Category: Conversations

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


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

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

Guest Participant:
Alan Rich

Friday, August 18, 1989, 9-11 AM

Recorded and transcribed by Laura Kuhn

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

George Crumb: Jumping Off The Page to Become Sound

George Crumb

George Crumb
Photo by Sabine Matthes, courtesy C.F. Peters Corporation

Frank J. Oteri in conversation with George Crumb at his home in Media, PA

Friday, July 12, 2002—Noon

Filmed and Transcribed by Amanda MacBlane

 

FRANK J. OTERI: Your music, more than that of any composer I can think of, is so sensitive to sound both to the ear and to the eye. It’s completely original sounding and looking yet it’s also extraordinarily beautiful. How did you come to be so concerned with the way music looks?

GEORGE CRUMB: With its appearance on the page? It may have something to do with my teacher, Ross Lee Finney. He was a stickler for notation and getting the music on the page to look like it sounded, and also to try to find an evocative notation that would convey something to the performers, to jump off the page and want to become sound. He was very much into that himself. He was a student of Alban Berg, whose pages were also rather interesting I think, visually.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now, what was the first piece that you did that defied conventional ideas about notation?

GEORGE CRUMB: I think it was a transitional work for orchestra, which happened to be my doctoral dissertation in Ann Arbor, Michigan; it was a work call Variazione, variations for orchestra, large orchestra. I think there the notation is already an important part of the music. But the first time I used bent staves was in a work called Night Music I. That was in 1963 and that’s a few years after the orchestral work I mentioned. But certain aspects of my notation, like in the orchestral work, were already changing a bit in a visual way.

FRANK J. OTERI: So, even before you started doing this full-blown, do you feel that you came to this way of notating because of certain sounds that you were hearing that you wanted to convey that standard notation just didn’t offer? Or was it, as you were saying, an extension of Ross Lee Finney’s idea to convey something beyond what notation conveys to the performer—to make it jump off the page?

GEORGE CRUMB: I suppose all of my notation is concerned with being as clear as possible in communicating the necessary information to the performer. There are only a few pages of my music that are involved in what I would call these rather symbolic notations and I think you’re referring to those specifically—circular notations that involve bending the staves on the page. And this may reflect what seemed to me a kind of a circular element in the sound itself, in the music itself.

FRANK J. OTERI: So it’s to give the performer, or the listener following the score, a sense of the structure of the piece…

GEORGE CRUMB: It’s also tied in with actual sound.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now, if a classically trained performer, who is used to playing standard repertoire like Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, is all of a sudden confronted with one of your scores for the first time, it might not seem very clear to them at first. What were the initial reactions to these scores when performers…?

GEORGE CRUMB: Well, I’m trying to remember back all those years ago. Musicians were kind of interested, not being used to it would be the better expression, but they quickly assimilated that, like pianists who played my music a lot. They learned to memorize the pieces and avoid the impossible reading off the page, for example.

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah, how would a page-turner deal with a circular score?

GEORGE CRUMB: Yeah, that’s right!

FRANK J. OTERI: It almost defies sight-reading in a way…

GEORGE CRUMB: I think of it as more positive, as in a more positive way, as encouraging memorization, which pianists do a lot anyway, so….

FRANK J. OTERI: But then again, when you’ve memorized a score, you’re no longer interacting with the visual element.

GEORGE CRUMB: That’s right, then it’s in your mind, I suppose. But a lot of these things are just in my piano music, so I’m thinking a little bit practically there, you know.

FRANK J. OTERI: So you wouldn’t write those sorts of things in an orchestral score?

GEORGE CRUMB: Well, actually I might, in the score itself, Frank, but in the parts, I would tend to write those out on the horizontal.

 

FRANK J. OTERI: You haven’t written that extensively for orchestra, and maybe this is because of that. We have had the unfortunate situation in the U.S. where a piece of music will get commissioned and maybe you get two rehearsals, three if you’re lucky. So there isn’t that kind of time that you really need to probe into a score full of mysterious notations.

GEORGE CRUMB: That’s true. I have only four representative orchestral works, but even the first of those is transitional, so I have all together only four works. It’s true that not only in the notation, but in the sound itself one has less flexibility with orchestra. The minutes that go by are costing money and all these people are on stage. Whereas in small chamber groups it’s easier to get at problems of timbre, projection, or rhythmic subtleties, coloristic subtleties, generally, notational things. All of these things would become simplified in a smaller chamber dimension.

FRANK J. OTERI: You’ve been very lucky to have musicians who have championed your music, which is the exact opposite of an orchestra rehearsing something twice or three times. You’ve had people who have devoted substantial portions of their performing life to your work. I’m thinking of Jan DeGaetani, whose fantastic recordings of your music really spread it around, more recently David Starobin who has been a real champion of your mu
sic and has got you writing for the guitar

GEORGE CRUMB: Mmhmm. Yes.

FRANK J. OTERI: …like the pieces about your dogs including the one who keeps wandering back into the room! (laughs)

GEORGE CRUMB: (laughs) That’s right.

FRANK J. OTERI: Or the Kronos Quartet, who weren’t the initial performers of Black Angels, but they certainly have spread it around.

GEORGE CRUMB: They played it quite a bit. Yeah.

FRANK J. OTERI: And they have gotten to know it in a way that allows them to live the music which brings me back to the question of the score. What should a score convey to a performer? What kinds of things should a performer be guided by in a score, in your opinion?

GEORGE CRUMB: Well, I used to tell my students when I was teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, if they would send there scores to Tokyo or Tel Aviv and couldn’t be there themselves, they would receive in the mail a taped cassette and their notation is good if it conveyed enough information so that they recognize their piece. And if the essential content of their piece projects to, first of all the performers, and then eventually to the listeners—if it falls short of that, then it’s under-notated.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now have you had experiences early on or even recently, when you’ve heard a performance and thought, “That’s not my music?”

GEORGE CRUMB: You know, that may have occurred in earlier years, but I think after a while, Frank, the word gets around, the way your style goes, generally, or certain idiomatic things, certain technical things amongst performers, I’m sure through the grapevine. You know, “This is the way you do this.” “There’s an easier way to do this difficult thing,” you know. It might be a question of harmonic projection, harmonics on the piano or something. So the word gets around, but in more recent years, even the last 20 years, I’ve generally had kind of solid performances. Not equally inspired, but not disastrous ever. Just very exceptionally… But in the early years, it was kind of a normal thing. After all, we were writing in a time when there were very few people amongst the performers who can do this music at all. You’ve already spoke of Jan DeGaetani. One could also say Gilbert Kalish, David Burge, you could say Paul Zukofsky. These people were kind of one or two in a category and that’s all there were and of course, now they’ve had students and their students have had students, so that one can go to an out of the way place now and there might be a beautifully competent percussionist, for example, out in the wheat fields of Kansas or something, you know. So things have changed so remarkably that way.

FRANK J. OTERI: Yet despite what we’ve been talking about here, I wouldn’t characterize your music as overly complex.

GEORGE CRUMB: Well, it’s not intentionally complex at all. I’m always striving for simplicity. It can never be simple enough for me.

FRANK J. OTERI: The sounds may not necessarily be sounds that a performer is used to making, but they’re not necessarily difficult sounds to make once you’ve figured out how to do them.

GEORGE CRUMB: Once you do them, once you know how to produce them. That’s true. I think my music is never difficult in the old-fashioned sense of finger dexterity, you know. It’s not difficult like a Chopin etude or any of Brahms…the difficulties are more in the area of timbral projection, balance, getting the fabric of the music, the kind of color projection also in terms of texture.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, it’s interesting. One of the charges that has gotten raised about a lot of contemporary music is that it’s music for the eye, you can analyze it on the page but when you hear it, it doesn’t pan out. Now, your music is very much about how it looks on the page, but it does pan out to the ear and looking at your score, you might get a structure, you see things like a spiral or circle and understand the structure that way, but it doesn’t strike me as being overly structured music in that sense.

GEORGE CRUMB: Well, I suppose my model was always Mozart. I loved him even when I was a tiny kid. (laughs) I was writing in the Mozart style when I was 10 or 11 years old. I thought that was contemporary music, in West Virginia. You know, that was contemporary music. But I admire his economy—the fact that there were so few notes on the page. The fact that every note was expected to accomplish something.

FRANK J. OTERI: That’s so funny because that famous accusation that the nobleman said about The Abduction from the Seraglio—too many notes.

GEORGE CRUMB: Too many notes, my dear Mozart. (laughs) That’s right and Mozart said, “Which notes would you delete, your majesty?”

FRANK J. OTERI: Right. Now to that question then, the question of analysis. What does a listener get from your music following a score that say a listener not following a score might not get?

GEORGE CRUMB: I think that most listeners probably don’t look at a score. Do they really? That’s more, I suppose if you’re a terribly dedicated amateur or an enthusiast about music, maybe you’d get into the notation somewhat, but I think of the score primarily for the performer and anything I invent in terms of the visual aspect I hope will focus musically then to the listener. I think you’re implying another area too maybe, Frank. I never was much into a kind of analysis—self-analysis or any kind of analysis about music. It’s been my experience that people who know nothing about music technically sometimes can have an incredible awareness of everything that’s happening. I can understand that immediately because I feel that same way when I hear Indian music. I wouldn’t know a raga from a balalaika, but I feel that that music is just as clear as a Beethoven, you know.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now in terms of this question, to get back to what you were saying about practicality and mailing your scores to Tokyo and getting a tape back and if it’s your piece than you did something right—um, there’s something delightfully impractical, I think, about your scores. I remember I w
as a high school student and I got a copy of the score of Ancient Voices of Children and I still have it and, in fact, I was going to bring it today and have you autograph it, but we’re carrying all this stuff and I didn’t want to damage it…it’s so huge and it’s hard to carry around!

GEORGE CRUMB: It’s hard to carry, yeah.

FRANK J. OTERI: It’s not exactly practical!

GEORGE CRUMB: Some of my scores I call master scores for kangaroos, you know. But it’s true. Hasn’t that become a common thing with lots of composers in our time?

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, it’s interesting, because yesterday we went out to the Subito warehouse and they’re doing all this stuff. They’re providing a service for any composer who pays for their service to have their scores copied and bound and printed up and they have these fancy machines that staple the parts together and hand sew them and glue them and, I thought to myself, “Well, you couldn’t do a George Crumb score.” They certainly couldn’t do the Ancient Voices of Children score. It’s too big.

GEORGE CRUMB: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

FRANK J. OTERI: So I guess the question for you then is, could these scores have been presented differently and still convey what you wanted to convey?

GEORGE CRUMB: No, in a way I think the size of the score, in a way, was linked to my concept of the notation. For example, there’s a movement as you know, in Ancient Voices, that’s based again on this circular thing.

FRANK J. OTERI: “Dance of the Sacred Life-Cycle.”

GEORGE CRUMB: And that had to be on one page really, and that sort of demanded a certain size score page to accommodate that kind of notation and then that, of course, became the size for the score.

FRANK J. OTERI: You’ve been extremely fortunate, as have all of us in fact, to have had a publisher who’s printed these things up. For the most part, all of your published scores are from your hand-written manuscripts.

GEORGE CRUMB: Yeah, they’re either hand-written manuscript or in some scores I used a kind of transfer process, but even then most of that was even pen and ink.

FRANK J. OTERI: I notice on your piano an actual binder of blank score paper with a bunch of staves, but for most of your music you probably begin with a completely blank piece of paper with no staves.

GEORGE CRUMB: Oh, yes. Like, this representative page is all hand-drawn as far as the staves… I may sketch in a sketch book that’s printed score paper to save time, but once I get to my own copy—this for example wouldn’t show the structure of the piece which is involved in these little units of ostinato and it leaps out clearly that the piano, two staves reduced to the one, every time it occurs, you see? So in a way, it’s a visual fortification or emphasis of a musical idea.

FRANK J. OTERI: Interesting, so do think there are any advantages to computer notation programs?

GEORGE CRUMB: Well, the computer notation now is very beautiful but in the early days it was atrocious. It looked scrawny and undernourished. It was horrible. Now it’s almost as good as, let’s say, German engraving in the great days, say the 1880s, 1890s, the characters are beautiful and it’s possible to reproduce the highest standards of engraving. It takes time to do that just as in every process, but there’s a charm in a more manual way of working too—one’s own manuscript. I love to play Mozart from copies of his own handwriting. His rondos for piano… Of course, you have to learn to read the C soprano clef to do that, but that’s easy to learn. You know, you get past that barrier and you’re playing from Mozart’s script! It gives you a different sense.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, to get back to this, this thing we started with, this sensitivity—I find there’s also a magical quality to almost all of your music and part of that magic is your personal touch and the computer kind of takes away the magic a little bit.

GEORGE CRUMB: Just like engraving erases the personality of all the old masters. You know, their original copy had so much character. Chopin, Brahms.

FRANK J. OTERI: Although those Beethoven scores were impossible to read.

GEORGE CRUMB: They would’ve been impossible, but they’re just loaded with character. Of course, there’s a limit of practicality. You know, one could hardly read Opus 111 from Beethoven’s copy.

FRANK J. OTERI: But if he would’ve had Finale or Sibelius, it would have been very different.

GEORGE CRUMB: You know, it’s interesting. All of my students use those ways of making scores nowadays and I guess, for me I’ve done the other way for so long I probably wouldn’t ever consider converting, but generally, you’re right, it’s being done. And it’s very useful. It makes very clean scores. They’re ultra-legible.

FRANK J. OTERI: Do you feel something is lost though?

GEORGE CRUMB: Maybe something is lost, but it was lost anyway in the period of engraving. The thing we’re talking about.

FRANK J. OTERI: Do you feel like if a composer starts creating a piece using this rather than working with pen and pencil…

GEORGE CRUMB: I don’t know if there’s a mistake in the actual writing that…I don’t know. I know of composers that work directly into that machine, which I think probably is a mistake. I see it more as a copying device, not as a way of notating. Even when I was teaching, students would bring in sketches as if they were published things. They looked like engraved music and these were the most fleeting first sketches of a piece and, you know, here they are immortalized in beautiful type. It was disconcerting.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, I make all my notes on one of these little hand-held devices and this has replaced a notepad for me.

GEORGE CRUMB: You know, maybe it’s just what one is used to. Times change and however, you know, you work. I have to do a lot of sketching like, you know, I have these books and I throw away so much. I work very slowly. I’m a bumbling composer. It’s like plodding. I have to work through all kinds of wrong ideas before I can find the right one. But people work in different ways.

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FRANK J. OTERI: Now, one of the unique aspects of your music which, of course, you can’t really convey with computer notation and I don’t know if you could even conceive of it if you were thinking directly into a computer are all of the visual elements that go along with so many of these pieces. From performers wearing costumes to the performers walking around while they’re playing, being off-stage, singing, having the pianist suddenly sing or shout or having a clarinetist start playing another instrument, like a hand-held symbol or something. What prompted you to think of those extra elements, the elements beyond the actual instruments?

GEORGE CRUMB: My music accommodates many elements like that. It would be exactly analogous to opera. You know, like a recording of opera, you’re missing a lot of what’s going on. Sometimes things can be incorporated in a recording, like Bridge has done, is doing a series of my music now and later this summer they will be recording Echoes of Time and the River. Well, how do you record the processionals? You have to have a sense of the music actually moving in space, and one should be able to hear that certain musicians are describing an actual change of position, you know. But they’re going to work that out, I think, with a microphone technique rather than undergo the risk of the footsteps and the extra noises. But there are certain things, like if there are certain theater elements like lighting or some kind of costume, anything like that, of course, it’s not sound related. That’s lost like an opera décor or…

FRANK J. OTERI: It’s interesting to me because there are all of these theatrical elements in your music, yet to the best of my knowledge, you’ve never written an opera or a musical theater piece.

GEORGE CRUMB: No, although in the early days two or three of my vocal works were called mini-operas of a new kind, referring to Ancient Voices and Night of the Four Moons as a kind of genre that wasn’t precisely a cantata, but that pulled in dramatic elements and was a little bit operatic in a miniature way.

FRANK J. OTERI: Would you be interested at all in writing an opera?

GEORGE CRUMB: I used to say no. I’ve been looking recently…I won’t even mention the subject because probably I will talk myself out of it. I might become attracted to it someday if I really feel myself pulled in that direction strongly.

FRANK J. OTERI: What pieces do you want to write that you haven’t written yet?

GEORGE CRUMB: Oh, there are a lot of those. In fact, I’m working on getting back into a little more sustained writing again. And some of these are ideas that were sketched out a bit in earlier years, so I’ve just completed a new piano work and a new vocal work for my daughter Ann based on Appalachian songs, a cycle for percussion, piano, and voice.

FRANK J. OTERI: Texts have been very important to you; the poetry of Federico García Lorca, in particular, inspired nine different piece of your music. That’s an amazing amount of effort to devote to one person’s work.

GEORGE CRUMB: The extended cycle, yes.

FRANK J. OTERI: What initially drew you to Lorca?

GEORGE CRUMB: It was during my student years, it was the setting of one poem by a classmate. A fellow student used “The Boy Wounded By the Water”—that’s the English translation. And it was beautiful…well, I loved his musical setting and this got me into the poetry. It was set in English in his setting. And I got a bilingual edition then and got more and more into the poetry, but decided, as dangerous as it was, that it should be in Spanish. Because I have no real facility with Spanish, I read a little but and when I say dangerous, it is a leap to set another language that’s not absolutely familiar to you.

FRANK J. OTERI: Yet in some ways, it’s even more precarious for composers to set American English and make it work.

GEORGE CRUMB: Well, that’s true too. That’s true too! (laughs) That’s right. I’ve often thought that the greatest models for American English settings would be the popular song literature of the ’30s and ’40s. It treats English as a parlando language essentially which is not even as lyrical as German is, say, in Schumann and Brahms.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now, in terms of setting the language, and this harks back to questions of performers’ backgrounds, if you come to a piece in American English, with a bel canto background, or a heldentenor background, you know, singing Wagner or singing Puccini, it’s not going to sound like American English and yet, if the score exists in a certain way on the page, those guidelines for interpretation are not necessarily there and this gets back to the question from the very beginning—how much do you convey on the page, what do you say. What kind of training, you are fortunate and we are fortunate as a result, that the sound of your music is familiar to so many players so you will get a performance that is characteristic of your style, but if somebody doesn’t know your style, how do they get that without hearing it?

GEORGE CRUMB: Interesting question, but I think, you know, today recordings are considered a kind of an extension of publication, it’s yet another source to clarify, particularly if the composer is in on those recording sessions, like the series I’m doing with the Starobins. I’m trying to be in on all those sessions as a way of kind of doing just that—making it a supplement to the publication. One could refer and say, well, this is really what he meant, you know. But it’s a very good question. There’s an erosion of time too. I’ve talked about what they call the performance tradition but also there’s a certain erosion I think that maybe happened with composers like Beethoven to an extent, you know. Where the tradition is not so certain anymore about certain aspects. Tempos, mostly, in his case. We think his metronome was broken. But, maybe internally, if one knows the style, one studies a range of works, you could develop a sense of what seems appropriate.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, this question of tradition, in all the things you’ve said this afternoon, you’re definitely connected to that Western classical tradition, but your music is so its own thing. Where do you feel you connect to the rest of the Western classical music tradition?

GEORGE CRUMB: Well, I feel old music is interrelated and all of the classical tradition, whatever I know about tradition, is part of that, but also all of the non-
Western music I’ve heard in all of my life—popular music, folk song, jazz, all music is interrelated. I’ve never believed in categories, you know. I think everything can come together. I have a recent piece on a Thelonious Monk tune, and I love the tune. It’s just as elegant harmonically as anything by Chopin. And as a student even there were beautiful recordings in those days already of a vast range of Asian classical music, South American, African. And that entered my ear; I didn’t study it. I’d never had a course in ethnomusicology.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, it’s so interesting because you’ve used instruments from other cultures. The Lux Aeterna uses a sitar and tabla, although it doesn’t sound like any other sitar and tabla music there is! Or you use a banjo, but it certainly doesn’t sound like Appalachian music or bluegrass.

GEORGE CRUMB: Yeah, yeah. Well, I think those things can happen. That’s maybe an illustration of this crazy thing when you see all musics as kind of interpenetrating, you know. I think that’s the characteristic of our own day—that we’ve broken categories.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, it’s so interesting because nowadays in so-called contemporary American classical, serious music (there’s no real good word for it), there are so many different separate fiefdoms. There are the people who do 12-tone music still or the disciples of that, the post-serialists. There are people who do minimalist music. There are the people who are neo-romantics who have gone back to writing this big, expansive orchestral stuff using lush late-romantic harmonies. People doing stuff based on chance. People doing stuff with other tuning systems, microtonal stuff. You’re somehow outside of all of that, yet there are elements of all of it, you know, that connect and I think that you are one of the few composers people in all of those camps respect.

GEORGE CRUMB: Well, it’s just a philosophical view of my own. To me all music is philosophical, and philosophically contemporary. I’ve had students who, maybe a certain measure in Bach sets them off. You know, they make a connection themselves. They’re interested suddenly…a whole world is opened to them, there’s this big circle, arc, back into time and they’ve touched a point that sets them off on a way of their own. I believe this. I’ve always been reluctant to think of it in terms of schools, all that sort of thing—post-this or post-that. I see everything as interpenetrating. Maybe there’s a penalty to pay for that, too, that I don’t know about, but that’s just the way I think.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, it’s interesting, because so many of these people in these various camps pretty much hate each other as we’ve discovered time and time again on our forum: we doing something about serialism and all the minimalists say that their stuff is terrible and we do something on minimalism and all the serialists say, “How dare you write about this stuff; that isn’t music?” Yet, here you’re essentially outside of all that, and you’ve been acknowledged with a Pulitzer Prize, you’re in the Norton Anthology of Music, which is the canon! You’ve even won a Grammy award for Star Child

GEORGE CRUMB: You know, I’d have to say Frank, there are contributions in all these areas. I was influenced by Webern in my early years. There are a lot of valuable additions to vocabulary that came through Schoenberg and the other guys, especially in my opinion, Alban Berg. The minimalists. It’s a very interesting concept and all good music is kind of minimalist in a way. Sometimes you can violate the principle of economy for a special effect, but as a general principle, it’s interesting… So even there I can’t have this feeling that there’s one way. I never believed in this idea that there’s one central stream of music. Otherwise, there’re all these composers you can’t account for like Debussy and Mussorgsky and Berlioz and Chopin, they were outside this European mainstream. I think this is fictitious and I think that any excuse that there was for that way of defining music has completely evaporated by now. What is the central tradition today? There isn’t such a thing.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, it’s interesting because there’s an area that you haven’t explored in your music or at least in any of the stuff that’s been published and is out there and it was certainly a very big undercurrent when you rose to prominence in the 1960s and that’s the whole field of electronic music. I mean, you’ve certainly amplified instruments and I think you’ve even used an electric guitar here and there. But you’ve never really plunged into work on synthesizers or wrote tape pieces or computer music. That somehow stayed outside your work.

GEORGE CRUMB: Well, yes. I think because I need the human element underscored in my music, but even there I’d have to say that electronic music, the advent of that music, has had an enormous effect on all music today, including my music very much. I think probably we will hear Mozart differently because of this. Our ears are turned. And as a matter of fact, it started before the first synthesized sound; it started when records were first being made. Our hearing was already changing with the very earliest recordings. It gave us a different sense of sound and so forth. The microphone placed a little different, you know, or bringing out certain partials or qualities of attack or decay. Our hearing is totally changed and I’ve never been as attracted to the pure form of it. I mean, I can’t admire the machine. I think music depends on the bravurial amount and we depend on performers to convey that element of excitement and the machine i
tself can’t convey it excitement unless it’s compositional.

FRANK J. OTERI: So then, the future of this music?

GEORGE CRUMB: Mmhmm. Who knows? I would say that it’s limitless. It could go in any direction, but I suspect it’s going to be rather totally, involving the total musical culture.

FRANK J. OTERI: A lot of music that’s evolved in the recording studio, using electronics, is not notatable and as a result doesn’t exist on the page. You might have people improvising in the studio or creating in the studio or shaping sounds in the studio. Brian Eno, who began his career making rock albums, once famously said his instrument is the recording studio, and this is true for many of today’s composers including Paul Lansky and Virgil Moorefield whom we featured in NewMusicBox a few months ago.

GEORGE CRUMB: That makes sense. You know, in the sense that I think too, you know, it’s not a detriment that it’s can’t be really notated conveniently, because jazz would have the same objection… Look, Gunther Schuller in his big book on jazz was trying to notate some of that stuff. It looked impossible in the actual, you know, you’re getting into proportions and complex things, but it made what seemed simple by ear, a very complex, unnatural thing on paper. It wasn’t invented for paper.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now in terms of the future of music, your son is a composer.

GEORGE CRUMB: Yes, uh-huh.

FRANK J. OTERI: Your daughter is a jazz vocalist and also a musical theater and classical vocalist. You’ve taught for many years, and you’ve talked about practicalities. What else should younger composers and musicians be thinking about?

GEORGE CRUMB: Well, I suppose that you could tell students a lot of things. One of the safest things to tell them is to really, what the bottom line is, is discovering their own persona. Who are they? There’s nothing new about that. That’s what the old Greeks talked about too, you know. Who am I? All about discovering yourself. And that’s not so much in your control. You can just get at it obliquely, you know, and hope that it develops. But there are so many things that choke music. You mentioned the period of the ’50s or the ’60s that carried over where there was a sense that there was an international style that was kind of, you could describe it as either post-Schoenberg, or post-Webern. It choked the life out of a lot of composers because everybody was trying to do a style that was, first of all, done better already by those people. You know, you can’t re-write that music and make it better. It had a lot to do with canceling out personality. I think it did incalculable damage. I was so happy when the idea became more prevalent that this is just a man-made definition of musical style. There could be a thousand styles…There may have been a very few composers, my colleague George Rochberg, I think, was the absolute master of the post-Schoenberg style. He did better than anybody else, in his early music when he was involved in that, it didn’t dampen his energies as a composer and his personality came through very strongly in those early works.

FRANK J. OTERI: But then he certainly turned around.

GEORGE CRUMB: Oh, yeah. Then he did a complete about-face. Yeah. That’s just an example of how some people can overcome that kind of suppressing effect that—it may be the idea that there is only one way. I always hated that idea…

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, it’s funny. I’m finding out that even in my own music. When I was in college in the very early-’80s it was the very last gasp of that post-Webernian, pointillistic orthodoxy, and I did everything I could to avoid it, but now that that style has fallen from grace, I find it really interesting to listen to and perhaps even work in.

GEORGE CRUMB: I find it beautiful. I’ve always loved Webern especially and Berg! Good Heavens! What a composer! And moments in Schoenberg, so I’m not speaking against the origins of that, but it became a kind of university music…

FRANK J. OTERI: Are there any composers or styles of music that you are not at all interested in?

GEORGE CRUMB: It’s hard to think of any that don’t have something in them.

FRANK J. OTERI: Today’s pop music. Do you listen to it?

GEORGE CRUMB: Oh, yes, I hear it because my son has an enormous collection of international rock. Anytime I make a trip to any country, I have to bring back what’s going on in the contemporary field. He has maybe a couple thousand CDs.

FRANK J. OTERI: Wow.

GEORGE CRUMB: And that stuff’s floating around the house.

FRANK J. OTERI: I want to look at that collection!

GEORGE CRUMB: (laughs) Yeah, you can take a peek! I can say my music has amplification too, so maybe there’s a little influence in that direction.

FRANK J. OTERI: Any thoughts on rap music?

GEORGE CRUMB: Rap? I don’t know anything about it much. I’ve heard a couple of examples. It didn’t bowl me over but maybe I’m missing something, you know.

FRANK J. OTERI: You’ve spoken quite a bit about Chopin and Mozart and Brahms; these names just keep coming up. And you’ve written solo piano music—although it’s for an extended piano. You’ve written for string quartet, but again it’s an amplified and somehow extended string quartet. And there are the handful of orchestral pieces. But you haven’t really written anything in conventional forms. You haven’t really written an absolute string quartet or a violin and piano sonata or a symphony or a woodwind quintet or anything like that. Do those formal structures and conventional combinations still have anything to offer younger composers or should we all be looking for new structures and combinations?

GEORGE CRUMB: It’s an interesting point. I’m not sure I have an answer to it. It seems to have two parts. One thing is the actual kind of ensemble. Few people write piano trios anymore. There are a few exceptional ones in those categories, those genres, but… And the other thing is the forms that were attached—the sonata, the rondo, the scherzo. The forms probably would be hard to use these days because it depended on a functional tonality which is kind of lost to us now. But I think it makes us obliged to find other forms to fill, to make the music.

FRANK J. OTERI: Yet interestingly enough, someone like Roger Sessions wrote great 12-tone sonatas and symphonies.

GEORGE CRUMB: So did Bartók. Not 12-tone, but I mean, hugely complex in terms of dissonance and chromatic possibilities. But you’re right, they were structured very much like the old forms.

FRANK J. OTERI: And as a corollary to that I would say that although your music definitely goes into new harmonic areas, it is essentially operating from the sense of a tonal center.

GEORGE CRUMB: I think so, yeah.

FRANK J. OTERI: One of the most beautiful things in all of your music is the end of Voice of the Whale, for flute, cello, and piano, which after a great deal of tonal ambiguity ends triumphantly in what is undeniably B major!

GEORGE CRUMB: It’s used in sort of a non-functional way though, again. It’s like one’s taking a bath in the tonality of B major. In a sense, it’s like you’re bathing in that tonality. Um, I suppose that one can make that gesture still, but I would find it hard. I shouldn’t speak for other composers, but I would find it hard to use some of the older forms in a modern way. I had too much influence from composers like Robert Schumann, all of his early works were kind of in the fantastic variety, you know. Carnival music and different kinds of dances and then weird images and poetically inspired and inventing new cycles that had nothing to do with conventional forms, very much to do with conventional forms. Although later on he of course wrote his symphonies and so forth and found his own way of using those forms. But nowadays, well, I think it’s really just open. There’ll be a renaissance maybe of the sonata form 10 years from now. Somebody will discover a new way to do that. It’s hard to close off any possibilities, I think.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, I hate to close this off, but that really is a closing thought, I think.

GEORGE CRUMB: Well, yeah. I like to think of it as encouraging, saying that it’s all open really, you know, that nobody knows where music is going. But it’s a nice thought to think that it can go so many directions still.

 

Sounds:

Three Early Songs  (1947)
from George Crumb 70th Birthday Album

Night Music I  (1963, rev. 1976)
from Quest

Madrigals  (1965-1969)
from 20th Century Voices in America

Night of the Four Moons  (1969)
from Orchestra 2001, Music of Our Time, Vol. II

Ancient Voices of Children  (1970)
Dance of the Sacred Life-Cycle
from George Crumb: Ancient Voices of Children

Black Angels  (1970)
from Kronos Quartet: Black Angels

Lux Aeterna  (1971)
from Orchestra 2001, Music of Our Time, Vol. I

Makrokosmos I  (1972)
performed by Laurie Hudicek

Makrokosmos II  (1973)
performed by Emmy Henz-Diémand

Music for a Summer Evening: Makrokosmos III (1974) 
from George Crumb: Ancient Voices of Children

Star-Child (1977) 
from George Crumb 70th Birthday Album

Processional  (1984)
performed by Kayako Matsunaga

Federico’s Little Songs For Children  (1986)
from Quest

Easter Dawning  (1991)
from Complete Crumb Edition, Vol. 5

Quest  (1994)
from Quest

Mundus Canis  (A Dog’s World) (1998) 12
from George Crumb 70th Birthday Album

Visit here for a complete discography


Scores:

Ancient Voices of Children – The Dance of the Sacred Life Cycle
(Download/View: 1.9MB PDF)

Makrokosmos I – 12. Spiral Galaxy [Symbol] Aquarius
(Download/View: 325KB PDF)

Makrokosmos II – 8. A Prophecy of Nostradamus [Symbol] Aries
(Download/View: 390KB PDF)

Makrokosmos II – 12. Agnus Dei [Symbol] Capricorn
(Download/View: 321KB PDF)

Threnody II: Black Angels
(Download/View: 111KB PDF)

All score samples appear courtesy of C.F. Peters

Merce Cunningham: Moved by the Music of Our Time



Merce Cunningham

New York, NY – April 17, 2002
On the roof of the Cunningham Studios

Filmed and Transcribed by Amanda MacBlane

FRANK J. OTERI: You have been a very significant figure in the history of American music, not only because of all of the composers you’ve worked with, but also because your ideas about dance have had a universal impact on all of the arts. But it is often difficult for non-dancers and for people who do not follow dance to fully understand what dance means.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Well, the meaning lies in the action and movement. You can describe things in it, particular things, but you usually have to form it in words to somebody beforehand or after you have referred to it. And as regards meaning, my meaning is in the actual movement. Not necessarily referring to something or being tied to something in any way, but simply by what it does on its own steam. In a sense that’s the way I’ve worked for a lot of years.

FRANK J. OTERI: So in essence that’s very similar to the way many composers refer to their music; it exists on its own terms.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: It exists as sound. A sound and many different kinds of sounds can be utilized and in that same sense many different kinds of movement could be utilized depending how you feel about them. But those are possibilities.

FRANK J. OTERI: Your career now spans over half a century, do you feel there’s been a change in how audiences perceive things?

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Well, yes. Not necessarily huge but I think it’s not just the way they’ve come to look at what we do, I think it’s in the society itself. We perceive things differently, I think. There can be multiple connections, rather than single connections, that you can see. For us primarily audiences in Europe in the last 30 years have been—not particularly in France, it’s quite remarkable in a way. In the beginning, they, in traditional French style, they threw things. As soon as the lights went down they all said wonderful things. [laughs] But we kept returning thanks to our presenter and liaison in Paris and we have played all over France, not simply Paris. Multiple cities. And I think in a sense that could be true any place. I don’t mean just for us. With visual art, you see a painting and it doesn’t strike you or you think it doesn’t look like something or whatever, you know you have the chance to look at it for a long time and you may come back or you may just see it by chance. But with dance, you see it once and it passes in front of you and your impressions are made by what you remember about other dances and your impressions about dance anyway. And then if the dance is not in a familiar form and the music is not familiar and it’s something outrageous, then it’s different for a person to put all of that together himself or herself. But I think it’s about looking: to look at the dance and to just keep looking, that’s what it’s about.

FRANK J. OTERI: In a way, dance is the most human of all art forms because it involves actual people.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: [laughs] Yes, it involves people moving around. You’re quite right. I’ve never thought of it as not being human! I don’t think of abstract things. I think movement is human behavior. It may be in an unfamiliar way, but it’s still humans doing it.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well you once said something that I found quite remarkable. You said, “Life is basically movement.”

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Oh, yes.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, if all life is movement and art is part of life, then all art—the painter’s brushstroke, the writer writing a poem, someone bowing a violin, or playing a piano—that’s all dance.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Well, it is movement, you’re quite right, and it is movement that could be utilized as dance maybe. It could be movement not necessarily that is referring, but movement that a human can do, but then you’ve changed the rhythms so it wouldn’t look like you were playing the violin. [laughs]

FRANK J. OTERI: So, does it become dance when it’s conscious movement?

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Perhaps. One of the things you see in it too is that for no reason at all, all of a sudden, dancing, it’s not formal dance but it has a kind of dance quality about it. And it’s not to music necessarily. I get that it simply becomes through the way they do it as something you could perceive as dancing. So for me it broadens the kind of sense or range that one thinks of as dance.

FRANK J. OTERI: So, opposite kind of question: Is there any kind of movement that isn’t dance?

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: You could say that. [laughs] It would be perfectly possible. If you could of course do it.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: One of the things that I now have, and a number of other dancers too, is a computer [program] called Life Forms, devised at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. It’s a joint enterprise between the dance department and the science department. They’re still working together as far as I can tell. I was introduced to it, oh, way over 10 years ago. They asked me if I wanted to see something about it and it looked so interesting, I said yes. So they sent me a video of the way it works and I was struck immediately because of the technology, for one thing. It was in a computer which was visual and there was dancing which was visual, so I though, “Well, they go together!” [laughs] So I said I was interested and they arranged for me to have a computer here, and then someone from the university came to help me. And she would sit with me and say, well, now you do this and this and then I would do it and it would all fall apart and she’d say, “No, that’s alright, we’ll get it all back again!” [laughs] And gradually simply through pursuing, because I knew absolutely nothing about computers in any way, I’ve learned to use it and I use it now in all the works, not entirely, but in a great portion to amass great amounts of material, visual material. Because what you see is this single fig
ure, which you can manipulate in any way and you can put it into a shape and then you move on the computer what’s called a timeline, where it’s now a different time so you can put another movement. So you can put another one—I’m doing this very simply, but that’s basically what it is. Then the computer will go from this movement very directly to this movement. In the most direct possible way you see the body do this and then become this. Well, I thought looking at this, well, what if you put something else in the window! [laughs] So I would try that out and of course I crashed everything! But I didn’t mind because I figured, I didn’t know anything so it wasn’t a mistake, and I’d just go on. And with practice and use and periodic help, I’ve worked on it a great deal. It has limits naturally because like anything technological, in the beginning there are awkwardnesses. We don’t see them that way perhaps, how long something takes for example, but we see how quickly it removes several of the steps if you do the same thing with Life Forms. Something that used to take, say, five operations now can be done with one so that there is a certain speed. You can only put in one figure at a time, but you can amass a great amount of material that way and then put the material on different smaller figures, on what they call the stage space. It’s like a checkerboard. And there you can bring up smaller figures each of—they can all do the same thing or you can bring up different things. So there’s this complexity possible which you can examine. Now, I can work with those figures for hours. They don’t get tired! But it’s very difficult with dancers because it’s hard and they have to stop every once in a while. And it also gives me a way of working when the company is on a break.

FRANK J. OTERI: To take this back to a composer’s perspective, I started using a very sophisticated music notation program last year and I found that I began to understand the orchestra better and how instruments interact together better than I ever could working this out on paper. I can actually hear combinations and make changes.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: That’s right.

FRANK J. OTERI: A lot of composers today struggle when they first start working with an orchestra because orchestras don’t commission a lot of new works. It’s not like when Mahler had the Vienna Philharmonic at his disposal. He knew what those sounds were by living with them. We always think of composing as a very solitary act: you should be able to have those sounds in your head. You should be able to write a symphony out on paper and know what it sounds like full form. But for choreography, it’s never been that way. It’s always been about working with other people.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Well, seeing it.

FRANK J. OTERI: And seeing it and interacting.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Visual, visual.

FRANK J. OTERI: But it’s never been about writing something out and then saying, “Ok, here’s my choreography. Go do it.”

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: I don’t… This, of course, can also be used just to record and very accurately. You have to do it. You have to put it in clearly, but once it’s there it’s very useful that way. I know that many people now in various schools use it and I think from that point of view it’s good. You can put a ballet combination in very clearly and the student can see this and then the teacher can slow it down so you can see exactly how it operates. Even if when the dancer does it he or she cannot do it that slow, they can see what makes it up, the kind of digestive parts! [laughs] And I have books with some of our exercises in them. But principally, I like it because, first of all, I can make things up and second of all I can see.

FRANK J. OTERI: But of course, there’s probably not been a dance that you have completed using this program without testing it on people and then changing it.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Well, O.K., you’re quite right. You have all of this in the computer and I take it to the studio and to the dancers. If it’s something unfamiliar, I usually put it in the classroom exercise just simply to see if we can do it. But if I see one student get it then I know—once somebody has done it, then other people would say, well, we can do it too. So, you can see it that way and then go back and if it needs to be changed for physical reasons, we can put that in the computer so what we have now is what the dancer can do.

FRANK J. OTERI: In an essay you wrote about a decade ago you listed four things that were life-changing to you in terms of your creative work, the Life Forms program being the fourth of those things. I want to take a few steps backward and talk a bit about the other three, starting with the first, which is the notion of rhythmic structure: music and dance sharing the same space and time but not necessarily being related to each other.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Yes.

FRANK J. OTERI: And how that enabled you to think of dance independently.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Well, that was working with John Cage, of course… You see he had composed a number of pieces prior to this for modern dance soloists. And he also knew that there was some conventional way of taking a piece of music and then putting a dance to it. He didn’t like either one. He said that way one dominated the other. So I thought, well, that’s a very nice idea, that they should somehow be made independent. So he had devised this rhythm structure, which was the square root system, numbers say, whatever number, the first sequence in the first however many, 10 seconds they would count, then the whole thing would be 100, 10 times 10. And the first solos I remember when we worked this, we had figured out a given path of a given soloist, what the structure would be and then he went away to the piano and I was in the studio and began to work and this was very peculiar because I had no support in that conventional sense. I had to depend on myself and in that way I also got to know exactly what I was doing! So at some point, and it was difficult, very difficult to work at those early pieces, but at some point in one of the dances, one of the songs, we came together, I wasn’t finished nor was he, but he had composed a certain part of it and I had enough of a dance so we could try this out. It was difficult because, there was nothing to count against eventually… but there was one remarkable thing that happened for me. It was so-to-speak a dramatic dance and there was this one point where I made a very large strong movement and there was total silence and a fraction of a second later came this sound and I thought, “Oh, I get it. I get how it could work.” Because they each relied on themselves they didn’t rely on each other.

FRANK J. OTERI: But by that same token, would you say that seeing something, in terms of an aesthetic, watching it happen on stage and hearing it, would you say, “Well, gee, those two things just don’t work together?”

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Well, yeah. Because they’re not together! But if you think that that is a possibility then you also can see that there’s no reason why they need to be together so that they could happen independently.

FRANK J. OTERI: So, using that same notion, is music necessar
y for dance?

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Yes. And, no, not necessary. I don’t know if that’s the proper word, but life is full of sound and do you want to be without it? Since it’s there?

FRANK J. OTERI: The very first silent films had no music to them and very soon music became a convention.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: That’s true, that’s true.

FRANK J. OTERI: And it sort of morphed into this sort of ambient role with the talking pictures. It was still there but not throughout. I’ve seen dance performances where there’s no music and it’s disconcerting. It doesn’t feel right.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Well, there really is sound all the time as John said so often, and if you think it’s silent, then…

FRANK J. OTERI: Like all the planes going overhead right now!

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Yeah! So what are you going to do, say, “Go away?” No, sound exists, but I don’t think the question is about doing it without sound, I think it really was the idea that they could really be independent. Each could have an identity that when put together could do something that neither one of us could have written, could have thought of previously. And in the same sense, with the visual, with the artist the same principle was used although there often the artist wants to do something. I have no objection to it. I just say, would you be interested in working this way, and then what would you do.

FRANK J. OTERI: But what is so interesting, of course, in how music is used in our society is that music written for dance will exist independently. You can buy a recording of The Rite of Spring, which was created for dance, and listen to this music and have no idea what the dance was and it exists separately. But the dance doesn’t exist separately; the dance always has the music with it.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: You’re right. But I think there’s a very curious thing that happens on the television now where they run a series of short clips of things they’re going to show—something out of a movie, something out of a play, something out of music, with an orchestra—that are all five seconds long. They can’t change the music because each segment is too short and they put a single work underneath. So it fits everything. But they’re going on to all these—you see somebody you saw in a film where the person you see is Fred Astaire dancing, where the music was something out of Gershwin, but the music that they’re using for this segment is something else.

FRANK J. OTERI: So in that sense the dance is existing separate from the music that it was written for.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Yes, yes. And I also think having sound in particular be on the radio, that tells you it’s there. [laughs] Otherwise, you wouldn’t know.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, one of the things I always find an interesting trick with whether it’s dance or music videos, when I’m watching on television or a video tape, is to turn the sound off. And, once again, it’s very, very disconcerting.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Yeah, yeah. Well, I like old movies, so sometimes, not frequently, they have silent films, but then now I think they have music to them, something so this kind of vacuum is filled. I suppose on the radio when it’s on you have to have sound. Well, in the sense with the television, it’s not so much sound but with the television you have to change your vision to see it. So you produce that.

FRANK J. OTERI: So then, do you listen to music independently of working with it?

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Oh, yes. Not often, in fact, not often enough. I like to listen but there’s always so much to do. I don’t have time to listen to music, but yes I have a tape machine, you know, to play things on, you know, things I’ve heard before. Things that people send me. Oh, yes. Not as often as I would like to…

FRANK J. OTERI: What do you enjoy listening to in particular?

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: If I can make a blanket statement in that way, I like contemporary music. That is music that may tell me something about the time I live in that I didn’t know about before. I get very tired with the 19th-century forms. I find that they seem to work very poorly. They’re not for me. [laughs]

FRANK J. OTERI: Now when you hear music, whichever music it is that you hear, since for you music and dance share the time-space but they exist independently, do you envision dances?

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Oh, yes. Sometimes. You see, I used to be a tap dancer when I was an adolescent, that was my beginning and I learned the waltz clog and the time step and I noticed lately I couldn’t remember them, so whenever I hear something on the television that maybe was comparable to the three for the waltz clog, I’m trying to learn them back. But I suppose that’s the extent.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now, the second area, the second big discovery, chance operations, indeterminacy.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Yes, uh, yes. I think there were many reasons for that with me. One of the things I think that impressed certainly John Cage and other people at that time, it was the early ’50s, there was a publication of the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes where you cast your fortune, but whatever you got was for that moment and for that space and the next second there could be a completely different one. In other words, it was that morning which you had cast for. So the next moment—it wasn’t like it led from one thing to the other, so we began to think about using chance because of the possibility of making continuity. The effort to do it in the beginning was just astonishing because using chance operations, say one had taken a series of separate movements and then used chance operations to make the order, what came up was something that was totally different from one’s physical memory. And first of all simply to learn one step and then remember what the next one was and learn that and then go back and see if you’re memory knows that, because the memory had been trained in another way. Sometimes in a linear way and this isn’t linear at all. The best story I have about that is at Black Mountain College the summer that we were there. It was the beginning of the company and John Cage was there and David Tudor was there too—he was rehearsing for a program of contemporary music that he would play later in the summer, but he was also the player for us and I didn’t want to ask him to come to rehearsal because of his own work, but I was getting so desperate for this dance that finally I asked him if he would come one day. I had not made the dance to the music but I had in a sense made it with the music because of the timing. It was a piano piece by Christian Wolff. And so David came and we started and he would start to play and I would start and in about 20 seconds, I sat down in despair and David stopped, the way he would, and I would get up and we would try it again. I couldn’t remember physically, the whole memory system was discombobulated! [laughs] So we kept on and each time we would get a little further and after about the fourth time, we sat down in despair and David Tudor came around the piano, looked at me and said, “Well, this is clearly impossible but we’re going right ahead and doing it anyway!” We just kept on going.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now you were saying for you the 19th-century forms are just not interesting and this whole notion of indeterminacy and chance in a way is about breaking out of this whole notion of linearity and climax because life doesn’t really work that way. Life is something here, something there, something there.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: I think more so than ever now because we’re not just living in a single place and operating only with those things in a sense in a linear fashion but we operate with a multiplicity of things and not just in a single space. When you can see on the television something that’s going on in China, something telling you about the stock market at the bottom, something along the top view telling me about the weather , describing the weather in Minnesota. There are three different things going on and nobody has any trouble with that. Now, if you do that in the theater they’re just harassed. But they see it on the television everyday! [laughs] Now they have four of these lines or something coming in with all of this!

FRANK J. OTERI: It’s very strange but I would definitely say, I would say that it’s influenced by work of you and Cage and Christian Wolff…

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Well, that’s very possible but I mostly think that we were just a part of it.

FRANK J. OTERI: Although initially many of the transitions from movement to movement determined by chance operations might have been unnatural, are there any of these sequences of movements that have become transitions that you think of as natural?

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Oh, absolutely. I was in Russia once for a week and we showed our videos in Moscow. There were some dancers there and there was a translator and one of the questions was from a man who was a ballet dancer from the Bolshoi, and he said in Russian, “The movement doesn’t look natural.” And the woman who translated, a wondrous lady, translated to me and I said back to her, “If you do something often enough, it becomes natural.” She said, “That’s great!” and then went back into Russian. [laughs] Because it’s true. We all thought that about the typewriter. What are you going to do with an automobile when you’re riding with a horse on it? And the computer is the most conventional instrument, but look at the complications of doing that and it itself has changed too. I think that many of the movements that were devised that we had trouble with in the beginning the dancers now handle in an amazing way. I’ve added complexities in arms, which when we began took a very long time, understandably so, for the dancer to understand that he or she was in what’s called first position in a relevé. One arm was like this and one arm was like this and the torso was turned and your head was turned this way. And all that had to be done, piecemeal, so that one thing linked to the other. Then you go to another movement where once again each thing had to be turned the other way. Now with some, they get it so fast, it’s amazing, sort of because I know the history. It wouldn’t seem that way to someone who was watching. But for me I can see the quickness with which their eyes pick up these ideas.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now, is there a timeline in terms of training dancers? How long does it take somebody who doesn’t know this stuff to get it?

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Well, they have to come, if it deals with our work, first of all, we have to have trained dancers and many of them have come from ballet training and that’s useful for us because they have strong legs. Then with us they need to learn things about the torso and these additions and the arms, and that takes a while. But if they do it and they work at it can work. It’s just a question of realizing what it is and that you have to learn it like you learned it with the technique of your legs. You have to learn how to use your body.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, it’s interesting because sometimes training can prepare you, but sometimes training can get in the way.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Well, I think style is important, I always thought that. I think that when one equates technique with style, then that gets into trouble. I think there’s no question that what I do comes from me, but it wasn’t to make a style. I’ve tried to keep it as open as I could in terms of physical behavior because I can’t imagine, seeing it on a computer and then trying to get it across to a dancer.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now certainly it’s said with music, and this is an old cliché which isn’t always true but is true in some cases, but it’s very difficult for many conservatory-trained musicians who play the classical repertoire to relax and engage in improvisation. Now would be there parallel to that for a ballet dancer coming to you?

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Well, I think dancers in general probably, are given to improvising on the ballroom floor, and most of them can do that kind of thing and enjoy it, as I do to with my computer.

FRANK J. OTERI: The third discovery you came to was working with seeing dance on film, capturing dance on video and seeing details that would otherwise be invisible to an audience. What kinds of aesthetic decisions did you end up making based on this?

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Here, it must have been, at that time it was the ’70s, and Charles Atlas was our stage manager and he also was a film and video person. And he kept talking about it and I had never…and he brought his camera in and he said you have to go through it, so he put it up and I, well, I had often talked with dancers who had worked in television, and most of them, at the time, said they didn’t like it. And when I asked why, they said, “Well, it doesn’t work” or “It doesn’t look like I thought it would,” or something like that. And I looked through this, like she is [indicates camera person] and I thought, “Oh! It’s totally different from the stage. You can do something different. You don’t have to do that.” That was the first thing that struck me right away. Instead of thinking it isn’t what I know. I began with something I didn’t know about so I could approach it from somewhere else. At least that’s how it started. And then work
ing with Charles Atlas, we made several dance films here. Dances made specifically for the camera. And I, people often say, some dancers, the camera doesn’t interest them. They’re all saying that it doesn’t look like dance and it looks better on the stage and I always say, well, there’s Fred Astaire. We all saw him in the movies and you didn’t see him on the stage, or I didn’t see him on the stage. And yet the dancing that comes through is so remarkable. So the whole thing about it not working on film was blown to pieces, I’m sure for everybody. [laughs] And so working with Charlie and with that thinking, I found it absolutely fascinating and terribly difficult. Hard if you want to maneuver and see it from different angles. You see, if you see something on stage, you’re sitting here and it’s going on there and you have the frame in which the movement can go, say, relating to the frame. But with the camera, you see it here because maybe there was a camera here so the frame was different and the look of the dancers different. That I liked. I thought it was interesting. Something that might make me uncomfortable which is simply another way. And several things with it, for example, repetition content. I quickly realized that if you start to repeat a lot, people are going to turn the channel because they know you’re repeating. On the stage repetition can have a kind of power, but in camera you get this idea that you want to do something else. But if you saw it from different angles, that was one way. Then the other thing I noticed was how small steps, I’m talking dance steps, a slight change would make a difference that it wouldn’t on the stage. If the dancers are facing this way on the stage and do that [indicates small movement], you would barely see it at all, but you’d see it on the camera. The first time I noticed that was when we were working on a sequence and I kept seeing them, when the sequence worked, then I saw them off the camera, and then on the camera something was wrong. I couldn’t figure it out and finally I realized that it was one of the five women, one of the women when she turned, instead of ending this way, ended that way. That was the difference, but once I spotted it I thought, well, you have to learn how to do the small things quick. So I began to add things in the technique classes, which involved rapid movement, not necessarily large because then soon you’d be off camera, but how to maneuver here and make the movements clear and the steps sharp that you can actually see with the camera. It brought a lot of things. How to work things in a small space, for example. That and the repetition and also I like very much the shifting angles where you can see something from a different point of view, because I think it opens your eyes about that stuff.

FRANK J. OTERI: And the most recent discovery that you’ve been working with, which [your Director of Communications] Trevor Carlson was telling me about, is motion capture computer technology.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Yes, that’s used in Biped with the scrim in front of the old David Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar projections. The principle and simple difference between my awareness of working—of both these just to explain—is that in Life Forms I put the movement in on a figure through the computer and move along with the dancer, so there it is. With motion capture, the way we have worked so far, is that they would shoot a dancer doing a short sequence of movement from Biped, but the shooting is different. The dancer’s in a space which is, in a sense, circular and the cameras can move all the way around, so when you make it, you don’t have to worry about which way it’s going, because they can change it after they get it in the camera. Now for the dancer that is participating, he or she is wearing black and a black hood on which these knobs, which are the size of small ping pong balls, are placed around the joints. So then it’s shot with all these cameras and what you see of these things, sort of movements through the joints, they can take them, having all this material, they can change it in an absolute multiplicity of ways. The movements were basically short simply because it was all so new to me, and to them as to how to get this take from me to them! I didn’t do anything on the computer—it was much more complicated than my work with Life Forms—but they would come every other week and show me and then they’d make suggestions and it’s in its way a mélange of how you can make not just clear images that are clearly the figure moving but to change those images to become more fluid hand-drawn figures that you can draw on the computer itself and change. This is all what one has the opportunity to work with now, that’s what interests me. Not simply thinking in terms of old-fashioned scenes, but with what kind of things can be done now. And I’ve been very fortunate with the visual artists with whom I’ve work, I think in general. They don’t all use computers… Rainforest, for example, with Andy‘s pillows, which are like moving scenery. They’re not fixed in anyway and sometimes they bound off the stage and move with it…I saw them in a small exhibit, the first one he’d ever had, and he was sitting in the corner, and I was walking with Jasper Johns and I could see him and I said, “Oh, Jasper, those are Andy’s pillows!” And he said, “Yes.” I said, “They’d be marvelous on the stage. Do you think we can ask him?” And Jasper said, “Well, should we ask him?” And Andy said, “Oh, yes.” So, we had a décor!

 

FRANK J. OTERI: Now this raises the whole question of possibility and what’s possible and this goes back to the thing you were saying at the very beginning of this conversation—the 19th-century linear versus now and this multiplicity of events. It’s very interesting to me that the audience for serious dance seems to be much more willing and open to new ideas than the audience for serious music. Why is that?

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: I can’t give you any real reason, but my feeling is the multiplicity of the television in the last four years; it’s grown more complex. People’s eyes now accept something out of television, so that that can be transferred to seeing something in the theater. But mostly it’s quite true, most of the time in the theater they go back because the theater itself is framed, but we have done so many of our things, these events in unconventional circumstances. We’ll do two next month in France which will be a round stage with the audience around it. And I’ve found always with those the public. They may be puzzled because it took them long to begin to see what’s going on and to make some decision about it. But I think very strongly that we live in a really visual atmosphere; we have to take in so many different things at once. No, I don’t think it’s a question of like or dislike, but I do think—and of course I’m thinking of New York, of course, primarily—but the dancers, one of the whole things in contemporary dance is the variety: the kinds of things they use, the kinds of steps or whatever you want to call it they use for dance, and it isn’t limited to a f
orm we already know, or even a technique we know. We can devise another one and all of that, I think, is part of the heart of the minute changes in the visual atmosphere.

FRANK J. OTERI: You, more than anyone in our history have been responsible for more pieces of new music for dance.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Yes, we’ve commissioned… (laughs) Well, I go back to the same thing. I like to work with contemporary visual artists, same thing with composers, because they are a part of the world we live in. They are thinking, however they are, in the ways that are related in someway to the way that contemporary life is and it’s—whether it’s a good or a bad idea, I don’t care—it’s only because it’s what is interesting. What am I’m making in this kind of dance? What kind of music does this composer do? Our most recent piece was, it’s a dance called Loose Time which we did at Berkeley and it has music by Christian Wolff and fortunately he’s going to be with us when we do it at Lincoln Center on that 50th anniversary

FRANK J. OTERI: I want to ask you a question that you might not want to answer, but I’m going to ask you anyway: Has there ever been any music that you have used in a dance that you actually didn’t like?

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: There have been some things—very few actually—where I realized what the composer was doing and I liked it in itself, but for various reasons I don’t think it would work with any kind of dance. Well, that’s just an impression of mine. But the music itself—I won’t say what it was…

FRANK J. OTERI: Oh, no. That’s fine.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: But I think it’s really been and I must say I was fortunate with Cage because of his, not only his own music, but his perception about what contemporary music can be in many ways, not simply from his own point of view. We’re presenting, on Thursday, a piece back from 1960 with music from Conlon Nancarrow and at that time nobody in the United States knew who Conlon Nancarrow was. Well, John happened to hear tapes of his music through someone at the New York Music Library and he thought it would work well for a dance, so I listened. I thought it was wonderful. So we were among the first people to play that here. And now, of course, Conlon’s music is known by many people.

FRANK J. OTERI: So, what prompted the decisions to structure the events that you put together for the upcoming 50th Anniversary Festival at Lincoln Center?

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Nigel Redden spoke of, “Well, it’s your 50th anniversary, it’s about history.” And I ordinarily am prone to do new pieces, of course, and ones that are closer to around now, so to speak. But he said, no, he’d like something about history. So we thought about it. We decided, talking to everyone about it, that we would try to use something from various times. So the dances don’t come in this order on the program, but the oldest one is Suite for Five from 1956, which has music by John, music for piano and the original costumes were by Robert Rauschenberg. Then the next one is 1965, called How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run. It comes from a different time; it’s a different kind of dance and the music is, was John Cage and David Vaughan reading stories from Indeterminacy and now it will be David Vaughan and myself reading. And that’s a different kind of dance. It comes from a different period. Then the next one is Pictures which I think was late ’84 and that has music by David Behrman and the costumes and set were by Mark Lancaster. And then one other one is Loose Time, well, Loose Time you know, but the other one is Fabrications from the late ’80s with music by Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta and costumes by Dove Bradshaw. In other words, they tried to bring something from each period and [dancer] Robert Swinston, who’s done an enormous amount of work to bring them back…

FRANK J. OTERI: How did you reconstruct the older pieces? This is before you used Life Forms…

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: …Before video even!

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Well, we have one misty tape of Suite. [laughs] And then the help of the mind memory and then I had some notes which I can’t find and Caroline Brown, who was in it, is helping us greatly with a lot of her memory. We’re getting it. Not entirely but we’ll have a piece. It’s a suite for dance. Pictures we have tapes and we remember, it’s closer than some people even realize. And so it works that way, but the worst thing is, you know, if you don’t have some misty video, which is the only thing you have, and some of my hastily written notes, which are impossible to decipher and then dancers’ memories, which they think are accurate, but they’re often not—but together all those, looking at photographs, you put it together and I think that between what Robert is doing and the rest, we’re getting them back the way they were. Now, they’re not the same because those are not the same dancers, but these dancers are doing those dances, these dances in the way they would do them now. Not that we’ve changed anything, but they are different dancers. That’s part of life, anyway… It almost amazes me with Swan Lake, they say this is a revival and this is exactly what it was, but the costumes are not, the décor doesn’t come from 1870.

FRANK J. OTERI: I guess that’s ultimately what makes dance always the most open to the new: the fact that it is about the people that are doing it at the time.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: That’s right, and the way they do it, the way that each person does it. Yes.

FRANK J. OTERI: This has been a wonderful afternoon, it feels like it’s July even thought it’s April.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Yes, but we can see the river from here!

FRANK J. OTERI: I always think there’s something about the space you’re in
that contributes to the creative act and there seems to be something really special about this space…

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Well, it’s a building, which was, of course, the Bell Telephone Laboratories, and then they moved, I guess just after the war, they moved to New Jersey and so the building was left. And so, what do you do with it? Somebody decided that it could be housing for artists. David Vaughan read about it and said maybe there would be a space we could claim, because we had to move from where we were. We came over here and I think the elevator went to the tenth floor and then we had to put on hard hats and come up here and they were constructing. But I saw immediately it could work. So we did what we had to do to change it and moved in, and we’ve been here ever since.

FRANK J. OTERI: Wow! Over 20 years?

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Yes, I think we came in the ’70s. It was when all of this was being changed. That took years, of course, going through government officials.

FRANK J. OTERI: It’s a really unique spot, there’s a great view of the Hudson

MERCE CUNNINGHAM: Oh, that part is wonderful. It’s changed, of course, even these buildings weren’t there so the view of downtown was really quite extraordinary with the Statue of Liberty. If you go out further you can still see it.

FRANK J. OTERI: This will be put on the Web in July, so it’s somehow appropriate.

Suite for Five in Space and Time, 1956

(later called Suite for Five)
First Performed: South Bend, IN; 18 May 1956
Music: John Cage
Design: Robert Rauschenberg
Dancers: Merce Cunningham Dance Company

 

Photos courtesy Cunningham Dance Foundation
Special thanks to Stacy Sumpman

 

Maryanne Amacher (b. 1943)
Torse (1976)

Robert Ashley (b. 1930)
Problems in the Flying Saucer {for Eleven} (1988)

Larry Austin (b. 1930)
Beachcombers{for Coast Zone} (1983)

David Behrman (b. 1937)
“…for nearly an hour…” {for Walkaround Time} (1968)
Voice with Melody-Driven Electronics {for Rebus} (1975)
Interspecies Smalltalk {for Pictures} (1984)

David Behrman, John Cage, David Tudor & Gordon Mumma
Changing Steps (1973)

Earle Brown (b. 1926-2002)
Indices {for Springweather and People} (1955)
Four Systems {for Galaxy} (1956)

Gavin Bryars (b. 1943)
Biped (1999)

John Cage (1912-1992)
Credo In Us (1942)
In The Name of the Holocaust (1943)
Shimmera (1943)
Triple-Paced (1944)
Root of an Unfocus (1944)
Tossed As It Is Untroubled (1944)
The Unavailable Memory Of (1944)
Spontaneous Earth (1944)
Four Walls (1944)
Mysterious Adventure (1945)
The Encounter (1946)
The Seasons (1947)
Orestes (1948)
Sixteen Dances (1951)
Music for Piano {for Suite for Five in Space and Time} (1956)
Variations IV {for Field Dances} (1963)
Variations V (1965)
Duet for Cymbal {for Paired} (1964)
Cheap Imitation {for Second Hand} (1970)
Etcetera {for Un Jour ou Deux} (1973)
Child of Tree {for Solo} (1975)
Inlets (1977)
Letter to Erik Satie with Sound Anonymously Received{for Tango} (1978)
Instances of Silence {for Trails} (1982)
Inlets {for Inlets 2} (1983)
Voiceless Essay {for Points in Space} (1986)
Sculptures Musicales {for Inventions} (1989)
FOUR3 {for Beach Birds} (1991)

John Cage & Livingston Gearhart (1916-1996)
Experiences (1945)

John Cage & David Tudor
Five Stone (1988)

John Cage, David Tudor & Gordon Mumma
Assemblage (1968)

John Cage, David Tudor & Gordon Mumma
First Week of June {for Signals} (1970)

John Cage, David Tudor & Gordon Mumma
52/3 {for Landrover} (1972)

John Cage, Takehisa Kosugi & David Tudor
Five Stone Wind (1988)

Stuart Dempster (b. 1936)
Underground Overlays {for Ground Level Overlay} (1995)

Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta (b. 1957)
Gravitational Sounds {for Trackers} (1991)
Microcosmos {for Windows} (1995)

Warren ‘Baby’ Dodds (1898-1959)
Fast Blues (1946)

John Driscoll
CyberMesa {for Breakers} (1994)

Brian Eno (b. 1948)
Ikebukuro for three CDs {for Pond Way} (1998)

Morton Feldman (1926-1987)
Variation (1951)
Ixion {for Summerspace} (1958)

Jon Gibson (b. 1940)
Equal Distribution {for Fractions I} (1977)

Alexei Haieff (1914-1994)
The Princess Zondilda and her Entourage (1946)

Lou Harrison (b. 1917)
The Open Road (1947)

Toshi Ichiyanagi (b. 1933)
Kaiki a.k.a. Sapporo or Music for Piano {for Story} (1963)
Activities for Orchestra {for Scramble} (1967)

Mar
tin Kalve
All Happy Workers, Babies & Dogs {for 10’s With Shoe} (1981)

John King (b. 1953)
Gliss in Sighs{for Native Green} (1985)
“blues 99” {for CRWDSPCR} (1993)
New Work {untitled at the present time} (2002)
Gliss in Sighs{for Native Green} (1985)

Takehisa Kosugi (b. 1938)
S.E. Wave/E.W. Song {for Squaregame} (1976)
Cycles {for Gallopade} (1981)
Spacings {for Doubles} (1984)
Assemblage{for Grange Eve} (1986)
Rhapsody {for Carousal} (1987)
Spectra {for Cargo X} (1989)
Streams {for Neighbors} (1991)
Transfigurations {for Doubletoss} (1993)
Wave Code A-Z {for Scenario} (1997)
Trilogy {for Way Station} (2001)

Norman Lloyd (1909-1980)
Seeds of Brightness (1942)

Gordon Mumma (b. 1935)
Mesa {for Place} (1966)
Telepos {for TV Rerun} (1972)

Pauline Oliveros (b. 1932)
In Memoriam: NIKOLA TESLA, Cosmic Engineer {for Canfield} (1969)

Maxwell Powers
Renaissance Testimonials (1942)

Michael Pugliese (1956-1997)
Peace Talks {for August Pace} (1989)
Icebreeze {for Touchbase} (1992)

Pat Richter
I Can’t Go On to the Next Thing Until I Find Out about You {for Deli Commedia} (1985)

Ivan Tcherepnin (1943-1998)
The Creative Act-Electonically Varied Heterothonies on a Text By Marcel Duchamp{for Field and Figures} (1989)

Yasunao Tone (b. 1935)
Geography and Music {for Roadrunners} (1979)

Trimpin
Installations (1996)

Gregory Tucker (1908-1971)
Ad Lib (1942)

David Tudor (1926-1996)
Rainforest (1968)
Toneburst {for Sounddance} (1975)
Weatherings (Nethograph #1) {for Exchange} (1978)
Phonemes {for Channels/Inserts} (1981)
Sextet for Seven {for Quartet} (1982)
Fragments {for Phrases} (1984)
Webwork {for Shard} (1987)
Virtual Focus {for Polarity} (1990)
Neural Network Plus {for Enter} (1992)
Soundings: Ocean Diary {for Ocean} (1994)

Ben Weber (1916-1979)
Pool of Darkness (1950)

Christian Wolff (b. 1934)
Suite by Chance (1952)
For Piano I {for Untitled Solo} (1953)
For Piano II {for Lavish Escapade} (1957)
Suite {for Changeling} (1957)
Music for MC {for Rune} (1959)

La Monte Young (b. 1935)
2 Sounds (April 1960) {for Winterbranch} (1964)

Walter Zimmermann (b. 1949)
Self-Forgetting {for Change of Address} (1992)

Abbey Lincoln: A Woman Speaking Her Mind



Photo by John Sann, courtesy Verve Music Group

Abbey Lincoln at home with Lara Pellegrinelli

May 10, 2002—2 p.m.
New York, NY

Filmed and Transcribed by Amanda MacBlane

1. Family

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Well, Abbey, if we’re going to talk about your work as a composer, why don’t we talk a little bit about the Lincoln Center performances back in early March? You did three days of your own compositions.

ABBEY LINCOLN: Yeah. Now I’m trying to remember exactly what I did, but I don’t. I think there was a spirit that just carried me through. I don’t think I sang forty songs—I know I didn’t—but I have written about forty songs since 1970. And I’m glad that, I think that I’m going to be known principally for my repertoire, for my songs.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Why don’t go back to the beginning and tell us a little bit about your childhood and what brought you into the music?

ABBEY LINCOLN: I’m one of 12 children, the 10th child. And my father built the house in which I was born.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: In Chicago?

ABBEY LINCOLN: Yes. Morgan Park. And he built the house in Calvin Center, Michigan, where I grew up. And my mother was brilliant and beautiful and a great woman, and taught us about our spiritual selves. And everybody in the family got over really. They produced a tool and dye maker, my oldest brother, that’s Alex. [she points to his portrait] And Alex, he really didn’t like it here. I understand it. Bob, the second eldest boy, became a judge and the youngest boy became a V.I.P at a great corporation. It was like that. My sisters brought many, many children. When Mama died, there were 84 children. She was 84 years old and there were 84 children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren that she had.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: That’s amazing.

ABBEY LINCOLN: There’s probably about 200 of us now. I believe it’s got everything to do with the mixing of the nations, even though it was a drag. But we’re hybrids and we’re healthy and strong people. African, Indian, and English and Irish.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Mixed together.

ABBEY LINCOLN: Yes.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: How much do you know about your family heritage?

ABBEY LINCOLN: What my mother told us. She was the griot in the family. She was the storyteller and told us who we were, who our grandparents were, who our great-grandparents were. In the book, she left about 38 pages that are going to go before my own story. I asked her to write it. She said, the first part of the first page, she said, “They called me the preacher.”

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: They called her the preacher?

ABBEY LINCOLN: Yes.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Why?

ABBEY LINCOLN: Because she was a woman who spoke her mind and told everybody the difference between right and wrong. As she understood it. And she didn’t tell us, she and my father, they didn’t have to tell you but one time!

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: [laughs] You listened.

ABBEY LINCOLN: All of us did. We grew up with discipline and principle. And if you don’t have that in this world, you’re lost. You can’t just do anything.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: What does it take for a child to listen to a parent? What kind of qualities does that parent need to have?

ABBEY LINCOLN: Dignity.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Dignity.

ABBEY LINCOLN: That’s all. Yeah. Dignity and honesty, which goes with dignity. My mother didn’t lie about anything. I never heard her drag anybody. The only person she was mad at was my father! [laughs]

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: [laughs] Well, give me an example of you doing something wrong…

ABBEY LINCOLN: I didn’t do anything wrong.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: You never did anything wrong?

ABBEY LINCOLN: No. There was a piano in the house that my father brought for us.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: In Kalamazoo?

ABBEY LINCOLN: No, in Michigan, on the farm. When I was five years old, I went to the piano because I could, because Mama and Dad let me do it. If I had gotten on my mother’s nerves or my father’s nerves, my brothers and sisters would not have left me alone at the piano, but they all did. And I learned how to play a song I could sing. I remembered the intervals. I didn’t know they were called intervals then. The spaces between notes. And I taught myself how to play a song. And I went to school and I sang in school when I was like 6. [sings] “Away in a manger no crib for his bed.”

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: What denomination were you growing up?

ABBEY LINCOLN: The church that Mama took us to was African Methodist Episcopal and they didn’t talk about Jesus. Mama never told us about Jesus. My father would have been drugged anyway, all he was going through. If she had this picture of him on a wall, this white man on the wall, and called him God, he would have nutted out. So we didn’t go through that. But we were taught principle. We didn’t, Mama and Dad didn’t talk about anybody who wasn’t a part of the family. We didn’t know that the Europeans were supposed to be our enemies then, even though we knew that we had been slaves. But they didn’t complain about the white folks. I found that after I left home. What can I say? I’m really fortunate.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: I think so.

ABBEY LINCOLN: Yeah.

2. Continuing the Great Women Vocalist Tradition

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: You sang in high school too, right? High school band follies?

ABBEY LINCOLN: Yeah. Mr. Chenery is the one who included me in the show. It was his project and I sang for three years. The first year I sang an Ella Fitzgerald song I’d heard, a song that she’d sung. And the second year I sang a song that Lena Horne had sung, “Stormy Weather.” “A Sunday Kind of Love,” Ella had sung. And then the last year, I sang Sarah Vaughan‘s “You’re Mine…”—I mean “Don’t Blame Me.” After that, shortly after that, we moved to…

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Calvin—

ABBEY LINCOLN: No, we were in, this was in Kalamazoo in high school. I went to high school in Kalamazoo. After that was when I went to Jackson, Michigan. The minister of the church sent for me to sing for the young kids in the basement of the church. They call it the Devil’s music.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Was it that way when you were in high school?

ABBEY LINCOLN: It’s always been like that. Yeah, they call it the Devil’s music. Jazz. It’s not seen as sacred or holy, but if you sing about Jesus, then it’s holy. If you don’t sing about Jesus, it’s not holy. But it’s the same music.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Did your parents accept you singing these songs?

ABBEY LINCOLN: I didn’t sing anything that wasn’t what was expected of me. I didn’t sing the blues or anything like that. Mama told me that her mother, that when she was a little girl in the house she was singin,’ [sings] “He may be your man, but he comes to see me sometimes.” And my grandmother, her mother, slapped her in the mouth, and she never sang that again. So I started writing songs when I discovered what I’d been delivered to: a stage where women stand and sing about a low-life man. Now what does that make a woman? If he’s nothing how can you be something? I don’t sing any of those songs anymore. I did it for a number of years. “Happiness is Just a Thing Called Joe.”

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: “You’re Mine, You.”

ABBEY LINCOLN: Yeah.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI:Good For Nothing Joe.”

ABBEY LINCOLN:Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man (of mine).” “My Man.” “It’s cost me a lot but there’s one thing I got, it’s my man. Cold and wet. Tired? You bet. All of this, I’ll soon forget with my man. He’s not much on looks, he’s no hero out of books, but I love him. Two or three girls has he that he likes as well as me, but I love him. I don’t know why I should. He isn’t good. He isn’t true. He beats me too. What can I do?” You have to be a stupid woman to go for something like that.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: But wait a second, I mean…

ABBEY LINCOLN: No, I am not waiting a second! You leave. What can you do? You leave!

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: But there are women who you admired, who you do admire, who have sung those songs, like Lena Horne and Billie Holiday.

ABBEY LINCOLN: That doesn’t mean that I don’t admire them. It was the time for that. The people that hired them expected them to play this role of the berated woman whose man wasn’t nothing.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: And they did it.

ABBEY LINCOLN: And she was not seen as anything herself. “Stormy Weather.” Anyway…

3. Some Autobiographical Details

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Go back to high school. When did you decide to leave Michigan and how did that happen? We’ve never talked about that.

ABBEY LINCOLN: I didn’t decide to leave. My mother decided to come to Kalamazoo. She and my father were divorced. And she brought us to Kalamazoo, where I went to high school with my brother and sister. It’s not anything I want to talk about. Kalamazoo’s a long time ago! [laughs]

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: When you graduated from high school, did you stay or did you go?

ABBEY LINCOLN: No, when I graduated I came to Jackson, Michigan through this minister and started to work in Jackson, Michigan with a band. So I didn’t do this all on my own. There was always somebody to help me to do what I do.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: And then from Jackson, was that Honolulu next?

ABBEY LINCOLN: My brother came to Kalamazoo to see my mother for Mother’s Day and brought me back with him to California.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Where in California?

ABBEY LINCOLN: I don’t want to go through all of that.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Okay.

ABBEY LINCOLN: Really I don’t! It’s autobiographical. I’ve written about it. Yeah. California. When Watts was a beautiful place to live. There was a red car that went from Central Avenue, from Watts to downtown. I did not live, I have not lived a tragic life. I’m one of the privileged ones that came from the royal man and woman. And so are my sisters and brothers. They all know how to live here and take care of themselves. And none of us have ever been in jail. We’re not junkies and we’re not whores.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: I know that.

ABBEY LINCOLN: Yeah. That’s where I got it. I’m made at home. I didn’t have to figure it out and on my way through with my career, on my way through life, I stood where I was given to stand. It serves me.

4. Songwriting

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: How about Bob Russell?

ABBEY LINCOLN: He was my first manager.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: In California?

ABBEY LINCOLN: Yeah. He was a great songwriter and he taught me a lot about songs. That’s how I learned how to write. He was a lyricist and he taught me what a good song was. How to judge a good song, a great song, has something to do with being original, succinct in your description. Yeah, Bob Russell. He wrote “Do Nothing ‘Til You Hear From Me,” “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” “Crazy He Calls Me,” “(You Ain’t Gonna Bother Me) No More.” Yeah, that’s where I learned about great songs, was from Bob Russell. And I also knew the great Duke Ellington. He was a great songwriter.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Did you know Duke at that time or Duke’s music?

ABBEY LINCOLN: I met him during that time. Same time I met Bob Russell in Los Angeles.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Was it the band playing in Los Angeles, Duke’s band?

ABBEY LINCOLN: Of course! Whenever he wanted to play. He was a king there.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: What did you learn from Duke’s writing?

ABBEY LINCOLN: I didn’t learn anything else from anybody else’s writing. I knew what a good song was, but it was Thelonious Monk who told me I was a great composer. That’s why I started writing compositions. Thelonious was quoted as saying on an album [Straight Ahead] that I’d recorded— Max Roach did the liner notes, and he asked Thelonious for a quote, Ruby and Ossie Davis for a quote, like that. And Thelonious was quoted as saying that ‘Abbey Lincoln is not only a great singer and a great actress, she’s a great composer.’ And I started to write my own compositions. I started to believe what I heard and I wrote my own songs. My first one was called “People in Me.”

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Maybe we should fill people in on your acting as well, because some of the people reading might not be familiar with…

ABBEY LINCOLN: I don’t care if they’re familiar… I’m not really interested in everyone knowing everything about my life, if you want to know the truth. I didn’t come to the stage to be popular and to be known. I came to save me from the grief of living here. Yeah. And there’s a lot of grief here. So I sing songs about my life that help me to live. I don’t have to go to a therapist. I can write it down and remember where I’ve been. Yeah.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: You started writing lyrics before you started writing compositions.

ABBEY LINCOLN: Yeah. My first lyric was on an album with Riverside Records, and Max wrote the melody, but he said that I had written it anyway. It’s called “Let Up.” That’s when I was beginning to understand where I was in the world. All the trouble. I was having a relationship with Max Roach, who was married, and I wasn’t concerned for his wife or his children. I was thinkin’ about myself. I’ve forgiven myself over the years because I’m an African woman and I know that my ancestors practiced polygamy. I wasn’t supposed to feel shamed, I wasn’t supposed to be treated badly. He was supposed to give me the bride price and his first wife was supposed to be trying to help him get it! [laughs] I know that. His children are my children, I love them. And he was a wonderful husband in many ways and taught me a lot about this form that they call bebop and jazz. Yeah, Max Roach.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: What in particular?

ABBEY LINCOLN: Well, just witnessing his life. He would sit at the piano and compose; I had a chance to listen to him compose. Now I know how you develop something from a line. If you live in a house with a master, you learn who they are. That’s all it is. Yeah.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: What was he working on at the time when you first met?

ABBEY LINCOLN: I don’t remember anything about what he was working on. I don’t know what he’s working on now. He’s a great musician. Comes from the times, from Charlie Parker and Miles Davis and all that. All of these men became great bandleaders. The people that were with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie. Yeah, they were all great, all of them. I didn’t meet Charlie Parker. He was gone before I got to New York. But this is the work of a spirit—the human spirit.

5. African Heritage

ABBEY LINCOLN: The reason the African American people have music is because our ancestors practiced it. Music and dance. [claps] Hey! Forever. And we inherited it like our hair and our skin. The ability to express yourself.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: You went to Africa.

ABBEY LINCOLN: Yeah, I’ve been there a couple of times. Miriam Mikeba took me there and introduced me to the heads of state. She was Sékou Touré‘s friend.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: In Guinea?

ABBEY LINCOLN: Yeah. She worked for the state. And, yeah, so that’s where I’ve gotten my African names. I’m Aminata Moseka. I got a bunch of names. Anna Marie Wooldridge was the name I was born with. Then I took Gaby because the people at the Moulin Rouge in Los Angeles wanted me to have a French name. They didn’t know I already had one. I didn’t either. Anna Marie is as French as it gets. And Wooldridge is English. They gave me Gaby and kept Wooldridge so I had a German and an English name. It’s America! [laughs] And then Bob Russell named me Abbey Lincoln, because we used to sit and talk about life. He understood how I felt about my people because he felt the same way about his. He said to me, “Well, since Abraham Lincoln didn’t free the slaves, maybe you could handle it.” Named me Abbey Lincoln and I laughed, but that’s the name that I took. Abbey for Westminster Abbey he told me, and Lincoln for Abraham Lincoln. He was aware of his self and of his people—socially aware. He’s the first socially aware person that I met. Bob Russell. Roach is socially aware. Duke Ellington, all of the great ones. I met Louie Armstrong in Honolulu, Billie Holiday, who sang “Strange Fruit.” Yeah.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: What was the experience like going to Africa the first time?

ABBEY LINCOLN: I knew I had come home when the minister of information named me Moseka in Zaire. He told Miriam to tell me because they spoke French. He told me that Moseka was a god of love in the form of a maiden. He didn’t tell me it was a goddess and I knew that I had come home because I know that God is a god—male and female. I do not worship the man, any man as God alone. I’m the one. It’s me and him. She’s the one who makes the baby out of her. She clones the baby. The women ought to be ashamed of themselves to do this, to play this role and then blame him for it. How could you bring a baby, carry it for nine months and create it and praise God “He”? There’s just no, it’s perfectly understandable that He’s as crazy as He is. And He is crazy. Almost as crazy as She is. Yeah. He, Him, fall on your knees and worship Him! Is he supposed to know the difference between Him, that Him, and him? It’s not right. And lean all over Him? She’s not God or the Devil. He’s both. She’s nobody. I don’t respect it at all. It makes me angry too. That we’re going through all of this. For what reason? Is She a coward? She can’t tell him that She’s God? He doesn’t know that She’s God? She ought to knock him out then! What kind of a fool is that? So, my music is full of all this. Stories that I tell about the life I’ve had “…a figure made of clay. I think about the things I lost, the things I gave away. And when I’m in a certain mood, I search the halls…”

6. Movies, Paintings, Beauty

ABBEY LINCOLN: The halls for me are the books and the landlord, my landlord in Los Angeles, gave me some precious old books from 1953. Encyclopedias and dictionaries. Larry Weiss. And I would get up in the morning and fix my coffee and have a cigarette and go through the books and I have a dissertation, a thesis on Egypt.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: But this is later. This isn’t the first time that you were in Los Angeles.

ABBEY LINCOLN: This is in 1970.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: This is when you started writing songs.

ABBEY LINCOLN: Yes.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Where were you in your life at that point of time?

ABBEY LINCOLN: Rolling. I left the marriage and left my career, too. I’d just made For Love of Ivy with Sidney Poitier. I played Ivy. I was supposed to kiss somebody’s feet, so I could get another job. I was raised better than that. I wasn’t planning on making any movies in the first damn place. So I really wasn’t living for another movie. I painted. The paintings here, I painted them when I was living in Los Angeles. Living over a garage in three rooms.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: What’s this one?

ABBEY LINCOLN: I did her in Los Angeles. Her name is—that’s The Merry Dancer. I was using that board as a, because I make my clothes, I used to anyway—I still do—and it was a cutting board I was using and I inherited the whole big house so I didn’t need it anymore. I put it outside and I brought it in one day and I thought I’d paint it. Yeah. That for me is God. Yeah, The Merry Dancer. I wrote a song about her. “Mama told me of a beauty that is made of purest gold. One the weather will not tarnish, one that never will grow old. She said beauty comes from understanding, looking at the things we see. Beauty of the human spirit. Beauty that will set us free.”

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: That’s beautiful.

ABBEY LINCOLN: That’s the lyrics. Has nothing to do with vanity. Vanity is a useless thing. You shouldn’t look for excellence in the shape of your nose or the shape of your mouth or the color of your skin or the texture of your hair. This is disgusting! And the size of your breasts… And the width of your behind… I mean, really! [laughs]

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Do you think it’s more difficult to be here as a beautiful woman?

ABBEY LINCOLN: No, it’s a blessing to be called beautiful! I didn’t become beautiful until I was about 17. When I was 14, I was the one that the boys said, I mean, “Hey cookie! Not you, dog biscuit.” Yeah, I really did experience that.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: [laughs] You told me that and I find that still incredibly hard to believe.

ABBEY LINCOLN: Well, it’s true! I wasn’t supposed to be beautiful. Mama said to me one day when I was 14, we hadn’t spoken of it, but she knew. She said to me, “Don’t worry, you’re going to be beautiful like your sister Betty in a few more years. And it really cooled me out. So I’ve been known as a beautiful woman all my life on the stage. Because of that, there were people who said I couldn’t sing. You’re not supposed to be talented if you look a certain way. It’s really stupid. So if I didn’t write about my life, I’d lose my mind here. That’s the thing that keeps me sane and secure is the fact that I can write it down on a piece of paper and have a realization. Yeah. Mama and Dad.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Well, they give you everything you need.

ABBEY LINCOLN: Mama, yes, she did. Yes, they did. We’re failing the children today. They, the women, push them through the street—the men, too—in a battering ram. The baby can’t see the person’s face who’s pushing them. They could be choking to death and they wouldn’t even know it. And push it across the street like it’s a piece of luggage. We’re lost here, whether we know it or not.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Where did your song “Conversation with a Baby” come from?

ABBEY LINCOLN: I met a beautiful little boy, who lives in the building. His name is Ghandi; he’s got a little brother named Walker. And I was just inspired to write it. “We were really very lucky that you got here. Nowadays we slay them at the door.”

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Abortion?

ABBEY LINCOLN: Yes! The Supreme Court has said this. They also said that the Africans were 3/5’s human! We got a lot of work to do here. This is not going to work. If the child has to be sacrificed, you don’t have a life, that’s suicide. The baby, abused. The Priesthood. This is pitiful and I’m full of tears, too. I’m mad as hell. [stamps foot] This is not right!

7. The Purpose of Art

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Do you think that songs have the power to change or at least to help?

ABBEY LINCOLN: I don’t do it for that reason; it’s for my own spirit. I believe that God made us and God made the world and God has to fix it. I’m not trying to change anything. I’m not trying to fix it. I didn’t make it. [wipes eyes] It’s the creator’s world. And if it’s all right with God, it has to be all right with me. I don’t know why we’re going through this—all of this. [blows nose] Nobody made anything here. But as you can see, I’m beside myself. I’d rather cry than…

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Do you want to take a break for a minute?

ABBEY LINCOLN: I’m okay.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: You’re all right? Abbey, I think it’s better to cry than not to cry and not to care!

ABBEY LINCOLN: Yeah. Yeah.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Because if you don’t care, then…

ABBEY LINCOLN: You may as well…

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: you may as well not be here!

ABBEY LINCOLN: That’s right. All that we have that we can depend upon is love. You have some regard for yourself and the people that you know and we all deserve some love.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Is music part of that love?

ABBEY LINCOLN: Yes. The arts are the expression of the great human, holy spirit that is love. Through the arts, through technology, through the sciences. They talk about Egypt all the time. It’s because the artists did that work. The artists created that house that’s on our money.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: The pyramids.

ABBEY LINCOLN: Yes. They were totally fascinated with their ability to express themselves as brilliant human beings. So what is this? It’s disgusting.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Well, they knew everything. They had the math and the sciences and music.

ABBEY LINCOLN: Yes.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: It’s the cradle of civilization.

ABBEY LINCOLN: Yes. So we can’t say that nobody told us, because it’s not true. Somebody did tell us. And they also wrote that the love of money was the root of all evil. That is an absolute truth. You’re not supposed to love money. And it does grow on trees! How insulting and rude are you going to be to somebody and say, “Money doesn’t grow on trees?” And you make it out of paper and where does paper come from?

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: [laughs] I never thought about it quite that way before.

ABBEY LINCOLN: It’s amazing. Oh, I mean, it’s really a sneer. I mean, it’s a spit in your face, a total lack of respect. Yeah, it doesn’t grow on trees. Oh, my. And you’re not supposed to say anything, you know? They’re going to clone a human being and the women have been cloning— the female clones everybody who comes here. You’d think somebody would knock this man in his mouth, would hurt him for saying such a thing to us. Yeah, she clones everybody. I look like my mother, I think like my mother, my mother and father. This is who we are. We come from our ancestors. We’re living in a weird time.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: That’s why it’s important to have art.

ABBEY LINCOLN: Without art, we would not be human. All human beings practice the arts. All of them. They have music, they dance, and they create things and make things. Women create the people. She’s the one that makes the people. He builds the bridges and the houses and makes cars and things. He’s brilliant. He’s the perfect other half to the woman and vice versa.

8. Gender Distinctions

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: So it’s all right to say that men and women are different?

ABBEY LINCOLN: Yes! Are you kidding? I mean, really.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Well, there are some women who are…

ABBEY LINCOLN: Are trying to pretend that she’s just like him?

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Yes.

ABBEY LINCOLN: Oh, I know. It’s sick. We weren’t made like that. She’s not made to play football. If that was true, she wouldn’t have to complain about being abused. She could defend herself. He has muscles.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: But just because they’re different doesn’t mean anyone is less than anyone else.

ABBEY LINCOLN: No, it doesn’t. It means that we are this. [clasps hand together] If everybody is what they know how to be, we are strong and brilliant. But a woman wants to be a man and a man who pretends that he’s a woman? Give me a break! How are you going to continue…how would you perpetuate the species like this? This is just a bunch of lies that we’re living through.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: I’ve heard other people use the word feminist to describe your work…

ABBEY LINCOLN: I’m not a feminist. How are you going to be a feminist and you bring the male and the female child here?

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: What does the word feminism mean to you?

ABBEY LINCOLN: I think that the women have had these resentments and she hasn’t been woman enough to speak about it until just now. After Dr. King got over, after the blacks got over, she thought, “Okay. But I didn’t get mine yet,” she said. And she teaches. She talks to him, much the way the African Americans talk to the white man. He’s to blame for everything. Nobody did nothing low but him. How is anybody supposed to believe this? The African people are paying for something they did a long time ago. They were delivered to the level long before they met the Europeans. Well, the woman, the white women, followed after the blacks. It’s my body. Really? Well, if you keep your dress down, it’s yours. And the man didn’t say to her, “Yeah, until you lay with me, then it’s ours and if you kill my children, I’m gonna kill you, I’m gonna hurt you.” He didn’t. My body. My word! So we’re all guilty in this. I don’t know. I guess the white man has got really a great superiority complex because everybody blames him for everything. Nobody did nothing low but him! [laughs]

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: It’s a terrible burden for him, too.

ABBEY LINCOLN: It’s not right.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: No, it’s not right.

ABBEY LINCOLN: It’s a lie. He didn’t do this by himself. Yeah. It’s really interesting growing older and becoming elder. I’m thankful for my life. I really am. I don’t want to stay here forever. But I’m glad I had a chance to experience this.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: And you’ve put so much of that into your songs. Do you think of those as your monuments to us?

ABBEY LINCOLN: Yes, I think so. I never knew it was going to be like this, but…”When I’m Called Home.” Stan Getz said to me, “Abbey, I don’t want to put a hex on your song, but this is a great song.” “When I’m called home, I will bring a book that tells of strange and funny terms and of the heart it took to keep on living in a world that never was my own! A world of haunted memories of other worlds unknown.”

9. The Process of Composing

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: When you begin to compose, how does a song take shape?

ABBEY LINCOLN: I can’t explain it. It just comes. It’s through concentration and I have to wait on the spirit that brings the music. But when I sit down and I start, that’s all. I start. And I’m accompanied, I know this, by my spirit, whoever that is and everything. They write all this stuff. It’s not me. I’m an instrument that they use.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: A medium?

ABBEY LINCOLN: Yes. An instrument. Yes.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Do you find that you find your texts first?

ABBEY LINCOLN: No, it depends.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Or it’s just all…

ABBEY LINCOLN: It all depends.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Can you give me an example?

ABBEY LINCOLN: “Look to the Star” came as a composition first. It took me a while to find the words. Usually I find the words first, but sometimes not. I always did like language. There was a big dictionary in the back of the school in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where I went to a one-room schoolhouse. I love language—to express yourself through words.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: You’d mentioned to me, too, that Bob Russell had given you a book on rhetoric?

ABBEY LINCOLN: No, not rhetoric. He gave me a book, Hayakawa wrote one, on semantics and helped me to approach things from a serious standpoint, reading, how to begin and read the whole book, everything from the very beginning. Yeah, semantics. How To Increase Your Vocabulary By a Thousand Words or Less, or something like that, was the name of another book. And it did help me too.

10. Today’s “Terrible Times”

[Outside noise/music coming from a car]

ABBEY LINCOLN: You hear that? That’s confusion. No, it really is confusion and it’s also revolution. And nobody’s supposed to have any rights, just them. Play your music loud and everybody has to listen to your crap.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Well, the volume on everything…

ABBEY LINCOLN: Yeah, this is all crazy.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: …keeps getting higher.

ABBEY LINCOLN: Hysterical. The TV is, everything is…it’s a wonder that my nerves aren’t worse than they are. That any of us have—we’re going through a terrible time right now.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: You wrote “Devil’s Got Your Tongue” about some of these rap artists.

ABBEY LINCOLN: The rappers and the women who take their clothes off and walk—you know what I mean? Who entertain in her drawers, with herself exposed. Yeah. Madonna. Devil’s got her tongue. They say that I am spiritual, but so is she. There’s all kinds of spirits—there are holy spirits and there are demon spirits. And if you’re not careful, you will be controlled by the demon spirits here in the name of music or whatever you’re doing. Either it helps us to live or it doesn’t.

11. Being a Singer AND a Composer

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Do you use the word “diva”?

ABBEY LINCOLN: No. It’s just I don’t know what it means. I’m a singer. I’m an artist. I’m not a diva.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Do you think as a vocalist it is more difficult for people to think of you as a composer?

ABBEY LINCOLN: I don’t care if they think of me as a composer or not! My producer thinks of me as a composer. [laughs] Jean-Philippe Allard, probably the greatest man I ever met on the planet.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: And he’s the one…

ABBEY LINCOLN: Who helped—yeah, Jean-Philippe Allard, he’s French. Doesn’t try to tell me what to do, he helps me to do what I do. When he called me the first time, he said, “Abbey, what do you want to do?” And so he has blessed my life. That’s why I have all these albums. And it’s why I’m popular, because I’m being marketed by PolyGram and Verve. There’s a bunch of names now—Universal.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Universal, Verve, the Universal Group.

ABBEY LINCOLN: Yeah. Yeah.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: I asked because when I wrote the piece on you for the New York Times and when Nat Hentoff wrote the companion piece, our whole, all of our writing was to talk about you as a composer.

ABBEY LINCOLN: It was wonderful.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: But when the review ran a few days later, the headline on it was “Singer Abbey Lincoln”!

ABBEY LINCOLN: Yeah, I’m a singer though.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: I know.

ABBEY LINCOLN: I’m glad they know that I’m a singer. Some singers write their own songs, some of ’em don’t. Bob Dylan is a great composer. So they just say Bob Dylan; everybody knows who he is. Yeah.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Although there are some within the music we call jazz who would not…

ABBEY LINCOLN: He’s not what you would call a great singer. You know what I mean? He’s a great composer and lyricist, Bob Dylan is, as far as I’m concerned. He writes about the real world. “Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me. I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to. Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man play a song for me. In the jingle-jangle morning I’ll come following you.” I don’t know what the jingle-jangle morning is, but I have a pretty good idea. It’s one of the greatest songs I’ve ever heard to describe a world we’re living in.

[recorded on “Who Used to Dance”]

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Do you think that songwriting has helped your longevity as a performing artist?

ABBEY LINCOLN: Probably. But I’m a lot more than just a singer. I’m a personality. And I’m strong and… You have to help people to kill you, you know. You have bad habits. You can die young here. Most people die of bad habits. I believe that if you’re blessed to have this work, then you should be experienced in spirituality and it should make you strong and great.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Would you still be singing if you were singing standards?

ABBEY LINCOLN: I don’t know anything about that. It’s not who I am. I’m an actress. And I’m a woman. More than anything I’m female. Female of the species. Yeah.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Do you think women have a role as the storytellers, as the griots?

ABBEY LINCOLN: Of course they do.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Why is it the women?

ABBEY LINCOLN: It’s not the women or the men; it’s the women and the men.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Okay.

ABBEY LINCOLN: Some men are griots and some women are griots. Depends on where your head is. What you want to do. That’s a picture of Billie Holiday up there against the wall next to my father’s paintings—at the piano. I didn’t know she played the piano. She looks just like my sister, like my big sister. She wrote “God Bless the Child(‘s got his own)” and “(Hush now,) Don’t Explain.” I come from her. She comes from Bessie Smith. Bessie Smith wrote this song and I’ve repeated it more than once. “I’m going up on Black Mountain with my razor and my gun. I’m gonna shoot him if he stands still and cut him if he runs.” [laughs] Yeah!

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: It’s interesting to me to see that when Billie wrote, she started with the blues. Which kind of goes back to that.

ABBEY LINCOLN: She comes from…

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: Bessie.

ABBEY LINCOLN: No, she does come from Bessie, but she got her start with Louie Armstrong. In the book that she wrote [Lady Sings the Blues], she worked in brothels and cleaned up after the prostitutes and that’s where she heard Louie Armstrong. They called them jazz houses. Jass houses. Because it’s the only place they played the music then, in environments such as that. Yeah, she comes from Louis Armstrong.

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: And when you started to write, the first thing you wrote lyrics to was a blues…

ABBEY LINCOLN: No, it wasn’t. I wrote a child’s song called “People in Me.”

LARA PELLEGRINELLI: No, I mean the first lyrics that you wrote for “Let Up.”

ABBEY LINCOLN: “Let Up.” Mmmhmm. I’m not really overwhelmed by the blues. They talk a lot about the blues, but I’m a ballad—I write. “The Music is the Magic” is like a chant. It’s not the blues though.

Three Generations of Teaching Music Composition



George Perle and Paul Lansky

Part One: George Perle and Paul Lansky
February 19, 2002
Upper West Side, New York, NY

  1. A Lifelong Relationship
  2. Direct vs. Indirect Advice
  3. Collaboration and Independence
  4. 12-Tone Tonality
  5. Self-Criticism

Part Two: Paul Lansky and Virgil Moorefield
April 5, 2002
Princeton University Music Department, Princeton, NJ


Paul Lansky and Virgil Moorefield

  1. Who Teaches Who?
  2. The Studio as the Orchestra
  3. Different Listening Modalities
  4. Confronting Compositional Demons
  5. The Student-Teacher Relationship
  6. From Being in the Class to Being Part of the Syllabus

Conversations Filmed and Transcribed by Amanda MacBlane and Molly Sheridan

Leo Ornstein: The Last of the Original 20th Century Mavericks



Leo Ornstein
Photo Courtesy OHAM

Leo and Pauline Ornstein speak with Vivian Perlis
From the Archives of OHAM (Oral History, American Music) at Yale University
Sierra Mobile Park, Texas

November 19 and 20, 1977

  1. The Elusiveness of Inspiration
  2. Today’s Compositional Tower of Babel
  3. The Independent Life of Musical Compositions
  4. On Serialism, Experimentalism and the Study of Composition
  5. On Personality and Interpretation
  6. Computer Music and Recordings
  7. The Greatness of Bach
  8. Hearing a Score
  9. The Public Life of Performing
  10. The Compositional Process: Influence and Memory
  11. Performing vs. Composing
  12. On Limits
  13. Heritage and Influences
  14. Early Career
  15. Husband and Wife Teamwork
  16. The Shortcomings of Music Notation
  17. On Polystylism
  18. The Uniqueness of Each Individual and Immortality
  19. Postlude: Vivian Perlis Remembers Leo Ornstein, March 19, 2002

A Chance Encounter with Christian Wolff



Christian Wolff

Friday, January 11, 2002—4:33 p.m.

Greenwich House Music School
New York, NY

 

FRANK J. OTERI: Your music is like no other music, even the music of other composers of the so-called New York School. And you’re largely, almost totally self-taught. What made you initially embark on the kind of music you’ve been making for the last half-century?

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: [laughs] How could I? It just sort of happened. You can put together pieces of how it got there. We could go on for a long time doing that. My background originally was very straight, very heavy classical—sort of Bach to Brahms, no exceptions. And nothing after… I mean, I hated modern music when I was a kid. I just couldn’t stand it. And I had sort of a conversion when I was about 14 years old when I heard, for the first time I heard some Bartók. And actually, the six string quartets got their first New York performance played in a room by the Juilliard String Quartet. And then I got to hear, at Tanglewood of all places, a concert again by the Juilliard Quartet, of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern and that completely turned me on. I thought, yes, OK, now I know what I want to do. Not write music the way they were writing it, but write a music which was as different from traditional music as theirs was. I mean, I would try to do it in my own way.

FRANK J. OTERI: So at the age of fourteen you said you hated modern music, but by the age of sixteen you were hanging out with John Cage!

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Yeah! Well, I said it was a major conversion! [laughs] I should mention the other musical item in that period which I took a long time to percolate through, but I think in the end was really quite important. I didn’t listen to pop music at all; I hated it. And if you think about pop music in the late forties I think you’ll find, unless you were really seriously into musicals and stuff like that, it was not very attractive. But we used to go hear Dixieland. Kids in school down on the Eastside around 8th Street and just about every Friday and Saturday night and I really liked that a lot. And what I liked about it I think primarily were two things, just the sheer musical energy going, but also two other things: one is the total virtuosity of the performers, which is a totally different kind from that of the classical, it’s much freer. And then, this I didn’t really understand until much later, but the heterophonic character of the music. That’s an idea that somehow registered with me much later, but which I realize was something that I was very interested in myself.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, it’s interesting, that period of the late forties of course was the period of the bebop revolution when jazz went from being popular music to being really heady and intellectual.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: (nods) But you know, I missed that. Somehow—I mean, I knew that something was going on. I think once maybe I went to one of those clubs. Those were more sort of half uptown in the forties and fifties. Somehow I didn’t catch on to that; I didn’t know enough to go. Dixieland was basically old-fashioned music, so in a sense, I didn’t connect to that new movement at all on the jazz side.

FRANK J. OTERI: How did you meet John Cage?

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Through my piano teacher, Grete Sultan. I had been doing piano lessons and I had started composing on my own. I had thought that I was going to be a pianist initially but I just didn’t have it. So, I practiced less and less and wrote more music, and to excuse myself at lessons, I would bring the music I wrote and finally she said, “You know, you need to go see a composer.” And I said, “Do you have a suggestion?” I knew one important composer at the time. I knew Varèse who lived around the corner from us on Washington Square. And you know, he was the one composer I could think of that was doing something that seemed to me really interesting in an area where I would like to be working as well, but she said, “No, I think this other person might be really good for you.” And that was John Cage.

FRANK J. OTERI: So what was Varèse like in the late forties? That was still the period where he hadn’t come out of his silence yet.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Exactly. Yeah. In a word, he was silent. He was a great guy. He was really an interesting person. He was sort of a neighborhood character in the Village and he was a friend of my parents. Once or twice I went to visit him to try to find out about his music. But it was in those days, you know, people didn’t have tapes, of course, there wasn’t any tape! You have to remember that. And there were no recordings. So you couldn’t hear the music and he didn’t really want to talk about it. I mean, he talked about these sort of notions he had about electronic music and all of that, but the technology wasn’t there yet so he was in limbo. He was sort of waiting for something and then it finally, fortunately, happened and he got back in and wrote those pieces, you know, Déserts, and so forth.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now, your parents were book publishers?

CHRISTIAN WOLFF:
Yeah.

FRANK J. OTERI: So, I guess that’s how they knew Louise [Varèse], because she translated all this poetry.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Exactly, but my memory is of—not my memory, it’s not my memory at all, but my parents told me, my father. We arrived in 1941 from Europe and moved into this grungy little place on Washington Square and one day there was a knock on the door, and my father goes to open it and there’s this guy standing there, you know, this sort of imposing character the way Varèse was, and said, “Bonjour. Je suis Varèse. Welcome to New York.” Just like that! You know there’s the immigrant community had a way of supporting each other and he may have very well learned from Louise that these people, publishers from Europe, had just come over. Go check in on them and stuff

FRANK J. OTERI: Now after you started composing music, did you ever get to interface with Varèse? Did Varèse get to see or hear any of your music?

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: I don’t think so. I mean, Varèse was basically about Varèse. For instance, Cage knew him and admired him a great deal but I don’t think the feeling was mutual. I didn’t talk to him a whole lot, but I don’t recall his ever really talking about other people’s music.

FRANK J. OTERI: And the only student I know him ever having was Chou Wen-chung. That’s it.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Chou Wen-chung, exactly. So he was really isolated in that sense. I mean, people admired his work, obviously, but he just was there. He was a part of the landscape and didn’t really interact with you a whole lot.

 

FRANK J. OTERI: So, the first meeting with Cage.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Yeah, Monroe Street. Which I don’t think exists anymore

FRANK J. OTERI: Now it’s the name of a record company!

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Exactly and that’s why it is! It was on the Lower East Side. And he said show up at such and such a time, on such and such a day and I went down there, and I’d never been in that part of town before, and it was a little creepy. It was really rundown. It was right at the end, just before you got to the river, just sort of at the Corlears Hook, I guess.

FRANK J. OTERI: Avenue D?

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Something like that. Yeah. Now it’s a huge housing development, but in those days it was just a bunch of rundown little tenement houses. And then next to his house, there was this great big wreck of what once been apparently a bakery that had burned down and they had just abandoned it. And you could still smell this faint baked bread smell. It was really weird and you’d see rats running around. It was really amazing. Anyways, so—I was a kid so I thought, Oh my God! What have I gotten myself into? And I go into this building and there are about six floors and it smells bad and it’s really your typical tenement. And I don’t know … and of course there are no names anywhere, no indication of who lives where, so I have to go from door to door. I knock. Well, I listen at the door first of all and if there are kids I figure, that’s not Cage and I go on. I knock, no answer or and I work my way up the entire building and of course he’s on the top floor, right? And I finally knock and there he is, so…

FRANK J. OTERI: Almost a sort of indeterminate quality to that meeting!

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: It was a funny time, yeah.

FRANK J. OTERI: And had you already written the Serenade?

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: No, that was later. I had written just a few little things, which I guess were sort of odd. I guess, I was very interested in dissonance and—lots of dissonance—and I would write these sort of canons which were designed to be for maximum dissonance and within a very close range, so they were really like through-composed clusters. But you know, I would write maybe like a page and half’s worth and not even that much, you know twenty bars and then I wouldn’t know what to do next and Cage really liked what I was doing, but of course he said, “You know, where do we go from here?” But anyway, what he saw he found interesting and he said, “Yes, I’ll take you on as a student.”

FRANK J. OTERI: Now do those very early pieces survive?

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Well, I have some of them buried away somewhere.

FRANK J. OTERI: I’d love to see them and hear them sometime.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Well, I don’t know if we really want to get into that!

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, you’re description of them makes them sound really appealing.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Well, actually there’s a piece for four violins. I wouldn’t mind hearing that sometimes. But like I said it’s a fragment, it’s the very beginning of a piece.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now, composition lessons with John Cage, what was that like?

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Well, he had projects, four projects I think. One was, he had just heard the Webern Symphony, which had just gotten its first performance at the Philharmonic, and that’s where he met Feldman. A very important occasion, both musically, well, in every way. And, you couldn’t buy the score, so he went to the public library and copied out the first movement, so he could analyze it and he had just started to do that when he said, “You do this.” So that was one assignment: to finish the analysis of the first movement of the Webern Symphony. I think he wanted me to copy the second movement so we could do that one too, but we never got around to doing that. And then, what was the other one? Then he was going to talk to me about rhythmic structure. The Webern was very important for me. I think I am still working under the spell of that… Webern I generally like a lot, but that particular piece, I owe a great deal to it. And then the other really important thing was the rhythmic structures, which is basically how to put a piece together from a structural point of view and so I did exercises to learn how to do that. And then he thought that we ought to be doing something regular, serious. And he thought counterpoint exercises. Which was totally mad, because I hadn’t even had harmony yet! But that’s what he had done when he’d studied with Schoenberg. There were two years he’d studied with Schoenberg and all they did was 16th-century counterpoint. So, we started off on one of those things and then the last thing was just to do my own thing and bring that in too. That was it. That was the program.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, it’s so interesting because you never wrote twelve-tone music as far as I know.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Nope. Nope.

FRANK J. OTERI: But you were studying Webern…

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Yeah. Well, it was in the air. These things happened simultaneously on this side of the Atlantic and then over in Europe. It was Boulez, Cage had—well that’s the other thing—Cage had spent a year in Paris, the previous year, on the Guggenheim and had spent a lot of time with Boulez. They were really good friends at that time. And I think he picked up a lot of that information at least and interest and also the interest in Webern has to come from there. And then Stockhausen is just around the corner and so on and so forth. So serial, maybe not twelve-tone, but serial music in one form or another and then remember what started me on all this was the interest in Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg. And when I was first writing, before I met Cage, I basically sort of reinvented the twelve-tone system. I worked out kind of a crude version of it, but it seemed to me to be a useful way to try to put the music together.

FRANK J. OTERI: So you actually did write twelve-tone pieces of a kind…

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Sort of. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

FRANK J. OTERI: But then everything took a shift almost in the extreme opposite direction, if you would. Almost to the point that as I read through these things and listen through these pieces, I would dare say in some ways you influenced Cage perhaps as much as he influenced you. You gave him his first copy of the I Ching.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Yeah, that’s not me, that’s the I Ching! [laughs]

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah, but you were the one that brought it to him.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Yeah, yeah. It’s true. It was a pleasant accident. Yeah. [laughs]

FRANK J. OTERI: And the very notion of indeterminate music, this thing that we think of as John Cage, “chance music,” is not really exclusively John Cage. It kind of came about through these talks that you in many ways instigated by bringing him that book.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: He was headed in that direction and I think that there were various things happening. Because there was Feldman, and Feldman was doing those graph pieces and in some ways they’re not at all indeterminate when you get back far enough because that’s the way, he just worked with sonorities, he didn’t care about the pitches and, you know, he wanted a high flute, you know, you just make that little square high and that’s a high flute. You didn’t have to worry if it was an E-flat or an F-sharp. That was secondary. But it was, on the other hand, the notion at the time was very shocking to people. They were like, “What? You’re not telling the flute what note to play?” [laughs] And so I think Feldman in that sense was the first person specifically to do something like that. I actually did make a piece, which I dug out recently for some reason, but it was a vocal piece for trio—a vocal trio, where the pitches were not specified: there were simply single lines and the melodic movement was indicated, but not what the pitches would be. I mean, each singer simply picked a central, comfortable pitch and then moved up and down according to the movement along the lines and this was in three parts so that you would get a resultant that was definitely unpredictable.

FRANK J. OTERI: And this pre-dated Cage’s indeterminate pieces?

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Right, yeah. Yeah. But he was definitely looking for something like that and he already worked with these charts, these magic squares, which caused continuities that would be unpredictable. The materials he used within them were fixed but how they would combine and sometimes overlap that was…He was constantly looking for strategies for making that happen by some force other than his own decision.

FRANK J. OTERI: And certainly, the whole notion of a prepared piano… You can never exactly prepare it the same way and you never know what harmonics are going to resonate and what pitches you’re going to get.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Yes, that’s certainly another issue. Yeah, yeah.

FRANK J. OTERI: How did the first performers react when they were presented pieces with no pitches determined?

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Feldman‘s pieces, for instance? Actually my vocal piece never got played… That sort of disappeared. It still hasn’t been played! [laughs]

FRANK J. OTERI: But you have it.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Yeah, I have it. Yeah, we almost got it done last spring, but it didn’t happen. The Feldman pieces and these other pieces, I mean, the Cage pieces that were done by chance, that were indeterminate from the compositional point of view and my music and then, not long after, Earle Brown‘s music, I guess you’d have to say the reaction generally was very hostile. I mean, I got used to very early on that I was doing something that most people really hated. [laughs]

FRANK J. OTERI: But you kept doing it!

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Yeah, I kept at it because there were enough people who seemed to think it was okay. I mean, I was interested in just writing music, but I wanted to do something that hadn’t been done before. That seemed to me to be partly maybe a little bit of an adolescent thing, do things a little differently, but also just that seemed to me a reasonable way to proceed, and also the way Western music has always proceeded. I mean, that is, the composers you know are the ones who did it differently.

FRANK J. OTERI: But of course the amazing irony to this whole thing is that this almost sounds ego-driven in this strange kind of way and the thing that makes this music so spectacular, I think, is how selfless it is, how completely crystal clear Cage’s post-1951 music is, or any of the music of Feldman, and Earle’s music as well as yours. It is all just about sound and nothing gets in the way.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: This is true. In fact, that’s probably the single thing that unites all of us, the notion of non-expressionist music. I mean it is not about self-expression; it’s about, as you said, sounds. And then the sounds themselves can generate and cause feelings in some mysterious way. And that they could still do that was, obviously perfectly okay and fine and desirable, but it wasn’t going to be something where we said, “Okay, now you’ve got to feel this”—bang! You know, that’s it.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, clearly in fifty years of writing this music and having performances of it. There have been performers who get it.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Oh yeah. Things have changed. I mean, extraordinarily. The
re were these concerts last year—the “When Morty Met John…” series—they played those pieces that I still remember thinking “Oh my God,” this terrible reaction and people just love them now. They just sound so beautiful. You can’t believe it! Yeah, time will make a big difference honestly.

FRANK J. OTERI: And in terms of performances, who have been some of the people who’ve championed your music and really allowed it to shine?

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: I’ve been very lucky. I mean, the key figure in a way—the thing about John Cage was that he, in a way, the most important lesson of all was the notion that he said, you know, a piece is not finished until it is performed. It’s got to be out there. And he was definitely energetic and always organizing something or trying to get something going, some concert or so forth and so on. I mean, I was a kid and Feldman was not particularly good at this and so forth, so John was the one who really took over this side of things and then we had this extraordinarily piece of good fortune in the name of David Tudor. There were other musicians. There were always a few musicians who were friends, who wanted to try it or whatever. I mean this is New York after all, even in 1949, ’50, or whatever. And so Maro Ajemian, for instance, who devoted herself to the earlier piano music and there was a violinist, Frances Magnus, who played Feldman and then various cellists who were interested in Feldman and so forth, but David Tudor was the key figure because this is all he wanted to do. I mean, he wanted to do the avant-garde music that was happening right now and that meant Cage and ourselves and then also Europeans. He was interested in doing the first performances in New York of the Boulez Second Piano Sonata and the Stockhausen pieces and so on and so forth. So the result was that after that, starting in ’51, I think, all I did was write piano music because our resources were seriously limited. There was no money. There were no public funds at all; there was no arts council…

FRANK J. OTERI: No orchestra commissions…

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: None! [laughs] And so Tudor was basically it. But he was so phenomenally it. You know, I mean, he was this extraordinary pianist so that he really pushed us because we thought, David wants something new and different and possible to play to do. You know, and so we were trying to provide that.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now, what’s so interesting to me in terms of your story with these people is that you were a kid! You know, Cage at this point was 40 years old.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Almost, yeah.

FRANK J. OTERI: You were seventeen, like sixteen, seventeen, hanging out with these heady adults.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Well, Feldman was in his mid-twenties, and Earle, too, was 26 or 27.

FRANK J. OTERI: But you were still the kid.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: I was the baby. Yeah, I was the baby.

FRANK J. OTERI: And did they treat you like an equal?

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Oh, yeah. I mean, clearly I lived a slightly different kind of life. I went home to my parents at night.

FRANK J. OTERI: You didn’t hang out at the Cedar Tavern?

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Well, I might tag along, but when it was suppertime I either had to negotiate it at home or, you know, I still had those parameters, and I still had to go to school during the day and stuff like that! So to that extent, clearly we were in a slightly different world. But when it came to music or the concerts and the rest of it, no, we were all on the same wavelength.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now in terms of interacting with the visual artists. Did you also interact with Rauschenberg and Guston and…

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Well, certainly I saw them. I still remember when Cage first took me way down in the Financial District, where Rauschenberg and Johns had an apartment together. Had a space, because they also used it as a studio. I remember being taken along there and seeing, I think it was the Bed—he’d just finished it—and seeing those early Jasper Johns targets and flags and stuff. So, yeah, I got to see that stuff early, but there my age did make a little bit of a difference. Because I was still from a different world and I was sort of tagging along with the musicians. So, I was aware of the art and I liked it a lot, but I didn’t have that special relationship that say, especially Feldman, and Cage too, had with that work.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, what’s so interesting is they influenced the artists and the artists in turn influenced their sense of how to make pieces of music, so you didn’t feel that connection?

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Well, yes and no. I mean, maybe a little bit later. I felt very close to Jasper Johns’ work for a long time and in very oblique ways and that surely came from that period when I was first made aware of his work at all and then whenever there was a chance to see it, I would immediately go and check it out. And so, I couldn’t tell you how it affected my work, but there’s just something about it. It was just very classy. It had this very elegant quality which I aspired to—let’s put it that way—which I found really interesting and wanted to respond to in some way.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, there definitely is a connection. I was listening the other night to the Tilbury pieces which are very painterly. It’s just like abstract expressionism. You’re throwing these pitches out there the way an abstract painter would throw a splash of a certain color out there and it’s very coloristic. And especially that first Tilbury piece, which is essentially for the most part a solo piano piece but there are intrusions from a melodica, and they kind of come in as if all of a sudden it was an all black painting and there’s a little bit of red in a corner somewhere.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Well, that’s good. Now I should say…

FRANK J. OTERI: Those are much later of course.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Well, that too, but the notion of using this melodica for instance, in other words, what the music gives the performers, is only notes in the case of this particular piece, so that the particular coloring, and it is clearly a keyboard piece. I mean, you can make other arrangements, but you start from the notio
n of the keyboard. But the version that you heard, is that version and I could make you one that was quite different. I mean, you could clearly hear that it was the same piece, but it might have a different feeling. For instance, if it were only keyboard, then you wouldn’t have this sort of color…it would be much flatter, it would be more like a black and white painting, or something. But I think you’re absolutely right, that yes, that the image of the way that the paintings feel and look definitely transferred into the kind of work that I was doing.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, that brings us back into the notion of performers and what performers have brought to this music. Clearly with the series on Mode, you have these interpreters that have done such fantastic work with this music, like the members of the Barton Workshop. They get it. And they bring out things in this music that a performer who isn’t versed in this music can’t possibly bring to it. By writing pieces in a notation system that doesn’t give all the instructions, you’re putting a lot of faith in the performers. Have you been at performances where the players just don’t get it and you’re totally dissatisfied?

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Oh, yeah. It’s not that different from performing any other kind of music. I mean, you can hear Mozart played in a way that’s just awful, if somebody doesn’t get it. In fact, Mozart is rather hard to play well. That is the basic situation with notated music, that you have to figure something to do with this information, which is not sound, which is just symbols on a piece of paper and I turn that into something that works musically. Now, of course, how it works musically or what constitutes being musical for this music, that’s another step, though that is beginning to develop. There’s a kind of performance practice of late-20th-century music and on from there. But, yeah, one friend of mine, a player says that my music is very fragile because I’ve really had some very bad performances and I’m thinking, my God, have I really written this crappy music? Or else people will hate it and I understand! And then it turns out, you know, that either sometimes there’s simply a misunderstanding of how the material is to be used. If somebody didn’t read the instructions or didn’t read them carefully, that’s easier to deal with, but other times it’s just not having an ear for it and just not knowing what to do with it. It’s doubly complicated. It depends a little bit on what kind of pieces we’re talking about ‘cuz my earlier indeterminate music is really indeterminate and yet at the same time it’s much easier to do because you’re in such a totally different situation that you don’t have to think about “how should I do this?” You just have to do it. You know, you’re too busy waiting for these cues, you know, you have five seconds to wait before you can make this sound and then it has to have three changes in color and, oh my God, you have to be done before the next guy makes his sound. So, you’re just very busy and as a result you are very business-like; you just make the sounds. And the question of expression and all that other stuff just doesn’t enter into it. And that’s fine. And as I said, if I can get somebody to do that in the first place that usually works out okay. Those pieces, in a funny way, are not fragile. The fragile ones come later somewhere around in the ’70s, and it in a way, beginning with those Tilbury pieces, where I gave up that older, sort of invented notation and the music initially looks much more like regular music, with the notes on staves and the rest of it and a musician looks at that and thinks, “Okay. Now I’ve got to do this and this and this and that. Now is that what he wants? Is this what you want?” You know, and then I get into real trouble because I can’t honestly say yes or no because it has to be what the performer thinks has to be the way to do it. Now it’s true, some performers may think of something more interesting, some less, but there’s no one image of what the piece exactly should be like and that’s the problem because it looks as though there should be.

FRANK J. OTERI: Right.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Whenever you see a piece of music you think, okay, there is a way to do this and then you keep striving for that. In this case, that’s a kind of blank or it’s a question mark and you’re struggling to figure out how to get into this thing and how to do something with it and so forth.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, there’s always this myth of the composer. Beethoven hearing the Ninth Symphony in his head and not being able to hear it in real life and he conducted the premiere and of course he was still conducting after the musicians stopped because obviously he didn’t completely hear in his head the tempo they were actually playing. With this music, with this indeterminate music, in a way, if you’re hearing a finished product in your head, you’re not hearing it. So what is it you’re hearing in your head?

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Well, you are hearing specific things, but you are aware that they are possibilities rather than the only possible result of what you’ve written. And it’s true, especially with the earlier music. I sort of tried to test it. You know, you play something, try it on the piano, you know, does it sound okay or not? You know, and you can’t do that when all these indeterminate elements are there, but you can think about, well, what’s the worst I could do with these freedoms that I have here? What could I do that would be totally unacceptable to me. And if I can’t figure out how to do that, if in fact the conditions are such that that’s not going to happen, then it’s okay. But if this somehow could be twisted—I mean, in extreme cases it can always be—I mean if somebody really sets out deliberately to sabotage the piece, of course they’re going to be able to sabotage it. Feldman had this happen to him a number of times with those graph pieces. People would just play tunes.

FRANK J. OTERI: Right.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: And that means that they’re just really not serious. There’s no good will at all there. I mean, you have to assume that there’s some…that if they’re going to do it, will to do it with some interest in doing something decently.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now, in terms of setting boundaries, all of the movements in music have been in a way about restricting as well as giving freedoms. I mean, certainly, the serial system is about having a perfectly contained sound world, that’s permuted along a certain path and minimalism to even more of an extent, you know, stripping down everything and having cells from which pieces are generated. But in a way, I’m thinking of these earlier pieces of yours extending all the way to the Tilbury pieces that we were looking at maybe a 20-year period here from like ’49 to ’71, let’s say. The pieces that have restricted pitches are almost a serial minimalism in a way. You’re only using those pitches, so in a sense there’s an order, a serial order, but since you’re only using a handful of pitches, it’s minimalism. A generation before minimalism happened.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Yeah, yeah, those are kind of a separate chapter, you might say, entirely. I mean, that’s really b
asically where I started. That’s where… I think of my first real pieces, I think of those early pieces with very small numbers of notes.

FRANK J. OTERI: Like the Serenade?

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Yeah, exactly. And indeterminacy is not an issue there. If you’re looking from somewhere where they might have come from, the nearest I can think of would be the earlier Cage music, the pre-chance Cage music. Some of those prepared piano pieces, which themselves can be very minimal too. A very small number of pitches…

FRANK J. OTERI: Four Walls.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Yeah, for instance. Very simple pieces… I didn’t know that piece, but there are a couple that I do know. That might have had some effect on how I did those. Though there were technical reasons why I did that which I had cooked up myself, which had to do with…yeah, actually, initially it all came out of one of those exercises that Cage set me, which was to do, I had to learn how to do this rhythmic structure and he said, “Well, look. Do it just monophonically for one instrument and use just five notes. That way you can really focus because it’s so restricted,” and so I did that. And I really liked working within this very small area and then I thought, okay, I’m not interested in just monophonic, I wanted more. And I thought, well, okay, let’s do two instruments and let’s cut it down to three notes. And then I thought about that and thought well, look, it’s not three notes. It’s a whole bunch of sounds. For instance, any combination of those notes, there’s two, so 1 and 2, 1 and 3, 2 and 3, that’s already three sounds. And there’s 1, 2, 3, in any case by themselves, that’s six sounds. Then you have the sound of 1 and 2 together, let go of 1 and that moment when 2 sounds after having been together with 1, that’s a new sound. There’s no other way to hear that except in those situations. And then you get the permutations and before you’re done, as it happens with two instruments, two melody instruments, and three pitches, absolute of course, pitches, you have twelve sounds. And so, that seemed to me a lot to work with. So I made pieces with these twelve sounds and now, I regarded them each as it were as a sound unit and then I thought I was working melodically with these sound units, which might be simple. Just a simple sound or they might be one of these more complex things and that’s what that stuff is about.

FRANK J. OTERI: And in terms of rhythm?

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: That was sort of intuitive. The rhythmic structure was there, but then it was like making melodic, single-line melodic material.

FRANK J. OTERI: And dynamics were always pretty much…

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Similar. I’ve never really been interested in serializing all these different things. I did do pieces where everything got more complicated, you know where, a lot of variety of dynamics and stuff like that. And, you know, well, maybe, yeah, it’s possible that in some of those pieces there is a kind of serial thinking. But it’s rather more informal.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: The thing about the twelve-tone thing that drove me crazy was that once you start on a sequence of twelve, you had to run through the sequence. You had to go 123456789, and so forth. Which seems really stupid because, one, I’ve got 1722225134, or something, you know, what is this? And so to that extent, what I did was I set up the equivalent of a row but it was simply a kind of reservoir of pitches. And they might be three, it might be twelve, it might be fifteen, it might be seven. You didn’t have to and you could, it could include octaves. And they were not transposable, that’s the other thing. The twelve-tone system, at least in its sort of simpler, strict form, is very abstract really, because, it’s just a tone row. But there’s nothing said about the instrumentation—the registration! A crucial factor. Nothing there at all. So in a way I was stricter because I fixed the registration and the pitches.

FRANK J. OTERI: Right.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: But I never got hung up on this intervallic business, this Milton Babbitt thing about combinatoriality and all this stuff, you know, I just couldn’t see that at all.

FRANK J. OTERI: So did you ever interact with Babbitt?

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Well, everybody knew everybody else in the community, the new music community, so I sort of bumped into him and, you know, we knew each other by sight. I knew him more through some of his students. I actually spent quite a lot of time in one year with a guy called Richard Maxfield. You know that name?

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: We both got Fulbrights the same year and we hung out together a lot and he was just saturated with this stuff and I was giving him a very hard time about it. And we spent the whole year quarreling about this and then actually the end result, you might say, was that I won because it was after that year that he started doing the tape music and he completely gave up all that other stuff and got to be a really interesting composer.

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah, I never heard his serial stuff. I only know the whacked out tape stuff.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Exactly, exactly. Now he totally went off…so that was sort of my indirect experience with Babbitt. And Feldman had a sort of chip on his shoulder about Babbitt, as you can imagine. [FJO laughs] No, Babbitt himself is a great guy. He’s a fun person and an interesting person and so forth.

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah, we had a great time with him a couple of months ago.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Yeah, I bet. He is a funny man!

FRANK J. OTERI: We talked about beer and Broadway musicals and…

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Right, right.

FRANK J. OTERI: How about Carter, who actually to this day still lives around here?

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Does he still live on 12th Street?

FRANK J. OTERI: Yes.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Oh my God. Alright. Yeah, Elliott Carter. Again I would meet him periodically here and there and we had one friend in common and that’s Frederic Rzewski. A surprising friend in common actually… And they got along very well and he did good things for Frederic. He got him good gigs and things like that. I had problems with Carter’s music. A few pieces I like a lot, but mostly it seems
, it’s a little bit beyond that sort of early, really uptight European serial music, but not too far.

FRANK J. OTERI: But it’s not serial.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Well, that’s the other thing. It’s not strictly serial but it’s still very organized. I mean, a lot of it is in the rhythmic stuff, but it seems so kind of hyper-constricted music. Maybe I just don’t have an ear for it or something, but it just doesn’t…I mean, my wife put it once, it’s funny, she said, “It doesn’t swing.” [laughs] And I had to confess I knew what she meant…

FRANK J. OTERI: It can be very busy. But it’s interesting because the music he’s written in the last decade is much lighter…

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Yeah, which I don’t know. I’ve sort of lost track of it. What I gather, he’s sort of loosened up a lot and it must be quite different.

FRANK J. OTERI: It’s fantastic. And of course, you know, he’s in his nineties, and he’s writing this stuff.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Yeah, it’s amazing, the work he’s doing. No, I still need to catch up with that.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now, to talk about how your style evolved over these years and I don’t know what you’ll think of my saying this, but works like the Piano Trio, which is one of my favorite works of yours, and Hay Una Mujer Desaparecida are almost neo-romantic in a way. And they’re almost harkening back to the past. What’s that about?

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Yeah, well. I think two things. One is sort of personal and that has more to do with what I told you earlier, that I was saturated with all this classical music, which I didn’t give up, you know, I mean, I still get a kick out of Brahms occasionally [laughs]. And so some of that may be in the background. But otherwise, the main thing that happened to me was in the late ’60s, the early ’70s is this turn to politics, you know, this interest in politics, like a whole lot of other people, obviously. But through the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, it got us pretty stirred up and interested and then a number of us asked, “Well, this music we get. Where’s that in this larger picture of the world.” And the feeling was, and mine too in the way, I mean, I didn’t have this problem that say Cornelius Cardew had where he decided to reject all of his earlier work and to denounce it and so on and so forth. I certainly didn’t. I thought, it was done in good faith. I certainly didn’t want to keep doing it and that also for personal reasons. I thought, I’d already done everything I wanted to do with that way of working. I wanted to do something different. And in a way the first break from that, it’s a couple of things: it’s, there’s a larger piece called Burdocks was one thing and then something like the Tilbury pieces were another. And those were really, in some ways they’re still minimal and have all these other qualities, but they’re also quite different, or at least they seemed to me at the time to what I’d been doing before. Well, it’s simpler, there are a lot more notes! You know, I guess the early music was very sparse, very like Webern in that way. But I was looking for something else to do. That was another factor. And then as far as the politics go, the feeling was that what I’d been doing was so kind of specialized and esoteric and self-enclosed, and I wanted to try something that was a little bit more, you know, going in the other direction, and that’s basically, those were some of the results. The other thing was, again on a more technical level, that one way of doing that, which again occurred to a number of us, was to use traditional material–folk songs, or political songs, or politically connected music–and work that into our pieces. And so that’s a sub-stratum of that. For instance in the Trio, each movement is based on a political song and once you’re into those political songs, I can’t use them abstractly. I mean, they’re full of all kinds of very powerful feelings and ideas and stuff like that, and that becomes sort of part of what’s in my head as I write that music and therefore it then becomes fairly direct, expressive music that the early music had not been.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now, in terms of the politics…These pieces are mostly instrumental pieces.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Right.

FRANK J. OTERI: So the message that’s coming across is not coming across verbally.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: No, no.

FRANK J. OTERI: Do you still think that an overt political message can come across in instrumental music?

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Overt? No, no, no. I did do that too, I wrote some songs. I wrote sort of a cantata on the IWW, the Wobblies: Wobble Music… The only way to be directly political—I mean, not the only way, this is a large subject—but for starters, the only way to be political is to have a text… Music is notoriously elusive. I mean, that’s the whole point. What is expressed can only be done through music. You can’t do it with words. If you have a text, that’s a whole other scene. And even there, text plus music can come out to something that is not just the text. In fact, it can be something completely different than the text. And so, there are all those issues there. But when it’s straight instrumental music, the best you can hope for is that there’s something—it could be in the title of the piece, it could be in the notes accompanying the piece, you explain, or you mention that this song was used and then you say a little bit about the song and where it belongs—and so that you kind of position the music to a kind of political culture. Ideally, the thing is to write really great agitational songs…

FRANK J. OTERI: Which is what Cardew wanted to do…

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Exactly, exactly. And it’s not easy to do. It’s really hard. And also it’s both from the point of view of composition, but also from the point of view of circumstance, you need to have, you need to be in the middle of a strike to write a piece, you know to write a song that’s going to work in a strike. So, and that kind of experience, occasionally, there were moments in the Trio, for instance, which are dedicated to these three women’s camps, anti-nuclear camps, which happened to be Seneca, NY, down in Sicily, and then in Greenham. Well, I was at Greenham and my wife was both at Seneca and Greenham, so that these things connected with real things that were going on in the world that had a political significance.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, one thing though in this music since it allows the performer so much room is that the music in and of itself is a statement against autocr
acy…

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: That’s another way to look at it. But something like the Trio doesn’t leave the performance that much room…

FRANK J. OTERI: That’s the irony!

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: [laughs] Yeah, exactly. I mean, I had this experience once, and the piece (not that piece) but a piece from that period was performed somewhere in England, I think in London, and when it was over these kids said, “Why are you doing this? This is terrible! And it’s politically bad.” And I was really quite shocked because I thought I was doing the right thing and they said, “No, it’s your earlier music that’s really political.” The stuff that I had rejected as too esoteric… And then of course these ideas came up which you might say because it’s a kind of model or a symbolic enactment of certain ways of relating among people, and therefore about politics, that in some deeper sense was more political than the stuff that I later did with using songs and things like that. It’s another version of it. No, I have to also admit, I had no idea, I had no notion of being political in those pieces. [laughs] That was a bonus in retrospect! But it is true, that the notion of de-hierarchizing, you could say, has always been important to me.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, it’s interesting that Luigi Nono, who was an avid left-wing political thinker, wrote really hardcore serial music

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Yeah, he’s one of my favorite examples when you raise issues connected…I mean, you go the whole—between Cornelius Cardew or somebody like Hanns Eisler, wrote hardcore political music and had been themselves avant-garde folks and then you get someone like Nono who is hardcore political and writes this really hard music. Yeah, yeah. [laughs] No, there are many possibilities out there!

FRANK J. OTERI: In the last couple of years, you worked with Sonic Youth on their album Goodbye 20th Century. What was that like?

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: That was fun. [laughs] You know, and it was very brief. I mean, to say I worked with them, it was one session. They just had this very nice notion of making that record…

FRANK J. OTERI: I love that record.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: You know, they tried out all of these avant-garde things and it’s an accident that I worked with them because Lee Ranaldo just called up one day. I mean, I’d never, I vaguely had heard the name Sonic Youth, my kids know about all this stuff, there like into this, all of this. [laughs] Well, I learned. So he calls me up and says, “So we’re going to do these pieces of yours, is that okay?” And I said, “Sure, it’s fine. It’s great. When are you going to do it?” And he mentioned the date. “Oh,” I said. “I’ll be in New York.” And he said, “Well, why don’t you join us?” And so I showed up at the studio and we had this really great session. And that was it. But it was very enjoyable, I must say. It’s funny because the recordings, recordings are usually… I hate them. They’re just torture. You know, they go on for hours and they do this phrase ten times and the next one ten times and so on and so forth and then you have to edit it all and it’s awful. But here basically we sat around…I arrived and they were sitting around and there was some music laying around and they said, well, what are we going to do? And I saw a piece called Edges, which is basically an improvisation piece, so I said, “Well, why don’t we try that?” So then we explained the score, the notation and so forth and then we go in the studio, we start playing. We play for about twenty minutes, okay, step out, let’s listen to it. Ah, it’s pretty good, now what are we going to do? [laughs] It was great. I mean, it was just absolutely super. And then we did one of the pages from Burdocks.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now, so do you feel that their interpretations of your music are your music?

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Well, yes and no. I mean, this is also a larger question that we’ve touched on in a way before. No, my first impression when I hear it is yeah, that’s Sonic Youth. [laughs] Right. However, it is also true that it isn’t quite Sonic Youth, because in fact, it’s an expanded band. I mean, Kosugi‘s playing on it, Christian Marclay‘s playing on it…

FRANK J. OTERI: William Winant.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: William Winant is playing on it. I’m playing on it. So we’re getting something a little bit different in that sense. The ground tone is, as it were, is certainly, partly because of the conditions under which we did it—it’s electric, so on and so forth, and they do have a very strong presence, so it’s a Sonic Youth kind of thing and yet they probably would not have done it, anything like that if they hadn’t started with my material, right? It’s sort of…in that sense, it’s a kind of symbiotic relationship.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, what’s interesting is hearing the stuff they’ve done since then. And, certainly, before they did this particular record, had done three albums of these avant-garde improvisatory things that are fascinating. And all of this experimental work has really affected the actual songwriting they’ve been doing on their official rock albums that have come out since then.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Oh, really? Isn’t that interesting…

FRANK J. OTERI: It’s fantastic and the thing that excited me about it probably more than anything, because I’ve been a Sonic Youth fan for years, but now there was this extra bonus. There was an item about Goodbye 20th Century on one of the video stations. And they featured Pauline Oliveros because of this! All of a sudden the entire alt-rock crowd was aware of Pauline Oliveros because of this album. And that is a great thing.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: That was very nice. That was great. Yeah, yeah.

FRANK J. OTERI: And what’s interesting to me is that that audience, the audience for alternative rock music is more open to the music of Wolff and Cage and Feldman and Pauline…

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: That’s been one of the nicest things about the last three or four years, is the number of younger people that come to these concerts. I mean I’m astounded, you know, because we’re old fogies here. We’ve been around for years and all of sudden, all these kids turn up! You know, and they seem to like it or at least are interested; they’re willing to check it out which is very nice. It’s really nice!

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, what’s interesting is that they’re more open to it then the so-called classical music audience, which is still dismissive of this.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Yeah, yeah.

FRANK J. OTERI: I recently heard this piece you wrote for orchestra and it was your first orchestra piece, if I’m not mistaken.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Not quite. There are two or three others preceding it and a couple of little ones. Very little orchestra music because I can’t get the commissions for it and I’m not going to put in the work, and I mean, it’s an enormous amount of work to do an orchestra piece. So unless I have at least a notion that this is going to get played, I’m not going to do it.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, writing for an orchestra is almost the opposite phenomenon of working with a rock band. The orchestra is this standard ensemble that largely plays repertoire that they’ve been playing for a hundred years; it’s codified and the audience for the orchestra is much different from the audience for Sonic Youth, let’s say. What was your experience working with orchestral musicians and working with the audience?

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: It’s been mixed. Setting aside a couple of the earlier pieces, which I just did to try it out and then the first, I can’t even remember what the first one is, but a relatively recent one, a bigger piece which was a commission from Donaueschingen, the festival in Germany, where they’re into that kind of music, preferably for orchestra, and there’s a lot of it and this is just one more in the—so there is a kind of new music culture, if you will, that does a lot of orchestra music—you’re not going to hear Beethoven on those programs, it’s just going to be Lachenmann and Rihm and if I’m really lucky, there’ll be some Wolff on it! Right? So, to that extent, from the audience point of view, that was no problem. On the other hand, from the orchestra point of view, there were major problems, which I kind of suspected. I mean, I was there when the New York Philharmonic did Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis, which was a shocking, really, really awful event. I mean, just dreadful. They deliberately sabotaged; they killed the piece. Literally, I mean, before your very eyes on the stage. Half the musicians just sat there. They wouldn’t even play their parts. I mean, you wouldn’t even believe how unprofessional that group of people were. It was stunning. So I knew that orchestras could be a problem. And then, you know, you hear stuff and you can understand it in a way. I complained a lot to Cardew and Cardew said, “Well, look, wait a minute! The ultimate image of alienated work has got to be orchestral musicians. You know, those poor guys. They have no say in what they’re going to play. They have to do exactly what this guy tells them to…” and all the rest of it. You know, it’s a completely hierarchical situation and that creates certain kinds of feelings and situations and then this kind of tension between orchestras and their conductor. Now, for this particular piece for instance, it’s the Sudwestrundfunk Orchestra, which is an okay orchestra that specializes, no it doesn’t specialize, but once a year every year, they take off a month and a half and do nothing but new pieces. But they’re regular conductor had just left and they were using temporary conductors. And I’d come for the first rehearsal and we hadn’t gone but one minute into the rehearsal, when the concertmaster’s already telling the conductor what to do. And you know there’s trouble, I mean that there’s going to be… So the whole thing is a battle to sort of establish turf and establish territory and who’s going to tell who… You can’t really look bad so ultimately they will pull something together, right? But as far as actually thinking how the music goes, it was really a bad, bad situation. So that’s sort of the negative side, and it wasn’t entirely negative because I had a great soloist, a percussionist, Robyn Schulkowsky, who was terrific and a few members of the orchestra did get the idea and actually came to me and said, you know, “I think this is okay. It’s kind of nice.” And so forth. But generally speaking it was a very tense and unpleasant situation. So that’s that experience. Good experience: Petr Kotik. Heroic efforts to do something interesting with orchestra musicians, right? And this is New York, so he gets to put together groups that are really first class.

FRANK J. OTERI: The Orchestra of the SEM Ensemble is a handpicked group.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: It’s a fantastic group and it’s people who know what they’re getting into and are not going to be shocked if they have to do something a little differently, or whatever it is that they’re required to do, and might even find it kind of interesting and get into it. So I knew that I was in a much better situation. Now that particular piece was originally written for, or at least, the piece exists as a kind of modular collection of material, which can be used in a number or different ways. So that’s harkening back if you will. But it was originally made for this orchestra in the Czech Republic, which is a sort of provincial orchestra, not very good, not until Peter got hold of them (don’t ask me how), had only done classical repertoire and he started them off… I mean, their sort of initiation to new music, to any 20th-century music, was with Cage‘s Atlas Eclipticalis [laughs]. So they had been a little bit broken in and the concerts had been successful, so that they did feel as though they were doing something that people were interested in hearing. And in fact, were more interested in hearing than Beethoven, which was played better by the orchestra in Prague. You know, so that was nice. And so, to that extent, they were willing and they were relaxed about it. And so I knew I would have a fairly positive kind of general atmosphere. And then it was just more of a question of what to do with this hierarchical situation–having three orchestras is really a good start, because that means that no one person is in charge. And then different, all kinds of different strategies… The way they began that performance in the Czech Republic I like a lot. There are solo parts for every single member of the orchestra. There are 80 parts. Everyone gets their own solo. It’s not very long but there it is. It’s completely…and when you do that part of the piece, you simply block off some time and then whenever you think you want to do it, you do it. And so what happens is that the quieter instruments have to kind of look for some space. Because flutes in a low register have to wait until the trombone’s done his thing over here or else forget it! And so forth. But anyway, so the piece started and I didn’t know quite how this piece was going to work out. That’s dangerous. You know, 80 people all doing something more or less simultaneously. The parts of it can be arranged in different sequences, and they decided to start with that and so the conductors come out, all three of them, and take, you know, the whole routine, take their bows and so forth. Look at thei
r orchestras. And then just sort of nod their heads and put their arms down and the music starts. And there’s music for three minutes and nobody’s doing any conducting whatsoever! [laughs] And it sounds absolutely beautiful!

FRANK J. OTERI: Oh, that’s great. We’ve got to get a recording of this.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: I was interested in doing the piece in doing not just that, but sort of trying all of the different possible ranges of control, non-control, you know, and so forth. So there are parts of the piece where—I never did use a unison for everybody—but there are parts where there, say, if only just writing two lines and the entire, all three orchestras are playing at the same time, but the two lines are, as I was saying, we’re cutting across that space, so it’s very precise and the conductors are the only ones, I mean, they just make sure everyone plays on time, but otherwise it’s completely determinate, because it’s you know…And yet, on the other hand, it’s highly indeterminate because of the spatial situation and where you’re sitting and the way the sound is hitting you. And also because it’s impossible to coordinate at those distances that the musicians are from each other, perfectly. You’re not going to get, I mean, you can do it on the computer or with a computer or with a synthesizer, but with an orchestra there’s no way you’re going to get—or also just the way you hear the sound—so you in fact you get this very rich, complicated sounding thing even though all I have notated on the score are these two lines of notes and relatively simple rhythms. [laughs] So that’s the other extreme.

FRANK J. OTERI: So that’s the heterophony issue, going back to the very beginning of our conversation.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Exactly. Right, right. Yeah.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now we talk about the ideal performer to some extent. What about the ideal listener?

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: I don’t have a lot to say about that. Let’s start with that. I think it may be partly because of that initial experience that I had which was that people hated the music… I mean, in concerts, there would be a very small group I knew would be interested and the rest—either they would hate it or if they were my family or friends, they’d say, “My God, what are you doing?” They just couldn’t relate to it in anyway. And so I got kind of hardened early to the notion that, look, this is what I’m doing and…There’s plenty of music out there that people like to listen to and if they like to listen to it, they should go listen to it. I’m going to do my thing and if they like it fine and if they don’t, too bad.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, to a listener that’s coming to your music, what advice would you give? How should somebody listen to your music?

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Besides just listening to it? Well, just relax. I don’t know, I just don’t know. I mean, I don’t want any special favors or anything. You should just listen to it the way you would listen to anything else! It’s true, though I mean, the problem with it, of course, is that it doesn’t sound like anything else. Or you might say the problem, or even the greater problem, is that it might occasionally sounds like something else and then suddenly it doesn’t. And then it leaves, you think, “Ah, now I’ve got something I can get, you know, relate to” and then I leave them hanging dry, you know and that…So, yeah, I don’t know what to say. I used to talk a certain amount about art actually. I mean, people don’t have problems with abstract pictures. Alright, so you can’t see, here’s a picture of a mountain and here’s a picture of just blobs and you don’t have any problems looking at one and then the other, you know. And the music is like that too. I mean, I haven’t totally talked that way for a long time but that seemed to me perfectly, and maybe that’s, maybe I should raise that again. Just listen to it as another kind of, what could you say, work with sound. I mean, maybe that’s an issue that came up earlier. Don’t worry about music, now especially nowadays that shouldn’t be such an issue because every kind of music is out there. And as you said the kids are used to music from, you know, Borneo and Sonic Youth, and Bach and it’s all part of this great thing and people are much less troubled now by making peculiar sounds or whatever it is. It’s just part of the world’s music and maybe that’s what I would say. Just listen to it just as though you listen to anything else that is out there.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now, this question…

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: My main problem with audiences is that they’re totally unpredictable. Because you never know who it is that’s out there, and why they’re there, and what they think they’re doing there and so on and so forth. And there’s no way you can control that. I can control what I write on a piece of paper. To a certain extent if I’m there when they’re preparing the piece or I’m playing in it, I have something to do there, but beyond that, it’s totally out of my hands. I mean, I can choose my venue, okay, but who knows who’s going to come to a concert? Or with what presuppositions and maybe all they do is listen to classical music. Well, of course, they’re going to have trouble with this to a certain extent, yeah. On the other hand, if they listen to Sonic Youth as well then maybe they can connect a little better.

FRANK J. OTERI: But indeed, isn’t that the most wonderfully indeterminate quality of music? That you don’t know the audience…

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Sure, exactly, yeah. Well, that is the ultimate indeterminacy.

FRANK J. OTERI: For years, you’ve had this other life. You teach Classics which is a whole other world than cutting edge, new music. [CW laughs] Thousands of years separate them! [laughs] Is there any connection at all?

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Right, right, right. My day job. Well, there’s got to be some connection, right? I never worried about it. I just kind of stumbled into that very early on. I decided, I thought, when it was time to think about college and stuff like that, I thought first of all, I should really go to music school, you know, a conservatory. I’m a musician, right? But then people kind of talked me out of that. They said, you know, “You should get a proper education. So broaden yourself, go to a liberal arts school.” And so forth. And by then, I’d encountered Cage and anything after that was going to be too late. So I got to college. To major in music and study with Walter Piston? After having studied in 1950 with Cage?! Come on! I thought much later, maybe it wouldn’t have done me any harm, say, to do a harmony course, or whatever. Counterpoint, maybe.

FRANK J. OTERI: His string quartets are nice.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Yeah, right. Yeah. Sure. No, Piston’s fine. He was a great guy; he was extraordinarily tolerant. You know, he never gave us a hard time, you know, and we caused trouble there and stuff. But he didn’t mind. He was, it was good. And he was a very accomplished composer and I could probably have learned all sorts of stuff, but anyway, I just kind of decided no. And the other thing was t
hat I thought, well, I can’t play, I write this music that is really problematic as far as the audience goes and it seems to be what I do. How the hell am I going to make a living? You know, what am I going to do if I want a family or any of those things. And I looked at John Cage in his late thirties, destitute. Living on hand-outs from here and there. I mean, really having it hard. I mean, it’s hard to imagine because eventually things worked out but he was halfway through his life and he was just in desperate straits and I thought, can I do that? You know, I didn’t, this wasn’t necessarily conscious but was my picture of what it was to be a composer like that.

FRANK J. OTERI: And Feldman at the dry cleaners!

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: And Feldman doing dry cleaning and so forth. And I thought, I don’t know if I want to do that. So I thought, let’s go to college and see what happens and I…You know, I did have this literary thing in the background. My parents were publishers and so forth, and somehow I’d stumbled into Classics. I had a very good Latin teacher in high school, and so I was well prepared. And I took a Latin class and I enjoyed it immensely. And classics students are hard to come by at these institutions, so as soon as they see that you’re even there and that you have a little capability for doing this stuff, they’re on you immediately. “Come join us!” And here I was at Harvard, with a very distinguished department and they wanted me! Anyway, that’s how I got to be a Classics major, and then the idea of teaching appealed to me. Especially when I saw, again, a very distinguished institution, and these people teaching this great stuff, and really not being very great teachers. Some of them… You know, there were both good and bad, but the indifferent ones and the bad ones at this great institution, I thought, wait a minute! I can do this better, maybe this is what I should be doing. And that sort of got me and then I could see and I was, sort of, at the time… Now, the idea of going into Classics to make a living is totally bizarre. But in those days, some way, maybe I was naïve but I thought okay, let’s try that and then that’s what I did.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, it’s another one of those weird ironies: teaching Classics is more lucrative that being a composer.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah, there certainly are the…two other things, or one certainly. There was the interest in teaching and somebody once said, that my music, there was a strongly pedagogic element in it, especially the earlier music. It’s not just about playing the music, but it’s about learning about what music is and how it works and how you do it. And maybe that’s the connection. I mean, it’s this impulse to teach. And so that’s again, it’s a little bit abstract, but I think that could be a connection.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, interestingly enough, I mean, ironically in the earlier part of your life, you were an academic and a composer, but you were not an academic composer! [laughs]

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Not in any stricter sense, no.

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah, now, in terms of the music departments that you interacted with, you eventually started teaching music.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: I did, yeah.

FRANK J. OTERI: How did that happen?

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: I’ve actually only had two academic jobs in my whole life. One was at Harvard. I got my degree, I got all my degrees there, and I ended up teaching there for actually eight years and I had no interaction with the music department at all, except once. I once got asked to come in and teach a class about Cage. And that was by the guy who was their Renaissance specialist. [laughs] So it gives you an idea. And then the Harvard thing, the Harvard gig sort of came to an end and I was looking for work and there was a job open at Dartmouth in Classics and I went up there. And when I went up, I met this guy Jon Appleton and he knew about me as a composer and he said, “You know, if you come to Dartmouth, you really should be part of the music department too. It would be great to have you here.” And somehow that worked out. That we had a dean who thought it was going to be interdisciplinary, which it really wasn’t, but anyway… And so I got this joint appointment and that was how I ended up teaching some music, finally.

FRANK J. OTERI: You are largely a self-taught and an intuitive composer. So what sort of things have you tried to bring out in the music of your students?

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: Well, the first thing to say is that in the entire time that I’ve taught at Dartmouth, which was well over 25 years, I only taught a composition course once, and that was in my last year! [laughs] And in that case, so I can tell you what happened there. What I did, no, I did do something else. It was a workshop; it was called Workshop in Experimental Music where I took anybody who wanted to come in, whether or not they had any background, and basically we spent the term figuring out what we could do and what kind of repertory we could make use of and we gave a concert. And that was great, that was, basically, so, in other words, and you didn’t, you could, there was no, nothing about composing, it was about performing. But it was a kind of performing, it was mostly those like my early pieces, some Cage, but there’s a huge, there’s a large body of work, which is just prose instructions. A lot of Pauline Oliveros‘s work is like this, so that is the kind of stuff we did with this. If we had a couple of instrumentalists who really had some chops then we would do things around them to a certain extent, but it was mostly about teaching them how to perform the music. And to perform the music which required them to be something like a composer, the activities really cross there. As they should in fact all the time. And so that’s one thing I did and if in the course of the term they got interested in doing their own things, that was great. Then we would in fact get student compositions but they were spontaneously generated out of this performing situation. And then the composition course, that was a rather specialized case because Dartmouth has a small program, a graduate program in music and technology, and so you tend to get people there who are highly computer sophisticated and spent all their time in the studio and never played an instrument. And this course was billed as, you know, Composition in Electronic Media, or something like that and I told them immediately, you know, I don’t know the first thing about electronic media, so we’re just going to do music here. And basically, I mean, I did have them make pieces, but I had insisted they made only pieces that could only be performed in class. So, in other words I made them get out of the studio and either they had to do it themselves or find somebody or whatever, but it was performance oriented. So my teaching basically has to do with performance. Composition is a kind of poetry. You can’t really teach, I mean, obviously you can technical things. You can help people; you can see their work and say okay, this doesn’t seem to work well and stuff like that. But as far as just teaching composition, it’s like teaching how to write poetry. I mean, somebody has to want to do it and has to have som
e impulse for doing it and then you can help them and then there are technical things you can learn, but otherwise, no. So in a way, I was glad that I didn’t have the opportunity to teach composition as such, you know, and I got to do it in these more indirect ways which seemed more interesting.

A Cup of Tea with Dawn Upshaw



Dawn Upshaw

Across the street from the Metropolitan Opera
in New York City

Thursday, January 3, 2002—11 a.m.

Videotaped and transcribed by Amanda MacBlane

FRANK J. OTERI: When your Vernon Duke album came out, I was so excited because I think there’s something about your performance that really captures the spirit of both the music and the language in the lyrics. In these songs, there’s a consummate marriage of music and text, which is something I feel so-called classical composers and performers can learn a great deal from. Many composers rarely achieve this kind of marriage, and it even more rarely comes across in performances. A lot of vocal music and a lot of singing just isn’t English-centric. So, it begs the question: How is English different to sing than French, German, or Italian?

DAWN UPSHAW: Of course, you’re speaking to someone whose first language is English—only language really. It’s not like I’m fluent in anything else. And I think the way that one spends time on consonants or expresses the connotation of the word through the actual pronunciation of the word becomes much more intense when you’re really connected to the language. So I think that what might appear to be an advantage in this situation, being the English language, is actually just an advantage of it being a language that’s so close to me. I do think that sometimes in the “classical” music training for singers we don’t spend enough time with students making sure that along with sound and clear diction, that the way an m is pronounced or any consonant really, that that can be just as expressive as any interpretive decisions, consciously or unconsciously, you’ve made. So I do feel that sometimes that gets a little lost in the training and you end up with a more antiseptic kind of diction and pronunciation.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, I always find it strange that there are still some American singers who sing English as if it were Italian, you know, rolling the r’s which sounds so strange when you hear English sung that way.

DAWN UPSHAW: I guess there are still teachers that teach that. I think there are instructors that realize that American English doesn’t have a rolled r. (laughs) That just comes from the idea, I think, that English from across the waters is the correct English, which I totally disagree with, but I really enjoy the American r. I think that it’s gratifying and it’s expressive and it can be beautiful.

FRANK J. OTERI: So we’re essentially saying in some ways that English English is a different language or at least a different dialect than American English.

DAWN UPSHAW: Sure, sure. Totally different accent. Or they’ll say we have the accent.

FRANK J. OTERI: Right. Well, in terms of the music that comes out of this, when you’re singing works by British composers versus singing works by American composers or American composers who set British poetry or vice versa, does that come into play at all?

DAWN UPSHAW: I think it should come into play… It gets a little more complicated in a situation like an American composer setting an English text rather than an American text. And I don’t think it has to be pronounced in the English way rather than American, but I think that it’s worth considering. So, I think it’s just a matter of choice, but I don’t think that it should be disregarded nor do I think that there should be some sort of set rule that you always stick by.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, it gets really mixed up in the 20th century, especially with a work like The Rake’s Progress, which you’ve done. I think it’s an American work, Stravinsky was a naturalized U.S. citizen by the time he wrote it, but English was his third if not fourth language, and the text was by a British poet, Auden. So how do you handle that? Is it an American work? What is it?

DAWN UPSHAW: Well, I think it can be thought of musically as American and still pronounced with an English accent. Well, I’ve done it different ways, but certainly when I recorded it, that was everyone’s wish—to try to have pure English pronunciation.

FRANK J. OTERI: You said that English is your only language. When you’re singing things in other languages, how do you get into those heads?

DAWN UPSHAW: When I say it’s my only language, I’m just trying to be as realistic as possible. Of course, I spend a lot of time working on trying to get that same connection in other languages. I realize I’ll never get there completely. I’ll never sing German and feel as comfortable as when I’m singing English. I guess I sing in French more than any other of the foreign languages, and then German and, you know, I’ve done Polish. I have to find someone with who can help me on both understanding every bit and the sound, trying to be as expressive as possible with the sound.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now, do you feel that there are certain techniques that are dictated by the language or are they…how much of it is coming from the language? You’ve sung Górecki‘s Third Symphony and the Polish language is so different from the English language in so many different ways—you know, you think of these Slavonic languages of having a very different sound, almost a sound of Slavonic singing that’s very, very different from Western European singing.

DAWN UPSHAW: Actually, I don’t know why but I feel almost more connected, in a sense, to some of those sounds than I do with French. French took me a long time to get a hold of. I feel like I have a good understanding of it now, but there was something about the subtleties. And Polish, I mean, it’s all just right there.

FRANK J. OTERI: It’s a bunch of consonants, just like English.

DAWN UPSHAW: German, you have to really bite into and go all the way. There’s no subtlety, you know, there’s n
othing that you want to hide behind at all. It’s very much right here.

FRANK J. OTERI: So, what is good vocal writing for American English.

DAWN UPSHAW: Well, you know, it’s hard. I’ll say, “Something that sings,” and nobody will really understand what I mean. I suppose, to a great extent, it’s a personal choice because, you know, everybody’s going to have different reactions. But I do like an expressive line. Not necessarily even a melody or what’s thought of as a melody, but something that is truly expressive of the text or something, even if it’s not expressive of the text in the way I would interpret the text, something that speaks clearly to me and moves me somehow. I mean, really this is true for any kind of music, but if we’re talking about setting the language, I’m not as interested in things that break up the flow so much, unless breaking it up is making a clear point about the interpretation of the text that I understand. So, I am a lover of a good line.

FRANK J. OTERI: Are there things that somebody setting an English text should do differently than if they were setting, say, an Italian text or a French poem?

DAWN UPSHAW: No, I think that if you know these languages well enough you know how we sit in the sound of a given word, the ebb and flow of one word, and I think you need to incorporate that into your piece, keeping that in mind.

FRANK J. OTERI: Half of the burden is the composer’s burden to come up with something that works for a text, but half the burden is also the text itself. Are there texts that you just can’t sing?

DAWN UPSHAW: I think so. I think that some composers are much more gifted at choosing texts than others and I do think that there are some things that just don’t set well.

FRANK J. OTERI: What would be the qualities of something that does set well or the qualities of something that doesn’t?

DAWN UPSHAW: Maybe I’m kidding myself, maybe it is a personal choice issue again. Maybe what I mean is more the context and the meaning of the poem. Some things are better left read. (laughs) Sometimes I have trouble with the musical interpretation of poems, you know, with the marriage, that it doesn’t work. So, I don’t know, maybe with language that’s just a personal choice.

FRANK J. OTERI: Could music hurt a text?

DAWN UPSHAW: I certainly think so. (laughs) But, something that I think doesn’t work may be life changing to someone else. So I don’t think there are any hard and fast rules about this.

FRANK J. OTERI: Can you think of an example of a text that you wouldn’t want to see set to music?

DAWN UPSHAW: I hope this won’t offend the person who sent it to me…I was sent a piece that set the telephone book. You know, (laughs) part of it, of course, not the whole thing—that would be impossible. But (laughs), but…

FRANK J. OTERI: That could be pretty funny actually.

DAWN UPSHAW: But I didn’t look at it to be honest with you, I didn’t look at the music because I wasn’t interested in singing the telephone book.

FRANK J. OTERI: But there’s that old Charles Laughton story that he would recite the telephone book at parties in Hollywood to friends and he made it sound like a great literary monologue.

DAWN UPSHAW: Maybe I should have looked.

FRANK J. OTERI: You still can!

FRANK J. OTERI: Charles Laughton was a great performer, and his telephone book routine came up in a conversation I had with Michael Tilson Thomas where he was saying that one of the tricks of a great performer is to be able to make anything sound good. You sometimes can make something magical that otherwise might not be.

DAWN UPSHAW: You mean create magic that’s not there, so it’s kind of like selling the piece. I think there’s like this line that I don’t want to cross anyway if I can help it. I don’t want to feel like I have to sell something. I think hopefully that the piece sends me some place and I can share that or open up that door to the audience. And maybe it’s opening a door to a different room than another singer would with this very same piece, but, the times that I’ve had to do something that I didn’t feel strongly about, something I didn’t think was a good piece—that’s the kind of hard work that I try to stay away from. (laughs)

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, you said something very interesting in the Bravo documentary. When you get into a role, it takes over your entire personality and you lose a sense of who you are, you’re no longer yourself. Yet at the same time, later in the documentary, you were talking about how it’s important for interpreters to personalize the repertory they’re performing and sort of take it over and have it be their personality. A wonderful contradiction! But it’s interesting because it’s that combination of submission and control that is the great balancing act of interpretation.

DAWN UPSHAW: I think that if something really is working well with me, inside of me, there’s an instinctual or subconscious takeover, in a sense, so it all begins with a piece, the best experiences begin with a piece that not only retouches something I already know, but teaches me something new about that or about something else. And so once that happens, I think, yes, with each interpreter there are different ways of adding on a strength, hopefully strengths rather than weaknesses. But there’s also something that when it really clicks is subconscious and you know, kind of takes over.

FRANK J. OTERI: So this question of getting into a role, whether it’s an operatic role which has the extra layer of drama and acting or a vocal recital, or even an art song, is it harder to recreate a role that you’ve already heard someone else do, or is it easier to create it out of nothingness, as it were.

DAWN UPSHAW: I don’t know that it’s really harder. I think I enjoy creating things from a clean slate, probably a little bit more, especially if we’re talking about traditional opera, sometimes there’s a whole lot to be learned by watching and listening to what’s been done for years and years and years and years and years. Other times I feel that that stamp, those decisions and those opinions that have been set for so long end up being a hindrance for repeating it and trying to bring something new to it.

FRANK J. OTERI: That is the quagmire of classical music at the beginning of the 21st century. What can 21st century performers bring to this music that not only itself is old, in some cases now two or three centuries old, but has a performance history that’s been preserved on recordings for over a century. You know, you do the St. Matthew Passion—that’s what? 1721—but you’re not only dealing with 1721, you’re dealing with every single pe
rformance of it that happened since then, and especially all of the past century’s recordings of it. How do you compete against that history? Is the goal to transcend what’s been done before? How do you make it new?

DAWN UPSHAW: I can’t really think about all of that when I’m working because it just needs to feel true and real to me at the moment. And, of course, all my training comes into the picture and my experiences of hearing those recordings. But ultimately I have to throw that out the window while I’m finding whatever truth there is for me in that moment. I think that that’s the only way we can go forward and I think that’s why it’s so important with new music to really try to appreciate what is unique about any given piece and what the musical language tells us about life and things that we can relate to today.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, it’s interesting, when we were talking to Milton Babbitt across the street at Juilliard a couple of months ago, he was railing about the singers at Juilliard and how they never do new music and how the teachers tell them not to because they can’t get work. They’re on a career track. It’s like training to be an investment banker or a lawyer, there are certain kinds of law you’re not going to go into because there’s no work in it. But your career refutes that notion. Here you are, a celebrity singer in the classical music world who does mostly new music, and that’s what you’re known for.

DAWN UPSHAW: This came from wonderful teachers that I happened to have. My primary teacher in college, who happens now to be my father-in-law, was throwing new music at me as often as the traditional repertoire, the older repertoire. And I think it’s true that there aren’t very many teachers around like David [Nott] and it’s a shame that it’s so rare—and then I worked with Jan DeGaetani shortly after that…And not having grown up with classical music in my house, but with folk music and popular music and Broadway, I didn’t know what he was doing was so unusual. I grew up in my classical music training with a love and appreciation of all kinds of music and I do think it would do us all a world of good if more voice teachers embraced a wider range of repertoire.

FRANK J. OTERI: What got you excited about music initially? Any specific people or groups that you gravitated toward early on?

DAWN UPSHAW: My parents were quite involved in the neighborhood politics and the civil rights movement so it was Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger… That was the music that was not only played a lot in my house on recordings but we also sang as a family when I was very young and sang songs by those groups often.

FRANK J. OTERI: And when you decided to discover music on your own, separate and apart from your parents, what was the first thing you gravitated toward?

DAWN UPSHAW: I went into more popular music, Joni Mitchell who was really important to me and something that just popped in and popped out of my head, a lot of the groups like Blood, Sweat and Tears. And then I also became interested in Broadway music because, partly because of my parents involvement in a community theater group.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, so when you started recording Broadway music, that was almost sort of a homecoming in a way.

DAWN UPSHAW: Robert Hurwitz at Nonesuch knew a little bit about my history, he brought up the idea and I said, “That sounds like fun, why not?”

FRANK J. OTERI: Looking now in the year 2002 at shows like Show Boat or Carousel or The Most Happy Fella—they’re classics at this point. They’re the past. We’re as far away from them as people then were from Dvorak in the 20th century, and the fact that these shows get revived all the time shows they’ve become a new standard repertoire in some ways.

DAWN UPSHAW: It’s true. Yeah.

FRANK J. OTERI: In the Bravo documentary, you were performing one of the Ives songs with Richard Goode and I thought you brought a Broadway spirit to that music and it came alive in a way that few performances do. The Ives songs are great but a lot of times the delivery just isn’t. You made it come alive because of that vernacular background, which I think is in the Ives.

DAWN UPSHAW: There is all sorts of stuff in the Ives, of course, packed in with Americana, but certainly there is some of that.

FRANK J. OTERI: But that is our American tradition. Our American tradition does come out of this other tradition. This is a bit of a leap, but I even heard it in the new Jacob Druckman recording that you’re singing on. He was a jazz musician before he became a “concert” composer, whatever that means. And in so-called vernacular music, whether it’s Broadway music or folk music, there’d never be a question of does this line sing well with this text? It always does!

DAWN UPSHAW: Yes. (laughs) It starts there maybe. We’ve strayed a bit I think, maybe that’s an important point to try to get back to.

FRANK J. OTERI: Marketers like to categorize things. But you do so many different kinds of things: classical music, Baroque music, opera…which are different audiences and new music which is a different audience; the Broadway stuff, a different audience, the Bill Crofut album you did, a folk album with yet another audience! Are you different people when you sing these different musics?

DAWN UPSHAW: I don’t think so. I hope not. They’re all a part of me. They
‘re all a part of so many people and so many performers. I consider myself so fortunate to have done all sorts of different projects and I really have Nonesuch to thank for making a lot of that possible. But I know that it confuses the people that are trying to market the recordings and maybe it confuses the audiences, but that’s not a track that I can put myself on or think about, you know, it’s not the part of the work that falls in my lap, as a responsibility. Or at least I haven’t taken it.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, the interesting thing about Nonesuch is here is a label that you really can’t define. What are the recordings they’re putting out? And I think that is the goal of the label: to put out each recording as its own unique object.

DAWN UPSHAW: It’s very courageous.

FRANK J. OTERI: The fact that they exist inside a large corporate structure is pretty surprising.

DAWN UPSHAW: And a corporate structure, at least with the classical music world, which is kind of crumbling at the moment, but they’re still going…

FRANK J. OTERI: But in a way, they’re not really a classical label. They’re something else.

DAWN UPSHAW: Yeah.

FRANK J. OTERI: The composers that you’ve been collaborating with closely in the past few years are all “something else” too. John Adams, for example, you know, what is his music? Yeah, certainly we could say he’s a classical composer, whatever classical means, but he wrote something that is in essence, music theater with Ceiling/Sky, and he did that wacky record Hoodoo Zephyr which was almost techno. I mean, he’s sort of all over the map and you know, his music is so informed by all of the things that your singing is informed by, so it’s just this wonderful thing that you’ve come together in El Niño. What is it like working with John?

DAWN UPSHAW: Well, that was really the first time that we had worked on a substantial project together. It was wonderful. First of all, he’s a great guy so it was a great pleasure to get to know him and to spend time with him and I was so moved by the piece. It really just blew me away. I was expecting a lot but it really blasted me. (laughs) So it was really an extraordinary experience. I just want to go back for a second because you were talking about how these different composers, at least whom I’ve been working with recently, also are hard to categorize, and I think that’s great. I would love for things to change and for people to stop categorizing. Maybe it’s come primarily and continues because of the whole marketing issue, but I think it’s so unfortunate in terms of the life of the music. I am so moved by El Niño; I don’t really care where it came from or what it’s pointing to so much or what it means musically in terms of its place in the world musically. All I know is that in a sense it changed my life. And that happens to me every once in a while and, you know, I’m very thankful that music can do that for me and does that for people, but that’s what’s most important and that’s what’s so rare.

FRANK J. OTERI: John Harbison is another composer whose music is not easy to describe. Gatsby is a wonderful work, one moment it’s modernistic, another moment it’s a 1920s Gershwin musical, other times its neoromantic. And sometimes it’s sort of all these things at the same time and then some!

DAWN UPSHAW: Yeah, of course, very, very, very different than John Adams. I’ve worked with John Harbison for a much longer time than at least at this point with John Adams.

FRANK J. OTERI: You did that wonderful Chorale Cantata.

DAWN UPSHAW: Oh, yes, with Peggy.

FRANK J. OTERI: A gorgeous, gorgeous piece.

DAWN UPSHAW: Having done so much of John Harbison’s music before, it was very interesting and gratifying to see where he was going to take all of this in The Great Gatsby.

FRANK J. OTERI: And it’s being mounted again.

DAWN UPSHAW: And we’re bringing it back, the Met brings it back this spring, in May.

FRANK J. OTERI: There’s another composer you’ve worked a lot with whose music is finally beginning to get attention in this country, Kaija Saariaho. You did this gorgeous, gorgeous piece of hers that is just your voice and electronics, Lonh.

DAWN UPSHAW: Her music is a whole other world, a completely different world. In fact, that ‘s what’s sort of so intriguing to me. I think with Kaija, I’m sort of more amazed and in awe of something that I don’t quite understand yet. In some cases I feel like I understand it completely and having done her opera L’amour de loin a couple times now and we’ll do it again in the future—this summer in Santa Fe—I feel like I’m getting closer, but all I know is when I first heard her music, it was like, Wow! What is that? That is a totally different voice, very individual sounding, you know. With a very strong kind of identity and that really drew me in. There are different ways that we get drawn in, you know. But hers was like a whole new sound world.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, I find it so interesting that when you get involved with a composer it becomes a long-term relationship. You’ve done at least three different pieces of Kaija’s now that I’m aware of…

DAWN UPSHAW: Yes.

FRANK J. OTERI: And quite a few of Harbison’s: the Mirabai Songs, the Chorale Cantata, the opera and…

DAWN UPSHAW: Simple Daylight, the song cycle.

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah, and so you have these long-term relationships with composers. So do you feel that having an ongoing role as an interpreter of these composers has shaped the subsequent works that they create? What do you feel your impact is as an interpreter on their work?

DAWN UPSHAW: Well, I would hope it would be of some benefit to them (laughs) to have a relationship where they can see the growth of, not just their music, but maybe how I react vocally to something. If they’re trying t
o learn about writing for singers… I know I certainly benefit from the experience because it’s just always more pleasing to, and gratifying to really dig into a subject or dig into the music. For instance, if I’m working on Debussy songs, the more Debussy I can listen to at the time, the better. I learn more and I will have a different kind of understanding about those particular songs. So certainly working with new music, assuming I like the music, the more I can get, the better.

FRANK J. OTERI: And you’re working now with Osvaldo Golijov?

DAWN UPSHAW: Yes. Yes.

FRANK J. OTERI: I heard a little snippet of something that you did with Kronos.

DAWN UPSHAW: It was probably Lúa Descolorida. Osvaldo Golijov is somebody who is writing music that just goes straight to my gut and my heart. I mean, I feel a connection, maybe like nothing else before. An immediate sort of connection with the energy and the sentiment and I think he’s incredible. I’m excited about all of the attention he’s getting.

FRANK J. OTERI: So, fantasy projects, future projects, composers you’d love to tackle whose music you haven’t tackled yet.

DAWN UPSHAW: Well, certainly Osvaldo. We will do several projects in the future. And I would love to do some more John Adams and we will repeat El Niño a few times in the next few seasons, but even some new works if he had time and interest. We talked a little about that. And Kaija, I’m excited that many different opera companies seem interested in L’amour de loin. I think that that will continue to receive a lot of attention and I’m looking forward to that.

FRANK J. OTERI: Older repertoire that you would love to dig into, American or otherwise?

DAWN UPSHAW: Older repertoire! Um, well, this isn’t real old, actually I’ve been wanting to make room in my schedule to do some Kurtag for quite a while and I do think if I look at my short list of things that I would really like to get to before I stop singing, which is a ways down the road…

FRANK J. OTERI: I hope so!

DAWN UPSHAW: Kurtag is certainly there. And more Debussy. I’m kind of a Debussy nut. There’s a small group of composers, Debussy’s certainly a part of it, who, you know, I almost feel as though I’m having an affair with the music or something when I’m working on it because I am so intensely moved.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, it was so exciting to hear that new Jacob Druckman recording because there’s a whole repertory by American composers that needs to be kept alive. It is repertoire. It’s been done, it’s been premiered and you know, it’s been shelved somewhere. It had its performance; it didn’t happen again. There’s so much of this stuff that needs advocacy. Or even the Ives songs

DAWN UPSHAW: I would love to do a huge Ives project sometime.

FRANK J. OTERI: I would love for you to do it!

FRANK J. OTERI: You’re here today with your lovely daughter who’s just sitting over there off camera.

DAWN UPSHAW: Yes! Very patiently I might add.

FRANK J. OTERI: How do you balance your family and your musical career?

DAWN UPSHAW: It’s a day-by-day venture. Certainly having my husband home full time with the kids is a big answer to the question. And you know, life’s complicated. Life’s complicated for lots of people, I think, no matter what you do. Perhaps what ends up being a little bit harder on me and on my family is my being away for extended periods of time, but we have family rules about that that we stick to about how long I’ll stay away without seeing them and then they’ll come and spend time with me. In the end, even though sometimes it’s complicated, it is really the focal point of my life. My top priorities begin there and I think that it affects everything that I do in a wonderful way. Having that unit, that love that comes from those relationships that touches on everything that I do. I’m sure that’s true no matter what anybody does for a career. But what I enjoy is how I can bring that into music making.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, to turn the question upside down, how does the music making affect you as a parent? Are you constantly a missionary for the cause of music? I suppose we should probably turn the camera around for that one (laughs)…

DAWN UPSHAW: I don’t think I’m pushing music so much in the house. I mean, the kids take music lessons. If they didn’t want to, we wouldn’t have them take music lessons. I’ve talked a little bit about how the greatest music along with touching me teaches me something. Spiritually sometimes, it teaches me emotionally, it teaches me even maybe how to be more loving and generous. There is something about music making that keeps all of that, the healing aspects of music and of love, alive.

FRANK J. OTERI: And new music?

DAWN UPSHAW: Any kind of music.

FRANK J. OTERI: In the household?

DAWN UPSHAW: New music… Well, we listen to pop radio stations. Right now we’re playing the Beatles all the time, the kids are really into the Beatles and so it changes and sometimes we listen to, I still listen a lot to Steely Dan and so they hear all kinds of music in the house. Even just if they come to my rehearsals, of course, they’re hearing all kinds of music. I think music adds so much to living whether, you know, whether it is your source of income or not and that’s what I hope for my children is that they will have an appreciation and a love music that will allow music to touch their lives the way that I think it can which is a wonderful gift.

VERNON DUKE: From Five Victorian Songs 
JACOB DRUCKMAN: Counterpoise 
BILL CROFUT: The Chipmunk’s Day 
JOHN ADAMS: El Niño 
JOHN HARBISON: Chorale Cantata 
JOHN HARBISON: Simple Daylight 
LEONARD BERNSTEIN: What a Movie! 
JOHN HARBISON: Mirabai Songs 
CHARLES IVES: Five Songs 

A Place for New Music: A Discussion on Concert Hall Venues



Russell Johnson, Colette Domingues and Limor Tomer

Russell Johnson
CEO of Artec Consultants, Inc.
Colette Domingues
Principal, Magalhães Music
Limor Tomer
Curator for BAMCafé

Conceived by Molly Sheridan and Amanda MacBlane

Moderated by Frank J. Oteri

Friday, December 7, 2001
The Robert Steele Gallery in Chelsea
New York, NY

Videotaped and Transcribed by Amanda MacBlane

 

FRANK J. OTERI: We’ve reached the point now where music really is everywhere. You can turn music on in your home; you can walk around the streets with it, with a walkman; music of your own choosing if you choose CDs or MP3s or whatever it is that people are listening to these days or music not of your own choosing if you’re surfing through the radio. You can even listen to music playing whether you want to or not. When you walk into a supermarket there’s Muzak blasting…

COLETTE DOMINGUES: The subway platform.

FRANK J. OTERI: True, you can even hear live music just about anywhere… There’s almost no longer a distinction between a place that’s specifically meant for hearing music and anywhere else. Is this a good thing or is it a bad thing? Is there too much music all around us?

RUSSELL JOHNSON: I think that what’s been happening is just going to keep going. I don’t think we’ll ever go backwards. There’s always going to be live music on the subway platforms, there’s always going to be Muzak in the supermarkets, so I just think we can almost not ask, “Is it a good thing or a bad thing?” I think we have to realize that that’s what we’re going to have. It’s not going to change.

FRANK J. OTERI: But does it sort of numb us when we hear music in a “real” space?

RUSSELL JOHNSON: No. I don’t think so. I don’t think so.

COLETTE DOMINGUES: I think it is expands our landscape. It expands our sonic landscape to have music everywhere whether we choose to hear it or not. It’s the creation of the Walkman, the elevator Muzakä. The introduction of music in unlikely spaces has just broadened the sonic landscape to a point where it’s just another conversation piece; it’s just another conversation heard on the street. It’s a part of our daily lives.

FRANK J. OTERI: But does it bring us to the point where a concert experience isn’t as significant?


The interior of Carnegie Hall, New York, NY
Photo by Don Perdue

RUSSELL JOHNSON: I don’t think so. I think most of us turn the things off that we don’t want to receive. When I hear live music on a subway platform, it doesn’t really damage me. I can ignore it. So therefore when I go into another environment, let’s say Carnegie Hall, where there’s an established way of listening that’s been developed over the last 350 years; when you go there you have quite a different experience than any other aural experience you’re going to have. So I believe that the more or less sacred ground of concert halls, I think it’s going to continue with this for, I hope, 200 years.

FRANK J. OTERI: Only 200?

RUSSELL JOHNSON: (laughs) At least 200!

LIMOR TOMER: When you go to listen to music, when you’re actually going, whether you’re paying or not paying, or going to a bar or a concert hall or an outdoor festival, you’re making a conscious decision to go and you’re participating in the experience, you’re taking it in; so the level of your seriousness and you’re participation is different than being exposed to music as pollution, or air or traffic noise and so, you could hear it or not hear it if it’s coming at you on speakers or in Penn Station or in the street or in the subway, you’re not actively seeking it or participating in it, so the question is whether the listener is participating or not. And if they are then the experience is different and it’s…it could be in Carnegie Hall or an outdoor arena.

FRANK J. OTERI: Russell’s comment about being able to channel out music he doesn’t want to hear is interesting. To look at from the opposite point of view, is it possible in such an environment to actually listen to something? What if the subway musician happens to be really fantastic? Can you ever really hear that person in this context or do you need the barrier of a concert hall? Do you need a wall to somehow contain the music in order to give the performance credibility?

RUSSELL JOHNSON: I don’t think so. I think if a busker were standing in front of a theater in the Broadway section of Manhattan and he was really talented and had developed a technique for getting across his message, he gathers an audience and you do get the impact. You get everything he’s delivering. And some of them, some of these chaps are really fantastic. So I don’t think you have to be in a dedicated space.

 

FRANK J. OTERI: So then the question becomes, what function does the dedicated space serve? What is the purpose of a concert hall at this point in our history? What could or should a concert hall be? We know what a concert hall has been. Russell mentioned Carnegie Hall, which is this model that goes back to the way people have been listening for centuries. But is that still the model that is the right model for our society here and now?

COLETTE DOMINGUES: I think at the moment, the concert hall serves its well-established community and without its concert hall, that well-established community would find itself without live music. The people who go to Lincoln Center to hear a specific, Western classical music tradition concert are not going to be surfing the Internet looking for a live webcast. That’s their community. They know the people that are sitting next to them in their subscriber seats and the community is very solid. Without that particular experience of hearing music, they would be musically homeless. So, yes, those traditional concert halls I believe do a wonderful community service for Western traditional classical music, for their specific audience, and that audience is going to be with us for a long time. They don’t make the transition into another environment. That’s their environment; that’s their home.

FRANK J. OTERI: But is new work served by this kind of concert hall situation?

COLETTE DOMINGUES: New work is not served by that concert hall situation. Traditional work is served and that’s all.


The exterior of Lincoln Center, New York, NY
Photo courtesy Lincoln Center

LIMOR TOMER: We were talking about tuning out buskers or subway musicians. I’ve seen more people tuning out in the traditional concert halls—Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall—than on the subway platform. I mean, it becomes a whole other thing for many people when they go to a traditional concert hall. Sometimes it’s about the music and sometimes it’s not. I don’t think that music is necessarily served by the concert hall environment; I think the concert hall environment is something
that emerged—I don’t know, maybe I’m completely off—that emerged from economic conditions, what was happening with the middle class demanding and owning something that was only available to a different class before that. And so the size just began growing and growing as more people were interested and demanding to be exposed to culture, you know, museums and that whole model of making important culture available to large numbers of people. But new music does not necessarily fit itself or develop along those lines. And its needs are very different and its audience is different and the way it needs to be nurtured is not going to fall into those existing structures.

FRANK J. OTERI: But in order to get people to listen, in order to make that leap, there needs to be some kind of message: “This is what you should be paying attention to out of the myriad of noise surrounding us.” So, you know, we have these barriers; it’s almost like a sanctioning. Somebody says, “Well, you know this guy has a gig at the Knitting Factory. Oh, well, the Knitting Factory must think this guy is good therefore I should pay attention to this.” Whereas somebody playing on the street, nobody says this guy is good, he’s just there in the street playing. So the question becomes, this barrier, this construct of the concert hall with its social context that allows you to listen to music in the foreground rather than the background. The questions become: Are these barriers the same for every kind of music? Are they different for different kinds of music? Why are they different? And what kind of barrier is minimally needed to listen to anything?

LIMOR TOMER: All right, so, the Internet, right? Everything is possible; everything is available. It’s like all the colors are there so everything becomes white. So an unsuspecting neophyte who wants to love music, who wants to engage, is lost. So then what becomes really critical is the role of the curator. The curator becomes someone a listener can trust and say, “O.K., lead me and I will follow. And I will trust your point of view. And I will take chances and I’ll spend money on what you tell me to buy and the curator can be a critic, it could be an artistic director of an institution, it could be an institution. It becomes a sanctioning and a curatorial entity that people can trust and follow. And that I think is a tremendous opportunity for people in institutions who are positioned to really advance great new music and new music that matters and people can sort of follow that. And the Knitting Factory is a great example. I mean, it’s such a terrible place in every way, acoustically and the floor and just the environment, and yet it has established itself as a curatorial entity of real importance. I don’t know exactly how this happened, a lot of it was by conscious action…

COLETTE DOMINGUES: A lot of it was created by the artists who wanted to form their own community and found the building to be in a geographic location that was suitable to their needs. So the artists putting up with the awful conditions, which we’ve learned, kept on coming together in this building that they called home. And obviously in the past few years, the artists have chosen to go their own way and to create new homes and new buildings.

FRANK J. OTERI: But that wasn’t really so much because of the acoustics so much as the environment, the culture, the personalities involved. To bring us into an acoustical dimension, you have musicians that are playing in halls with terrible sound, but there’s a scene there and there’s some sort of recognition, so the audience comes. There’s a legitimacy to the scene. From an acoustical point of view, is the music being poorly served in such a scene?

RUSSELL JOHNSON: I don’t think so. Forgive me for going back to the Knitting Factory. There, it’s something that’s established; it’s a routine, it’s established and if you don’t get that experience anywhere else in Manhattan, you’re going to go to the Knitting Factory whether the acoustics rate 3 on a scale of 100, or 82 on a scale of 100. So, acoustics is not by any means the dominating thing in performance.

 

RUSSELL JOHNSON: If you have an audience which is sensitive to acoustics, or a music director who is sensitive to acoustics or a group of performers, musicians who are sensitive, then of course they are going to keep looking always for a better and better place acoustically. But we also know, acoustically speaking, that all over the world there are a lot of very unsatisfactory opera houses and a lot of very unsatisfactory recital halls, a lot of very unsatisfactory concert halls and yet that’s where musical life is. Maybe 92 percent of musical life of the world is in acoustically unsatisfactory places.

COLETTE DOMINGUES: I curate a series at Galapagos, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and it’s a raw, brick back room of a large and well-housed bar. The acoustic is maybe five on a scale of zero to 100. But the environment and the constituents of the neighborhood, the actual visitors to the space, create an atmosphere in which most new music proponents want to perform. They want to be there, they’re eager to be there, they volunteer to be there. So with the right environment as far as the furnishings of the room and the candles on the wall and the drapery in the background and the dimming of the lights, we can create a warmth and a coziness that the music demands and also a much more informal atmosphere than one would find at Alice Tully Hall. People can get up. People can change their positioning so they can get a better sightline of the stage, of the musicians if they want to. So the whole nurturing of the barrier is there and available and people come for that. They’re not coming for the 100 percent acoustic on the stage. They’re coming to be part of a new music community and they find it very inviting.

FRANK J. OTERI: Before the camera got turned on, we talked about our other favorite venue to pick on other that the Knitting FactoryLincoln Center. e talked about the New York Philharmonic premiere of what I believe was probably a beautiful piece, I’ve heard many other works of his and they’re all beautiful and I can only assume that this one is beautiful too. I say it was “probably beautiful” because I can’t say it with certainly even though I was at the premiere! I’m talking about Somei Satoh; I’m not sure I heard his music at that premiere.

COLETTE DOMINGUES: You didn’t hear it. You didn’t hear it.

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah, and I heard parts of it and I what heard was beautiful, but it was an utter failure in that space and…

COLETTE DOMINGUES: And it wasn’t for wont of Kurt Masur trying to control the audience. That piece starts with 32 seconds of pure silence…resonant silence. A waiting, pending, pregnant pause. And the conductor, even though he tried three times, could not create the right pregnant pause to be able to start the peace. I think I found the right venue for Somei Satoh, which is the Angel Orensanz Arts Center down on Norfolk Street, but at the same time we’d have to create the right seating environment. No squeaky folding chairs, people reclining. So I think it could be developed, but certainly not in Lincoln Center, despite the best efforts of the maestro to create that environment.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well that then becomes another question, the proper environment to hear a new piece of music and obviously every piece comes with its own agenda and you certainly can’t to a new concert hall for every single piece of music that’s being done, although Carnegie Hall‘s attempt at this with their plans for that new Zankel Hall which has twelve different stages that change depending on what’s there is a pretty interesting way to deal with this issue. But the question now becomes how to experience a piece of music? Sitting, standing, laying down…what is the ideal physical state that a listener should be in when listening to music?

RUSSELL JOHNSON: Send that question somewhere else first.

COLETTE DOMINGUES: I think it’s an individual matter; it’s an individual listener’s concern. I mean, some people like to buy standing room, I mean, that’s where they’re more comfortable. Others are more comfortable in one of the new cinema seats, which is like a cushioned armchair with a reclining back, others are quite happy to sit bolt upright. It’s an individual decision that a concert hall can’t really facilitate. It can’t enable those people to have a multitude of ways in which to pose themselves to listen to the music.

LIMOR TOMER: I don’t know. I think it’s a little bit of a goofy question. I think the ideal way for me to take in a new piece of music is: A) to want to and B) to have a drink in my hand. I don’t mean alcohol necessarily but a glass of water, something. And I think that maybe that just symbolizes a willingness and a comfort level, you know and then I’m engaged and then I am open and then I want to listen. I can be standing, I can be sitting, I can be lying down. All that is sort of, if the composer tries to or wants to dictate the positioning of the audience, fine. I find it interesting what you said about Somei Satoh and Orensanz in this sort of ecclesiastical environment where certain pieces just live and breathe more comfortably.

COLETTE DOMINGUES: Yeah, and for Somei Satoh, the breathing is the thing. The space between the notes is absolutely of quintessential importance to the understanding of his music and if you miss the silence, you miss half the piece.

LIMOR TOMER: And just the building, just the Orensanz has that…

COLETTE DOMINGUES: Quality.

LIMOR TOMER: Quality in it, so…

RUSSELL JOHNSON: Oh, all right, I’ll try. I guess realizing that over the last 200 to 300 years a lot of the music we consider classical today was actually composed to be played when the emperor was dining and entertaining his guests.

COLETTE DOMINGUES: Background music.

RUSSELL JOHNSON: In Vienna in the summer particularly, tea houses… A lot of the music that we consider sacred today was performed in that kind of environment. Also in parks, in very elaborate bandstands over the years, so having a drink in your hand to listen to music is not new.

LIMOR TOMER: Well no. I don’t pretend it is. It’s just, to me it has the connotation of a comfort level and a lack of formality that I think helps me and other people deal with the demands of new music, unfamiliar music.

FRANK J. OTERI: Yet at Carnegie Hall you can’t have a drink in your hand.

LIMOR TOMER: No. Drink bad, Carnegie Hall.


The interior of Boston Symphony Hall
Photo courtesy Boston Symphony

RUSSELL JOHNSON: In fact, at Boston Symphony Hall, for years, they’d clear out the whole main floor. They’d occupy the entire main floor with tables and about ten or twelve people at each round table. That’s been going on. I don’t know if they’re still doing it, but for most of the last 100 years, they’ve been doing it. So again…

LIMOR TOMER: That’s not new.

RUSSELL JOHNSON: It’s not necessarily the Mahler Ninth; it’s a lighter version of symphony music. I’m sure we can think of many examples where food and drink are very intimately involved with listening to and performing music.

LIMOR TOMER: And it’s found in other cultures too.

FRANK J. OTERI: You said something very interesting. “A lighter form of listening to music.” So does having the drink in your hand or being engaged in another activity other than sitting upright and listening to music imply that you’re not completely listening in some ways?

RUSSELL JOHNSON: I think what happens in these circumstances is, you go through a number of minutes where you’re talking with your neighbor and eating and drinking and then most of the audience turns their attention to the performance. So I’m going to stop there.

FRANK J. OTERI: There was a comment that Molly made that I just absolutely adored, she said that we’re talking about musical Darwinism. If the music’s good enough, won’t people shut up and listen, no matter what?

COLETTE DOMINGUES: No!

LIMOR TOMER: I’ve seen that happen actually. I’ve seen it not happen but I’ve also seen it happen. Yeah, I curate a series in a space that’s a restaurant. And so it’s a very dangerous place for musicians. And I’ve seen musicians absolutely take over and it’s not just the music, it’s the projection or the communication skill. It’s like what you said about the buskers, the communication skill of the performer up there that just shuts down what we call the silverware channel. It’s just gone.

COLETTE DOMINGUES: And I bet you’ve also seen spectacular artists who have not been able to transcend the hub of noise.

LIMOR TOMER: Oh, yeah, well absolutely.


The new Iridium
Photo courtesy the Iridium, New York, NY

FRANK J. OTERI: One of the most tragic concerts that I’ve attended was a duet concert at Iridium, which has relatively good acoustics for a jazz club where they serve food and I have heard a number of splendid concerts there. This was not one of them. Even though it was musically fantastic—it was Charlie Haden on bass and Geri Allen</a > on piano—and it was summertime but the air conditioner was loud, so they decided to turn the air conditioner off and they decided to do the thing without amplification. You know, it was a fantastic idea in the abstract, but a deadly idea for this room. So it was just piano and bass with no amplification at all and busboys were taking away entrees and drinks and all, and they drowned out the entire gig. You couldn’t hear anything. While the little I heard was fantastic, it was an utter failure because it showed a total lack of understanding for that space. Yeah, the music was good enough and you know the audience was quiet, but the staff was not.

COLETTE DOMINGUES: Yeah you’ve got a similar situation at Belle Epoque, but the staff are all very concerned about the music so they’re literally on tender feet. They’re very, very respectful. So it’s the same kind of environment with the eating and the drinking and the busboys, but everyone is very respectful of the sound so it works beautifully.

FRANK J. OTERI: Sometimes it’s not even a question of volume. One time I was at the Beacon Theater. And you know, concerts there can be pretty loud, but despite that, the ushers were talking all the way through it and it was extremely intrusive. The audience was completely engaged, but the staff wasn’t, and it was a problem.

COLETTE DOMINGUES: That’s a matter of getting your act together and making sure that your business skills are in place so that you can actually go and manage the staff prior to the event so they know what is going on. That’s a shame because that could’ve been avoided.

 

RUSSELL JOHNSON: I also think of a situation where the waiters are the performers, Italian restaurants where the waiters sing opera. And they wait on a table and they wait on a table and everyone makes noise and when they’re ready to sing their arias everyone pays attention. There’s no one in the room that’s going to interrupt that.

FRANK J. OTERI: I remember Puglia‘s restaurant down in Little Italy and they used to come around and sing songs and they’d lock the doors so you couldn’t actually leave. It was a captive audience awaiting their pasta.

COLETTE DOMINGUES: I think careful curation helps. I mean, we were talking before the recording started about a performer who did a sonic meditation with a guitar and a wrench and it’s a very mournful, very peaceful, quiet sound, so that has to be scheduled at a time at Galapagos where the DJ in the next room is taking his break. If it’s between eleven and twelve at night, it’s the perfect time of night for that kind of sonic meditation. Any other time, it’s going to be lost. So careful curation can create a perfect environment, even if the general atmosphere of the space doesn’t lend itself.

FRANK J. OTERI: This all sounds a lot like the same kind of planning that goes into designing a great restaurant!


The Interior of Puglia’s, New York, NY
Photo courtesy Puglia’s

COLETTE DOMINGUES: Well, you make a careful reservation, you choose a menu, you choose a very efficient staff… Choosing your piece of music, choosing your composer, choosing your performers and choosing an environment that is suitable to your taste.

FRANK J. OTERI: A restaurant isn’t just about the food but it’s also about the space. And I think when we talk about concerts, we’re not always directly attuned to the space that the music is in but that space is as important a component as the music that’s being played and who’s performing it and how well it’s being performed.

LIMOR TOMER: For me, it’s exactly the opposite. I don’t want to be challenged. I just want to know that things will be a certain way.

COLETTE DOMINGUES: You want to know that the food tastes good. You want to know that the quality of the food is going to be…

LIMOR TOMER: Right, but I don’t want surprises, you know, I don’t want my sensibilities challenged…I want security. When I go to a concert, I don’t want that.

FRANK J. OTERI: You said before you do want that: you want to have a drink and to feel comfortable.

LIMOR TOMER: I don’t want that from the music, I want that from the venue. I want to feel comfortable in a venue as I do in a restaurant but I certainly don’t want—I’m not looking for security from new music, or old music, or any music! Dependability, you know…I’m not looking for a track record.

COLETTE DOMINGUES: I have to come back to careful curation. You know, the chef chooses the menu very carefully, the curator chooses the musicians and the venue very, very carefully. You create an environment in a space for new music in the way that a good restauranteur would create a good environment in a restaurant with attention to lighting and attention to the community seating in different sizes—you know, your table for eight, your table for four, your table for two, your table for the single. And you can create that kind of environment in a venue for new music.

FRANK J. OTERI: Would certain food not work in certain spaces? Most of the best Chinese restaurants don’t have a lot of ambiance to them. Very rarely do you go to a Chinese place that’s dimly lit, that has sort of a mystery to it. They’re just about having a good meal. I used to joke around a lot, there’s this place downstairs from us at the American Music Center, this Indian place, Sirtaj, which is a little hole in the wall. You know, the walls are very barren and you can see the cracks if you look carefully, but the food is really good. It’s cheap. But on their takeout menu they say “wonderful atmosphere.” What do you mean wonderful atmosphere? There’s no atmosphere here.


Merkin Hall during a concert
Photo courtesy Elaine Kaufman Cultural Center

COLETTE DOMINGUES: There is no atmosphere at Merkin Hall but the quality of the performances that come out of the place are excellent. I mean, the interpretation series, and people go and go and go, but it’s a cafeteria, there is no atmosphere.

FRANK J. OTERI: I love Merkin and I go to a lot of concerts there and a lot of them aren’t as well attended as I think they ought to be. And I wonder if that is part of it. If…

COLETTE DOMINGUES: There’s a harshness that’s not hospitable.

FRANK J. OTERI: Although by the same token, we were talking about the Miller Theatre which is also a terrible hall in a lot of ways, but the programming that goe
s on there is fantastic. The performances that are there and the environment is fantastic, the way George Steel has set it up: That after a concert there’s always a reception, there’s always drinks. So you can’t have a drink in your hand when you’re hearing a piece but after you’ve heard it and you’re talking to people about the piece you can have drink.

COLETTE DOMINGUES: But you might as well because George’s personality just sort of takes over Miller Theatre and it’s just…it’s a whole way of being with music that just makes it an intensely joyous experience.

FRANK J. OTERI: I remember when it was called McMillen Hall. I was a Columbia undergrad. And it was a God-awful place to hear music. Terrible, terrible environment. They didn’t redesign the hall; they didn’t repaint the hall. It still sounds as dreadful as it always did. But you know, you don’t really hear how bad it sounds when you’re there. Somehow you’re transported somewhere else. It’s like an acoustical placebo, you know, Miller Hall. The acoustics are bad, but they don’t sound bad, even though they are.

RUSSELL JOHNSON: (laughs) Well, of course, most audiences really pay absolutely no attention to acoustics and I think that’s appropriate. The people who are mostly focused on acoustics are the performers. In the average symphony audience in North America today, probably, probably a good 94 percent of the audience is just completely unaware of the acoustics. And that’s, of course, why so many halls are operating with very bad acoustics. That does not really send audiences away. The works being played, the quality of the musicianship, the quality of the music director, that’s what counts. So, it doesn’t surprise me at all, what you said. It’s sort of normal.

 

FRANK J. OTERI: So, in this country, most of the places that have the buzz value would not have it because of the acoustics. They would have it because of the environment.

RUSSELL JOHNSON: It’s mostly the performers on stage. It’s the music being played and the quality of the musicianship. Those two things together—that’s what really brings the audiences in, I think.

FRANK J. OTERI: I think another factor beyond the musicians who are playing there is the legacy of the musicians who once played there. Certainly that’s true of Carnegie Hall for classical music, and for jazz a place like the Village Vanguard where so many great live jazz recordings have been made over the years. Many of these recordings, like a Bobby Timmons Trio LP I was listening to last night, are stunning, but I don’t know if people are going to the Village Vanguard for the acoustics. They’re going for the history. They’re going there because this is where Coltrane and Bill Evans played.

RUSSELL JOHNSON: I think you’re missing something here. When I say the audiences are not aware of acoustics, all I am saying really is that that does not enter their consciousness. However, when they leave a performance, if they walk out the door at the Vanguard and they feel they’ve heard the musician that they want to hear and playing the kind of music that that man or woman plays, the acoustics of the Vanguard have still played a very, very important role. They’re probably completely unconscious of it, but when they go back to their homes, they’re going to be taking with them the memory of the whole thing, including the good acoustics. And of course, as you know, the Vanguard is the most crowded sardine can you can imagine. And the seating is most unusual. I can’t even imagine and people get a kick out of that. They’re in a very, very informal space and you sort of wedge yourself in at the Vanguard and the only times that I’ve ever been there it’s been absolutely packed. So acoustics are not all that important.

LIMOR TOMER: Max Gordon did not care one bit about acoustics, the fact that the Vanguard has good acoustics is just an accident. It’s an accident of nature and the artists made it what it is. And it happened—he didn’t care about jazz either. He didn’t! It happened.

FRANK J. OTERI: But Lorraine definitely does.

LIMOR TOMER: Lorraine definitely cares about something. And she cares passionately about many things.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now that’s a hall where you do hear the music because if somebody talks…watch out!

LIMOR TOMER: Yeah. But it’s the most wonderful place and you go there for the history and all that. And it does have great acoustics and people don’t talk, but I don’t think that it grew up there because it had great acoustics. I think that’s just something that we all appreciate and love about it.


Exterior of Teatro alla Scala, Milan, Italy
Photo courtesy Teatro alla Scala

FRANK J. OTERI: Places like Carnegie and the Vanguard are sort of like cathedrals in a way. They’re sacred spaces and playing in them carries so much weight, so much history. The same is true for places like La Scala in Milan or Covent Garden or the Concertgebouw. Can you have bad concerts in these places? Is it possible to have a bad experience? I had a bad experience at Carnegie Hall with a quintet by Giovanni Sollima but the same piece sounds great on my Walkman…

COLETTE DOMINGUES: I think of course you can have a bad concert at those reverent spaces because if the artist is irreverent and does not tune in to the natural feeling of the place, then they can quite abuse the space and come out with a sound that is unappreciated by an audience that would otherwise be appreciative. I think you can, a performer, a poor performer who’s not clued in can really create a bad environment.


Interior of the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Photo courtesy the Concertbouw

RUSSELL JOHNSON: I’m going to hazard a guess about Masur and St. John the Divin
e
. My guess is that when he’s getting ready to take the New York Philharmonic up to St. John, he is extremely conscious of what work or works he’s going to take up to St. John the Divine. And he picks works that he feels will work fairly well, as well as possible, in the very, very reverberant acoustics of St. John.

COLETTE DOMINGUES: So it comes right back down to careful curation, careful selection.


The nave of St. John the Divine, New York, NY
Photo courtesy St. John the Divine

RUSSELL JOHNSON: I know him just well enough to be absolutely certain that this is very much on his mind whenever he has a date coming up at St. John the Divine.

FRANK J. OTERI: Of course, the old joke with that is, “Oh, I missed the concert at St. John the Divine last night.” “Quick, if you get up there by five you can still hear it.” Well, you know, that’s the thing. What works in certain spaces and what doesn’t. Part of it is the acoustics and part of it is the environment. How would you feel if you heard the Bang On A Can All-Stars at Preservation Hall in New Orleans? What kind of experience would that be and why?

COLETTE DOMINGUES: I think Bang On A Can would overfill the space with sound. The space couldn’t contain them. It’s a small space; it’s full of dark wood. It’s heavily clothed; it’s quite claustrophobic. And I think their sound would just overfill it and be inappropriate. Not because of the musical content but because of the volume of the space.


Interior of Preservation Hall
Photo courtesy Preservation Hall

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, what about then hearing the Emerson String Quartet in Preservation Hall?

COLETTE DOMINGUES: That acoustic set would fit very nicely into Preservation Hall.

FRANK J. OTERI: But the hall is so set up just for one thing, traditional jazz. It would be like going to an Italian restaurant and being served lamb vindaloo! All of a sudden you have this incredible disconnect, which has to do with the venue as not necessarily the acoustics but what the expectations are of the audience that’s there.


The Atrium of the Liberty Science Center, New Jersey
Photo courtesy the Liberty Science Center

COLETTE DOMINGUES: I guess I would take more risks than you as a diner then, because I can see the Emerson String Quartet there. I mean last weekend I placed a pipa player, an electric guitarist, and a trombonist trio in Liberty Science Center in New Jersey, in the Health Floor Theater, with the doors open so that the constituents of the science museum could be attracted by the sound through the open doors and come in and see what was going on. It was a totally ridiculous environment in which to have these musicians, but it worked like a charm. It was a charm. It drew people in and it kept them there. We had just a few seats in a semi-circle, but you know, just imagine this is the middle of a science center where you just don’t expect to hear pipa, trombone, and guitar and it worked beautifully.

FRANK J. OTERI: So fantasy venue-performance pairings. A) for quality; B) for shock value. One that sounds a little bit of both. Would the Emerson Quartet at Preservation Hall have some shock value?

LIMOR TOMER: I don’t know. Why are you doing that? Just for marketing purposes or you know what I’m saying? I mean, if there is an organic reason to do something, well then by all means, let’s do it. But if it’s just to see…and also what would the Emerson be playing? Would they be playing a piece that was written by somehow who was doing an hommage to that kind of music? Are they doing Don Byron‘s take on do-do-do, or is it just Emerson playing Beethoven at Preservation Hall to sell more tickets or less tickets or…I don’t know, for me it has to be organic.

COLETTE DOMINGUES: For me at the Liberty Science Center, it was because the performance was part of a 48-hour webcast, so we were trying to make the connection for the Liberty Science Center between art and technology. So here we had a webcast using computer technologies on a health floor because the piece was a sonic meditation, so it was respectful of the environment insofar as the subject matter was conducive to the health floor. It was a sonic healing and it was a perfect choice. Liberty Science Center was a perfect choice for the art-technology combination. So it wasn’t purely for shock value, although the doors were open and people didn’t know what to expect. But it was part of organic whole; it had a purpose.

LIMOR TOMER: Right, it sounds to me like there was very conscious thought about how these whole, these points are connected, and so that makes perfect sense to me.

FRANK J. OTERI: Plus, perhaps you’re making a statement about tradition or about context. The thing I always love to say about Lincoln Center is that architecturally it’s a celebration of high modernism yet the majority of the music you hear there has nothing to do with high modernism. In a way, you know, the best possible music you could possibly hear in Lincoln Center would be music by Donald Martino or Charles Wuorinen because that music is sort of the sonic equivalent of what these spaces are visually. And…

COLETTE DOMINGUES: I would push it further and say Kyle Gann and William Duckworth also. The Time-Curve Preludes. Custer’s Ghost… To push it a little further.

FRANK J. OTERI: Even further into kind of minimalist or post-minimalist music, but yet at the same time, here you have this disconnect, you’re in a modern space and you’re hearing Brahms. That’s almost as disconcerting as going to La Scala and hearing Einstein on the Beach! I mean that’s sort of, but that’s what people go there for. I think most people would feel rather disconcerted if most of the programming at Lincoln Center, all of a sudden, was music written in the last 25 years, because that’s not the context of the place.

RUSSELL JOHNSON: You’re trying to match architectural style with music and what you’re overlooking is that once a building gets built it’s very, very rarely destroyed. So, civilized society always has a catalog of rooms that date from almost every style of the last 200-300 years. Now you don’t want to go around tearing them down just because the architecture of the façade doesn’t match the music on the inside. It’s that simple.

FRANK J. OTERI: There was a fantastic series of concerts produced in Europe a few years back in which there were concerts of chamber music from the 17th through the 19th centuries performed in rooms from those periods specifically designed for this music…

RUSSELL JOHNSON: Well, there are a lot of new operas on DVD that are performed in the very spaces that the action took place: Tosca and Don Giovanni, there are many, many DVDs of operas that are photographed, filmed in the appropriate, still-existing, physical surroundings.

FRANK J. OTERI: It’s almost taking the notion of period instruments to the next step: period venue to these works. But this brings us back full circle to this question of the ideal place for new music. Maybe the ideal halls for new music haven’t been built yet.


The late Winter Garden at the World Trade Center
New York, NY

LIMOR TOMER: Well, you know, there used to be, there isn’t anymore, there used to be the worst venue for music, the worst! Worse than Lincoln Center or the Knitting Factory but they used to have the most interesting programming consistently eclectic new music, openness, just the most fabulous thing and that was the old Winter Garden, which is gone. The worst! I mean I wouldn’t even call it acoustics, I don’t know what it was! It was just awful and the program was just the most consistently brilliant from season to season, within the seasons, each concert crafted, presented, not in a condescending way to the audience, not being insiders but in an open and in a context…

COLETTE DOMINGUES: A beautiful offering.

LIMOR TOMER: A beautiful, gorgeous, open series that I think did more to bring new audiences to the music than any other place and it was the worst acoustically.

FRANK J. OTERI: Yet some things acoustically worked there. The Stephen Scott Bowed Piano Ensemble concert that was there, it sounded fantastic. That worked.

LIMOR TOMER: Part of it is that they, as opposed to a lot of other places that use amplification, their sound guys were so conscientious and the team was just so, worked so hard to compensate and to bring things out. And that helps a lot. But yeah, ideal venue, I don’t know if there is such a thing. I think it’s curation and an openness and a willingness to go there and a willingness to pay for rehearsals, that helps a lot in creating the perfect venue.

 

FRANK J. OTERI: There are so many venues that won’t even let the performers in until the day of a concert. How much time ideally should a performer have in a space before giving a concert there?

COLETTE DOMINGUES: I try and create the day of from ten in the morning until the time of the performance, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but that’s what my ideal time is. It would be spectacular to have the day before but, you know, budget funds don’t allow.

LIMOR TOMER: Yeah, I mean, absolutely, if a group or a performer can spend some time getting adjusted and understanding the space, that is really important, but just having the resources to rehearse so that we get to hear the actual piece, not the potential of the piece.

RUSSELL JOHNSON: We’re mixing up all kinds of music.

COLETTE DOMINGUES: Yes.

RUSSELL JOHNSON: But I’ll go to the Conservatoire in Paris, when the Beethoven Fifth was first played there, the orchestra rehearsed for fifteen solid months before they asked the audience to come into the hall. It’s one of the longest periods of rehearsal I’ve ever read about.

LIMOR TOMER: Well, I’ll sign right now for three rehearsals. I’ll take it!

 

FRANK J. OTERI: One thing we haven’t touched on yet is amplification. It certainly was a factor in the negative experiences I’ve had at Carnegie Hall—I don’t think amplification works there. There are a lot of attitudes among performers, among listeners, among composers, among music critics that amplification is the great evil. Amplification is wrong. And I thought it would be interesting to address that in terms of can you have a hall that works for unamplified music and amplified music both? Is that possible?

RUSSELL JOHNSON: Yes, you incorporate in the design a tremendous amount of physical adjustability. And then you can get very, very good results for certain kinds of music without amplification and where the performer needs amplification and wants amplification and demands amplification you can adjust the room to work with amplified sounds.


The interior of Sibelius Symphony Hall, Lahti, Finland
Photo courtesy ARTEC

COLETTE DOMINGUES: I agree, yeah.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now clearly both of you present music that features amplification, so you don’t think amplification is evil.

LIMOR TOMER: Well, it seems to me that amplification doesn’t work in the traditional, large opera house size venues like Carnegie Hall, the BAM Opera House, or Avery Fisher Hall. It doesn’t seem to work, probably because it wasn’t designed to work.

RUSSELL JOHNSON: Yeah, BAM isn’t what we call fixed acoustics. Fixed environment. Carnegie Hall is a fixed environment; Avery Fisher Hall is a fixed environment. The halls we’ve done in the last 20 years, essentially we never use the fixed environment approach. Our hall, our concert halls in Dallas, Calgary, Edmonton, Birmingham, England, Lucerne, Lahti, Finland, uh, everyone of those halls has a tremendous range of adjustability which is why some evenings you can get the amplification working very well in a room.


Concert Hall of the Winspear Centre for Music, Edmonton, Alberta
Photo courtesy ARTEC

FRANK J. OTERI: I think we’re really spoiled in New York City. We’ve got halls that have really specific audiences and specific targets, but all around the country you’ll have a hall that one night is being used for a symphony orchestra concert, the next night it’s going to be used for Garth Brooks when he comes to town that night, and the next week it will be a touring Broadway show that will be there and every one of these scenarios requires a very, very different acoustic environment. And I always find it interesting what happens with chamber music, because chamber music is most poorly served by most of the halls that we’re currently in, because you can’t really build a hall that’s only for chamber music because it’s economically unfeasible.


The interior of Symphony Hall, Birmingham, England
Photo courtesy Russell Johnson

RUSSELL JOHNSON: No, that’s wrong. That’s absolutely wrong. What’s happening is in the 1920s, practically every community in North America built one room and the concept was that each community could only raise enough money for one room. Therefore, everything had to happen in that one room. Communities today have learned that that is not the way to go. So, in most of the communities where we’re working, the building owners are building four rooms or five rooms in a center—even in relatively small communities. In Kansas City, the building owner, which is a foundation, the building owner is projecting a pure concert hall and next to it a pure opera house and next to it a pure drama hall and in between the two a very small recital hall and then also down the hill, just a few feet a very small experimental room for contemporary dance. And this is the new pattern. In 1925, it was certainly not what was being done, but in the next 10, 20, 30 years this is going to be the construction and design pattern in North America and it’s well on it’s way.

COLETTE DOMINGUES: Well, I hope the recession doesn’t affect those plans. Those are beautiful plans.

RUSSELL JOHNSON: This foundation, this particular foundation has its money invested in the right places.

COLETTE DOMINGUES: Good, good.

 

FRANK J. OTERI: Of course, now there’s also so much music on the Internet and this has turned people’s personal computers into a new kind of concert venue. Of course, at this point, it’s still mostly a very acoustically poor environment.

COLETTE DOMINGUES: Having had this 48-hour experience of it last weekend with the Cathedral Project, you know, the sound is only as good as the bandwidth and I think as soon, if we push the envelope, the development of a better quality sound will have to follow. It’s not a matter of the art following the technology, it’s a matter of the art pushing the technology so that the technology can meet the demands… This weekend we engaged, we haven’t got the stats yet, we engaged the audience interactively, so it wasn’t a passive experience sitting on the other end of a computer, you could actually start to work with a virtual instrument and have some input into the whole experience. So I think if we push the technology to meet the needs of the art and if we engage the audience in an interactive experience, then we’re creating this vast new audience that has the mindset to appreciate the sounds that the musicians are making on the Web.

RUSSELL JOHNSON: I can’t add anything to that.

LIMOR TOMER: Um, I guess I’m an old-fashioned girl. I just consider the computer the tool that I use for my work and I resent having to go to it for my artistic experience. And when I go to an art gallery or a visual art exhibit where there are computer terminals where you’re invited to engage in an interactive art experience, I just avoid it and I know it’s me and I’m probably old, and there’s a whole generation that has a completely different relationship with computers and digital technology, but I just can’t go there. And I consider the Internet absolutely valuable in archiving music, in making it available and all of those kind of library functions, but it’s not a venue for me and I resent it when it becomes the venue.

COLETTE DOMINGUES: In this particular project—I can only talk about this particular project—the venue was the hub. Every single performance wasn’t in the studio, it was in front of a live audience, in a real venue, Taipei Theater, Galapagos here in the States, and many other really live venues. No studio environments, the audience coming and going. So, for us, the Web was an additional audience development and outreach procedure. It wasn’t the only place. It was the place where people who were geographically ill-located or physically confined or in jail (laughs) could join in and be part of the audience.

LIMOR TOMER: It’s the great democratic tool and…

COLETTE DOMINGUES: Yes.

LIMOR TOMER: …and I appreciate that and I think it’s for sort of a perspective and a broadening, and all that, great.

COLETTE DOMINGUES: It’s not instead of, it’s as well as.

LIMOR TOMER: Right.

FRANK J. OTERI: I think the irony of course is, you know, I always like to say that the Internet is this great democratic tool but it only works if you have a computer or have access to one…

COLETTE DOMINGUES: There were people at public libraries in Portugal, public libraries in Africa who were using a public computer, with maybe 20 people standing around one…

FRANK J. OTERI: With a 28.8 modem?

COLETTE DOMINGUES: Yeah, 28.8.

FRANK J. OTERI: Wow!

COLETTE DOMINGUES: With all the plug-ins. I mean, yeah, RealAudio 8 and then sharing it within community environments.

 

FRANK J. OTERI: There’s a specific demographic to the kind of person that will attend a concert, and that might vary according to who is the typical classical concert-goer, who is the typical jazz club attendee, who’s the typical rock
concert goer, etc. The Internet has kind of opened that up a bit. I’m not sure we have a demographic yet on who the person is who listens to music over the Web, but I think we can be relatively sure that they’re younger people for the most part, but that’s going to change too…

LIMOR TOMER: Younger and older. Both ends.

FRANK J. OTERI: We could also determine the demographic of somebody who doesn’t go to concerts at all. Should we be concerned about bringing them in? Does it matter that there are people who don’t listen to music that way?

RUSSELL JOHNSON: I look at people like Simon Rattle. Simon has a great drive to bring music to more and more people. It’s almost the core of his musical life. He’s constantly campaigning for bringing music education back into the school systems. I think that a musician who devotes his life to the performance of music, has an innate, overwhelming desire to have music mean more to more and more people as the years go by. You can’t avoid it.

COLETTE DOMINGUES: There are many Simon Rattles out there.

RUSSELL JOHNSON: If you’re onstage performing the Beethoven Third, you don’t want to really sit there playing your violin thinking that in forty years that institution will be almost gone. You just don’t want to, you know, that’s not human nature. So I think everyone wants music to matter more and more.

MOLLY SHERIDAN: We were talking about the new venues where there are multiple rooms. If you had the chance to design a room for new music from scratch, realizing that new music is a broad term in and of itself, what sort of things would you want that facility be equipped to do?

COLETTE DOMINGUES: I would have a committee meeting immediately with all of the musicians that I was going bring into the space and find out their needs, put it all together and put someone in charge to have it made. I wouldn’t make those decisions on my own. As a curator, I would have big, relative lobbies come and we’d have a democratic decision about it and build the perfect environment for all.

LIMOR TOMER: I would start by firing the soundman. That’s where I’d start. I’m not as democratic as you Colette, I don’t know about committees. But I’d definitely be open to listening to what composers and musicians are going for and try to build a room that allows them to do what they need to do…I’d think in terms of smaller rather than bigger because I’m just more comfortable in smaller environments.

COLETTE DOMINGUES: Yeah, me too. I like small art. Make the cameo perfect.

LIMOR TOMER: Yeah and minimize ambient noise. Have the bar outside. And the team has to be committed and all sort of have the same agenda. If there are other things going on like visual art or food—fine, that’s great, but everybody has to have the same agenda. The most important thing is the music presentation and then everything else takes a backseat to that. So…

FRANK J. OTERI: So are you going to build this hall for us?

RUSSELL JOHNSON: I’ll answer another question. New music created in 2050 will lead someone to design a space appropriate for that type of new music, the spaces, the design of the spaces will always be following the nature of the creation.

COLETTE DOMINGUES: Yeah, it’s behind, yeah.

RUSSELL JOHNSON: So whatever the composers are doing with new music in 2050, within a few years or a few decades after that, someone will be designing the appropriate spaces for that particular format of music.

Milton Babbitt: A Discussion in 12 Parts

Milton Babbitt Photo courtesty Milton Babbitt

Milton Babbitt
Photo courtesty Milton Babbitt

At the Juilliard School of Music
October 16, 2001—3:00-5:00 p.m.
Videotaped and Transcribed by Amanda MacBlane

  1. Conservatories, New Music, and that term “Classical Music”
  2. The Lure of Technology
  3. Responding to Attacks on Serialism
  4. Rap Music
  5. Popular Standards
  6. On People’s Attachments to Music
  7. The Economics of New Music
  8. Baseball and New Music
  9. Beer and New Music
  10. Babbitt’s Titles and Some Personal Favorite Compositions
  11. Some Advice for Young Composers
  12. The Future of Sophisticated Music
  13. A Sonic Gallery of Milton Babbitt’s Music