inti figgis-vizueta: the ability to grow
Composer inti figgis-vizueta creates music that carefully balances experimentation and practicality. She likens her compositions to plants which have the ability to grow and change when different people perform them.
“We’re able to continue to revisit them and see how they’ve changed,” she explained when we met over Zoom in mid-June. “I’ll hear people come back and play something that I haven’t heard in years. I thought I had a stable sense of that piece in my mind and suddenly someone just blows me away with a completely different place that they go with it. And to me, that has to feel really exciting because the idea that like, we’re just writing something to exist in one form and then it just, you know, like time passes, just stops moving–it’s very strange.”
inti’s openness to collaboration and belief in interpretative agency has made her music particularly attractive to soloists and ensembles ranging from Andrew Yee and Conrad Tao to Roomful of Teeth, Ensemble Dal Niente, and even the Kronos Quartet who asked her to compose a piece for their 50 for the Future Project.
“I remember hearing about this project and being like, ‘God, I wish I could do that, but I’m never going to be in this thing,'” inti remembered. “It was kind of a short turnaround … I went through all of the other pieces that were up, because this project had been going on for five years and there was a gamut of pieces. There were ones that were so hard. Maybe a graduate string quartet could do it, with a lot of practice. To like very beautiful and simple and quite lyrical pieces with a 16th note pulse or something. … I ended up kind of going from this really complicated score to this very simple score of a single stave that everyone was reading from. … How it happens over time can be determined by the ensemble.”
Over the past few years, inti has gravitated a lot toward string quartets and percussion ensembles, two groups that might seem at oppositive ends of the sonic spectrum to some composers but not to her. “I do feel like there’s a certain level of a kind of shared musicality, a shared sense of tone and timbre and attack and all of these things that contribute to a group mentality of how to kind of play with and affect texture in like all of their kind of individual ways.”
But she is also interested in vocal music and has begun exploring it again after a hiatus of several years where she was mostly focused on instrumental music.
“I felt like instrumentalists were down to clown a little bit, where I just didn’t always feel that with vocal ensembles,” she acknowledged. “Then this year and last year has been this kind of a big resurgence of that in my music and in some ways, it’s teaching me things all over again, which has been really, really fun. … I get to kind of luxuriate a little bit in the quality of two people singing together, actually using all of the complexities of a word to push forward meaning. But to me it’s not narrative meaning, and that’s what I was afraid of, that when I had to engage language, I had to be tied to a narrative, instead of being tied to the complexities of thinking about something like love, or lots of other things.”
Ultimately, whatever the medium, inti is interested in constructing open structures that take performers and listeners to new places.
“For the most part my pieces are workshops in some ways,” she said. “It’s almost like a loose suit and then we fit it over the rehearsal.”
When you're sitting around and you have a lot of thoughts and emotions, it's helpful to have an outlet.
inti figgis-vizueta
The psychology of string quartets is some of my favorite material in some ways to encounter with different groups that I'm writing for, kind of figuring out what feels good under their hands, what feels good, what sounds they kind of lean into.
inti figgis-vizueta
The kind of music that I write ... is really in some ways trying to hold a mirror to ensembles and their own kinds of musical tendencies.
inti figgis-vizueta
Maybe I'm showing my barista roots, but I love the idea of having something appear in one way, tasting it, adjusting a little bit, having it appear again, shifting out of the parameter.
inti figgis-vizueta
The idea of a shared score is extremely important because it feels like we're all reading from the same thing and therefore are able to make decisions from the same kind of mutual gaze or perspective.
inti figgis-vizueta
I kept being given drums in elementary school as part of our music lesson and then they would take them away pretty quickly because I wouldn't be doing what was being tasked of me.
inti figgis-vizueta
The music program at the high school I went to wasn't great. We watched Amadeus like maybe three times a week out of this class. So it was a very chill class. I really didn't do much. I learned the note names. I learned about Mozart maybe, depending on how we feel about that movie.
inti figgis-vizueta
I see them as vessels, but I also see them as plants, that we're able to continue to revisit them and see how they've changed. I'll hear people come back and play something that I haven't heard in years. I thought I had a stable sense of that piece in my mind and suddenly someone just blows me away with a completely different place that they go with it. And to me, that has to feel really exciting because the idea that like, we're just writing something to exist in one form and then it just, you know, like time passes, just stops moving--it's very strange.
inti figgis-vizueta
The reason that the work exists is that it's in some ways trying to kind of push at the notion that there has to be a separation between an interpretive artistry and a creative artistry
inti figgis-vizueta
When there's this kind of mutual investment that everyone has, then suddenly we can get past this the sense the score is something to be achieved versus the score is a tool to create really beautiful music in whatever that feels like for the people who are in the room.
inti figgis-vizueta
A lot of the ways that I started to first send out my music was through calls for scores and all of my instrumental music got picked up really, really quickly, and no one wanted to touch the choral vocal music. Probably because it was using techniques and ways of orienting them that just was outside the practice and I've come to now know that there's an entire industry based on music that's being written in a certain way for this ensemble. So I'm not surprised now.
inti figgis-vizueta
I felt like instrumentalists were down to clown a little bit, where I just didn't always feel that with vocal ensembles.
inti figgis-vizueta
How do you give permission for disalignment in an ensemble context? Because it often feels very wrong to people.
inti figgis-vizueta
There was a time pretty early where anytime anyone reached out, I just put everything into the piece that was being asked for.
inti figgis-vizueta
With string players, I hear them think about intonation a lot. With percussion ensembles, I hear about timing a lot, and I hear about unison and groove and pattern and beat.
inti figgis-vizueta
I am strategizing about what engaging creativity and openness means in a context where people want to be together. The philosophy of all of this exists at the mercy in some ways of who's playing it, because it's music that requires a level of sympathy to go along with me, to agree to my rules and my ideas.
inti figgis-vizueta
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New Music USA · SoundLives22. inti figgis-vizueta: the ability to grow
inti figgis-vizueta in conversation with Frank J. Oteri
June 15, 2023, 2:00 PM via Zoom
Transcribed by Michelle HrominFrank J. Oteri: Thank you so much for taking time to speak to me for this SoundLives podcast It’s so exciting and inspirational to me that there have been all these performances of your music happening; it’s been particularly gratifying because most of us spent the last three years locked in our homes and the idea that there are all these live performances again all over the world of your music is particularly exciting.
inti figgis-vizueta: Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, so, so happy to be here and yeah, it’s been a wild few years, especially this kind of remote mode of making music and building a lot of these relationships. Then this past year and this year have been really kind of the fulfillment and also actually putting what people are in real life to faces on a computer, which has been really gratifying and also hectic. But I’m so happy to be able to talk to you today.
FJO: What’s amazing to me is so many people during the pandemic were in the doldrums and they couldn’t do anything and they really felt emotionally paralyzed by it. It was a harrowing experience. I’m grateful that you took the time during the three years to write so much music. I’m looking through your catalog and I did an informal tally. It looks like you composed over two dozen pieces since the pandemic. That’s a lot of music.
ifv: When you’re sitting around and you have a lot of thoughts and emotions, it’s helpful to have an outlet and also have an outlet that is collaborative and dialogue-based with performers. A lot of these pieces formed out of a mutual desire from me and from a lot of other musicians to connect in the ways in which we were kind of missing out and how these relationships naturally form in concerts or in all the other places that our field talks about and engages and feels and makes plans for future music. So I feel like with that kind of energy and desire, that ended up pushing forward all these different projects and I think we were all kind of in a mode of being, not quite knowing what the future was going to be and wanting to do our best with what we had. I saw that in so many different areas. Like Nadia Sirota’s Living Music podcast, when we had nothing else going on, that weekly check-in of all these people who we normally saw, there was a real kind of sense of community and presence. There’s also this group Open Improvisations on Facebook. We would have all these little 10-minute slots and you would meet all these people doing all these wild things in their own environments. from playing solo music to, as our technology started to catch up, playing duets from different places, to then people being able to engage music in their own backyard. I remember one really cool performance of someone playing a canoe with various implements. I met a lot of people who I think I would have maybe met otherwise, but it didn’t feel like those relationships stopped forming. The kind of interest in making music together didn’t stop either. So I was really happy to be able to write so much in the pandemic and to now finally meet the people I was writing for, which has been the last year.
FJO: Now I really want to hear this piece for canoe. Have those open improv sessions been archived anywhere? Are they still available for people to listen to?
ifv: It was a Facebook group and all of them were done as live streams within the group, so I think there’s this backlog of like hundreds of videos where everyone would do their individual little 10 minute set. They would end right on 10 minutes and then you would get another notification that a Facebook Live started and so then you would click into that, you would see all the same people and the sidebar chat kept on going.
Frank J. Oteri: Yeah. Wow, I love it. I guess I have to join the group. Hopefully they’re still letting people in. And I can raid those archives and go straight to the canoe. I want to hear other things, too, but the canoe is intriguing. But to bring it back to your music. These pieces that you wrote during this time, it’s all over the map. There are solo piano pieces, there were percussion ensemble pieces, but there are full orchestra pieces, and then of course something that probably makes the most sense during this very uncertain era of ours, pieces for variable instrumentation, pieces that are more open-ended. It’s wonderful that there is now this growing repertoire, not just by you, but by a lot of composers, that have flexible instrumentation. You’ve written for all these different combinations, but there are certain things that keep recurring. You seem to have a particular affinity for string quartet and for percussion. They’re almost polar opposites.
ifv: I don’t know if I would say that. [Laughs] I appreciate you noticing these patterns. One of the things that comes up for me is that I write for individuals a lot or I write for groups and it’s really about groups approaching me and for things like string quartets or percussion ensembles, quartets, whatever, I do feel like there’s a certain level of a kind of shared musicality, a shared sense of tone and timbre and attack and all of these things that contribute to a group mentality of how to kind of play with and affect texture in like all of their kind of individual ways. The psychology of string quartets is some of my favorite material in some ways to encounter with different groups that I’m writing for, kind of figuring out what feels good under their hands, what feels good, what sounds they kind of lean into. But also what kind of interactivity happens within the ensemble. Who is cueing? Is the ensemble a first violin forward ensemble, or is it a cello forward ensemble? Does that affect all the ways in which sound can be made? And especially for the kind of music that I write, which is really in some ways trying to hold a mirror to ensembles and their own kinds of musical tendencies. Those particularities and peculiarities become the foregrounded texture and interaction that’s happening in a lot of my music and so I feel like for string quartets, there’s a really specific and rich history there that many quartets share, but that all of them specialize in different ways. And then I feel like for percussion ensemble, there’s a way of thinking about interactivity and togetherness. In the percussionist’s mindset, there’s also this curiosity and kind of improvisatory spirit that comes with even the selection of one’s instrument, so the selection of one’s table or setup or mallets, it’s all about this kind of tasting idea. Maybe I’m showing my barista roots, but I love the idea of having something appear in one way, tasting it, adjusting a little bit, having it appear again, shifting out of the parameter. So I feel like that kind of engagement with music is shared between the two ensembles, just in fairly different contexts, because the percussion ensemble is such a new invention and the quartet is so old. I feel like they’re, if not siblings, at least cousins, maybe.
FJO: I love the barista metaphor. I guess the reason I was thinking in terms of opposites is the whole ideal for string quartets is that you have these four people and they’re supposed to sound as one. They’re the same family of instruments across this wide range. The only thing that’s really parallel in Western music is the saxophone quartet, where you have the same family of instruments across the range. But percussion is completely open-ended. It could be any instrument. So, it’s not about homogenous sound. It’s very much about heterogeneous sound and also, the string quartet, you picture them. Yeah, there are some groups that stand up. It’s always harder for the cellist to do so. But they’re mostly seated, and it’s a very formal thing. Whereas with percussion, there’s really an element of choreography also. They’ve got to move around in order to make it work. So that’s why they’re on the surface, very different.
ifv: I think of the piece by John Luther Adams for four bass drums [Qilyaun]; it feels like that homogeneity is also something that folks are looking for and grasping for a little bit with percussion. I know for me the idea of a shared score is extremely important because it feels like we’re all reading from the same thing and therefore are able to make decisions from the same kind of mutual gaze or perspective or kind of source. The idea of a kind of sharedness of the quality of the sound itself with some variation is also an exciting kind of parallel back and forth. I also think of string quartets where the homogeneity is less foregrounded and it’s more about the viscerality and virtuosity of each voice Is it four voices coming together as one or are we trying to get as close as possible or as one as possible, I guess we could think about intonation, too.
FJO: Right and another thing that ties them together is the tactile quality, the very physical process. Obviously, no matter what instrument you play, it’s a physical act–playing a wind instrument, singing, although you don’t see the instrument that’s inside you. But we think of all those instruments, singing and wind instruments being controlled by breath, whereas strings and percussion are controlled by touch. Obviously, you’re also fingering a wind instrument, but your breath shapes the phrase, whereas your touch is exclusively shaping phrases both for strings and percussion, which makes me wonder in terms of you growing up and your exposure to music, did you play a stringed instrument? Where did this affinity for this kind of tactile way of making sound come from?
ifv: I think it came from a few places. There were times that it got me into trouble. I kept being given drums in elementary school as part of our music lesson and then they would take them away pretty quickly because I wouldn’t be doing what was being tasked of me. I would just be trying to hear all the different sounds on the drum and stuff like that. So there was this sense for me that exploration was always more interesting to learn than a set thing that I could choreograph with other people and so it didn’t make me super popular in my group music classes, but it did kind of stick with me as I was growing up in DC. There was just this real sense that music making was a kind of community activity, and the spaces that I would make it the most would be Malcolm X Park on 16th Street. They had a drum circle that was Caribbean-led, but it had all these different cultures coming together, West African drumming as well. There were also Capoeiristas that would come and dance along to the stuff. So there’s a kind of cultural and musical intermixing that I grew up with a lot and I remember there was a group in town that my mom knew really well and I don’t know, I was five, and they would let me play with them on stage for a song and so I think there was a sense of a kind of percussive childhood a little bit for me and the other part of that was this kind of guitar-oriented culture that sprung up around a lot of parties in the Latin American communities that I was part of. I never learned how to play that well, but I did have a kind of deep love of the instrument and honestly, when I shifted from noodling around on guitar to kind of properly playing mandolin, which I studied in school, to now starting to learn viola. I think a lot better in fifths than in fourths. The music program at the high school I went to wasn’t great. We watched Amadeus like maybe three times a week out of this class. So it was a very chill class. I really didn’t do much. I learned the note names. I learned about Mozart maybe, depending on how we feel about that movie. I was kind of an unfocused child. I would try out each medium and not commit that much time and just feel out what the connections were for me. Another place called the Sitar Center where my mom taught dance, when she was teaching her classes, they would just let me into the piano room or the music room and I would just like middle around for hours. It was very kind unfocused and then I started formally studying in college.
FJO: Composition?
ifv: Yeah, composition, but also an applied music requirement so that was this kind of Bach and Bartók on mandolin kind of stuff.
FJO: Well, it’s great that you brought up other cultures, because I was going to go there a little bit later, and specifically to that really brilliant essay you wrote called “Finding Tradition in New Music,” for I Care if You Listen, which I think is a really important essay because of how you struck what I thought was a really rational and commonsensical balance between the necessity of cultural sensitivity when approaching other cultures, but also the fact that everyone has the right to engage with the entire world of sound and that gatekeeping is a very problematic thing. So I think you struck the right balance in there and I’m reminded, I kind of want to correct us both earlier when we said string quartets are really old and percussion quartets are really young. There are percussion quartets going back millennia in other parts of the world, in West Africa, in so many Native American traditions, drum circles and whatnot. We talk about how so-called contemporary classical music is somehow derived from European classical music. Of course, now in the 21st century, it’s a response to all of the world’s traditions, and people all over the world make music that fits this rubric as yet to be defined and I think it’s great that it’s not defined, because as soon as you define something, you limit what it is. But one thing that’s problematic, is this notion that there’s one right way to play a piece. I see it with performers. I see it with composers. They’ll rehearse the piece, they’ll get the performance, it’s a good performance, they get a recording, okay, move on to the next one, never play it again. The composer’s like, I’m never interested in another performance, that’s it, goodbye, on to the next thing. Whereas in classical music, you know, 50 different pianists playing Chopin or 50 different interpretations, and there’s no right and wrong and you get excited about hearing what somebody else brings to it. I bring this all up because what I love about your music is the fact that interpreters have some agency in it and that it’s not, “Oh, these are my notes, you must follow my rules.” That it’s this thing where people feel part of it. And I would dare say that’s part of why all these performers are playing your music, because they feel like they could be part of it.
ifv: One hundred percent! I think you’re touching on one of the core tenets of what I write and how I write it, and honestly the thread that runs through the music. Sometimes I’ll look back at how many pieces and how varied they are and how many circumstances they exist in and some of them are really limited and some of them are really wide. But I feel like the thread is this sense of creating a piece that can be invested in and that where that investment can continue to transform over time and that investment can be affected by the world and your relationships and what you learn over time. So it’s kind of ability to grow. And so I see them as vessels, but I also see them as plants, that we’re able to continue to revisit them and see how they’ve changed. I’ll hear people come back and play something that I haven’t heard in years. I thought I had a stable sense of that piece in my mind and suddenly someone just blows me away with a completely different place that they go with it. And to me, that has to feel really exciting because the idea that like, we’re just writing something to exist in one form and then it just, you know, like time passes, just stops moving–it’s very strange. The functionality of the thing that I’m making is its continual ability to be brought into the present and brought into the context and the musicianship and the set of musical skills and backgrounds and traditions that individual performers and groups are part of and letting that affect the music. I think in some ways I’m pretty hesitant. In some ways, you know, I kind of am on either side of this line of trying to provide no recordings so that people can’t reference stuff. Trying to provide a first recording so people can reference just the first iteration and then putting something like five recordings of the same piece on the internet and I think I’ve done each one and feel differently about each, you know, how each kind of affects people. I do think in some ways there is this kind of morality that comes out of a kind of a writing practice where there isn’t an obvious answer as to how to create it in the perfect way and that’s an anxiety that a lot of performers, especially in the Western classical music tradition and conservatory trained performers, have deep inside them, that if they don’t know how to sound good along the parameters that I’m giving, then, you know, then there’s a paralysis there. There’s a kind of fear that comes in. It’s not something to be annoyed at or frustrated by. It’s just the reality of it, that the training doesn’t totally engage us. The reason that the work exists is that it’s in some ways trying to kind of push at the notion that there has to be a separation between an interpretive artistry and a creative artistry, when you’re able to invest yourself in a piece alongside other people. We can talk about the dynamic of a solo piece versus an ensemble piece or a flexible instrumentation piece. But when there’s this kind of mutual investment that everyone has, then suddenly we can get past this the sense the score is something to be achieved versus the score is a tool to create really beautiful music in whatever that feels like for the people who are in the room.
FJO: Or to get back to your barista metaphor earlier to bring food and drink into it, the score is a recipe.
ifv: Yes.
FJO: It’s not the meal, right?
ifv: Right, I know.
FJO: The performance is the meal.
ifv: Totally. I come across that philosophy that the music is the notation and I think it’s a funny back and forth with me sometimes where the way that I use notation is one of the aspects that people kind of foreground when they speak about what I do. But the notation in some ways is kind of this red herring a little bit. It pushes against the notion of a regularity of interpretation and then that first step lets us get to this much more expansive set of possibilities.
FJO: Well, what’s interesting about the notation is that the only people who see it, except people who are wandering around on the internet and see pages here and there, are the people who are playing the music. The general audience who comes to hear the performance doesn’t see the score. It’s not for them. To get back, though, to what you were saying about your different approaches with different pieces, I was going to bring this up, on your SoundCloud page, you offer multiple interpretations. That’s wonderful. Because it automatically says, there’s no right, there’s no wrong, there are multiple rights. I If you gave somebody one performance of something to say this is what it is, they’re going to try to imitate that, which is not what you want. And so if you give them five different ones, they can’t do them all, so they’re going to come up with the sixth one. Then, of course, if there’s no interpretation, you either get bewilderment or you get enlightenment, right? You get, you get, oh, I found this, you know, this other, this other path. It’s interesting to me to hear you compare your works to plants. It makes sense then that you’d have a piece called Branching Patterns. The piece for Kronos. I’ve looked at the score. it’s a very unusual score. Every musician gets the same thing. They get what everyone’s doing but it’s a very atypical string quartet score so I’m wondering how that evolved, how that worked in the rehearsal process, how the members of Kronos navigated that.
ifv: I met Kronos over the internet during the pandemic as well. I think when I talked to David, I think it was a profoundly difficult time for him because he has such a heavy performance routine and such a kind of outward personality that I think that distance made him turn to the internet in a lot of ways. We ended up connecting. He was really astounded by this piece that I did with Andrew Yee called Music for Transitions that we did pretty early in the pandemic, which kind of came out of multiple years of having different iterations of a piece that never got played. I’m never kind of precious about the past. I’m always like, what can I make right now? and so that ended up being this piece and it was for four, four cellos that were layered, so four Andrews. And it was this really beautiful kind of trippy kind of video with these sectioned off layers of Andrew vertical slices. As the piece goes on, you see a body have these moments of alignment, but otherwise be in this kind of constant transformation. David was really, really happy with that, with that recording and ended up featuring it on their digital Kronos Festival in 2021. Then I got another email, which was basically like, “Hey, we have this 50 for the Future project. We have one opening. Would you be interested in doing this? Super short timeline. Here’s all the things.” And I was like, heck yes, like, absolutely. I’m here for it. This was a dream. I remember hearing about this project and being like, “God, I wish I could do that, but I’m never going to be in this thing.” So having this kind of moment of being like, so do you want to? And I was like, absolutely and so it was kind of a short turnaround and it ended up being tacked on to the end of this two-year residency slash education program that I did with Jack Quartet called the Jack Studio Program. So I was already deep inside string quartet land and was given this opportunity. In terms of the score layout, the approach to it, the notation, it kind of all refers back to this collaboration and festival called Taproot at UC Davis that I did in early 2020. So this is January 2020, and I did it with the Spectral Quartet, they kind of got applications and they picked mine and I ended up writing a new piece for them. The first version of that piece was super complicated. It was very abstract. It’s all about these like giant cycles. I nested all these different things inside them. But it wasn’t quite the right thing and when things don’t fit, then I just put it down and make the next thing and see if I learned something from how something didn’t fit and so I ended up kind of going from this really complicated score to this very simple score of a single stave that everyone was reading from and then trying to make them as ghostly and strange as possible, putting them as high as possible, as low as possible, just really kind of painting with them at the edges. I had this idea of when we start with the edges, it kind of builds a frame and everything that comes afterward is affected by that frame and so that approach I kind of brought to this Kronos piece because I was really actually excited by the focus on youth string quartets and this idea of a kind of entry point for young string quartets to play contemporary music and to play music by people who are living and I went through all of the other pieces that were up, because this project had been going on for five years and there was a gamut of pieces. There were ones that were so hard. Maybe a graduate string quartet could do it, with a lot of practice. To like very beautiful and simple and quite lyrical pieces with a 16th note pulse or something. So to me this is like this giant spectrum and I was trying to figure out where I wanted to be on that and what did I want to in some ways kind of teach about either how to play my own music or how to approach music that involves things like choice, and choice that’s kind of outside of the idea of an aleatory that’s just tied to time, or just tied to repetition. Like, how can we create choice-making that’s about painting as lightly or as heavily as possible and have that be an expressive element of the piece and so that was kind of my approach to that piece as well. Finally, knowing that I was writing it for them, I wanted there to be a lot of solo moments and so I wrote in now it goes to solo cello, now we have David’s solo violin part coming out of that, and now everyone’s joining. So it’s just like this like really big dance to me. How it happens over time can be determined by the ensemble. There’s these natural inclinations of how the ensemble relates to one another that fills in and eventually becomes the kind of glue in everything.
FJO: This material is available for all these young quartets. Hopefully there’ll be 50 different young quartets around the world that take up this piece. So there’ll be many, many different versions of what this piece can be. You’d mentioned Attacca. Another piece of yours that I love is Imago, very different in some ways. I’ve not seen the score for Imago, I wonder how open ended is that compared to Branching Patterns
ifv: It’s different. Imago was commissioned by the Philips Collection and it was in response to artworks that I was able to select. So I selected this piece Untitled which is this giant Mylar drawing by Lynn Myers and then this giant sculpture, which is, I think, glass beads and wire. I wasn’t able to see them while I was writing the piece. So there was an element of reaching out to this thing that I can’t touch that I think entered the notation a little bit because the piece is quite a bit about shared gesture or the building of a texture over repeated figures and to me, it was about reaching out in these ways to feel the dimensionality of something that I can only engage on a screen and so the notation for that piece was fairly intuitive. I trust them a lot as interpreters. I think that I probably could have gotten away with a lot less than I put on the page, but I put a lot on the page, mostly to give them a lot. There was this opening section all about these different combinations of gestures. I was noticing that when I was writing string music and I would say, okay, turbulent or short or staccato or pointillistic, that it would often only mean that they were doing one kind of figure, Like ricochet. A texture that I feel has the capacity to grow and be absolutely spectacular, in some ways is constrained by my lack of giving other options. Asking people to change over time is difficult. So in this piece, I gave a lot of ways that I wanted gestures to be combined. So for example, like having a ricochet down bow, but then always being followed by an accelerating lifting up bow. The combination of those gestures then becomes almost like a more dense thread that is then being played with. To me, it was about giving more specific ways of playing as a group that then they could really grow off of. The second movement is one of my favorites. Everyone is doing this up, up, down, or down, down, up, all the way up, long note, pause. And they’re doing it all together, and they’re moving from the same string, and they’re opening the strings downward. And then it ends with the violin playing the E string that they hadn’t played yet. It was really beautiful. If we’re speaking about choreography, that’s how I felt about constructing that section. With some directions like that, they could make something really spectacular. There was a level of trust that had come out of working with Andrew so much before, but then also knowing the Attacca folks from different places.
FJO: Interesting, interesting. I’m going to go back and listen to it with another whole mindset now, the choreographic mindset.
FJO: You brought up Music for Transitions. I’m very glad that you sent me that recording from Red Cat just a few hours ago, because one of the places I was going to go with you, now we’re going to go to a different place instead, is I was looking through all this stuff and you’ve written for so many different forces, the string quartets, the orchestra, the solo piano, but where’s all the vocal music? There’s no vocal music. I’m looking at this thing and it’s an amazing string sextet. And then there’s this other person on stage. Who’s that? And then all of a sudden, they’re singing. Now, if you just had audio, you wouldn’t know at all because you wouldn’t know that person’s on stage and would kind of come out of nowhere. I was reminded, actually, of Arnold Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, where in the final movements, there’s suddenly a soprano singing, “I hear the sound of other planets,” because you’re taken to this other place and then the voice goes away. The other piece that it called to mind to me is the John Cage piece, Four Walls, which is this piano piece. It’s an hour-long; halfway through it, there’s an unaccompanied vocal soprano, and then that goes away and then it goes back to being a keyboard piece. I thought, this is so brilliant. This is such an interesting idea.
ifv: Totally, yeah. So vocal music is the place where I’m actually doing a lot of exploring this year. My first vocal music was choral and it was for this vocal ensemble in Boston when I was doing my year of a master’s there and it was an LGBT choir. It had both classically trained and non-classically trained musicians as well as folks that were going through a myriad of physical things and transitioning themselves. So that was actually some of my first music where it was music that was based on breath. I don’t think I’d use the word algorithmic, but I was doing mathematical things to it, having a long thread of things and starting to cut in patterns and all that kind of fun stuff that you do. I really enjoyed working with that ensemble and we ended up doing two pieces together. I left Boston and this was when I didn’t really know that many people. I was just kind of coming into the scene. A lot of the ways that I started to first send out my music was through calls for scores and all of my instrumental music got picked up really, really quickly, and no one wanted to touch the choral vocal music. Probably because it was using techniques and ways of orienting them that just was outside the practice and I’ve come to now know that there’s an entire industry based on music that’s being written in a certain way for this ensemble. So I’m not surprised now. But I was writing this music, having been very, very deeply affected by Roomful of Teeth’s first album when I was working in a music library at my undergraduate institute and coming across this disc and putting it on and being like, holy crap. So I think I was drawing from techniques and approaches into a world that wasn’t quite for it at that moment. And so I took a big step back from that part of writing. I went much more into the instrumental place. Part of it too is that there I felt like instrumentalists were down to clown a little bit, where I just didn’t always feel that with vocal ensembles. Then this year and last year has been this kind of a big resurgence of that in my music and in some ways, it’s teaching me things all over again, which has been really, really fun. I remember talking to Andrew; I was like, “Bass lines! I didn’t remember how good they were.” I did my figured bass in school, and just felt like it was pretty perfunctory when I was doing chorales and all this stuff. Now I really like bass and I think that that’s kind of come out of this stuff as well. So for the Music for Transitions concert, I ended up inviting Ming-Jo Chen, who was the vocalist. We had worked together at Mass MoCA, getting together to play and make some sounds.
FJO: It’s a gorgeous piece. It’s very expansive, it’s wonderful. Where I thought this might go, and it didn’t is there are people who write really amazing music that doesn’t foreground a pre-existing text, or they do different things with vocal music. Obviously, the person who immediately comes to mind is Meredith Monk, who rarely uses actual syntactical language, uses syllables and uses vocables and does extraordinary things and has created her own language through that. [But with most] vocal music, there’s this other element, which you have to deal with. Do you want it to be understood? And if you don’t want it to be understood, why are you using it? And what is the text you’re using? There are sensitivities. You mentioned the choral community, maybe the text you want to set might be a little controversial, and a group isn’t going to want to sing that. So it can go to those places as well. So I’m wondering, in that whole area of vocal music, the idea that an instrumental piece can be this abstract thing, it can mean whatever the listener wants it to mean. Obviously, you give it a title and it sends people thinking in a certain direction, but not the way a vocal piece does.
ifv: When I think of solos in an instrumental context, it feels like an expression of virtuosity often. In some ways, I think some of the most special moments that I can think of is when an orchestration is really full and then we get just a single voice playing something. But I try to avoid engaging the same kinds of emotional landmarks that are within a kind of classical frame, the idea of a cadential structure or of an accelerating harmonic rhythm or this kind of high romantic solo. There were things in school that I just didn’t mesh with that much and in some ways, I realized that the way that I craft harmony and all these things, it’s not so foregrounded in what I do in most of my instrumental music. In working with Roomful, there has been this moment where I’m like, single voice is as powerful and as expressive and as capable of holding us as 8 voices. There’s this stranger relationship between expressivity and emotionality that can happen with the meeting of just two sounds. Whereas in instrumental music, I often think of this as part of a larger arc. Here I get to kind of luxuriate a little bit in the quality of two people singing together, actually using all of the complexities of a word to push forward meaning. But to me it’s not narrative meaning, and that’s what I was afraid of, that when I had to engage language, I had to be tied to a narrative, instead of being tied to the complexities of thinking about something like love, or lots of other things. For the Roomful piece, I ended up selecting a text by Emily Dickinson called “I Have No Life But This.” It was one of these letter poems, so has all these little extra words. There’s all this text that didn’t make it into the poem. So also the context around the creation of the poem meant that I was drawing from all of this extant material that she had made and that we have a record of. So there’s one word, withheld, and to me, it engages this idea of the kind of love that she’s expressing, the idea of material around the eventual poem that didn’t make it in, and then also it has this very kind of social and musical meaning when it’s placed within the space. That is such a powerful nugget To me, the power of it was amazing and really beautiful.
FJO: So when is the world going to get to hear this piece?
ifv: We did a work-in-progress residency at Baryshnikov in April and we ended up doing a 15-minute version of the piece. It’s in collaboration with this animator, Rose Bond, who does these incredible hand-drawn animations. We ended up making it so that it was very cue-based on both ends. There was a mutual affection between the decisions of the ensemble and Rose, who was controlling the timing and motion of the animation. We have plans to expand it to a 30-minute piece, and that should be next year or two. But it’s been one of the nicest and longest processes of collaboration that I’ve been able to have with an ensemble. I think for a lot of instrumental pieces, it’s very much like I’m expected to do like a year and a half of back work and then we put it together in like three days or something. For the way that I write, it’s sometimes in friction with the logistics of rehearsal.
FJO: I can’t wait to hear the entire piece.
FJO: I want to hit a few more areas before we completely run out of time. You have this fascinating piece where you have several pieces that are different pieces that play simultaneously: Openwork, knotted object / Trellis in bloom / lightning ache I’m curious about how that works. That’s taking the idea of there’s no right or wrong even further, that there’s like so many different ways to approach this body of work.
ifv: That piece was a big leap for me, actually. It was commissioned by National Sawdust as part of the Hildegard competition. I ended up being selected as one of the winners in late 2018, early 2019. That was a month after I moved to New York and that has very much shaped my time here and through that program, I was able to do all these artist residencies. Meredith Monk actually came through and we did a three hour workshop. I don’t think I ever would have met her or been able to interact in that way. Part of writing the piece was at that point, I felt like I needed to ask permission a lot, are you okay going somewhere with me? The way I’m going to present this and the process of writing it and the iterations are going to be different because it’s not about you have a full score and all you’re doing is adding dynamics and changing the dovetail of the cutoff. It’s always a radical reshuffling of the materials into something different that I hope will create a different alchemy for things to happen. So for this piece I ended up writing it in these two big chunks, which was this very kind of orchestrated, very durational piece and that was lightning ache. That was all about the kind of inflections and ways of using limited material to paint with. The piece was referencing like a lot of music that I really, really loved. Like especially Haas’ Second String Quartet was big on my mind at that moment. And Donnacha Dennehy’s use of a kind of back and forth between equal temperament and just intonation. I felt that can happen back and forth, within a larger frame, and the back and forth is part of the inflection of an individual instrument instead of the changing of the entire harmonic frame that everyone’s playing. This was also when I was playing with notation a lot. As I learned new notation or invented new notation, I was able to get closer to what I wanted. So that piece is much more about having very limited pitch material and very limited rhythms, they’re just kind of very rounded shapes. Part of what I was thinking too was how do you give permission for disalignment in an ensemble context? Because it often feels very wrong to people. What I wanted was this sense that it was six performers all trailing in their own worlds but in almost like similar spirals to the world. Then Trellis in bloom was this way of organizing all of it. It has these individual little gestures and those can be repeated and so it’s also about the length of repetition. All this stuff was in the psychology of the notation but then it has this kind of framework for moving through all three pieces with some suggested timings for how long you stay in each and then everyone starts consecutively. So everyone has a different local time.
FJO: Wow. Now have they ever been done separately? Or would that be wrong? Is the idea that they exist together?
ifv: I think I came to that idea. Part of it was there’s a mentorship factor in this. I remember talking to Du Yun and I was like, I want it to be this, but I also want it to be this. Do I have to pick one? and she was like, no, just put them together and I was like, okay, cool. I’ll figure that out. So I think for me, all of them are incomplete pieces and they were completed by becoming a triptych; they became one.
FJO: Obviously, It’s a very unusual idea, but of course, you know, the 21st century, nothing’s without precedent. John Cage had this idea that you could play two of his pieces at the same time if you wanted to. You could perform Aria and have Fontana Mix in the background, but those pieces are separate. There’s something else when they come together but this is really a different idea, you’re getting a different kind of piece with this idea of these different things not aligning and that’s part of the listening experience. It isn’t about the idea that all things happen in time and that you choose.
ifv: I studied with Felipe Lara for a bit and he was very encouraging of this sense of simultaneous pieces going on and I remember that’s where I got some of this inspiration as well, but I have been a little bit hesitant to do that with pieces, not these three, but other ones that I’ve constructed and I know work together. Part of it is that I haven’t quite had the opportunity to engage a kind of performer-heavy community. I think this would have to happen at a school, to be honest. Openwork is in this strange place of being both written for a piano ensemble and having this idea that you can add as many instruments as you want. I want it to be this, but then it’s this. Having the opportunity since that premiere to hear it in these different ways is interesting to me. With this piece and with all of my music, sometimes I’ll hear someone just riffing on the same thing and I’m like, how are you going to get out of the situation you’ve placed yourself in where you’re now in this single moment or single space? So part of the piece and what it was trying to give was this option to just shift dimensions almost. Like if you’re tired of what you’re doing and you’re in this place, we’re in open work and you’ve been there for 10 seconds, just snap over to the next thing. It was trying to promote a level of agency of what material and in what context you were playing that material versus trying to fulfill a kind of structural perfection of it or even a conceptual perception or perfection of it. It was trying to be very practical but also asking something that’s very abstract and of which there’s no perfect answer.
FJO: Fantastic. The last thing I want to talk about to touch on, because it’s one of my favorite pieces of yours, taking it to another opposite that’s very much about synchronicity and being in sync and being together, is to give you form and breath, which is probably not only one of my favorite pieces of yours, but a lot of people’s because it’s been done a lot. It’s been done by different groups and it’s very exciting, very dynamic, but a very different aesthetic and performance than what we’ve been talking about for the last few minutes.
ifv: There was a time pretty early where anytime anyone reached out, I just put everything into the piece that was being asked for and this is one of those where I was asked for a percussion trio that could travel and it became this sense of an instrument that you can make. So you can find things and bring it together. I was inspired by a piece by David Lang called Anvil Chorus. It’s for a solo performer and it has all these different kinds of metal that the performer selects. So the sense of what the piece is changes based on the quality of what the people find. I had a really enjoyable time thinking about what kinds of materials I wanted and how I wanted to ask people to define them, to think about them and then eventually for me when I was writing it, how to create counterpoint out of timbre instead of out of pitch. So I was thinking about the instruments themselves, this idea of construction, of engaging the creative part of a percussionist’s instrument building and choreography building. Then I was thinking about this concept of squishing and expanding time a little bit so the whole piece is in 6/8 and the variations, the kind of polyrhythms that we get out of individual performers and then eventually everyone is this idea of squishing seven beats into six, or eight beats into six, or four beats into six. It isn’t a regular occurrence, but there is the idea that you’re building at least a pattern with it. With string players, I hear them think about intonation a lot. With percussion ensembles, I hear about timing a lot, and I hear about unison and groove and pattern and beat. I wanted to have a way in which each of the performers was able to play against this regularity in whatever way that they wanted and in a free kind of pattern with the instruments that they had. I wanted to let through a little bit the potential for virtuosity from individual performers. Because it seemed like that could be a cool and exciting part of it. I’m always thinking about this concerto-y vibe of like individual and group and stuff and in some ways I try and avoid the kind of romantic individual standing against the group strongly, but in this piece I felt like because of the shared nature of the timbres of the instruments that there was a way in which it would be more like a flourish of the group instead of the individual.
FJO: This is so interesting because one of the pieces you’re writing now is a piano concerto, which is kind of the ultimate romantic individual versus the society, this big grand piano smack in the center of the stage and you’re seeing one person fighting against the orchestra. So in this piece for Conrad Tao, are you going to be resisting the tradition of Tchaikovsky and Brahms?
ifv: I love the Tchaikovsky concertos but yeah, I think in some ways that piece is funny. I’m not that worried about it because of who I’m writing for. I think with Conrad, we’ve been friends for a few years now and we really connected over the pandemic and have a shared sense of the potential of spontaneity and improvisation in these larger contexts. In some ways, I think, you know, through the concertos that I’ve done in the last couple years, you know, the cello concerto for Jay Campbell and the LA Phil to the string quartet concerto for Attacca and ACO, American Composers Orchestra, there has been this sense of ambassadorship that kind of occurs from these very specialized players with a larger ensemble. Both of those pieces were for smaller orchestras and this is for a large one. I am strategizing about what engaging creativity and openness means in a context where people want to be together. The philosophy of all of this exists at the mercy in some ways of who’s playing it, because it’s music that requires a level of sympathy to go along with me, to agree to my rules and my ideas. And so in this piece, I think I’m trying to figure out how to allow or to set up Conrad to be able to allow the kind of internal listening that I feel like he does in his playing and in his improvising and allow that to affect the way in which the orchestra is playing. For the most part my pieces are workshops in some ways. This kind of collective responsibility around continuing a sound makes it so that there’s purpose in adding sound in an individual not knowing that they need to play and choosing to play, and that comes from the listening of being inside that group and so I think that’s where I’m trying to lean. But in some ways that also requires a level of sympathy and a level of listening. How this occurs in the notation and in the rehearsal practice and in how I construct the cue system for Matias Pinscher, I think it’s all going to be something that it’s almost like a loose suit and then we fit it over the rehearsal.
FJO: Can’t wait to hear it and see it, thank you. Thank you, inti. This has been an extraordinary conversation. Thank you for the generosity of your time and ideas and just keep writing music, keep doing this stuff, this is fantastic.
ifv: Absolutely, absolutely Thank you so much, Frank.