Category: Cover

John Eaton Photo by Lloyd DeGrane, courtesy of The University of Chicago Chronicle

August 3, 2000 – 1:00 to 3:30 pm

John Eaton in conversation with Frank J. Oteri
at The American Music Center

Filmed by Jonathan Murphy and David Hughes
Transcribed by Karyn Joaquino

FRANK J. OTERI: A lot of the concerns that you have as a composer and as a musical thinker are very near and dear to my own musical interests: the whole notion of microtonality as a direction for music, working with electronics, vocal music, new approaches to opera… Let’s start by talking a bit about microtonality. Most of the music that you’ve written incorporates, to some degree, to a very strong degree, the use of quartertones, yielding a 24-note equal-tempered scale. What led you to writing music in this scale with this system?

JOHN EATON: Well, let me, first of all, say, that as a microtonal composer, I’ve never been much of a theorist. My mind doesn’t work that way. I use whatever gets the job done. I haven’t been very much involved with any kind of puristic approach, nor have I been particularly concerned with finding a system that I could teach, or a system that would be consistent. I’ve just simply used what I’ve used because of the great, great expressive potential of it. And although I’ve composed a lot of chamber music and a lot of orchestral music, I am fundamentally interested in opera and I believe that more than anything else, microtonality extends expressive possibilities, particularly for the voice. Believe it or not, I think it was George Avakian who said to me once that he thought the microtonal approach was the one that held the greatest potential for the future, because it makes the greatest challenge to performers, composers and listeners.

FRANK J. OTERI: In your essay for the Kenyon Review, you talk about why you use quartertones in the operas… Our standard practice 12-tone equal tempered scale has major and minor thirds. And many of us think of the major third as being happy, and a minor third as being sad. In the essay you said that there are 3 other possible thirds that you can have in the quartertone system, and these could convey additional emotions. Anybody’s who’s familiar with blues has some understanding of what a neutral third sounds like, which is somewhere in between a major and a minor. It isn’t happy or sad, it’s sort of expresses a resigned state … it’s almost like the pitch equivalent of the perpetual present tense of ebonics: “I be here. I be doing that.” You know, which is a sense of tense that exists in non-Western languages, in western African languages, or in Chinese, in a variety of languages that don’t really conceive of time the way the Western world has up till recently. It’s a curious parallel considering that other cultures have been using smaller intervals for millennia.

JOHN EATON: Yeah. Absolutely. And the way that I got involved with microtonal music was, frankly, through jazz. I supported myself all during my 20’s as a jazz musician, or rather, as a performer, of both contemporary music and jazz. And they’re just so expressive there. I mean, the 7th, the flat 7th which approaches the 7th harmonic, very often comes off sounding like the cry of a frightened child. It has a kind of purity, a kind of, also, anguish involved, you cannot get in any other way. You ask why quartertones? Well, actually, I think quartertones are intervals that almost every performer I’ve met hears, and hears as distinct intervals. And I use microtones very often as a point of departure, that is, sometimes I will want something being a quartertone flat just simply to bring people down to the pure 7^th harmonic, so that I create a sheet of sound, a solid sheet of sound, which the pure 7^th chord is. Again, purely for expressive reasons, this is a very, very powerful sonority to have in your armament, to be able to use, it expresses things that nothing else that I can think of does.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, in terms of your experience as a jazz musician, what instrument were you playing?

JOHN EATON: I play piano, and then I did some jazz things with early synthesizers. I played the SynKet. But mostly in jazz my instrument was the piano.

FRANK J. OTERI: Which is an instrument that doesn’t really use microtonal intervals. It’s fixed in terms of the intervals it can play, although anybody who’s listened to a Thelonious Monk record knows that most of the pianos he played on were not perfectly “in tune.” That’s one of the things I enjoy the most about his records, that slight irregularity of the intervals which is a harmonic parallel to his irregular rhythmic phrasing.

JOHN EATON: Yeah.

FRANK J. OTERI: There was a recording a couple years back of the piano rolls of Jelly Roll Morton that had been mastered and done up, and they did it on this perfectly in-tune piano. It sounded wrong to me. I doubt he would have ever had access to such a perfectly tuned piano, so it wound up sounding like something was missing. There’s a flavor, a nuance, and certainly, you know, people who are in the period instrument movement will tell you there’s a real difference when you perform Baroque music in mean tone, or you when you perform Bach in Werckmeister III tuning. There’s a whole degree of nuance that’s completely gone when you’re stuck in 12-tone equal temperament.

JOHN EATON: When you modulate from C to E major: it’s like the heavens opening up, it’s so totally different.

FRANK J. OTERI: Which was part of the way those people were conceiving of music. Now, we’re talking about quartertones, it’s so interesting, because I think the notion of quartertones in the equal tempered scale grew out of this, this notion of extending chromaticism. In the early 20th century, quartertones were the path not taken. We’d reached this point where chromatic tonality reached a threshold, and Schoenberg had this idea that you would go into atonality and then serialism, well he hated the word atonality; he called it “pan-tonality.” But there was also this other possible path. Alois Hába had this idea that the future of music lied in extending chromaticism beyond the 12 notes. And Ivan Wyschnegradsky in Russia, who was a disciple of Scriabin, said that if you take these chords that Scriabin used in the Poem of Fire and you do quartertone alterations to them, you’d get some really interesting extended harmonies. You’re opened up this whole other palette. And Julian Carrillo here in North America, in Mexico, you know, was doing stuff, calling it the “Thirteenth Sound” as early as 1895. And certainly Charles Ives was coming up with some of these same ideas during his backyard experiments with Hans Barth in Connecticut. But none of this ever took off as a movement in music the way that 12-tone music did.

JOHN EATON: Well, I think the reason that it never took off, if I can say so, is that as gifted as all these composers were, for them, they were dealing not so much with necessities as with possibilities. And I think now, for many composers, myself and yourself included, the use of microtonality has become a necessity. We need it to express what we hear. We need it to express what we feel. We need it to capture the energy of contemporary life. And I don’t think that that was true, I mean, in the case of Hába, yes, he was really just trying to extend chromatic possibility. I think that’s true of Wyschnegradsky, too. With the exception of, I mean, Carrillo, I feel that he was very interested in the part of the overtone series where it goes to a whole tone scale. And most of his early music is involved in with sort of tuning up whole tone scales, out of impressionism. Ives, to me, the most interesting microtonal piece I know is the 3rd of his quartertone piano pieces, actually, because in that, he really begins working with microtonal scenarios.

FRANK J. OTERI: And the harmonies of those chords are just glorious. In the first piece the quartertones seem mostly ornamental and the second piece is really just playing off the fact that there are 2 pianos tuned a quartertone apart. They really become one in the third piece. Yeah.

JOHN EATON: It really has a microtonal sonority. It’s interesting, when I began working, and for years I was working with quartertones, I didn’t know any of the music of any of these composers. I knew them as names, I’d read about them, but the access to their music was very limited. For instance, the three quartertone pieces of Charles Ives, I had just finished writing my Microtonal Fantasy, and I played it for the music librarian at Yale. And he said, “Oh, do you know the Charles Ives microtonal pieces?” And I said, “No, not at all.” And he sent copies of them over to me, and I actually did the European premiere with another pianist, of the Charles Ives quartertone pieces on the same program that I did the Microtonal Fantasy.

FRANK J. OTERI: Wow.

JOHN EATON: So I got to know those pieces, so to speak, after the fact.

FRANK J. OTERI: So then, who was the model?

JOHN EATON: There was no model except jazz.

FRANK J. OTERI: But who was using quartertones in jazz except for Don Ellis?

JOHN EATON: Well, all performers were inflecting pitch.

FRANK J. OTERI: Right.

JOHN EATON: Not actually using quartertones. Why I hit o
n tuning the 2 pianos a quartertone apart, I don’t know, except to say that I’ve always used quartertones as a point of departure. I want to open up all sorts of doors. Well, you know yourself in the symphony orchestra there’s as much of a difference between a G# and an Ab as hopefully in my music I want there to be between an A quarter sharp and a B flat quarter flat. The B flat quarter flat might imply, for instance, the 7^th, the pure 7^th harmonic.

FRANK J. OTERI: Right. So you’re not thinking in terms of a rigid 24 equal-tempered system.

JOHN EATON: No. I’m thinking in terms of a point of departure, a field of action for performers to express an expressive need of mine which hopefully the context of music would convey. I remember a performance of my Concert Piece for 2 clarinets tuned a quarter of a tone apart, 2 oboes tuned a quarter of a tone apart, and flute, which, you know, which at least in 1964 or so when I wrote it; the flute was the instrument that was most adaptable to the playing of quartertones because of the work of Gazzelloni and various other people… The first performance of that was done by my good friend William O. Smith at the University of Washington. And he called me up after the first rehearsals and said “We’re using these tuning devices and we just can’t seem to get passages right.” I said, “No, look, don’t work on it that way. Play it. Play it over and over and people will hear what the pitches are supposed to be doing.”

FRANK J. OTERI: You know, it’s interesting, when Hába wrote his quartertone opera, his one quartertone opera…

JOHN EATON: The Mother.

FRANK J. OTERI: Yes, The Mother… He had special quartertone clarinets built. There were special instruments that were built which had extra keys and did certain things. But since the ’60s, with Bruno Bartolozzi‘s book New Resources for Wind Instruments, there are fingering systems for quartertones for the flute, for the clarinet, for the oboe, for the bassoon, every woodwind instrument, for saxophone… Every woodwind instrument in the orchestra can play quartertones if the musicians would learn the fingerings.

JOHN EATON: However, I have to correct that a little bit by saying that some of the quartertones, unfortunately, some of those fingerings change the color substantially of woodwind instruments. Also, there aren’t nearly all of them — a few quartertones which are just not, which are just really difficult to get. Usually they can get them by lipping or something of that kind. But, so, for instance, the work that Robert Dick did in getting the quartertone flute is very, very valuable. The idea of adding an additional valve trigger to the trumpet is something that’s really needed.

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah, a trumpet can’t do it otherwise. In fact, I noticed in your scores that you’ll have quartertones written for the woodwind parts, but there is a score written for French horns, and you have 2 French horns that were tuned so that one of them is playing the quartertone difference — the other 12 notes — one was a 12 equal and the other was a quartertone apart.

JOHN EATON: Well, even in The Cry of Clytaemnestra, I really went out on a limb but it was on the advice of one of the greatest horn players in the world, Phil Farkus, who was teaching at that time, we were both teaching at Indiana University. And I tuned the F division of the horn a quarter step lower than the Bb. And boy, did this ever set up a whole bunch of possibilities. And I found a few horn players who were willing to take on that challenge. And who did actually tailor the fingerings that they used to which horn they wanted the note to be played upon.

FRANK J. OTERI: Wow.

JOHN EATON: And of course it produces all kinds of runs that wouldn’t otherwise be possible, trills, tremolos, it really was great fun. [laughs] Of course, I must say, that’s one of the things about getting involved with microtonality and other experimental techniques is the fact that you’re working with performers, and on the whole, performers are really great people. They love to accept challenges, and extend challenges. They’ll say, “you know, you did this, but you can also do this.”

FRANK J. OTERI: Right.

JOHN EATON: Just the same, you know, as I’ve said, Phil, meeting in the hall one day and saying, you know, I love the way you use the horns in but you know, you could also just do the same thing with one horn. Of course, that’s an idea that wouldn’t have occurred to me in a thousand years.

FRANK J. OTERI: That’s the positive end, but then there’s also the negative end. You write a piece, you send it out into the world. And then all of a sudden you hear it back, maybe you didn’t get to work with these musicians, and not everybody has experience playing with these intervals, and not everybody understands the notations, there’s no accepted norm for how to approach this music. What do you do?

JOHN EATON: Well, I think of the late quartets of Beethoven, people were sort of playing them at half-speed, not really understanding what Beethoven was after, probably for years, you know. In fact, I sometimes wonder if we still do. [laughs] But, that’s part of the fun. You also will occasionally get a performance back that’s so stellar and that’s bett
er than you had imagined yourself, people have really applied themselves. Because, let’s face it, any clarinetist who has worked very, very hard on his instrument, or any bassoonist, knows much more about their instrument in an intimate and expressive way that I ever would, you know.

FRANK J. OTERI: You said that there were certain quartertones that don’t work on woodwinds. Have you ever written things and then have the player come back to you and say, well, that’s just impossible?

JOHN EATON: Well, it happens all the time and usually it isn’t. [laughs] Usually, it’s just a question of they haven’t worked on it hard enough or in the right way.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now, we talked quartertones: I know that in Myshkin you also used sixth-tones.

JOHN EATON: Uh huh.

FRANK J. OTERI: The 36-tone system was used to convey the moments of delirium. And, if my memory serves, those intervals were used mostly in the electronic parts. Were they used by the rest of the orchestra as well?

JOHN EATON: They were occasionally, and occasionally there’ll be a sixth-tone in a vocal part. Myshkin was an outgrowth of an idea I had of contrasting sixth-tones, which give you a pretty pure 7th harmonic, with quartertones. And, you know, it’s bound up with the whole poetic idea of the opera. You know, Myshkin himself, the main hero of The Idiot of Dostoyevsky, never actually appears on stage in the opera.

FRANK J. OTERI: Instead the audience… we are Myshkin.

JOHN EATON: Instead, all the action takes place within the mind of Prince Myshkin. And when he’s in the state of idiocy, it’s a very pure, very naïve state, which is, actually written in sixth-tones… Delirium is a misleading term, it’s more to capture this sort of simplicity of vision, this naiveté that Myshkin in this pure state has, and then as he gets involved in reality, I use the harsher dissonances of the quartertones.

FRANK J. OTERI: Right.

JOHN EATON: And the two forms, that is, the sixth-tones and the quartertones, weave in and out of each other. The electronic music and the instrumental music, depending on Mishkin’s state of mind, depending on whether he’s an observer, or generally a kind of troubled observer of things that are occurring outside of him, hence I use legitimate staging and, or more ordinary staging, and quartertones, or whether, as I say, he’s in this very pure state, in which I use the sixth-tones and use kinetic lighting sequences, things bathed in light, and so on. And so the reason for using the sixth-tones in Myshkin was very, very much an expressive one. I had also used them in Danton with the harps: the harps were tuned a sixth of a tone apart. And that came from a piece of mine called From the Cave of the Sybil, which was for flute and 9 harps, tuned in sixth-tones, three on each, three normal, three a sixth-tone higher, three a sixth-tone lower, and flute, which again was playing quartertones… When I lived in Rome, there was a sound I heard when I crawled in by the back entrance to the cave of the Sybil. I was with the archaeologist Frank Brown, who is a wonderful human being and a great friend of mine. We suddenly came into a huge chamber, and one could almost see the Sybil there, in this case holding a flute. One heard this incredible sound in this cave, and of course, it was the lapping of the Meditteranean on the cliffs. And it was a sound that I tried to capture for years after that, and finally, I think that I got it in this particular combination of instruments with this particular tuning. Most of the way through the piece the harps are playing with eraser brushes…Nevertheless, you hear it in this movement of slowly changing intervals.

FRANK J. OTERI: When you’re writing a piece, do you compose with an instrument in mind, and are you hearing all these intervals?

JOHN EATON: I hear in my head what I write, but I always play things out very, very slowly on two pianos tuned a quarter of a tone apart. And sometimes I’ll test things electronically.

FRANK J. OTERI: With the sixth-tones?

JOHN EATON: With the sixth-tones I do test things electronically. The SynKet had three keyboards, so it fit very naturally in that. But you can work that out very easily on modern synthesizers.

FRANK J. OTERI: Do you feel audiences can hear it?

JOHN EATON: Oh, yeah. I want the audience to be so involved in the sweep of the music. Because after all, music, of all the arts, is that that most begins with the fundamental basis of the universe itself. It begins with energy. And it begins with the very tissue of human and even natural experience on every level. I find, for instance, in teaching, I find when my students get off, it’s normally because they’re forgetting that fact, you know, that music is and has to be totally involved.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now, do you do ear training with students?

JOHN EATON: No. I don’t have any students who are microtonalists. Well, there are a few who have used it occasionally, but if they don’t feel the same necessity to use microtones that I do, they shouldn’t be using it.

FRANK J. OTERI: Do they at least get to learn to hear those sonorities?

JOHN EATON: Oh, sure, if they’re interested, you know, I let them into my studio all the time and they mess around on the pianos. At least they have great fun doing that. [laughs]

FRANK J. OTERI: Now, I remember an incendiary comment I read years ago by Donal Henahan, who’s long since retired as the chief music critic of The New York Times, who was ranting against doing unusual operatic repertoire. I think it was a column in response to some performance of a piece that hadn’t been done too frequently, and he wrote something like: “What’s next? Are they going to dig out the operas of Hába? Goodness knows, we hear out-of-tu
ne singing in Verdi and Puccini all the time over there.” And at the time I thought, this is exactly the wrong perception of what this music is trying to be. But to some people who hear it, who don’t know what it is, they say, oh, this is out of tune. Of course, it’s even more in tune, it’s more aware.

JOHN EATON: Let me pick up on that in a moment. First of all, I want to get back to the audience. I want the audience to be so swept up in the human experience of my music, or spiritual experience that I feel my music is involved with, that they don’t notice microtonality per se. In other words, I think that if an audience listens to something as an experience of how in tune it is or something of that kind, that the whole point is somehow being missed, and the music has failed. Of course, in opera, you involve the audience so much with action and with what’s happening on stage, that the music is the center of that action. Nevertheless, one doesn’t have time to think, oh, well, this is a quarter tone sharp, or flat.

FRANK J. OTERI: Right. Well, in terms of hearing structures, the Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara, whom I met when I was in Helsinki a few years back, said something that I’ve really taken to heart ever since. He said, I use 12-tone rows here and there, but I don’t want you to hear them. That’s the skeleton of the piece. You look at people: everybody has a skeleton. There are too many pieces that are walking around that are skeletons parading as people. These things are very under the surface, and if somebody wants to go probe and find them, that’s all well and good, but if music doesn’t strike you as an emotional experience, then it’s not working.

JOHN EATON: Yeah. I really write for people, as I said at the very beginning. I’ve never been very interested in the systematic development of microtonality for the simple reason that it’s not important to me. It’s not important to me to found a school; it’s not important to me to have disciples. What’s important for me is to communicate the vision that I have in sound with the audience that’s hearing it. And it really seems to. My music really seems to do that, if left alone. Not if somebody is lecturing people on what they should be hearing! Of the things I’ve found that performers can seize upon, hear and reproduce immediately, one is quartertones. Almost every performer I’ve worked with hears them as distinct intervals after a little bit of exposure. The second is just intonation, because when they go directly to just, it’s just a question of sort of removing beats and having pure intervals. And any performer can do that.

FRANK J. OTERI: Do you work with just intonation?

JOHN EATON: Oh, in Danton and Robespierre, Robespierre’s music is constantly in the just intonation system. And Danton’s music, on the other hand, is in a quartertone system where each note has the most possible relationships. In other words, each note has a multiplicity of function, to use, I guess, Brahms‘ term that comes from this very rich palette. Whereas the music of Robespierre is meant to be just the opposite. It’s meant to express a very pure vision, which, the more it becomes involved with reality, the more dissonant it becomes. Just as, when you modulate away from C, in a just intonational system, the triads become more and more out of tune. It howls.

FRANK J. OTERI: Right. And you have to keep adding additional pitches if you want to have the chords stay consonant…did you restrict yourself to just 12 pitches?

JOHN EATON: Well, in Danton and Robespierre I imposed a 12 limit. I used a scale which was tuned so that the further it would move away from C the more dissonant it would become.

FRANK J. OTERI: Howling wolves.

JOHN EATON: Yeah. Just like Robespierre’s vision before he becomes involved with reality, the more, the more of a monster he becomes.

FRANK J. OTERI: That’s such an interesting application of just intonation, a real contrast with someone like Harry Partch, who I think is a very interesting person to contrast with what you do, because so much of what he was concerned with was the stage. And I want to get back to Partch when we talk about the notion of the Eaton opera with the musicians and singers all being one on the stage. This is a notion that is very new but has an antecedent to some extent, I think, in some of the things that Partch was doing in the ’50’s and ’60s, where the actors, the singers, the dancers are all one.

JOHN EATON: Well, you know, I have the greatest respect for Partch as a human being. We sometimes think that the only virtue that matters for the artist is courage. And certainly had no one had more courage than Harry Partch. On the other hand, I have to say that there is a kind of rhythmic, and textural and orchestral simplicity about Partch’s music that sometimes seems utterly banal to me. I seemed to me to be kind of like ‘a thinking man’s Orff.’

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah. Well, you know, that’s a very interesting analogy, and I think what both Orff and Partch were doing, and to an extent, what the minimalists have done in the last 30 years, there’s this one notion of looking at the future of music and saying, okay, this is an evolutionary process, we’re going to go to the next step with this. And then there’s the other notion of being an iconoclast or wanting to return to core roots, believing that things have gotten too out of control, too complex, too alienating, we need to go back to the source. And these two notions are very different approaches to being avant-garde. Partch, with his 43-tone scale and all the instruments he built, was not trying to extend European notions of harmony and melody, but to overthrow them. [laughs]

JOHN EATON: That’s the bright side, and I can see that. But do I dare to introduce the dark side especially as far as Orff’s music is concerned. And that is, the thing that was so unsettling, I mean, I was in my teens during the Second World War, but the thing that was so unsettling about the Nazis was the fact that they were so involved with the banal, simplistic vision of life. And Orff, of course, was a favorite of the Nazis, Orff and Werner Egk.

FRANK J. OTERI: His music I really don’t know at all…

JOHN EATON: I once heard an interesting argument between Sessions and Dallapiccola about who was the worst composer of the 20th Century. And I probably got this wrong, but I think that Dallapiccola said Orff and Sessions said Egk. Maybe it was the other way around, but anyway, they brought up examples of the 2 people’s work and, in the course of the conversation, they changed sides! [laughs]

FRANK J. OTERI: [laughs] That’s interesting. You know, there are tons of great composers and great artists who have nefarious political associations throughout history. I mean, certainly, you know, Wagner, who’s at the other end of the scale, is quite far from being saintly in his views. Or Mussorgsky…

JOHN EATON: But I think that the kind of banality and primitivism that is being espoused is something that, as I said, has a great deal in common with fascism. And also has a great deal in common with the worst parts of the corporate society that we live in here in the West, which I tend to say I’m not a great fan of. [laughs]

FRANK J. OTERI: You know, one thing I will say, though, and I see a common thread between Partch and Orff, and your own work, and I want to get into this notion, because I want to talk about opera, this notion of music as a ritualistic celebration, and certainly, you know, I think Orff’s strongest works… you know people only do Carmina Burana over and over again… but his strongest works were the operas he was writing late in his life: he did an opera based on Antigone, and another opera based on Oedipus, and they’re extremely effectual pieces of ritual theater. Partch was also very interested in Greek mythology and reinterpreting the important primal myths for our time as ritual theatre. You yourself, with Clytaemnestra and Antigone and the Androcles story, these are all ritual topics based on Greek myths… The ancient Classical tradition is a very strong interest of yours as well.

FRANK J. OTERI: You’ve said that contemporary subject matter doesn’t really interest you that much in opera. What do you see the role that opera has as a communicative tool to an audience?

JOHN EATON: Well, opera began with an intent to resuscitate Greek drama, that is, modern opera as we know it. And, of course, the other root would be out of the ritual dramas of the church. And I wish that we had the capacity with our operas to do what Aeschylus did in the Oresteia, for instance; it was really establishing trial by jury. He was making a fundamental statement about the very basis of communal life. And I think that opera, because of the power of music, and because of opening up (…oh, this sounds corny…) both sides of the brain, has the ability to affect people with the vision, has the capacity for bringing a society together that is not found in any other art form. However, like the ancient Greek dramas, I want both sides of the brain to be open, you know, I want it to be a full experience.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, it’s so interesting you bring up the Oresteia. The first two plays in the trilogy, Agamemnon and Choephori, are very much like theater as we know it with action, suspence and linear plot scenarios, but the third play, Eumenides is almost like a church service; it really isn’t like theater in the sense that we know it nowadays. It’s very much a sort of call and response between one character and a chorus, which is in fact a much older kind of thing. And I think that’s why probably there are so many productions of Agamemnon and not the whole Trilogy, because modern audiences would have problems with the last part… I saw a wonderful production of Agamemnon a number of years back at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park that Joseph Papp did, that I thought was really interesting because they did all the choral stuff in the ancient Greek and didn’t bother translating it. At first, I thought, God, you know, this is terrible, but it was wonderful because it functioned as ritual instead of functioning as theatre which is the hybrid form that Aeschylus was working with. The theatrical elements were there but so were the ritual elements, and I think that this hybrid ritual theater that we’ve lost can only be brought back in opera.

JOHN EATON: And of course, the Greek dramas were so involved with music, so much more involved with music… If you look at the timing of many of the Greek dramas from the theatrical point of view, it’s all off, and I think the reason for that is that music played a very important part. Dance played a very important part. The choruses used to have to practice for hours, you know, just to get something right. And I’m sure there was a certain amount of pitch inflection involved as well. There’s a classicist who’s a friend of mine who pointed out to me that when the Spartans had taken Athens, the Athenians performed certain choruses of Euripides, and the Spartans were in tear
s and they decided to save Athens, he said, “if you look at those choruses and read them, you know, they’re not that moving, they’re not that much. There must have been something else involved.”

FRANK J. OTERI: It was the music.

JOHN EATON: I’m sure it was the music. We know that there was a great deal of choreography involved in the performances, and we know that there were instruments involved.

FRANK J. OTERI: And we also know that they used quartertones.

JOHN EATON: Yeah.

FRANK J. OTERI: [laughs] Which is a part of it, too.

FRANK J. OTERI: It’s interesting, you know, looking at the topics that you’ve chosen for your operas. I certainly haven’t seen all of them at this point, but I’m making a valiant attempt at it…

JOHN EATON: [laughs]

FRANK J. OTERI: Of the ones that I have seen, I’ve noticed that the topics are by and large inspired by Classical sources. There are the Greek myths, and then Let’s Get This Show on the Road, which is based by the Book of Genesis in the Bible. And then there are works that are based on later texts that have become part of a canon, like Don Quixote. Peer Gynt is part of the canon to a lesser extent; I don’t think as many people are as familiar with the story. Nor is Myshkin which is based on Dostoyevsky. But there’s also a Shakespeare opera, based on The Tempest, and you said in your essay, the Kenyon Review essay, that it was really important not to have a new plot, an unfamiliar plot, because it’s very difficult to perceive the dramatic part of what opera is if the plot is unfamiliar, because of hearing texts sung instead of hearing it spoken is already a sort of a comprehensibility problem. I’m going off on a tangent here, but I really enjoyed Golk, which was the only opera of yours that I’d seen that was based on a contemporary theme.

JOHN EATON: Well, I definitely felt, and still do feel, that the subjects that you use have to be things that are familiar to an audience. I’ll get to Golk in a minute, but as far as my using Greek drama and my using a Biblical story and my using Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky, I’ve tried to take things that the audience would identify with and would understand, because that gives so much more potential to an opera composer to manipulate dramatic intent, thematic elements, to make your particular point. I wrote an opera based on Jonestown, the Reverend Jim Jones, which was something that, at least at the time, was a story that everyone was familiar with. I mean, you know, we had been exposed to it constantly. I don’t know, now we’ve gotten so far away from it, I don’t know how effectively that opera would fulfill the criteria that I’m setting up here.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, it’s interesting. Before we jump in to talk about Golk, I remember a press conference that John Adams held with Peter Sellars when they were doing Nixon in China. And they were essentially saying that the story of Richard Nixon‘s visit with Mao Tse Tung is essentially a heroic myth of today; everybody knows who these protagonists are the same way everyone in Ancient Greece would have known who Hercules was… The so-called ‘CNN operas’ evolved out of that, you know, all these operas based on famous figures, everyone from Malcolm X and Harvey Milk to Marilyn Monroe…

JOHN EATON: You know, it’s a curious thing, I had started an opera called Nixon, which I discussed with Peter Sellars in 1985, I think it was.

FRANK J. OTERI: That was 2 years before! [laughs]

JOHN EATON: I started it, but I sort of gave up on it just because I thought that, frankly, it would be bizarre to have Nixon singing.

FRANK J. OTERI: [laughs]

JOHN EATON: It shows how wrong I was, I mean, I think that Nixon in China is a fine work. It does what I think opera should do. I think it’s a very important piece. But with Golk, television is something, and television game shows and…

FRANK J. OTERI: …Candid Camera…

JOHN EATON: Yeah, Candid Camera. This is a scenario that people are familiar with, and therefore I think you can use it. I think a lot of composers get into trouble just making up a plot and expecting an audience to follow that. People that go to an opera will spend the first time they see it trying to figure out what’s going on. And then later, if they have the patience to see it again, they can later begin to, you know, add other features.

FRANK J. OTERI: You said that you definitely sense the different audience reaction to Myshkin from the people who read Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, and people who haven’t.

JOHN EATON: Yep.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now, I’ve read Crime and Punishment, but I haven’t read The Idiot yet, so I’m one of the people who hasn’t read The
Idiot, and certainly as we’re reaching this era, everybody decries the lack of standards, the falling away of knowledge, you know, there are tons of people in America today who know nothing about Shakespeare, who know nothing about ancient Greek dramatists. There are probably people who really don’t know Biblical stories, although that’s ingrained more, I think, because people who are religious will be reading that no matter what, or will at least know something about it. It’s permeated our society. But Shakespeare is kind of falling off, and the classics are falling off, and really the thing that everybody gets the references to now are, you know, television sitcoms. I don’t get those references, but most people do. I almost never watch television but the other night I got drawn into this program called Who Wants To Be a Millionaire; my wife had it on…

JOHN EATON: [laughs]

FRANK J. OTERI: We’re watching this thing, and there was a question about what the Mona Lisa was painted on: wood or canvas or shellac… That was one of the questions; it was a good one I thought so I kept watching… But then after that question, one that was worth even more money, listed four TV characters, and the question was “Which one of these sitcom characters is not a single father?” I didn’t even know who any of those characters were! But the whole audience did. These are the references that people are getting. And you might say, like you said with Jonestown, well, maybe, you know, 50 years from now, no one’s going to know what that means. The classics won’t be gone. And, you know, hopefully 20 years from now, everybody will forget these sitcoms. But I don’t think that’s going to happen.

JOHN EATON: Well, nevertheless, I think the classics are still part of our cultural heritage. And they’re still something that are more generally known, those stories are more generally known, than something you might make up out of yard cloth, you know. And so I think they are still usable. Certainly most people who have seen The Cry of Clytaemnestra, have responded to it knowing at least the rudiments of the story, not to the extent that Aeschylus‘s audience would have known the story, certainly. Or maybe not to the extent that the audience in the United States would have known it 50 years ago. Still, I think that these stories are so deeply ingrained in our psyche. They’re almost ingrained in the fabric of human experience, the way we live, the way we react to each other, the way we think. There’s something archetypal about them, which I certainly want to use.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, it’s so interesting. To get back to Golk again, you know, this was based on a novel that was written in 1960. I mean, it’s 40 years old at this point, and you said it was inspired by Candid Camera, which was a very popular show on television, it certainly isn’t on television anymore. But I looked at this thing, I looked at it before I did any research about it, like learning more about the novel. I knew Candid Camera as a little child. But Candid Camera wasn’t what popped into my head. What popped into my head was Bill Clinton.

JOHN EATON: [laughs]

FRANK J. OTERI: I’m watching this thing, and there’s a scene of the President of the United States being caught with his pants down, and I thought, I really relate to this, because this is what’s going on in the world today. And I thought that Golk must have been a brand new novel that was inspired by what’s going on today, and then I looked it up and, lo and behold, it was from 1960.

JOHN EATON: Well, let me remind you that there were lots of people caught with their pants down before Bill Clinton, and I mean, it seems a common feature. That whole world of television is a kind of mythical world, and that’s what I was evoking, or trying to evoke in Golk. The way that Richard Stern, the author, and myself condensed the novel, was taking precisely the elements that have an almost mythical world, aura, rather, to them. I think the composer and production staff of an opera have a real responsibility to use visual elements of all kinds to make clear to the American audience, at any rate, exactly what is going on. That is, I mean, if this were the best of all possible worlds, yes, I mean, let’s have opera without supertitles because they are somewhat distracting. But in this world we live in, supertitles are a wonderful blessing, and I’m sorry that I’ve never, until very recently, had any of my operas done with them. I always wanted them to be used, because, after all, if they’re done tastefully, so that people can take in the words that are being sung as well as what’s happening on the stage, it really does a lot to communicate to both sides of the brain. And I’ve had wonderful directors, for example, Gerald Friedman who did The Cry of Clytemnaestra in San Francisco, knew how to make that story vital by what was happening visually. This wonderful director who worked with the NewYork New Music Ensemble… Mike Philips, who did the same thing with Don Quixote… He showed slides which brought people into contact with some of the more arcane stories of Don Quixote, which, of course, is a huge book. This kind of thing, you know, has to be done as much as possible and can make up for deficiencies in classical education, and so on.

FRANK J. OTERI: I find this so interesting as a younger audience member who came to concert music as somewhat of an outsider. You know, I grew up in a family that didn’t really care much about classical music, and they didn’t really expose me to it for the most part. I had one relative who did, you know, but mostly what I heard was pop music on the radio, not even good pop music — bad pop music. You know, lite FM, whatever was playing, that was what I heard. So I came to all this as an outsider. I started going to operas, I went to the operas in the park, and I really enjoyed them. And then supertitles came in, and I really got the sense of it. But it amazed me that people for years would go to these operas, these productions of things from another culture from a different time period, from a different continent, in a different language, and sit there and watch this thing and not understand a word of it. And I have a friend who’s a big opera fan who said, “Well, it’s a good thing, because the librettos are so wretched.”

JOHN EATON: [laughs]

FRANK J. OTERI: So, you know, he was an opera fan, and, you know, he’d go hear La Boheme, you know, again and again and again, and I really didn’t get it
. I still don’t get it! And, you know, the Met resisted having the titles for years, and now they have this wonderful system…

JOHN EATON: Yeah.

FRANK J. OTERI: But I can’t understand how you could possibly get young people, or people who are outside the loop of the tradition, interested in this stuff without having it be comprehensible. It makes no sense to me at all.

JOHN EATON: In Italy and in Germany, when a new opera’s being done, people will go the week that it’s being done, and they’ll buy the libretto… By the time the opera performance they attend takes place, they’ve really kind of absorbed that libretto. American audiences won’t do that.

FRANK J. OTERI: No. [laughs]

JOHN EATON: I mean, you know, for instance, I think Clytemnaestra‘s had over 20 performances, and I would be surprised if, in all those performances, more than 200 libretti were bought. I mean, they just won’t do it.

FRANK J. OTERI: I also think that we have another notion about theatre, that’s very different from thinking of theater as ritual or educational, and that’s thinking of theater as a suspense spectacle. Think about the things that are important in American culture; think about a baseball game. No one wants to go to a baseball game if they know who’s going to win.

JOHN EATON: Right.

FRANK J. OTERI: You know, everybody gets really upset when a boxing match turns out to be rigged. They feel cheated. Or wrestling… When wrestling was exposed as being a theatrical thing that was rigged, everybody was really upset. I mean, did it really change the experience? No. But all of a sudden everybody felt lied to. And, certainly people go to movies for the surprise element too… I remember this movie a few years ago, some critic had revealed how the movie ended and everybody was outraged because, how dare this critic tell the end of the story? He spoiled it for us. But, you know, this is the opposite notion of wanting to read a libretto before seeing an opera. I don’t want to know how it’s going to end, I want to, you know, I’m American, I want to go to this thing, and I want to be surprised to find out at the end that Clytemnaestra kills Agamemnon. Uh oh — gave it away. Sorry, folks. [laughs]

JOHN EATON: On the other hand, think of what occurs to me is Columbo. You know, where you always know beforehand who the villain is and you get involved in watching how Columbo unravels it. There’s suspense on one level, and hopefully people could read a libretto and go see one of my operas and the music does enough that there would still be suspense, the music and the stage action do enough that there would still be a great deal of suspense, because, really, a libretto, I think Dallapiccola said it, is just the punctuation of an opera. It shouldn’t tell you everything. Maybe it shouldn’t even tell you the essential things. But, again, I have to go back to the fact that nearly every plot that Verdi or Puccini chose was something that was something the audiences of the day were familiar with because it had been a popular theatrical piece, or it had been a popular novel, or something. They certainly worked with stories that were familiar. And very seldom did they make anything up out of, you know, yard cloth.

FRANK J. OTERI: Right. Well, nowadays, what are the things that people are familiar with? We’ve talked about sitcoms, but certainly so are motion pictures, and I know, or I know when they did the opera of A Streetcar Named Desire that André Previn wrote a few years back, I was so amazed because I thought, you know, I’m looking at this thing, and already I have my notion so preconceived about this thing, I’m looking at Stanley and Stella and I couldn’t erase Marlon Brando from my brain. It got in the way for me. You can’t compete with that image. That image is indelible. And there were things that were very effective about the opera. I thought Renee Fleming was a stunning and convincing actress. But we know too many of the details of the myth, as opposed to, you know, these other ur-myths like those in the Greek dramas where people knew the plot but we didn’t have a specific visual image of the characters associated with it. It’s getting much harder to have these kinds of myths nowadays and, as audiences get more fragmented and marginalized, it’s getting harder to have any plot that a large audience would all already know.

JOHN EATON: Well, you know, there’s another thing that enters in to these kinds of plays and so on, taking place in opera. And that, to me, is the form of the Broadway musical. I admire the musical enormously. It’s a terrific art form. I tried to write musicals when I was a kid: they were a flop, completely. But the fact is, though, that it’s a very different thing from opera. And it’s very different in terms of what the music is expected to do. I mean, the music in opera really is the embodiment of the drama, of what you’re watching. And it’s involved with the drama being expressed by vocal gesture. In musical comedy, this just isn’t true. People sing in a way to make the words clear, absolutely clear and stand out. So that something which is in America, a popular American theater piece, does much better with a musical comedy setting, or with some kind of hybrid, you know, than it does as a purely operatic experience, it seems to me. First of all, there are too many words, usually.

FRANK J. OTERI: Right. Yeah.

JOHN EATON: And then, as I say, the singing, the notion of singing is so totally different. I mean, in opera we go to have the exciting experience of a beautiful voice exp
ressing very musically internalized drama in vocal gesture. And we just don’t do that in musicals.

FRANK J. OTERI: This is an issue that really strikes to the core of what I do as a composer. You know, you listen to Puccini and you listen to Verdi, and these singers are singing bel canto and it works because it was a style of singing created for the Italian language. Those vocal techniques were designed for European languages, and so it works for European languages. I don’t really know if it works in English, especially not American English. I don’t think it works for me at all as a composer, and when I work with a singer who has operatic training, I’m always terrified… I set a lot of poetry to music, and I want those words to come across very succinctly. And the “aesthetically good vowels,” and the way consonants are sung, I think destroys English syntax…

JOHN EATON: Well, I think many English diction coaches have let us down in not paying as much attention to English diction as they have to, you know, proper pronunciation of Italian or German. I mean, I think that English is an exceedingly singable language, and always has been. I mean, look at Purcell, look at Handel, you know, it can be and should be sung. It’s just simply that, yeah, people falsified the vowels, and they shouldn’t.

FRANK J. OTERI: Or they roll the r’s. I can’t stand that!

JOHN EATON: There’s also a lot of bad text setting, in that composers don’t give, on high notes, you know, open vowels, nice vowels to sing on that open the throat. They don’t use those kinds of vowels for melismas, you know. And, I think it’s a really involved question. Now, I don’t want anything that I’ve said to be construed as thinking that I don’t think that there are lots of other possibilities. Like an amalgam of musical comedy and opera.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, certainly, I’ve heard that in some of your more recent pieces, certainly the Genesis opera, and also in Golk, where there are elements that are coming from musical theater or from cabaret singing. And I think it’s very effective, because it really works.

JOHN EATON: Yeah, although more from, I think, probably more from jazz, if the truth is noted. Jazz singing, and so on. But, oh yeah, absolutely it, I mean, it will work. But I think that just straightforward presentation of the text, without involving other musical genres and so on, works as well.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, the new type of opera you’re working on is certainly very far removed from bel canto and very far removed from the whole tradition of opera as we know it. But even more you came up with the idea of “the Eaton opera,” you worked on an opera for television, Myshkin. The enture notion of opera on television is another approach to the whole idea of alternative venues. You know, for the most part when we see Great Performances on PBS we get standard repertory. Every now and then you get lucky, and you get Nixon in China or Streetcar. But even these works were conceived for the operatic stage. Myshkin was actually conceived specifically for television…

JOHN EATON: Uh huh.

FRANK J. OTERI: …and it allowed you to do certain things that don’t normally happen in opera. Strangely enough, television is more intimate, even though it’s this disemboweled, disembodied screen. The fact of the matter is, that the person watching it is Myshkin. When I watched it, I was Myshkin and the characters were singing to me. You can’t really get an audience involved quite the same way on a stage.

JOHN EATON: I think our culture lost a great, great opportunity when it didn’t do more with opera for television in the early years. I mean, commission composers to write operas specifically for television. After all, one of them, well, the most popular opera by far, was originally commissioned for television, which was Amahl and the Night Visitors. I mean, Amahl and the Night Visitors has had ten times as many performances as almost any other opera Schirmer has in their catalog, or anybody else, for that matter. Amahl is done by church groups, by educational groups, so on and so forth. But one of the earliest operas that tried to use television was a little-known piece also by Menotti, what is it, Help, Help, The Globolinks?

FRANK J. OTERI: Oh, yeah, yeah, that was recorded… Newport Classic did a recording of that.

JOHN EATON: It really used the media in interesting ways. A lot could have been done at one point, it seems to me, with opera for television. But after the enormous success of Myshkin, which won the Peabody Award, the Ohio State Award, it was shown for several years on national TV and all over the world, really, after that, believe it or not, I was unable to get another commission to do an opera specifically for television. People were just afraid. And I think it’s a pity; it’s a great pity. Sort of like architects talking about the greatest challenge of the 20th century, almost completely ignored by builders, was building an airport. You know, it took years before we had any kind of sensible plan for any airport, which I can tell you, having arrived at 4:30 last night in Kennedy, and walking…

FRANK J. OTERI: [laughs] The single most unwelcome, unpleasant place to land in the entire world, is JFK.

JOHN EATON: Having so little to do with the spirit of JFK himself.

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah. [laughs] It amazed me no end. I have equally abhorrent feelings about the now-renamed Reagan Airport in D.C., which is well named… well, let’s not go there. [laughs]

JOHN EATON: But in any case, the opera on TV. There are so many things one could do if one just spends a minute, as we tried to do with Myshkin, thinking about the medium and how it could be used. It’s the ultimate expressionistic medium.

FRANK J. OTERI: Hmm. It’s so interesting. I’ve been reading Marshall McLuhan recently. And, you know, he died before the Internet existed as a phenomenon in our popular culture. And he’s talking about television having so much more power than books. And having so much more power than film. And he was one of the few people who wasn’t horrified by television. Everybody thought, oh my God, television, you know, nobody’s going to be able to read anymore, it’s destroying the young, you still hear this. And it’s not television that’s doing this, you know, it’s the crap that’s on television.

JOHN EATON: Yeah.

FRANK J. OTERI: But the medium’s great.

JOHN EATON: Yeah. Well, exactly. That’s true of all technology.

JOHN EATON: I think one of the greatest enemies in the use of technology, however, is the idea that if you use the technology you have to throw other things out of the window. I remember, for instance, with electronic music, that in the first days, when I was first experimenting or working around with it, the idea was, you put things on tape [and] you could finally get perfection. And this created so much absolutely dull, lifeless, electronic music. Because the fact is that music can only be made, it seems to me, by the total engagement of a musical sensibility, a very highly trained musical sensibility with musical materials in a way that there’s resistance. And, of course, this involves, to a certain extent, I think, by necessity, performance. It involves a trained sensibility capturing completely the materials that one is using and absorbing them, and then being able to use them as a performer and as a composer. The same thing was true of television. People felt if you did something for television, you could never show a human face, you know, unless it were somehow being constantly modified or so on. Not that one shouldn’t use all of those technical advantages, but the essence of what’s being communicated shouldn’t be technology.

FRANK J. OTERI: Right.

JOHN EATON: It should never be technology. It should be something that involves the human spirit in a varied and profound way, I think.

FRANK J. OTERI: One of the great tragedies of electronic music is this very notion: the technology keeps changing and therefore, there is a perception that anything that isn’t the latest thing is obsolete. And, you know, I love analog synthesizers a lot more than I love digital synthesizers. And I like the sounds on them and I like playing around with them. But, you know, if you write pieces for an electronic instrument… I’ve talked to a number of composers about this, and a lot of composers are reluctant to write for electronic instruments if they are getting works performed that their own ensembles are not doing, pieces that are going out into the world, because chances are that 5 years from now, someone’s not going to have that instrument, and then what do you do?

JOHN EATON: Well, that certainly happened to me with the Syn-Ket. There’s a whole body of my work that is fundamentally, at the moment, unperformable. Although, if this new instrument that I worked on with Robert Moog has all the sensitivity of the Syn-Ket, and more, and that can certainly do it. But the approach with those early analog synthesizers, whether you work directly with the sound, and even though it was sometimes very awkward, you did things like turning dials, which is the most unmusical gesture I can imagine, you know, It’s like trying to thresh wheat with a surgeon’s scalpel. Even though that was the case, nevertheless, one could deal with any element of the sound that you wanted to much more than you can with most commercial digital synthesizers… You know, you have so much sensitivity, so much control over the sound, and you can only put that control to certain very rudimentary places. You can’t get into the very core of the sound itself. Now I think that’s going to change, and I think it’s going to change very, very quickly.

FRANK J. OTERI: Last year I went up to Cambridge to hang out with Tod Machover at the MIT Media Labs. And one of the big things they’re doing up there is trying to develop more expressive interfaces, whether it’s a jacket that you can rub and play music on, or a ball that you touch in different areas and you get different expressive things coming out of that. We’ve been so busy trying to make electronic interfaces that operate the same way as acoustic instruments, we’ve rarely questioned that there might be better interfaces for electronic instruments than the ones that work best for acoustic instruments. We’ve been stuck with the keyboard interface but maybe that’s not the best one for electronic instruments.

JOHN EATON: Well, let me see, I can think of 12 places where the human body comes out in something that can command human nuance. The mouth, the tips of the fingers, and, well… [laughs] There’s a reason why there have always been keyboard instruments. And that is these wonderful points where the human body comes out. You know, ten of them, and a whole technique is already there of being able to use them. Whereas most of the stuff, when you put on a jacket or put on a glove, you’re using muscles that you’ve never used for any purpose like that. And they’re not trained, and they can’t be trained, I don’t think. There’s a reason why acoustical instruments were built to engage with the embouchure or built to engage with the tips of the fingers. And that is because of the way the human body is made. It has nothing to do with the difference between acoustic instruments and electronic inst
ruments. If music is to embody human nuance, and is to involve itself with any kind of depth of musical expression, I’m afraid, you know, we’re stuck with certain kinds of designs.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, you know, it’s interesting, though, because, to me, still, the single most expressive electronic instrument is the theremin.

JOHN EATON: But that again is using the hands.

FRANK J. OTERI: But in a very different way than…

JOHN EATON: But, you see the way Clara Rockmore articulated phrases. She used her fingertips.

FRANK J. OTERI: Right, right.

JOHN EATON: I don’t think the theremin has ever gotten the kind of expressive potential that the violin or that the piano has, which the ondes martenot in a funny way, has, you know, simply because, on a theremin, you’re not meeting any resistance.

FRANK J. OTERI: Right.

JOHN EATON: I’ve often thought if they build a theremin so that you felt shocks if you moved into an electronic field, you could gauge where you were better, you know.

FRANK J. OTERI: Hopefully not painful shocks…[laughs]

JOHN EATON: It requires a lot of effort, and as a result, you can’t get the kind of complexity that you can with an ordinary musical instrument. I mean, there’s, there’s… I don’t think I’ve ever heard double or triple stops on a theremin.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, no. It’s monophonic, you can’t.

JOHN EATON: And it can only be monophonic, because there’s no resistance, there’s nothing you can fit. These very sensitive points where the human body, you know, reaches out to the world, let’s say. There’s no place you could, you can put those, you know, nothing that you can feel their engagement.

FRANK J. OTERI: So given this notion of the imperfection, the limitations of nuance in electronic instruments, what made you get involved with electronic instruments? It’s certainly a very important part of your significance in our musical history. You were one of the first composers to work with synthesizers, and you were a sounding board for Robert Moog.

JOHN EATON: I can’t take that kind of credit. I think I was first to do live performances on a modern electronic sound synthesizer. I’ve looked and sort of found that that was the case. But Moog had worked with other composers before we met.

FRANK J. OTERI: I think Alwin Nikolais was the first to buy one of his synthesizers.

JOHN EATON: I know that Donald Erb wrote an early piece for a microtonal electronic keyboard.

FRANK J. OTERI: Oh, wow. A Motorola scalatron?

JOHN EATON: It was a scalatron kind of keyboard. But, as I remember, it didn’t have the potential for responding to human touch that even the Syn-Ket had.

FRANK J. OTERI: So, getting back to this notion of human touch, you know, what made you get involved with this?

JOHN EATON: Well, I wanted to become involved with the humanization of electronic music, because I was always interested in the question of performance and of how one could use electronic music to express what human beings wanted to express, rather than being about the medium itself. To say that I was the first to do this is ridiculous because I’m sure other people were trying, Oskar Sala for instance…

FRANK J. OTERI: Right.

JOHN EATON: But I’ve never heard a note that he’s played. I’ve always wanted to do that, you know.

FRANK J. OTERI: A new CD of Sala’s mixtur trautonium music just came out this year.

John Eaton (r.) with Robert Moog Photo courtesy of The University of Chicago Chronicle

JOHN EATON: A lot of that was just unavailable. But it seemed to me that what was very important was to make instruments that could receive human nuance from a performer, and therefore get composers involved with that side of things. So the ultimate vision was this keyboard that I collaborated with Moog [photo at right] on for something like 30 years, which reads out the precise extent the key is depressed. That is, it could be used for velocity like a piano keyboard. It could also be like a tractor organ, whereas if I applied the volume you could make crescendos, diminuendos, and so on. And of course it doesn’t have to be applied to the volume at all. It reads out your front-to-back position of the surface of the key. So it gets involved with violin kind of technique. There’s also a large area on the side of the keyboard in which you have more room to exercise that control, more range to exercise that control. It reads out your front, your side-to-side position on the surface of the key. It reads out the amount of area your finger will cover. And finally, it reads out the pressure you would put on a completely depressed key, after touch. So these five parameters are completely different for each key, or can be completely different for each key. You don’t have to use all five at the same time, which is a real tour de force of performing. I can’t think of any kind of performing that quite has that kind of complexity. Each figure of each hand could be playing a different volume level, I mean, it’s extraordinary what you could do, and how you could change things also by moving around, like a clavichord, which is where Ketoff got the idea of doing the sideways motion for the Syn-Ket. But there’s also the front and back motion which gets you involved in string technique. So it’s very difficult to play, but I think this is a very, a big advantage of it. I think instruments should be difficult to play and difficult to master, because in mastering musical materials, by overcoming difficulties, you’re involving yourself with them, and you’re making them your own, in a way that almost can’t be done, well, in any other way that, for the moment, I can imagine. The Eaton-Moog Modal Touch Sensitive Keyboard is a project that still isn’t finished because there are 2 more to come. One’s been made. And then, of course, I’ve got to get it interfaced with something that allows me to really get inside of the sound, to really work with the sound in interesting ways. Everything you do is human nuance. I once put a MIDI scope on it, and saw that it took me 10 minutes to read out what I had done in something like 2 or 3 seconds, you know. And of course, the voice, in singing a Verdi opera, somebody once said, is communicating something like 6,000 bits of information per second.

FRANK J. OTERI: I want to talk a bit about concerts, concert life and the static nature of going to a concert and watching people just play instruments, and how this sort of developed into your notion of the Eaton opera, and the productions you’ve been doing with the Pocket Opera Company in Chicago. What are those operas trying to do and how effective have they been with musicians and with audiences?

JOHN EATON: O.K. Well, it turns out there was another Pocket Opera Company in San Francisco which does completely different kind of things, which I was unaware of when I gave it this name. But nevertheless, it expresses so well what we do that I wanted to keep the name, and so I just made it “of Chicago.” But at any rate, for years I went to concerts of new music, and I saw performers sweating to get each note, each nuance, right in scores, in which they had absolutely no comprehension, it seemed to me, very often, of the human dimensions trying to be expressed. And so I thought, one way of bringing this about would be to write… I wouldn’t so much call them operas, because operas are so involved with singing, which these pieces aren’t so much. Some of them are. Some of them bring that in almost as an added dimension. I’d rather call them something very unpretentious like Romps for instrumentalists, you know, because they give instrumentalists the chance to be involved with a human context or the difficult music that they’re playing. And that was the whole basis of what you’ve called the Eaton opera, what I was trying to do. I mean, there certainly were precedents for it. L’histoire du soldat, you know, would immediately come to mind.

FRANK J. OTERI: And when I was watching these works I actually thought of Partch, as I’ve already mentioned, because of the multiple role of singer, the players are also the singers, they’re also the dancers. It’s a holistic approach to performance that goes against the Aristotelian notion of, you know, one person, one function.

JOHN EATON: Right, right. Well, this, again, I have to say, I didn’t know, I’d never seen a performance of one of the Partch operas when I undertook this. So I think they’re less involved, or many of these pieces are less involved with narrative than what I wanted to try to do, because I really did want to get the performers involved with story elements, with acting, with being somebody. And so, in that sense, calling them dramatic works for instrumentalists comes close to it. Again, you know, I wanted to keep a non-narrative approach to theater involved as well. But, again, I sort of feel that there’s a tendency to throw the baby out with the bath too often, you know, people think that electronic music can’t have anything to do with the long traditions that have been established. Both vocal music and instrumental music, just as many people in Bach and Handel‘s time thought one had to write instrumental music and forget about all these vocal values, now that the strings had really matured as a section, and so on. But composers like Bach and Handel knew we were working in a total continuum, and were willing to do whatever got the job done which, like I was saying at the very beginning, is a more practical approach. This is what got the idea going, and I found that I needed some real subjects, because if people… or subjects which were on a kind of extended plane of reality, because then you could accept, as you used to in the singspiel, the fact that people went from song to speech…

FRANK J. OTERI: And an audience could also accept somebody whipping a horse and that horse is really a cello if the story is Don Quixote.

JOHN EATON: [laughs] Right.

FRANK J. OTERI: And, yeah, I mean, Don Quixote’s deluded, you know, he could very well see somebody playing the cello and think that. [laughs]

JOHN EATON: Yeah, yeah. So I have tried to choose subjects which are on a kind of surreal plane of reality. And Peer Gynt being the first of these… I mean, the choice of Peer Gynt was really deliberate, because it never fit into the canon of realistic drama. In fact, Ibsen intended it to be read, not really done as a stage play…

FRANK J. OTERI: And it’s in verse. It’s the only one of his verse plays, in fact, that still is performed widely nowadays.

JOHN EATON: Yeah, yeah.

FRANK J. OTERI: So, you know, the idea of having a play in verse, you know, is so rarely done now in modern theater, and that’s, you know, one step further away from the notion of theater as ritual. And in a way, these pieces, operas, or dramas, or romps… whatever you want to call them, bring the ritual element of theater back. Because it’s not so much about method acting as it is about a sort of incantorial acting; it’s symbolic acting.

JOHN EATON: Well, you know, I remember… something that’s always stuck with me, a statement by probably my most influential teacher outside of the realm of music, which was the poet/critic Richard Palmer Blackmur (To whom I dedicated in memoriam the “Songs for R.P.B., the first piece to my knowledge to use live performance on a modern electronic sound synthesizer.) He said once that Dante was the greatest poet in Christendom because he took more disorder and brought it to order. And I feel that the question of scope is a terribly important one in music, especially today. We need to open up the future. We also need to keep everything valuable from the past. We need to
have as broad a range as possible, because life itself has that kind of range. We no longer live in simple villages in Germany, with a small plane of reference, like Bach did. And yet, the human values that Bach’s music embodies are still vitally important. So, to me, it’s a question of not being afraid to embrace the tradition but also not being afraid to dive into boiling oil on occasion. [laughs]

FRANK J. OTERI: So much of your music is concerned with that extra element. Because instrumental music is abstract and you can’t really put a direct meaning to it, so much of your music is operatic, or at least vocal in orientation, or has a narrative. I know that you’ve also written symphonies, you’ve also written completely abstract music… Do you feel that when you write completely abstract music that the standards are different? I mean, the audience has to latch on to it in a different way.

JOHN EATON: Well, I don’t know. Well, the very best operas are the ones written by the very best composers. Without question. Which doesn’t mean that a great composer can’t write a bad opera, if he has a bad enough libretto, you know, or if he sort of wanders in. I mean, that happens again and again. But nevertheless, it’s music ultimately that matters in opera, and opera is a piece of music reaching out as a vision in sound reaching out to the world. And that’s what these operas that I’ve written, these romps for instrumentalists, were. I want to give them fun, you know, but I wanted them also to get vitally involved with what they were doing on every level of their being, not just on the level of musical and technical competence.

FRANK J. OTERI: But a symphony certainly can’t have that outreach. It’s much more rarified… Being able to listen to a symphony requires a certain level of attention. I think it’s harder to experience than an opera because an opera is engaging your eyes as well as your ears. Opera is also engaging your sense of comprehension. You’ve written a Mass, in fact you’re one of the few experimental composers of our time to have written a Mass, which not only engages the eyes, the ears, and meaning, but it is also participatory, in fact it is part of a religious ceremony. So, ideally, the audience is doing more than listening. What has been the response to it?

JOHN EATON: Well, it’s been very interesting, especially the Credo. In the Credo, there are three different elements. There’s a soprano soloist who takes the part of the Credo. First of all, the problem with the Credo, for every composer is there’re all those words. You know. Bach splits it up into a large number of sections. Stravinsky just gets through the words as fast as he can, you know, by using a kind of rhythmic recitation in that part of his Mass, which I think has always been my favorite piece of Stravinsky. But, the point is, there were all those words to deal with. So the approach that I took was that the singer would take only the words which would be important, or would be significant, at least in my eyes, to a individual today. Not necessarily totally involved, but an individual who wasn’t necessarily totally involved with religion. Like, for instance, “I believe in one God.” Or “Christ was crucified.” You know. The parts of the Credo that are really key to us today…

FRANK J. OTERI: And the rest you left out?

JOHN EATON: Of her part. Then the clarinetist intones the entire Credo in Latin. I mean, this is a dogmatic part, into the clarinet. And it sounds with echo, so it sounds like it’s coming from a large medieval cathedral. This is the, again, the dogmatic part of the Mass. Then I have the audience actually, or the congregation, read the Credo. But as they do it, this was first written in 1970 or so, so the way I got a loop was have 2 tape recorders, one of which played back, and one of which recorded. So the audience’s voices come back at them in this endless loop, and they realize, as they’re reciting the Credo, how devoid of meaning it is for them anymore, and it mocks them, in a way. It says, do you really believe, it posits, do you really believe what you’re saying, you know? Or is this just something you go through, you know?

FRANK J. OTERI: Going through the motions.

JOHN EATON: And the reaction to that, when it was performed, it was performed in the National Cathedral in the electronic version in Washington. It was performed here in St. Peter’s Church in New York before they built Citicorp. And it was performed in Christ Church in Boston. And the reaction in New York was the most interesting. Somebody came back and actually tried to strangle me because of what I did to him in the Credo. I mean, it was, it produced a very, very violent reaction on the part of the audience, when they became part of this musical piece, a direct part of it. The performance in Boston was one of the finest performances I’ve ever had of anything in my life. People were totally involved in the piece in a positive way. And the performance, unfortunately, in the National Cathedral was riddled by the fact that our singer had developed an allergy to cats, and the doctor gave her cortisone, which stimulated the vocal cords.

FRANK J. OTERI: Yikes.

JOHN EATON: It was terrible.

FRANK J. OTERI: Considering you’ve gone back to the piece again recently, and you’re reworking it, or you’ve reworked it…

JOHN EATON: For vocal ensemble, soprano soloist and clarinet again.

FRANK J. OTERI: Is there a performance coming up sometime in the near future?

JOHN EATON: Well, there’s a CD which is coming out this spring by the Contemporary Vocal Ensemble of Indiana University, who have done it several times in Chicago. They’ve also done it in Bloomington, and in Israel, where it was very, very well received.

FRANK J. OTERI: One thing that I believe has been unfortunate is the dissemination of your music. I’ve known Danton and Robespierre for a number of years, I have the CRI LPs, and I have an old Turnabout LP with the Concert Piece for Syn-Ket and Orchestra, but I have very little else, and knew of very little else until recently, and certainly, you know, you’re in a very, very good position vis-à-vis, you know, the thousands of composers in America today in that you have music represented by one of the major publishers of the world, which is great. It’s enviable to a great number of composers. But there haven’t been a lot of recordings of your music that have been available, and I think it’s a crime. Danton and Robespierre isn’t even in print anymore, it needs to get reissued on CD, and so much of this music is not available, so what do you do? This is a problem facing every composer. How do you get your music out there?

JOHN EATON: Well, my music is difficult. Very difficult. Much of it. And it requires, you know, really dedicated performers. For that reason, I haven’t run after recording companies constantly to record. I wait until something is really in the shape that I want to make it as a permanent record, because I think of recording as a permanent record. However, yes, especially as one gets older, you know, you really hope that your music will become more generally available, even though some of the performances might be riddled with faults.

FRANK J. OTERI: One of the aspects of recordings that we sometimes forget is the value they have as a rehearsal tool for future performances. I recently had the luxury of having a piece that I wrote performed again by an ensemble that was completely different from the one that had originally performed it. Having a recording of that original performance saved so much rehearsal time. Of course, this should be completely obvious for any composer but I bring it up here with you since your music contains microtonal intervals that may not be second nature to many performers and if these performers could only hear more recordings of your music, they would have so much more understanding of it than if they were playing it cold.

JOHN EATON: Well, I can’t agree with you more, and I really wish every piece of mine were recorded, and I wish I had spent more time trying to pursue that.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, let’s hope all the folks at the record companies will see and hear this interview and your phone will not stop ringing with offers to record all your music!

© by John Eaton

Reprinted with permission from The Kenyon Review, New Series, Vol IV, No. 3, Summer 1982

It is almost a truism that music and verse can best use their special abilities to delineate action and create character when an audience can easily follow the plot. The Greek dramatists used some of the noblest and subtlest poetry conceived by man–and only the gods know what music!–to enshrine stories which their audience had heard from childhood. Thus Aeschylus, Sophocles, and especially Euripides are constantly able to manipulate known expectations, and by so doing to provide contrast, surprise, and heightened degrees of aesthetic satisfaction.

The composers of opera, an art that can be seen in spirit at least as an attempt to resuscitate Greek drama, also have turned repeatedly to the same stories. It’s very hard to follow a plot when characters are singing. Using one that is known to a composer’s audience has the obvious and practical advantage that the entire realm of vocal gesture can be liberated and the modern orchestra (which now often includes electronic music) can be unleashed for intensifying the drama or defining a character. The public can then follow the main line of the action without having to understand every single word. Furthermore, by using familiar stories, the composer can imbed the public’s expectations of the dramatic line, by a process perhaps largely unconscious, in the unfolding of the music. Having done this, he is in a position to play with these anticipations, defining the weight and timing of their realization or frustration, and thereby subsume them on a higher level of musical-dramatic form.

This is why composers (and perhaps verse dramatists as well) have so often turned to myths or well-known historical events or best-selling novels or popular plays or theatrical and literary classics. It is in some ways lamentable that the average opera buff goes to hear remarkable singing and that the average member of the operatic audience who is not a buff goes to receive emotional stimulation–to be “moved.” Both pursuits are best served by the traditional warhorses of the operatic canon, where even the music is familiar and attention can be given to the nuances of performance. To succeed in such company, a contemporary opera must shun esoteric or original subjects, unless the public is adequately prepared to follow the plot or unless the composer chooses to dispense with the subtleties, and indeed the very essence of his developed art. In this latter case, the work (which usually consists of one-note-per-syllable text setting over a light and hackneyed accompaniment, with no vocal or little orchestral invention) may enjoy a momentary success but probably will not hold the attention of the serious operatic public for long, and certainly will not make any lasting contributions to the art of the opera.

For, beyond any question, the operas that comprise the heart of the repertoire are those that were written by the best composers of their time or have music that most convincingly and effectively embodies–and emboldens!–a dramatic line or most memorably and touchingly creates characters.

Opera is first and foremost a musical form. Perhaps this is in part due to the fact that, when put in conjunction with the other arts, music, being the most abstract of them, must dominate the total motion or slip to so subservient a role as to have little or no shaping force whatsoever.

Furthermore, with the exception, alas, of most recent American works, opera has always engaged the newest musical ideas, the freshest sensibilities. The advantage to the composer seems obvious: drama can help clarify the meaning of new musical gestures and materials. This attraction of new musical conceptions and means exists throughout the history of opera. Monteverdi and the other early opera composers not only discovered a new musical practice, the recitative (expressive melody over a basso continuo), they filled their works with instrumental innovations, the most obvious being the string tremolo to express excitement and danger, as in Monteverdi’s Combattimento di Tancredi e Ciorinda (1624). Richard Wagner not only developed his own musical drama with continuous and irregular vocal lines over a seething orchestra whose symphonic techniques revealed the inner action of the drama, he stimulated the design of new instruments such as the Wagner tubas. Composers of
electronic music in our own time have done much to expand their audience by using texts and theatrical presentations.

The great problem in contemporary music, and perhaps in many of the arts, is not one of unity (“It doesn’t hang together”) but of continuity (“I can’t follow it”). Continuity in music is a matter of arousing and addressing the listener’s expectations. Contrast, including the element of surprise t is as essential as unity or homogeneity for holding the listener’ s attention. Since it is difficult to establish continuity in music today, there is all the more reason for choosing a drama that can be easily followed.

Generally, my operas have begun as musical-dramatic ideas. I have often had to search for the subjects they fit, although this has not been conscious on my part. Rather, in reading a play or a bit of history or a novel, I’d suddenly feel chills up and down my spine and know I had my next operatic subject. Generally, I saw immediately the main musical-dramatic line of the work, often in great and precise detail. Then I searched for a librettist who would talk out the dramatic synopsis with me scene-by-scene and, with the closest possible collaboration, write the words. (Once I tried to write my own libretto after actually composing the music, with horrifying results. Perhaps the most curious line was one that fit the music beautifully: “0! To chew on the entrails of a bleating goat!”) The one exception to this general rule of the musical-dramatic line preceding the subject has been my last opera, The Cry of Clytemnestra. This was delivered to me as a finished libretto. However, it was based on a play, the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, which I have loved above any other for my entire life and have often thought of setting. Furthermore, I had worked with the author, Patrick Creagh, on three operas and a host of other projects so that he knew more than anyone else how my musical mind works. Finally, the libretto was completely recast to fit a musical-dramatic form we saw in it based on a recurrent musical gesture, Clytemnestra’s cry, which punctuates the score, separating real time from imagined scenes in the past, present, and future, and which changes each time in psychological meaning, beginning in the depths of anguish over the death of Iphigenia and ending in ecstatic self-realization when she prepares for the return, and killing, of Agamemnon.

What kind of musical ideas–or better, imagined musical continuities–have brought my operas into being? How have the subjects, when chosen, proved apt?

Since the early 1960s, my music has been concerned with the expansion of pitch: with the use of pitches other than those represented by the piano keyboard. (For the sake of brevity, I will not speak of my earlier, chromatic operas although I believe much of what I win say is true of them as well.) These additional notes allow for a great expansion in psychological nuance. To put it in an overly simple and primitive way: if a major third is happy and a minor third, sad, even the use of only quarter tones (the pitches halfway between a white and adjacent black key on a piano keyboard) gives one three more distinct thirds, each one of which seems to have–or at least can be invested by a skillful composer with–its own distinct psychological character. Thus, an opera composer has greatly enriched tools with which to probe the human personality. My opera Myshkin (1970) is based on The Idiot of Dostoevsky. All of the action takes place within the mind of Prince Myshkin. When he is in the state of idiocy, I use kinetic lighting sequences and electronic music based on sixth tones, a smaller and subtler division than the quartertones used by the orchestra. These quartertones, with conventional staging, accompany Prince Myshkin’s more rational states. The two tunings weave in and out of each other, as the audience observes, through the psychological interior of Prince Myshkin: what he sees, imagines, and feels.

Another idea developed in Myshkin–by no means unique to it, but one that is greatly enhanced by the use of microtonal materials–is the simultaneous presentation of different levels of reality. Thus, at a party that culminates in his having an epileptic fit, Myshkin sees Aglaya but dreams of Nastasia, sees the respectable characters of the novel (represented by tonalities on the flat side of Myshkin’s key) but thinks of the disreputable ones (represented by those on the sharp side) .Two tempi related as 5 to 7–or, in other words, distantly related in terms of our ordinary musical experience–present the real and imagined events, respectively. Words and phrases with similar sounds pass from one area to another–for example, “delighted you could come” at the party becomes “with a fee, fie, fo, fum” in a remembered drinking song.

People who know Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot have never failed to be intensely interested in Myshkin. But despite my many efforts to make the story self-sufficient, the opera confuses those who are unfamiliar with the novel. And, having been presented for the first time on television with little or no preparation for the audience, Myshkin simply failed to communicate with a large part of its public. I look forward to stage performances and the greater familiarity, which comes with time and repeated hearings. Can you imagine how confused Richard Strauss’s audience must have been at the first performance of Die Frau ohne Schatten?

The thought that fertilized the ground for Danton and Robespierre (1978) was that Patrick Creagh and I should apply on a social level the techniques explored on a psychological level in Myshkin. But with all the talking we did, stimulated in great part by Crane Brinton’s The Anatomy of a Revolution, nothing began on that work until I imagined–and this was the first music written, a particular and unusual musical continuity–the chorale used throughout the opera to express the idealistic vision of Robespierre. I heard this music juxtaposed with the richest kind I had written based on quartertones. Ecco! Danton and Robespierre! The French Revolution! And in Danton and Robespierre, the real life of France, capped by the most fully human music I could write, that of Danton, finds expression in music based on two tempered scales of a quartertone apart. This technique of equal temperament affords a rich ambiguity by identifying pitches with, or even bending them toward, partials of first one scale step, then another. This tempered music is contrasted with the cold, unbending just-intonational system of the chorale-like music of Robespierre, in which every pitch is the partial of one key or its closest related triads (IV and V) .As the idealistic music of Robespierre moves from its own key to other keys it becomes more and more dissonant, depending on the degree of unrelated-ness of the key. Thus chords on the augmented fourth (F-sharp in C) are horribly out of tune, whereas chords in C are without a beat in live performance. (Alas! Pure consonance cannot be recorded because of mechanical imperfections.) The contrast between Danton, a humanist who had the largest library in Paris, a realist in terms of ends who would allow each person to choose his own means of pursuing happiness so long as he did not transgress on the rights of others to do likewise, who loved and was loved by people; and Robespierre, haunted by hereditary injustice, an idealist in terms of ends who would use any means to reshape society, who loved the people–this is the dramatic core of the opera, finding as perfect a musical expression as I could invent in the contrast of tempered, traditional music with just-intonation.

Of course, there is more to this epic opera than a battle between these two personalities, the climax of which is reached in the first scene of the third act. Throughout, many levels of society and their motivating forces are examined, separately and simultaneously. The trial scene is based on three contrasting tempi and classes of sonority (four including those of Da
nton himself), which represent respectively the judges, the prisoners, and the people of France. In the height of the terror, the 113 days in which Robespierre rules after the guillotining of Danton, there are three levels. First there is the tempered (twenty-four tone) music of the orchestra, which expresses the real life of France-guillotining and terror. Juxtaposed above that is the electronic music chorale representing Robespierre’s vision, the dissonance constantly increasing as the music moves further from its key, as Robespierre’s pure vision is more and more clouded by involvement with reality. Finally, untuning itself against this just-intonational music is the vocal line of Robespierre, culminating in hysteria and madness as Robespierre’s personality crumbles and his control of events disintegrates. (This is dramatic license, not an exact parallel with history.)

In all of my operas, pitch, its resources greatly expanded is returned to its rightful post as the sovereign of music, with rhythm as its domain and color as its plenipotentiary. The movement of the music and musical-dramatic line is primarily controlled by pitches–as it should be! For only pitch has the built-in relations that allow the richness and scope to create the kind of opera I envision. Rhythm and color can stimulate, they can evoke; they cannot by themselves delineate a drama or create a person. What microtonality affords an opera composer is a host of interesting possible relations, heretofore unavailable to fulfill these two purposes. And microtonal composers on the whole are interested not in achieving more dissonance and complexity, but more consonance and clarity, by using a wider harmonic spectrum and greatly multiplied possibilities of harmonic motion.

Although I have stressed the advantage of using familiar subjects and the bond between the germinating musical-dramatic ideas and the subjects I have chosen in three of my last operas, I have not dealt with the particular attractiveness to me of the subjects themselves. Perhaps this is best done by discussing the kinds of subjects I have not used and the reasons they have not appealed to me. (I hope the reader will excuse my being so personal on the subject of libretti. Patrick Creagh, my collaborator on all the operas discussed above, once said, “The main function of an opera libretto is to inspire a composer.” I use this as my license.)

I have never used a contemporary subject. Perhaps this is because a certain distance is needed to create characters that sing beautifully. (Broadway musicals, which have no trouble with contemporary subjects or language, use a different kind of singing from opera–indeed this is the main and perhaps irreconcilable difference between the two arts.) Let me also hazard that a composer–who, more than any other kind of artist, again because of the abstract nature of his materials, is a form-er–needs a certain distance from a dramatic subject so he can see it whole and deal with lives and events that are complete. People we meet every day speak to us. In the world of opera, a distant personality is released for a few hours’ time from the ordinary restraints on his vision or human attributes, and consequently sings.

American subjects have never appealed to me either, except for a very early “jazz” opera based on Ma Barker, the huge (Wagnerian?) leader of a mid-western mob that included her sons, whom she raised according to a stringent criminal code. She seemed to me to have the superhuman (or subhuman) characteristics of a serious operatic figure, even though the opera is largely comic. Part of my quest has been to restore heroism and nobility, ingredients so needed in contemporary life, to opera. That banal, ordinary persons should sing as the major characters is absurd and misses part of the mission of opera: to infuse into a society, through the powerful means of music and poetic vision, high values and purpose. The ultimate models, which though perhaps unrealizable today are nevertheless our goals, are Aeschylus, whose Oresteia sought to establish nothing less than trial by jury, and Verdi, whose very name came a can for independence and liberty. Like them, we must find subjects at a sufficient remove from ourselves and resplendent with dignity.

A NewMusicBox Exclusive

Featuring Excerpts from Productions of John Eaton’s Operas

“The Cry of Clytaemnestra (1980)” 3.2MB Play “Danton and Robespierre (1978)” 1.1MB Play “Myshkin (1971)” 2.3xMB Play “Don Quixote (1996)” 2.1MB Play “Golk (1996)” 1.7MB Play

Lewis Spratlan

A conversation with composer Lewis Spratlan, winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in Music with:

James Maraniss
Librettist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize-winning music composition
Harold Meltzer
Composer and director of Sequitur, former student of Spratlan
Frank J. Oteri
Composer and editor of NewMusicBox

Amherst, MA—April 21, 2000
1:00 – 3:00 p.m.

Filmed by Nathan Michel
Interview transcribed by Karyn Joaquino

Winning the Pulitzer

FRANK J. OTERI: Congratulations on winning the Pulitzer Prize!

LEWIS SPRATLAN: It’s a great thrill. I’m still coming down to earth from it.

FRANK J. OTERI: What have been some of the reactions that you’ve been getting so far?

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Well, an enormous variety of people, as you can imagine, from old, old students that I had totally lost track of through, you know, and colleagues have been calling me. Roger Reynolds, Yehudi Wyner, people who are roughly from my generation, and lots of people that I don’t know, too. A full gamut. Old professors from when I was in graduate school, and a former sweetheart of mine from high school, [laughs], who is now an artist in Washington DC… I had totally lost track of her. It’s been on the Jim Lehrer Newshour and stuff like that, generated, there’s been a New Yorker piece… Each time one of these comes out, there’s a little wave of e-mails that comes in. Hundreds of people have been in touch. It’s been wonderful to reconnect with people that way, too, as you can imagine.

FRANK J. OTERI: So what do you feel the prize means?

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Well, the number one thing that it means for me right now is that the chances of getting this opera staged are suddenly boosted by an enormous factor. That’s by far the most valuable thing about it to me, and I’m doing everything I possibly can to capitalize on that. This piece, as you know, has been sitting on the shelf for 22 years. First there was the opportunity to actually hear it, and it was this fabulous performance, an absolutely, world-class performance I think. Gunther Schuller, in the New Yorker comments that he made, described it as an “impeccable performance,” and he also said that it was a word he’s used about four times in his life, and it was truly that, it was a magnificent performance…

FRANK J. OTERI: It really comes across on the recording I heard.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: We had world-class singers involved, John Cheek and Allan Glassman from the Met, Christina Bouras, who’s doing a Juliet in New York City next year. Very, very fine singers from Boston, too, William Hite and David Ripley, and beyond that, probably the most committed performance from a conductor that I’ve ever had. He was another student of mine, J. David Jackson, who graduated from Amherst in about 1980 or so. He’s been in Europe for about 15 years doing the usual apprenticeship route: five years in Germany, five years in Spain, five years in Brussels, and he’s an absolute miracle worker with singers, and he has just the perfect touch with singers, and had absolutely internalized the score. He had learned the score more thoroughly than I’ve ever had any performer learn a score on a piece of mine. It was just in the palm of his hands, tremendous work from him. So all of that led to the performance. I’m saying the experience of this opera came in waves. First, this wonderful performance, and then some very nice recognition of the performance… It got a terrific review from Richard Dyer in the Globe, which in itself was of interest, because I think it drew a lot of attention to that moment, and with no great optimism, I submitted it to the Pulitzer Board. I mean, composers, as you know, just send anything that feels like it might be sort of big enough to be considered. I sent it along, but… And I had honestly no particular reason to think that it would fare any better than other pieces that I’ve submitted to the Pulitzer Board before. But, in fact, it seems, again, from Schuller’s remarks, it seems to have caused quite a bit of interest on the Pulitzer Board. I hadn’t even particularly paid attention to when the awards were coming out. I knew they were in the spring sometime. I didn’t know just when. So I was pretty knocked out when the call came.

FRANK J. OTERI: So the call came on a Monday…

LEWIS SPRATLAN: But not from the Pulitzer Board. It was three days before I heard from the Pulitzers. I got a little telegram, “You have won the Pulitzer Prize.” Ellen, our concert manager, got the call. The prize was announced at 3 o’clock. At ten minutes after 3, NPR called Ellen, wanting materials to put on the radio. And then she called me and said, “That’s fabulous. Congratulations!” And I said, “Congratulations for what?” And then she told me and I went straight through the ceiling at that point. But it was from Ellen that I first heard it. It started sort of pouring in after that, the phone was just ringing away, but nothing official still for a while.

FRANK J. OTERI: This is work that’s 22 years old. And it’s unusual – certainly there’s a precedent for it: the Ives Third Symphony won in the ’40’s, and it was written 30 years earlier. But it’s sort of odd, in a way, to have the Prize for the year 2000 go to a piece that was written in 1978. But it’s also odd that you submitted an older piece this year, and it’s obviously something, even though it’s from 22 years ago, that’s still very near and dear to your heart.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: To be sure. I consider this my magnum opus. I think it’s the most significant piece I’ve written. And, by far, the biggest, and the only opera… I have an enormous identity with the hero in this piece, who is an exile. Although I do all sorts of public things, there’s a certain sort of sense of psychological exile that I feel. So I have a visceral attachment to the piece. And I like it a lot, and I think it’s awfully good, and to have this performance sitting there became a perfect opportunity for me to submit it to the Pulitzer Board. And there was no way I wasn’t going to, I mean, I had been intending all along, assuming it was a decent performance, to submit it. I was aware myself of the fact that it was an old piece and I didn’t know whether that was going to be a kind of hitch in things, you know, whether they just sort of had a policy against giving the award to older pieces. I can imagine, I mean, it’s kind of conceivable that on balance, that is the view that they would take. If they had a sort of older piece that was right up there, but a ne
wer one that was just as good, I can imagine they might be inclined to give it to the newer one, but I like to imagine that the excellence of the piece is what won it the award, and that that was able to overcome whatever sense they might have that wouldn’t be normal to give it to an older piece that way.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now, the other thing that’s so unusual about the work winning is, of course, only the second act won, because only the second act was performed this past year. We are fortunate to have with us as part of the discussion this afternoon, the librettist of the opera. I’d like to talk to you a little bit about this. This is something you also did 22 years ago, and now, all of a sudden, here it is. There’s a performance that happens in January, and, it not only finally gets performed, it wins the Pulitzer Prize in Music. What is your feeling of the work now? Have you forgotten about this piece? How important is it in your life?

JAMES MARANISS: Well, I was aware of this year of Calderón. This year is the 400th anniversary of Calderón’s birth, and so there are Calderón symposia and celebrations all over the world. And the performance of this opera, to my mind, is the most significant event marking Calderón’s anniversary and presenting Calderón to the new millennium. When I was an undergraduate at Harvard in the ’60’s, I first became acquainted with this play and it had an effect upon me like that of Lew’s: I identified completely with the predicament that the hero was in, and I liked the language a lot. It was merely fortuitous that I would then become the neighbor of this person, who had, not only had this psychic affinity with me and with Calderón, but also had this prodigious gift as a composer and a musician. And my attitude then was that whatever I can do to put this into some kind of poetic English, and doing that over the course of 3 years, I didn’t really have the feeling that I was doing it alone. I had the feeling that I was the instrument of something, call it Calderón, that was bigger than me. And it was an archetype, really, of this idea, of “Life is a Dream,” and the predicament that this character, that I was doing this, and that I had the gift of having this friend who was a neighbor, who was a musician, and who could actually realize the archetype for the future, for the coming of the developing of western civilization in which this play was an important thing, in which his idea was an important thing. And so I never really thought that the play, the opera, wouldn’t be done. It was out of mind because it wasn’t being done, but I knew then, 22 years ago, and I’ve always known in the interim, that if there was any really good thing that I had done, (…and Lewis has done significant and wonderful things since but I thought also that this was his best work…), somehow or other it didn’t surprise me that this would be produced and that people would like it, because I always knew it was good.

Operatic Collaboration

FRANK J. OTERI: It’s interesting that the two of you were neighbors, but basically you worked on the opera totally apart from each other. It’s as though you lived in other countries, even if you were on the same wavelength.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Well, we saw each other all the time and we have an understanding, I think. Besides, it was just so good. I mean, if there had been problems with the libretto, I think that we would have had to work together a lot more. But Jim’s a great musician, he’s not a practicing musician, but he knows what a libretto has to be. The libretto has this magnificent quality of distillation about it, I mean, it just takes this Baroque edifice and boils it down to just the most meaningful parts. And the English is very beautiful, and extremely settable. He was so aware of those values, as to what sung English would have to be. Hands off was better, as far as I was concerned, and I can’t remember, did I actually play you bits of it? Every now and then…

JAMES MARANISS: Yeah, you would play me bits of it on the piano, sing all the parts, and you were always on key, your voice quality, you know, couldn’t really hit all the notes, but you were in key. My feeling then was, and it still it, now, that as far as I can imagine, the real rich wholeness of Calderón‘s poetry gets realized by being sung in the music, and that Calderón’s play in Spanish, or in English, or in any language, merely language, is partly realized, but that the real realization, in that it’s better as an opera than it is as a play, the real realization is when it’s sung.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: So this wasn’t through any sense of avoidance – avoiding one another or avoidance of the chore of sitting down and working together. It was just that it was taking care of itself.

FRANK J. OTERI: What I find so interesting about it, though, as a listener, hearing it, you know, 22 years later, in this performance from 22 years later, is it sounds like you were working together the whole time. The prosody is so perfect, it sounds like the words and music happened simultaneously. They marry each other.

JAMES MARANISS: Yeah, well, thank you very much.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: That is the highest compliment, by the way. I’m thrilled to hear you say that.

FRANK J. OTERI: Oscar Hammerstein II often said that great songwriting collaborations are about the words and music marrying each other. And they do.

JAMES MARANISS: That’s all his doing because I didn’t have anything to do with the music.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Except that it was musically conceived by you on whatever level, conscious or subconscious. But… Very well, I mean, it could be that it sounds as if we had been working side by side. In a certain sense we were, but just not actually. It was through a common understanding of the values of Calderón, I think, that led to this, but, you know, you’re mentioning the prosody. I’m very pleased to hear that, because the piece absolutely hangs on the language, it is in as many dimensions as you can imagine there, first of all, of course, just the semantic suggestiveness of it, but very much the rhythm of the language, very much the contour of the language. There are just pages and pages of the opera where you could go through and speak the words and you would find that the melody has just exactly that – heightened, heightened, of course, but it honors the language very much, and when it works against the language, it’s for some very, very particular dramatic reason. For example, in the music of the cousins, I think, does tend to, you haven’t heard it, but in the first act, Estrella and Astolfo were the pretenders to the throne, and in the first act, he’s trying to flatter his cousin and win her in cahoots so they can proceed together to take over the throne, and there, it’s this tremendously arched language. Like some blazing comment, just loaded with the most forced imagery. And the music is ludicrous there, as the character is ludicrous, and one of the ways that the music is ludicrous is that it fights the language of the words so much. So that’s what I meant in saying that when it doesn’t follow the norm of the language it’s for some dramatic reason.

Getting an Opera Performed

FRANK J. OTERI: Other articles have talked a little bit about what the history of this piece was, and people who are reading this might know something of the history, but I think it might be worthwhile, and certainly it is constructive for anybody who wants to write an opera, the process that set the creation of this piece in motion and then what wound up happening.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Sure. In 1975, Herta Glaz who was the founder and director of the New Haven Opera Theater, approached me about doing a piece for them. This was actually on the recommendation of Yehudi Wyner, who was a teacher of mine there in New Haven. I never studied composition with him but I’d done a number of other courses with him. He had said very early on in our acquaintance that he felt I had a dramatic gift, and he was rather emphatic about it. And I sort of pooh poohed it, because I’ve never considered myself an opera buff particularly. I really am not a big follower of opera.

FRANK J. OTERI: Had you written vocal music?

LEWIS SPRATLAN: I had written lots and lots of vocal music, and have continued to since. There’s a great deal of vocal music and choral music in my output but not opera. In any case, she reached me and it was partly on the prodding of Yehudi’s that I said, oh, okay, you know, I’ll go talk to her about it. (Jim wasn’t on board on this yet, it was actually just a couple of days before we got in touch.) At our very first meeting she sort of laid out the land of what the New Haven Opera was all about. It was a small modest company, and one of the reasons that it’s written for relatively small orchestra, just single woodwinds, 2 horns, 1 trumpet, 1 trombone, 2 percussion, harp, piano and strings, was because it is a fairly small company, I wanted to honor that. And it is a relatively small cast, too: 8 named characters and a chorus. So she laid out the scope of the company, and in practically the same breath, presented to me a copy of La Vida Es Suena of Calderón, saying this is a work that I would like you to think about as a possibility. That was not the commission as such, but I had told her I guess on the phone before we met, that I didn’t particularly have any story in mind. And so she came prepared, a little bit.

JAMES MARANISS:Do you know what motivated her?

LEWIS SPRATLAN: As to wanting to see this set? Well, I think she saw something in that play. It’s an opera sitting and ready to be written. If you ever read it, you can see what I mean by that. Just the way it’s structured, it’s immensely operatic in concept, I think. And I think she must have realized this. I’m going to have Jim butt in here for a second, because Herta is Viennese, and just, say a word about the kind of status that this play has in German-speaking countries…

JAMES MARANISS:Well, this play is well known in German culture. It was translated in the early 19th century by Schlegel.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Das Leben ist ein Traum.

JAMES MARANISS:And Hoffmansthal, the librettist for Richard Strauss, did some versions of Calderón. He did a version of The Great Theater of the World. And Hoffmansthal and Grillparzer and other German dramatists, you could call continuers of Calderón. Calderón has always had a position in German literature, equivalent to what he’s had in Spanish literature, which you wouldn’t say of other languages. So probably Herta Glaz, as a young girl, in the Gymnasium or wherever she was in Vienna, was given this play in the Schlegel translation, and read it, and thought it was great. That would be my surmise.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: There was an investiture there on her part, I think, and she realized that it could turn into something. Beyond that I can’t say. I never actually queried her about what her motivations might have been.

HAROLD MELTZER: Did the play grab you at first reading?

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Yeah. Bingo. I mean, page 3, almost. I don’t know what to say about that. It was just… well, page 10. But right away, and I had barely put it down before I had banged on Jim’s door and said, “Look what I found,” and then discovered that Calderón was his field, which I didn’t know yet. So that’s how it got launched, and off we went. We started to work on it right away. I can’t remember what time of year it was. You remember writing mainly in summer, so I would assume that it was sometime in the spring that I had seen Herta. And we just worked straight through on it. And then the crisis came, which was in the third year of our work on this, the company disbanded. Because Herta moved with her husband to California, and the company was just simply not well-enough funded to manage without her. She’s a dynamo, and she did all the fundraising, and she was the director of this company in a way far beyond what that term would seem to imply.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now in California did she work in opera?

LEWIS SPRATLAN: I don’t know. I’ve got to contact her. She’s now back in New Haven. She was married to the head of the psychiatry school at Yale and he got hired away to a position in southern California, either USC or UCLA, I don’t recall exactly. And they were out there for, well, 20, 21 years, and I discovered just the other day that she has moved back to New Haven. I haven’t been in touch with her yet. I’m very eager…

FRANK J. OTERI: She must have heard about the Pulitzer and she hasn’t been in touch with you yet?

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Well, she’s very old. Sh
e’s got to be in her 90’s now. She must be. But I’m very remiss in not having been in touch with her. I must do that right away. But I can’t answer your question. I don’t know if she was still doing operatic things out there. I’d be surprised if she weren’t. I mean, she was just so energetic that way.

FRANK J. OTERI: So the opera company and the planned performance of your opera fell apart before you were finished with it?

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Yeah, I was almost finished. I was halfway through the third act.

FRANK J. OTERI: But you kept going.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: If you’ve got two and a half out of… yeah, I kept going.

FRANK J. OTERI: And then what happened?

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Well, I started shopping it around. It was picked up almost immediately by Margun Music, my publisher. As a matter of fact, I think they were aware of the work even before it was done, and it was published at once, so they got to workshopping it around, and I did some of the same myself. And there were two encouraging responses, one from the Houston Grand Opera, the other from the Chicago Lyric. Both came to nothing. And then there were many other submissions to other opera companies, none of which materialized at all. I actually had voice contact with people from Houston and Chicago.

FRANK J. OTERI: Houston just did the new Carlisle Floyd opera. It’s the 25^th American opera that they’ve premiered, so they have a real track record for doing new American opera.

HAROLD MELTZER: They’re also just did Mark Adamo‘s Little Women…

FRANK J. OTERI: Since winning the Prize, have new offers emerged?

LEWIS SPRATLAN: There have been inquiries and I know particularly about one, but I’m afraid I can’t give any details about it just yet… If it actually comes into fruition and everybody involved signs off on it then I think that it would be fine to say something about it.

FRANK J. OTERI: By June 1?

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Fat chance.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, you never know, the power of the Web…

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Yeah, sure.

FRANK J. OTERI: There’s been a real flourish of activity in opera with American composers. There was a period when people weren’t writing operas. In the car ride coming up, we were talking about Pulitzer Prize-winning operas, and once upon a time Menotti won 2 Pulitzers, and Barber won a Pulitzer for Vanessa. The last time there was a Pulitzer Prize given for an opera was in the 60’s with Robert Ward‘s The Crucible. So, it’s almost 40 years since a Pulitzer Prize went to an opera. But in the past decade, there’s been all this activity, with Glass and Adams, and then everybody else jumped in on the bandwagon. It seems that everybody’s writing operas. But they are such large-scale works; the forces are so large. For most American composers, getting a large orchestra piece done is very difficult. Getting an opera done is really difficult, and getting a repeat performance of the opera once it’s done, yikes… And as you’ve seen from your own experience, writing the work that you consider the work of your career, nothing happened.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Sickening, isn’t it?

FRANK J. OTERI: What does it mean? I mean, what do you do? I mean, I’m working on an opera…

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Well, you know what it means! You’re working on an opera now?

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: On spec?

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah, [laughs], it’s insane.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: You are insane. I mean, you’re either that or a masochist, I don’t know. Maybe, perhaps it’s going to sail right to the top, I hope it does.

FRANK J. OTERI: [laughs]

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Good luck to you. But I wouldn’t sit down to write an opera on spec at gunpoint. I just couldn’t imagine doing such a thing. You know all the reasons behind this, Frank, I think opera companies are inherently timid. It costs a lot of money to put on operas, and they don’t want duds on their hands, and then they keep trying to second guess what is going to be a success and half the time they fail, or more than half the time they fail. One of the companies, I don’t even remember which company I sent it to, but I got this “falling out of your chair,” hysterically funny thing back from them. It was a checklist with little boxes and “Thank you very much, Mr. Spratlan. Please take note of the reasons that we did not accept your piece.” You know, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12 and 14 were all checked. “Do not overestimate the intelligence of your audience” was one of the things.

FRANK J. OTERI: [laughs]

LEWIS SPRATLAN: “Keep it simple, stupid” or some such… “Include reprises” was one of the things. “Do it again.” One of them said, “Melody, melody, melody!” with an exclamation point. This was the little list, and, as absurd as it sounds, one has the feeling that this is actually the level of conversation that is going on in the offices of these companies. They seem to have totally lost track of what opera can do in the world, the galvanic power to pull an audience into another world. They’ve lost all interest, not all of them have, clearly, but, I mean, it’s become something that’s sort of riding along, it’s become a little world in itself, full of its self-perpetuating myths that it’s made up. It’s lost touch with what it means to be in the world and to live in the world. And, for all of these reasons, I think, it’s difficult to put an opera on, if it’s an opera that has, that’s attempting to take the form somewhere.

FRANK J. OTERI: There is this nebulous, unidentifiable “fear of audiences” in so many of our institutions, certainly within the orchestral community, although less so than it once was, and in radio. I was at the conference of the Major Orchestra Librarians Association recently. And somebody there mentioned a list that was compiled of the 25 most frequently performed operas in the 20th Century.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Was there a single American opera on the list?

FRANK J. OTERI: No, and there wasn’t a single work written in the last 90 years. Puccini was the most contemporary composer on there if I remember correctly…

LEWIS SPRATLAN: I would have certainly guessed.

FRANK J. OTERI: This is stagg
ering.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Did anybody raise a hand and say, wait, any thoughts about this, to this group of assembled people?

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, it inspired a lot of discussion about the larger musical community, like, imagine a publisher taking on an opera, and the whole notion of parts and what that means, the investment and what that represents for something that basically has no legs in our society. But then you go back and you look at it and you think to yourself, okay, so maybe you don’t do any American operas, you don’t anything that’s contemporary, and you could say ditto for the symphony orchestras, or on the radio, just the so-called standard repertory. There’s a chronological disconnect and a geographical disconnect with almost all of the music, and then you wonder why only 5 percent of Americans are interested in classical music? It doesn’t connect to them. You know, why would it? And, you know, they can come back with anything they want, saying, well, you know, this isn’t tuneful, this doesn’t have tunes, this doesn’t have this, this doesn’t have that. Gangsta rap doesn’t have “tunes” and it’s immensely popular. People want something that’s visceral, they want something that’s exciting, they want something that’s going to be unlike what they know, that’s going to take them into another area and jolt them a little bit. If something’s completely complacent, it’s boring.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: If 3 or 4 opera companies in the country got serious about going against the tide of the lowest common denominator principle that they seem to be operating under, and were successful at it, it might suggest to other companies to start being a little bit braver, a little bit more in touch with the here and now. I don’t know what it would take, but it occurs to me that at the minimum it would be that. I mean, there’s got to be some sort of bellwether here, there’s got to be some leading company with a lot of visibility and a lot of press, and outreach having a success. And maybe that would make some difference. The whole thing is so unfathomable to me that I can’t even work up a sympathy for their point of view. It’s difficult for me to put myself in their position and sort of reason it from there, from their point of view.

FRANK J. OTERI: Look at the record industry. There’s a wonderful, hysterical thing that happened several years ago. All of a sudden Nonesuch has this million-selling record with Gorecki‘s Third. So all of a sudden all these major record labels were like, oh, wow, contemporary music, we can make money, let’s issue contemporary music. All these labels sprouted up as imprints of major labels that have all since folded, like Catalyst and Argo, and they were issuing all this music. Why didn’t it work? They didn’t understand. And then all these other labels issued Gorecki 3 again, thinking they’d sell, and, you know, they didn’t. “Let’s do the same thing.” Someone else issued Gorecki 3 and made money, let’s issue it and make money too. No one else’s sold. It was a fluke. Then a couple of years ago, they discovered the monks. And it became that for a bit. I think once you tie art to dollars and commerce, you’re going down a very dangerous path. And, in a way, you know, each of us in our own way is sort of lucky that we subsist separate and apart from those concerns. In this country, a record company or an orchestra or an opera company exists in the marketplace and always has to look at the bottom line. You both work here at Amherst, I work for a non-profit organization, and Harold is sort of scraping by [laughs]. You know, the “dictatorship of the bottom line” is not something that any of us really understands. But once you start mixing thinking about the bottom line with anything that’s creative, I think you’re doomed to failure.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: I guess I had enough sympathy with opera companies… the budgets are enormous for these things, as you know, and I mean, they’re not, I think it’s possible to be in business and hope to have a work generate a reasonable return on the investment, but it seems to me that if they really are counting entirely on the monetary success of something they put on, that they are reduced to a situation where they’re trying to second guess what’s going to be successful and then they run into this horrible problem that you’re talking about. Seems to me the answer, which we’ll never see in this country, I think, would be wholesale public involvement in the support of opera companies. But it runs so thoroughly against the tide to do that.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, look at a country like Finland…

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Oh, of course!

FRANK J. OTERI: The Savonlinna Opera Festival does so many contemporary operas. It’s amazing.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: That’s the one way to pull the “bottom line-ism” out of the thinking of the producers of these companies. But we’re stuck in a sad situation here. I mean, there was a little bulge of the ‘80’s where it looked as if the NEA was actually going to become something real, and we’d crossed the line, and we can see how utterly short-lived that was, and what a mistake it was to imagine that that line had been crossed. And, in fact, I think might have actually dipped down the other way. The NEA’s in worse shape than it was before. I applied for an NEA grant to support the performance of Life is a Dream, and not a dime.

JAMES MARANISS:And the support we got, which was a privatized form of public financing, we got from Amherst College which really allowed us to do it.

Teaching and Composing

FRANK J. OTERI: So Amherst has been completely supportive.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Wonderfully so. I mean, I just am very, very pleased by the support that they’ve shown throughout, not just about this piece, but they really have put their money where there mouth is, so to speak.

FRANK J. OTERI: You’ve been here a long time.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Since 1970.

FRANK J. OTERI: Thirty years.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Thirty years, yeah. And I’ve gotten performances, no music of mine has gone unperformed, actually, except for this opera. I’ve gotten very nice performances of everything. And the college hasn’t totally supported all of those performances, but it’s been involved to a certain extent monetarily in some of them, and you know, right through the whole time I’ve been here I’ve felt good support here. So this is a good place to be. It’s also a good place to be because it’s close to New York, it’s close to Boston, it’s easy to get people to come out here and perform. And there are a lot of very good players in this area, too, more than you might imagine.

FRANK J. OTERI: I want to talk a bit about teaching. I brought Harold along for me, not just for his wheels, which was great on a rainy day, but he is a student of yours, and in fact, he called me a day after I put the call in to you and sent off an e-mail to you and said, “I have this idea. I’d love to do an interview with Lew Spratlan. I was a student of his and I love his work.” So I said, “Lew called me back an hour ago; we’re on the same page, let’s do this.” I thought it could be really interesting to have input from a student of yours who feels transformed by the experience of having studied with you.

HAROLD MELTZER: When we were using the wheels on the way up here, I was talking about how you were my only undergraduate teacher. You’re the only person teaching advanced composition here, and I didn’t know whether this was peculiar to you or peculiar to undergraduate teaching, but I remember coming here to Amherst as an undergraduate in the mid-80’s, not planning to be a composer at all, and being turned on by how your first concern seemed to be with musical issues, rather than musical technique. Because technique can always be acquired, and you lose interest in acquiring it later if you don’t have anything that you want to say. And so I was just wondering, first of all, how you frame musical issues for a student who’s coming to music composition for the first time?

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Well, you could ask yourself that same question as to how I framed them with you. I think the important thing to say about that, is that right at the top of my concerns as a composition teacher is trying to discover what the student is bringing to this enterprise. To see what sort of music is in that person. And I must say I don’t consider that to be necessarily a revolutionary point of view. I was privileged in my own studies by having a teacher whose primary concern was just that: Mel Powell. I studied with him for a year as an undergraduate and two years as a graduate student at Yale. And this was magnificently his point of view. I mean, Powell was the opposite of a technique-monger. He would take the measliest scribbles that you brought in, something about which you felt awful, and find something in it he thought had a thumbprint of the students. And the lesson would then evolve from that to what the possibilities of what that would be. What does that little moment suggest, what are the implications of that moment? I didn’t register his teaching that way at the time. He was my first real composition teacher. Well, I had scribbled stuff when I was younger and my mother would comment on it and say, “you know, that should be a G#” and stuff, but I mean, it wasn’t beyond that. But Mel was the first composition teacher I had and I assumed that that was the way you taught composition. I have subsequently discovered that that is not at all the case, that this is actually quite an exceptional thing. And it would be on all kinds of levels, it would be this sort of, what that moment represented in a kind of psychological way, what its properties were, as far as musical structure, how to expand on that, what the reverse of that was, and the pieces would grow this way. And it was something, it’s certainly a way of thinking about teaching that I have carried forward. This is, now I’m not sure that’s a direct answer to your question, but I think that’s the heart of the matter. I mean, this is really what’s at stake to me in teaching, and it can happen in many, many different ways. You know, take these 3 notes and make something, fill a page with something that emerges from those 3 notes in some fashion. What might be the most foreign way of thinking for a student, but the very act of having to go through that is going to, in some way, reveal a proclivity, or a propensity, or a way of thinking… I don’t care about those 3 notes, actually, or technically speaking, what goes on with them. I’m concerned with what goes on in the cracks, so to speak. What way of thinking seems to emerge. And, you know, in some cases, nothing emerges. It could be a very formulaic worthless thing, and I will say it. “This is formulaic and worthless. Do the same thing again for next week, and don’t think so much about it.” That might be the next thing that I would say. And then, something would start to show up. And then, you know, it’s a long process, too. That’s the most frustrating thing about teaching in a liberal arts school I think. For all the best reasons in the world, the kids are heavily involved in other things. I mean, it’s just the nature of the place. You end up getting an education here, which can never be bad. I don’t know why I put it in the negative that way; it’s good, on balance. But it has its price, because kids don’t have enough time to write. And if they have time to write, it’s 30 minutes after dinner and then 15 minutes before breakfast. So that sort of concerted time to really compose is a big frustration. And there are kids who are, can never quite get over that. They’re ones who cannot carve out the time to compose.

FRANK J. OTERI: So, how much time do you feel someone needs to give to composition?

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Well, I can’t give a number to that. I think the important thing is carving out the psychological space. And if they can, you have to sort of dump everything, and clear the psychic desk, so to speak, to get down to a spot where the musical thoughts have room to formulate themselves. Some students can reach that spot very quickly. Others need a lot more time. What can I say? I guess one thing I do feel is that they’ve got to clear an ample space of time as much as possible every day. That’s certainly true for my own work, I feel like when I’m involved in a piece, it’s really just got to be regular work even if it’s a brief amount of time. So regularity. And then the most important thing, I think is just, whatever time one needs to make room for the business of composing. There’s no formula for it, but I thi
nk those are the two principles that are involved: regularity, and just being dogged about leaving enough time.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now, in terms of teaching, you don’t only teach composition students?

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Music theory, and other things.

FRANK J. OTERI: To people who are not music majors.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Yeah. That’s right.

FRANK J. OTERI: So, how do you bring in the students who are not part of this arcane world of new music that we exist in? How do you get them to appreciate contemporary music?

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Well, opening their ears, of course, is the big trick. I do lots and lots and lots of listening assignments. I think that sheer exposure and repeated exposure is a lot of what’s involved here. A lot of the time they just won’t go and do the listening because they’re scared to death of it, or scared that they don’t know how to relate to it, or it’s going to sound ugly to them or something, so really, just “forcing” them to do a lot of listening and finding that they are in fact, enticed by it, is step 1 here, I think. And also, I think it’s valuable in confronting new music for the first time to help a student hear how the things that they love about the music that they do love are going on in this music, too. And sort of translating things for them into a different language, and seeing how, such simple things as how music moves in time, when it tends to sit still, when it tends to move ahead faster, when it stops, the various means of intensification that worked for Mozart are still at work in this music now, and just helping them to hear what is happening on a visceral level for them, translate into principles that they can see are at work in music over the long haul and not just isolated to this particular repertoire.

FRANK J. OTERI: Do you also take in the pop music that they’re undoubtedly listening to?

LEWIS SPRATLAN: I take it in. I plead a little guilty. I’m not as up to date on pop music as I wish I were, because I value that. I think that that’s really an important way of getting to a student, opening doors of conversations with students. I’m not entirely outside of that sphere. One of the things is that the pop music scene is changing so rapidly, and it’s so far flung that it takes, it takes a real investment of time to stay on top of it, and it’s one that I haven’t made. I’m not proud of that fact. I have a wonderful colleague here at Mount Holyoke College, David Sanford, I don’t know if either of you guys know David, he’s young, he just took the position at Holyoke, but he’s a real pop music listener, and he has been his entire life, and it’s just as heavily involved, and he’s a real, very good composer, of, you know, quote “classical new music.” But it’s a very powerful tool for him in the classroom. I would say the same thing about Dan Warner at Hampshire College. So it’s something that I wish I did more, but I guess the quick answer is no.

HAROLD MELTZER: Do you think teaching has affected the way you compose, or your general approach?

LEWIS SPRATLAN: I don’t know. It doesn’t strike me that teaching has made all much difference in the way I compose. The only thing I would say, I suppose having to formulate things that are going on in new music to students when I talk to them about it, just the very act of that formulating has put ideas into my head, has caused focusing on certain principles, and so on. But it’s not something I’ve thought very much about. Let me ask you that question. You were a student of mine. Did you see ways in which the teaching I was doing somehow made a difference in the music that I ended up writing?

HAROLD MELTZER: I don’t know. There were issues that came up in class when we would discuss them together, because we would have private lessons and then we would all have a group lesson every Thursday, and those issues found their way, in some ways, into your pieces.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: It’s a little “chicken and eggy,” though, isn’t it? I mean, can you think of one example, possibly? I don’t want to put you on the spot.

HAROLD MELTZER: No, I remember around the time that you were working on When Crows Gather, which had more elements of not current pop music, but music from the past. At the heart of Crows there’s a hymn, a Charleston and there’s a ragtime. And I was writing, literally, my first piece with you. And I was also putting the same kinds of music in my piece. I’m sure you understood at least what I was trying to do, even if I didn’t, and I certainly had no idea what you were trying to do, but in a way we ended up getting closer together in these concerns. And I’m sure there must have been similar experiences you’ve had with other students.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: That’s a tough one. You know, I don’t think all that much about that issue. I don’t doubt that you’re right, but I’d have to sort of sit and think about it before I could describe it. I mean, it’s not the sort of thing that I’m ready with an answer for because it’s not something I wonder about very much. Let me just think locally for a second. Actually, there’s a kid, a wonderful student of mine right now who is doing music similar to what I’ve done, and I don’t know whether I’ve subtly urged him this way or whether he’s picked up on the fact – that’s what I meant about chicken and egg – it’s a marvelous technique, it’s like a jigsaw puzzle technique, where the whole piece or the whole phrase or the whole page, whatever it is, is the complete picture of a jigsaw puzzle, or we don’t get it, we just get this piece and we get that piece, and we get that piece and that piece and that piece, and then you begin to see the picture but it’s not until that last piece is dropped in until you finally get the whole…

FRANK J. OTERI: Is it cubist at all?

LEWIS SPRATLAN: No, I don’t think of it as cubist, it’s almost the opposite of cubism. I mean, if you think of cubism as taking a whole thing and fracturing it down into components, it’s almost going the other way, it’s taking these components and only gradually revealing what the whole thing is sequentially. But that’s, so, yeah, I’m very alert to his doing that. And I haven’t done it in as quite as systematic way as he has but we’ve talked about that kind of thing happening in my music in various places, so I guess there is feedback here but it’s not something that I’ve paid that much attention to. I don’t think all that much about how my life as a teacher is reflected in my own composition. I’m very aware of how my own music makes a difference to my students, or how it brings alive issues that I’ve been talking about it in their music, that I’m aware of, but not so much of how the teaching influences my composing.

FRANK J. OTERI: It’s interesting. This became a big issue for us, of course, you know, we’re all dual career, triple career, quadruple career composers and the issue with NewMusicBox we had for April 2000 is about that very issue. About people who juggle different careers and whether the two affect each other. In some cases they’re very connected, with someone like Joan La Barbara sings other people’s music and then does her own music, which is very vocally-based. Another extreme, it seems completely unrelated, David Soldier, a composer who has his own string quartet, is also a neurobiologist. But there are connections, and he feels that there are connections, that his music is largely inspired by a lot of the concepts that he gets from doing research in neurobiology.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: I’ve got plenty of things to say about that and me in the world. But not so much in teaching. For example, biology. I’m extremely tied into biological processes, and there’s a lot of thinking that I’ve done about biological processes that show up in my music and somehow, in one way or another. I remember, once I was up in the White Mountains, peering for about five hours at the bottom of a pond, it was a very shallow pond there. There was a state that you could fall into, where you could put yourself into that world, watching those tiny little organisms, little bugs and so on, where one little move over here would have terrific implications in terms of that whole little corner of the pond, and then it would subside again. I’ve also looked at the way trees grow a lot. That’s just one example. That didn’t have anything to do with teaching, particularly, but you’re mentioning your neurobiologist friend. I’m very sympathetic to that idea, and I think we probably all have things outside of music proper that fascinate us, and that we are interested in finding out more about.

HAROLD MELTZER: I can think of an example of the influence on teaching on your work, the Apollo and Daphne Variations…

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Oh, well, this is a very peculiar…

HAROLD MELTZER: This is based on a theme that you wrote for a theory class.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: That is an extremely vivid example, almost to the far, far extreme relative to the kind of mealy-mouthness that I was coming up with before. That is a, this came about because, well, I can’t resist telling the story, I’ll try to be as absolutely brief as possible. Have you met Ron Bashford, Harold’s partner? [laughs] Partner! The word partner doesn’t mean the same thing it meant 20 years ago. His collaborator.

HAROLD MELTZER: Collaborator and college friend.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Ron was in a theory class of mine. Turns out we were studying Schumann, and going through the whole letter key thing, you know, the DSCH business.

FRANK J. OTERI: Like fugues on Bach‘s name… You can play with 9 pitches…A B C D E F G, then H is B natural so B has to be B flat, and S is Eb. I call it “pitchtalk.”

LEWIS SPRATLAN: It turns out this guy’s name is B-A-S-H-F-O-R-D, 6 out of the 8 letters work.

FRANK J. OTERI: Wow.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: It is loaded [sings] “nee da da dee da daaaa” So the assignment was to go off and write a little 16 bar piece a la Schumann. Character piece, if possible, using code letters that way. So, Ron, I said, “Ron, you’re particularly on the spot, because you’ve got the most musically loaded name in captivity. And so he did a little something, and completely wasted his name, and in response to that, I said, here’s what you could have done with B A S H F D, and I dashed it off that night, and I brought it in for the next class, and it is in fact, the seed from which this entire piece grew. I didn’t even think of the name of it. It has an aggressive first 8 bars and a serene second 8 bars, and literally, five minutes before I got into class, I said, oh, God, I’ve got to get a name to this, let me see, aggressive, serene: Apollo and Daphne. So I just scribbled out Apollo and Daphne on it. It was completely, it didn’t generate from the idea of Apollo and Daphne; it was after the fact. So what Harold’s talking about, is that piece, in toto, is actually, that little piano piece is quoted about 6 or 7 pages into this piece and gives rise to the whole series of variations that then, it’s variations on that tune that came out, and on the front part of the piece is kind of subliminal, arising from the murk of the materials that finally cohere to that. So that’s a particular example of teaching and composing…

Music and Geography

FRANK J. OTERI: We talk about California composers, and a “California sound.” For years, the expression “New York School” has been bandied about for painters and poets and now it is frequently used to describe the music of Cage and Feldman and their cohorts, and other composers there now are the heirs to this. And people talk about midwest composers. To some extent, you’re an outsider from the compositional centers that we think of in this country. And last week, when I listened to a tape of When Crows Gather, I thought to myself, “God, you know, I could never write this piece. I’ve been in New York City my whole life.” You know, it’s such a ‘not New York’ piece. It’s such a ‘not city’ piece.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: But it’s not an Amherst piece, either.

FRANK J. OTERI: No, but it’s a piece that is so in touch with nature and is so organic.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Well, that’s a great compliment.

FRANK J. OTERI: I was blown away by it, I was just sitting there, and I thought, this is so unique, it’s a poetic response, it’s a response to nature, I mean, to me, nature is concrete, traffic lights are my trees, buildings are my mountains, you know… They really are. New York City is what I know and it is what has shaped who I am. So I wonder how being in a small college, living in a small town, has shaped you as a composer?

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Well, it might have freed me, in one sense. But I really have never felt that I’m part of an Amherst school or the Western Massachusetts school or even a New England school. That’s why I jutted in a moment ago “it’s certainly not Amherst music.” I am referred to occasionally as a New England composer, I think that’s very casual, I mean, I’m a composer who lives in New England…

FRANK J. OTERI: …You grew up in Florida.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Well, yeah, sure.

FRANK J. OTERI: And your family’s from Alabama.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Montgomery. My people are all from Montgomery, the Montgomery area. So that’s a whole other conversation. I don’t feel like I’m an Amherst composer or a Western Mass. composer. I feel like the nature thing is interesting, and I think you might be onto something there. I mean, I’m extremely responsive to nature, and I guess it’s nature, not in the concrete sense of nature, but in the more, sort of, ordinary sense of nature…

FRANK J. OTERI: Or extraordinary, if you would.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Yeah, yeah. So it could be that that might, you may be onto something there, I mean, it could be that my access to nature and the accessibility of nature and my propensity in that direction could be tied up in this. The particular piece that you mention is very, very, expressly in that direction, I mean, even the title, it arose from an experience of nature, I mean, I don’t know if you read the program notes for that piece…

FRANK J. OTERI: You mean the imitation of the sounds?

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Yes, right, right, the very end, the frank imitation of it. But it’s not, it’s not all about nature, the piece, the part of it that you mentioned, the overlay of the hymn, and the Charleston and the ragtime and so on, is actually about my mother-in-law, who is an Indiana woman, and this is a little digest of my three fondest things about her.

HAROLD MELTZER: Is that where you got that?

LEWIS SPRATLAN: That’s where it comes from. She was a conventionally Protestant religious woman, from a farm in Indiana, and she would sit at the piano and play little hymns like that. Totally untutored musician… And I’ve seen pictures of her, she was something of a flapper, and that’s where the kind of Charleston-ish thing of it comes from, and then the other element is the ragtime, those are things that were from her, she used to play rags at the piano, too. So this was a little homage to this woman, she had just suffered a stroke, and was essentially not in this world anymore though her brain was completely active, and it was sort of a contemplation of her imprisonment, and that’s what I was responding to in that piece. This both is and is not a programmatic piece. I mean, in general, there are things that are frankly programmatic: as you mentioned, the evocation of the crows … But there are also some very, very secret things in it. I mean, one of the sections is about a housebreak, it’s a most violent one, I think it’s the 3^rd or 4^th unit. We were robbed one day, we came home and all our valuables were taken, the TV was gone, the silverware, everything, and I had imaginations of them going up in my kids’ room. So there are little bits of their, kind of, closet versions of favorite tunes of my, I don’t know, Harold, in that little place where the 3 clarinets go [sings] “puh da doot da dut da ting/ Puh dat dit dit dee da dung.” Lydia, our daughter, was watching at the time a little kids show that had a jingle: [sings] “Love somebody / Yes I do / Love somebody / Who are you?” Something like that. So, I mean, that was my little nod to this bandit, this burglar, this vile person being up in my daughter’s room.

FRANK J. OTERI: Wow.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: And then, naturally, my son Dan, at the time, I’m trying, it’s a little bit awhile ago, but then, at that same point, there’s a little theme from The Love Boat in there, my 12-year old was watching The Love Boat all the time. This is all very disguised, and there’s a lot of violence in that same movement. And it’s the violence of the intrusion of this bad man or men or whoever they were. That is true of a lot of my music. Now, I don’t know, going back to New York, Boston, you know, West Coast, blah, I don’t know how all of this fits into that. In a way I do feel sort of free to do anything I want here. There’s no school that I’m trying to get a check mark from, you know, or anything like that. I think that it goes both ways. If I were more, you know, if I were more a part of some school, I’d probably have
more performances than I do, because I’d be taken up by that school and sponsored by them, and so on, but at the same time I think that that might have its cost, in terms of trying to, sort of keep writing more like what it was that got that kind of response.

Musical Heroes from Ives to Mingus

FRANK J. OTERI: When I was listening to When Crows Gather, the composer that came into my mind was Charles Ives.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Oh, big one for me. Of course. He was another New Englander, of course.

FRANK J. OTERI: Who do you admire? Who are your heroes?

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Well, Ives, enormously, and not just because of, sort of, the New England stuff. The freedom to layer things in Ives is something that I’ve loved about him from the very first music that I heard of his. Nothing’s off limits to compound, and unlike things can live together and so on. That’s a deep idea to me. Yeah, you know, so interesting that you should mention that. He is a very, very important figure to me. But, well, I, my heroes are, I mean, some of my basic heroes are the same ones that any composers, you know, the giants of this century, you know, the Viennese composers and Stravinsky, and, less so for me the sort of, earlier American composers apart from Ives. I mean, the whole, sort of, you know, Virgil Thomson end of things is a part of American music that just doesn’t interest me very much. I’ve always found it overly obvious, or something like that. But as far as the deep for… and then I adore Boulez, and little bit less so Stockhausen, I, very, I like the recent Finnish people a lot.

FRANK J. OTERI: Magnus Lindberg?

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Lindberg, Saariaho, and so on… Berio is a tremendously important composer to me. It’s not going to be a very surprising list… Something very important also that I have to say. I grew up, college age, luckily, I was in New Haven, and I went to New York practically every weekend, or very nearly every weekend to hear the great jazz players. And they are enormously formative and central in my music. You know, Bird, Mingus, Miles Davis… These are people that I heard in their heyday, in the late ’50’s and early ’60’s. My music is loaded with jazz, sometimes it becomes a little evident, and other times it’s much less evident. Art Farmer, Blakey, are very, very deeply important to me…

FRANK J. OTERI: When you were saying “this section represents this, and this represents the burglar coming in,” I was thinking of Mingus, in terms of, you know, that each aspect of whatever chart that he was working on actually often does refer to things, like the “Fables of Faubus” or “Pithecanthropus Erectus.”

LEWIS SPRATLAN: That’s an absolutely accurate perception of yours, yeah, tremendously accurate. As far as me and New York, it’s mainly the great jazz players in New York. If I have a big regret in that regard, it’s that I get down there so seldom.

HAROLD MELTZER: As an aside, one of the great pleasures of having these composition seminars as an undergraduate was when you finished a piece, the bop elements of any piece came to the fore when you would demonstrate it, not so much by sitting at the piano, but by turning the pages and actually singing the fastest line you could and you were practically scatting. You wrote a piece in the late ’80’s called Penelope’s Knees, which was a double concerto for saxophone and bass and ensemble, and your rendition of the saxophone solo sounded like Ella Fitzgerald on speed.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: I did a lot of scatting. You know, there were buddies of mine when I was an undergraduate, we would just go in the hallway and scat a lot. It was very big. Vocal responses to things are very important to me, and sometimes in very abstract ways, too. I mean, there have been plenty of pieces of mine that have come about just through vocalizing, that, and not scatting tunes, particularly, [scats] “Waaah ‘n yoo su wow,” you know, something like that, will be the very first idea that comes to mind for a piece, and it will go from there, and I consider that, you know, it’s a vocalization of some sort. And I don’t know, it’s hard to say exactly what, well, I don’t know what the roots of that are, I’ve been singing in church choirs since I was that big, so the voice is a very natural thing to me, I don’t feel, what I just did is not out of church choirs, especially, but I don’t know what to say about that. It’s just, there it is. Am I coming close to saying something valuable to you about this question?

FRANK J. OTERI: Oh, yeah.

Uptown/Downtown

HAROLD MELTZER: We’ve been talking about being an outsider, and not being an outsider, and what that leaves you free to do. And I was thinking about the other piece that got premiered on the same concert as the opera, the new piece, Sojourner, for 10 players, and I remember this from when it was only a beginning MIDI file, and we talked about the piece. Your preface has this pair of sentences which are a lot about being an outsider. “Just as Sojourner, the brave little mini-tank, with the hinged proboscis, takes the lithic temperature of various objects on Mars, so the sojourner takes the psychic temperature of various clumps of society here on Earth. This piece is about both.” Now, this seems to tie together everything from your interest in various scientific processes that you mentioned earlier, to being an outsider, to commenting on things both musical and non-musical, and I was just wondering, you know, what does this piece say about where you are now, and how you feel as an outsider at this stage?

LEWIS SPRATLAN: First of all, before this conversation came up today I don’t think I ever thought of myself as an outsider. That idea had never particularly occurred to me, although once you posed it, it makes sense, it makes all kinds of sense. But so, I certainly had no thought of myself as an outsider in regarding that piece. The business of what it’s really about does derive from, I mean, I’m very interested in astronomy and astromechanics, the engineering aspects of space, and I was totally captivated just on a most personal level by the little Mars rover, you know, we’ve all seen it on TV, it goes up and it sticks its snout out, and at one point its wheels go up. It’s a thrilling thing to me, that sort of accomplishment, but, and the idea of, you know, and I knew it was named Sojourner, and it just sort of started cooking to me that, this little thing is sampling rocks on the surface of Mars, and through life, we sample things all the time, too. The minute we walk into a group of people or a room or something we sort of size up what’s going on psychologically in that scene. I just started thinking about those parallels. And then, the heart of the matter in this music is these three, the three big movements in it are called Probe 1, Probe 2 and Probe 3. And each one of them is supposed to be an agglomeration of the Martian and Earthly perspectives. The way they blend together is quite different in each one. But that’s what gave rise to it. Now as to far as, the sort of outsider issue, I’m not sure how that ties in. You tell me. I don’t know what it, what is there about?

HAROLD MELTZER: Well, you’re taking the psychic temperature on Earth. It seems you’re taking a step back to take that look. Someone who’s in the middle of it…

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Okay, I see. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. That makes some sense. But as far as my not being a part of a school, it’s both liberating and confining, in its way, as far as being in the circles of things…

JAMES MARANISS:In the valley here, in the Connecticut Valley, there are other schools, and there is a community, maybe provincial, to some degree, but certainly not a school. And there are other composers that I know, and that Lew knows, too…

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Oh, sure.

JAMES MARANISS:And performers that are known nationally, people who are really first-class musicians live around here, so it’s not as if you’re in the woods somewhere.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Right. No, that’s very important to say. I mean, it’s not a school, but it’s not an arid spot as far as musical resources.

FRANK J. OTERI: But it’s also not a political hotbed. New York City has sort of projected itself onto the whole nation with this notion of uptown and downtown, and it refers to geography in the borough of Manhattan. And, you know, we sort of superimposed this onto the whole nation. If you’re below 14th Street, your music has to sound a certain way. Elliott Carter lives in Greenwich Village, and for years, Steve Reich lived on the Upper West Side.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: I can’t comment on if I lived uptown or downtown, but I mean, if I were living in New York, I’m not tremendously sure, here I am, from the vantage point of someone who’s about to turn 60, so I’ve been at this for a while, and I have my own habits of how I look at things. But I like to think that if I had been living in New York, I wouldn’t necessarily have wanted to write either uptown or downtown music, but how can you say? I might have fallen into the sort of feeling that I needed to write what was politically important to write at that time. I can’t say; I just don’t have the kind of hindsight to do that.

FRANK J. OTERI: Certainly, you’ve written music in the 12-tone system. In fact, Harold said on the way up, that when you were teaching composition to him, that’s the first thing you taught him to do.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Is that a fact?

FRANK J. OTERI: And he was writing serial music, for what, 6 years after that?

HAROLD MELTZER: Yeah. I didn’t start by…

LEWIS SPRATLAN: But Picker had a lot to do with that, though…

HAROLD MELTZER: Yeah, well, strangely, he was so far away from that itself.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: It’s the only way he knew, I might even say that it wasn’t necessarily 12-tone, but it was highly, highly systematic, the pieces that you were writing.

HAROLD MELTZER: Yeah.

FRANK J. OTERI: And it was interesting because at that point in time, you know, we’re talking about the late ’80’s, it really ceased being the central musical language for so many composers.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: There’s very little serial mu
sic in my opera. Basilio’s music is serial, the king, very conspicuously in that interview, the, yeah, their, and Basilio’s first meeting is very, very, very intricate serial music, with all sorts of fixed registers, things going on, which was symbolic of his frozenness and his star gazing. The only serial music in that piece, is Basilio’s music.

FRANK J. OTERI: And there’s no 12-tone writing as far as I can see or hear in >When Crows Gather.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: None. None.

FRANK J. OTERI: So, do you still use rows in your music?

LEWIS SPRATLAN: No. Well, actually, in only the sloppiest way. I had an orchestra piece premiered just this past Sunday, and the middle section of one movement actually is serial, but not in the least bit post-second Viennese school. If I can just say a few words about that… When I did use serialism, it was definitely from the sort of Webernian persuasion, I mean, I just love the sort of symmetry and the mathematics of it, and the fun, sort of the mathematical-like fun of it. That was the part of serialism that most intrigued me, and I felt like I just said pretty much what I had to say, oh, I certainly would appropriate it for something which was just exactly right. But it’s not especially ideological. I don’t feel that that way of thinking about music has exhausted itself. I mean, I think there’s still ways in which individual impetuses can be expressed that way. I never felt ideologically about it before or after. It was very much in the air when I was studying; when I was a student it was very much in the air…

FRANK J. OTERI: Powell…

LEWIS SPRATLAN: … and I sort of appropriated it, because that’s what everybody was sort of doing. You know, I think, on some level, he certainly encouraged me in that direction. I remember, he sent me to an awful lot of Babbitt pieces, and some of his own.

FRANK J. OTERI: There was an article by Matthias Kriesberg that appeared in the New York Times that decried all the people who have equated 12-tone composition and serialism with communism, and the collapse of the two being, sort of, analogous events…And it was a bit of a rant…

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Very chewy stuff, but it doesn’t quite nail the true heart of serialism’s demise: the fact that the way the system was taught made it seem as if all you had to do was “follow the rules” and you had a piece of music. This approach, of course, produced a lot of bad music and non-music. It also replaced real teaching, which entails opening the ears and teasing out of the student something truly fresh and truly personal.

FRANK J. OTERI: The gist of the article was essentially saying it’s so upsetting that serialism is getting equated with communism, and his last point was so true. He said if anything, neo-Romanticism is equal to Reaganomics. They did come into being at the same time!

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Neo-romanticism is very boring to me. Not because it’s necessarily a bad idea, but usually it’s just so horribly practiced. You know, if you’re going to take that on, for Christ’s sake, be good at it! And it so seldom is. It just becomes a substitute for imagination a lot of the time to me. I don’t want to mention names, but you know what I’m talking about. It, to me, is one of the weakest, it’s the most, it’s one of the biggest collapses in, of will, in American art.

FRANK J. OTERI: But it’s been enormously successful.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Tell me about it… So what? So it’s been successful. I think it will be a black mark on the history of the last 15 years. Oh, no, are you a neo-romantic?

FRANK J. OTERI: Not exactly…

LEWIS SPRATLAN: If you are, I’m sure you’re a very good one. Look, the funny thing, when you hear some of this stuff, well, for example, Penelope’s Knees… The Apollo and Daphne Variations, is in Db major, I mean, great spans of it, and I would own up to its being a neo-Romantic piece. But it’s good, and it takes Romanticism to the next step. It doesn’t just go over the same ground. Also bad minimalism, I think, is boring. Good minimalism, I love, I’m not against minimalism. It’s really made a very, very big impact on me…

FRANK J. OTERI: When Crows Gather has elements of minimalism…

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Absolutely…

FRANK J. OTERI: What would be an example of good minimalism?

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Oh, Reich‘s Music for 18 Musicians, Six Pianos… In C.

FRANK J. OTERI: I was joking in the car… you know, in 1964 the Pulitzer Prize wasn’t awarded. I said, well, that’s the year they should have given it to In C.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: They decided there was no adequate piece?

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Is that a fact?

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Has there ever been another year that…

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah. ’64. ’81, ’65 and ’53, the year they didn’t give it to 4’33”.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Really? Terrible. No, In C should have gotten it that year!

Other Pulitzer Winners

FRANK J. OTERI: Ultimately, the Pulitzer is uptown recognition. After all, it’s administered by Columbia University…

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Has a downtown piece ever won the Pulitzer?

FRANK J. OTERI: No.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: No?

FRANK J. OTERI: No. Never. And, you know, I was compiling a list of composers who, you know, are significant in our history who have never won the Pulitzer. We came up with an interesting list.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: It’s a glorious list, I imagine.

FRANK J. OTERI: Cowell, Roy Harris, Cage, Feldman…

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Cage never won? Wow.

FRANK J. OTERI: Ruggles. Lou Harrison never won. Reich, Adams, Glass, Rochberg, never won. But Babbitt also never won, although he received a special commendation at some point, which I think is interesting, too. And another major twelve-tone composer Andrew Imbrie, who is not based on the East coast, never won. Luening and Ussachevsky, neither of them ever won…

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Davidovsky?

FRANK J. OTERI: He won.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: He did win?

FRANK J. OTERI: Yes. ’71.

HAROLD MELTZER:Star next to his name – Ralph Shapey never won.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Yeah, I know that story… That’s an astonishing list.

FRANK J. OTERI: And, but by the same token, you know, some of the composers who did win, we don’t really think much about anymore. John La Montaine, Gail Kubik, Quincy Porter, who was actually one of the founders of the American Music Center and a major force at Yale for decades, you know, won, but his music isn’t done very much these days; yet, it’s so weird, there are also these works that are really part and parcel of what we think about in terms of American music: Appalachian Spring, 2 of the Carter quartets, Ives‘ 3rd, Barber‘s Vanessa, I mean, these are pieces that are all part of our musical identity as a nation…

LEWIS SPRATLAN: In the canon, really.

FRANK J. OTERI: In the canon. So it’s a weird…

LEWIS SPRATLAN: …contradictory mix.

FRANK J. OTERI: It’s an odd mix. And so I guess, to bring this conversation full circle, for you, I thought we’d speculate on how you fit in the trajectory of winners of Pulitzers. This is loaded, I know…

LEWIS SPRATLAN: What could I possibly say? I don’t know. I love a lot of the winners on your list, I mean, their music is tremendously important to me. I also love a lot of the losers – I mean, the non-winners.

FRANK J. OTERI: Right. [laughs]

LEWIS SPRATLAN: But trajectory? God. I must say I’ve never given any thought to that. I’ve never thought of the curve of the Pulitzer Prize. I don’t know. I’m still very much in the flush of it. Look, it’s probably going to get this opera put on. I’m in a very selfish mode of thinking about it right now.

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah, but that’s probably the first time anybody who’s won the Pulitzer has ever thought that it’s going to get a performance of the piece!

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Yeah! As far as I know, it’s never been awarded for a fragment of a piece, well, this is a major fragment, I wouldn’t exactly call it a fragment, but it happens to be, you know, it’s at the heart of the matter, too, it’s not just a little corner of the piece. But what’s most extraordinary, I’d be surprised if there’s any other Prize that’s been awarded for just a part of a piece like this. Which actually flatters me quite a lot, that this beat out whole pieces. My little part of a piece beat out a whole piece… I think that what that must mean on some level is that, from this act, they are able to extrapolate that it’s probably a good opera, although they were very careful to award it for the second act, concert version. I mean, they did not say for the opera itself. But that is sort of an interesting twist to things…

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah, “Perform my opera. The second act of it won a Pulitzer Prize!”

LEWIS SPRATLAN: It is very strange.

JAMES MARANISS:Another thing that might be said, although it might sound absurd, you should, with regard to the Pulitzer Prize, you should take into account that Calderón is in the equation. Calderón is this great playwright of the 17^th Century whom the German Romantics thought was even better than Shakespeare, and who, at least can be spoken of in the same breath as Shakespeare. Perfectly realized by Lew’s music, and insofar as somebody, a great writer can find his realization musically with a composer that elevates a composer to a range of consideration beyond the ordinary.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Very well said. Part of what is compelling about this piece has nothing to do with me, at all, in a certain sense, and that’s the greatness of the drama itself. The flip side of that is that there have been many horrible operas written on great, great literature. I happened to see one, well, I’ve seen several, but I’ve only seen one I think was on great literature, a great source work, Medea, it was by… I can’t even remember the composer’s name, but it was the piece that beat this out in a competition that the New England Conservatory mounted just around 1980, or so. I won second prize in the New England Conservatory – Rockefeller Opera Competition around 1980, and I went over to Boston for the premiere of the prize-winning piece, which was Medea, and it was…[Everyone laughs]

FRANK J. OTERI: But based on a play by Euripides, an equally important playwright.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: An equivalent playwright to Calderón. So, I mean, true enough, JI sound caviling when I say this, but it is, you’re completely right, it’s the greatness of the work, of the Calderón, obviously the piece couldn’t exist without it. But your projection of the truth of that piece and your libretto, and my ability to understand both your libretto and the source, all were involved in making this happen, for sure.

FRANK J. OTERI: I think, for all of us out there, your winning the Pulitzer Prize was thrilling. I must confess, I did not know who you were until you won the Pulitzer Prize.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Did you know who Melinda Wagner was before she won it?

FRANK J. OTERI: No.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Well.

FRANK J. OTERI: This is thrilling, because I think it says to all of us out there that it isn’t necessarily about just the people who you think are going to get it, who are always getting the performances or who are in the inner circle, and it gave me an opportunity to learn about a new composer, so it is very exciting on that level.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: You know, it was terrific for me, apart from the individual pleasure, alongside that, it was hey, you know, somebody like me can win the Pulitzer. Not just that I won it, but that somebody like me, that nobody’s ever heard of…

FRANK J. OTERI: And I think that’s really important…

LEWIS SPRATLAN: It’s not true, by the way, that nobody’s ever heard of me. I mean, there are a lot of people in New York, people on the West Coast, people in Chicago, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, I’m not any kind of household name, amongst even sort of people, you know, the general run of new music listeners.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, your music has been recorded on Gasparo. And, as Harold pointed out, I’d actually heard a piece of music of yours on one of his Sequitur concerts the year before.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Oh, the Vocalise with Duck?

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah, and then it clicked.

An Identity as a Composer

FRANK J. OTERI: I guess this is in sort of the advice to the rest of us composers department, what to do? How do you make people aware of your music?

LEWIS SPRATLAN: I think there’s a prior question: what do you do to write good music?

FRANK J. OTERI: Okay.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: That’s the first question. Well, this goes a little bit back to the discussion on Mel Powell. I think you just dig deeply down into yourself to find out what is special that you have to say. I think that’s has irreplaceable value in composing. It’s the most important thing. Second thing is to hope that you are taking the art somewhere, you know, that you’re contributing, that some stone is being turned over by your work. But as far as getting out there, I have hooked myself up with various wonderful performers fairly early on and cultivated those relationships. John McDonald, an excellent pianist and also a fine composer, has performed my Toccapsody a number of times. Boston Musica Viva did several performances of works of mine very early on after I came here in the beginning of the early ’70’s and after that the Dinosaur Annex Ensemble in Boston, who has done 3 different pieces of mine over the years in multiple performances of all of them, I have been extremely pleased with these performances, and I haven’t felt a tremendous need to go out and find others. The one area where I felt frustrated is in orchestral performances. I’ve sent orchestra pieces around to all the big orchestras and I’ve had very little success, the exception being the Florida Orchestra. You know, it’s not a major symphony orchestra; it’s a very, very good one, by the way. An excellent young orchestra…

FRANK J. OTERI: You wrote a major piece, In Memoriam, about the 500th anniversary of the conquest of the Americas, as it were. The so-called “discovery”; I won’t use the term discovery, and this is a work that’s been done…

LEWIS SPRATLAN: One time.

FRANK J. OTERI: One time. I mean, the score, this is a significant thing to spend your life working on for one performance.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Definitely. I’m sure hoping the Pulitzer‘s going to make a difference in that regard, too. This is one of the pieces that Schirmer doesn’t have in its catalog that I want very much for them to get in there quickly and to distribute around. I’m a slob. I should have sent this piece around a lot more than I did. Partly, the thing that I regret, my worst quality is self-promotion, and that devolves mainly from laziness. And also, I have a lack of discipline. I’m very disciplined in certain regards. My wife is after me constantly to set aside x hours a week to do self-promoting things, and I just don’t do it. I hate it so much. And if I hadn’t been hearing my music, I think it would be a different thing. But I’ve heard it, and I’ve heard good performances of it. But I’m very bad about that, I should have made up, you know, 50 copies of it and sent it around to everybody. And I’m hoping that because of this new association with Schirmer, that they’ll take on some of that. I realize that, you know, you can’t expect your publisher to do everything. But I plead slovenliness on that front a little bit, and I guess… Look, you know, if it hurt enough, I would do more of it. It just doesn’t hurt quite enough. Which I guess, means that, on some level, I don’t care that much. Although I do! I mean, this is very, very complicated because… I got a pretty good performance of this piece. It wasn’t a great performance. It’s a very demanding piece. It was entirely local. Entirely local. I mean, nobody came in from the outside to do it. I used most of the really good musicians in the valley, and I wouldn’t say that I haven’t heard the piece, but I certainly haven’t heard it in an optimum way.

FRANK J. OTERI: And certainly, you know, the world hasn’t heard the piece.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: The world hasn’t heard it. There’s no public recording of it.

HAROLD MELTZER: This brings up a question because you said that your interest in having a piece go out there flags at little bit after you’ve feel that you’ve had a good performance of it – begs the question of your relationship to audiences.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Begs the question?

HAROLD MELTZER: Well, in a way, if you feel comparatively satisfied, once you’ve heard it, the question is, who are you writing for? And, you know, what is your interest in your piece having a life past the premiere?

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Very great, but as soon as I say that, it’s obviously not great enough to get me off my ass more… Not great enough to get me off my ass to do more about it than I do do, so it’s a vexed question. I mean, I would… I have no interest in privacy. It’s not as if I love having only 6 people hear my music. Nothing would make me happier than for everybody to hear my music. I would love that to happen. But obviously I don’t love it enough to do more about it than I’ve done. So, I don’t know, there must be some psychiatric commentary on that, which I don’t know about.

FRANK J. OTERI: It leads to an odd question to pose to you at the very end of this discussion, rather than at the beginning, but, when did you first think to yourself, growing up, “I’m a composer. This is what I want to do”?

LEWIS SPRATLAN: In a formal way, probably not until halfway through my undergraduate years, although I was writing music a lot before that, but I didn’t have an identity as a composer. It was just something I did because I felt like doing it. I hadn’t hung out my shingle, so to speak, to myself. But, I guess about halfway through my college years… It’s when I switched from being an English major to being a music major because I realized I was spending all my time doing music. And then once I switched to being a music major, I thought, I considered myself, well, I was an oboist. A very, very active oboist. I played a lot. And then, all right, there was a time when I was thinking about, should I become a professional oboist, and reeds convinced me, I mean, just the horror of, oh, the life of an oboist is just one precarious day after another precarious day…

FRANK J. OTERI: And I’ve been told that you’re a fabulous conductor as well.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Yeah, well, thank you, I am a conductor. But I have never had any interest
in being a professional conductor. I did think about being a professional oboist but never a conductor. And so, so, it came down to say, you know, which way am I going to go? The thing is, I was writing more and more music. It just… It’s not as if I suddenly one day said, oh, well, I’m hereby going to be a composer… It just sort of, you know… When I applied to graduate school in composition, I guess that meant that I was a composer. I was an honors candidate as an undergraduate in composition. So, by that time, I guess I identified myself…

FRANK J. OTERI: And when you thought of yourself in terms of that vision of what a being composer was, did you think, well, that means having works performed by orchestras, recordings, new music ensembles, a teaching career – what did you think…

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Teaching was certainly not part of it. Teaching is just what I did because I decided, well, that was a big fork… Do you go and wait tables in New York or…? I got married fairly early on, and, I don’t know, I can’t retrace all of this, but at some point, the decision to go the academic route was… Those were my models, after all, you know, these academic composers. Well, they were certainly more than academic composers but that’s how they made a living.

HAROLD MELTZER: Mel Powell.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: Mel Powell, Gunther Schuller, and Yehudi Wyner. Yeah, so that was the model that was around me. They seemed to have the best of both worlds. They had time to write. They got good performances, and they got a paycheck. There was a paycheck coming in. They all seemed to enjoy teaching, too, which I reckoned I did, you know, I did a certain amount of TA-ing in graduate school and I was very good it. I kind of fell in that direction… It wasn’t a huge tug and pull, it was just sort of the course things more or less naturally took. I have frequently had second thoughts about it. My wife and I have plenty of “what if”-type conversations…

FRANK J. OTERI: And she’s a singer, she’s a performer. And you’ve written a number of pieces for her over the years.

LEWIS SPRATLAN: You know, I wrote good music when I was in high school. I had a saint of an oboe teacher, a man by the name of Dominique-René de Lerma, who was far, far more than that. He was a great, great musician – a student of Tabuteau, this fount of all oboe playing in the United States, who was in Philadelphia… All modern oboe playing derives from Tabuteau, and my teacher was a student of his. He was a Corsican madman, Corsican American, a fabulous person. I would go for these 3-hour oboe lessons, about 1 hour of which would be oboe playing. The rest, he would say, “Now today we’re going to look at the St. Matthew Passion by Bach.” I was nine. You know, it was a huge, huge part of just my musicianship, not particularly my identity. After a few years, you know, he said, “you should write something.” So, with absolutely no more than that as a go, I would scribble down something and bring it to him at my next oboe lesson. They weren’t composition lessons, but he would approve or disapprove of this and that, and he was able to arrange things, I had some performances of mine when I was still in high school. But, again, I just wasn’t thinking about career at that time. But on the other hand, you can’t not count these things…