get produced in the full way that I imagine it. I keep feeling like the music I’m writing out of each of the changes that I go through is getting better, and more interesting, and deeper, and funnier, and more joyful, so that’s O.K.

FJO: After the hearing loss, you also finally wrote a string quartet with no electronics, Extended Family, which is an extraordinary piece but also a very extraordinarily traditional piece. It harkens back to centuries-old traditions in ways that a lot of your other music doesn’t. It’s multi-movement and the last movement is even a fugue.

NR: I love fugues. I love the way that they sound and the idea of them coming out of these other textures that I’m working in. But it’s something that I learned how to do when I was in high school. It’s just like playing with electronics. I can just do it.

FJO: I was wondering if hearing in mono has somehow realigned your musical priorities. Electronic music is all about exploring a very detailed level of distinctions with textures, timbres, and directionality. Perhaps other musical parameters are now rising to the forefront in your music. We all know what the sound of a string quartet is. You can’t necessarily make a new timbre with a string quartet, but you can do wonderful things within that timbre and emphasize other aspects of the music making. I’m wondering if there’s something to hearing the world a different way that now gives you the opportunity to say, “I appreciate this just for what it is.”

NR: When I started the piece, I thought it was going to be about my extended family, meaning my daughter’s family that lived here in Washington Heights with me, and the kids I saw all the time, and the community that I have around me here. Then it became about my actual extended family, as I spent a lot of time with my brothers and my sister, and my mother dying. Actually the previous string quartet that I wrote was about my father dying. I hope I don’t have to write too many more quartets about those sorts of things. But they were both very strong experiences for me. I was with both of them when they died. My hands were on them. Life and death are so much more interesting than thinking about electronics or not—the details of how the piece is going to come together. Often, when someone approaches me about writing something, they say, “And of course there’s a computer part.” And I say, “Yeah. There’s a computer part.” I was really interested in the idea of not working with electronics, because I’ve done so much.

With Extended Family, ETHEL wanted a multi-movement piece, so the five movements were the way it worked. Besides the fugue, which I think of as sort of bringing all the parts of the family together, the part of that piece that I really love the most is the central movement which is slow and basically has one chord that just hangs there. We get a very halting little melody that traces its way through it. That’s not a texture that I really think about. I’m sure that there are lots of string quartets that do that, but I wasn’t even thinking about texture. I was just thinking, “How do I capture this in sound?”

FJO: I imagine another factor that might have led to your writing a piece for ETHEL that doesn’t involve electronics is that a non-electronic piece is probably much easier to tour.

NR: Absolutely. The first string quartet that I wrote for ETHEL is Shadow Quartet. In cleaning out some stuff at school, I found a quartet I wrote when I was teenager, so it’s not quite the first, but it’s the first one that I would want anyone to listen to. When we put that together, it was at a weeklong residency up at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, and I had it all set up, so they were all controlling everything. I had them all with pedals, and they were bringing things in and out, controlling how much everything was happening, and switching between things. Then when it was done, they said, “Great, we would love to take this piece on tour, but we can’t take you on tour. So you have to figure out a way that we can do it without you.” And I said, “I can’t do that because it’s got to be interactive and I’ve got to do all this stuff,” and they said, “Then we don’t have to tour with it.” And I said, “But, but, but…” So since we were going to do a recording of the piece anyway for CD, we recorded it. We used a click track and we multi-tracked everything. Then I extracted their parts from the recording, and left only the effects. So if they played with that click track, it sounds exactly like I’m processing them live. And I had these wonderful discussions, particularly with some more doctrinaire electronic music people, about cheating. You really can’t do that. On the other hand, they probably did a hundred performances of Shadow Quartet. No one had a clue that it was not being processed live. And, in fact, it was processed live, because if I hadn’t processed it live, we wouldn’t have had the recording to put the click track on. So ultimately it doesn’t really make any difference to me; what I’m interested in is the music coming out.

Neil Rolnick: Shadow Quartet, First Movement: “Western Swing” performed by ETHEL (Cornelius Dufallo & Mary Rowell, violins, Ralph Ferris, viola, Dorothy Lawson, cello) at EMPAC (Troy, NY) on Feb. 16, 2010.
FJO: So you actually turned it back into one of those old school pieces for ensemble and tape.

NR: Yes, exactly. But it’s very different from the old school ones, because it’s got the impression that it’s all being generated by the instruments.

FJO: It’s sort of a Milli Vanilli approach to electronic music.

NR: Well, maybe. But if we go back to the idea that I can’t notate the things that I do when I’m playing and then what happens to this music, it is so important. The communication doesn’t happen because I’m sitting on stage mixing what’s going on with the electronics; it has to do with the instrumental performers up there playing for the audience and then these magical things coming up around them. I can make that happen so that they can take the piece out and tour with it.

FJO: You’ve traveled around the world a great deal over the years. You mentioned Japan during our discussion, but you also travelled extensively through former Yugoslavia as well as China and these travels have inspired quite a few of your pieces. Some of the remoter parts of the world that you’ve visited don’t have the same level of access to electricity that we have.

NR: When I was in China, one of the places that I played The Economic Engine was in this art area in Beijing called Qī Jiŭ Bā [“798”] which is in an area of old munitions factories. Artists moved into it, then the government decided it should become the official art area, so there are now lots of high end galleries from all over the world there. These people produced this thing and it was in one of the old buildings there. There was thick dust on everything. It was just this abandoned place that hadn’t been renovated. We had the whole top floor of this building, but there was no electricity. There was electricity in the plaza down below, so we ran an extension cord up four stories on the outside of the building and plugged in the sound system. I don’t need much electricity to do what I do. A laptop doesn’t take a whole lot and speakers don’t take a lot. But I also feel like I need the electronics for me to perform. If the music doesn’t require electronics, then like the string quartet, it can happen without me.

Of all of the places that I’ve been, the recent trips to China have been particularly interesting because China is not a kind of backward third-world country anymore. It’s got lots of really sophisticated things, and it’s been really interesting to see a kind of underground electronic music scene growing up there. I’ve gone there to do something with the conservatory or an official conference, and then there are these guys who are in their 20s and early 30s in clubs that are completely non-academic. It’s almost like two different worlds happening. I find the freshness of the young non-academic things really invigorating and exciting.

FJO: So now that you no longer have to do the day job of being at the RPI, you can actually travel even more.

NR: I hope so. That’s my plan. I’m in the midst of trying to see what comes up next. I’m working on saxophone and electronics pieces for Demetrius Spaneas. He’s done a lot of work traveling to Central Asia, so I’m looking forward to an opportunity to take that piece to Kurdistan and Tajikistan and all these places I’ve never been.

FJO: Bring your battery chargers.

NR: That’s right.

Frank J. Oteri

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