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Other Minds Archives Goes Live January 26, 2024

The Other Minds Archives hosts thousands of audio and video recordings, rare photographs, and ephemera documenting the history of 20th and 21st century experimental music, including interviews and musical recordings by such new music luminaries as George Antheil, Anahid Ajemian, John Cage, Henry Cowell, Laurie Anderson, Anthony Braxton, Conlon Nancarrow, Morton Feldman, Pauline Oliveros, Nicolas Slonimsky, Pamela Z, and Frank Zappa.

Other Minds is a leading proponent for new and experimental music in all its forms, presenting a yearly festival, radio broadcasts, and podcasts; commissioning new works; and releasing new recordings on the Other Minds Records label. Other Minds’s archives have been growing steadily since the inaugural Other Minds Festival in 1993. Along with the organization’s documented concert history, Other Minds became a steward for other media collections over the years after embarking on a long-term preservation project that began in 2000 with the acquisition of the KPFA-FM Music Department collection. Other Minds has to this day continued its efforts in the archiving and preservation of audiovisual material in its collections, placing emphasis on public access by making material available through the OM Archives website and other institutional portals.

To coincide with the launch of the new Other Minds Archives website on January 26, 2024, Other Minds’s Program Associate Joseph Bohigian sat down with Charles Amirkhanian, Executive and Artistic Director of Other Minds, and Adrienne Cardwell, Other Minds’s Archivist, to talk about the history and contents of the OM Archives.

L to R: I Wayan Sadra, Larry Polansky, Jim Tenney, Laurie Anderson, Roger Reynolds, and Pauline Oliveros working on the manifesto on censorship at the Composer-to-Composer Festival in 1990 in Telluride, CO. Photo by John Fago from the OM Archives.

Joseph Bohigian: The collections of the Other Minds Archives began with a donation of 4,000 audio tapes to Other Minds from KPFA Radio in Berkeley, California in 1999. How did Other Minds come to be in possession of those tapes, and what was on them?

Charles Amirkhanian: Jim Bennett, who was the then manager of KPFA, wanted to clear out a room to use for another purpose and I had a lot of the tape recordings of music programs in that particular room. The original idea was that the programs should go to the Pacifica Library in Los Angeles, but they really didn’t have the capacity to process them at the time and Jim wanted to get them out of the building at ASAP. So he called me and said, “Would you want to have these for Other Minds for any purpose?” and my head started spinning and I thought, well, I don’t want those tapes to be put in the alley for the garbage man to pick up so I’ll think of what to do with them right away. I called my friend Scott Atthowe, he started a business years ago to help collectors who had more paintings than they had walls in their homes to store their paintings in temperature controlled buildings, and I said, “Do you have any storage space that we could have to put these in while we figure out what to do with them?” and he said he would be glad to move the tapes into a space that somebody had just vacated. So we authorized Atthowe’s services to move the tapes into the storage facility and then we realized we had a huge problem. There were no shelves in there and we needed shelves because there were so many tapes that it would fill 300 linear feet of reel to reel boxes of tapes. So, little by little, we were able to put them in a sort of order and then we started applying for funds to digitize the tapes, which comprised recordings of interviews, concerts, original works that were produced at KPFA that had never been released commercially, poetry readings, happenings. The tapes were eventually, after being digitized, donated to UC Santa Cruz and all the tapes are there in their special collections.

JB: What kind of music was KPFA programming when it started broadcasting in 1949?

CA: There was a Music Director who was a folk music person named Rolf Cahn and another person, Americo Chiarito, who were very involved in both folk music and classical music. Those were the two dominant styles that were heard on the station when it went on the air. The Music Directors following Chiarito starting around 1950-51 were Robert Erickson, who was a highly respected composer who eventually founded the Music Department at UC San Diego, and Alan Rich. The Music Directors from 1950 to the time I left in 1992 were all either composers or music critics, so there was a tendency to do a lot of music of living composers, which of course was very unusual at the time, and people in Europe, who were used to this sort of thing, started seeking out KPFA when they came to the West Coast and they would go into the station and do interviews, one of them being Pierre Boulez in 1957. Alan Rich was at a party at somebody’s house and he recognized Boulez and invited him to come to the station and called a bunch of composers to have them come sit in on the interview and the interview turned out to be very contentious because the people doing the interview were all of the Roger Sessions school of listening where you have to listen from the beginning and your memory plays a part in what you hear and if you are attentive and you can follow the development of a kernel from the beginning of the piece 30 minutes later to the end, you win. But Boulez had a different idea which is that you have these sound objects and one follows the other and you don’t really rely on memory to make sense of it in the same way, and so they had a blistering discussion and fortunately we got a copy of it before Alan Rich died, and it’s now in the Archives.

JB: When did you start working at KPFA as Music Director?

CA: I started in 1969. I had been working at a record store in San Francisco called the Sea of Records and a couple of customers who would come in and ask me for advice on what was new were Robert Hughes, the composer who founded the Cabrillo Festival, and John Rockwell, who later went on to be a New York Times music critic. They both advised me that this job was open and I should go apply for it, which I did. They offered me the job, but said I’d have to do it on a temporary basis for 6 months, and I said no, I can’t do that. I would lose my job at the record store. If you if you want me, tell me so and I’ll take the job, but I want a month off because my wife Carol [Law] and I had just gotten married and we hadn’t had a honeymoon, so we’re going down to Mexico City to see somebody we haven’t met before. So we went down to Mexico in our Volkswagen Bug that broke down three times and met Conlon Nancarrow, who was living in more or less glorious isolation in a nice district of Mexico City called San Ángel. He was the composer who had done player piano roll music where you could take a blank player piano roll and punch holes in it and get the piano to do anything that a human couldn’t do. I’d heard this music at Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco as an accompaniment to a Merce Cunningham dance. I got his phone number and called this man and he said he would maybe see us if we got to Mexico City, but he wasn’t sure. So we go down there and went to this house and we rang the doorbell and nothing happened for about 3 minutes. We didn’t realize we were ringing the bell of a walled in house and there was a driveway about 200 yards long and Conlon had to come from his house and walk slowly down this gravel path to let us in. We just loved talking with this man and listening to his music and I decided that one of my first programs on KPFA when I got back was going to be about him. So I asked him if I could interview him and he said, “absolutely not.” So this is the beginning of my radio career. I’m turned down before I even start.

Conlon Nancarrow seated at his piano roll punching machine in 1969. Photo by Charles Amirkhanian from the OM Archives.

JB: Your documentation of that trip is available on the Archives, but do you have any place to start for someone interested in Nancarrow?

CA: The Speaking of Music event that he did at the Exploratorium in San Francisco is there and that would be one good place to start if you’re interested in hearing more about him.

JB: Another person who’s featured in the Archives is the violinist Anahid Ajemian, and the January 26th launch coincides with the 100th anniversary of her birth. Who was she and what is her significance to 20th century music?

CA: She was the only classical instrumentalist who would play John Cage and Alan Hovhaness in 1944, 45, 46. She and her sister Maro Ajemian had graduated from the Institute of Musical Art, which later became Juilliard, and they were well-versed in Schumann and Beethoven and all the classics, but they had a particular interest in the personalities that they were meeting in New York, composers like Cage and Hovhaness and later Lou Harrison who were not supported by the establishment. They were doing things that were kind of outside the bounds of the mainstream movements of the time in modern music. The fact that they gave the first Town Hall performances of Alan Hovhaness and John Cage were significant because that legitimized those two composers for the general public, and suddenly when her sister Maro started playing the Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano by John Cage, the reviews were very, very positive, if you can imagine, for an instrument that sounded very peculiar because there were erasers and screws and other objects placed directly on the strings and it made the piano sound like a Gamelan or a percussion orchestra rather than a classical instrument. That was one thing. The other thing is that Anahid married George Avakian, who was a jazz producer at Columbia Records, and he was one of the first people to really give serious attention to jazz album production. George insisted on treating them the way the classical composers were treated, so you would have Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five in a collection that would be bound with a spine and there would be program notes on the inside cover of the album describing or praising the content of the music, and that was a big deal at the time. Later, in the 50s, they did a series of public concerts called Music for Moderns where they would invite Henry Cowell and Mahalia Jackson to be on the same program. I mean, this was just not done. To this day, I think of them as kind of precursors of Other Minds because we do the same thing.

Anahid and Maro Ajemian rehearsing at home ca. 1950s. Courtesy of Anahid Ajemian from the OM Archives.

JB: How has Other Minds acquired new collections for the Archives since that initial donation from KPFA?

Adrienne Cardwell: I would say it always seems to come by way of Charles. Someone says that they have something that may be of interest and it turns out that it usually is of interest for us to retain or it resonates with other material. Relâche for example, we were solicited by their co-founder Joseph Franklin.

CA: Relâche is a new music group in Philadelphia and they had a lot of recordings of their concerts, but no place to put them. Some libraries are just reluctant to take on material that’s just audio, but we’re happy to do it if it fits with our mission.

JB: Why is it important to preserve these materials?

CA: It’s so important to hear people speaking about their own music in their own voice. It’s not the same as reading about it in a book or not having the information either in a book or on audio. Once it’s lost, it’s lost. These are not records from a record company that made 5,000 of them. These are primary research documents. There is no other copy. Once they’re gone, they’ll never resurface. It’s better to err on the side of preserving things than just letting them go.

AC: I think another important part of that is having cultural reference points to various eras. You can compare the development of not just music but art and literature to what was going on in the world at that time. I find that really interesting in a lot of the tapes and especially KPFA programs, where you get a sense of what’s going on in the world from a more countercultural perspective than you would on a lot of the commercial stations.

CA: The fact that KPFA was doing this from 1949 to 59, before any of the other Pacifica stations went on the air and did the same thing, KPFK in Los Angeles went on the air in 1959 and WBAI in New York in 1960. These were stations that also started doing programs on contemporary music, which was definitely non-commercial and never would be aired on commercial stations, so for the vast majority of the public, it didn’t exist. What happens between 1949 and 59 is that there becomes a base of people who have a certain knowledge of an art form that nobody else had in other parts of the country. Therefore ensembles that played this kind of music felt supported. There was a scene developing here that is exemplified by the San Francisco Tape Music Center and various other organizations that sprang up. Something called the Composers’ Forum. The fact that there have been a lot of important developments in music that emanated from San Francisco is not an accident, it’s partly a function of the existence of a radio station which broadcast these developments. The fact that the beat poets were in San Francisco and the jazz scene here was very vigorous. The fact that the orchestras and chamber music organizations were recognizing the importance of playing contemporary music is I think partly a function of KPFA’s existence. I think it’s also important to remember that the entire minimalist music movement was launched here on the West Coast. Terry Riley and La Monte Young were students at the UC Berkeley Department of Music. Steve Reich was studying with Luciano Berio at Mills and Terry’s 1964 performance of In C at the Dancers Workshop/SF Tape Music Center, favorably reviewed by nationally prominent music critic Alfred Frankenstein, sparked public awareness that something was afoot here. This change of focus, from slow-developing thematic evolution then in vogue to microscopic concentration on a few individual notes in repeated phrases, launched a long-lasting stylistic revolution that has proven to have longer staying power than impressionism, neoclassicism, or serialism. I just know that it couldn’t have happened anywhere else. Of course, composers mostly had to move to New York to market their careers, but the lack of an overbearing traditional approach here gave people a freedom to invent. That was a prerequisite, and that freedom is reflected in some of the eccentric program content you’ll find in the OM Archives.

JB: Are there any collections or topics on the Archive that will likely be unfamiliar to people but interesting to check out.

CA: There’s a lot of information about sound poetry, which is a genre that’s a crossover between music and literature. There are practitioners who are musicians and went into speech and speakers who were poets and went into the musical aspect of delivering the poetry. That was a genre that was not taken seriously in the music world for a long time, so it developed on its own and it dates to the Dada and Surrealist and Futurist poets of the early part of the twentieth century. Then there’s the radio events. These were events that we started in 1969 where I would invite an artist to use as much airtime as they wanted, but they had to do something that involved the listener going away from their radio at home and doing something else. In other words, a kind of happening that involved activity. They’re pretty amusing and they’re worth investigating. Then there are individual artists like Ivan Wyschnegradsky or George Antheil or Annea Lockwood. These are people who are not household names, perhaps, but there is a lot of concentrated activity around their music that happened as a result of either my interest or the interest of somebody who was working at KPFA or at Other Minds.

Portrait of George Antheil. Courtesy of Böski Antheil from the OM Archives.

AC: Some of the material came from artists who now have a bigger name, but back then maybe they sent a reel to KPFA for broadcast, something new that they had just made that wasn’t commercially released. It’s like a never-ending history lesson. Some of my personal favorites are the photographs that we have, a lot of which come from Charles’s documentation over the years of traveling and interviewing and meeting with all these other artists.

JB: What will visitors to the new website be able to do in terms of searching and creating their own collections of materials.

AC: If you register as a user, you can have what’s called a “light box” where you can save things and organize them for future reference. You can create your own private collections and share them with other users, which could be useful for people in educational settings. There are advanced search options that will help tailor things toward what you’re looking for.

JB: In addition to all this historical material, will documentation of Other Minds’s activities over the past 31 years also be available on the new website?

AC: We have everything that has been documented through audio and video, as well as photographs and all the programs. We have a vast collection of the iconic OM festival photographs taken by John Fago.

CA: John Fago is photographer who uses a Leica, a very quiet rangefinder camera. John lives with composers when they’re in residence at events and he becomes part of the furniture, so you forget that he’s there taking photographs of you interacting with other people. His photographs are very striking in that they’re black and white and he likes to take pictures in which there are at least 5 hands showing, like people gesturing, so you can tell a Fago photograph. Usually somebody is doing this and they’re not looking at the camera and they’re not posing. They’re doing something where they’re caught in the action. He has been present when we’ve had some of the most amazing composers in the world here. Those photographs alone are a unique addition to the OM Archives website.

—January 17, 2024

L to R: Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Jon Jang, Julia Wolfe, and Trimpin at Other Minds Festival 1 in 1993. Photo by John Fago from the OM Archives.

Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels Jointly Win the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Music

The front and back sides of a Pulitzer Prize medal

Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels have been awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Music for their jointly composed opera Omar. Omar was commissioned by the Spoleto Festival USA where it received its world premiere performance on May 27, 2022 at the Sottile Theatre in Charleston, S.C. It was subsequently staged by the LA Opera (October 2022), Carolina Performing Arts (February 2023), and Boston Lyric Opera (May 2023), will be done at the San Francisco Opera (November 2023), and has been published by Subito Music. The annually awarded $15,000 prize is for a distinguished musical composition by an American that has had its first performance or recording in the United States during the previous year. This prize is the very first time the award has been given to two creators for a jointly-composed work. Omar is based on the autobiography of Omar ibn Said (1770-1864), an Islamic scholar from what is now Senegal who was adbducted in 1807 and taken aboard one of the last trans-Atlantic slave ships to arrive in the United States where he was enslaved for the remainder of his long life. The Pulitzer citation describes Omar as “an innovative and compelling opera about enslaved people brought to North America from Muslim countries, a musical work that respectfully represents African as well as African American traditions, expanding the language of the operatic form while conveying the humanity of those condemned to bondage.”

Rhiannon Giddens, a 1977 native of Greensboro, North Carolina, first became widely known as a founding member of the Grammy Award-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops, an eclectic old timey country band in which she played fiddle and banjo and was the lead singer. She has since recorded four solo albums, the most recent of which, They’re Calling Me Home, a 2021 collaboration with Francesco Turrisi, received the 2022 Grammy Award for Best Folk Album. In 2017, she was award the MacArthur Foundation’s “Genius” grant. Ms. Giddens serves on New Music USA’s Advisory Council.

Michael Abels, born in 1962 in Phoenix, Arizona, has composed music in a wide variety of genres ranging from the hip-hop influenced film score for the 2019 Jordan Peele film Us to the string quartet At War With Ourselves which was premiered by the Kronos Quartet. He has also produced an album with the late Rev. James Cleveland, who was one of the most significant Black gospel singers and songwriters.

Also nominated as finalists for the 2023 music prize were Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) by Tyshawn Sorey which premiered on February 19, 2022 at the Rothko Chapel, Houston, Texas, and Perspective by Jerrilynn Patton (a.k.a. JLin) which was recorded by Third Coast Percussion on Cedille Records and released on May 13, 2022.

The jury for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Music was: John V. Brown, Jr., Vice Provost for the Arts and Professor of the Practice of Music, Duke University (Chair); past Pulitzer Prize-winning composers Raven Chacon and Du Yun; Arturo O’Farrill, Founder/Artistic Director, Afro Latin Jazz Alliance and Professor, Global Jazz Studies, University of California, Los Angeles; and Carol J. Oja, William Powell Mason Professor of Music, Harvard University. It is the first time in the history of the Pulitzer Prize in Music that all three of the works submitted as finalists by the jury, from which the winner is selected by the Pulitzer board, were by Black composers.

The announcement of this year’s Pulitzer Prizes was made online by Pulitzer Administrator Marjorie Miller via a stream posted on the Pulitzer website which can also be streamed on YouTube.

ASCAP Foundation Announces 2023 Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer Award Recipients

Banner for the 2023 ASCAP Foundation Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer Awards

The ASCAP Foundation has announced the recipients of the 2023 Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer Awards. Jazz composers up to the age of 30 are eligible to apply to these annual awards, which were established in 2002 and are named in recognition of The Herb Alpert Foundation’s multi-year financial commitment to the program. Additional funding for the program is provided by The ASCAP Foundation Bart Howard Fund. Winners selected through a juried national competition receive cash awards. The ASCAP composer/judges for the 2023 competition were Ayn Inserto, Aruán Ortiz, and Sachal Vasandani.

Photo of all the 2023 ASCAP Foundation Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer Award Recipients and Honorable Mentions
The 2023 Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer Award recipients are listed below with their age, current residence and place of origin:

Nicola Caminiti (born 1995 in Messina, Italy; based in New York, NY)
Chase Elodia (b. 1994 in Norwalk, CT; based in New York, NY)
Samantha Fierke (born 2002 in Columbia, MO; based in Brookline, MA)
Dava Giustizia (born 2002 in Surabaya, Indonesia; based in Boston, MA)
Yue Han (Moonsita H) (born in Anshun, China; based in Boston, MA, aged 27)
Joseph Herbst (born in Easley, SC; based in New York, NY, aged 27)
Tammy Huynh (born in Philadelphia, PA; based in New York, NY, aged 27)
Jack Lanhardt (born 2000 in Corona, CA; based in Denton, TX)
Emiliano Lasansky (born 1993 in Iowa City, Iowa; based in Los Angeles, CA)
Shane McCandless (born in State College, PA; based in Rochester, NY, aged 23)
Ben Morris (born 1993 in Chatham, NJ; based in Nacogdoches, TX) age 30
Ciara Moser (born in Vienna, Austria; based in Boston, MA, aged 26)
Daiki Nakajima (born 2002 in Tokyo, Japan; based in San Jose, CA)
Denin Slage-Koch (born 1996 in Richland, WA; based in Greeley, CO)
Ben Turner (b. Cherry Hill, NJ; based in East Lansing, MI, aged 25)

In addition, the following composers received Honorable Mention:

Zachary Bornheimer (born 1993 in Margate, FL; based in Tampa, FL)
Gabriel Chakarji (born 1993 in Caracas, Venezuela; based in Queens, NY)
Ethan Cohn (born and based in New York, NY, age 27)
Ariel Sha Glassman (born 1996 in Dublin, OH; based in Denton, TX)
Phillip Golub (born 1993 Los Angeles, CA; based in Brooklyn, NY)
Jake Hart (born in New City, NY; based in Winston-Salem, NC, aged 26)
Anthony Hervey (born in Miami, FL; based in New York, NY, aged 26)
David Leon (born in Miami, FL; based in Brooklyn, NY, aged 29)
David Mirarchi (born 1996 in Scranton, PA; based in Queens, NY)

New Music USA launches NewMusicBox Guest Editor series

New Music USA launches NewMusicBox Guest Editor series with forward-thinking artists and organizations across the US

First partnership kicks off today with Los Angeles-based radio station dublab, which will present original content  that explores the current landscape of music composition

 

 

New Music USA‘s web magazine NewMusicBox today launches its new ongoing Guest Editor series, which aims to celebrate a plurality of voices from across the nation and will feature exclusive content written, produced, or commissioned by a rotating artist or organization. The series kicks off with Los Angeles-based nonprofit radio station dublab, which strives to cultivate and support cultural ecosystems through community-generated radio, curiosity, experimentation, inclusivity, and connection. NewMusicBox, edited by Frank J. Oteri, amplifies creators and organizations who are building a vibrant future for new music in all its forms, and has provided a vital platform for creators to speak about issues relevant to them in their own words since 1999.

The dublab partnership will feature new weekly content from at least 15 different voices through January 2023, presented in conversations, DJ mixes, articles, and live performances all exploring the current landscape of music composition. Contributors include creators, curators, writers, and artists such as Andrew Maxwell, Colloboh, Jeremiah Chiu with Marta Sofia Honer, Maddi Baird, Mark McNeill, Qur’an Shaheed, shesaidso, Tana Yonas, with more to be announced.

The first piece, an introductory essay written by dublab’s Executive Director Alejandro Cohen, is available to read now here.

The Guest Editor is the first such series in NewMusicBox’s 23-year history and reflects New Music USA’s aim to deepen its impact across the many diverse music communities across the United States. This aim is also demonstrated by NewMusicBox’s ongoing “Different Cities, Different Voices” feature that spotlights music creation hubs across the nation.

For more than two decades, dublab has been one of the defining voices of online radio as a medium; through radio broadcast, myriad public events and celebrated cultural projects, dublab has fostered a community in Los Angeles and now around the world that places creativity, enrichment, diversity, inclusivity, and equality as valued priorities.

“The goal of NewMusicBox has always been to give voice to American music creators working in every possible idiom,” says NewMusicBox editor Frank J. Oteri. “These idioms keep evolving and transforming and we hope that by creating space for other ‘curators’ around the country we will amplify an even broader range of people and their work as well as present this material in an even broader array of formats. All of us here at New Music USA have been fascinated and inspired by what dublab has been producing since, as luck would have it, 1999, the same year that NewMusicBox launched online. This is a collaboration that is long overdue, so it is an honor and privilege to feature dublab content on NewMusicBox.”

“As we launch dublab’s collaboration with New Music USA, we welcome the opportunity to feature the work of many musicians we believe represent the current landscape of contemporary music composition,” says Alejandro Cohen, dublab Executive Director. “Throughout our four-month hosting we hope the series can not only shine a light on these artists and their work, but also bring up questions such as the place, role and meaning of a composer in our current times.”

The dublab Guest Editor content will be accessible for free at newmusicusa.org/newmusicbox starting today. The site also features thousands of NewMusicBox articles, interviews, and more dating back to 1999.

 

About the NewMusicBox Guest Editor Series

Published by New Music USA, NewMusicBox is a web magazine that amplifies creators and organizations who are building a vibrant future for new music in all its forms. The NewMusicBox Guest Editor series features exclusive content written, produced, or commissioned by a rotating artist or organization, and aims to celebrate a plurality of voices from across the nation. Learn more at newmusicusa.org/newmusicbox

About New Music USA

New Music USA supports and amplifies the sounds of tomorrow by nurturing the creation, performance, and appreciation of new music for adventurous listeners in the United States and beyond. We empower and connect US-based music makers, organizations, and audiences by providing funding through our grants; offering support and fostering new connections through our programs; deepening knowledge through our online magazine, NewMusicBox; and working as an advocate for the field. New Music USA envisions a thriving and equitable ecosystem for new music throughout the United States. Learn more at newmusicusa.org.

About dublab

dublab is a non-profit, radio station based in Los Angeles.  dublab broadcasts hundreds of radio programs hosted by some of the most talented DJs worldwide. Our DJs are empowered to freely play sounds they are passionate about, making each show distinct.  Our “Future Roots” concept collapses time, space and genre to celebrate the continuum of creative music made by passionate people. Influential sounds of the past flow into the dynamic sounds of tomorrow.  The dublab airwaves allow space for diverse styles, eras, genres and music cultures to co-exist. dublab is documenting the lineage of creative sound and accelerating its progress. Learn more at dublab.com.

Out of the Box: Plus C’est La Même Chose

Imani Mosley Out of the Box

[Ed. note: Last November, New Music USA marked its 10th anniversary. While we are continuing to celebrate all of the remarkable new music that has been created over the last ten years and our relationship to it throughout the coming months, we also want to start our second decade by imagining what the landscape for new music will be ten years from now. To that end, we are asking a group of deep musical thinkers to ponder this question. We aim for this series to spark important discussions in our community as well as to raise important journalistic voices from all around the country. Our first contributor is University of Florida-based musicologist and bassoonist Dr. Imani Mosley.-FJO]

Anthony Tommasini, in his final article as chief classical music critic for The New York Times, asks “so what things about classical music shouldn’t change?” It’s an interesting thought exercise that he unfurls throughout the article, reminding readers of things possibly slipping away: the sound of live acoustics, the exhilaration of risky playing, the generational work of artists and institutions. I don’t particularly have a qualm with the exercise or its examples — it’s a way, in a sense, of grounding classical music in a space and time that currently feels so unhinged, unembodied, unpracticed. But I am struck by the binary presented (even if it is to take apart a particular “problem”): that we in classical music-land are either asking what should change or what should remain the same. In approaching an essay such as this one that I was tasked with writing — what will new music look like ten years from now — I find myself running into that same binary. It is the idea that in order to assess or predict the new music landscape, one must be forced to face the conflict of change and stasis; not that things will change as most things inevitably do, but that change is not definite; stasis is.

This binary becomes murky both in theory and practice. One could say that art music throughout the twentieth century was based on change and the refutation of past practices. But as composers and performers shifted from style to style, medium to medium, our institutions became museumified, creating a dichotomy of either/or. The urge to be static rose concurrently with the urge to change. And so, in the twenty-first century, we’re presented with a choice: to look ahead or to look down. Not back or backwards, not into the past (because pastness cannot be and is not always equated with stasis), but down: down at our idle hands, down and away from our communities, down and buried in the sand. Had I been approached with discussing the future of new music two years ago, I probably would have answered differently; that our desire to look ahead would always be countered with our desire to look down. But as we enter the third year of a global pandemic, my view has shifted ever so slightly. Looking down is no longer a feasible or viable business model. It has become “look ahead or cease to exist.” And while I do not want to tie this piece so explicitly to current events, I don’t think it is possible for me to talk about the future without acknowledging what is happening in the here and now.

Music is indelibly linked to space and place. Those elements can shape, structure, and define our listening and performance practices. The rigid acoustics of a European concert hall, the grand solemnity of a cathedral, the vast possibilities of a soundwalk—these are all ways in which music moves from the theoretical to the experiential. Music thrives on the performance of the experiential, on the real. The real, dependent upon physical space and presence, has been valorized above other kinds of performance often by listeners and performers. Whereas other types of music and performing media may thrive within recordings, art music relies upon the live. This is not disputing the long history of classical music recording, but rather positioning it within a synchronous history of live performance practice. Recording obfuscates authenticity because it has to be imbued in order to be believed, as explained by Philip Auslander: “[T]he music industry specifically sets out to endow its products with the necessary signs of authenticity.” Even Pierre Boulez expressed concern about the fidelity of recording, where “the so-called techniques of reproduction are acquiring an irrepressible tendency to become autonomous and to impress their own image of existing music, and less and less concerned to reproduce as faithfully as possible the conditions of direct audition.” For a genre that existed before recording technology, its authenticity lay within the visage of liveness (one only has to look to arguments around amplification to see this concept at work); liveness becomes the real. It has only been until very recently that the idea of space and place has been limited to the tangible. Philip Auslander and Jonathan Sterne discuss a shift that occurred in the 1990s, but the advance of the internet has accelerated that shift. Space and place could become virtual, mediated, otherworldly. The late 2000s saw Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir as well as the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, emphasizing that a virtual space could still be experiential, authentic, real.

So, what happens when physical space and place are no longer available to you? The COVID-19 pandemic posed this question to musicians, composers, and institutions. What about your precious real now? Many organizations opted to make already filmed material available to a wider public, following the already existing models created by the Berlin Philharmonic, Metropolitan Opera, and Glyndebourne. But others saw this as an untapped creative space: Opera Philadelphia created a streaming channel with new works by composers such as Caroline Shaw, Angélica Negrón, Tyshawn Sorey, and Melissa Dunphy. These composers created works within a virtual space, decidedly unreal in a sense, to make a multifaceted multimedia object, one that uses all available tools to build something unique. Like the television opera/opera on television divide, these works exist in this mediated way first, much like Benjamin Britten’s Owen Wingrave or Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors. Their authenticity is not predicated on some kind of prescribed and imagined liveness; they are not meant to be experienced in that way. And more than anything, that shift away from liveness (something that I believe was on its way) is a huge step in the future of new music. This is more than just using media, electronics, and technology as tools; this is about restructuring foundational elements of art music.

I am loathe to cite this pandemic as a breaking open of anything. Music’s relationship to this moment is varied and I find the “Newton’s Annus mirabilis” approach to these last few years as demoralizing and unapt. But decisions will be made and I wonder if in ten years hence, we’ll look back at now and see those decisions as being tectonic for new music. There is an immediacy that exists in a way that has seldom been seen and with that immediacy comes freedom: freedom to create new music without the shackles of place, space, and institution. The freedom that signifies the taking back of creative power and control. As someone who is ensconced within the world of living composers, never have I felt as much access to them and their works as I have in the last few years. And I cannot imagine anyone wanting to give that up. With the virtuality of space and place comes a kind of equalizing; yes, there will always be funders, donors, money, connection, and privilege. But virtual space is limitless. I’m reminded of composer Garrett Schumann’s “I’m a composer and I wrote this music” TikToks, maximizing the medium’s penchant for virality, its visibility and algorithmic pervasiveness to introduce his music, new music to the world. And as we’re forced to turn to those virtual spaces to have as close to real musical experiences as we can get, the more we reify that aforementioned power. I do not foresee a looking down after this moment ends.

So, what does that mean for the future of new music? What happens in that next decade? I personally can’t speak to musical and stylistic changes, that’s anyone’s guess. But as a musicologist and historian who specializes in how people have reacted to music in specific cultural moments, I can guess as to how the moment will be presented to us. In schools, in our major institutions, and with individuals, we will have assessed what to let go, what will change, and what will remain static. Looking ahead may be the only feasible way forward, the only way we will have created for ourselves. Tommasini ends his article noting that he wants to “protect it [classical music], as well as shake it up.” This reads as that forced binary appearing once again and this moment now suggests that that binary may no longer be viable. We may experience another moment when we will have to let things go because they have been taken from us. And instead of approaching that moment as a deficiency, let us approach it as an abundance, as so many composers and performers are doing now. Creation not in spite of but out of a desire to. A future where change is definite.

The Art of Being True: Sonic Ritual & Favorite Quarantine Recipes

"pursuit of happiness" by Anjna Swaminathan (the back cover art for The Art of Being True)

[Ed. Note: Today we present our sixth and final installment of excerpts from an anthology of writings by the 12 participants of M³ (Mutual Mentorship for Musicians) in advance of their next round of concerts taking place on June 12 and 13, 2021 under the auspices of the National Jazz Museum (and which have received funding from New Music USA). The anthology, The Art of Being True, is edited by author, journalist, and musician Jordannah Elizabeth; it is published in its entirety on Elizabeth’s website Publik/Private. Back in December, in support of M³’s debut concerts, which were also presented online by the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, we asked all twelve of the initial participating musicians involved in this initiative to write about how mutual mentorship and creative collaboration have affected their artistic process. – FJO]


Val Jeanty operating electronic music equipment in a performance (Photo by Wolf Daniel)

Val Jeanty (Photo by Wolf Daniel, courtesy of Roulette Intermedium)

From Val Jeanty’s essay “Sonic Ritual”

Music is pure communication and Vodou-electro is rhythmic intelligence that escapes the boundaries of the tonal. Operating as a kind of sonic communicative life-form, it incorporates a host of sampled wavelengths, rhythms and effects. Its tech-driven effects allow it to confuse the ear, blending interior and exterior realities so that, under the right conditions, it can virtually be seen, touched, and interacted with. More than just effects and inspiration, Vodou Culture has always been a powerful catalyst of change in my work, introducing powerful abstract harmonies that encapsulate new ways of thinking and bold compositions. Each rhythm has produced its own unique set of resonances and all of these sounds have – at some point – fused with and influenced one another, merging into a vibrational ocean of Haitian ancestral legacy. I continue to sample this ocean, creating new pulses and rhythms that send tentative sonic probes into unmapped realms and the ancient futures.


Tomeka Reid playing the cello (photo by Joel Wanek)

Tomeka Reid (photo by Joel Wanek)

From Tomeka Reid’s “5 Favorite Quarantine Recipes”

Sunflower Butter

I love sunflower butter and have attempted to travel with it but have often ended up having it confiscated by the TSA! Forgetting to check it in my luggage, I’d have a jar in my snack bag and because of its “creamy” nature it would get tossed! Additionally, in my efforts to limit my use of single-use plastic, I decided to learn how to make it. Using 3 cups of raw sunflower seeds, lightly toast them on high on the stove for a few minutes until browned and then put them in a food processor. Blend in 1 minute intervals. A total of 10 minutes of blending usually does the job of turning them into a nice paste or butter. You can also do this with sesame seeds to make tahini. No oil needed in either case! The oils will eventually be released from the processing. Store the butter in mason jars or some other suitable container. I can’t say too much about the shelf life because it’s usually gone after a week or two. I also don’t add anything like sugar or salt, for example, but I’m sure you could!

Cindy Lam: Voicing Trauma and Connecting with Your Inner Child

Cindy Lam

Pianist and Music Educator Cindy Lam shares her experience of PTSD, initially triggered by surviving a car accident at 18, which temporarily threatened her musical capabilities, and heightened in 2020 by the loss of her father to a rare genetic Prion disease. Cindy discusses her ongoing healing process, the importance of sharing one’s story, finding joy through teaching and musical expression, and feeling strong enough to momentarily step away from music to focus on her health. She emphasizes the need to connect with our inner child, both to inspire creativity and to ultimately heal trauma. Lastly, Cindy shares her view on the stigma surrounding mental health challenges within Asian and Asian-American circles, and reflects on the escalating hate crimes against the AAPI communities and their possible impact on mental health.

What does it mean to be American?

This post was originally written for the Salastina Music Society, ahead of their premiere of Derrick Spiva Jr.’s American Mirror string quartet on October 7, 2017.
The text has been reworked with the assistance of Kim Nguyen Tran for NewMusicBox and reposted with permission, along with a video of the performance. The original post can be found here.

A few months ago, I was getting ready for an international trip. I had lots of preparing to do. For anyone who has traveled internationally, we all know that immunizations can be a huge part of the process, depending on which country you plan to visit. In this case, I am a classical composer who often integrates musical practices from around the world into my work, and I was going to Ghana—an amazing country in West Africa—to continue my studies in traditional Ghanaian music and culture.

Spiva in Ghana

Derrick Spiva Jr. (in grey hat) playing axatse (shaker) with an Ewe music ensemble in Anyako, Ghana, hometown of the Ladzekpo family. July 2017.

One of the most important immunizations required for entry into Ghana was the yellow fever shot. I had received all of my other immunizations, but this one was in short supply globally, so I had to go to one of only two places in Los Angeles that provided it. When I arrived at the clinic, I filled out all of my paperwork and waited to be called in.

The travel clinic was decorated with some lovely paintings and other pieces of art from around the world. How beautiful, I thought. When I was called in to receive my immunization, I couldn’t help but strike up a conversation with the nurse who was administering the shot. While looking at my American passport, she asked me where I was from.

“I was born in Santa Ana, California,” I told her. “But I grew up in the Central Valley and live in Los Angeles now.”

“Oh, wow!” she responded. “I thought you were from Bali or something.”

I couldn’t help but chuckle. I asked her how in the world she had gathered that information.

“Well,” she said, “I thought I recognized your accent.”

I thought to myself, I know a few people from Bali who live in Los Angeles, and I absolutely love playing Balinese gamelan with them at UCLA on Tuesday nights!

Spiva after a gamelan performance

Derrick Spiva Jr. (right) and his wife Kim Nguyen Tran (left) with their Balinese gamelan gong kebyar teacher, I Nyoman Wenten (center), after a performance in 2016.

But I don’t have any linguistic roots in Bali. If anything, I would have a slight accent from the American South, seeing as my grandparents grew up in Tennessee and Texas. I’m not sure how I would even fake a Balinese accent while speaking English, without first doing some intensive research and rehearsal. Beyond that: what accent is considered the American accent, anyway? Aren’t there are multiple dialects of English throughout all 50 states? Needless to say, there was some identity confusion taking place.

As an American who is a descendant of slaves, I don’t have a complete picture of exactly who my ancestors are. But I am going to claim who I am, nonetheless. My American identity is shaping up to be the result of the absorption of many different coexisting cultures.

As an American who is a descendant of slaves, I don’t have a complete picture of exactly who my ancestors are. But I am going to claim who I am, nonetheless, as a member of my community, here in America, here in Los Angeles. Like many people living in this sprawling metropolis, my American identity is shaping up to be the result of the absorption of many different coexisting cultures.

I’ve been mistaken as not being an American before, and I know this experience is shared by many others who live in our country. Sometimes it is as simple as a misunderstanding in an immunization clinic. At other times, it can be downright abusive, as it is used as a tactic to separate individuals from a group by using religion, race, sexual orientation, and/or gender to isolate them. It is a scenario that I have seen play out at every level of our society, including debates about the Americanness of a president of the United States. And not just with Barack Obama. John F. Kennedy’s loyalty to the United States was questioned because of his Catholic religion.

Incidents of judging Americanness in the court of public opinion continue to drive me to ask these questions:

What does it mean to be American?
Who am I, as an American?

Because I am a composer within the genre of classical music, I also ask:

What is American classical music?
Does classical music have something meaningful to say in this conversation about being American?

The answers to these questions seem to continuously morph and unfold over time, just as the social experiment that is our country seems to do the same. I decided to write a string quartet (titled American Mirror) that I hoped would shed light on the America that I have experienced.

Of course, after it was done I couldn’t help but also ask:

What have I gotten myself into, trying to tackle these questions in a string quartet !?!?

Despite what its reputation might be, classical music—especially contemporary classical—is amazingly open as a musical form. Classical music is one of the most flexible genres in its ability to accept a wide variety of sounds into its sonic world. Take a look at this list here. It’s incredible that all of these diverse pieces fall within the classical music genre.

Palestrina – Missa Papae Marcelli – Gloria

Kala Ramnath – Amrit (arr. Reena Esmail)

Penderecki – Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima

Alvin Lucier – I Am Sitting in a Room

Rhys Chatham – A Crimson Grail for 400 electric guitars

Juan Pablo Contreras – Mariachítlan

Classical music has an ability to open itself up to different sounds, instruments, cultures, genres, and perspectives. Despite this openness, sociological, economic, and historical factors have excluded large groups of people from participating fully in classical music. Women and people of color in particular have had difficulty finding a place in the classical music world.

Classical music has an ability to open itself up to different sounds, instruments, cultures, genres, and perspectives. Despite this openness, sociological, economic, and historical factors have excluded large groups of people from participating fully in classical music.

I have struggled to find my place in the classical music world at times, also. I have always been drawn to the porousness of classical music, it’s ability to accept limitless sounds and concepts into its sonic world. But in my classical music education, I did not always see this openness highlighted. I found myself being deeply drawn into other musical traditions that resonated with me in ways just as profound, yet different, from the ways that classical music resonated with me.

Some of the musical traditions that have most influenced my classical compositions are traditional Ghanaian music, Hindustani and Carnatic Indian classical music, Eastern European folk music (particularly from Bulgaria), and American folk traditions (gospel, hymns, jazz, bluegrass). In order to engage with these different musical traditions in a meaningful way, I realized early on that I needed to continuously accept the humbling fact that there was so much I did not know.

When hearing live Ghanaian music for the first time, I was overwhelmed by the many layers of polyrhythms and timbres. It felt as if I was riding an avalanche of rhythms thundering with joy. It took months of listening, practicing, and performing for me to even begin to understand the complex structures and relationships between the instruments, vocal songs, and dancing of this tradition.

There is also a sense of welcoming in the music, a feeling that I (or anyone else) could be a part of that avalanche of joy, if we took the time to learn it. In traditional Ghanaian music, it is common for there to be a participatory and communal relationship between performers and audience. You are often expected to be a participant (clapping, singing, dancing), not just a spectator. As my teachers, from the Ladzekpo family, always tell their students: “If you can talk, you can sing. If you can walk, you can dance.”

I want the classical music community to experience this kind of access to music, where the audience feels that they are part of the music-making process. I also want the classical community to experience the beautiful close harmonies and melodic ornamentations of Bulgarian women’s choir singing; the rhythmic complexities of Hindustani and Carnatic Indian classical music; and the profound stories of historical struggle and redemption that are present in the sounds of American folk traditions. My compositions strive to integrate these concepts and aesthetics into a cohesive and expressive musical language, in a classical music setting. I reach for the possibility that people in the audience, no matter what their background, might be able to hear themselves reflected somehow in the music—whether it be a reference to a folk tune from their homeland, a lullaby a parent sung to them as a child, or a rhythm that makes them want to get up and dance.

My string quartet American Mirror is a sonic reflection of my community here in Los Angeles. The music reflects what I see, hear, and live with in my everyday life as an American in this beautiful City of Angels. Melodically, the piece draws from gospel, West African, North African, and Eastern European vocal techniques. Underneath these melodies, American Mirror uses Copland-esque open harmonies not only found in Appalachian folk music, but also many other folk musics from around the world. There is also some audience participation built into the piece in the form of humming a drone (perfect fifth) to support the musicians and keeping tala (Hindustani and Carnatic rhythmic cycles) in the traditional way by clapping and waving.

Finding a way for all of these musical traditions to exist together in a cohesive, integrated way has taken a lot of time and effort, through performing, researching, and trying to locate and understand the points of overlap that exist between the styles. I found that vocal lines, certain rhythmic cycles, and the embodiment of rhythm through movement were particularly important points of connection. It sometimes felt like playing that old video game Tetris, in which shapes have to be layered as efficiently as possible in a given amount of time. The most amazing thing to me is that there are so many wonderful interconnections between what at first seem to be very different musical cultures.

When you understand and empathize with someone (and maybe enjoy their music), it makes it awfully difficult to hate.

Writing American Mirror was very emotional for me at times. A slow section in the middle of Part II was especially difficult. The section begins with solo viola, playing a very vocal melody inspired by the humming of folk tunes, a phenomenon that occurs in many cultures across the globe. Gradually, the other instruments join the humming viola, with their own versions of the humming. When it comes down to it, when everything is taken from us (property, technological gadgets, finances), we still have our own voices. Without anything else, we can tell stories, mourn, express infinite things through just our voice. While I was writing this section, my thoughts were with members of our community who have not been able to feel the sense of belonging that we all yearn for. Many of us know what it is to feel like an outsider in our own communities.

One of the main purposes in writing American Mirror was to represent my identity musically, by weaving together my favorite moments of awesomeness in musical cultures that resonate strongly with me and sharing this with the classical music community. It’s important to understand that each of the individual musical practices that I have brought into the piece are amazing, uplifting, and transformative in their own right, and certainly don’t need my work to shine. But I hope my music can be a doorway for people to learn about musical cultures that they are not yet familiar with.

As I continue to find points of overlap between the musical cultures that I practice, it is becoming clear to me that music has the ability to serve as a model for how we can find points of common ground in our society at large. The shared experience of music can be a profound vehicle through which people come to understand one another, despite different backgrounds and perspectives. When you understand and empathize with someone (and maybe enjoy their music), it makes it awfully difficult to hate.

Christopher Cerrone: Everything Comes From Language

Christopher Cerrone Photo: Molly Sheridan

There have been many composers who have been deeply engaged with literature. Perhaps the most famous examples are Anthony Burgess and Paul Bowles, whose novels overshadow their nevertheless formidable achievements in musical composition. While composer Christopher Cerrone has not written any original prose fiction or poetry, at least not that he’s shared with the outside world, he approaches his own musical compositions in much the same way that a writer weaves a literary narrative.

“I try to have people learn how to hear the piece via the order of events,” Cerrone explained when we visited his book-filled Brooklyn apartment. “The more it goes on, the more it’s about the memory of the thing. I lean more towards the linguistic as a composer in that I’m interested in language that’s understandable, perceptible, and followable. If I’m not following my own story musically, then it’s not interesting to me.

Aside from offering a model for his compositional syntax and aesthetics, literature is also the primary inspiration behind almost every piece of his music. In addition to the work that has garnered Cerrone his greatest amount of attention thus far—the site-specific multimedia adaptation of Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities, which was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Music—he has created solo and choral works derived from texts as diverse as Tao Lin, E.E. Cummings, and the 18th-century Zen Buddhist monk Ryōkan. But even the lion’s share of his instrumental output has been triggered by literary references—a stanza by Erica Jong fueled his single-movement violin concerto Still Life; a passage from a poem by Philip Larkin provided the title and something of an abstract program for High Windows, his concerto grosso for string orchestra; and a quip by Bertolt Brecht inspired his 2017 orchestral work Will There Be Singing premiered this past May by the LACO.

“It’s always so funny what comes out of texts,” Cerrone exclaimed. “The most pretentious way I ever put it is that verbosity is ontology for me. It has to be heard as words, and thought of that way, for it to exist.”

Given Cerrone’s profound empathy for language, it’s somewhat surprising that he chose music instead of literature as the outlet for his creative impulses.

“I don’t have that kind of keen observational sense or that keen psychological sense that I think really great writers have,” he acknowledged. “As much as I love words, the ability of music to have the emotional, the visceral, and immediate pre-psychological impact won out.”

Still, he makes an effort to pick up a book and read at the start of every day before he settles in to work on his musical projects.

“We all probably wish we read more, but I try to put an hour in in the morning, whatever’s going on. And the periods where I do that are the really fecund creatively for me, and they always affect how I think in a really great way. Days when I wake up and check my email and check my text messages and go on Twitter are probably less creative.”

September 27, 2017 at 1:00 p.m.
Christopher Cerrone in conversation with Frank J. Oteri
Video and photography by Molly Sheridan
Transcribed by Julia Lu

Frank J. Oteri:  It seems to me that words are almost as important to you as sounds.

Christopher Cerrone:  I’m a very verbal person. I grew up thinking I was going to become a writer before I decided to become a composer.  I was always surrounded by books as a child, and I was read to constantly.  I remember my mother used to not just read to me as a child, but also just make up stories.  So I think that perceiving the world through words is just very deeply embedded inside of me, both in my music and in my notion of how music should work.

FJO:  But even though you thought you’d be a writer, music ultimately won out.

CC:  The genuine answer is that it became very clear to me that I had more of a talent for music than words.  I loved words and I loved writing, but I wasn’t a fiction writer. I’ve noticed that my fiction-writer friends are unbelievable observers of people.  It’s almost a little scary to have a fiction-writer friend, because you’re like, “When am I going to wind up in one of those stories?”  I never was that kind of person.  I loved reading and I loved observing things, but I don’t have that kind of keen observational sense or that keen psychological sense that I think really great writers have.  At the same time, I was constantly obsessed with music, always listening and curious about what made the music work.  I remember taking a music theory class in high school and thinking it made so much sense.  As much as I love words, the ability of music to have the emotional, the visceral, and immediate pre-psychological impact won out.

“The ability of music to have the emotional, the visceral, and immediate pre-psychological impact won out.”

FJO:  Nicely stated.  But, of course, if words are all about their meanings, and they mean specific things, how can they not provoke an emotional reaction?  They’re all about being comprehensible.  Whereas music isn’t, and yet it is, on another level.

CC:  I remember reading somewhere that a different center of the brain processes words in song and words that are read. This kind of makes sense. One of my favorite scenes from the movie Annie Hall is when [Woody Allen]’s with that Rolling Stone reporter played by Shelly Duvall and she quotes “Just Like a Woman”: “She breaks just like a little girl.”  It sounds so trite.  If you listen to Dylan, your heart breaks because it’s such a beautiful song.  But if you hear someone say it, it sounds dumb.  So I think that combination was always what was interesting to me: the meaning of text and the meaning of words, but also the ability to process it in purely emotional terms.

FJO:  The thing about music is that it gets its meaning only by the associations we attach to it.  Words operate much differently. Right now we’re talking to each other and every single word we’re using is a word that each of us has said before many times and have also read and written many times, which is why we’re able to understand each other.  You can’t do that with music.

CC:  I think you can.  I was teaching a composition lesson a couple of days ago in Michigan. I had this student who is very talented, but to me the music sounded too much like other music I’ve heard before.  So I said to him that all music exists on some kind of spectrum, from something that involves nothing you’ve ever heard before to music that sounds exactly like everything you’ve ever heard before. I think all great music exists somewhere along that.  In music, you’re speaking a language of things heard already.  You’re just rearranging it in a way that is unique.  You use sonorities that have been heard before, like I use major chords.  But even if you don’t use major chords, everything is along the lines of some kind of reference.

FJO:  But curiously I think that with language, and by extension literature, the spectrum is slightly different. You can’t really have something that functions in a literary way that’s completely new words that you’ve never heard before, even though the Dadaists and later experimental writers attempted this.

CC:  Right.

Two bookshelves filled with books.

FJO:  The big revolutions that sent shockwaves through all the artistic disciplines in the 20th century are related to each other. In visual art, it was about escaping representation. And in music, it was the so-called emancipation of dissonance. In literature, the parallels to those developments would be things like stream of consciousness, automatic writing, concrete poetry. While a lot of people like to say that contemporary music didn’t catch on with a large audience because most people didn’t want to hear those dissonant sounds, those sounds are much more a part of our collective culture at this point than a novel like Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans.

“All music exists on some kind of spectrum, from something that involves nothing you’ve ever heard before to music that sounds exactly like everything you’ve ever heard before.”

CC:  Yeah, it’s a rough read.  I’ve not finished it.  It’s so true.  I think that’s interesting because it gets to the idea that works of art teach you how to experience them. My favorite works of art are works that teach you through the process of seeing them.  This is what I try to do in my music through the course of forms. I try to have people learn how to hear the piece via the order of events. The more it goes on, the more it’s about the memory of the thing. So yeah, it’s funny, I think I lean more towards the linguistic as a composer in that I’m interested in language that’s understandable, perceptible, and followable.  If I’m not following my own story musically, then it’s not interesting to me.  Not that there can’t be moments of surprise, but the surprise is also part of the language.

FJO:  Well that’s the thing.  Surprise comes because if you know these chords and it suddenly goes somewhere different from progressions you’ve heard before, that gives the music an element of surprise.

CC:  I also think it’s interesting to be a composer and to have grown up in an age where that’s all happened already, all the revolutions. The Berlin Wall has fallen and so has the musical Berlin Wall, so you’re sitting there and you’re like, “Okay, there is nothing I can possibly imagine that could be accomplished through just the act of radical revolution in music.”  Maybe it’s possible, but to me that’s not what’s interesting.  There are so many things that are built totally out of noise, out of a completely impossible to understand vocabulary—or not impossible to understand, but that wall had already been pushed up against to such a point even within the aesthetics of modernism.

People are more interested now in theater and things that are actually more familiar. I remember seeing [Helmut] Lachenmann give a lecture in New York. Apparently every time he meets some player, they’re like, “Oh, Mr. Lachenmann, hear this sound.”  And it would be like krrr-krrrr-, and he’s just like, “Okay, that’s great.” Even he thought it was silly that people would walk up to him and give him new weird sounds.  This isn’t what I do as an artist.  I’m not just trying to make the weirdest sound possible.  I’m trying to make music and art, so I think as a composer I’m much more interested in building a language that is as broad as a linguistic thing. I have so many things in my vocabulary as a composer, which are all syntheses.  How much can I import into my language as a composer and still have it be consistent?

FJO:  I came across a piece of yours recently which I had not before that I was floored by—the Violin Sonata. But it’s somewhat of an outlier in your output.

CC:  Is it an outlier?

FJO:  Well, in the most obvious way, it’s an outlier because your pieces are almost inevitably inspired by literature and have these beautiful evocative titles. Whereas calling something a violin sonata merely tells listeners about the form and instrumentation of the piece.

CC:  That’s a good point.  The funny thing about it is I almost feel like it’s poetic.  The poetic reference of a violin sonata is what the point of that is, more than anything else.  It’s obviously not a sonata in the classical sense. It has sort of a superficial resemblance to it but, to me, what was interesting about that whole thing was the idea of the poetic notion of these two people on stage playing these instruments.  That’s why I called it a sonata more than anything else.  I do know though that there was a concert program recently that was all my music, and I was like, “Oh, you should have included my Violin Sonata.  It would have been a nice thing on that concert.” And [the person who put the concert together said], “Oh, I hate sonatas.” So I think that the piece turned off at least one person by having that title.

FJO:  Wow!  Yet he might have had a completely different reaction had you given the piece some beautiful, unique, evocative title, because words automatically trigger previous associations.

CC:  Right.

FJO:  But the words “violin sonata” also trigger associations. It gave him a very specific message, and that message was the history of every other violin sonata that’s ever been written by every other composer.  And had you previously written three other pieces that you called violin sonatas and you called this the fourth, those words would immediately reference the fact that you had done this same kind of piece three times previously.

CC:  I can’t even imagine that.  It was definitely a one-off calling something a sonata.  It was really funny, I remember my friend Timo Andres had a piece done at the New York Philharmonic, a piano concerto, and it’s just called The Blind Bannister. Apparently the New York Philharmonic insisted upon stylizing it Piano Concerto No. 3, “The Blind Bannister.”

“It just felt almost oddly romantic to call something a sonata.”

I think most composers are a bit reticent to throw out these titles.  But for me it was actually very much about the poetic notion of a sonata and writing a piece for these two people who happen to both be—more than most of the people I write for—immersed in the classical repertory in a really specific way.  It’s not like it’s ironic.  It just felt almost oddly romantic to call something a sonata.

FJO:  I didn’t know that story about Timo’s piece; that’s really interesting.  I see the title Piano Concerto No. 3, and I am immediately curious about the earlier two if I haven’t heard them yet. So, for me, giving something such a title is as much autobiographical as it is associative with previous music history. It makes you want to know the pre-history of where the composer came from for that piece, almost to the point that it can’t live independently the way a piece with a beautiful title can.

CC:  I almost feel like calling a piece Violin Sonata was maybe unfair to an audience because it’s almost like me saying, “If you know all my works, you know I never give titles like this.”  I don’t have a bunch of sonatas.  I have literally one sonata.  Since every other piece has an evocative, poetic title, you almost know that on some level that this title has a kind of layer of evocation as well. This is unfair because obviously not everyone knows all my pieces, or any of my pieces.

FJO:  I tried to get to know them all over the past couple of weeks.  We’ll see how far we get talking about all of them!  But the other thing I thought about, before we move on from the Violin Sonata, in your notes for it you wrote that you’ve avoided calling pieces sonatas because you didn’t want to be part of that chain of influences.  Your music exists outside of that, but once you give a work such a title, it forces the comparison.

CC:  I felt like it was time for me, that I felt comfortable. To sort of side swipe your answer, there was this interview with Morton Feldman late in his life, and I found it to be such an interesting interview because he talks about Steve Reich. He was at that point in his life when he finally came out admitting that he sort of loves Steve Reich, but he talked about the instrumentation. I wouldn’t say it was disparaging, but Feldman’s thing was that the instrumentation is the piece.  A Feldman piece might be for piano, flute, and percussion. It will have this incredible combination, and it’s so beautiful and it achieves an otherworldliness. Whereas Reich is like, “Alright, I’m finding an ensemble.  It doesn’t matter.  No one cares about me anyway.  So there’s going to be two clarinets, and four singers, and a million percussionists, so it’s going to be amplified.”

I think that that Reich tradition is the one that I felt more comfortable in initially as a composer because of the lack of history and being able to find my own combinations. Importing ideas into more classical ensembles is something that I’ve done more lately.  It’s somewhere my career has gone.

A wall filled with framed pages of scores by John Cage

In addition to admiring Morton Feldman, Cerrone also has a great fondness for another New York School composer, John Cage, and an entire wall of his apartment is lined with framed pages of Cage scores.

FJO:  There’s also the practical matter of writing for a so-called classical ensemble; these tend to be ensembles that there are many of.  If you write for your own particularly created ad-hoc group, it’s possibly the only group that has that specific instrumentation and can therefore be the only group that can play the piece.

CC:  That’s true.

FJO:  How many ensembles are there with two clarinets and lots of percussion? By necessity, Steve Reich formed his own ensemble and worked with musicians he knew, but later in his life, he also began writing for more standard ensembles. The piece of his that won the Pulitzer, Double Sextet, is a piece for a “Pierrot plus percussion” sextet. Of course, he doubled all the parts, which is the thing he does, but it’s a standard ensemble. When people now want to put together a performance of, say, Music for 18 Musicians, they have to put a special ensemble together, whereas there are tons of “Pierrot plus percussion” ensembles out there already; Double Sextet can be played by any of them.

CC: I’m sure there’ve been a million performances of Double Sextet.  On the other hand, I think he was really smart in the pieces that were for these larger combinations.  He more or less wrote evening-length works.  So you can justify doing Music for 18 [Musicians], because that’s the concert.  If it was an eight-minute piece for the Music for 18 Musicians instrumentation, I think it would never get performed.

FJO:  It’s interesting that you bring up Feldman when you talk about the Violin Sonata because, as you said, the instrumentation was the piece for him, and toward the end of his life the titles he gave pieces would just be what the instruments are.

CC:  Oh yeah, like Piano, Violin, Clarinet.  Well, that’s the thing I was tapping into almost with the sonata thing.  It’s a poetic thing about these instruments—the poetic potential of just sound.  A big part of the spectrum of where I sit as an artist is the sound thing from Feldman plus this allusive thing in literature. Get those two things together and you more or less have my music.

FJO:  But the other thing about your sonata is that I think it’s very carefully not referencing other sonatas.  That’s not what it’s about.

CC:  No.  Definitely not.

FJO:  It’s about referencing the techniques required by virtuosos who play together and referencing this idea of a duo.  This might have not even been a conscious thing on your part and perhaps it’s even something I inferred that isn’t even there, but the only thing that I heard in the Violin Sonata that associates it with any other music is at some point toward the middle of the end of the first movement, I heard things that sound like ‘80s power pop chords.

CC:  Yeah.  Totally. I always call it the Springsteen section.

FJO:  Ha!  How did that wind up in there?

CC:  It was really funny because I remember Rachel [Lee Priday] at the premiere introduced it that way, and I thought, “Don’t say that.”  But it’s so true.  I think I should just own it.  More and more I’m interested in bringing everything in my world as an artist into my music, and that includes pop music for sure.  I grew up on a diet of it.  I recently discovered the Björk album Vespertine, which is amazing and maybe my favorite now. But I had never heard it, because when I was 18, I decided I was going to become a composer, so I decided to only listen to classical music and never listen to any pop music ever again.  The extremism of the 18-year old, I think, is kind of a funny, beautiful thing.  But I realized I’d never heard that album because between 2002 and 2005, I didn’t listen to any pop music; I sort of just immersed myself in classical music entirely.  And then I was like, “Wait a minute.  This is dumb.  I love all this music.”  I was just being really absolutist and silly, but I have holes from that period.

“When I was 18, I decided to only listen to classical music and never listen to any pop music ever again.”

Anyway, I think that for me the thing is to bring in as wide as possible a reference of things that I love. It’s not ideological.  It’s just like the whole piece sets up that moment; it’s an extremely stretched out version of just three pop chords.  You’ve got all these natural harmonics.  They’re all sounding pitches on the violin, open string harmonics.  They’re all super tonal because harmonics on the strings of an instrument that’s tuned in fifths are going to be tonal.  So when you compress them all into a single moment, it just becomes one, four, and five chords.  It’s literally just chords that came out of the overtone series on a violin, but I love the idea of the reference to kind of a pop song, too.

FJO:  I want to unpack your decision to avoid listening to pop music in the early years of the 21st century. By then, the schism between so-called pop and so-called classical music was less pronounced. It seems like those walls were coming down, certainly in terms of what other composers were writing.  So it seems weird that you were putting the walls back up.

CC:  I went through a series of musical rebellions in high school.  I studied piano, classically from a young age, and I played jazz. I was starting to compose, and I played electric guitar and bass.  I played a lot of music of all different kinds; I was very immersed in all kinds of music.  I think that there was this weird thing where I just had the ultimate rebellion into conservatism by accident, because I’d heard all this post-noise, post-rock music. I was listening to Godspeed You! Black Emperor in high school and at some point, I thought this is actually kind of like classical music.  As I went further and further into long form things, I weirdly wound up back at the other end. I think it was also that I grew up on Long Island, which feels like I grew up in basically a cultural wasteland.  There was no culture really at all.  Capitalism fills the holes of the suburbs with more capitalism, so there was commerce and there was popular art, which I’m not denigrating at all, but there was no sort of serious visual arts because it’s a place that’s sort of cut off, other than from New York City, and it sort of relies upon New York City. It has never developed a culture of its own really, except for a few odd places here and there.  So, unless you go to New York City, you don’t see orchestras, you don’t see classical music.  You don’t go to museums, and you don’t see theater.

FJO:  Even though the Hamptons has this big gallery scene?

CC:  Yeah, I guess so. But I wasn’t sophisticated enough as a 17-year old to know about the gallery scene in the Hamptons.  But I was literate.  I think that’s actually why I have this great love of literature; it was the one thing you could really get deep into since you could get books.  There was actually a great independent bookstore in my town which was my favorite place. Amazingly, it’s still there and it’s still an independent bookstore.  Anyway, I think that the notion of becoming a classical composer was this gigantic rebellion against Long Island and the American notion of suburbia. So I think as a result of that gesture, I went really far with it. I was an insufferable, pretentious 18-year old who was like, “I only listen to Beethoven.”  Then I chilled out a little bit and became a little bit less insufferable and learned to remember that I love all kinds of music.

Three superimposed scores are propped up on Cerrone's piano, Stockhausen's Klavierstucke XI, an original composition, and a Beethoven sonata.

FJO:  So when you cut everything else off, were you only listening to older music?

CC:  I was discovering at that point.  As an 18-year old on Long Island, access to contemporary music is extremely limited.  My library had a couple of Kronos Quartet CDs, so I do remember hearing the first tracks of that famous Black Angels disc.  I was like, “What is this?  This is so discordant.”  But I think the first music I really loved was actually more like the neo-romantic tradition. I still think there are some really great pieces in that tradition.  And then I discovered Lutosławski and Ligeti. What I loved about that music and what I still love about it is its mix of influences.  And I discovered minimalism.  Then I discovered Cage and European Modernism, and I went backwards from there. I had teachers who were encouraging me to discover more and more; that was really, really lucky.

FJO:  Did you listen to music from other cultures at all?

CC:  I think that was an even later thing, the period where people were just dumping stuff from hard drives onto hard drives. I think probably somewhere through the middle of college I discovered gamelan and then I discovered gagaku and West African drumming. That was all probably later in my development, but it was obviously hugely influential.  I discovered American shape-note singing.  It’s such an incredible tradition.  It really sits with me.  And I discovered Sardinian music. That moment when you could just dump anything from a hard drive onto another was an amazing moment.  I mean, it also ruined the music industry, but there was a moment where you just could discover anything.

FJO:  Getting back to the comparisons between how music and language function.  We’re saying all these words to each other in a language we both grew up speaking and the words flow naturally without us having to consciously stop and think about each one. Certainly that happens in music when people immersed in an idiom improvise together and respond to each other’s phrases in real time. But when you’re alone writing a novel or creating a notated musical composition designed for other people to perform, there’s a lot of pre-meditation that goes into that process even though a lot of what comes out is also the result of a subconscious absorption of things you have either read or heard or both.

CC:  I feel that way absolutely.  I’ll come up with something and it will feel really original, and then I’ll realize it’s just a half-remembered version of something I heard 15 years ago.  I think that 18-to-22 period is such an important period. I read somewhere that your brain is the most malleable at that point.  It’s like a sponge, and you just absorb everything. I was genuinely very curious, but I was also very lucky to have access to a lot of stuff. I remember my teacher in college, Nils Vigeland, would give me a list every single week with 15 pieces.  I’d run to the library and study everything.  That was the moment for me to discover a ton of stuff.  And I think all that is subconsciously in my vocabulary as a composer.

FJO:  You’ve actually composed a piece that seems like an attempt to turn into musical sounds the way our brains process memories—Memory Palace.

CC:  I’m surprisingly un-premeditated as a composer.  I don’t plan as much as you might think.  I just sort of keep going, and then I work backwards to make it seem that I planned it.  That piece is for no real traditional percussion instruments.  They all have to be made.  So since I was stripped of the possibilities of traditional instruments, I thought I guess I better, like, think back on all the times that I didn’t really have an instrument and had 12 beer bottles left over from a party and filled them up with different amounts of water and we made a song out of it.  It started as improvisation with a friend and electronics, and it just kind of went from there.

FJO:  I think it really captures what you described earlier as a pre-psychological, emotive moment. But, because of the indeterminate elements you’ve put into this score, the fact that performers must make their own instruments in order to realize it, it becomes very personal and very specific to whomever is interpreting it. So I wonder how divergent performances have been and how representative you feel they have all been of your intentions.

CC:  How do I put this?  There’s a moment when pieces stop being something you wrote almost and they start to become part of the repertoire. That is the most amazing feeling, but it’s a very strange feeling when you see something so far from where you conceived it.  It’s a surprisingly fixed piece in terms of the pitch choices being notated, but I think that the sounds, the colors, are the most interesting part—the timbres.   I remember one person, his house was being demolished.  He moved and he saved all the wood from his deck and took the wood for that piece out of it.  That’s so cool.  And I was at this party recently, and this guy I happened to have corresponded with, whose son is a percussionist, came up to me and said, “I want to thank you.  My son played Memory Palace and we made the instruments together.  We don’t really have that kind of relationship.  But since he had to do it, I helped him and it was this really big bonding experience.” That is probably one of the more meaningful things that anyone has ever said to me about my music.

“It’s a very strange feeling when you see something so far from where you conceived it.”

FJO:  That’s beautiful.

CC:  It’s something I’m sure I’d do with my own dad, although we argue when we build things together.  [The electronic component of] that piece literally had a set of wind chimes I recorded that are in my parents’ house still.  I was digging really deep with that piece. I think that that’s been the process for me as an artist, generally speaking. The thing that’s really hard is to emotionally strip yourself down to exposed places, but that will yield something powerful.

FJO:  Interestingly, the two pieces we talked about in detail so far, the Violin Sonata and Memory Palace, are both very much about you having an idea and then running with it.  Those ideas were not things you got from somewhere else, although as we’ve been saying, nothing exists independently; everything comes from something.  Still, you had no guide to take you on a path; whereas, with the majority of the pieces you’ve written—obviously all of your vocal pieces but even many of the instrumental ones—the inspiration will come from something that is concrete that already had existed in literature, whether it’s a novel or a set of poems.  So I’m wondering, in terms of what you just said about stripping yourself down emotionally to find this essence, how do you work within something that already exists to find the thing that’s you?

CC:  I think it’s as simple as the way you read a book and you relate to it.  You don’t have to be like that person to relate to it.  I’m reading this book by Teju Cole right now, and he’s a Nigerian-American writing about his experiences. Obviously that’s not an experience I relate to, but I still relate to the book.  And I still relate to the things he says and does in the book.  I think that’s true of most of the texts I’ve dealt with. I’m sure I have a very different experience than most of the writers I set. You can still relate to them, and they become about you anyway. People have commented on how my interpretation of works tends to become about me.  It becomes about how I feel when I read something, and so I think it’s the same kind of emotional thing.  It’s just filtered through someone else’s text.

A paperback copy of Teju Cole's novel Open City rests on top of a page of Cerrone's music manuscript.

FJO:  So I want to dig deeper into reading and its importance for you—how much you read, where you read, what you read, how you find things to read, and when that moment comes and you start pondering whether or not you can turn it into a piece of your music.

CC:  I try to read in the mornings, as much as I can, but it varies, honestly.  We all probably wish we read more, but I try to put an hour in in the morning, whatever’s going on.  And the periods where I do that are the really fecund creatively for me, and they always affect how I think in a really great way. Days when I wake up and check my email and check my text messages and go on Twitter are probably less creative.  People usually recommend things to me, and I’m always lucky to either hear someone or, as I’ve had some really great experiences of late in different residencies, literally meet the author, get to know the works of my author friends. I have a lot of very literate friends, and I grew up in a family that reads a lot.

“Days when I wake up and check my email and check my text messages and go on Twitter are probably less creative.”

Starting from there and then outward, it’s always just some sort of random connection. Some people say it’s so much easier to write a piece based on a text because you have that guide structurally and that’s half true.  But the part they don’t talk about is the volume one goes through to find a source text. The research aspect of it is insane. For every poem I set, I read 500 poems.  This one is too long, or this one doesn’t quite get the feeling right.

FJO:  So what’s the “Aha!” moment when you’re reading something?  Is it the very first reading and you’ll say, “Oh, this really grabs me.  I hear things in my head; I hear sound.” Or will you come back to something after reading it a few times and internalizing it, and then decide you can do something with it?

CC:  More often than not, it’s usually pretty immediate.  When you read a poem and you’re like, “Oh, okay, clearly.”  And it’s usually the length.  “This is short.  Great.“ So that’s often the “Aha!” moment.

FJO:  Like those peculiar Bill Knott poems you set, which I knew nothing about before I heard your Naomi Songs, even though Knott had posted them all online. How did you discover his writing?

CC:  I have this friend who’s the most crazily literary person and he dumped a ton of stuff on my hard drive that he found on the internet.  Those Knott poems are so great, right?  I found them, and he died a year later, and it was like, “Oh God, how am I going to get the rights to these?  Who even executes his estate?” But I found the person who had written his obituary in The New Yorker and he managed to put me in touch with his executor, and he was super nice about it.  Then there are certain authors. For example I love Lydia Davis, but I feel that so many composers have done such brilliant things—David Lang, Kate Soper.  There are just all these great pieces with Lydia Davis texts. I don’t need to be the fifth person to write one. She’s brilliant and great, but there’s something about the discovery; one hopes that in the world that we’re in, the texts I use are often discoveries for people.

“One hopes that in the world that we’re in, the texts I use are often discoveries for people.”

FJO:  I remember when I first learned about Lydia Davis. I was the music person on a multi-disciplinary panel many years back, and the literary person on that panel was trashing the short stories of Lydia Davis because they’re way too short and undeveloped. This person seemed to treasure long, dense work. But that negative reaction actually made me want to seek out her work and read it, and when I did I instantly fell in love with it, too. At that point, nobody in the music community seemed to know who she was, and in the back of my head I thought it would be really cool for her writing to be set to music.  Then everybody else did it!

CC:  Poor Lydia probably gets these emails every week: “Can I use your text?” I learned about Lydia Davis because I heard Kate Soper’s piece, and I thought, “Oh my God, this writing’s amazing.”  But maybe since I had my moment with that already through music, it was less interesting to me to try to do the thing again.

FJO:  Then why Italo Calvino?

CC:  Yeah, he’s well known.

FJO:  Very well known, definitely not a discovery. And yet his writing inspired several pieces of yours.  Most obviously Invisible Cities, your weird, wacky, magical, wonderful piece that’s more than a setting of this pre-existing thing, but which was obviously inspired by it.

CC:  Calvino to me is so inspiring as an artist, and I think he was the person who helped me discover how to become the composer I wanted to be, much more than any composer. He’s such an amazing writer obviously, and I read quite a few of his books.  Some were funny or cute. Well, not cute.  That’s the wrong word.  He would have hated that.  But they have a lightness to them.  He loved the word lightness and talked about the word lightness a lot.  Invisible Cities had that, but it also had a little bit more depth and a little more emotion to me.  It read very emotional to me.  I don’t know if others read it that way.

I cared and still do care about structure so much—interesting, complicated structures. But I’m also interested in writing music that hopefully people think is beautiful and sensuous and lyrical. So I read that book, and I thought to myself that this is a writer who can accomplish lyricism and also complexity, but not how complexity has come to mean unpleasant somehow.  Not that people actually think that, but I think there is this sort of subconscious subtext with difficulty.

“To me, Calvino’s complicated and complex, but he’s not difficult.”

To me, Calvino’s not difficult. He’s complicated and complex, but he’s not difficult.  To me, he’s effortless, and giving the illusion of effortlessness was so important.  So I read his books, and I’m like, “This is what I want to do as a composer.”  It was such a moment for me.  And so I definitely wanted to make things out of his amazing works.

FJO:  So the idea of doing a piece that’s experiential, that sort of breaks the fourth wall and takes place in multiple locations, breaking the space-time-proscenium continuum of how we experience music theater pieces, where in the process of creating this did that become how it was going to be done?

CC:  Well, I was writing this piece obviously through grad school, and I didn’t really know what it was going to be in a sense.  I knew that the text was sort of the anchor. The text is all based directly from the novel. But I knew that this was not an opera in the sense of we’re going to go ahead and tell a traditional story.  This was a piece that is a meditation.  And I knew it needed something very, very unconventional.

I had applied for the VOX Workshop at New York City Opera, and it was accepted into it. That’s where I met Yuval Sharon and we became friends. We did this workshop, and that was the culmination of me realizing what it was. It was originally scored for orchestra and it had all these opera singers, and it was just not right.  I knew there was something there and I kept going with it, but I knew that the version of the piece was not the right version at all.  So I pared it down to a chamber ensemble—a sort of unusual chamber ensemble in the Reich tradition of having multiple pianos and percussion in the group.  And it sort of kept going and I still didn’t know what it was. I had this workshop at this thing called the Yale Institute of Music Theater; Beth Morrison was producing it at the time.  She literally said something along the lines of “I don’t know who would be the right person to direct this.  It would have to be someone with a crazy, out-there vision.  Maybe someone like Yuval.”  It was really funny.  I’m like, “Well, that would be great.” And so when he moved out to L.A. and he called me, I had come to the conclusion that this should not be a staged piece.  It should have people all over the place, all over throughout the hall.  It was going to be amplified, and it was going to have movement, and that’s all I had at that point.

So Yuval comes to me with this idea, “What if we do it in the train station with movement and using headphones so you can hear everything perfectly, but the experience is flexible?” I think I said yes immediately.  Then I can do all the sound design stuff too, and I can have all sorts of crazy amplification ideas.  That’s where my work was going already anyway.  The idea of the train station was entirely his, but it seemed perfect. I think it was actually sort of at the behest of Chad Smith from the L.A. Phil.  They had done the overture and Yuval was sort of casting around what to do, and Chad suggested what about this piece.  And Yuval’s like, “Of course, I know this piece from VOX.” And it was kismet!

FJO:  You mentioned sound design, which is interesting given your years of avoiding listening to pop music. After all, so much of what pop music recordings are about is their sound design, whereas people whose work comes out of the so-called classical music tradition rarely think in terms of shaping recorded sound objects and bringing certain things out in the studio.

CC:  Something that was revelatory for me was that when I went to graduate school, I was randomly assigned to work in the recording studio.  I didn’t really know anything about electronic music at that time.  I got a C in electronic music in college.  It was my only C and was sort of a badge of honor.  But then I started working with microphones, and that was the moment where everything started to spill back into my life in terms of technology. I got really interested in technology and sound design.  I realized that I sort of hate how classical music has been recorded, one mic 50 feet away from the orchestra, no EQ-ing, incredibly loud and incredibly quiet at different times.  That was the moment where we started doing Invisible Cities. So I’m working with Nick Tipp, our sound designer, and I was like, “Oh, let’s compress this and let’s have these really quiet moments be really loud.” There’s whispering, and the whispering’s super loud.  I got to make a studio album live, and it was incredible to me.  Actually learning how to do it was incredibly important.

FJO:  That surrealness of loud whispers mirrors the surrealism of Calvino.

CC:  Absolutely.

FJO:  So you were able to put your own stamp on it, but that text is what guided you.

CC:  Yeah, 100 percent.  Everything in the opera comes out of the book.

FJO:  So what happens when you set a writer who is completely different, like Tao Lin, whose poems are the basis for your song cycle I Will Learn To Love A Person? Or maybe in your opinion, he’s not so different.

CC:  He could not be more different.

FJO:  Yet his words speak to you as well, and they’ve brought out music from you.

CC:  I spent more or less three years in and out working on that opera. My identity was formed around it as an artist and as a composer. So for the next vocal piece—it was literally the next, it was the first vocal piece I wrote after that—I was like, “Okay, I love Calvino; he’s a genius.  But I need the complete opposite now.”  Calvino is semi-contemporary; the book is from the ‘70s. But I wanted to do something written, like, last year.  I’ve noticed that whenever composers set texts, they always tend to refer to something much older. If they’re not setting Auden or Whitman, they’re setting 20 or 30-year old things.  I didn’t really know anything about contemporary poetry, and so I sort of dove in.

I had this friend of a friend who was a poet.  She’d written this article about this movement called the New Sincerity.  I think the term New Sincerity came out of this David Foster Wallace article called “E Unibus Pluram.” It’s the opposite of E pluribus unum. He was talking about irony and postmodernism and how television absorbs it. I think he was very ahead of his time in that regard.  I see the internet as the same thing.  TV was not a big deal compared to how crazy the internet is in our culture. The final rebels will be ones who dare “single-entendre principles.” I love that quote so much.  That was where that movement sort of took its “Invictus” from.  I was very interested in that movement, because it was something I was really relating to at that time in my life, writing music that does not have a sheen of a postmodern irony around it.  I wanted something that was very direct.  So my friend Jen Moore wrote an article on two poets, Matt Hart and Tao Lin.  And I saw these Tao Lin poems and I was like, “Oh, this is perfect.”  They’re basically song lyrics.  Sometimes people struggle with the tone of his poems, which is very hard to pin down—sort of ironic, but also funny, sweet, and sensitive. There is this one poem, which I love and I almost set. I decided against it. The last line is “I AM FUCKED,” existentially in capital letters, 43 times in a row. I loved how Tao Lin was just really direct and really honest.  I loved how he exposed himself in those poems emotionally, so I thought isn’t this kind of wildly rebellious to have a song cycle where people actually discuss deep-seated fears and pains, but not in a sophisticated way.  Just like, “I am this.”

FJO:  I know his novels more than I know his poetry.  His novels are so twisted.

CC:  Oh, like Eeeee Eee Eeee

FJO:  My favorite one is Richard Yates, which appropriates names of teen stars for its main characters but isn’t actually about them.

CC:  Oh yeah, Dakota Fanning.

FJO:  And Haley Joel Osment. The whole novel is basically a G-chat between these two characters whose names seem to just be there for the sake of irony. Because of that, I find it somewhat incongruous that he gets lumped in with the New Sincerity. To me his novels seem completely ironic.

CC:  I would say that that’s somewhat true.  Taipei, his most recent book, is, I think, the closest to being emotionally direct.

FJO:  I haven’t read that one yet.

CC:  It’s super good.

A paperback copy of Tao Lin's novel Taipei is on the top of a stack of books.

FJO:  But another one of his novels, Shoplifting from American Apparel, is also super ironic.

CC:  Yeah, definitely, I think he’s still grappling with irony. I think everyone’s grappling with irony all the time.  The poems are the most direct thing he wound up writing.

FJO:  You mentioned David Foster Wallace and I see Infinite Jest on your bookshelf.  That one’s hard to hide because it’s so huge.  But you’ve not set him.

CC:  There are tons of writers I love who I did not set.  They tend to be verbose.  And they feel complete.  I don’t think there’s anything you can do.  The thing about writers that I set is that there has to be room in the text for more.  Another poet who I feel that way about, and he’s one of my favorite poets, is Frank O’Hara.  I don’t know if there’s anything you could do to a Frank O’Hara poem that would make it any better than what it is.  It feels complete; everything’s there.  So I wouldn’t want to set his poetry, even though I love it, you know.

“There are tons of writers I love who I did not set. They tend to be verbose. And they feel complete.”

FJO:  And besides, if you were setting David Foster Wallace, what would be the musical equivalent of a footnote?

CC:  We’ll come back to this later!

FJO:  Literature has obviously been key to the pieces of yours that have texts, but it has even informed many of your completely instrumental pieces like High Windows, the gorgeous string orchestra piece you wrote for the String Orchestra of Brooklyn, which you named after a line from a poem by Philip Larkin.  How did that play out?  Did you read the poem and decide that, instead of setting it, it would influence you musically in other ways?

CC:  Usually there’s some kind of synchrony.  Titles come at all different points in the composition process.  Sometimes it’s like, “Bam, that’s it.” Then sometimes it’s like, “This was what I was doing.”  That is often an equally powerful thing to me. And sometimes you’re just desperate and you really need a title.  Usually it’s pretty rare that I have a really clear premeditated notion of what I’m doing when I’m starting a piece.  Usually it finds itself over the course of a piece.

FJO:  So how did the title come about for Will There Be Singing, particularly leaving off the question mark?

CC:  That was really funny.  I remember I got a number of questions about that. Is there a question mark?  And I’m like, no.  “Will there be singing.”  Not, “will there be singing?”

FJO:  But that also comes from somewhere—from Bertolt Brecht, though obviously in translation. Although he’s the guy who also came up with the line “Is here no telephone?” in English for Mahagonny.

CC:  And “Oh, don’t ask why.”

FJO:  I think there’s a question mark in Brecht’s original.

CC:  Yeah, and I think the Brecht line is actually: “Will there also be singing?”

FJO: It’s interesting that the source was Brecht, since it’s essentially making a political statement about our time. There’s a famous anecdote about Brecht in East Germany after the war.  He’d written plays that were censored and couldn’t be staged, and someone from the West interviewed him about it and asked, “Since you’ve always been a force for freedom of expression, how can you live in this society where they’re censoring your work? “ And he said, “Well, that means they read it!”

CC:  Oh, Brecht.  So clever.

FJO: So what’s the actual story with the title?

CC:  That one was pretty clear from the beginning.  I started writing that piece in January 2017 when the world felt like it had fallen apart.  I knew that quote and I emailed it to Martin Bresnick the day after the election.  This has to be the mantra.  It was really funny because this is also how I know Yuval and I are artistic soul mates: he was obsessed with the same quote, and sent out something about that quote in a newsletter with The Industry.  So we’re clearly in the same zone.

The piece starts with chords that are me feeling anxiety about the world.  They are just harsh chords and it goes from there.  But it doesn’t feel like a political statement because I don’t know if I’m interested in making political statements. If you haven’t made your mind up about Donald Trump, I don’t think my orchestra piece is going to convince you one way or the other.  It’s more just a reflection of the times that we’re in and who I am as a person at this moment.

FJO:  It’s now almost nine months later and the world still feels like it’s falling apart, but it does seem like there will still be singing no matter what.

“Verbosity is ontology for me.”

CC:  Seems that way.  I’m starting this new piece right now. It’s always so funny what comes out of texts.  The most pretentious way I ever put it is that verbosity is ontology for me. It has to be heard as words, and thought of that way, for it to exist. There’s an inscription that was an epigraph to another book of poems by this writer John K. Samson by this guy named Tom Wayman: “Weak things have power.” Democracy can only exist when we are weak, when we are fragile, because then we want it to be democracy and not autocracy.  It’s something I’ve been really connected with lately. What is the opposite of Donald Trump?  It’s someone who admits their fragility.  This is a person who can’t ever admit fragility, and the response to any kind of thing is anger.  In a sense, while I deeply empathize with the anger of so many people in the world right now against him, admitting your own fragility as a person is the political statement that I want to make.  I’m a flawed person, and I want to express it. I have fears. I have anxieties and I have pain.  That, to me, is the way forward.  The way forward is not people screaming at each other.

Christopher Cerrone talking in his apartment.

A Letter to Leslie Bassett (1923-2016)

Gabriela Lena Frank and Leslie Bassett
Anita and Leslie Bassett with Gabriela Lena Frank and Paul Yeon Lee

Anita and Leslie Bassett with Gabriela Lena Frank and Paul Yeon Lee in February 2012.

My dearest mentor, my teacher, my role model, my Leslie:

I miss you like crazy. It’s been a few years since we last talked, a total insanity considering how often in my daily life, I still hear your words of counsel from our music lessons of old. I can see the way your hands used to hold your knees when you laughed while seated, head back and eyes closing in mirth at some bit of mischief I would jaw off, nervous and eager to amuse. I remember your distinctive walk, frail and steely both, across worn carpet to the treble-bright piano in your studio, thick music score in hand. When I was over early at the house, you and beautiful Anita would fry up corn pancakes while discussing a marvelous new clarinetist who bled “for his composer and played like it was his last breath!” These days, when I hear the clarinet, I swear, in a fit of quasi-synesthesia, that I’m tasting corn…

The love that a student has for her teacher is a special one. I was not a child when, in the ’90s, you stepped out of retirement for a brief stint to become a mentor for a few lucky students at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In fact, I was already experienced and cognizant of the usefulness of having someone to idealize and be guided by, especially a composer so widely revered and respected. I even expected it. What I hadn’t expected was to be consistently wowed—humbled really—by your humanity. Honestly, I can’t imagine the wellspring of personal experience and patience you reached into when assessing the counterpoint and orchestration of my well-meaning but so very naïve scores, those earliest attempts to tease out a voice as a Peruvian-American with Chinese and Lithuanian Jewish forbearers, as a woman with hippy-feminist roots, and even as a disabled individual. Although you were from a certain era of “old school” American men that might not have been surrounded by the most diverse peers, you easily talked with me about the most volatile of subjects affecting me deeply as a young composer: Racism and “playing the race card,” cultural tributes vs. cultural parasitism, ambition in one’s career and ambition in one’s personal artistry, sexism, and the distracting, god-awful noisy politicization of it all. I was well aware of taking up the time of a man who had been a young soldier in one of the world’s ugliest wars, who later experienced what no parent ever should in losing a young child, and whose own face was startlingly altered after fighting serious illness. You still believed in teaching and writing great music, and that made me even more devoted.

Knowing well how your eyes shone to work with performers who played from the gut, leaving it all out on the stage, I remember putting my fingers to work in the only meaningful gesture I could think of to properly thank you when I left school: recording your complete piano and piano/violin works on a CD. It was a Frank family affair with my sweet mom, the stained glass artist, designing a cover to your specs and with my father, the Mark Twain scholar, editing the booklet texts. (I couldn’t figure out a role for my scientist brother.) In the recording sessions, I threw myself into the heady mix of tonality and atonality that was your hallmark, wrestling with the terse lines that needed to suddenly sprawl, or pulling symphonic colors out of the Steinway borrowed from the Detroit Symphony. Definitely, for a brief time, I caught the bug that unjaded new music performers have: Wanting an esteemed composer’s approval so bad, it’s like needing benediction from the pope.

You taught even when you didn’t mean to. Introducing me to the joys of Wallace and Gromit? Priceless. Gamely working a tough piece of jerky I offered when I forgot that chewing was difficult, an embarrassing faux pas? Likewise priceless. Playing hopeful yet gentlemanly matchmaker between me and a platonic male composer friend, declaring others to be “boobs?” So, so, so very priceless.

If I had stayed in better touch these past few years, I would have been able to tell you that said platonic male composer friend and I are still dear to one another while both happily married to others. I would be able to tell you that my career landed fine, and I think it will continue on all right. I would tell you that I absolutely did kick to the curb my illness and its ensuing “wellness” regime of surgeries and radiation. I would tell you about playing your Preludes piano suite in a men’s prison and them loving its craggy unyielding modernity; that, as you advised, I have a tough skin against bad/ignorant reviews but a necessary skeptical eye towards the good; and that I’ve bought land to raise Peruvian alpacas not far from where you grew up in the San Joaquin Valley, son of a pig farmer. I would tell you that having lived into my middle years now, I appreciate better how steadfastly you held onto your values as artist, teacher, colleague, father, and husband: Simply put, a man of integrity and honor. Most of all, I would tell you that I it pains me that performances of your beautiful music had slowed in recent times—an injustice—but that I would, nudged once again into action by your leaving us, do what I could to remind the world of your musical legacy.

You knew me as an atheist, more by circumstance than intentional design, but I confess that there is the rare occasion that someone gives me pause. I feel their incandescence, and I’m at a loss to explain their excellence in ordinary terms.

Rest in peace, my teacher, Leslie dear. I will always be missing you tons.

Yours,

Gabriela

Gabriela Lena Frank, Leslie Bassett, and Paul Yeon Lee

Gabriela Lena Frank, Leslie Bassett, and Paul Yeon Lee.