Category: In Print

In Conversation with Mark N. Grant



Mark N. Grant

An interview with the author of The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical

Molly Sheridan: I’m curious about the evolution of this project. What motivated you to write this book?

Mark N. Grant: After I finished my previous book in 1998 for Northeastern University Press, Maestros of the Pen: A History of Classical Music Criticism in America, Northeastern’s editorial director William Frohlich asked me to write a book freshly evaluating the so-called “golden age” of the Broadway songbook. Bill knew I’m a composer and sometime playwright, that I’d written theater music and am from a theater family, etc. So, with the thumbs-up of Gunther Schuller, the music advisor to Northeastern University Press, the project went ahead. And, eventually, it grew, vastly beyond the scope of the original plan to focus just on the songs.

Molly Sheridan: What sort of readership were you aiming for? What impact/outcome were you hoping for?

Mark N. Grant: Most books about Broadway musicals preach to fans of musicals and stay within their niche. Many simply rehash the hit parade of greatest musicals, or give almanac-like summaries. My book relates the 150-year development of the music of Broadway to contemporaneous developments in 150 years of popular music outside of Broadway. You’ll find Sinatra, Crosby, Presley, Robert Johnson, and Bjork in this book alongside the usual cast of Jolson, Merman, and Andrew Lloyd Webber. My book argues that the important advances weren’t only made by individual shows but occurred in the slow evolution over many decades in melody writing and vocal style and range. Show song melodies changed to suit the changing voices of Broadway, as the Irish- and African-American ballad singing traditions converged with the legitimate voice of opera, and then underwent a fateful metamorphosis with the introduction of the microphone. I also explain how the fundamental beat of American popular, and thus theater, music, changed twice in 150 years, first from the march or 2-step to the foxtrot, and then from the foxtrot to the rock groove, and how this ultimately affected Broadway musicals for better and for worse. And I’ve tried to explain these sea changes in voice and rhythm technically, but not academically, so that lay readers can understand and even be entertained.

The book also regularly invokes many out-of-the-box comparisons with opera, classical music, ballet, legitimate drama, painting, the movies, poetry, and other art forms, and discusses not just the hitherto untold historical changes in the music but also in the lyrics, the dramaturgy, the stage direction, the choreography, the set design, and the orchestration. So it is addressed not only to theater aficionados but to educated general readers interested in the arts for whom the questions “Whatever happened to musicals? How come they used to sit on the leading edge of popular culture and don’t any more?” are intriguing.

Molly Sheridan: The masterpieces in various art forms were not necessarily the most popular works in their day. I’m curious what you think are some of the musicals of the past we will most want to hold onto as a society in the decades ahead specifically for their artistic construction, not necessarily their content…

Mark N. Grant: A central organizing premise of my book is that there have been three distinct eras of the Broadway musical’s artistic development in the last century and a half: the first age (1866-1927), the second (1927-1966), and the third (1966 to the present). In the first era, scripts were chaotic and frequently changed at will from performance to performance, lyrics were inelegant and didn’t fit the tunes, songs and dances didn’t relate to the subtext of the story, and spectacle was more important than dramatic integrity. In the second era, the musical grew up artistically: the book, music, lyrics, and even dances, scenic designs, and orchestrations were much more dramatically integrated. The best musicals of the second era were superior both in content and in artistic construction. But in the third era—in a case of developmental retrogression unusual in any art form—Broadway musicals (save for a few cardinal exceptions like Sondheim and A Chorus Line) have returned in almost every way to the cruder characteristics of first-era musicals as I just described them. Worse, they now bear the cross of overdriven sound design, a once benign tool that has gotten grossly out of hand and has weakened theatricality, I argue. The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical brings out far more extensive and specific information about the history and practice of sound design in the Broadway musical than can be found anywhere else.

Molly Sheridan: Though musicals used to be the culture’s pop music, we seem to be coming up on a trend where the situation is reversed—the recasting of old pop/rock songs into shows. In your view, is that significant? Valuable?

Mark N. Grant: The creation of (so-called) new musicals by retrofitting and crowbarring in pop songs is putting the cart before the horse. We can’t have significant art in our popular musical theater until we first write meaningful scripts and THEN adapt pop idioms to the scripts using craftsmanship, dramaturgical knowhow, melody, and all the age-old verities of what works on the stage going back to Aristotelian pity and terror. The theater isn’t supposed to function as some kind of live monster iPod for pop playlists. That’s for clubs and cabaret. Sure, the pop idioms of previous eras were brought into the theater, but the songwriters subsumed them to dramatic craft. In my book I finger the foxtrot as the ur-rhythm making the golden age Broadway songbook possible, but by so saying I’m not suggesting that contemporary writers turn back the clock to write foxtrot songs. Rather I mean that newer rock/pop writers need to study how the older rhythmic idioms helped support and guide a song lyric to tell a story or deepen character. Some of these new shows—I call them jukeboxicals—are concerts with merely the thinnest of pretexts for being presented in a theater. It’s as if suddenly novel writing were undertaken by blog writers and written like blogs but still labeled “The Novel.” It’s false.

Molly Sheridan: It struck me as I worked through the sections of your book that, much as the classical and jazz industries periodically lament the impending death of their art form, the Broadway musical is going through a similar sort of questioning? Can we/will we be saved from the Age of the McMusical, as you so aptly call it? What will it take?

Mark N. Grant: I’m afraid it has become economically impossible, given the costs of production and labor wages, for Broadway ever to resume its role of the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s as an incubator of artistic daring. Besides, DVDs now tend to promote the illusion that you don’t need to be there live for anything, much less the theater. But the human instinct for live theater is thousands of years old, probably genetically encoded, and will not die. We do have some writers and composers already attempting creatively challenging musicals that very occasionally are getting produced in traditional channels. But for a large-scale renaissance, there will have to be both a new economic model and better writers.

In Conversation with Philip Hayward



Philip Hayward
  • An interview with the editor of Off the Planet: Music, Sound and Science Fiction Cinema

    Molly Sheridan: I know the idea for this book was born out of a class you were teaching in Sydney. Can you talk a bit about how that led to this collection?

    Philip Hayward: I’ve been teaching a third year undergraduate class in Screen Soundtracks at Macquarie University in Sydney (Australia) since the mid-1990s. Both Music and Media studies majors take the class and I have had to find ways of presenting the material and my analyses that both groups can engage with. Science Fiction films were one area that I specialized in teaching, since there was material in them that seemed to attract interest and debate from both groups. This led me to think of pulling in some of my colleagues and my favourite international writers to produce a focused anthology on the topic.

    Molly Sheridan: The basic premise for this book, especially coupled with the cartoon-y cover, left me unprepared for the rather serious, academic nature of the essays inside. What sort of readership were you aiming for while you edited this collection? How did that influence your selections?

    Philip Hayward: I LOVED the cover!

    Science Fiction films are obviously part of a popular cultural mainstream and the cover was meant to represent that. But as an academic concerned with popular culture I am involved in academic analyses of it. So the anthology reflects that. It’s aimed at final year undergraduate and grad students, academics and researchers and also what might be termed an “educated general readership” interested in the genre.

    Molly Sheridan: I’m curious about the evolution of this distinct slice of composition. Can you offer a trend/descriptive highlight reel based on your research/editing?

    Philip Hayward: At different periods there have been different approaches to composition for sci-fi films. Obviously one element is the expression of ‘strangeness’ and ‘alienness’—usually through fairly well established approaches to musical exoticism [of the type that was covered in my previous volume Widening the Horizons: Exoticism in Postwar Popular Music (1999)], or else through using the latest electronic instruments. Another aspect is—with those terms sketched by Caryl Flinn—a nostalgicism for epic scoring that creates epic effects in more recent films.

    Molly Sheridan: To date, what has been, in your experience/opinion, the most effective sci-fi score? Why?

    Philip Hayward: In terms of effective sci-fi scores, there are several that I’d identify. Two are analysed in detail in the book by Rebecca Leydon, who must be the most insightful film score analyst around at present. Forbidden Planet is an electronic music epic, really stretching the boundaries of how electronic sounds can be used as a thing-in-themselves, rather than as an application (or pale shadow) of orchestral scoring. As for orchestral scoring, Bernard Herrman’s score for The Day The Earth Stood Still remains the pinnacle of the genre. Two more recent films also stand out for me. The eclectic mix of Danny Elfman’s score and Slim Whitman recordings in Mars Attacks (that I have a chapter on in the book) produces a really deep level of meaning and affect in the film. I also have a lot of affection and interest in the score for 1960s sci-fi flick Barbarella. It’s all apparently light-hearted and throwaway but combines with and expresses the narrative and visual texts in a manner that has to be taken seriously and appreciated.

    Molly Sheridan: Since a lot of sci-fi films draw on the wonder and anxiety posed by the unknown future, do sci-fi composer have more significantly more leeway to be ground-breaking and “experimental” in their writing than traditional film composers do?

    Philip Hayward: The futuristic and/or alienist aspect of sci-fi scenarios and settings are “liberating” for composers, within a certain spectrum. They allow for noise and dissonance as a conventional pleasure-orientated element of the audio-visual text rather than a challenging or abstruse one (as in various kinds of musical post/modernism). Put another way, they invite composers to “have fun” with noise, dissonance and impact, allow them to “entertain the idea” of otherworldly otherness (and entertain the audience at the same time). There are of course clichés in this, and much recent sci-fi film work has been very generic (in the negative sense of that term). Sci-fi cinema should allow the composer to “boldly go” anywhere but, inevitably, industrial expectations come into play.

In Conversation with Christoph Cox

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Christoph Cox

An interview with the editor of Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music

Molly Sheridan: The book includes many of the heavy hitters of musical thought, yet ultimately it’s quite readable. What sort of readership were you aiming for while you edited this collection? How did that influence your selections?

Christoph Cox: We really hope for several different kinds of readers. There’s a growing interest in what we call “audio culture”; and we wanted to offer a book that gathered together key texts in this emerging field. We wanted it to be a book that would interest non-academic music and sound art enthusiasts who devour magazines such as The Wire or Signal to Noise. But we also hoped to attract an academic audience. In a way, we see the book as falling strategically between these two domains. We hope that, for the general reader, the book reveals the rich genealogies of contemporary musical practices and highlights the theoretical, conceptual, and philosophical issues at work in these musical forms. But we also hope that it helps to unsettle the moribund categories and habits that define what “Twentieth-Century Music” or “Contemporary Music” mean in the academy.

Molly Sheridan: A book is one thing, but has the time come for the academy to shift its focus? Will it move naturally that direction? Should the academy be on the cutting edge or should it stand back a bit?

Christoph Cox: The relationships between the academy and non-academic music and art are complicated. Dan and I constantly shuttle back and forth between these domains (Dan as an academic and an artist, I as an academic and an independent critic and curator). Both of us have an interest in bringing the resources of each to bear on the other, though we’re also happy that the two are distinct, that the circles only partially overlap.

The academy can be a very stuffy place. Music history and musicology, for example, are deeply conservative disciplines that are wedded to very traditional conceptions of genre, formalist conceptions of analysis, and linear conceptions of history. For the most part, they are pretty far out of step with what has been going on in music for the past several decades (at least). My own field, academic philosophy, is also (especially in the U.S.) a very conservative discipline that tends to conceive of philosophical thinking as a sort of analytic science, rather than as sort of synthetic art.

On the other hand, the academy is also a place where important and exciting theoretical work is being done, work that we think is of real use in helping to think about and make sense of the noises that surround us.

For myself, I’m not content to leave the academy alone and let it become moribund. I’m interested in opening it up to new forms of musical thinking and making. And, by the same token, I think that the worlds of experimental music and sound art can benefit from the kind of conceptual work that the academy can offer.

Again, it’s this shuttling back and forth that I think is important, with each domain breathing new life into the other. I think that a total separation between the academy and the non-academic world of music would be a bad thing, as would be a total identification of the two (though, thankfully, no one really has to worry about this latter possibility!).

Molly Sheridan: The topics and the writers are a diverse bunch, and yet connected in an avant-garde, downtown sort of way (no essays by Milton Babbitt here, for instance). What were the aesthetic boundaries of the book? Why?

Christoph Cox: The book includes a lot of stuff. But it certainly excludes a lot as well. We wanted to give a sense of the authors, texts, and ideas that actually circulate and have currency in experimental music and sound art networks today. So, for example, Cage and Stockhausen get included while Babbitt and Boulez do not. Babbitt and Boulez are hugely important composers and thinkers who have done wonderful work. My co-editor Dan Warner actually studied with Babbitt and admires him greatly. But Dan’s own work is symptomatic of what has happened in the world of vanguard music. These days, Dan performs live improvised computer music and produces sound installations that owe much more, conceptually and sonically, to Cage than to Babbitt. The impact of Cage and Stockhausen has been felt far beyond the domain of avant-garde classical music; while that of Babbitt and Boulez (despite Babbitt’s fondness for jazz and Boulez’ collaborations with Frank Zappa) have remained fairly tied to that lineage and tradition.

The book is essentially interested in networks and genealogies—the way that apparently disparate practices connect (HipHop and minimalism, Stockhausen and Aphex Twin, free improvisation and drum ‘n’ bass, etc.) via shared concepts and lineages. If you extend those connections far enough, nearly everything will be included. We just wanted to give a sense of some of the connections that are particularly strong and intriguing in audio art today.

Molly Sheridan: Audio Culture straddles time periods/movements and effectively juxtaposes them in thoughtful ways. What is your impression of how writing and criticism on music in recent years compares to earlier decades?

Christoph Cox: In the introduction to the book, we talk about the ways in which the new sonic sensibility that informs audio culture today is no longer analog — a continuous, linear unfolding—but digital—a set of random access alliances and affinities that have little respect for traditional historical and generic boundaries. The Internet, the shuffle function of CD players, hypertexts, etc. all have this kind of structure.

In the early 1980s, drawing examples from botany, philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari constrasted the lateral, hyper-connective structure of the rhizome (for example, grass or crabweeds) with the hierarchical, branching structure of the tree and pushed for structures of the rhizome type. I think this contrast is helpful for sorting out different ways of thinking about music history and criticism. One can take something like “classical music” or “jazz” and treat it as a more or less unified form with a more or less coherent history and development. Or one can consider the myriad connections (actual and possible) between these forms and forms of very different sorts. The former kind of history and criticism is what one finds in a book such as Robert P. Morgan’s Twentieth Century Music (which, despite its title, all but excludes any discussion of jazz, rock, so-called world music, etc.). The latter kind of history and criticism is what one finds in the work of a writer such as David Toop, whose books are massive rhizomes in which all sorts of musics and concepts are made to connect. It seems to me that Toop’s way of doing music history, criticism, and theory is both more appropriate to our time and also more productive than that of a more traditional music historian such as Morgan.

Molly Sheridan: We keep hearing that music has fallen off the radar for a large number of otherwise culturally aware people—but if this book can be taken as evidence, there’s no shortage of interesting ideas floating around. Still, the audience for new music is perceived as much smaller than the one for new art, dance or theater. Do you agree/disagree with that perception? I realize that’s ultimately a huge and
complex question, but if there’s an aspect you’d care to dive in on…

Christoph Cox: There are, of course, very different sorts of “new music.” Those who lament the lack of audience for “new music” are generally referring to the tradition of the classical avant-garde steeped in serialism—folks like Babbitt, Wuorinen, and Ferneyhough. While interesting and important in a number of respects, these composers, I think, don’t have a great deal of relevance within today’s musical culture.

But that’s one particular segment of music and one particular segment of “art music.” There are other composers who have remained relevant or who have become newly relevant within the new audio culture. Classic minimalism (from Reich and Riley to Conrad, Dreyblatt, and Palestine) continues to be a powerful force. Morton Feldman is cited left and right by artists working outside of the classical tradition and the academy. In fact, the whole American experimental tradition (e.g., Cage, Feldman, Wolff, Behrman, Lucier, Oliveros, etc.) continues to be highly relevant and to have an honored place in the new audio culture. The same is true with figures such as Varèse and Xenakis.

The difference, I think, is that this latter group of composers has been drawn into alliances with musicians and musical practices outside the domain of classical and academic music. Minimalism has become allied with Techno and post-rock. Varèse and Xenakis have been celebrated by noise artists and by experimental Hip Hop producers. The British and American experimental traditions have become powerful forces within improvised music.

Again, I think it’s insularity and linear traditionalism that kills music and thought. Conversely, it’s alliances and cross-fertilizations between heterogeneous fields and practices that give new life. And, indeed, it’s these sorts of networks, alliances, connections . . . rhizomes! . . . that define the new audio culture.

In Conversation with John Luther Adams



John Luther Adams

An interview with the author of Winter Music: Composing the North.

Molly Sheridan: We often idealize the importance of the urban cultural metropolis to building an artistic career. Your book celebrates the other path taken to the extreme, though as Kyle Gann mentions in his intro, we see you here in Manhattan with some frequency as well. For the composer whose sense of home compels him/her to live “off the radar” if you will, what advice would you give knowing what you know now?

John Luther Adams: Find where you belong—musically, geographically, spiritually—and ground your life there.

I grew up in several different homogenous suburban environments where I never felt I belonged. As a young man I came to Alaska in search of home. The moment I arrived I knew I’d found it. And during my first ten or twelve years up here I rarely left home. I didn’t give much thought to professional success or building a career. But during those years I discovered my music and a built a life that wouldn’t have been possible in another place.

Music is an art. And art is a life’s work. Professional success may or may not come. But a life in art is a great privilege. It’s also an obligation. An artist’s first obligation is to the art. If we’re true to the art then the art gives us a life. In turn, our art becomes our best gift to the world in which we live.

Molly Sheridan: Though the book is not long, I really got the sense by the end that even if I hadn’t known you before, I would understand not only the basics of your musical thought but also have a solid picture of your life as environmentalist, husband, and friend–esp. from the journal entries and reflections on your wedding anniversary. Why make the book about more than the music?

John Luther Adams: The earliest piece in Winter Music dates from 1974. The most recent is from this year. So putting the book together was in part a process of reflecting on thirty years of work. The first draft was twice as long as the final version. After reading the manuscript one of the anonymous readers (whom I later learned was David Rothenberg) gave me some very wise advice. “Make it like your music”, he said. “Leave out everything that’s not essential”.

The book is about more than the music because I believe that music itself is about more than music. As I say in the Preface, music for me is an inextricable part of the fabric of life. Music is not what I do. Music is how I live. It’s how I understand the world.

Molly Sheridan: You include a number if score pages without additional comment, almost as illustration. Why was that decision made?

John Luther Adams: You’re right. The score excerpts in Winter Music do function as illustrations. They illustrate ideas in the text and, for those who read music notation, they provide glimpses into my musical texts. For readers of the book who don’t read music I hope the score pages serve at least as attractive and evocative graphics.

Molly Sheridan: Your discussion of experiencing native music that is more than “art for art’s sake” reminded me of John Dewey’s writings on art and aesthetics. How does living amid that experience influence you and the work you create?

John Luther Adams: I’ve been very fortunate to travel all over the North and to experience festivals and traditional ceremonies in Iñupiat, Yup’ik and Athabascan villages. Native cultures make little distinction between the quotidian and the spiritual. What we call art is valued not as something apart, but as a central part of the life of the community. The song maker is honored as a bearer of special gifts, but she or he is also respected as a hunter, or a healer, a teacher or a carver, a nurturer of the children. This model reminds us that even the most solitary artist is a worker and a citizen.

Molly Sheridan: In this month’s issue, we’re talking about appropriation, in the largest sense of building on bits of recognizable work that have come before. In a certain sense, since you are not a native Alaskan but have dedicated yourself to it on many levels, you have appropriated your place. And beyond that, you have been asked to write works using various indigenous languages. Do you ever question your “right” to do that, or where the aesthetic/ethical line is?

John Luther Adams: It might be more accurate to say that my place has appropriated me!

It was the wilderness that drew me to Alaska. But over the years I’ve come to know and love this place in ways that extend beyond the physical landscape. As Barry Lopez says: “Landscape is the culture that contains all human cultures.” After living here for most of my adult life I feel closer to the spirit of Alaska Native cultures than to the spiritual culture in which I was born and raised. In Native teachings, everything in the world is inhabited by spirit. The world itself has awareness. And we human animals need to be always mindful and respectful of this spirit in all things.

Whenever my work has embraced themes directly related to Native cultures, I’ve worked with Native collaborators. My collaborators have helped keep the work accurate in factual details and attuned to a proper spirit. Most importantly they’ve brought to the work the dignity of their own presences as bearers of their cultural traditions.

Earth and the Great Weather was commissioned the Festival of Alaska Native Arts. After the premiere, my wife heard an Athabascan elder telling his grandson: “That’s the way it used to be.” A couple of years later when we performed Earth at Anchorage Opera an Iñupiaq man told a newspaper reporter: “I kept going in and out of the spirit world.” In my work I aspire to an authentic resonance of place. So I’ve been deeply touched and honored by responses like these.

One of my most memorable experiences was composing a song to a poem written by my friend Ari Vahan in her native Gwich’in dialect. Ari used the song at a summer camp on the Koyukuk River to teach young children a little of the language of their ancestors. Over the years this song has taken on a life of its own, as it’s been translated into other Native languages and sung in villages from Bethel to Anaktuvuk Pass. I’ve learned much from my Native friends and neighbors, and this little song has completed the circle in a rich and gratifying way.

Molly Sheridan: I was once again struck by how much, not necessarily image, but light, plays into your discussion of the work you do. I know you’re very much enamored with painters. Does that go back to your reading/study there? Or is it more the fact that in Alaska, the light (or lack thereof) takes on more present meaning?

John Luther Adams: The extremes of light and darkness in the North have profound effects on consciousness. Winter and summer, it’s like living in two different places. I think you can hear this in my music. Much of it is quiet and nearly motionless. But some of it is explosive, even violent in an elemental way.

High latitude light is unlike light I’ve seen in any other place. Here in Fairbanks the highest the sun ever reaches is 48.5º above the horizon (at solar noon on the summer solstice). So most of our sunlight is sidelight. The shadows are very long and the colors are saturated.

Snow covers the ground for much of the year, so any available light and color is intensified. Our winter nights are very long, but there’s an extraordinary luminous quality to them. We have nights when the moon turns the whole world a deep saturated blue. And then there’s the aurora borealis. Those spectral shapes and colors in the night sky are simply magic. They never fail to evoke a d
eep sense of wonder.

Beyond the natural world, I find inspiration in the forms and colors of painting and sculpture. The abstract expressionists and the minimalists are old favorites. And I feel a special affinity with light and space artists, particularly Robert Irwin and James Turrell.

Molly Sheridan: Considering all the time that must have been invested in putting this book together, have you had any time left to plan for future projects?

John Luther Adams: Always. I’ve just finished a concert-length orchestral work in memory of Lou Harrison. And currently I’m immersed in work on The Place Where You Go to Listen—a room I’m creating for the Museum of the North at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

The installation incorporates light in a very direct way. The south side of the space is a wall of glass 20 feet wide and 9 feet tall covered with translucent scrim that transforms it into a constantly changing field of light and color.

Just as the colored light from these windows is filtered through material scrim, a slow sweep of colored noise is filtered through two harmonic scrims—banks of band-pass filters tuned to the natural resonances of the room. This noise sweep is controlled by the position of the sun above or below the horizon. One of the harmonic scrims is associated with daytime, the other with night. As the noise passes through the scrims, discreet tones emerge and the entire space is transformed into a vibrant resonating chamber.

In addition to these harmonies of day and night we also hear low-frequency “drums” and high-frequency “bells”, controlled by data streams from seismic activity and changes in the earth’s magnetic field, which are associated with the aurora borealis. So in a very real sense the music in this room is “played” by forces of nature, unfolding in real time with seismic waves, geomagnetic weather and the changing light of the sun. The piece has no beginning, middle or end, and it never literally repeats.

All this is changing the way I work. Usually I work from overall sound image to formal conception to the moment-to-moment details of sound. Most of my time is spent composing a score, followed by rehearsal, performance and recording. But this new project demands a new way of working—a process grounded in direct observation, listening in and listening to the physical space of the work.

Like all my work The Place Where You Go to Listen is deeply rooted in a specific geography. But it’s my hope that it will resonate beyond the place from which it comes. I want the work to be more than a simulated experience of the natural world. I want it to be a heightened form of experience itself.

In Conversation with David Toop



David Toop

An interview with the author of Haunted Weather: Music, Silence and Memory

Molly Sheridan: Haunted Weather is rather unique in that the first person narrative makes it feel very personal, yet the topics can get very academic and abstract. How did you come to write the book in this way?

David Toop: When I wrote Ocean of Sound in 1995, I spent about six months just deliberating on the shape of the book. At that time I was emerging from a long period—over ten years—as a full time journalist, often working for mass market publications with strict style rules. You might say I had served an apprenticeship in communicating to a very broad audience, yet I wanted to deal with difficult issues and esoteric music at the same time as being accessible. The first thing to do was to abandon linear chronology, that boring and false sense of logical progression through which one development follows its precursor as if culture was designed in advance by an art historian. Then there was the problem that I personally knew many of the people I was about to write about; some of them were my friends, or close professional associates. In effect, I was an actor within my own drama, which raised some obvious problems of being partisan. Finally, I realised that if I wrote from my own point of view, as a musician, a fan, a record collector, a critic, a person deeply involved in all aspects of music making, then this was much better than pretending to be objective. Readers are interested in human stories, after all, even if they are not so interested in the content of a particular person’s activities. I think that was a way in, and very liberating for me, and it’s a method I’ve used ever since.

Molly Sheridan: It seems the ideal venue for much of the music you discuss in Haunted Weather has not been created yet. If you were asked to design that space, what would it be?

David Toop: Personally I wouldn’t design it. I’d go to a great designer and say, these are the challenges: it has to be a quiet, flexible space, with beautiful acoustics, somewhere between a small studio theatre and a white cube gallery, but without the associations of either, a neutral space that has a clear, simple aesthetic, a feeling that can accommodate very varied groups of people, a space that can be social but at the same time allows intensely focussed events to take place without disruption, a space that’s technically rigged for the present without feeling technocratic, discreet but not too polite or anodyne; what can you do?

Molly Sheridan: You devote several pages to a discussion of an exercise you used with a group of theater students in which you asked them to identify very early sound markers. What is yours?

David Toop: I wrote some of mine in Ocean Of Sound, in the introduction. They include the strange phasing echoes of a particular street I used to walk along with my mother, and wind howling in the drain pipes. They’re sounds that have quite a strong connection to some of the music I listen to now!

Molly Sheridan: The laptop is the new guitar. Agree or disagree?

David Toop: I sort of agree, except for the fact that laptops are far more standardized objects than guitars. When you think of all those incredible futurist designs and colors for electric guitars that started to appear in the 1950s, then compare them to the black or titanium minimalism of a laptop, there’s no contest. There are deeper differences, in terms of the origination of sounds, and in terms of the extra functions of which a laptop is capable, but for a lot of people, the laptop is the way to go. That’s just how it felt with an electric guitar when I started playing, in 1961 or so.

Molly Sheridan: When people dedicate much of their lives to music, I’m curious about what music they really love on a purely personal level. Could you list a few examples (no pressure that it be a “best of” sort of list, just what comes to you)?

David Toop: I really love a lot of very romantic 1970s soul, and that’s often what I’ll listen to when I’m feeling relaxed, or happy, or a bit down. Bobby Womack is a good example. I like romantic symphonic music, like Vaughan Williams and Sibelius, and since the mid-’70s I’ve listened to a Japanese composer named Minoru Miki, who wrote very beautiful, minimal but melodic modern koto music. None of these things are considered quite acceptable in the circles in which I move, but that’s tough. Music touches different parts of you at different times, and humans are complex creatures. The family situation is interesting. My wife, my daughter and me all listen to different music, but where we all come together is listening to club classics, great dance records of the last 30 years.

Molly Sheridan: Artsjournal.com recently hosted an online conversation among classical music critics concerning their predictions about the “next big thing” in music. I was rather frustrated by their posts (which were largely devoted to a debate between the merits of “classical” and “pop” music!). I was reading your book at the same time, about what vital contemporary music is and seeks to do, and was really curious what you might have had to say. Given the breadth of your knowledge base, what would you suggest is a current and/or future “big idea” in music?

David Toop: I always refuse to answer this question, or at least, predict the future. Ten years ago, what did we know about MP3s? In 1994, I knew maybe two people who understood that downloading music was going to be a significant issue, and I only knew one person actually in a position of power within the music business who knew about the Internet. Technological changes are very fast right now, and they have a big impact on all aspects of music making, manufacturing, distribution, and ultimately, meaning. Besides, I feel I’m involved in this process; I’m not outside it. I’m in a position to encourage certain tendencies, by curating exhibitions, or writing books, or if I’m a judge on a music prize. What I do know is that young musicians in places we never even thought about before are starting to make strange music with electronics, computers and local instruments. My friend Robin Rimbaud was in Hue, Vietnam, recently, and he was talking to me about performances he saw by people who had never heard experimental music or knew its history, but they were improvising on their own instruments. To me, that’s much more exciting than debating the merits of classical against pop, not least because these debates are locked in the past.

In Conversation with Denise Von Glahn



An interview with the author of The Sounds of Place: Music and the American Cultural Landscape

Molly Sheridan: In the book, you connect some of your discussion to the visual art ideas popular at the time. Is this connection to finding inspiration in places something that goes in and out of fashion? When is this most popular?

Denise Von Glahn: I think for musicians in America, finding inspiration in place has always been there because the American place was such a remarkable place. It was so very different from what was valued in Europe. In Europe in the 19th century—and that’s when we’re really starting to talk about having a musical culture—it was cities that appeared to be the source of cultural energy, but in America at that time, we didn’t have cities as cultural centers so we couldn’t compete. What we did have though was a remarkable natural place. We had a diversity of geography that was unlike anything in Europe. So we made what was a wilderness and what many might have thought of as wild and unattractive into our asset. We privileged the natural place and we connected it with Eden. In America I think there’s always been a fascination with the natural place because it was the thing we had in aces early in our culture.

One of the very first composers I talk about, Anthony Philip Heinrich, what does he latch onto? Not a city. He latches onto Niagara Falls. I think he had a number of agendas. He wanted to identify himself as an American and there was no better way to do that than to identify with some iconic place, but it was also the way America distinguished itself from Europe. It had nature in variety, and grandeur that Europe just couldn’t compete with.

Molly Sheridan: Your book gets into great detail when it comes to talking about specific musical examples to illustrate your larger points, so I’m curious, is there a specific musical vocabulary that you started to see emerging in America that was used in relation to these new American natural elements?

Denise Von Glahn: I don’t think a distinctly American musical vocabulary, no. In my discussion of the Hudson River school of artists there were distinctly American places being depicted but the artists actually used some very European techniques and ways of representing those American places. I believe that there were iconic places that composers wanted to talk about. The first one that I noticed was Niagara Falls and of course that was a place that was not only energizing and inspiring to composers, it was inspiring to poets and writers, and painters, to people making bread boxes and curtains for stages in theaters [laughs]… it became the most important visual symbol of America early on.

Molly Sheridan: Where would you say today is the place that is a focal point for artists following in this tradition?

Denise Von Glahn: I think since 9/11 there has been an effort to recapture some of the earlier 19th century iconic places—a lot of visuals of the great vistas of America. The Twin Towers and the Pentagon, because of what they immediately suggest to people, those places now have also become symbols of America. I am not sure that there is a consensus anymore about what one place might signify America. I think that still when people are looking for visuals to accompany any kind of speech that is intended to rouse patriotism, you will see Niagara Falls, you will see the Grand Canyon, and the mountains and plains, so those initial iconic places still have a lot of cache, but the nation isn’t as geographically restricted as it was in the 19th century; we aren’t all coming out of the Northeast with the same kinds of values. I would imagine for Americans coming up from Mexico that a very different kind of natural place would have meaning to them. So I don’t think there’s one or even a few natural places that would really speak to all Americans now in any way comparable to the way Niagara spoke to Americans in the 19th century or the way New York City spoke to them at the beginning of the 20th.

Molly Sheridan: Talking about the sheaves of wheat and perhaps the sort of nostalgia that goes along with that…as a society in general most of us have significantly less contact with the nature around us and more experience with suburban and city environments. How has that affected composers writing today? Is there a trend to the sentimentalize it?

Denise Von Glahn: I think some of it is a nostalgia for the way people imagine life was, but I think too that there’s a new sense of the value of nature. Now we are concerned with preservation, hence the environmental movement that really got started in the 1960s. I think our interest in nature is now not quite as naïve or as incomplete as in was in the 19th century. Now we look at nature as a very precious commodity that we could destroy and so our musical responses to it are informed by that awareness. Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s Symphony No. 4 The Gardens is a prime example. That piece could not have been written 50 years ago. It would not have that same sensitivity. But when she wrote it at the very end of the 20th century, that was how people were thinking of nature. I was so grateful to stumble upon that piece and then to have the privilege of speaking with Ellen Zwilich on a number of occasions about what those gardens suggested to her. It was eye-opening to me and it was a wonderful lesson about our morphing relationship to nature. We can no longer take it for granted and Ellen Zwilich’s Symphony says that in no uncertain terms. That kind of sensibility is very much a product of the 20th century and never would have occurred to writers on nature in the early 19th century.

Molly Sheridan: You might assume when we’re talking about something so concrete as a place that we can all visit that there might be an almost unavoidably programmatic aspect to this music. Do you talk about composers inspired by these connections but their music doesn’t necessarily sound like it?

Denise Von Glahn: Absolutely and one of the distinctions I hoped to make in the book is that these pieces were not necessarily programmatic. In fact all of the composers with whom I spoke—Robert Starer, Dana Paul Perna, Ellen Zwilich, Steve Reich—were very clear that they were not writing programmatic works. They were writing pieces that had been inspired by places, and there’s a difference. What I was hoping to show was that America as a place or as places had the power to inspire art and that with that inspiration, and with that resulting artwork, we learn something about what nature means at that moment in time. I’m looking for how an artist is inspired by a place and responds to a place and then how their artwork reflects that place back to us. And since in America we were so caught up with place as defining the nation, I found it interesting to see how the different interactions with places actually told us something about the different ways we think of ourselves as a country. It’s a circuitous route but I also think that it’s a very clear one. We can see what we think about ourselves by listening to music about place, by looking at paintings about place, by reading poems about place. We learn something about ourselves as individuals, we learn something about the creator of the artwork, and we learn something about ourselves as a nation.

In Conversation with Author Michael Broyles

An interview with the author of Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music.

Molly Sheridan: Obviously writing a book like this consumes a lot of your life, so I’m always curious to find out what attracts an author to a particular topic. So, why mavericks and why now?

Michael Broyles
Michael Broyles
Photo by Denise Von Glahn

Michael Broyles: This whole project started, oh, quite a few years ago. I’d been writing about American music and what always struck was that in our culture—and this is true not just in classical music but I think in popular music as well—we, that is Americans, have some sort of fascination with the individualist, the person that tends to go his own way, and in music you see this over and over again. That’s sort of the standard image of most rock musicians, but you see it in classical music too. People that we tend to revere most are those who seem to be somewhat different, who have struck out on their own. I began to look at it and I thought, “Well, here’s a topic. Since I’m writing about music, why not focus not so much strictly on these people but what it is about our culture that so fascinates us about that.” And that’s really what the book is about.

Molly Sheridan: Sort of that James Dean phenomenon…

Michael Broyles: Yeah, James Dean or do you remember the old commercial that was on TV for years of the Marlboro Man? Even the Lone Ranger, going back even further than that…

Molly Sheridan: You’ve been involved personally in music for a very long time. As you were writing this book, whom for you was the most striking? Who of the mavericks you encountered did you pick out or especially love. Music wise and also as a personality?

Michael Broyles: Well, one of the reasons I got started in this is Charles Ives has always been and remains one of my favorite composers. I’ve noticed his music; it’s like Beethoven, it wears. You never get tired, at least I never get tired, of Charles Ives. But a couple of other composers really stood out to me. I was somewhat but not entirely familiar with them. The first was Harry Partch. I’ve become a huge fan of Harry Partch and he’s not as well known as some of these other people—he created his own instruments, these huge things, 5 tons of instruments to move around—so he didn’t get that many performances. That was one. The other one that fascinated me was Meredith Monk. Interesting thing there is that most people in our culture don’t think of her as a composer. They think of her as sort of performance artist or a dancer or something like that, but she herself considers herself a composer. What she does is mostly with her voice and she does extraordinary things with it. I mean there are lots of others but those are just two. So many of these people I love the music of, going all the way back to William Billings in the 18th century, but those three—Ives, Partch, and Monk—especially stood out to me.

Molly Sheridan: What about when you look at it a bit apart from their music? You speak about the outsider, loner personality that was either naturally theirs or that they cultivated just because of the fascination that Americans have with that kind of thing. Was there anyone who particularly stuck out that way?

Michael Broyles: I think Ives, again. I’ll go back to Ives, because I don’t think he himself purposely cultivated anything. He was basically in some ways a shy man, but he knew what he wanted to do and I think he knew that he couldn’t write the kind of music that he wanted to and become a professional musician. What’s fascinating about Ives is that he became a businessman, and he was as successful in the insurance business as he was in the musical world [in the end]. And by successful I mean he not only made a fortune in the insurance business, and I really and truly mean a fortune, but he revolutionized it. He created a lot of new concepts and ideas that in the insurance word are still being used today. Ironically, I’ve talked to people that are in the insurance business, executives and so forth, and you mention the name Charles Ives and they’ll say, “Oh, yes, he created such-and-such for us.” Sometimes they don’t even know he was a musician.

Molly Sheridan: And the music community may know his background, but perhaps more with the attitude that, “Oh, insurance distracted him from composing music.”

Michael Broyles: Exactly. And Harry Partch, I love his music. He was amazing in that he was so steadfast in what he did, but it was almost as if he had to fail in a monetary sense. He was so at odds with his culture. I think had he not failed he might not have created as much music as he did. He was the true James Dean-type that was really rebelling all his life.

Molly Sheridan: After all of the research that you did for this book, do you have a working definition in your head of just what “American” music is for you?

Michael Broyles: No, I don’t. I’m not sure…you know this is something so many musicians, especially American musicians have tried to address. I think it was Aaron Copland who may have said that probably the best definition of American music is something written by an American. What has not worked have been many attempts by American composers to consciously sound American. The result is it comes out being self-conscience and not always entirely successful.

You grow up in a world and a culture and you absorb that society. I think if I were to go to, say, Europe and live in Germany for many years I might assimilate very much into that culture, but I think there would be something about me that would still be American. Bartók talked about that. He was Hungarian, of course, and he used a lot of Hungarian folk elements, but he said what really made him a Hungarian composer is that he absorbed this Hungarian folk idiom so thoroughly that he was not even conscious of it when he was using it, and I think that’s what makes an American composer truly American. They write in such different ways—you can go from John Cage to Charles Ives. So I don’t think there is one thing.

Molly Sheridan: Fair enough. There was one passage in your introduction that I wanted to get you to elaborate a little bit on. These lines: “First a composer was a maverick by default. Then it became a badge of honor to be one. Then it became lucrative. Finally it became a necessity.” I guess I’m most curious with the last few words there, but take as much of it as you’d like to.

Michael Broyles: Well, I’ll just quickly start at the beginning and then I’ll try and hit the end there. At the beginning just the idea of being a composer was almost completely alien to American society—this is going back to the 18th century. People didn’t think that way. There’ve been a lot of tune books published, which were a bunch of compositions—some secular, some sacred, most all vocal—but maybe ten compositions by Americans at that time. Most of these were just compilations from European sources. William Billings came out with his own book which had over 100 original compositions. In other words, ten-fold the amount that had even been composed!

Then as we move through time, it became sort of a badge of honor, this whole business of the individualist. But what I say at the end—”finally it became a necessity,”… in
our artistic world today, unless you take a stance as being someone really unique and individual, it’s very hard to get noticed. You see this probably more in popular music than in classical music where there’s a little more adherence to a broad tradition. I do include Frank Zappa in this book at some length, but the patterns that these classical musicians were developing very early, for instance, in the 20th century, you see emerging really in popular music in the second half of the 20th century. Just think of any pop group—unless there is something unique about them, they tend to get lost. That’s really what I’m referring to there. This is ironic: The maverick has become the standard.

Molly Sheridan: And many of these points that you make, you say quite bluntly that they are a larger commentary on American society. For those inside the industry, especially composers, what would you hope they take away from this?

Michael Broyles: Well, I wasn’t writing this specifically with composers in mind, but if a composer does read it I guess I’d say persistence. The reason these people succeeded is because they persisted, in some cases obviously against some pretty big odds. That’s probably the key to it right there: Just be determined.

The book is about mavericks, but more than anything else it’s about what I call the maverick tradition, it’s about a dissonance between composers and American society. It’s the basis for writing this book. The question of why we as a society revere maverick types so much is really telling us about American attitudes and values. I’m writing it for people who are interested in learning more about American culture and society in general and that’s why the very first sentence of the book is, “This is a book about us.” As we said, I could have written about James Dean or something like that…

Molly Sheridan: Well, it’s interesting then that you picked this kind of music, especially now when so many people argue and debate about what relevance our particular musical culture has in connection with American society at large. It’s an interesting statement that we do reflect it and exist right along side.

Michael Broyles: I think I was lucky, because I started this book in the early ’90s–I had some side-tracks along the way–but I began to realize as I was getting towards the end that this is something that is being talked about. I think I was lucky. I hit something that was more and more talked about as I was working on it.

Molly Sheridan: I know this is an unfair question and I don’t really expect you to have an answer, but as you were researching this book is there anyone you noticed who’s coming up now that might be the next Charles Ives or Meredith Monk, continuing to move that maverick tradition forward?

Michael Broyles: Oh, let me think. I don’t think I do. That’s a good question. What I think is that it may not be someone who’s doing strictly music in an aural sense. We of course live in a very visual culture, and you begin to see these separate arts such as music and then visual things and theatrical and so forth, and I think it’s all coming together. You already see that on MTV and things like that. That’s why I have such a respect for Meredith Monk because she brings these all together. Our next artists, whoever they are…I really don’t have a name for you, but I think that’s were to look, not just what may be going on in a traditional concert but in someone who can somehow fuse these things into maybe a bigger and greater art.

In Conversation with Editor Stephen Peles



Stephen Peles

An interview with the editor of The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt

Molly Sheridan: Knowing Milton Babbitt‘s writing so well at this point, do you think that there is still something valuable in reading this collection if a composer knows that he or she either does not agree with Babbitt’s philosophies or with his musical style?

Stephen Peles: Oh, I think there’s any number of excellent reasons to read the book. Really let’s be honest—there were two major composers, and by major I mean composers of international stature, in this country in the post-war era. I’m leaving out John Cage because I think history will ultimately judge him not to be principally a composer, but more a kind of early performance artist. The two were Milton and Elliott Carter. Of the two, they both are very interesting, very literate men, but Milton was a little bit more forthcoming not only about other people’s music but about his own. That’s one very good historical reason to be paying attention to what he has to say in print.

More than any other composer of his generation, Babbitt had an impact on fields outside of composition. I suppose the most obvious one would be music theory and yes, of course, we’ve always had some kind of music theory—but in a very real sense as we currently understand the field as being constituted, it’s very much a post-war English-speaking-world phenomenon and Babbitt’s work really was, in many senses, the big bang which began that. He was crucial in the early dissemination in the English-speaking world of the work of [Heinrich] Schenker, for example. Now, one has to realize that there were no English translations of anything by Schenker until the mid-1950s and of course Milton was familiar with that work at least going back to the 1930s, though I’m not sure I can recall, if indeed I ever knew, when he first encountered something by Schenker. But he was certainly one of the prime movers in a certain sense seeing in Schenker’s work things that Europeans could not and as a consequence of seeing those things, making it relevant and frankly palatable in American university environments. Obviously his work on the generalized properties of non-tonal pitch class selections is also seminal to the other principal branch of post-tonal theory for which the English-speaking world has assumed a global dominance in the profession. So from the point of view of music theory we would not have the discipline as we currently have it were it not for Milton’s foundational early work.

Other reasons: not merely was Milton a life-long participant in really an extraordinarily interesting period of world music and political history, but he was also a witness to much of it. That is, he was on very intimate terms with a contingent of European intellectuals, musicians and otherwise, who came to this country, principally, at least initially, to New York City in the 1930s which is exactly where Milton was. So, as a bit of cultural history since they are arranged in chronological order, the collected essays make really fairly fascinating reading as a kind of oral history of the impact that WWII and the immigration of European intellectuals into this country had on the development of music and, no doubt, other aspects of American culture at the time and since.

Molly Sheridan: To take that answer a little further, I was just reading somewhere about the “Babbitt-ization” of orchestral music and it reminded me of how we like to make him a poster child for serialism, often also making him a sort of punching bag for all that went wrong between art and the public during a certain period, if you subscribe to that philosophy. So considering all you’ve just said, how do you expect he will be treated historically moving forward.

Stephen Peles: I haven’t the foggiest. I’ve now seen enough unpredicted change in my lifetime to make me very cautious about predicting what’s going to happen in the future. I can’t think one can disentangle Milton’s long-term fate from my long-term fate or your long-term fate or, for that matter, the long-term fate of western art music generally. It may well be that western art music as we’ve known it is coming to an end. Now I’m not necessarily saying that’s the case, but it’s certainly possible and it’s a relatively recent phenomenon as human history goes. What we don’t know at this point and time is whether or not music of—I don’t know what to call it—with serious intellectual aspirations is going to survive absent the cultural environment that initially gave birth to it—we simply don’t know. So how future generations are going to look upon Milton is going to depend very much on what the culture is in which those future generations grow up.

Molly Sheridan: Did you have much contact with Milton personally?

Stephen Peles: Actually, surprisingly little in recent years. I was of course a graduate student at Princeton, and as was typically the case for most graduate students there of my generation, I was in residence for probably about 10 years, so of course during that time I went through all the usual course work with him. He was, as you can imagine, an extremely popular lecturer. His classes were attended not just by music students but would attract other people who just liked to hear him talk. Since moving, both he and I have more than enough things on our plate at this point in our lives so that no, frankly, there’s not terribly much contact anymore. I’ve seen him a couple times in the recent past owing to a number of academic conferences that have happened as a consequence of the publication of the collected essays and he’s certainly looking well and is still composing at a quite phenomenal rate and is in the process, as I understand it, of finishing up a commission for the Boston Symphony.

Molly Sheridan: I’m always just curious about people who have such a large and public professional output, and in this case through both music and writing, and then the picture of them more personally from people who know them. Especially in this case were you’ve spent so much time immersed in his work, and then comparing that to the actual person behind all the that.

Stephen Peles: Sure. In the case of the collected essays you have to understand that many of these were written by Milton many, many years ago—the volume spans 50 years—so the vast majority of the original typescripts have been lost. I’ve forgotten what I wrote last week, so there’s really no reason to believe that Milton could reconstruct any of these things verbatim, so in short we worked for the most part without relying on Milton for help. We did what we could to salvage what typescripts there were, tracked down all the original publications, some of which no longer exist, and for the most part relied upon the scholarly expertise of the editors, such as it is, rather than upon Babbitt.

Molly Sheridan: Did you notice, since the collection does span such a period of time, any change in thought or philosophy that was remarkable to you?

Stephen Peles: Actually, in change of thought, no. One of the things that has always struck me is how early Babbitt got a number of things right and put his finger right on the pulse of some very important, very difficult issues. If there’s a change at all perhaps it’s just a change of tone, and that’s a little bit poignant. Like many of us in the art music community (which in my case as an active composer dates back to the 1970s) I think we’ve looked with considerable dismay at the decline of support financ
ially but also, more broadly speaking, at the decline of support culturally, for the production of new music. Though this is a very difficult thing to point to particular instances of in the collected essays, it’s not something that goes un-remarked upon, at least in terms of the tone of voice. I don’t know if you know his very excellent essay—I think it’s the last in the collection entitled Words About Music: the Madison lectures, which is essentially a transcription of public lectures and classes that Milton taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in the 1970s—called something like “The Unlikely Survival of Serious Music.” So again, the dates are significant. Milton, being at the center of things, was certainly able to notice the decline in its very early stages. To go back and read that article, one is impressed by the prophetic tone, however much one regrets the accuracy of the prophecy.

Molly Sheridan: One more thing that I was thinking about that’s a little bit off track: You mentioned that people were coming to his lectures from all sorts of disciplines. Anecdotally, do you recall any topics or moments that have really stuck with you over the years?

Stephen Peles: Well, Milton’s presentation were not, to put it politely, strongly influenced by the presence in the audience of non-musicians or for that matter by their absence. You’d probably find it unsurprising that in such a context particularly Milton did most of the talking. I will say that awaiting me on my return from a conference at Princeton last December that was organized precisely to commemorate the publication of these works I had an email from someone in the Princeton physics department who while I was on the plane apparently had been going through his copy and I’m embarrassed to say this, had found a typo. So the tradition, in short of there being interest amongst intellectuals even outside of music in Milton’s writing and music is apparently still alive and well.

In conversation with Author Samuel Solomon



An interview with the author of How to Write for Percussion

Molly Sheridan: You’re already juggling what reads like a rather extensive performance calendar. Why take the time out to write this book?

Samuel Solomon: Well, my current performing career consists almost entirely of new works written for me, so the process of writing this book has now, I think, perhaps even saved me some time by helping manage my working relationships with composers. When I first started working seriously with composers, it was really difficult. I found that if the composer was asking about some specific problems, I had a lot to say, but if the composer had never written for percussion before and was starting a new piece, we were both just lost in this enormous sea of information. Not only are there so many different aspects to percussion writing, but the way that percussionists learn and retain the type of information that composers need is usually from very specific contexts. I found that every piece of information I had was connected to a specific piece or specific instrument or technique, and so when I tried to explain it to composers, I would find myself just traveling down all these different disconnected tangents and I’d completely overwhelm them with information.

So I realized that a book was the only way I could really give composers all the information I felt was necessary. I researched the available literature and found that none of it was as involved or as informed as I was hoping. Also, nearly all of it was written by composers, and I feel (and I think my book demonstrates) that percussion is way too complicated to be explained by someone who doesn’t do it every day. So for the next few years I started compiling and organizing the thousands of pieces of percussion information that came out of my head and out of pieces I played and heard and out of the mouths of my composer and percussionist colleagues—and I found a lot of connections and similarities between instruments or techniques or notations that I previously thought were completely unrelated. Also I found that I could make generalizations about things like logistics and notation and sound production which makes it far easier for composers to understand how percussionists operate, and therefore far easier for them to write idiomatically for the performers as well as for the instruments.

So now when I work with composers, I am, of course, considerably more organized and considerably more useful. I know what problems to look for, what solutions to suggest, and I also understand the things about notation and logistics that can help the composer write music that is considerably easier for me to learn. And after the book is released this month, it’ll be interesting to see if my collaborations with composers in the future go even more smoothly—I’m hoping a lot of their questions will be answered before we even start working together. I think that was probably my dream at the start of this project—to have a document that I could just give to composers that would answer all their questions so that the only thing I had to work with them on was the music itself.

Molly Sheridan: Who did you envision as the reader of this text while you were writing?

Samuel Solomon: Anyone who writes music for percussion—composers or arrangers or orchestrators. The text is definitely directed at them, but not at any specific level of experience. There are many parts that would probably be more appropriate for younger college-age composers, but I suspect all of it will be useful and informative for even older professional composers. I think for a lot of composers, both young and old, percussion is still a rather mysterious thing—there are just so many details that it’s hard, if not impossible, for composers to really know all that information. Writing music is hard enough without having to memorize how long it takes a percussionist to pick up a quica and get it in position to play. I think the book really puts a lot of information in one place that would normally require a composer to go to percussionists to research, and so I think composers of all ages and levels of experience will find most if not all of this text helpful.

Other than composers, a lot of percussionists have expressed an interest in reading this book, but I think much of it will probably be old news to them; however, the book does sort of function as a compendium of what can be expected of percussionists, so percussionists might find it interesting in that respect. Some people have also said that conductors would benefit from it; I suppose conductors often do a lot of the same type of work that composers do with respect to timbre, instrument choice, and balance, so the book may be useful to them as well.

Molly Sheridan: Our question to percussionists this month is: “How much detail do you expect, want, and ultimately get from composers in the percussion scores that you perform?” I’m curious how you would answer that question? Now, I’m suspecting that a certain lack in that department may have at least in part inspired you to write this handbook, so feel free to share some anecdotes…

Samuel Solomon: Hmm. Well, I think quality of detail is far more important than quantity. If it’s done right, a composer can get away with a lot of specification, but if done poorly, the percussionist will probably just ignore all of it. The difference here, I find, is a real genuine musical understanding of whatever it is the composer is trying to use. The biggest thing I’m worried about with this book is that I’ve now armed composers with an enormous collection of tools (instruments, beaters, setups, special effects, etc.) which many people will feel confident using without ever actually hearing what they sound like. I plan on starting a video companion to the book soon, but in the meantime, I hope composers take the time to study some of the suggested scores with recordings and work with percussionists to actually hear what these things sound like and see and understand the way percussionists play them. I’ve definitely often found myself making my own decisions with respect to beaters, dynamics, timbre, note length, articulation, and instrument choice in contradiction to some details the composer has very carefully indicated. If the composer really wants to use all of these details, they have to really know exactly what they’re doing or else it probably won’t work.

I think that more often than not, composers can give percussionists the benefit of the doubt, and less detail is better. Or not less detail, but more abstract detail, because percussion is sort of an abstract thing. A specification like “hard mallet” can mean many different things depending on what instrument or instruments are being used, what the dynamic is, etc. And even a specification like “large tom-tom” can mean many different things—different timbres, different pitches, different amounts of resonance. For example if a composer wrote the word “brittle,” it would be far more specific than writing “hard mallet.” The performer can use an indication like “brittle” to make decisions which produce a brittle sound, decisions which might not have anything to do with using a different mallet. The same thing applies to instrument choice—the instruments available to one percussionist might be completely different than those available to other percussionists—so very specific indications of instruments may yield a far less-than-perfect situation, and a more approximate indication could give the performer the opportunity to use instruments that are better sounding or more unusual or creative.

Sorry, no anecdotes—this book has had me thinking in the abstract for so long that I think all my anecdotes have bee
n usurped!

Molly Sheridan: Understood. So how closely do you like to work with the composers you commission and how large a role do you feel you usually play in the creation of any new work? From what you’ve been saying, it seems to me that when it comes to percussion, it has to be more of a collaboration than your average, say, violin concerto.

Samuel Solomon: Ideally, I would meet with the composer as often as possible. Like I said, there is so much to percussion that the composer really needs to have a percussionist try things out to make sure that it all works the way the composer is imagining. Normally, at the start I’ll speak with the composer about any general questions they have, get a feel for the direction they plan on going, and suggest some instruments and ideas. Then once they decide on a list of instruments, I design a few options for systems of notation and draw them a diagram of the setup I plan on using. This way I’m sure they will be using the notation that I feel is most intuitive, and they can use the diagram to have a better understanding of how I might be moving around the instruments. Then once I get the score, I usually send an email of immediate issues and suggestions—these are usually issues of beater or instrument choice—and then I stay in close contact with them throughout the learning process with various questions and suggestions. Throughout that process I have two main objectives: first, make the composer’s intentions as clear as possible; and second, make the piece as easy for me to execute as possible. Of course the latter will tend to aid the former.

Molly Sheridan: I love all the samples and suggested works you’ve included at the end of the book. It seems like a kind of summary of everything you had studied and learned to date. How did you really go about compiling such an extensive resource list?

Samuel Solomon: Well, it’s certainly not everything I’ve studied to date—these are works that I feel are examples of good percussion writing, and those works that exhibit bad percussion writing definitely made a huge contribution to this book [laughs]. But to compile this list I simply thought of every piece which I feel is an example of percussion writing worthy of study. I wanted it to represent a very wide gamut of ideas and styles, as well as a wide gamut of compositional, logistic, notational, and sonic issues. Much of the information in the book is technical stuff, which is very important, but it’s through these examples of great percussion writing that a composer really learns how to write for percussion. So I hope that it is well used.

Molly Sheridan: Considering all you’ve been thinking about putting this book together, what’s your ideal dream commission situation?

Samuel Solomon: An ideal commission situation would be one in which I’m working with a composer who has read my book and is using that information and working closely with me (like once a week or so during the composition process) to really bring those ideas to the next level. And by that, I mean, design compositions that really use the tools available within the scope of what is practical for the performer to do. When percussionists perform improvised music, they are able to do complex things specific to them and specific to their instruments and beaters which are truly idiomatic yet very unique. I think that level of composition is rarely effectively achieved by a non-percussionist composer. With my book, I hoped to give composers access to these behind-the-scenes things so that once they were in the practice studio with the percussionist, they would know what things to look and listen for and have a clear idea of what is possible and practical. I find that a lot of the music I play is very difficult for reasons which do not serve the composer’s musical intentions. With my book and with a close working relationship with a performer, I think those types of problems could be eliminated.

In Conversation with James Pegolotti



An interview with the author of Deems Tayor: A Biography

Molly Sheridan: I wanted to start by talking a little bit about what drew you to Deems Taylor and motivated you to take on a project of this magnitude. I’ve been reading through your book and it’s extremely detailed. I’ve got to believe that there must be a connection there for you to have devoted obviously a lot of time and energy to thing particular project. So why don’t we start there.

James Pegolotti: Okay. Well, there are so many aspects of why I started writing this book. I think probably the most important one is that I grew up in Northern California, and as a young person I was on a dairy ranch. At night I would hear music from San Francisco and it’s really how I learned to love classical music. I went to a one-room schoolhouse, believe it or not, and so there was very little music education to say the least. I listened particularly to “Voice of Firestone” and Telephone Hour, which were on Monday nights back to back. I went for my undergraduate at St. Mary’s College in the Bay Area, and because we had a wonderful symphony forum I was able to attend concerts by the San Francisco Symphony for 50 cents. So for the four years that I was there I was going to live concerts and that really filled in my background. Then when I went to UCLA to get my doctorate in chemistry I went to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, so I learned a lot by listening. It’s always been an avocation.

The other aspect of is it that I’ve always been a teacher, that’s been my real goal in life. I went along teaching chemistry and then because of other issues decided to go into college administration, which led me ultimately to Danbury and Western Connecticut State University. I then started to write about music–to do some program notes for local organizations, the Danbury Symphony and such as that. Then when I left administration I decided to become a librarian and went to get a library degree at Southern Connecticut State which is a sister institution to Western. There I met a young man, Ken Crilly, who was at that time working at the Yale music library but not yet a librarian himself. Well, within four or five years he was the director. And Yale, it turned out, had most of the Deem Taylor papers.

I had to do some background on how to be a librarian to get my degree, so I went to a little library near Danbury called Bethel Connecticut Public Library and there I found out, of all things, that Howard Barlow who had been the conductor for the Voice of Firestone on radio and TV had spent his last years in Bethel and they had a lot of material. I actually wrote a lengthy article that was published on Howard Barlow. Howard Barlow turned out to be a good friend of Deems Taylor and though I knew a lot about Deems Taylor, I hadn’t really heard him because he was on Sunday afternoons with the New York Philharmonic and I could only get the evening broadcasts at that time from San Francisco. So I decided it was time to look into Deems Taylor because I’m always interested in why people sort of disappear from the scene, when they’re so important. I started to research Deems Taylor asking the question, ‘Why hadn’t someone already done a biography on this man?’ Taylor was a composer who had disappeared from the scene, even though he was the first man ever to be commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera, and had two very successful operas in the ’20s and ’30s.

And I think probably more than any other reason why I ended up doing it was that I was really taken by his sense of humor. I found that in Taylor throughout his writings and in a lot of the actual radio programs that I had copies of from off the air. I love humor, I love music, I love the capacity of someone to write well for a broad public, which is what I attempt to do because I don’t have the musical background to be a musicologist in any way, shape, or form. I try to write in a way for people who, like me, are very interested in music and have some background but not a lot.

After three years of researching I then came to a time when I said I’m going to retire and I’m going to spend my time working on this book. Ultimately I got the contract with Northeastern.

Molly Sheridan: You said when you started the project that you were curious why no one had written about him before. Did you ever come up with an answer for that?

James Pegolotti: A part of it is that too many people looked only at it his composing self, which had gone out of favor obviously, and to write solely about that would be kind of uninteresting. They didn’t see him as far as his importance as a supporter and a champion of American music of his time, particularly when he was on the radio, always really supporting the people who were composing as he was even though he certainly didn’t agree with much of the music that was being written at the time, but he always said you’ve got to listen to things at least twice.

Also what they hadn’t seen is the incredibly interesting life he led on so many different levels, starting with writing the college shows at NYU, and then moving on to actually being part of a major newspaper, the New York Tribune Magazine. So he became a writer, he was a composer, he was a very fine speaker on the radio–he had a wonderful voice–but I think that most people that were looking at him were looking from the point of view of his world as a composer which had really disappeared completely in the ’40s and he never had a lot of his good music recorded. So people are not cognizant of what he was all about. There’s never been a commercial recording of either of his two operas–The King’s Henchman or Peter Ibbetson. Schwartz’s concert version out in Seattle four years ago was recorded but they still haven’t released it commercially and I don’t know that they ever will. He said they’re still thinking about it. It’s a wonderful, wonderful recording.

Molly Sheridan: Do you think Taylor’s music then will disappear as the years go by or do you expect that there will be a chance later for it to be rediscovered?

James Pegolotti: I suspect that it will reappear and show up on orchestral concerts off and on in the future and I think that probably Peter Ibbetson will be performed somewhere. It’s the kind of opera that with some very clever staging would be very impressive. The music is excellent.

Molly Sheridan: Well, we chose to excerpt the portion of the book that focuses on this period in his career when he was writing operas. The Met was searching for an American composer, questioning just what is American, which is of course near to our hearts here at NewMusicBox. I was impressed by the reaction to Taylor’s operas. The public really reacted favorably to these performances, which is something that for some reason in this day and age seems almost surprising.

James Pegolotti: That’s right. You know I have a copy of the review of Peter Ibbetson from The New York Times, the day after, and it is six full columns top to bottom! It’s one full page with the history and all. It just amazes people. But as you say they were looking for this special person to come along and they thought for a while that it was him. I think also if you ever listen to The King’s Henchman you’d be surprised at how modern it is. It is not an easy opera to listen to and I think critics have been unjust in that regard. Peter Ibbetson is much more impressionistic and romantic. The King’s Henchman I think is a very tricky and modern type opera, with this very strange libretto by Edna St. Vincent Millay—she used only Anglo Saxon words because it was an Anglo Saxon story of the 10th century and it’s hard to listen to sometimes because you don’t know what they’re talking about.

Molly Sheridan: What about musically? You say that it’
s the more modern and since most people probably haven’t heard it, why don’t you talk a little bit about what characterizes it and what your impression is of it.

James Pegolotti: The vocal lines are very often at some odds with the orchestral lines. They are very often singing phrases and as I tried to explain–and believe me, it’s hard to do this mainly because I don’t have the music background–but one thing that Taylor did try to do was to be like Debussy and give it a foundation which was in a sense independent of the vocal line. When you listen to the singers in King’s Henchman it’s almost as if there’s some difficulty and a sort of clashing between the sounds that they’re providing and the orchestra itself. There are a lot of thematic sections that he uses over and over again. He was really trying to be a little like Richard Wagner at the time. In fact the most famous essay that Taylor ever wrote was called The Monster and the monster was Richard Wagner. It’s an essay that still is used in teaching today because it’s so clever and so to the point. So Wagner was very much his hero throughout and then Debussy came in and paired off with Wagner. So in The King’s Henchman he used a lot of thematic things over and over again and their not that melodic even though he said melody was a key issue. Still the most melodic thing in the opera is a Scotch folk song that he adopted into a march and that’s sung at the end of the first act in a very heroic way. So that’s the best I can say. There was certainly not in any way a strong Puccini-ish or Verdi-ish melodic line. It was very broken up and extremely important that the words be heard.

Molly Sheridan: Deems Taylor’s professional life took on obviously so many aspects. Do you think he had as much time as he wanted to devote to composition, or do you think if he had it to do over again…did you get any indication from his papers and letters and things that he wanted to spend more time than he was able to?

James Pegolotti: Well, I believe that at some point he saw that he was not going to be the great American composer. I think maybe at one point he thought he might be, especially with the popularity of the two operas. Then he got very much involved with women—wives and non-wives, and very much concerned about how to support his wife, his second wife particularly, and his daughter, which was by the second wife.

Molly Sheridan: And was kind of a surprise from what I gathered. She managed to keep the pregnancy from him till after the birth…

James Pegolotti: It was a total surprise.

Molly Sheridan: I had to read that section twice. I thought, ‘Wait a minute, that can’t be right.’ I just never thought of Deems Taylor like that—all these wives and everyone is in love with him. But he just looks so sweet in the photographs. It’s just not the first thing you think of.

James Pegolotti: Right. It’s about the last thing that a person is expecting when you go looking into it. It certainly was totally a surprise to me as I dug deeper. I came to 1951, he’s still shepherding around Miss America who was 43 years younger than him.

Molly Sheridan: Did he just have a charismatic personality?

James Pegolotti: Had to be something, because boy they fell for it, and all of them were absolutely beautiful too.

Well, anyway, I think in a sense he could have been like Aaron Copland if he had chosen to go with American folk songs. The folk songs he chose for the operas were always from Europe. It seems that Taylor couldn’t get rid of the European influence in his thinking, and I think that’s where he saw finally, probably towards the end of the ’30s when he truly gave up writing major works, that it was better to go and get the money where his other talents were and hope for the best otherwise. I think he saw the picture clearly. But he wrote some very nice little things in the ’40s that should have been recorded.

If you listen to all his orchestral works, just orchestral, back-to-back, maybe there would be two hours of it, leaving out the four operas. At some point he decided that he was not going to make it as a composer, but he was going to make it as a clever, witty, very well spoken commentator for American music for the Philharmonic and then as a leader of ASCAP for six years at a very important time in ASCAP’s history. By the time he left ASCAP he was 63.

Molly Sheridan: What was your research process for this book. Obviously there’s a ton of detail in here and I can’t imagine how long it really took you and how many hours you put into. I know you’ve mentioned that his papers were at the Yale Library and that was a starting place for you. Is that where most of this was drawn from?

James Pegolotti: A good amount of it, but as you well know there was so much letter writing between people and those letters then end up in the sites of the individuals to whom they were written. Thankfully I just go into it as the Internet started to open up and academic libraries started to make their files available. And being a librarian and getting touch with other librarians made it very nice, sort of like doctor to doctor. They would send me a copy gratis of a letter and that kind of thing. So it was about three years before I retired that I started. I did a whole summer and two winter months at Yale getting material onto my lap top and then starting to make copies of materials and building up my files and then deciding how the heck the book was going to be written along with the help of an editor ultimately.

I must tell you that Northeastern University Press, once they give you the contract–and I did not know this–they send the manuscripts out to readers and two out of three readers must say ‘yes’ for the manuscript to be then brought to the board for final approval. Even though you have a contract there’s no guarantee. Well the first reader–and these are people who are reading different versions as they are coming along–the first was very positive. The second was absolutely, horribly negative. I saw what he wrote and in so many terms it was ‘absolutely never publish this book.’ Now I was an academic for 40 years and I can spot one a mile away especially when they are very critical, and I saw this as a particular person, musicologist I’m sure, who absolutely did not think Deems Taylor’s music worthy of anything. I made an argument with the editor about this, and I tried to take examples from what the person had said and point out that this was unfair because Taylor was more than a composer. In fact many people have said to me that what they like about the book is that it’s not so much about the music but is really a snapshot of the era. You go from theater to literature to the Algonquin to all these people who are a firm group in New York’s culture at the time. So, the editor bought my feelings that we should keep going. I think at that point he could have said well I agree with this guy, it’s not going anywhere, but I did a third draft and they sent it out to another reader who said, ‘Yes, but.’ And the ‘but’ was that they wanted more of my opinions in the book and I will say that I studiously avoided that because I just…you know it’s the first and only biography I’m ever going to write and I just felt a little uncomfortable with that.

Well, to write the fourth draft I just went away for a couple of weeks by myself, took my material, and said I’m really going to find out what Taylor was about that I can say. I looked into it and realized that what I could say about Taylor he had already said about himself in some of his writings and then I discovered that there was this definite problem between him and his father and that he had this thing about women. And he had these things about nev
er growing up so I drew that conclusion at one point that one of his problems was he couldn’t grow up.

Going to one of things you said about why is it that he didn’t go further in music. He never was educated beyond about two months study of theory and he learned orchestration on his own. You have to keep improving yourself and he did not improve himself in terms of his studies. Copland of course went to France and went through I’m sure an awful lot being at the hands of teachers but ultimately it develops a part of them that they might not even suspect was there. So this is an issue with Taylor. So I decided that one of the things was that he just couldn’t grow up psychologically or musicologically and that’s where he kind of ended himself.

Anyway, that was what they wanted and then they got a fourth reader who said, ‘yes, yes I like it.’ That was a year and half ago.

Molly Sheridan: So was the whole process worth it for you?

James Pegolotti: Oh, absolutely. I will never regret it. It was an education I’d never had before and never will have again, and I’ve had quite a few.

Molly Sheridan: I was going to say, you’re something of a Renaissance man yourself, similar to Taylor really. You’ve picked up quite a few interesting professions along the way.

James Pegolotti: I think that’s very true and I saw some of Taylor in me, there’s no doubt about it and I felt comfortable with him because I could understand in my life what I’ve gone through too, moving from one thing to the other. I always say that teaching has been my key, and in a sense I see this book as a teaching instrument. It’s helping people to realize what radio was all about, what people went through in the ’20s and ’30s that then brought us into the current scene, so for me it was an education and just another way to teach I suppose.

Molly Sheridan: So you’re sure you’re not going to do another one?

James Pegolotti: Oh, god no. This was really fateful, I’m almost convinced of that. You can’t believe how many things had to happen for me to get thrown into this. All these things that came together so I said, ‘Gee, maybe I should write it.’