Category: Cover

Nicolas Collins in conversation with Molly Sheridan
April 25, 2006—11:00 a.m. at Robert Poss’s Studio in New York City
Video presentation by Randy Nordschow

Go ahead: ignore those little warranty-voiding cautions against opening up electronic appliances. (But make sure it’s unplugged first: that rule still stands.)

When I first met composer Nicolas Collins on a rainy Saturday afternoon last April, he had his hand inside a radio with its guts exposed. His book, Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking, had just been published, and he had a crowd gathered for a lecture/demonstration at the Bent Festival in Lower Manhattan. Using his fingers to bridge the circuits inside, the radio on the table in front of him was talking—white noise, bits of broadcasts—a far cry from the usual AM talk-radio banter. The miracle of electromagnetism, suggested Collins, is perhaps the best argument he’s ever heard for the existence of God.

Collins has stripped apart and reconfigured all sorts of gadgets and toys in pursuit of new sounds. Still, he suggests that his resulting compositions do not carry an identifying sonic “Made by Collins” tag. After just ten minutes in his company, however, I think I might hear otherwise even if he does not, because Nic Collins is funny. Both in front of a crowd and the camera, he shows himself to be a charmingly dry and self-deprecating artist, and there is an aspect of this that also tints his sound. Some bit of his wit accompanies even the densest of his textures and shouts out, “Hey, you. Come listen to this!”

Born in New York City in 1954, Collins studied composition with Alvin Lucier at Wesleyan University, where his interest in electronic music extended into messing around with circuitry and outfitting his own instruments. Not that he doesn’t work with traditional players, but his discography is thoroughly peppered with lines such as “for any number of performers with radios and screwdrivers.” I told you he was funny.

Collins, currently the chair of the Department of Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, calls himself a Luddite when it comes to the computer programs most of his students are fluent in. But he offers them the skills to step out from behind a slick piece of code and build a sound world with a soldering iron. “I like to say it’s like being the oldest living Kimono maker,” he says, explaining that what he is teaching is really the “glue technology” that connects computers with the real world. “When there’s a burst of enthusiasm for things Japonais, suddenly they have to dust off these 80-year-old men and women and learn again how to do this thing that for 200 years was an unbroken tradition. This is where you can teach somebody something that they didn’t pick up while editing their own films when they were in the eighth grade.”

—MS

Edited and transcribed by
Molly Sheridan and Lyn Liston

Video presentations by
Randy Nordschow

A special thank you to Julia Kirchhausen and the American Symphony Orchestra League for the use of their conference space.

Get a few people from the new music world in a room together, toss out the word “orchestra,” and the talk will quickly take a turn towards eye rolling, deep sighs, and “I wish” statements. Funny thing is, try doing the same thing with a room full of orchestra managers and the phrase “new music,” and things will pretty much go the same way. So wait a minute—composers want successful performances of new work; orchestras want the same thing. What is the big problem?

Well, of course, real life isn’t quite as neat as congenial cocktail-party conversations at music industry conferences and post-concert receptions might sometimes suggest. Sure, we all want to hear great performances, but what’s the best way to foster them? How should a composer and new work fit into the ecology of the orchestra these days? You only need to utter the phrase “promotional recording” to see just how far apart we are on some key issues. But has anyone ever looked closely at what the real barriers between the various constituencies are so we can drag them off the road already?

With such a goal in mind, NewMusicBox asked representatives of the major players in the equation to sit down together and lay their cards on the table. In the course of a two-hour debate, the conversation delved into a number of areas spanning a wide range of issues that impact orchestras presenting new work by living composers. Our hope is that we can learn from the successes and the challenges outlined during this lively discussion and find ways we can work together to solve common concerns. In the end, no one denies that we want performances of new work that composers, musicians, and their audiences will look towards with pride and satisfaction. Hopefully, this conversation arms us with an understanding of the perspectives in play and prepares us to reach out to one another so that together we can do just that.

—MS

Today’s panel includes:

• Christopher Theofanidis, an award-winning composer and professor of composition at the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the Juilliard School in New York City;
• David Lennon, president of New York City’s Local 802 AFM;
• Jennifer Bilfield, president of Boosey & Hawkes Inc., one of the larger publishers of music in today’s orchestral environment;
• Henry Fogel, president of the American Symphony Orchestra League and former president of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra;
• Robert Levine, principal violist of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and also president of the Milwaukee Local 8 of the American Federation of Musicians; and
• Gerard Schwarz, music director of the Seattle Symphony and principal conductor for the Eastern Music Festival in North Carolina.

I’m Drew McManus, the moderator for this discussion. I’m the author of the weblog Adaptistration, which covers orchestra issues, and I am also an orchestra industry consultant. The discussion today is going to examine how new music is incorporated into the orchestra landscape, where the problems are, and how we might work together to solve them.

Starting Points: Or, hey…how did we get here?

McManus: Before we really dive in to what the specific issues are, we’re going to do just a quick overview of what the actual process is—how a piece of music gets from the composer’s pen to the music director and the musicians presenting it as a piece of art. Chris, could you walk us through that process?

Theofanidis: Sure. Part of it depends on when you’re talking about in a composer’s career—if they’re just starting out or are a little bit further down the road. Typically, now, I receive a phone call from an artistic director or from an administrator who says they would like to commission a piece, and they want it to be of a certain length and also approximately the size of the group, with some flexibility to add a couple of players here and there, depending on what the occasion is. I come up with a concept for the form and shape of it based on what the orchestra is looking for. Every once in a while it happens that a group will say, “What would you like to do?” When you get to that stage, where you can really do what you want to do, it’s a wonderful thing, but for a long time it’s not quite like that, and getting to that point has been a kind of interesting process.

Then of course they send a contract back and forth. I think the best way for a composer to deal with an orchestra is to be the artistic collaborator, so my brother, who is a lawyer, handles all the contractual things on my behalf. We have certain points that I try to express through him to the orchestra. Then when that’s all settled, a lot of it is just kind of technical back and forth. I do a short score, and then when I get to an orchestration phase, I usually am in touch with the librarian about specifics. Sometimes the librarians prefer now to have Finale or Sibelius files sent directly rather than having composers do all the parts themselves.

McManus: Jenny, how does the publisher work with this? He’s talking about moving the parts to the orchestra and back from his own computer. At what point does the publisher get involved?

Bilfield: I was very happy to hear that you do go through this agreement process with the orchestra with someone working between you. It is very, very difficult for composers to advocate on their own behalf when the business terms are being agreed. There are a number of wonderful advisors and attorneys who can make sure that what a composer is committing to and what the orchestra is requiring are really on the same page. I find a number of younger composers who are eager to have their first orchestral work performed will not completely take on board the commitments that they’re making and in their eagerness may have a rocky start at the beginning of a new relationship.

Where the publisher would begin to be involved in terms of the delivery of materials really does depend upon the requirements articulated in the agreement and the composer’s work habits. In many cases, of course, the composer isn’t necessarily able to render the piece exactly on schedule, and that’s when our editors work their hardest to make sure that they have the infrastructure and the team to deliver the materials as close to the delivery time as possible. Many orchestras have in their contracts an articulated requirement for materials—they need them 12 weeks in advance—and it is a very sensitive point when a composer might not sort of feel the muse on schedule. So that’s when we work very hard with the librarians, with the administrators, and with the orchestra managers to not lose a performance or to at least manage the awkwardness of having to learn a new piece as it’s put on the music stands.

McManus: Well, Henry, you have to be able to add something good here. From an administrator’s point of view, how do you deal with a situation where maybe there are some bumps in the road getting a piece that you’ve commissioned actually in the hall and on the stands?

Fogel: To some degree that will depend on the conductor. George Solti, one of the great conductors of the world, defined himself as a very slow learner, and if a score that he commissioned came in late, we would postpone it a year. I’ve always felt as an administrator that it’s more important to play the piece than it is to play the piece on the date you first said you were going to play the piece. If you have a composer who you know is habitually late—example, Notations by Pierre Boulez—late by periods of 10 or 12 years, you simply make an agreement with the composer to not publish a date for a performance until you have a score in your hands.

But you have to negotiate with the conductor and at a certain point with the players. And even that depends a little bit on how hard the piece is. Musical languages and grammars are all over the place, and some things are much harder for musicians to learn than others. And if the orchestra committee comes to the administration and says, look, we can’t do it, as a manager I would accept that. I accept that orchestra members are professionals, and if they say we’ve talked to our colleagues and we don’t think we can do this piece justice, we put it off. That’s not usually the end of the world.

McManus: What about the cost issue? Let’s say the music director comes to you and says it’s going to take more time than we originally thought, which means more rehearsals, which means higher expense. If you’ve got a budget you’ve got to stay in, do you shelve it, put it off for a while, or just find the money?

Fogel: That, too, depends a lot, frankly, on the size of the orchestra. An extra rehearsal or two for the Chicago Symphony is a much tinier percentage of the budget than an extra rehearsal or two for, say, the Omaha Symphony, which may only give ten concerts a year. We would find the money in Chicago. If the cost is manageable without threatening the orchestra, I think you try to undertake it. If the cost will have a significant impact on the budget, then I think you have to postpone it and plan for it a year later.

You also get pieces sometimes that are completely different from the requirement you set out. We asked once for a 20-minute piece from Ralph Shapey and got a 62-minute piece, and that means, of course, completely changing the concert, because the rest of the program was timed to go with a 20-minute commission.

Schwarz: But you did the 62-minute piece eventually?

Fogel: We did, partly because it was a joint commission with the University of Chicago where Ralph was the composer for the joint centennials of the two organizations. I would say in another situation, if we asked for a 20-minute piece and got a 62-minute piece, we would probably say no.

McManus: Gerry, Henry had just mentioned the willingness of the music director to be willing to work in a situation like that. In a music director’s schedule, where you’re traveling and not always around and sometimes options are very limited, what do you do?

Schwarz: Well, I think Henry covered it very well. I’m not like George Solti, I’m a quick learner, and I digest lots of new music. The greater concern for me would be giving the players the opportunity to practice the parts. In our particular contract in Seattle, the players have to have the music two weeks in advance. That’s a requirement. There are weeks when you’re doing the Chamber Symphony of John Adams, which is very difficult, and that’s the time that they’re going to have to spend weeks in advance practicing. The great orchestral players understand that, so the weeks when they’re doing all Beethoven, they’re preparing for something else. And, as Henry said, what you end up doing as a music director is you try to program repertoire so that they have that opportunity.

My question to Henry about Ralph Shapey—that’s very problematic. You go to a great composer like Ralph Shapey and say [you want a] 20-minute piece, you pick 20 minutes for lots of reasons. Among them is the audience. Does the audience want to hear, are they capable of hearing, and digesting, and enjoying this 62-minute piece of Ralph Shapey’s. If I went to Henry and said this is going to be a 62-minute piece of Ralph’s, he would probably take a breath and wonder whether we should ever do it, at all. But once you get it, then the question is, if you don’t do it, think of the press that you would get—”Chicago Symphony refuses to do new work of Ralph Shapey because it’s too long.”

Fogel: Drew, you keep referring to music directors, but remember that in many orchestras more than half the concerts, especially at large orchestras, are done by guest conductors, and the whole set of problems can be very different. If it’s your music director, he can shift rehearsals around or change programming. If a guest conductor is the person doing the new piece, and that’s the only week he’s with you, that presents a completely different and more problematic situation, frankly, and it’s often the case.

McManus: Well, Robert, there are between 60 and 100 players in a symphony orchestra. A hundred people don’t show up at the manager’s door and say we’ve got problems. How does it work if the players have trouble with the music that they’re able to express a concern to a conductor, a music director, or an artistic manager?

Levine: Well, I have to say, I’ve personally never seen that happen, although I can believe it does. Most orchestras have not only an orchestra committee that does union-type stuff but [also] an artistic liaison committee. Presumably, if I had a concern about a piece that was coming up that looked like it was just flat-out impossible, I would take it to them. But the fact is I think it’s hard for musicians to know in advance, because they may know that their part is impossible—frankly there are a lot of parts that are pretty much impossible, including things in Wagner and Strauss—but they don’t really matter because in context they work. Without knowing what the context is, you don’t know whether this impossibility is something you need to drop dead over or something you’re just going to be able to fake your way through.

McManus: And along those lines, what happens when the entire ensemble gets together and you start to discover just physical mistakes in the part—just wrong notes or tempo changes are marked incorrectly?

Schwarz: The world’s changed a lot in that way. Nowadays, because of Finale and Sibelius and the meticulous work that composers do and that librarians do, we rarely find many mistakes. It’s really a lot different than it once was when composers were doing it by hand or getting their friends to help them. What’s interesting is that if the orchestra doesn’t like a piece—you do, say, a 10-minute piece, and they find three or four mistakes—they’ll complain to me. They’ll say, god, the piece is full of mistakes. If they like the piece, you’ll never hear a word about it.

McManus: What about that point you had made, Robert, about “I can go to the composer and ask him what he meant.” As a composer, how much contact do you get to have with the players?

Theofanidis: That’s a big issue, actually. It really depends on the good will of the conductor in a lot of ways. There’s a definite psychology to the rapport that the orchestra has with the composer and the way that the information from the composer is transmitted to the orchestra. I would never assume that I was ever going to speak directly to an orchestra. I always defer to the conductor and wait until the maestro actually turns and says something to me, if they want me to engage the orchestra. If they don’t, I usually take notes and pass that on after the rehearsal if it’s of use and kind of stay out of the way until told otherwise, basically. The players sometimes will come out and ask a question on the break or something like that. It really depends. Oftentimes they just raise their hand, and if there’s a problem it can actually bring the rehearsal to a grinding halt over a small detail. And that goes to the issue of the importance of getting everything just right the first time around.

Fogel: Robert used a phrase in an earlier comment that I think relates here, too—that it’s not just a question of the conductor but the culture of organization, the culture of the orchestra. I know that in Chicago the culture was to try to encourage composers to speak to the members of the orchestra directly. So I think that sometimes it’s an institutional culture question and not even a conductor question.

McManus: Have a composer/musician play date.

Bilfield: When we’re talking about a brand new score, there isn’t a lot of erroneous information running around in the world. When we start to talk about some of the difficulties of the new works in a rehearsal setting, it’s when there are a lot of sets of parts out in the world, there are errata sheets circulating around. The conductor has a score from two years ago when they first looked at it and marked it up. Then the publisher sends a set of parts that have been corrected. Making sure that whoever is taking care of the conductor’s library has the most recent set of corrections, if it’s not a premiere, I think, will ensure that subsequent performances don’t grind to a halt. And I think that’s where, more than the premiere, a lot of the challenges arise.

Schwarz: That’s so true. As a conductor you get the situation where you do a premiere of a piece. You’ve worked very hard on it. Lots of ideas, put the bowings in the string parts, I mean, whatever you do. And then the composer makes a few little changes and the publisher decides that they have to incorporate the changes, of course, and they send you all new material. And that’s happened to me so many times where I say, well, can I have the old material so we can put the bowings in. No, the old parts have been destroyed, and we have to redo everything again. It hasn’t happened once—that probably has happened to me 30 times.

Bilfield: And that’s because in everyone’s paranoia to just have things marry up, there is more of a willingness to sacrifice the details that the original orchestra puts in. But it is, it’s a huge loss when an orchestra and a conductor have invested that much time in it.

As a publisher running a rental library, you know, you can imagine that we have a large number of orchestras that want the bowings of the orchestras that have gone before them and will ask for the St. Louis Symphony’s parts or the Philharmonic’s parts or whatever, and an equal number want a completely clean slate. And then when the materials actually degrade and need to be replaced over time because they are falling apart, just regular library maintenance will mean that those are taken out of commission. I know that certain meticulous librarians will make a copy of the principals’ part so that they have the record if they do the work again.

Schwarz: I think there’s another issue here. There are some composers who you put the music on the stand—boom, it’s just the way they wanted it. And there are other composers who scratch out and change and make adjustments. I mean, it’s a living art form. If a composer, some of them can just imagine everything and that’s great. Some can’t, and that’s okay, too.

Bilfield: The worst thing in the world for a new piece is a composer and an orchestra to have a bad first experience with each other and to do a performance that everyone feels is compromised by whatever logistical or artistic disconnect there might be. A number of orchestras who haven’t worked with a composer before will either play an existing piece, or they’ll ask for the piece a year ahead of time so that they can actually run it and see if there are any issues that need to be addressed. Then the following year can be spent getting the materials in shape, re-editing the piece, and, in some cases, we’ve found that when this is done the composer completely re-writes the piece, it’s a completely new set of parts and it’s a brand new piece, but everyone is happier with it and they learned something in the process.

Fogel: That’s an interesting idea because opera does have the concept of workshopping, and we don’t have that in our world. And it’s too bad.

Theofanidis: The residency that I did in 1994 with the California Symphony in the Bay Area allowed me to do just that. I worked with the orchestra for three sessions prior to the actual performance—three times! It was the best possible training, and it’s something that most of the conservatories, if you’re lucky, in your entire graduate program you have one reading session that lasts 40 minutes. That’s it. And from that tape you have to convince conductors that it’s worth taking a chance on you in this orchestral arena, and then you get the appropriate-sized scale work, and you don’t have a lot of chances to do revisions.

Schwarz: But it’s interesting, it’s not only young composers. For our 100th anniversary in Seattle we did a new piece of John Harbison’s, a new symphony. A fabulous piece, and I’ve known John for many years and I initiated the commission. So the contract came and he wanted a rehearsal six months in advance, and then he wanted five rehearsals before the performance, including one the prior week. And so I called him and said, “John, you know we’ve worked together a lot. Have I ever not given a great performance of a piece?” And what was he going to say? Of course he says no. I said, “Well, you have to trust me. I guarantee that this will be a great performance in our normal schedule. It’s an easy program other than your symphony, and we know your language. We’ve played a piece of yours every year. It will be great.” He said, “I’ve had so many bad experiences with orchestras that even though I trust you, Gerry, and I think you’re great, this is my deal. You want my symphony? This is what you have to do.” We did it. I loved it. I mean, the fact is when we did the premiere it didn’t feel like a premiere, it felt like a piece we’d been playing a lot, so one could say you lost the edge of the premiere or one can say you represented the piece in an even better way. But he was successful in getting it done. If I had asked for that as a music director, I go to the manager and say I need an extra rehearsal and I want to pre-rehearse it in September and we’re doing it in May, the manager would say you’re out if your mind.

Fogel: He got that in part because he was John Harbison and not a young, unknown composer. Ironically, it might be the young unknown composer who needed it more.

Lennon: Well, one of the things I’m struck by is this separation that exists between the players and the composers. As a union president, I do hear from composers, and I hear from them individually. And of course the complaints I get or the concerns that are expressed to me is that our involvement, our piece of the puzzle here, kind of happens separate and outside the whole process you’re talking about, but certainly will impact them. I’m already thinking as we’re having this discussion that these kinds of discussions should not be absent from the bargaining table. I think that composers, they come to us and basically the main thing they want [to understand] is how can I have more opportunities to have my work heard and what exists currently in the agreements that may be prohibitive to that? How can the union help? And quite frankly it’s a little late hearing it at the endgame. On the front end of that conversation is when we should be having these discussions. And I think that that’s something all of us should look toward.

Levine: But I think it’s important to recognize that the primary obstacle to getting new music in orchestras, played by orchestras, recorded by orchestras, is not the orchestra, is not the musicians. That’s not to say I know what the primary obstacle is and that’s not to say that there aren’t obstacles there, but that’s not the major problem.

Fogel: I think if you look at programming of orchestras, particularly in the last 15 or 20 years, I don’t know that it’s fair to say that getting new music programmed is a universal problem. There are some orchestras that program a great deal of it. For me, one of the biggest problems is getting a wider range of new music programmed or more new music programmed is something I said a little bit earlier—this enormous difference in vocabulary. We’re just coming out of a era now—and I think you’re going to agree with this Gerry, because I know where your tastes lie, and they’re very similar to mine—composers are writing who actually say I want the audience to like this and I’m writing for an audience that is a traditional symphony audience. Those composers for a long period of time where demeaned by a major part of the music establishment. And there was a very strong emphasis, underlined by a constituency that I wish where in this discussion but isn’t—the music critic constituency— where it seemed to me the general thrust was I, the critic, have to show that I’m smarter than my readers, so I like this music, whatever style, even if most of the audience didn’t. And I can tell you, when that kind of music was programmed, as an administrator I knew what my mail was going to be. I had in my computer file at the Chicago Symphony a pre-written letter on the importance of us continuing to do new music by living composers, but I think that distance that developed between composers and public not only made it harder, but, frankly, I have to say, legitimately made it harder for the music to be programmed. Prior to World War I, no composer wrote not caring what the public thought. Even those who had a problem, like Mahler, resented that problem; they never would have said I’m writing for myself and I don’t care what the public thinks. And I think that was a very unhealthy period, frankly, and I do think we’re coming out of it now.

Schwarz: I know we’re coming out of it. You’re absolutely right.

Fogel: And I think that’s also what’s going to make it easier to program new music when people who support our orchestras by going to them hear a new piece and say, I kind of like that.

McManus: Jenny, you’ve been wanting to jump in.

Bilfield: Yeah, you know, I think it’s true and it’s not, and it doesn’t apply only to composers, but when you make one piece of the equation invisible by not having it part of the community, visible from the stage, then it’s off the radar, and it’s a signal that’s sent, it’s a tacit assumption that this is not important to us—we’re not going to show it to you—so it can be marginalized and compartmentalized. The other thing that is so important and as a publisher, we see all the different ways orchestras involve and celebrate composers and torture composers around the world, when there’s a music director and an administration that is sincerely and transparently passionate about any sort of programming they’re doing, whether it’s a Mozart festival or a brand new piece—and Gerry is this personified—if the audience trusts the music director, and they trust the institution as artistic leaders in the community, then they will go to all those gnarly places simply because they rely and trust the artistic leaders in their community. And when someone is saying, as you have with so many composers, not only am I going to do this one symphony, I’m going to do all the symphonies of David Diamond. And I’m going to record them, and I’m going to bring them back. And the audience understands that this isn’t just a marginal piece that’s sort of a bon-bon, but this is part of the ecology of an orchestra. Then you can’t compartmentalize it, you can’t put it away because it’s an organic piece of the institution. And that’s where it works. When it’s presented simply because it’s an important composer, it’s an anniversary—we insert it, we get a grant—that’s where it’s easy to dismiss it; it’s a new music fly-by and that isn’t what’s going to strengthen the relationship. It’s going to reinforce all of the bad will and the distance.

My perception is that it takes a great deal of institutional time and institutional commitment to create these meaningful integrations and relationships. But where it’s been done, having just been back from the LA Philharmonic, where every single concert was sold out for the minimalism festival and James Levine speaking from the stage about a new commission of Elliott Carter’s and how he put the program together—even some of the most difficult music, when there’s excitement and context, people will trust. They’ll go along for the ride, and they’ll have a strong opinion.

Fogel: You have just added an important element which is what I fear doesn’t always happen, and to be perfectly candid, I couldn’t always make it happen in Chicago. I think the institution, including the conductor, have to understand and accept that some music needs help. When you mentioned James Levine speaking about Elliott Carter. There’s no question for the bulk of people who are normal symphony subscribers—now we’re not talking about putting Carter on a new music festival but in front of an audience that is a traditional audience—that music does need to be explained whether we or Elliott or anybody likes to admit that. And when that’s done, and when a conductor says here’s what I love about this piece and why I’m doing it—and preferably they don’t talk about the resolution on the harmonic 7th and the retrograde inversion of the secondary fugue theme, but they actually talk from the heart about why this piece is on this program—it can make an enormous difference. When they don’t, and you just put it in there, to an audience that thinks of Bartók as modern music, and they don’t have a grounding in that grammar, you can actually hurt.

Levine: Pieces that the audience doesn’t know are always a hard sell. How often have you heard the Vaughn Williams Ninth in concert? The answer is basically never, or maybe once. It’s a great piece, but the audience doesn’t know it. And even people that like Vaughn Williams aren’t going to get it the first time around, no matter what the conductor says.

Schwarz: You can talk to the audience and they can be polite enough to stick around, but we do a piece of yours [gestures to Chris], the audience doesn’t know who you are, let’s say. They’ve never heard your music before, they don’t know your language. It takes them a while to even get into what you’re thinking musically. I think the key really is trust and consistency. It means you can’t do everybody; it means you have to pick three or four and work with those people. Then you do a festival, and you include everybody.

For years I’ve been simultaneously eager and reluctant to speak to Ned Rorem. I’ve always been somewhat intimidated by him. And it’s not just because of his celebrated propensity for biting comments.

For people who are equally drawn to composing music and writing words, there are very few role models: Paul Bowles, Anthony Burgess, John Cage, perhaps a handful of others, and Ned Rorem. While he’s most frequently praised for his gifts as a composer of art songs, he has been an equally prolific composer of instrumental music from string quartets to symphonies and a remarkable collection of concertos for various instruments which redefine concerto form. As an author, he is always engaging and immediate. Words seem to flow effortlessly from him. Not just in his famously candid diaries, but also in his many provocative essays about music.

I’ve met him numerous times at various premieres and receptions over the years, each time reintroducing myself and seeing if our brief conversations could eventually lead to a more substantive one on videotape that could appear in NewMusicBox. At some point, I had almost given up hope that it would ever happen. Then Ned Rorem’s opera Our Town received its world premiere performances in Bloomington, Indiana, to seeming universal acclaim. (Our Town will be presented this summer by the Lake George Opera—July 1, 5, and 9—and at Aspen’s Wheeler Opera House—July 31 and August 2.) Rorem has been at the top of his form and perhaps more approachable than ever before as a result. So I gave it a try.

I spent about an hour talking with Rorem about his recent triumphs, as well as some of his lifelong aesthetic concerns—creating viable vocal music sung in English, the meaning of music, tonality. Inevitably, some of his biting comments found their way into our talk—fans of Bob Dylan or Oprah beware. But I left unscathed and perhaps an even bigger fan than I had ever been.

***

Frank J. Oteri: Even though so much of your writing concerns music, you’ve written so many books and have given so many talks that the manipulation of language has taken on its own separate career for you, separate and apart from being a composer.

Ned Rorem: I’ve been a composer all my life; I have also written several things. Europeans are much less specialized than Americans; partly because they have to earn a living. A doctor will treat your scalp as well as your corns or your liver. But here you have to go down the hall to another doctor. Or you’ll go to a party and only see doctors; you don’t see lawyers and merchants. I’m European in that I’m not a specialist. My first book, well, somebody I met read my diary. He worked as an editor at Brasiliers. He took my diary and submitted it and they published it immediately. I didn’t paper my walls with rejection slips. There were several other diaries published immediately by the same publisher. When I realized that what I was going to write would be published I became a little bit more responsible and then started writing things that weren’t just about my own ego, like these books on music. I suppose everything is ego. People ask, “Do you set your own words to music?” The answer is no because I feel that whatever my music may be worth, the words I select to put to music are pretty good. The kind of writing I do is completely unsingable. Years ago, I once did a text that I set to music. It’s called The Robbers. I showed it Marc Blitzstein and he said, “Oh Jesus, you’ve gotten trapped in libretto-land.” He kept the score overnight and changed every word of it without changing a note of the music. I had written things like “Oh that thou wert” kind of bullshit. Marc translated it from English into English, which is how it’s [now] done. He made it less antique. So I don’t set my words to music. If I were to, I could probably write an opera as an adaptation of something, but I certainly don’t write poetry.

FJO: In terms of the amounts of time you spend on writing versus composing, how does it carve up for you?

NR: People always ask that, and let’s put it this way: I’m never not composing, even as I sit hear and talk to you or lie in bed at night with my insomnia. Since Our Town, I’ve written two choral pieces—maybe three, I forget, and I’m supposed to do a fourth one. After that I don’t know what I’ll do. I don’t know if I have it in me to write another opera. Another book is going to come out in several months which I just scraped together: I put a bunch of scraps together, and then the other half is pre-published articles from magazines mainly on music. But I have no idea what another book would be.

FJO: How long will an idea germinate in you for a piece of music or a piece of writing?

NR: I don’t know.

FJO: How about Our Town?

NR: If I’m doing an opera, then I know where I’m going and how it’s going to end before I’ve even begun. If I’m writing a flute concerto, I certainly don’t get ideas for snare drums. I’m professional, not inspirational. I don’t especially believe in inspiration. Everyone’s inspired but only professionals know how to put it together and make it transferable from the artist to the general public.

FJO: But you did just say that you have ideas as we’re talking now or in the middle of the night when you have insomnia. So it’s not like you allot a specific time, say between 9:00 a.m. and noon, for composing a specific number of measures of music.

NR: No, sometimes I’ll write down a theme or a series of notes, and it can be pretty lousy the next day; the same with words.

If I died today, I think I’ve said everything I’ve had to say. But who knows what tomorrow will bring. I’m not ashamed of what I’ve done, and I think it’s been a fairly wide scope, at least from my perspective.

FJO: It’s a remarkably wide scope.

NR: Well, I guess. I don’t know that a wide scope is necessarily admirable or not. Fauré didn’t have a particularly wide scope, or Kafka. But it’s what you say within the scope and how it’s said. Like the person who wrote that book that Oprah was critical of. I think it’s perfectly fine; it’s a new form. But I haven’t read the book. And I think Oprah’s a big bore.

FJO: But maybe if we could get some contemporary composers on Oprah, more people would be aware of them.

NR: Or on Charlie Rose for that matter. Oprah wouldn’t know what we’re talking about, but Charley Rose has had artists but almost always interpretive artists. For the first time ever in history, the performer—the interpreter—is the star. A composer of the same age and perhaps reputation as a given performer earns about a twentieth of what the performer makes. Itzhak Perlman lives across the street. He makes in one evening what I make in a year, and he does that by playing Mendelssohn and standard classics. That began about a hundred years ago for financial reasons.

I wrote a letter to the editor [in response to] a review of The Pajama Game yesterday, and said, “This review, which is three long columns, raves about every one of the performers: the set designer, this and that, and the singers. [But there’s] not one word about who composed the music or lyrics.” And I gave the names. I said, “For the record, you should review these people.” [Charlie Rose] talks to Yo-Yo Ma, for example, about creativity. But he’s not a creator. People always use that word creativity as though it was some magic thing. Just recently I read some place that “a concert by Yo-Yo Ma is a wonderful dream of creativity.” But it’s not; it’s simply a misuse of words. Like the 9/11 tragedy: it’s not a tragedy according to Aristotle; it’s a calamity.

FJO: This all raises interesting questions about why someone would even want to be a composer. In an essay “Vocabulary” you wrote decades ago, you described being a composer the way someone would describe race or sexual orientation. It seemed almost as involuntary a choice.

NR: I believe that. I’m five things: I’m homosexual and alcoholic (a recovered alcoholic – I haven’t had a drink of any sort in 34 years). I’m also an atheist, and a pacifist, totally atheist and totally pacifist. And I’m a composer. That’s the only one that’s problematic; people don’t know what you’re talking about when you say you’re a composer. But you are a composer or you aren’t, and you know that pretty early.

They asked me to come up to Buffalo to teach composition, six lectures followed by concerts. And I said “I don’t know anything about music except how to write it.” But I sat down and decided to [talk] about what I did know about: writing songs, setting words to music, how it feels to hear your orchestration. Each lecture took about a half an hour and all of the concerts were contemporary music, though not all American. Then I became a very excellent teacher: I knew everything; I knew all the answers. Then I was at Curtis for twenty years and the longer I stayed, the less I knew. I don’t know how to teach composition; I don’t know what it means. What it means is to decide who the person is and then help him or her (and there’s almost as many hers now). You can tell where you think they’re going.

At the American Academy every year, seven of us who are very different as people judge those who have submitted scores for prizes. We listen to 80 different pieces in 2 days with a fairly good, catered lunch. I never read the recommendations because it’s always the same thing: “So-and-so is this-and-that.” I judge by the music. We give every one about eight minutes, maybe ten minutes, and they have two pieces. People meander a lot and the music—most of the time—doesn’t get down to business. Or if they start an orchestral piece with a solo cello, you say, “When is that solo cello going to shut up?” If they don’t say something in the first minute or two, we tell the person over at the machine, “Go on to the next piece, please.” You get very blasé and very hard to please in this thing. One piece in 15 is vocal. These are all American composers, but the text for these things is usually Rilke or maybe Emily Dickinson or Whitman. [It’s] partly [because they’re] public domain, but partly it’s as if there were no other texts besides Whitman and Emily Dickinson. And the American singers, who aren’t going to be making it in opera anyway so should be trying to revive the song recital, can’t sing in their own language. They all learn to sing very well in German and Italian, and they all give concerts of Hugo Wolf. But if it’s in English, they’ll role their R’s Italian style or they’ll sing cute, encore-type pieces.

FJO: Might it be that singers not being able to sing in their own language is a result of some aspects of vocal training in classical music?

NR: Well, if all the teachers are always old ladies from Italy at Curtis, or from Germany—I don’t know if it’s still that way, but it was when I was in school—they learn to sing impeccably Hugo Wolf, Schubert, Schumann. If I were a singing teacher, I’d say to the singers, “I don’t care how beautiful your voice is if I can’t understand the words.” Go on the principle that you have the best voice in the world, and then think 90 percent about the words. In every language, get it out the way the best singers do. If you’re singing in your own language, you know what you’re singing about, which can be embarrassing, and it’s very revealing. And singers, more than any other soloists, deal with an audience and look at the person who is listening. They have to take off their glasses to commune with the people in the audience.

FJO: You’ve pretty much only set the English language.

NR: I have done a few French songs, but I excuse that because I, first of all, lived in France for many years, and I wrote these mainly in France. But of the four or five hundred songs, 20 are in French. And I think [there’s] some Latin choral music. If we don’t create our own literature, no one is going to do it for us.

Music doesn’t mean anything. Nobody can prove that it has any meaning the way literature does. Literature always means something, so does painting. Music doesn’t mean things like: Tuesday, or Jonathan, or pineapple. It doesn’t even mean things like death or wind. It can do onomatopoeiatic imitations of these things but those are conventions. Sadness wasn’t in the minor mode four hundred years ago. Vocal music does mean something, but it only means what the words tell you. So, I’d say to a class, for next Tuesday we’re all going to set the same poem to music. And since the poet never asked for it to be set to music, who am I to say it must be this or that. The only two rules I had are: Don’t repeat words the poet hasn’t repeated and try to keep it pretty much at the speed of speech so we can understand it. I never give value judgments but I might say it’s interesting how John put the climax on this word and Jennifer put it on that word, or Eleanor did it slow and Peter did it fast. There’s no one inevitable way. I even wrote a song cycle of 18 songs on 9 poems, each one set to music twice.

FJO: Might this whole notion of music not having a discernable meaning be the explanation for why most people don’t have a clue about what being a composer is, as opposed to the other four things you are?

NR: Everyone knows what being gay is because everyone has tried to pretend they were to see what it feels like. And everyone knows what an alcoholic is which I think is ingrained; I think you’re born that way. Atheism is a conviction that comes from a certain experience. And so is pacifism. I was raised a Quaker, in the Society of Friends. My mother’s brother had been killed in the First World War, and she never got over it. My parents decided to join a group, not for reasons of God but for reasons of pacifism. So I think all war is bad under any circumstances. As for music’s meaning, Mendelssohn said it’s not too vague for words, it’s too precise for words. But then he didn’t define precise.

FJO: I was very excited when the disc of your symphonies came out on Naxos. I had no idea you wrote symphonies; I was too young to have heard your third when it was popular and the first two were not known at all. You’ve written a lot of non-vocal music for orchestra since then, but you never again used the name “symphony.” Considering your observations about music not having any meaning, I wonder what attaching such an abstract name to a work means to you and what made you stop using the term.

NR: I think I wrote a symphony in order to have written a symphony; that would be the first one. Back then I didn’t think in terms of abstraction; I didn’t know what it meant back in those days. I’ve written a lot of big abstract orchestral works that do have descriptive titles like Sunday Morning; it’s a suite [of movements] all with titles from a Wallace Stevens poem. In many, many pieces without voices, like the Fourth String Quartet, for example, it’s in eight or ten movements and each of them are named after a Picasso picture because that amuses me. The Debussy preludes all have very illustrative titles but many of them were tacked on after the fact. A composer likes to give titles to his pieces because he knows if he doesn’t nobody else will. Whereas painters will call a picture Abstraction No. 2 but there is no abstract painting, even Jackson Pollock. Just like when you look at a cloud, the cloud becomes a camel. You can always find a donkey’s head there or a leg.

FJO: Is that the equivalent of tonality in painting then?

NR: You can’t compare the arts at all, even though people do it all the time. If the arts were all like each other, we’d only need one art. A lot of times the poets I’ve set to music, if they’re alive, are mildly flattered, but they don’t know why I bother. Elizabeth Bishop, for example. I think I corresponded with her from 1952 until she died in the ’70s. She’d send me poems and I set several of her poems to music. And one was published with a cover by Cocteau—actually it’s on the wall over there—and she was thrilled to be immortalized by Cocteau. Then I sent her a recording of the song. It was very touching, her letter about trying to tell me she liked it even though she didn’t know what it was. “Well, maybe it should have been slower. Maybe it should have been higher. Maybe it should have been sung by a man.” Well, let her write her own songs. But I can sympathize. She had heard her own “music” when she wrote the thing and mine is by definition not that. The song is a third thing, and it doesn’t belong to her any longer. Other poets who think of themselves as musical who write poems for composers, usually the poems are no good. They’re full of vowels because they think composers like to rhyme June with moon. The arts are not the same thing. And there’s a sort of bastardness about songwriting, to take something that already exists and breed it with something else. But that’s healthy.

FJO: Of course, operas are the highest form of that. In the two full-length operas that you’ve done, you’ve taken pre-existing plays—Miss Julie and Our Town—both of which are acknowledged classics of the theatre, and turned them into operas. And your opera Our Town is remarkably faithful to Thornton Wilder’s play.

NR: Sandy McClatchy made the libretto of this. Looking at it, I was very pleased. I almost didn’t go because I was feeling funny for a long time. But I did go. I forced myself, and I’m awfully glad I did. They rehearsed it, and it was very good. The orchestra sounded marvelous; they didn’t make any mistakes. It’s very unflashy, no percussion. I sat in the audience as though I were just a general auditor.

FJO: Certainly people knew you had written it.

NR: They treated me like Greta Garbo. It’s a very good school. They had two casts. For the [role of the] Stage Manager, one of them was black, which was O.K. but not quite O.K., but he had a better voice than the other one.

FJO: This is the tricky thing with a play that’s so well known. Of course anyone could look right for the part in a new work. What’s right is whatever you want to be right since it’s your work. But everyone has associations with how people looked in the original production. Everyone is walking in with assumptions of what it is supposed to look like.

NR: Of course.

FJO: When André Previn did an opera based on A Streetcar Named Desire, every one was talking about whether or not Rodney Gilfry looked enough like Stanley Kowalski when they were really wondering how much he looked like Marlon Brando who played the role in the movie.

NR: It has to be a third thing. It’s terribly dangerous. I don’t know if I would have written Our Town if I wasn’t commissioned to write it, and it’s going to get a lot of performances. People have said, “How does Ned think he can improve on the original?” I’m not trying to improve it anymore than Verdi was improving on Shakespeare when he did Otello.

FJO: Our Town was a period piece even when it was written in the ’40s. It was about an era that was no more even back then. Revisiting it now in an opera, 100 years after the action takes place, is like going through a time portal. What does a piece like Our Town say to a 21st century, post 9/11 America that’s in the middle of a war?

NR: Albeit people can go to the opera now and be very touched by Puccini. And actually, 9/11 is no more theatrical than Socrates’s or Euripides’s plays, or Lysistrata.

FJO: So what in your estimation is the role of an artist, a composer, in terms of reshaping the language vs. maintaining the language of his or her art?

NR: I don’t do things because I’m supposed to do them; I do them because I want to do them. I’m not sure before the 18th century that the composer was interested in being new, having his own language. He spoke his own language with his personal vocabulary. Anybody can be a perfect composer, but that doesn’t mean that what they’re saying is communicable. You can’t teach it, but you can teach technique to everybody. So, I don’t think there is a role or responsibility that we have to write this kind of music. I think that’s dangerous. Then—I think it’s in yesterday’s Times—there is a big article about, “What is American painting?” They said the same thing about American music. Virgil Thomson said, “It’s very easy to write American music. All you have to do is have an American passport and write any kind of music you want.” Which is the way I feel. If there’s something American about it, it comes in spite of yourself. It doesn’t mean using Kentucky folk songs, like Appalachian Spring, because that’s mainly more Copland than it is American. And he invented what is the American sound. The American sound is Copland rather than folk songs. And certain composers, like Poulenc, wrote their own folk music. And Poulenc is immediately identifiable as Poulenc because of that element that can’t be defined. You always know Poulenc when you hear it. There’s a lot of Ravel in it, but still, it’s very different from Ravel.

FJO: And I would dare say that I know your music when I hear it.

NR: Do you really? That’s nice to hear.

FJO: There’s recently been a big debate about whether or not there’s a difference between “Uptown” and “Downtown” music. It reminds me a bit of your old dichotomy between French and German music (which similarly transcends geographical borders) as well as the notion of there being a distinction between European and American influences or between high and low culture. Do you think there is still a value in sustaining any of these polarities?

NR: It’s much more disparate than it used to be. It’s 99 percent pop music of one sort or another and 1 percent serious classical music, for lack of a better term. Of that classical music, which is mostly all Beethoven and Mozart, one hundredth of that is living American music. If cultured intellectuals know about Beethoven or Vivaldi—even [the ones] who know all about Dante and Philip Roth, or Michelangelo and Jackson Pollock—the contemporary music that they know about is strictly The Beatles or Sting, or other elements of that sort.

I think Bob Dylan is revolting. He can’t sing, he can’t play an instrument, his tunes are very ordinary, just tonic to dominant; his sentiments are that the times are changing. So what? He has no charm, but everybody just worships him on bended knee. So he has at least one opponent, and that’s me. On the radio yesterday, I heard somebody, I thought it was Bob Dylan, but it was somebody else. He was a big influence. I use the word “pop” for lack of a better word. Judy Collins is a dear friend and she sings a couple of my songs, three actually, and she’s got sort of a real voice.

The pop music of my time was Cole Porter and Gershwin, with wonderful bands, with Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman and the Dorsey Brothers. People writing songs that are real songs, and sung by real voices, of which there are [now only] a few, like that dykie woman k.d. lang. She has a real voice; she could belt out a tune. She sang for President Bush recently at the Kennedy Center wearing a tuxedo, dressed up as a man. But, most pop music today doesn’t interest me in any way. Nor can I understand the words most of the time.

The public that we have is very small. I think that smallness is O.K. I don’t think everyone has to have a big public; people think they do. I think for song recitals by American singers who sing in their own language—rare as they may be these days—a hall that seats 200 is lovely. Everything is money, money, money now, so the situation is different.

As for French vs. German, that can only go so far. Unlike 30 or 50 years ago, there is no culture in Europe. There is nothing coming out of France that I know about—and I would know—in terms of serious theatre or music, or literature or painting, either good or bad; likewise Germany. England is fairly interesting but, strange as it may seem, America, with all its vulgarity, is the most interesting country culturally on earth today in music, in literature, in theatre, in painting. I guess in painting. So things have changed. And I don’t see things getting any better.

As for Uptown-Downtown, does that even exist any longer? The so-called “serial killers” lost their grip on virtually everybody (including Stravinsky and Copland who rallied to the Boulez cause although they wrote pretty good things). People stopped being frightened of towing the line to a certain kind of music. I never knew what Downtown music was or Uptown music. I just don’t know.

FJO: The Uptowners would be allied toward serialism and the Downtowners would be allied toward John Cage, chance, conceptual music like Robert Ashley, minimalism—Steve Reich, Meredith Monk, etc.

NR: Well, those people are all over the place now, not literally downtown. I don’t think you can say any longer that serialists are this or that and so forth. People write what they write.

FJO: That’s certainly true for you. Your music is unrepentantly tonal, but you’ve used tone rows.

NR: I’m going to go to a Milton Babbitt concert tonight actually. He’s 90, and it’s his birthday and he’s a colleague. I can’t prove it, but all music is tonal because the law of the universe is tonality—Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, Boulez. Elliott is getting a hell of a lot of performances these days, and he’s going to be 100 one of these months. And he goes to these places; I don’t have that kind of energy at all. He’s God; not for me, but for a lot of people. But for everybody writing a tone row, they’re only writing it to be not tonal, so they’re thinking in terms of tonality, by definition. A listener of any age who doesn’t even know music is going to hear a sort of pedal point beneath it all, the way we do in Berg. I don’t care what a person’s language is. But you don’t find people being as dogmatic and as uppity about the language they speak [these days].

FJO: So will you be hearing pedal points in Babbitt’s music tonight?

NR: I hope so.

FJO: It’s interesting to me given your stance on tonality that you’ve incorporated elements of twelve-tone thinking into your harmonic vocabulary. Why did you opt to do that?

NR: I don’t know. I met Lou Harrison very early in my life, when I was about 20, and we were very fond of each other. He was 28, which was a big difference. And he knew everything; I didn’t know anything. He knew Ives, Ruggles, and Varèse, whom he was promoting. He wasn’t a teacher; he was just a pal whom I drank beer with, but he taught me how to write music with a twelve-tone series for about an hour. And for about a week I applied it just in order to apply it, and then I simply wasn’t interested, even though some of my best friends were twelve-tone composers, Ben Weber being one then. I never did John Cage, but I knew him reasonably well, and his wife Xenia who did very pretty mobiles. I’ve never written according to a system, but I never got scared by the serial composers when Boulez took over. Then, when you were allowed to write tonal music again, I felt like the Prodigal Son’s brother whom no one had paid attention to because he’d been a good boy all the time, as opposed to David Del Tredici, for example.

But I never say, “This is what I’m trying to do here,” because I’m not interested in hearing what people say about their music. Music doesn’t exist for what the composer says it means; it exists on its own. I’m pretty good about talking about other people’s music, and I’ve written a lot of books in which the word “I” doesn’t even occur—I’m not talking about the Diaries. I talk about other composers, and 99 percent of those are contemporary composers. (I did one essay on Mussorgsky and one on Carmen.) When it comes to composers talking about their own music, I never listen much; I don’t care. The music speaks for itself….I’m morally against percussion.

FJO: Except you wrote that great mallet concerto.

NR: I agreed to do that for Evelyn Glennie if the orchestra would have no percussion because if I never hear another cymbal it won’t be too soon. Elliott Carter’s piece, played about a month ago with the Philharmonic, which was written 30 years ago, was full of cymbals. I said to Evelyn, “You will play just pitched mallet instruments.”

FJO: In this piece, like all the other concertos you’ve been writing over the last few years, you seem to have invented a new form. Each of these pieces has seven or eight shorter movements strung together instead of the more conventional three-movement fast-slow-fast.

NR: I guess I’ve written a lot of concertos, for lack of a better term. I write program notes for them, too. There are as many definitions of concertos as there are concertos. Bach has written concertos for one instrument with no accompaniment. De Falla wrote the harpsichord concerto for just a few instruments and [then there are] these big fat ones, but usually it’s a conversation or a dispute between soloist and orchestra. The first concerto I ever wrote was a harpsichord concerto, [before] I wrote the Piano Concerto No. 1. It might be at the Library of Congress. I gave them all my stuff.

FJO: There are a number of pieces you’ve written over the years that you’ve either revised or discarded. Some are completely withdrawn, like your first string quartet.

NR: It’s not that I discarded them. If someone wants to sing something that’s never been published, I’d say, “Sure, why not?” But, why not do some others? And the piece needs a life of its own, as songs do, especially songs because both men and woman can sing them. You can’t tell the difference between a male and a female violist or flutist, but you can with a song. And I don’t mind them being transposed. But it’s inconceivable that a pianist will say, “I’m transposing the Chopin Etudes,” because there’s no reason. As for withdrawing works, I remember Virgil Thomson said, “I wouldn’t be too worried about withdrawing works. They just withdraw themselves.”

FJO: I know Miss Julie has gone through a number of incarnations because looking at the published score from 1965 is very different than hearing either of the recordings that were made several decades later.

NR: It’s now a one-act opera.

FJO: It went from two to one.

NR: I don’t believe in revision after a certain period, but opera is different because opera is a freak of nature and there is something deliciously illegitimate about it. But like poets where their collective works come out 45 years later, they revise them—Paul Goodman did it, always for the worst; Auden did it, always for the worst—they’re no longer the same person. Do you know my song “The Lordly Hudson”? It’s my most sung song, actually. Anyway, Paul Goodman wrote [the poem]. It’s very singable because he’s a very intellectual poet, but it’s full of “be still, heart.” He changed that to, “be still, Paul.” You can tell already how terrible that is. Plus, where does that leave my song? Also, for theatrical reasons, one would change an opera, I suppose. I lose interest after the first performance, after I see it.

When we arrive at Joan La Barbara’s apartment on a particularly sunny January morning, it sounds like she’s already got company. I’m getting rather curious as to just who will pop out of the kitchen to join us when Joan returns with her son’s talking parrot on her shoulder and introduces us. Though she was invited to join us on the couch and chime in, Plato—usually something of a chatterbox (as seen here with choreographer Jane Comfort)—kept her comments to a minimum.

La Barbara is a singer whose name is rather synonymous in the new music world with extended vocal techniques. She has shared those skills as a colleague and muse to composers who defined a significant swath of 20th-century repertoire—men like Robert Ashley, Morton Feldman, and John Cage—but came to realize that she had ideas of her own that would not be heard unless she became a composer herself. With that in mind, you can listen and simply be amazed by the unique sonic world she conjures in pieces like 73 Poems and Shaman Songs. But for those who simply must know how the magician does her tricks, we also have a behind-the-scenes masterclass for you to view.

It’s a tightrope act to keep such a multi-pronged career balanced, but La Barbara keeps a bit of advice from John Cage close at hand. She recalls, “He said to me one time, ‘I always try to say yes when people ask me to do things because I never know when I might be surprised by the outcome.’ And I think that’s perhaps one of the most important lessons that I ever learned from anyone. When people ask me to do things, oftentimes my inclination will be to say that I don’t have time. And then I’ll catch myself, and I’ll say yes. So many times wonderful things have happened that I would not have expected.”

Sections:

• I Say It’s Opera
• Extending the Sound of the Voice
• Buried in Tape
• Telling Stories
• Masterclass: Joan La Barbara and Leighanne Saltsman

I Say It’s Opera

Molly Sheridan: I know that you were just in Austria working on your opera in-progress, WoolfSong, so why don’t we start there?

Joan La Barbara: WoolfSong is an opera I’ve been working on now for about two years, inspired by the life and work of Virginia Woolf. I was very fortunate to get a Guggenheim music composition fellowship last year, and I spent a lot of time doing research. I was in London and saw some of her manuscripts and her letters in the British Library. It’s been a process of immersion, I guess I would say—reading the novels, reading the short stories, reading her memoirs, and trying to find the music in the work. One of the things I discovered was that she said at one point that when she wrote her novels she heard them first in music and then translated them into words. So it’s been my process to try to see if I can find the music in her words and transfer it again, back into music in a way. Her language is so fluid and oftentimes she’ll work a sentence many different ways, or certain words or phrases will appear and then come back again several pages later, so this whole idea of repetition and reconsideration is part of what her language process is all about.

In dealing with this in the opera, what I have in mind is to have a single character played by different people—let’s say by a musician, by a singer, and a dancer, for example—so that you would get one view of a character in purely musical terms, and then you might get another interpretation of that character through movement, just as an example.

MS: It reminds me of how the Michael Cunningham novel The Hours uses Woolf’s life and intertwines it with two other women. What made you interested in her work in particular?

JLB: I started studying Woolf when I was in high school, and when I was in college I did some papers on her work. I went away from her material for quite a while and then several years ago picked up a book of the short stories and just found them fascinating. I learned that she would write these stories and then put them away in a drawer. When she would get a commission for a whole piece, either from a magazine or an opportunity to do a whole novel, she would pull out a story and then flesh it out. So the stories really have all the essence of the material for a full novel but in just a few pages. Also, what fascinates me is this kind of stream of consciousness way of working where you actually experience her mind.

MS: Keeping that in mind, how faithfully will you be using her texts, or will you? You have an interesting relationship with setting words as opposed to working with more abstract sounds.

JLB: I’m still in the process of deciding which words will actually appear in the opera, and I do have to deal obviously with the issue of rights. At this point in time I haven’t used any of her words.

I guess I should explain a little bit about my working process. When I write a piece of music, depending on what the inspiration is, I’ll do a stream of consciousness writing just of words about the subject that I’ve decided to work on. Then I’ll go back and re-read what I’ve written, and I’ll find the music in that. So I’m using that process [with WoolfSong], but in this case I’m using her words instead of mine. I’m using her words as the inspiration for musical ideas, but I’m also finding that there are certain aspects of the language that I would like to use. She’s not an easy author to translate or to take a libretto from because, as I said, she writes in stream of consciousness—she considers and reconsiders an idea, she’ll treat a character in many different ways. You meet a character and think you understand what that character is about, and then later on you’ll meet that character again and you’ll see a very different aspect. She’s constantly reworking and rewriting the ideas. But there are sections of words that I think would be very effective, so when I get that figured out then I’ll have to deal with the rights issue.

MS: When will there likely be a full performance of this?

JLB: I’ve been doing a series of work-in-progress performances. I did the first one at the Chelsea Art Museum a couple of years ago using members of my ensemble Ne(x)tworks. Then we did another work-in-progress performance again with Ne(x)tworks at New York University in October of 2004.

I was working at that point with a video artist, Kurt Ralske, and we had a number of sessions talking about the imagery and certain ideas that I had about specific visuals that I thought should be included—a tree with no leaves and certain colors—and then I just gave him free reign. He came up with both some historical footage that he used, and he was also taking live images from the performers, altering and modifying them, and then rebroadcasting them in real time. In that performance I was using the musicians on stage. I was the sole singer, and they were acting as actors in addition to performing the music. That was a very challenging situation, to get them on stage and get them moving and playing instruments and thinking about personifying a character. There are also upcoming performances this spring. I have one performance in May, again with Ne(x)tworks, and then I have a series of three performances in April with the Juilliard Electric Ensemble, and they’ll be performing one scene.

MS: Are these performances start-to-finish as you have it set at the time or if they are just the pieces you’re working on.

JLB: They’re bits and pieces and each time I do a performance either I’ll do a section of the opera or I’ll layer up different scenes to see how they work superimposed over each other. One of the ideas that Grethe Holby, who is an opera director, and I have been discussing is the idea of doing the opera in layers so that we would have one layer that is basically Woolf’s mind, another layer that would consist of characters from several of the novels, and a third layer that would be a kind of emotional context.

MS: Now, you’re calling this an opera, but the work you’re doing is very different from the newly commissioned operas they’re putting up at the Metropolitan Opera House. It’s just a word, but when you’re thinking about it, you’re using the word opera. Is it really an opera to you?

JLB: Yes, I am, and I think that the whole concept of opera is experiencing a revolution. There certainly are people who are still writing more in the realm of traditional opera, but there are also a number of composers who are thinking about opera and rethinking the concept. What is opera? It has stories, it has characters, vocal music, sometimes it has instrumental music. And my opera contains all of those things, so I definitely think of it as an opera.

Extending the Sound of the Voice

Molly Sheridan: I want to talk about vocal techniques, because when people see the name Joan La Barbara, it’s probably the first thing that comes to mind. I was listening to some of your recordings yesterday and wondering what sort of child you were. Is this something that when you were a kid you were constantly running around seeing what sorts of sounds you could make or was this something that came later in your training?

Joan La Barbara: My mother remembers me always singing. I was singing in church and in school, but I didn’t think of myself seriously as a singer until I guess I was in high school. But as far as beginning to think about stretching the voice and using it in other ways, that didn’t come until I got to college. I started to see instrumentalists who were exploring different ideas and different techniques. I didn’t see or hear singers doing that, and I was very curious about it. There were, of course, recordings of Cathy Berberian. Some of the work that she did with Luciano Berio is considered by some people the beginnings of extended vocal techniques, although what she did was not all that extended. She did some gasping and gurgling, humming, laughing, sounds like that, but not really extending the sound of the voice. It was more including what we would consider everyday sounds in the vocabulary of vocal music. Towards the end of her life she really disavowed any interest in extended techniques. She was interested in making sure people knew that she could sing, and she felt that by doing all of that contemporary music somehow people had gotten confused and thought that she really wasn’t a singer, that she was more of an actress.

When I went about beginning to explore these techniques, I started to work first with instrumentalists asking them just to play long tones. I would try to imitate the sounds of different instruments and gradually began to improvise. And then for a time I was working with poets and writers, and I would react to the texts they were reading and see if I could get some interesting new sounds. Early on I also did a sensory deprivation experiment piece called Hear What I Feel. I had taped my eyes shut for a period of an hour prior to the performance and sat in an isolated room and then was led out to the performance space with my eyes still taped shut. My assistant had put items in these six glass dishes, and I only stipulated that they shouldn’t crawl and shouldn’t injure me. I didn’t want to identify what was in the dishes, I just wanted to give an immediate vocal reaction, the idea being that having spent that hour in isolation and the heightened state of awareness of being in a performance, then coming and touching these substances—I just wanted to react to them hoping that maybe a new sound would come out. Also, I wanted to communicate with the audience on that pre-verbal level. The vocal instrument communicates on an emotional level in a very, very deep way even without words.

MS: You mentioned using these techniques and people wondering if you really can sing. This is something that critics who write about your own performances feel the need to talk about—that you really can sing and it’s beautiful, as if you’re doing these other things so we don’t catch on that you have no vocal talent. Is this something that you struggle with?

JLB: You know, no, because my career developed in a parallel way. I was singing the music of other composers and for the most part what other composers would ask me to do was basically pretty traditional singing. There were some composers who asked for unusual techniques, but most of them didn’t. I was exploring so much in my own music with these extended techniques I think they felt that if they wrote a piece for extended techniques it would sound more like my music than their music. So the only time it’s actually been a problem is when I go out and do workshops. Sometimes I’ll work with singers and they’ll be a little hesitant. Somebody will say, well, is that going to damage my instrument? I say, no, I’ve been doing this for over 30 years and it hasn’t damaged by instrument and I certainly wouldn’t do anything that would damage it because I’m a singer.

In one workshop that I was doing—I think it was out in Minneapolis—there was a woman who was a vocal therapist. She said some of the sounds that I make are actually sounds that she uses in therapy because they’re like a deep massage for the throat. For example, the vocal fry and the multiphonics are just very, very relaxed physically for the voice and so these are some of the sounds that are used in speech therapy.

MS: You did mention that you were singing the work of other composers, people like Ashley, Feldman, and Cage. I read a comment that characterized you as a muse to these composers, and I thought that sounded like a lot of fun and a lot of pressure.

JLB: One of the reasons that I went into the contemporary music field was that I was being trained to do traditional opera, Mozart and everything, and I began to be frustrated—learning the established way of singing “Vissi d’arte” lying on the floor because that’s the way it had been done for a number of years. So I was really intrigued by the idea of working with living composers, with people that I could have a conversation with, discuss ideas, use my brain in a very different way. Contemporary music fulfilled that for me. I could discuss [a piece] with a composer while the music was still being written and have an influence on what the piece was going to be. Actually my last vocal teacher, Marian Szekely-Freschl, said to me, “You must work with composers. You must help them because they don’t know how to write for the voice.” And so I really felt as if this was one of my responsibilities. And then as I was working more with composers I realized that I had ideas of my own that were not going to get heard unless I became a composer, so these things developed sort of simultaneously.

MS: How do you balance that then, after having become identified with the work of these composers because of your role in its creation? How did you get out from under the shadow of what you had done before to compose your own work?

JLB: Since I know the music of these other composers so well, I’m very careful not to write in their style. I was working with a composer several weeks ago, and there was a text that he wanted delivered, and I started doing it not realizing at first that I was doing it in the style of Robert Ashley. I thought, no, this is not going to work. So I’m very aware of it.

As I’m getting older there are certain works that I can’t sing anymore, and I realize that my further responsibility now is to find other singers that I can pass this material on to—not only my own techniques, but some of this wonderful repertoire that’s been generated for my voice. I need to find other people who can take on that repertoire to keep it alive.

MS: Since you were so invested in bringing a lot of these works to life, how much leeway is there? Should a new singer coming to it have the freedom to interpret certain aspects or should it sound as closely as possible to how you performed it?

JLB: I think that I can give singers the information about how I did it. I think it would be more interesting for them to do a new interpretation. Whether I like it or not is really not the issue. A work like Three Voices of Morton Feldman—which is an extraordinarily beautiful work, and I’m very proud to have brought that work into being—I heard one other recording of the work and I didn’t like it. So there is an aspect of being territorial about the material.

I guess in the case of composers who have passed on like Feldman the implication is that because he wrote it for me, because he heard me do it on a number of occasions and approved of it, that’s the way that particular work should be done. But Feldman’s Only was written in 1947 when he was 21. I performed that, but only after his death; he never heard me sing it. Who knows whether my interpretation is the correct one? It’s simply my interpretation.

MS: You mentioned guiding composers who are writing for the voice. Are there some key things that when you’re working with a new composer you would advise them on, especially when writing in ways that stretch the voice?

JLB: Well, for example, when I was working with Philip Glass years ago, I explained to him that yes, I could sing two notes for twenty minutes, but then in the next piece he’d have to move to a different part of the range. The vocal apparatus is musculature, and if you were holding your arm in a particular position for twenty minutes, it’s going to get tired so you have to relax it. You also have to change the positioning of the vocal chords so that they get to relax and rejuvenate themselves. I explain how certain techniques feel. I try to get composers, if they are going to try to write for some of these extended techniques, to try them to see what it feels like to make them. I explain that certain techniques take a little more preparation time so that you need to give space in the music so that the singer can prepare a particular technique. So a lot of it is very logical, but sometimes people are not very practical.

MS: I was reading about some of the film work you’ve done like Alien: Resurrection and how much went into actually thinking about this sci-fi character’s physical structure and how that impacted the sound that you made. Outside of work that you’re doing for specific projects, when you’re thinking about creating new sounds, where does that inspiration come from?

JLB: When I was beginning to explore extended vocal techniques I did a lot of imitating of sounds, not only of instruments but of birds, of animals, of machines, of synthesizer sounds, developing a vocabulary and developing a language. And so when I’m starting a new composition I’m drawing on my palette of vocal sounds the way an orchestra writer thinks about the instruments of the orchestra. Do I want to have a kind of percussive base as the foundation or do I want a kind of fluid ongoing vocal texture? A lot of times I think that way; I’m layering up sounds so I’ll think about the foundation on which I’m going to build, and then once I get that foundation established I’ll decide what kinds of more decorative or explorative work I’m going to layer on top of that. If I’m writing a piece for a dance company, I like to learn the choreographer’s language, and that inspires me to go in a particular direction with the kinds of sounds that I’m going to be making.

MS: What about when you decide to do a piece just for instruments? What makes you decide to go that route and does it change how you approach writing the piece?

JLB: Sometimes when I write for instruments I’m trying to translate from my vocal techniques. For example, the ululation, that sort of fluttery sound—what instruments can pick that up and how does it change as it goes to another instrument? I recently wrote a piece for solo violin and I asked the violinist to gasp. To me that’s a very easy thing to do—it’s a vocalized, inhaled short, rapid sound. We all do it. It’s amazing how difficult it is for an instrumentalist to do that, but I guess when you choose to play an instrument you choose to have your sound coming out of that. You don’t expect the composer to ask to have a sound coming out of your body, but I’m intrigued with the person and the instrument so I want to bring that into a piece. Then, of course, I’m fascinated with the sounds that instruments can make that I can’t make, like the Bartók pizz. on a string instrument, which is just this fabulous little snap. The harp is a great instrument; there are all sorts of things that the harp can do that the voice can’t do—not just what we usually think of as that wonderful glissando but all of these fabulous noises.

Buried in Tape

Molly Sheridan: You’ve also interacted with technology throughout the evolution of your career—I’m thinking of that iconic image of you on the album cover where you’re buried in tape. You’ve been actively working with a lot of this equipment as it developed. What did these different aspects of technology bring to what you could do?

Joan La Barbara: Well, it’s changed immensely. When I started out working on multi-track tape that was wonderful because I could layer and create a whole choir out of my own voice. When digital technology came along, what it has allowed me to do is to get more involved with the computer and how I can move the sounds around. With analog tape, moving sounds around was extraordinarily difficult. The idea of having to literally cut the tape to make edits and splice the tape together made it very fragile. Now with the computer, you can record into it, you can take little edits and move things around, but you never lose anything. Well, hopefully! But presumably you don’t lose anything. Now, when I’m working with dance companies, it’s allowed me to go and record a rehearsal, to bring my musical rehearsal tapes back, to work with them and then be able to send things to the choreographer within a day that will allow the choreographer to work with that material. Then we can have a dialogue about what works and what doesn’t work. So I’ve just become much more involved in technology as a tool to help my composition.

MS: Is there anything that you don’t like about the way the technology has evolved that you’d like to go back to?

JLB: Well, yes. The scoring notation programs I find are not as flexible. I like to use a lot of graphics in my notation and the technology is really not up to speed. I mean I still will draw certain things on blank paper just because I need to get that flow of ideas. I’m also one of those people who sees sound in way so that when I’m writing a musical gesture, it has a physicality to it, it has a shape. And I find that using graphics allows me to get that shape into the score.

MS: Which leads really nicely to my next question, which is: how do you translate these extended techniques into the score? When you say graphically, what does that really mean?

JLB: I tend to do two kinds of scoring. One is traditional notation. And then in certain cases I’ll do traditional notation with a graphic sort of superimposed on top that gives an indication of how I want the flow of the musical material to proceed; how much energy I want poured into the sound. When I’m working with my ensemble I can just demonstrate; I can say, well, I want the sound to be like this. If you’re going to send music out to someone else who’s not going to be able to work with you on it you have to be able to be as specific as possible. So I’ll write instructions—I use a lot of verbal instructions to explain notation. Sometimes I’ll send a recording of my sound doing certain things.

MS: Especially when you’re trying to pass on some of this repertoire that was written specifically for you, is it even possible to do that without sharing a recording or coaching them in-person?

JLB: Almost impossible because the scoring is still just an approximation. You know, how do you score an inhaled glottal click? I mean, I put a little series of X’s with dots going after it, and I then write inhaled glottal click.

MS: But even among singers this is not something they’re going to know right on the uptake, right?

JLB: No, so you’d have to demonstrate, and in each voice it’s a little bit different, that specific sound. If I do it, it sounds one way because of my bone structure, my body, where it resonates. If you had a six-foot baritone doing that sound it sounds very different.

MS: Is it possible then that some of the pieces just will, in a way, have been for you, and we will just have the recordings when you no longer sing them?

JLB: Maybe, but I think it’s much more interesting to think about somebody else picking up the material and doing an interpretation of it. I have had a couple of instances where I’ve worked with a singer and I’ve allowed them to do some of my multi-track pieces. When I do them I go out and I improvise the live part over the multi-layered composition, and so I’ll have a score that I give to the singer and I’ll say, well, this is a suggestion of the kinds of material that I do. Listen to it and see what you can do with it. You know you may not necessarily want to do it in the same order that I did it, and so let’s see what happens with that.

Telling Stories

Molly Sheridan: You rarely work with words and you’ve spoken about communicating on a pre-verbal level and the importance of that. What about Kenneth Goldsmith’s 73 Poems inspired you?

Joan La Barbara: That was a very, very specific work. Ellen Salpeter, who was the original producer of the piece, was involved in a gallery and had something called Permanent Press, which was the press that published the original book. Ellen introduced me to Kenneth and said I think that you guys would work beautifully together. Kenny was working on this series of multiple texts, and she described them—this dark text superimposed over a light text, and so I said, well, I’ll have to take a look at the work. So I went to Kenny’s studio and I looked at it, and I really was intrigued by what he was doing, how he was working with the words. It’s a wonderful offshoot from concrete poetry, where the words are treated as objects as well as words themselves. Also, I liked the way they looked on the page, the physical aspect of them. So I said I was very interested in the collaboration and Kenny had done, oh, I don’t know, maybe about 20 of these drawing at that point in time. So I said, what do you know of my music? And he said, well, I know Three Voices and I know Singing Through. I said fine, you know me singing Feldman and you know me singing Cage. What do you know about my work? And he said well, I guess I really don’t know it. So I gave him a list—I didn’t give him the music—and I said part of this exercise is for you to actually have to find this material. He took it on as a challenge and went and found everything in used record stores and CDs and came back several months later and said, “It’s amazing—it’s just this whole world of sounds that I didn’t know existed.” Then he went back to work on his poetry, and I could see the change in what happened to his material after he heard my compositions. The letters started floating in a way, and the texts just changed. So he finished them. It’s called 73 Poems but there are actually 79 of them. He couldn’t stop.

He gave me the whole stack of them—huge Xerox copies of the actual drawing—and I put them up in my studio. At that time I was living in Santa Fe, and I had a former two-car garage as my studio, so I put them up all over the walls and just sat with them for days waiting for the sound to come. I didn’t start at the first one. I started somewhere in the middle. It was one of the very densely layered works, and it had words like “wow” and “meow” and all of that in it, and that really spoke to me. So I started there and then worked in different directions until I had all of the material.

Then the problem was how to translate that so it would be a reflection of what the poetry was visually. And of course the difference between a piece of visual material and sound is time. That’s the essential difference. So I went and recorded all of the vocal material, and then Michael Hoenig, with whom I’ve worked very closely, acted as the engineer and also co-produced it with me, and we then went in and layered the recordings so that they would reflect aurally what you see on the page. We began working with what I call depth-of-field so that you get an impression of the sonic architecture that reflects the visual architecture in each one of the poems. When the dark texts becomes the light text of the subsequent poem, I wanted it to be the same musical material but to be experienced differently, so either we did a different electronic treatment of it or we placed it differently in the stereo horizon. So it was a very long process.

MS: Looking back through your catalog, what do you hope your audiences take away from having experienced your work, especially when you’re pushing at new forms and new boundaries?

JLB: I hope that it inspires their curiosity to find out more about it, particularly about the vocal instrument. There’s such a wealth of wonderful vocal sounds in the world, and if I inspire someone to go and do a little bit more investigating, that would be wonderful. A lot of times people come away from my work with visual experiences, at least that’s what they’ve told me. They get a whole sort of storyline or just visual experience, and I find that fascinating. So I’m intrigued by that. I guess I want them to be intrigued by the work and to want to hear more.

MS: Do you think that that whole connection to visual experiences and a storyline is because it’s a human voice and we’re used to people telling us stories?

JLB: I guess when a musician listens to a piece of music you can’t help but begin to analyze what’s going on structurally. You think that way and you also think about the performance aspects, how well the performers are playing. When a person who is not trained as a musician listens to a piece of music, I think they hear it differently. They may experience the structure but maybe not to that deep extent, so I think that people go to a musical experience and come away having been enriched in whatever way they can be. A lot of people experience films, and so they go to a concert and they’ll have a film playing in their heads. That’s just another way of experiencing things.

MS: I was paging through the list of your compositions and noticing the dates on them. You’ve produced steadily since the ’70s and you perform and you raised a child and you’re your own publisher. How do you do all these things?

JLB: It’s a lot of work. I could probably get a lot more music written if I weren’t also my own manager and my own publisher and all of this. One of the problems with publishers is that they’re looking at the bottom line. I have talked to publishers, and I’ve said, you know, I do have music that I think other people would be interested in playing. And they just have to be convinced that there would be a large enough market for that. So, sometimes I get frustrated, but I’ve always been so independent and just take things on.

MS: You’re closer to your specialties of extended vocal technique and composers working in these areas. Who are you watching because their work is exciting to you?

JLB: Well, I’m very interested in the work of Kenji Bunch. Kenji is in the ensemble that I work with a lot, Ne(x)tworks, and I really like the work that he does for this ensemble. I don’t know all of his music so I don’t know his more traditional things. I know that he’s written for orchestra and writes for ensembles, but what he writes for our group and for my voice is exploring sound in a very unique way and I find that really fascinating. I guess what I’m interested in, and it’s what I’ve always been interested in with different composers, is a particular point of view. It doesn’t necessarily need to be exploring new territory or new sounds, but it has a unique voice and just a way of thinking about sound or thinking about structure or thinking about music in a way that’s sort of off the beaten path; that’s what intrigues me.

Masterclass: Joan La Barbara and Leighanne Saltsman

After the masterclass with Joan La Barbara, Molly Sheridan spoke briefly with Leighanne Saltsman about the experience.

Molly Sheridan: You did an amazing job. Was this the first time you’ve ever tried most of these techniques?

Leighanne Saltsman: Most of them, yeah. I’ve tried close approximations of them in my own playing around, but I’ve never known how to get exactly the same effects. I came here completely cold. I emailed Joan and she said no, I don’t want to see you beforehand, and I was like, oh God, what do I practice?

MS: What were your expectations as opposed to what it turned out to be?

LS: It’s so strange because I came here prepared to sing and be a singer on tape, and it’s more exploration of the voice really than classical bel canto singing, which is what I’ve studied for years and years. It’s really nice to realize that you can go beyond that. I used different parts of my voice than I did before with bel canto, and it’s just a different approach in general, which is awesome. The voice can do great things, you know?

My goal is to use all parts of the voice to touch people and convey emotion and sometimes it’s not done best through pretty singing, so to have access to something like what Joan is doing, you can really convey messages and touch the feelings inside people more easily.

MS: Is it hard to do these techniques?

LS: It’s hard to relax into them but not technically hard I wouldn’t say. But then again I’ve been singing for years.

Being classically trained hurts you in the sense that it gives you a very narrow path to follow and you don’t tend to see beyond either side of that because it’s not what your teachers are encouraging you to do. It helps tremendously that I’m now fluent with theory. I know the history of music and why things are the way they are. So if I can claim all of that—I don’t know if I can claim all of that—but just to be fluent in the music world and have a base to jump from. That’s why I did go to study, to lay down a solid base so I can explore more.

MS: Do you find that the people you’re interested in working with end up having very similar backgrounds to you or something very different?

LS: They do have similar backgrounds because I’m more comfortable working with people who do read music. I tend to pick people who I can communicate with on that level. Something that I did a lot of at school was teaching composers how to write for voice.

MS: What was your advice to them?

LS: It’s a question of range sometimes and strange intervals. If you’re doing it for a certain style, fine, but too often composers would say, oh, can you make this sound like you’re bored? It’s hard to make that come through if their intervals are all over the place. You want to have the singer get the message through as easily as possible. As much as you want to treat voice like an instrument, you have to leave the humanity in it because that’s what voice is.

Born in Rhinebeck, New York, Leighanne Saltsman arrived in New York from Oberlin College and Conservatory, having completed both her Bachelor of Music in Vocal Performance and her Bachelor of Arts in Visual Arts. Saltsman has achieved success as soloist with New York City’s unaccompanied vocal ensemble Cerddorion, directed by Kristina Boerger, premiering the works of Lisa Bielawa, David Lang, and Elliot Z. Levine.

As a vocalist, Saltsman’s interest and expertise falls in the realms of early music, new music, oratorio, and the choral repertoire. In addition to working under the auspices of Doner/Pierce Associates, Saltsman is currently in demand as a soloist in diverse projects ranging from early music to contemporary works, and has recently been commissioned to help reinvent Cavalli’s La Didone with The Wooster Group.

She has participated in masterclasses with Pamela Z, Walter Thompson, and Paul Horn. She has appeared behind Thomas Quasthoff and the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, Walter Thompson (soundpainting), and Olga Borodina and the Russian Chamber Chorus of New York.

Video Presentations by Randy Nordschow

Edited and Transcribed by Frank J. Oteri, Molly Sheridan, Randy Nordschow, and Anna Reguero

Maybe it’s just me, but every time I turn around someone else seems to be writing an opera, from the top names in our echelons to scads of emerging composers all over the country. And, not only are composers writing these operas, companies are presenting them to huge and appreciative audiences all over the country. This past year has witnessed the world premieres of John Adams and Peter Sellars’s Doctor Atomic in San Francisco, Mark Adamo’s Lysistrata in Houston, Richard Danielpour and Toni Morrison’s Margaret Garner in Detroit, and Tobias Picker’s An American Tragedy at the Metropolitan Opera House. Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar was staged by the Santa Fe Opera and Great Performances at Lincoln Center. In the coming weeks, Margaret Garner opens in Philadelphia and Lysistrata comes to New York City Opera. There have also been some memorable not-so-high profile premieres of new operas. Jennifer Griffith’s

Jack Vees debuted a one-man opera about another atomic bomb pioneer, Richard Feynman, at the Knitting Factory, of all places! And even Art Jarvinen’s recently launched web-based multi-media project The Invisible Guy, a music-infused spy novel with weekly-added episodes, is a kind of opera.

What exactly does it mean to be writing an opera in the first years of the 21st century? Although the word “opera” essentially only means “work”—and therefore could be used to describe any kind of a piece a composer could possibly imagine—it has come to have very specific connotations for the general public. When an evening-length music theatre work for which I wrote music was staged last year, my collaborator and I assiduously avoided the word “opera” because we thought that these connotations would get in the way of people’s dealing with the kind of work we were trying to do.

Yet plenty of vanguard artistic creators are completely comfortable working within the conventions of standard opera where new work shares the same stage and the same audience as those for La bohème, Carmen, Tristan, et al. Over the past month, we visited the homes of two composers who’ve had great success writing new work for opera houses in recent years: Tobias Picker and Mark Adamo. Tobias, whom we caught up with in the middle of the run of his fourth opera, An American Tragedy, feels completely at home working within time-proven conventions and posits that what others might perceive as limitations are in fact guidelines for creating an effective stage work. Mark, whom we spoke to right before rehearsals were to begin for the New York premiere of his second opera Lysistrata, admits to falling into the world of opera rather by accident but now has the zealotry of a real convert. Originally an aspiring Broadway composer, he has left the world of musical theatre behind and contends that opera houses offer composers greater resources they could ever expect to have anywhere else.

—

Leonard Slatkin in conversation with Frank J. Oteri
November 18, 2005—7:00 p.m.
At the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
Video Presentation by Randy Nordschow
Edited and Transcribed by Frank J. Oteri, Molly Sheridan, and Randy Nordschow

Although I’d been to Washington, D.C., at least four times before, I had never been to The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts until this last trip. But I did my best to make up for lost time, getting a sweeping grand tour of the entire facility by Kennedy Center PR chief Patricia O’Kelly and catching two very different performances. The first was a rush-hour concert featuring the cream of the crop from six different D.C.-area youth orchestras playing alongside members of the National Symphony Orchestra. The other was an afternoon family concert by the full orchestra featuring the world premiere of a work especially commissioned for the occasion, David Del Tredici’s Rip Van Winkle. Both performances were led by Leonard Slatkin, who, in his ten years as music director, has really made the National Symphony into America’s orchestra through his commitment to this nation’s composers and performers.

Being based in the nation’s capital, of course, gives the orchestra and its concert hall a slightly different local color than those in other cities. What other town can boast a venue that has reserved boxed seating for the president of the United States, seating that is technically the property of the White House and can only be entered with White House permission? Even though we’re no longer living in an era of a classical music-loving P.O.T.U.S., having that box directly across from the man on the podium creates a very unusual psychological dynamic in the hierarchy-driven world of the orchestra. But just as Leonard Slatkin can roll up his sleeves and be completely down to earth when interacting with orchestral musicians as well as students, he also doesn’t worry about the rank of anyone—politician or otherwise—who might be sitting in the audience—though Condoleezza Rice is a regular. This is probably what makes Slatkin such an ideal conversation partner for a discussion about making orchestral music meaningful in the lives of contemporary Americans!

—FJO

Keep reading

Edited and Transcribed by Molly Sheridan
Video Presentation by Randy Nordschow

As I type this, I am studying four different biographies of composer Raz Mesinai and listening to his 2001 Tzadik release Before the Law. Still, I find I’m tripping over my words trying to succinctly categorize the music he creates. My dilemma is poetically appropriate considering the composer’s particular dislike of such monikers—not that it has stopped people from trying. Depending on which of his discs you’re spinning (there are more than a dozen to choose from), it might be filed under Downtown, avant-garde, illbient, maximalist, improvisatory, electronica, sound design, dub, or experimental. See him perform live, and you could add another set of adjectives. No matter. Mesinai will shift again and slip right through your fingers.

Perhaps this chameleon pose is to be expected, considering the life he has lived and the company he has kept. In addition to a childhood spent shuttling between New York and Israel soaking in street beats and Bedouin influences, he’s collaborated with such hard-to-pin artists as Mark Dresser, John Zorn, Marc Ribot, Elliott Sharp, Eyvind Kang, and Zeena Parkins.

Rather than artificially forcing Mesinai into a genre for the sake of some kind of artificial understanding, let’s just say that whether he’s using a palette of electronic or acoustic sounds, notating, improvising, or at work in the studio, he’s principally a storyteller. With an audiophile’s stock of influences, he is crafting a narrative for his listeners, from the existential alienation of Kafka to the boyish energy of an imaginary comic book war in the desert. Here, Mesinai invites us into his studio to tell a few stories closer to home.

—MS

Matthew Shipp in conversation with Frank J. Oteri
July 27, 2005, 11 a.m.-noon in Shipp’s home and October 3, 2005, 2-3 p.m. at Shipp’s practice studio
Video filmed and edited by Randy Nordschow
Transcribed and edited by Frank J. Oteri and Molly Sheridan

Matthew Shipp’s recordings—and there are tons of them—are always surprising and refreshing, but hearing him live is an even more remarkable experience. Watching him play feels like actually watching his neurons fire as they translate non-verbal thoughts into phrases on the piano, all in a matter of seconds. The piano somehow seems like an extension of his brain. Yet, at the same time, the music is as emotional and rapturous as it is cerebral and virtuosic.

So I thought it would be great to actually get verbal with him for NewMusicBox. We spoke right before he went into the studio to record a solo piano CD, One, which Thirsty Ear will release in January. He said it will be his last album, but he’s said that before.

Matt talks like he plays: a million thoughts fly by in a sentence. While keeping up with him in a conversation was a challenge, transcribing our talk was downright Herculean. But it was worth the process. Our chat wandered from the role of the piano in today’s society to the relevance of genre to the shifting, but somehow never adequate, economics of making music in America. It was shocking to me that one of my personal favorite pianists alive today doesn’t have a piano in his own home, so in addition to visiting him there we also convinced him to briefly let us peak into the private world of his practice studio. Join us.

—FJO

Rock bands tour all over the world basically playing the same set of songs. Jazz groups will also usually maintain a specific set list for most of their gigs when they are traveling. Yet orchestras, when they commission a new piece, will rarely if ever play it more than once. The result is a lot of stillborn music since we all know how hard it is to get a second performance and frequently the first is under-rehearsed and doesn’t reveal what the music was fully meant to sound like.

Sometimes an orchestra will tour with a new piece of music, but such opportunities for composers are few and far between. Orchestra tours are a logistical nightmare and, in today’s economic climate, they are happening less and less. Now, imagine if somehow a piece of orchestral music could tour without the orchestra. That is exactly what is happening with Joan Tower’s Made in America. Beginning this month, this roughly 15-minute work will embark on a tour of all 50 American states, featured on programs by some 65 orchestras over the next 18 months. So for anyone reading this in the United States, a live performance of this music is likely only a drive away.

This extraordinary and unprecedented exposure for a piece of new American music is the result of a partnership program between the American Symphony Orchestra League and Meet The Composer with major financial support from the Ford Motor Company Fund. With this level of support, smaller orchestras around the country can take part in the kind of high profile commission usually reserved only for the top tier. Plus, a myriad of carefully prepared and ready-to-use resources made available for all the participating orchestras—including program notes, educational materials, and even press releases—takes care of much of the time consuming work that often makes administrators reluctant to program a new piece.

It seems so natural, so right. So why hasn’t it ever been done before? And what can we do to make it happen again and again with music by lots of other composers?

When we use prizes and gimmicks to attract attention we lose sight of the fact that a composer’s greatest calling card is his or her music. Joan Tower kept reminding me of this when we spoke only two weeks before the biggest premiere marathon in new music history.

Frank J. Oteri: The first thing that strikes me about the Made in America project is how much sense it makes, artistically and economically. So why is this the first time it has ever happened?

Joan Tower: Every classical music world has its own culture, its own DNA, its own view toward what living composers are, and it also has its own activity of repetition. For example, in the quartet world: if you get hooked into a quartet that loves a piece that they commissioned or whatever, they will play it all over the place. They’ll play it in Europe and the United States, if they have that kind of touring capability. In the orchestra world, it tends to get slightly frozen. I think if someone did a study on it, you’d see that most pieces are played in one place, one time. Then there are certain pieces that make such a big musical impact for whatever reason that they get repeated just by the natural fuel of the strength of the piece. But I think you’d find that those pieces are in the minority.

FJO: It seems like such an incredible waste.

JT: I know. It’s unlike the band world, for example. I know the band world a little bit now because I wrote a band piece and I have another piece that was arranged for band. First of all, it’s an eager world. They do lots of consortium commissions—they get together 34 bands and then they commission a composer. They don’t have money enough to commission one composer [on their own], so they get together. And they do this constantly. And they share conductors, they share soloists. You could say the orchestra world shares soloists, too, but the band world, I don’t know, it seems to be a lot more generous and a lot more interested in composers.

FJO: But orchestras were once all very interested in composers. Why do you think the orchestra world wound up where it is right now?

JT: You know, I’ve traveled around the major orchestra world for 20 years now, but I’ve never been in the community orchestra world—hardly, once—and in the youth orchestra world three times. These are different levels of worlds and we just had a symposium on this in Aspen. [American Symphony Orchestra League CEO] Henry Fogel was on the panel and he said, “You know there’s a whole culture of orchestras out there that we’re not actually talking about. We’re talking about a certain level of orchestra.” And that was a very interesting statement to me because I think there’s some truth in that. I don’t know this world yet—I’m about to get to know it in spades!—but I’m very curious as to the way they view me as a living composer, because I’m a litmus test. I’m very curious as to how they’ll negotiate my piece. Now, I know some of them are much better than others; there are all levels. But I’m curious whether the piece is strong enough to make them want to work harder and what the level of passion is that’s going to be in there. Part of that depends on the piece and part of that depends on the nature of their community orchestra and the people in their orchestra. And the conductor. I’m curious to see how they’re going to deal with me. Are they going to call me up? Are they going to ask me questions? Are they going to invite me to talk to the orchestra or not? That’s up to different kinds of conductors.

FJO: So all that stuff hasn’t been worked out with each of the orchestras?

JT: No, because I haven’t started yet! I’ll come back to you in two years and tell you then.

FJO: Now, what kinds of arrangements do you have with these orchestras in terms of how many rehearsals they’re going to do? Are there a fixed set of parameters that they must follow?

JT: It depends on how much time I can spend [with them]. They overloaded the fall because everybody wanted to get in on that first wave. So they double booked and triple booked concerts, and I can only be at one [at a time]. And also I’m conducting three of them this fall and one in the spring.

FJO: But there’s no contract that if they’re signed on to do this piece they have to have four rehearsals, let’s say.

JT: No, that’s up to them because they’re all different. Some of them started rehearsing already; some of them will only be rehearsing that week. They are all [different] levels.

FJO: Now, in terms of interpretive leeway, we had the honor of being at—the new word that’s getting bandied about—the “avant-premiere” of the piece. I was so excited to be able to hear the piece, but I was even more excited to be able to hear it twice because it sounded very different: the first time with the student conductors trading off each other and the second time with you conducting. I was peering over the shoulder at somebody’s score, and it was so much looser when you conducted it than when these students conducted.

JT: Probably because I’m a looser conductor. [laughs] I’m not as “trained” as they are, but I know the piece. They don’t know the piece. They were following their directions and I decided that some of the directions weren’t working too well, so I changed them. I can do that!

FJO: Can they do that in performance? What are the guidelines? Will people in City X be hearing pretty much the same thing as people in City Z?

JT: No, because the hall will be different, the orchestra will be different, the level will be different, the conductor will be different—there are a lot of factors here. I think most conductors will try to honor the tempos until they get to know it better. If there are two or three or four performances, then they might say, “You know, this tempo could be a little faster.” But I think the first time they do it they’re not going to say immediately, “Oh, I think this could be faster.” It takes a little bit of time to get into those kinds of changes.

FJO: So you’re okay with that kind of interpretive leeway?

JT: Oh, sure, whatever works, and if they have suggestions for something to do better, absolutely. I’ve already gotten one suggestion.

FJO: So the piece has changed to some extent, I guess?

JT: Oh, yes, it’s a livable thing. It’s going to change, and I’m going to change it. And it’s great. It’s like what Mahler used to do, though of course he was the conductor, too, so he could do that. But it’s a living entity. It shouldn’t be fixed in cement.

FJO: But that’s so opposite of what the orchestra tradition has become.

JT: I know.

Frank J. Oteri: You hadn’t written for orchestra in a number of years and actually swore it off. Have you written differently having to write for people who might not be the top-level players?

Joan Tower: Oh, yeah. I had several player advisors and we went over it with a fine tooth comb. What happened was I found myself getting more and more confined. Can they handle that height? Can they handle that speed? Not too fast. No, no, no. Not that high. Not quite that high. And oh, you can only feature certain people. You’ve got to be careful who you feature.

FJO: So who can’t you feature?

JT: Well, [laughs] I don’t want to do damage to those poor instruments, but you can imagine. I can tell you who you can feature because there are reasons for it. The flute, because flutists are trained, and clarinetists and trumpets, they come up in the band world, and they’re trained to follow conductors. And they’re trained to count and play in tune, and they’ve got a lot of chops going for them at an earlier time. And then the first violinist, because the first violinist should be the best player in the orchestra…

FJO: Strangely enough the lessons learned writing for these community orchestra do translate back into writing for the “A” level orchestras. You might be working with the best possible players, but maybe they’re not going to give it the rehearsal time that it needs to be the piece that you want people to hear.

JT: Well, the top-level [American] orchestras can read like nobody in the world, including the European orchestras and every other orchestra. The players in the major orchestras are the most unbelievable sight-readers I have ever encountered in my life. The Chicago Symphony sight read my Silver Ladders, they literally sight read. The percussionist took the part home, I think, to get the choreography, but the others didn’t. It’s a matter of pride sometimes, not to take it home.

So they have “X” amount of time to learn this piece and, boy, they just learn how to connect. But it’s not an architectural blueprint. It’s not like the nails have to be that size for every house, you know what I mean? So the burden for the composer on the page is extraordinary when it comes to the major orchestras, because you get exactly what you put down.

FJO: No interpretation?

JT: Well, maybe in the solos and maybe the conductor understands more about the piece, which is great if they do, then you get more interpretation, especially with a second and third performance.

FJO: Now, is this because the orchestra’s repertoire and way of doing things is completely fixed with doing standard repertoire works that everybody knows and everybody’s heard a zillion times?

JT: It’s very complicated and I’m still trying to figure it out. You’re dealing with a large entity of people. It’s not like you’re dealing with a string quartet. So you cannot say, “Oh, excuse me conductor, I think it’d be great if you did this or that.” Why? Because there’s no time for that. It creates a discussion because the person next to you says, “I don’t agree with that. I think we should do it this way.” My first conducting gig was at the Scotia Festival and I did Barber’s Adagio for Strings, which is one of my favorite pieces. They were all first chair players from different orchestras in Canada and the United States, and I said, “I’m new to this and I’m not sure about the tempo of the Adagio.” I got six different ideas of what that tempo could be. There was a 20-minute argument/discussion, and I just stood there like this [crosses arms] waiting for them to finish and finally I said to myself, this is not a good idea. We are now 20 minutes into this. I said, “Thank you so much for your input.” And that was the last time I asked them anything! I saw what the problem was.

FJO: So sometimes a non-democratic model is more efficient.

JT: [Sighs] Yeah. The creativity has to continue but it has to be there on another level. Like St. Luke’s does, for example. You create a new music series, an old music series, you back up a singer or you back up Metallica, which they’ve done at Madison Square Garden, and so what you’re getting are these floating choices that these people have which keeps them more creative. They have a lot of input in everything, and I get the feeling that it’s a much happier band of people.

FJO: You began writing for orchestra long after being a composer of exclusively chamber music and being a chamber musician yourself as the pianist with Da Capo which you founded. So the orchestral way of making music, where one person says what to do and you only have a certain amount of time to work on something, was very different from the world you knew where, ideally, everyone in a chamber group makes decisions together. It’s a very different way of thinking.

JT: Oh, very different. It basically puts the burden on the page for you, and if you don’t have that absolutely in order, you’re going to suffer. Composers don’t always understand how to get that in order because they are not allowed to be heard very much, so there’s not a lot of advanced training for hearing what works and what doesn’t. It’s a difficult situation for a young composer, because it’s like being a young conductor. They have to have an orchestra to try things out. They can’t do it in front of a mirror forever.

But in some chamber music settings like the string quartet world, the page is flexible and they have to carve it out, because in order to be competitive with other string quartets they need to really have a creative voice.—No, I think we should do it off the string a little more. No, absolutely not. What are you talking about? No, look, let’s just try it.—And the dialogue is very tough in the string quartet. They have to learn how to fight and interact and balance, but a composer comes into this and it’s like old home week because they’re thinking the same way. You’re walking into an actually creative setting, so it’s just great because it’s natural. But there’s more time and there’s less people: there aren’t 16 first violins and it’s a very different setting.

FJO: So why write for orchestra if it doesn’t have this creative edge?

JT: Well, it’s just such an incredible palette of color and there are so many exciting things you can do with it. But the human situation for me is very difficult, and I unfortunately go into all musical situations as a human being, not just as a person on paper.

FJO: What’s so interesting to me is that in a lot of your orchestral pieces, you have specific players in mind. When you were the composer-in-residence in St. Louis, you got to know the musicians you were writing for and you wrote to their specific strengths. You gave up writing for orchestra because of how anonymous it can be, yet Made in America is even more anonymous because there are 65 different orchestras involved. There’s no way you can know all those people and, as you said yourself, you’re not even going to be at all the performances.

JT: But those people are there not because they’re making a lot of money. They’re in those orchestras because they want to play and they want to be there. That’s what I’m curious about. How does that effect what they do with my piece? And I’m going to hear that right away. And I’m going to hear that the chops are not as good, the intonation is going to be not as good, everything is going to be “not as good,” but I can hear the effort coming through. I mean, I face clarinetists playing my Wings at all kinds of levels, and I can hear within three measures what the level is, how long they worked on the piece, what their commitment is to this piece, and how much they’re willing to go against the page. I can hear that within three measures because I’ve done this so much. And I’m just very curious to see how my piece is going to come off of the page to them and how enthusiastic they’re going to be about making it work the best way they can. That’s what I’m really interested in.

FJO: In a way, this is the ultimate piece to write knowing it’s going to get so many performances.

JT: [laughs] It’s a huge burden.

FJO: Well, I’m thinking about it in terms of the future, because you have a lot more pieces in you. Where do you go from here?

JT: I just finished a brass quintet for Juilliard’s 100th, and I’m just about to finish a piece for Orpheus which is going to the other end of the earth from the community orchestra. They’re really a large chamber group and very different from a major orchestra type setting. They don’t have a conductor. It’s a very personal ensemble. So that’s why I accepted that. And I just finished a viola concerto which is going to be done this year, too. The concertos I never opted out of for the simple reason that I’m going through one person who’s up front and that becomes the musical connection to the orchestra.

Frank J. Oteri: Your music is so much about individuals and personalities, yet you’ve insisted on never writing vocal music.

Joan Tower: I’ve really thought about this a lot, because the resistance is so high with me and a lot of singers have asked me. So every time they ask me, I think about it. I finally did accept a youth chorus, for Transient Glory. That’s going to be my entrée, but writing for young voices in a group is sort of like dealing with instruments. I can do just anything. I don’t even know what text. I probably won’t even use a text. But I started thinking that composers are pretty much split in history down one side or the other—I think somebody should do a dissertation on this. There are a few—like Mozart, Schumann, Schubert, even Bolcom in this century, and Rorem to a certain extent—that have done both, and some very easily on both sides, but very few. The majority of composers are on one side of the fence or the other.

FJO: But they’ll have maybe one work or a handful of works in the other.

JT: Right. Beethoven really struggled with the voice.

FJO: Yet he brought the voice to the symphony.

JT: Yeah. Anyway, it’s not like I’m particularly special in that respect.

FJO: But is there an aesthetic decision involved as well?

JT: Yeah, I think that composers express themselves through “meaning” of different kinds, and the vocal meaning has a verbal connection to it, so they can’t get going without the verbal inspiration. That’s one kind of meaning. The others don’t want to have anything to do with verbal meaning; this is pure, abstract, musical, instrumental, whatever you want to call it. You can make whatever you want of it.

FJO: Sonata No. 12.

JT: Yeah. And I think there’s a very clear distinction between those two types of composers.

FJO: But that’s funny because I was listening to the new Naxos CD of your music and I was really taken with the solo piano pieces. They were all based on phrases from John Ashbury poems, and I thought, wow, she’s responding to literature here.

JT: No! What happened was I wrote a piece and found the phrase that I needed for the piece. [laughs] That’s really what happened. Some of the phrases were actually beautiful. I just loved “vast antique cubes.” Whoa, that’s a great phrase. So in that one I tried to emulate that idea somehow. But the others: “Holding a Daisy,” “Throbbing Still” is pretty clear; and “Or like a…an engine” was attached to a motoric piece.

FJO: But there’s definitely a language-music connection. Just by giving something a title, you’ve given a piece a very specific meaning it might not otherwise have had, and you’ve done this many times with everything from Silver Ladders to the Fanfares for the Uncommon Woman.

JT: Do you know Debussy’s piano preludes? They’re beautiful titles—”Sunken Cathedral,” “Footsteps in the Snow.” And if you’ve played those pieces, those images are just perfect for those pieces. Well, it turns out he wrote those images after the pieces, not before. He found the right image to fit the piece, and that’s basically what I do. I guess it’s just a way of creating a little window into the piece that isn’t too heavy. You know what I mean? Like Wings for clarinet. Well, that just evokes flying, right? And that’s one of my best titles. And then I have some that are too confining, like Amazon. I’ve had people come up to me after and say, I heard the jungles there, and I heard the monkeys,” and I’m like, “What are you talking about?”!

FJO: It’s interesting, though, because except for maybe the concertos, you don’t tend to use boilerplate titles for things. You don’t call something String Quartet No. 2, and in a way that’s sort of distancing yourself from the classical music canon of the past. So you clearly see the need for having the titles.

JT: Yeah, I want to have an action and an image that’s not too overwhelming. And I work hard on the titles. I really do. I spend a lot of time. The last one I have is Purple Rhapsody for Viola and Orchestra. I love that.

FJO: Bringing it back to Made in America, that’s an odd title.

JT: I gave up on that one. No, actually I went around and around and around the block. The project is called Made in America and I featured “America the Beautiful” as the main tune, so I thought, why not just call it that, Made in America? So, it’s not bad. It was a little bit of a cop-out though.

Frank J. Oteri: What you are writing is clearly part of the classical music tradition but contemporary music is usually not on the radar of the people who listen to classical music. Many times you’ll hear listeners say that they “don’t get” the new piece on a program. You talked about creating windows into pieces with titles, so you’re clearly thinking about the audience. But who exactly is that audience?

Joan Tower: Wow, that’s a loaded question. That’s a heavy question. If somebody is sitting in an audience and listening to a piece of mine and they “don’t get it,” I don’t care who they are, I don’t care how old they are or how much new music they’ve heard, where they’re from, how much education they’ve had, if they’re not musical, let’s say they’re just not musical, then that’s a problem. But let’s say they’re basically musical people and they don’t get my piece, then I haven’t done my job. I really believe that.

We go to this gym and there’s this fireman. His name is Bill. He’s retired from the New York Fire Department, and he’s this big burly guy, and he’s always talking about how uneducated he is. He’s embarrassed by it, but I keep telling him to shut up. But he’s just a wonderful guy so I invited him to one of my concerts. I think the only thing he ever heard was rock, pop, folk maybe. But never classical. I said to him, “Look, you’re probably going to hate this stuff,” but he says, “I’ll try.” He comes to the concert and I gave a little talk ahead of time and I said there’s a guy in this audience who is going to be really challenged by this and I’m just hoping I’ll get to him somehow. So the music was played and he came up to me, this big burly guy, and he threw his arms around me and he says, “You know, I really liked it! I really liked the music.” And that meant a lot to me, because I had crossed a lot of barriers there. This is totally new stuff to him. Somehow I just wanted to get him, for the connection to be made. I think there’s a power of music that goes beyond style that is very, very important. I think these distinctions between classical, folk, rock, jazz, electronic, are a little bit strong. I say to somebody I’m a classical composer. They feel it’s too elitist for them; it’s a category that’s a little too prejudicial. I think for somebody that’s musical, some pieces will just get to them no matter what.

FJO: It’s that word “classical.” Everybody hears classical music and they think Mozart. That’s not living music. And then for the people within the community, you say modern classical music, and that conjures up another.

JT: Oh, right, exactly, I’m outta here, right? [laughs] That’s way too smart for me. That’s like me with art. I get totally scared when somebody takes me to a museum. Ohmigod, I won’t be able to know what that’s about. I’ve tried, I really have tried, but I’m just not basically too visual. I just have to accept that. And I think that’s where the delineation comes. There are people who are “musical” that go to all kinds of things, and then there are people who are just non-musical. They just don’t make musical connections. That’s the delineation that one has to be careful of.

FJO: We both kind of joked around and said, “Oh, that’s too smart for me,” but there was definitely a sound world that composers had that was distancing in the recent past. It spawned some great music and there are some composers who are still actively pursuing this style, but it had a distancing effect with the mainstream audience for classical music and never really reached a large public beyond that.

JT: You mean the Schoenberg school? Yeah, right.

FJO: You came up in the heat of this as a composer. That’s how you were trained. But at some point you made a break with it. Was it being active performing music—dealing with other musicians and with audiences on a regular basis—that led you away from writing that kind of music?

JT: I think when you’re young you tend to be swept up in your locale, whatever is nourishing you in one way or another, and that could be many different things. I was swept up in the whole serial group which was led by Charles Wuorinen at the time. He and I were very close friends. I watched him create all these concerts uptown, and conduct them and play, so I said that’s what I want to do. So I created some concerts downtown at Greenwich House so that I wouldn’t compete with him uptown. And I played the piano. I couldn’t conduct because at that time a woman conducting was…forget it! This was in the ’60s.

I was impressed with his brightness, and also Babbitt, Wolpe, and Boretz—all extremely bright people. And caring, too. But there was a stylistic bent in all of this which was very “bright” [laughs] and I always felt like I was in the wrong place. I would try to read their articles and I spent months trying to understand them. It wasn’t actually until I heard some other music like Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time and a piece by Crumb; I remember those two pieces. I heard them for the first time and I was struck by the simplicity and the power behind these pieces. I was just blown away. But, of course, I couldn’t say anything, because at that time that kind of music was way too simple and too direct. The music was supposed to be very complex and very layered and very pointillistic. That’s the music we were involved with. That’s what we thought was the world, or that’s what I thought because that was my world. And then I heard those two pieces and I was jarred out of that world. It took me quite a while to get out, but I finally pulled away.

FJO: It’s interesting that you say Charles was doing this stuff uptown and you were doing this stuff downtown.

JT: I wasn’t stylistically doing Downtown.

FJO: I know. But since you just said that, the so-called Uptown/Downtown war is another thing that really divided our community. Some people say it’s over and we’re now in a more tolerant era of polystylism; others say it’s still going on. Kyle Gann says it’s still going on. Where do you see the current compositional landscape?

JT: Kyle Gann is a colleague of mine, and he’s a writer and a thinker. Part of his talent is thinking about these things and articulating them, so he’s interested in the path of history very seriously. He’s an incredibly informed guy, about American music in particular. I’m not that type at all. I’m not a historian, I’m not a scholar. I know a lot of music, but I couldn’t tell you how it fits into the cultural path of this or that. I couldn’t. I just don’t have that kind of talent. So I think you have to be careful who’s talking about what. I think we live in an incredibly interesting age in the sense that we have a lot of freedom of choice for the first time in history, really big choices. Maybe a little too big, but there’s something there for everybody. If you want to just do DJ music, you can go over here. If you want to do just strict straight pure improvisation, you go over here. If you want to do controlled improvisation, music with dance, jazz, notated music—I’m in the notated crowd—you’ve got all these choices. And I think the competition in some people’s minds has to do with money, awards, visibility, those kind of outside factors, which can play a role in jealousy. Like, why is Yo-Yo Ma only playing Chris Rouse or Richard Danielpour? Why isn’t he playing Terry Riley? You can get jealous with that kind of visibility level, which is natural. But I’m not so sure that the Uptown/Downtown thing has the same competitiveness that it used to have. There were actually two groups, Uptown and Downtown, Cage and Babbitt, basically, and then a few Midtown people like Copland. But it was pretty small. It was a small group of people. Now it’s a huge group of people. There are ten new music groups Uptown and there are twenty Downtown groups, it’s just proliferated like that.

FJO: But, of course, the ironic corollary to that is with 500 channels to choose from, how many people are watching? Day in and day out you hear all these reports about some orchestra dying or that they’ve made the very last big cast opera recording on a major label. There’s been a Cassandra death knell for big “C” classical music, and for notated music. It’s less than 3 percent of the market, but 3 percent is an awful lot of people if you do the math.

JT: Yeah, and also I think you have to be careful of the statistics, like you have to be careful of polls and stuff like that. I’m an old “classical,” “notated,” whatever you want to call it. I see lots more string quartets playing new music. I see lots of flute players commissioning right and left. They have 5,000 flutists at the flute convention. Clarinetists up the wazoo who can play rings around everybody. Saxophone players are coming up now. There are a few laggards among players, but I won’t mention who they are.

FJO: But certainly a project like Made in America has the potential for gigantic outreach. So might this ultimately be the way to enlarging the audience for this kind of music?

JT: It depends entirely on how my music goes over. That’s the burden. If my piece has some impact, and draws the players in a little bit, or a lot, and draws the audience in a little bit or a lot, then it has some reverberation. I’m putting the entire burden of this thing on me, because the music is the center of everything no matter what anybody’s telling you. Whatever the PR, marketing, historical value, blah, blah, blah, that’s going on around it, you still have this living entity in front of you that has to do its work, whatever that is. I’ve believed that ever since the ’60s. I tell young composers that. They always ask: What competition should I apply to? Will you write a recommendation? How do I get to this group? All this career stuff, and I’m like, wait a minute. Who’s in your backyard? Who are the players in your town? Who are the players in your school? Go to their concerts, get to know them, get interested in what they’re doing and maybe you’ll hook up something musical with them. And then write the best piece you can write for trombone or whatever it is, and then he will bring his trombone friends to the concert and they’ll say, “Wow, I want to play that piece!” So then they play it at their concert and there are six other trombonists there, and then suddenly it’s going places. This piece has legs without any advertising, without any PR, without any “connections,” any awards, nothing. This one little piece has legs. And I really believe that, that that’s your PR—this piece. The piece, not anything around it.