Tag: composer-performer

Tony Conrad (1940-2016): Writing “Minor” History

Posted on April 26, 2016 by Patrick Nickleson - Headlines, Memorials

I only met Tony Conrad twice—once after a performance at Issue Project Room in September 2014, and again, almost exactly a year later, at his apartment in Buffalo in August 2015. The second time I had come to interview him as part of my dissertation research on authorship in early minimalism. He was—as those who knew him much better have consistently portrayed him—funny, painfully intelligent, generous with his time (we spent about eight hours together), respectful of those with whom he has worked over the years, and impatient with praise or questions that read too far into his own career and ideas.

In his book Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts After Cage, art historian Branden Joseph argued for Conrad as someone too complex, heterogeneous, and self-critical in his work to allow for the formation of a heroic “major” narrative. Joseph’s brilliant book presents an artist who aimed always to work at the margins, and in response to whom a straightforward “life and works” biography would do a great disservice. Nevertheless, the major narrative has appeared: particularly in obituaries, it leaps across a number of media, always carefully noting his problematization of authorship. But still, we can now trace a line that connects The Theatre of Eternal Music to early films like the Flicker and Straight and Narrow, before diverting to Germany to discuss his album with Faust, the Yellow Movies, his 1980s work in public access television, and his 1990s return to recording. That this narrative leaves out important works is inevitable—this is the case in any posthumous overview of an artistic career.

As a musicologist, I’ve been consistently impressed by Tony’s work as a theorist and historian of music—the way he has created critical foundations for his own work, within the long history of Western art music, all the while undercutting and mocking those very conditions of possibility.

Still, across all of this outpouring of attention, a few roles have taken center stage: filmmaker, violinist, and teacher/collaborator. As someone who met him relatively recently, and spoke to him as a researcher, I would like to uphold some level of the “minor” status Joseph attributes to Conrad by leaving aside his films and music. As a musicologist, I’ve been consistently impressed by Tony’s work as a theorist and historian of music—the way he has created critical foundations for his own work, within the long history of Western art music, all the while undercutting and mocking those very conditions of possibility. The avant-garde lineage within which he articulated his work is one of both depth and contingency. It is revered and mocked simultaneously, with Conrad enjoying the spoils of the tradition while outlining its unspoken power structures (and offering guidance in how to topple them).

How did he do this? The answer is strewn across an entire career’s writings and interviews. Anyone reading along the last few weeks is surely now aware of the extensive liner notes from his 1997 Early Minimalism, including his infamous assertion that “history is like music—completely in the present.” In those essays, Conrad framed a polemical narrative of his work with La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, and John Cale in the original Theatre of Eternal Music as a deliberative and democratic collective rather than as a group formed, as historians like K. Robert Schwarz have written elsewhere, for the sole purpose of performing drones under Young. Perhaps most powerfully, Conrad ties his travels in the avant-garde to the Western canon in an entirely novel way, drawing on the influence of the 17th-century violinist-composer Heinrich Biber, whose music Tony claims he heard as organized according to timbre and tuning rather than harmony or melody.

Tony Conrad. (Photo by Bettina Herzner, courtesy of Greene Naftali Gallery.)

Similarly, as Jeremy Grimshaw has argued, with the earlier CD Slapping Pythagoras, Conrad criticized Young in the guise of Pythagoras for substituting “a Theology of Numbers for the pragmatics of counting.” He considers this a profoundly anti-democratic confiscation of political potential from regular people, and shows how this initial theft becomes the organizing principle of specialized Western music against the heterophonic principles of community music-making. The articulation of this argument is, as with everything Tony did, paradoxical, messy, even silly, as it shifts between first-person attack and a more “objective” historical voice. He seems to have developed some of these ideas in the less publicly available works to which scattered reference can be found online, such as “Inducting Lully” and “Roughing Up Rameau.” This series of projects—as much scholarly as artistic—articulated a relationship between Western art music, tuning, and power that is perhaps Tony’s central theoretical contribution. Most importantly, it has inspired generations of musicians and artists, not only introducing to them the mathematics of just intonation and tuning, but doing so in such a way that is attached to the critique of power in art music.

This mode of anti-authority historiography continued outside of writing: it existed equally in his archival releases of his own music and that of others. His small imprint Audio ArtKive provided a number of releases that were avant-garde and probably unsellable even by the exceptional standards of their parent label, Table of the Elements. Several of the pieces on the three-CD set New York in the 1960s—archival recordings made with John Cale and others from the circle around 56 Ludlow St. (Angus MacLise, Terry Jennings, among others)—show their effort to formulate a new music making that was neither sole-authored nor purely “improvisation” in the wake of what Conrad saw as the post-Cagean challenge. The recordings show, more than anything else available, the problem of marking a strong dividing line between, for example, The Theatre of Eternal Music and the Velvet Underground, or treating Young as an inherent influence on the latter, or placing those two groups as obvious examples of an “avant-garde” and a “popular” impulse towards similar ideas. Similarly, the three Jack Smith CDs are incredible documents of the interaction between those same musicians and the experimental film scene occurring in that same apartment. To shift the locus of historical writing—which has yet to happen, at least in musicological thought on the period—from Young’s apartment at 275 Church St. to Conrad, Cale, and Smith’s at 56 Ludlow reveals an entirely different relationship to performance, labor, time, and intermedial influence.

We can further expand Tony’s mode of historiography into his “writing” in public space. One of my favorite examples of his historical practice—which is also a political practice, and an artistic one—comes up in an interview he conducted by email in 1996 with Brian Duguid of EST Magazine. Asked about the times he picketed performances by Young in Buffalo in 1990, Conrad explained himself in this way:

But picketing—picketing for or against something, and handing out literature—these are conspicuously formal actions. They have to be understood as indirect communication. Yes, I am “in communication” with La Monte Young, of course, when I picket and he is there to perform his public action—but by clearly shaping my own action as “picketing,” even though there is only me there, I am making my action interpretable only as a public or political action, not as a private communication. What I’m trying to say is that both the message conveyed through my picketing, and the picketing itself, were not communications primarily intended for La Monte Young personally. They were communications which took place on the public level, which is the level of culture, of symbolic statement. These were symbolic or formal statements, which are as much a part of “Music” as this interview is—even though this interview is actually silent, and we aren’t even speaking out loud.

Conrad chose picketing to be in communication with the public sphere, rather than only with Young. He stood by his proclamations and found the appropriate means of circulating them during a period when, we can assume, several letters by lawyers may have changed hands. Around this time, Young attempted to get Conrad and Cale to sign contracts admitting that they were merely performers in what Young claimed were his (and only his) compositions for the Theatre of Eternal Music. By standing in the street, Conrad publicly articulated these protests as part of the history of this music. His mode of engaging and reinserting himself into the history of “early minimalism” (a phrase which he frequently noted was intended to be ridiculous) was by asserting a continuity between his formal actions, the sounds on Young’s tapes (still inaudible to most listeners, since Young refuses to release them), and the public memory and context for any of the sounds that might eventually become available—which happened ten years later with the Table of the Elements release of Day of Niagara. In this public articulation of his argument—a means of taking to the streets as a solitary, weird protester to make history—Tony was building off his work from around the same time in his public access project “Studio of the Streets.” This is yet another project which is likely to receive little attention in the near future, as it breaks with not only economies of art, but also modes of historicizing art. (For some interviews, photos, and writing around the project, see Doing the City, a program published by the 80WSE Gallery in New York.)

Listening to the crowd from his window, placing it in opposition to its filtered presentation for mass mediation, draws to attention the dissonance between history as it actually occurs and history as it is mediated for us through the memorialization of experts and specialists.

Perhaps my favorite historical record, though, in Tony Conrad’s long career, is from another Table of the Elements CD, The Bryant Park Moratorium (1969), that went entirely unnoticed among all of the roundups of his “best moments” in the news these last weeks. In 1969, Tony Conrad lived just off Bryant Park in New York City during the famous “Bryant Park Moratorium” aimed at demanding an end to the Vietnam War. While the protest is remembered today for the involvement of and speeches from prominent celebrities and politicians—Woody Allen, Mary Travers (of Peter, Paul and Mary), forgotten Broadway stars (“please sit down so people can see them” the producer introducing them yells), Dick Cavett, and so on—Conrad provides an entirely different mode of listening to the event. In place of the representatives, delegates, and stars that so frequently stand in both for regular people and for the importance of an event, Conrad takes a unique approach to presenting the tension at hand in media coverage of such democratic mobilizations. Conrad sat in his apartment with one microphone and tape machine pointed out his window at the crowds below, and another mic’ing his television set’s news coverage. In the Table of the Elements release from 2005, the two tracks are panned left and right, showing the stark tension between the noise of the crowd and the clear, singular speech of the television set, focused on representative individuals deemed able to speak for the crowd. What’s remarkable on the CD is how rarely the sound of the speakers at the podium are audible above the roar of the crowd. Amid the celebrities constantly interpellated from the crowd by the reporters, and the politicians speaking to the crowd through loudspeakers, one might expect to frequently hear the same sounds booming across the park and up to Conrad’s window. Instead, we hear rhythmic applause, percussion, shouting, street noise, always in stark contrast to the bland platitudes of politicians and actors. Only rarely does any event in the media coverage rise to the level of street-level attention.

While Conrad was only 28 at the time, the method of recording the moratorium clearly set a standard for his approach to many issues of history and representation throughout his career. Listening to the crowd from his window, placing it in opposition to its filtered presentation for mass mediation, draws to attention the dissonance between history as it actually occurs and history as it is mediated for us through the memorialization of experts and specialists. His entire approach as a historian, artist, and all-around trickster, seems to be: How do I supplement the count of people assumed responsible for this public action? For the sound of minimalism in the early 1960s? How do I remind popular memory that an event was messy, collaborative, collective, and noisy? Is there something that occurs comparable to a difference tone that can result from listening to a heterogeneous collision in the realms of history and politics?

Tony Conrad’s writing is an incredible model of thought for any composer or musicologist. Studying his work as a historian means not only dealing with facts and details about the life and works of an important musician; it means engaging in a dialog with a thoughtful writer and thinker himself, someone whose thought and writing provokes reflexivity in my own writing studies. As several people noted in a fascinating piece on NPR that drew on the comments of several important collaborators, Tony could not help but be a teacher—including of generous and critical music-historical practice.

Kate Soper: Real Communication

Posted on January 20, 2016 by Molly Sheridan - Conversations, Spotlight

Armed with a serious supply of Post-it notes, Kate Soper is working her way through Aristotle’s Metaphysics—not for the first time—with the aim of turning selections drawn from the classic into chamber music. It’s an exercise familiar to this composer/performer, who has made the setting of challenging or ambiguous text, spanning ancient philosophy to contemporary poetry, something of a calling card.

The space to study new ideas outside her area of expertise is one of the things she loves most about being a musician working in this way. “It gives you an excuse to deeply investigate anything,” Soper explains. “I’m always just trying to read and keep my mind and eyes open for something that I really want to explore further, and then I get to do that because I’m a composer.”

That commitment to open-minded study has led to the creation of illuminating works such as Voices from the Killing Jar, a song cycle inspired by fictional characters that resonated with Soper, and the theatrical work Here Be Sirens, which mixes original text penned by the composer and a range of other sources to explore the very human story of these mythological creatures.

Most recently, Soper has begun collating works that were originally created independently along with new settings under the heading of Ipsa Dixit (“she, herself, said it…”). The six-movement piece, of which Metaphysics will eventually be a part, plays explicitly with ideas about language. While the use of words in a piece of music adds a layer of meaning, that may not necessarily translate into clarity of communication and Soper is fascinated by that ambiguity—”the complexities of language and meaning and vocalizing and speech and how we can connect those, the interesting ways we can play with those intersections.”

Extended techniques in her vocal and instrumental writing, as well as integrated choreography and other dramatic elements, further work to memorably illuminate these ideas. But they can also push a musician beyond her comfort zone, which Soper sees as just par for the course as a performing artist. She recalls coming face to face with this reality in her late 20s. “I was feeling the need to follow this instinct to communicate and realizing that the risk was essentially that I was going to embarrass myself. I had to let go of that fear and take that risk or it wasn’t worth continuing to do what I was doing, which is writing music.”

Even with her anxieties set aside, she acknowledges that the conversation she can have with an audience is quite different from one-on-one communication. Still, she strives to foster meaningful shared human activity between herself and the people in the hall through her work, a connection that can feel quite direct due to her position as a vocalist using words and not standing behind an external instrument.

There’s also a compelling logistical advantage to writing work she can perform herself. Though she’s excited to have other artists present her pieces, she finds great benefit to writing for her own instrument and being able to monitor how things are going as the piece develops in rehearsal and performance firsthand.

Plus, as a composer, it’s a good way to push the performer into new territory with confidence. “I will do anything as a performer that I as a composer ask me to do.”

Erik Friedlander: Stories Without Words

Posted on April 22, 2015 by Molly Sheridan - Conversations, Spotlight

“It’s not your skill level, it’s how much you communicate,” cellist Erik Friedlander advises early in our conversation. “It’s how much you express that the audience really wants to hear. They come to hear you be real.”

Friedlander, however, is clearly not a musician lacking for chops. The years of training and gigging he did to establish himself in New York City’s music scene—largely on the downtown/avant-garde jazz side, though his active performance career has taken him all over the genre map—left him with a reputation as a go-to freelancer. And while he’s since honed his focus down more tightly to his own composer/performer work, it’s this underlying sonic curiosity and his ability to aurally convey deep emotional experience that colors the ongoing evolution of his work, both in solo and group contexts.

This week, Friedlander released a recording of Illuminations, his ten-part suite for solo cello, originally a commission by the Jewish Museum in New York City tied to an exhibit of ancient books they were hosting. Friedlander notes the echo of Bach in the piece’s construction and the obvious impact of the historic texts that inspired him. Yet while the filter of that history overlays its message, its musical language is modern.

Friedlander explains that he took away a particular image from this display of illuminated manuscripts which inspired his later thinking. “You just felt like you were in the presence of some incredible work, some incredible time being spent to carefully detail every letter,” he recalls. “I was interested in the content, but I was more interested in the labor—the exquisite time and effort that was taken into creating these beautiful books. I just imagined the life that was given to doing this job.”

Erik Friedlander’s home studio.

Friedlander’s Luis and Clark carbon fiber cello

His working process varies from project to project, though inspiration for much of his recent catalog can be tied to such personal life experiences or visual elements. A prime example, perhaps, is his album Block Ice & Propane (2007), which he performs live as “Taking Trips To America” with the accompaniment of projected images taken by his parents (his father is the admired American photographer Lee Friedlander) during their annual summer camping trips.

No matter the impetus or the eventual scoring method, at some point Friedlander says he always ends up at the cello while working out ideas “because that’s where I’m most comfortable.” And while adventurous when it comes to finding new sounds and ways to play his instrument, there’s also a complimentary caution to adding techniques. Friedlander says he was always self-conscious about using pedals in performance, for example, because they didn’t fit as fluidly into his work as he needed them to until recently. The development of his remarkable pizzicato technique went through a similar period of appraisal, which he speaks about in the video at the top of this post.

But his experiences in New York’s downtown music community helped him build a platform for the experimental ways of working he was seeking. “I finally fell into a scene where a string player could be doing world music, could be doing rock-inspired music, any kind of music, and this is what I was searching for. I was a cello player who was not entirely happy just playing the music that was given to me in orchestra or chamber groups. I mean, I liked all that stuff, but I had something different about me that needed to be explored, and this was the scene for that perfectly.”

It was a necessary addition to his more traditional training. “When you learn classically, you learn to develop a very strong inner censor who’s constantly berating you for what you’re doing wrong. I think all players, classical or otherwise, need to get a good gag on that person,” Friedlander recommends. “You’ve got to shoot higher than that; you have to shoot for expression rather than technical perfection.”

Caroline Shaw: Yes, a Composer, but Perhaps not a Baker!

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Frank J. Oteri - Conversations, Cover

A conversation in Shaw’s studio apartment in New York City
February 9, 2015—11:00 a.m.
Video presentation and photography by Molly Sheridan
Transcription by Julia Lu

When Caroline Shaw’s Partita for Eight Voices won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2013, a great deal was made of the fact that she was—at age 30—the award’s youngest-ever recipient (beating out the previously held record of Charles Wuorinen, who was 31 at the time he received the award in 1970) and was just at the start of her musical career. (Never previously studying composition formally, she had only enrolled in Princeton’s doctoral program in composition in 2010.) The fact of Shaw’s newcomer status to the scene seemed to be even more pronounced by her reluctance to embrace the word composer, identifying instead as a musician.

For many younger musicians the word composer has connotations that are antithetical to the collaborative nature of a lot of today’s music making. But Shaw’s reticence to embrace the word has a different motivation. Equally active as a singer (in Roomful of Teeth) and a violinist (in ACME), Shaw was more concerned about accurately describing her musical life, which has many parts and is a delicate balance. Now two years later, when we met up with her in her tiny studio apartment a few blocks away from Times Square, she is more comfortable with the word composer though she still believes that musician is a more appropriately inclusive moniker.

Yeah, I am a composer. I’m also a lot of other things, a lot of other nouns. So I feel like if there was going to be one noun that was used, it doesn’t seem like the right one. It’s just a matter of taxonomy, the way things are categorized. It wasn’t necessarily a reaction to not wanting to relinquish the control, because—come on—we’re all a little bit obsessive. Musician just encapsulates what I am a little better, I think.

Nevertheless, Shaw’s compositions are central to her musical identity and, in recent years, she has been venturing far beyond works that she has created for her own performance. Her vocal and string playing background has undoubtedly resulted in her ability to create highly idiomatic and particularly effective music for voices (such as her Its Motion Keeps created for the Brooklyn Youth Chorus) and string quartets (including Entr’acte, which the Calidore Quartet has been touring this season). But equally fascinating are her solo piano piece Gustave Le Gray, which takes as its departure point one of the Chopin mazurkas, and a percussion quartet scored for flower pots called Taxidermy (written for So Percussion) which evokes the sound world of Javanese gamelan. Later this month, the Cincinnati Symphony will premiere Shaw’s Lo, her first composition for orchestra.

Still, the level of specificity and fixedness that are de rigeur when working with orchestral musicians is somewhat antithetical to Shaw’s personal compositional aesthetic.

It was the most foreign thing I’d ever done. Everything has to be in the score. … There’s something about this concept of baking versus cooking on the stove. If you write a piece where you have to notate everything and you give it away and you can’t touch it anymore, it’s like baking. You hope you followed the recipe exactly, and the chemistry’s exactly right. Then you can’t touch it anymore. But I do like the idea of following a recipe from some great chef that you like, David Chang or Julia Child, but you also can make it a little bit more like what you want. You change the sauce a little bit; you sort of trust the ingredients. … It’s why I guess I gravitate to smaller groups and people who don’t want you to have everything on every note. … When I have the choice to put information in a score or not, there’s always a careful thought about whether it’s necessary. If I didn’t put this here, would it give a sense of freedom to the performer to do something informed by the rest of the music? And is there enough other information there to give them a context to make a decision that they feel excited about?

Shaw found a way around the requisite notational strictness of writing for the orchestra by writing herself into the piece and creating a part for herself that is more open-ended, more like stove-top cooking than baking.

The solo part is just vaguely written out, only the parts that they really need. A lot of it is left open. And some parts I’m actually going to play with the first violins the way you would with a Mozart concerto where you have the option of playing the tutti parts. You know, I didn’t think that I would ever write for orchestra. But I’m glad to have had the opportunity. … I do think that there’s a changing relationship between composers and performers now. People are really giving a little bit more trust to each other than in the past. And I like that.

It was great to have an opportunity to talk about a broad range of topics with Caroline Shaw—performance practice, sashimi, painting. Shaw is remarkably unselfconscious, extremely enthusiastic, and bursting with ideas. It is indeed a great thing for the contemporary music scene that she has become a significant part of it.

Frank J. Oteri: There are already several really good interviews with you out there which invariably start by asking you about Partita and the Pulitzer. So I don’t want to do that. But you’ve done lots of other fabulous stuff, too. Partita’s wonderful and we’re eventually going to go there, we have to, but I thought it might be more interesting to begin by talking about your solo piano piece Gustave Le Gray. I’m curious about how and why you decided to construct a piece around music by Chopin and how much of his music is actually in your piece.

Caroline Shaw: It actually started out as my Princeton Generals project. At Princeton, there’s this assignment to write a piece responding to another composer, another piece, something that’s really different from what you do. It often ends up being very similar to what you do. We sort of find simpatico elements. There’s something about the way that Chopin changed harmony chromatically, something that Dmitri Tymoczko has talked about. In my work, I found that I’m using a lot of standard I-IV-V, really Baroque, chord progressions, just blocks chords. So I wanted to create a piece that nested around this little Chopin mazurka. It’s the A-minor Mazurka. It starts out almost like “Chopsticks,” and then this perfect, beautiful melody spins out on top of it. I wrote something that starts that way and just creates a little encasing for the piece. You can actually perform the whole Chopin inside of it, or you can perform the piece separately if you want. There are two options. There’s a little seam where you can either seamlessly go back into my piece, or you can open it into the Chopin and close it off from the rest of the piece.

FJO: You’ve predicted my next question. The performance of it by Amy Yang that’s streaming on your website and the performance of it by the Italian pianist Enrico Maria Polimanti that he posted to YouTube are totally different from each other. Polimanti’s version had the whole Chopin.

CS: Yeah, I created a couple little hinges so you can do either one. I would like to do that with other pieces, too, where you write something that just kind of sets you up in this way—21st-century ears, or something like that. You hear it in this different context, then you come out of the piece rather than with applause, with something else. Maybe it’s irreverent to the older piece, but I find it’s actually kind of like having a really nice conversation with a friend.

FJO: In a way, it’s like having a single abstract painting in a room with a bunch of old portraits or vice versa, having one painting that totally doesn’t belong with the others. It results in a really weird space that makes you look at the old work differently and the new work differently, because they’re in a dialogue with each other that they never otherwise would have been. I guess most classical music concerts are like that. If you hear a new piece, it’s surrounded by all these much older and more familiar standard repertoire pieces, and then people are scratching their heads with the new piece thinking, “Why doesn’t it sound like the other ones?“

CS: Often I think it’s hard to find things that speak to each other properly if they weren’t intended to be that way. But sometimes programming can be very thoughtful. There are some projects recently—Michael Mizrahi, David Kaplan, and Timo Andres either commission or write works that are responding to others. David Kaplan has a project where he commissioned, like, ten new pieces responding to Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze. Everyone’s responding to a different movement of it. It’s cool, because then you can program something with new things and old things. They’re intentionally relating to each other, rather than just this sense of “oh, that was odd.” But I also like the juxtaposition of totally random things right next to each other. It’s the whole shuffle idea on your iPod where you have Mozart, the Cranberries, and Pavement right next to each other.

FJO: Is that what’s on your iPod?

CS: No, those are just things that I happened to have read about in the last 24 hours. Pavement, Cranberries, and Mozart. I don’t listen to Pavement, but I have a friend who does.

FJO: Slanted and Enchanted is a wonderful record.

CS: Oh yeah?

FJO: Anyway, you also mentioned Timo Andres, who did this re-composition of Mozart’s incomplete Coronation Concerto in which the stuff he used to fill in for the missing left hand of the solo piano part doesn’t really sound like Mozart. There’s also Night Scenes from the Ospidale, the project that Robert Honstein did with the Sebastians using Vivaldi.

CS: I played in the premiere of that. Yeah, it’s really beautiful.

FJO: This all feels very much part of our zeitgeist, a real manifestation of postmodernism, like those mashups of Jane Austen novels that have additional characters added in.

CS: It’s like classical music fan fiction, revisiting this older music that a lot of us really love, I think, very sincerely. It’s not in a kitschy or ironic way, like “I’m going to deconstruct this little thing, because isn’t that silly and old so let’s undermine these systems,” at least not in my case or in some of my friends’ cases. These are things that I grew up with and really love, they’re part of—people say my musical DNA. I think that’s a kind of bullshit concept—something that I came from.

FJO: You were talking about the difference between your harmonic palette and Chopin’s harmonic palette just now, the I-IV-V versus leaning into passing chords, almost like jazz substitutions. In your program note for Gustave Le Gray, you described your own music as being like sashimi, whereas Chopin was more like prosciutto and mint.

CS: Oh, my god, that’s a great combination!

FJO: Sashimi is all about the taste of a piece of fish; it’s total immersion in one flavor. Prosciutto and mint are each immersive, but combining them creates yet another experience.

CS: Yeah.

An excerpt from the solo piano score for Caroline Shaw's Gustave Le Gray

FJO: You wrote this piece to get outside of yourself and what you normally do. As a result of doing this piece, have there been more ingredients than just the piece of sashimi in the other pieces you’ve written since then?

CS: I think so. I don’t know if it’s because of this piece, but I did want to try different combinations of harmonies that I’m not naturally attracted to. I like jazz chords with substitutions and slightly meandering things with irregular chord permutations, but there is something beautiful about sashimi. That’s how I often describe the beginning of Passacaglia. I just want to hear one chord, but not in a driving, ‘70s or ‘80s traditionally minimalist way. So not experiencing this one thing in time repeated and repeated, but just singularly. Like one instance. Like a painting, but music is a time-based art, so you kind of have to negotiate this with minimalist tendencies. I don’t know. Are there things that I now do after that that I didn’t before? Definitely. I’ve been trying to push myself a little bit more.

FJO: The title Gustave Le Gray is a bit of a curve ball. “Prosciutto and Mint” would have perhaps been a less cryptic title or maybe “Prosciutto Mint Sashimi.”

CS: That would be delicious! Gustave Le Gray was a pioneer photographer in France in the mid-19th century, around the same time that Chopin was the thing in Paris. He was famous for developing a technique to represent clouds in a photograph. It’s kind of a simple idea. But there was something about thinking about creating an image that’s a still image and watching it slowly develop that seemed appropriate for a title.

FJO: Well it’s funny, when I started thinking about the title I started wondering if perhaps they knew each other, but I couldn’t find any evidence that they did.

CS: I don’t think they knew each other. Maybe they did. I don’t think that their arts work in the same way—music is so different from photography—but what if you thought about some element of them as overlapping?

FJO: Well, what I thought was that the title was a really subtle way of telling people that what you did compositionally was somehow a sonic photograph of that Chopin mazurka. It’s not the actual Chopin piece but rather a new piece created based on it, just like a photograph of an object is a new object based on that original object.

CS: Yeah! I should probably mention there’s another piece that I wrote, a string quartet called Punctum, which is maybe the origin of my starting to think about the photographic moment and its relationship to music. There’s a Roland Barthes book called Camera Lucida which is a meditation on photography, memory, and nostalgia. He describes these two concepts—the punctum and the studium. The studium is sort of like what the photograph’s about, like a photograph of three people sitting around the table, playing cards, and looking at each other. And you can see a mom, a husband, and a child. So that’s what the photograph is about. But the punctum in that photograph is maybe the man’s tie which is a particular color that’s just really striking, or the way that the little boy is looking off to the side. That’s the moment that actually grabs you and that you remember. I don’t know if that’s related to Gustave Le Gray, but it’s really related to this idea of capturing a moment and trying to identify a slice in time either of music or of a scene.

FJO: Ha, that’s another curveball title, when I heard that title I thought—

CS: Punctum, contrapunctum?

FJO: No, I thought Punkdom, as in The Kingdom of Punk, Sid Vicious in one corner and Joey Ramone somewhere else.

CS: You’re so punk! You’re way more punk than I am.

FJO: Well, I think your piece Taxidermy has a somewhat punk title.

CS: Oh yeah?

FJO: It’s a macabre word. You’ve written that you like the word because it’s somewhat creepy. I think it’s a fabulous and somewhat punkish word to use as a title. But at the same time it seems a bit weird to me that you chose the word for—of all things—a piece for So Percussion.

CS: Well, it’s going back to the idea of the sashimi. You present; you put this here. It’s going to fall down. Presenting one thing—here, this is all we have. It’s not decorated. And I’m going to present it to you again. Like, here’s another piece of perfect salmon. It begins with them playing just these little flower pots. There are no pitch indications, so it’s not about the chord or the harmony. It’s just about one sound versus another sound, a very simple binary. Then other things happen in the piece, and eventually it becomes these two chords that happen. It’s almost like you just have this deer in the headlights look. Like this is all I’m giving you. There’s something awkward about it, something a little bit naked, something macabre, as you said—creepy, funny, quirky, but kind of also grand. You think taxidermy and you think about a giant moose or tiger looking at you that was once this grand creature but now it’s just frozen in time. You’re experiencing it a hundred years later.

Also it came from this idea of the awkward moment. Let’s say you’re on a date with someone and you say, “I’m really into taxidermy.” There’s a pause. It’s awkward.

FJO: That didn’t happen to you, did it?

CS: No, it didn’t.

FJO: And had it happened to you, you wouldn’t have been the one who was into taxidermy?

CS: No, no, no. But one day I’m going to write a great little short story about some meeting of two people. But how do you create that awkward pause in music?

FJO: When I heard that title, I immediately thought the word taxidermy seemed like a really potent critique of classical music. Because in a way, that’s what classical music is: all this focus on things from over a hundred years ago that were once such a big deal in the culture they were created in—grand, like that moose. But now in the 21st century—

CS: —it’s here placed beautifully in the dining room, and we’re eating a lovely meal next to this ancient grand moose. I think you make an excellent point about what older classical music is. Classical music is a broad term that means many things, but to many who are not in that classical music world, it means a particular thing which is a particularly 17th, 18th, and 19th century version of music. And there’s a comfort level in experiencing that music in museum-like situations which I’m actually not critiquing. I love museums. I love concerts where I sit and listen very carefully to something that was beautifully constructed a long time ago. I love that experience. But I think that sometimes there’s not a real awareness and consciousness of what that is and what it means for new music now and what the possibilities are for thinking about older music and thinking about newer music.

FJO: But of all the pieces you could have called Taxidermy, you gave the name to something you wrote for the one kind of ensemble that could never be accused of being musical taxidermists. Percussionists pretty much exclusively perform new music, especially the So guys who either write or commission almost everything they play.

Excerpt from Caroline Shaw's score for Taxidermy

CS: I was wondering why you thought percussion was an odd choice. Okay, yeah.

FJO: I could see a string quartet being called Taxidermy, maybe something for violin and piano, or, probably most appropriate, an orchestra piece.

CS: I understand your point. I think there might be something more antagonistic than I intend if I called a string quartet Taxidermy. I’m very conscious of the string quartet as this incredibly old form, but I also really, really love it. So I don’t want to poke anyone’s rib. I’m going to stop now.

FJO: Well, before we do, the reason I wanted to bring up those two pieces of yours that we’ve been talking about before anything else is in some way to address what a lot of other people have been saying and writing about you: You’re a new kind of person in our world. You don’t think of yourself as composer. You prefer to be called a musician. Since you’re a singer and play stringed instruments, you write very idiomatically for voices and strings. While your vocal pieces are really well suited to voices and your string works take full advantage of your insider performer knowledge of what these instruments are capable of, Gustave Le Gray is very pianistic even though you’re not out there publicly as a pianist. And Taxidermy is also totally idiomatic even though you are not a percussionist. While it’s true that much of your music has grown out of your relationship to music as a performer, those two pieces clearly didn’t. They came out of something else.

CS: Right. I can relate to the string and the vocal sound very naturally. But I don’t play the piano. I used to play piano, and I can play some percussion, but I wanted to create something that is outside of my natural, physical, musical world. In both cases, they were written for particular people that I knew and so it comes out of their sensibilities. There’s something about So Percussion, their attitude and their quirky, careful relationship to what they do, and their willingness to just play flower pots very gently. The piano piece Gustave Le Gray is written for Amy Yang—who is a pianist far better than I could ever dream to be—and for her particular relationship with the repertoire that she loves, the instrument, and with her older teachers which include Claude Frank. Whether or not it comes from a different place, I don’t know. I’m still kind of figuring out what the music is that I like to write. I guess we all are all the time. Every chance you get is a chance to discover something new about yourself, and writing for something that is less familiar to you is a great way to—as Steve Mackey has said—put your brain into a different shape for the day. So I guess that’s what those pieces did.

FJO: Well, to be a bit of a provocateur here and to get back to this whole notion of taxidermy, in a way, when you’re writing a piece down you’re sort of taxidermizing it to some extent. If you create music that’s for your own performance, you can still play around with it since—after all—it’s yours. Sure, when you write a piece for another ensemble, you have to let it go, but the whole relationship between composers and performers of score-based music is predicated on respecting what is put down on the page since the way the composer is present in the music—even if he or she is not actually participating in the performance of it—is through those written instructions. So in a sense, you have to somehow taxidermize yourself when you write a piece for others.

CS: Oh, that’s an interesting point. I would like to think that one doesn’t preserve themselves strictly in this text form when writing a score. So far I’ve always been able to work pretty closely with the people who perform it. There are many important things when writing music. You know, create a score that represents accurately what you would like, whether it’s different parameters that are easy to represent like pitch, duration, some things about timbre—but timbre is a really impossible one to actually represent. Phrasing sensibility is also impossible to represent. Humor is really hard. You can give little hints of it, but to give someone a sense of your own relationship to this music and your own humor and attitude and how they should approach it is so difficult. And I don’t want that to ever be frozen in time. When I was playing early music, whether it was Corelli, Mozart, or Beethoven, biographies of these composers were important. Did they exactly want this, or is it open? Was it a culture of “you can improvise on this note” or “this is exactly what you should do”?

Caroline Shaw at home.

FJO: I see you’ve got a Baroque violin behind you on the wall.

CS: With a broken string. I perform mostly with Roomful of Teeth now and a little bit with ACME. I haven’t done a gig on Baroque now in a year and a half. I miss it a lot. I love that exploration of a time when there was less information on the page. We actually just did a concert a couple nights ago with Roomful of Teeth and ACME, and I did some arrangements of Purcell. There were no dynamics or tempo indication in the score, so I left it like that. And it was a really great experience of working closely with these two groups. We all know each other’s sensibilities and trust each other to see what comes out of that organic performance practice. What do you do with four whole notes? How can you shape that when the information isn’t strictly given? When I have the choice to put information in a score or not, there’s always a careful thought about whether it’s necessary. If I didn’t put this here, would it give a sense of freedom to the performer to do something informed by the rest of the music? And is there enough other information there to give them a context to make a decision that they feel excited about?

FJO: You’ve hit on something that I think is really a key issue in contemporary music. In the 20th century, a lot of composers felt the need to put articulations on every note in a score, to offer precise instructions about every dynamic level, an exact metronomically determined tempo indication, and so on. But what would have happen if those scores had fewer details? Is Purcell’s music any less worthwhile because those details are missing? On some levels, the malleability of performance and the possibility of variable interpretations are what make a piece of music feel alive and not like a piece of taxidermy.

CS: I agree with all of those things. At the same time, I think it’s a very beautiful artistic gesture to indicate all of those things, like the quality of the accent or a mezzo-forte dynamic. Everything on every note is an incredible human creation. That’s an awesome thing. It’s not the way that I work or that some of the music that I’ve previously played works, so I’m happy to maybe live in that world a little bit more. But I do think that there’s a changing relationship between composers and performers now. People are really giving a little bit more trust to each other than in the past. And I like that.

Shaw’s pet fish

FJO: I don’t want to sound like I’m only ragging on composers here for over-notating. I think the other part of this phenomenon is that performers came to expect it. I once “under-notated” something and it drove the person playing it crazy. I kept getting phone calls: “What do you want here? How do you want this phrased?” My answer was, “How do you want to do it?” and the player was flummoxed by this.

CS: We haven’t talked about that. Yeah, that’s a terrible bristling reaction.

FJO: This sort of thing is particularly an issue in the orchestral realm where there is usually only time for two rehearsals and the clock is always ticking so anything that’s not precise on the page is perceived as an irresponsible waste of their time. I don’t know what your experience has been working with orchestras or if you’ve had an orchestra piece performed yet.

CS: I just did one! I’ve only done one, and it’s being done in March. And I wrote myself into the piece so I could be there on stage, because I didn’t want to be far away. I just felt weird about it. It was the most foreign thing I’d ever done. Everything has to be in the score. But, at the same time, I know a little bit about what the players’ repertoire is. It’s an orchestra that plays a lot of grand, old repertoire. And they have a beautiful conductor who is French and who specializes in Mozart, so I wrote with that kind of thinking.

There’s something about this concept of baking versus cooking on the stove. If you write a piece where you have to notate everything and you give it away and you can’t touch it anymore, it’s like baking. You hope you followed the recipe exactly, and the chemistry’s exactly right. Then you can’t touch it anymore. But I do like the idea of following a recipe from some great chef that you like, David Chang or Julia Child, but you also can make it a little bit more like what you want. You change the sauce a little bit; you sort of trust the ingredients.

There are so many things to talk about with this. The different kinds of reactions that players give to a composer depending on how much information they’re given goes so deep into what musical community is, who we’re writing for, who’s playing it, who’s listening to it, what the size and the history of the institution is behind the music, how it’s funded, and what the venue is. All these things have such an effect on the way the music is written, even though we like to think that that’s not the case. The idea of writing for a standard ensemble that executes it in this robotic way—I hate it; it’s not the kind of world that I want to live in. It’s why I guess I gravitate to smaller groups and people who don’t want you to have everything on every note. You know, they won’t bristle at that. I have had that one time. It was my first year as a student at Princeton. Well, it wasn’t a bristle-y reaction. It was like, “Well, I could really use more dynamics here.” But I could sense that I lost all trust; the player just didn’t trust me to have done my job and thought I didn’t really know what I was doing. It was hard. So I gave a few more dynamics, but then I said, “You should think of the way that you approach Mozart versus Haydn versus Beethoven. It’s not all the same. It’s slightly different, but there is a general sensibility that you come to that with. It’s how you play four eighth notes in a row; you wouldn’t play them robotically. You would create some kind of shape.” But a quartet has that time, an orchestra does not.

FJO: So where and when is this orchestra piece happening?

CS: March, in Cincinnati.

FJO: Fantastic. How long is the piece?

CS: It’s 17 minutes or so.

FJO: You said you wrote yourself into it, so is it a concerto?

CS: I don’t call it a concerto. It’s a piece for a lot of players, and I’m going to play the violin.

FJO: But are you in the violin section or are you actually a soloist?

CS: Soloist. But actually the solo part is just vaguely written out, only the parts that they really need. A lot of it is left open. And some parts I’m actually going to play with the first violins the way you would with a Mozart concerto where you have the option of playing the tutti parts. You know, I didn’t think that I would ever write for orchestra. But I’m glad to have had the opportunity.

A passage from Caroline Shaw's orchestral score for Lo

FJO: Well, this gets into this whole musician versus composer thing. I wonder if not wanting to have obsessive control over the music you write is part of what made you reticent to use the word composer to describe yourself, even though you are in fact a composer.

CS: Yeah, I am a composer. I’m also a lot of other things, a lot of other nouns. So I feel like if there was going to be one noun that was used, it doesn’t seem like the right one. It’s just a matter of taxonomy, the way things are categorized. It wasn’t necessarily a reaction to not wanting to relinquish the control, because—come on—we’re all a little bit obsessive. Musician just encapsulates what I am a little better I think.

FJO: I find it weird that people don’t realize that composer is a subset of musician.

CS: Just like there’s a terrible thing that reviews sometimes do: “the musicians and the singers did a great job.” I’m like, oh my god, guys! Basic concepts of classification here.

FJO: But the thing about the word composer that I love is that, unlike artist or writer, it means someone who puts things together. So it really isn’t some super powerful creator who is making something from nothing. The only other field where this word gets used is in perfumery; the people who put different chemicals or essences together to create scents are also called composers.

CS: Oh really? That’s very cool.

FJO: Yeah, so I love the word composer.

CS: Me too.

A passage from Caroline Shaw’s score for “Sarabande,” the third movement of her Pulitzer Prize-winning Partita for Eight Voices. © 2009-2014 Caroline Shaw Editions. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

FJO: The music you’ve created for groups that you’re also involved with as a performer—like Partita for Roomful of Teeth—really has been composed in the “put together” sense. The different movements were actually first performed at different times and in different places over the course of a few years and you kept revising it. Many pieces evolve this way, but until the Pulitzer changed their rules a few years back to allow a first recording of a piece from a calendar year to qualify and not just a first live performance, pieces made this way got overlooked. Of course, if you’re gigging and workshopping a piece, there is no one set premiere. Although it blows my mind that even after you won the Pulitzer for it, you’ve still been tinkering with it. So you don’t think of it as a fixed document even now.

CS: I don’t. Most things haven’t been tinkered with, but I did add a whole section to Courante and kind of remixed it. We took that out it recently. It’s just too long. And we change the vowels on things a lot. We felt like that “aaah” last time was feeling a little bit abrasive. It didn’t have the right effect with the audience because they heard it as something aggressive, so let’s make that “aaah” something a little bit brighter and happier and you change the mouth shape just a little bit, and it changes the effect. And we changed the quality of the breaths in Courante. All of the time we’re changing it. And once in a while, we’ll have a sub who comes in and brings in a new idea. So I don’t like to think of it as a fixed document, but there’s definitely a lot of information there that is set. That is a recipe that one can follow, but still cook on a stove. You can still add some pepper, you know.

FJO: So it’s not baked.

CS: Not baked. I can’t say I’m baking it so hard.

FJO: It’s interesting that you said we and not I.

CS: Yes, Roomful of Teeth.

FJO: So even though it’s your music, you feel like the piece belongs to the whole group on some level, the whole group molds it to some extent so in some ways it’s less authorial, less a strict baking recipe where you absolutely must put in those two cups of sugar or it isn’t your cake.

CS: Well, you know, if it needs two cups of sugar, and you’ve put in like one cup of flour, I’ll correct it. I think people definitely look to me to give some suggestion. But as much as I possibly can—and this is true with other stuff I’ve done with the group—I really want to empower people. I would love for them to have suggestions. Unless it’s a terrible idea, I’d love to try it in a performance. If you can create some kind of sensibility among each other that encourages people to come up with ideas and feel empowered to articulate them, that’s what I would like to create.

FJO: Now this can happen very organically and very fluidly if you’re part of a group, or if they’re friends, or if you’ve worked with them. But if you write a piece of music on a page, and it’s out there in the world and somebody obtains a copy of the score in, say, Zagreb or Shanghai, they’re not necessarily going to be able to say, “Hey Caroline, what do you think of blah-blah-blah?” So it’s going to become more like baking than like cooking on the stove.

CS: Yes, that’s true. Then the relationship to the performer is very different.

FJO: And that’s starting to happen with your music now more and more, I would imagine.

CS: Yeah. Then you realize you’ve created something that is just out in the world without you, without the little quirks of your sense of humor and your attitude. Maybe somebody’s watched an interview to get a sense of who you are as a composer and as a person, but if they haven’t and they just ordered the score, they just have this thing. They want to play it. Hopefully you’ve given them something to dig into and to be engaged with and that they will want to shape in their own way. There’s nothing more you can do. You put it in the oven.

But at the same, I think about what you guys do at NewMusicBox. It is this really incredible archive of getting to know a composer. So if you are in Zagreb, and you order a piano piece from someone, you can Google them. It’s not like 20 years ago when you just couldn’t; you just didn’t know anything about anyone. Now you can watch a video. You can get a sense of who they are. You can have a little sense of the biography of someone developing over time. I like to think that that’s what the world is going to look like in 20 years. Getting music, but also being informed by the way that that person’s other music was performed and the way they think about music.

FJO: With the orchestra piece, which affords the least amount of personal interaction with the musicians since there’s so little time to prepare for it, you still wrote yourself into the piece. You didn’t want to let go that much; you wanted to have that interrelationship with these players. I’m thinking also of Its Motion Keeps, your piece for the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. You wrote yourself into that as well. I’m curious about how that all evolved and played out. It wasn’t a group that you had regularly been a part of, but I think they really served what you did extremely well.

A passage from the score of Caroline Shaw's choral composition Its Motion Keeps

CS: Yeah, they were amazing. I still did get to work with them, so it changed certain things that were a little ambiguous in the score. There’s a little thing that goes nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah, which I can’t really say in the score, but it takes two seconds to describe it. And then you have it. They did an amazing job. I did write myself into that piece, too, because I’m still at the beginning of this writing music for other people. I don’t know what the future will look like. For now I like being there with them. But it’s been done without me playing viola since then.

FJO: So is the viola part optional, or did they bring in someone else to play it?

CS: They just brought in another violist.

FJO: With the Cincinnati Symphony piece, you said a lot of the solo part isn’t written out. What happens if someone else wanted to do it, say, two years from now with the LA Philharmonic?

CS: I just assume that no one’s going to want to do it.

FJO: You don’t want to think that.

CS: I could feasibly write out a part for someone to play. But actually, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus is a great example of that. There’s something written out. Originally it was pretty loose, and I made it up, and still whenever I play it, there’s a whole section that I basically improvise within a certain structure. Some nights I like to build it up here. And then the next night, I just actually take myself out mostly for five bars. But there is a part that’s written out, and if they hire a violist to play it, they can play that. It’s fine.

FJO: So is whomever they hire to play the viola part expected to improvise as well?

CS: [The score] says, “Play this as if improvised.” They could either play exactly what’s on the page or—depending on the person’s background and personality and the way they like to engage with music—they can loosen it up rhythmically. Let’s say they were preparing to play the piece and they saw a YouTube video and said, “Whoa, none of that is the same. There’s a little more freedom here.” So maybe they take a little bit. If they called me and said, “Hey, I’m playing that piece.” I’d say, “Yeah, that whole section in the middle, you can kind of do what you want. This is the basic idea. Don’t play too much. Let them play here; do something that’s tasteful.” And then you don’t know what they’re going to do.

FJO: So how connected are you with performers when they play your music? I know that the Calidor String Quartet just played your Entr’acte at Juilliard. Did you work with them at all?

CS: Well, the cellist in the quartet was a cellist that I played a Mozart quartet with my first year in grad school. We’re good friends, so they sent me a recording before they performed it at the Phillips Collection in D.C. For the most part it was the ideal match, and I was sort of involved. But the quartet has actually been performed by other people and I haven’t been involved and I have no idea how it went. It was written to be a quartet played not necessarily by a new music specialist group, but a group that is used to playing Mozart and Beethoven. I like the piece a lot and I feel good about that quartet being a kind of calling card as a way into my music.

A passage from the string quartet score of Caroline Shaw's Entr'acte

FJO: I imagine that’s starting to happen more and more now, the music is slipping away from your ability to shepherd it, which is a good thing but also requires letting go.

CS: Ultimately, it’s a great thing. We have a very short time on this earth. Music is music. It should be out there in the world. People should be excited about playing it. And there shouldn’t be a sense of weird control freakiness that I probably could have. So I’m very happy that it’s going out in the world. Whether or not it’s a problem that I’m not involved, it’s probably better. At a certain point, you can tinker with your recipe to death. I used to paint. You can paint something and just keep on doing it. Then ultimately, if it’s a little bit brown and kind of smudgy, you can’t really work with that anymore. So it’s better to let it be what it is, let it go off, and trust people.

FJO: Well, part of why letting go is hard is the difficulty involved with transmitting new techniques. You were talking about the breathing in Partita and then the Brooklyn Youth Chorus making certain sounds. It reminds me of all the extensive prep work that goes into a performance of a Meredith Monk piece. There’s no adequate notation for a lot of that stuff. So what do you do to get it done by other groups? Several published Meredith Monk scores are accompanied by audio recordings to give interpreters a clearer sense of how to make certain sounds. But even with recording, you don’t necessarily get some of the nuances of how those sounds are made. Her own ensemble workshops her music rigorously. In some ways, your music has gone down that same path—certainly it has with Partita.

CS: Yeah, a little bit. I’ve never actually met Meredith Monk. I saw her one time and I got so nervous, I had to turn around. She’s just an amazing musician. But the thing about her work is that it’s not just about the sound. You could get a recording and imitate the sound. There’s something theatrical about it. It’s like a playwright writing more than words. You give a stage direction and there’s a sensibility to it that is connected to the narrative and the character and what they’re trying to say. I think that is really hard to notate in music. Again, it’s this concept of attitude and humor and the subtleties of that. I think my music is probably much more notated than Meredith Monk’s is. I’m still kind of an obsessive engineer about it. This is where everything goes. But then there are these little, almost theatrical subtleties that have to be passed down orally.

FJO: As you said earlier, notation does some things very well but others not as well. No matter how obsessively you write something down, there’s only so much you can do. We have all these added advantages over, say, Purcell. We’ve increased the kinds of details we can notate. There were no metronome markings back then, for example. And nowadays, as you said, someone can watch a YouTube video of a performance and maybe get something really precise if there’s good camera work to get the shape of someone’s mouth. When Molly talked to Joan La Barbara for NewMusicBox, she also recorded a whole lesson with Joan La Barbara which captured very detailed things about how she produces some of her sounds. So you don’t have to meet Joan La Barbara to learn how to do her stuff anymore.

CS: That’s amazing.

FJO: So when somebody gets, say, a score of Partita, do they get other things with it? What materials do you give somebody to ensure that it’s going to be as close to the recipe as is appropriate without being too controlling, but also have it be what you want it to be?

CS: There’s something that I wrote at the bottom of the first page of the score. I don’t remember the words exactly, but basically it was that no one document should be prescriptive. Be free and live life fully. That’s what I wanted that piece to go out with. The recording is very helpful and the score is very helpful, but ultimately do it the way you would like to do it. The piece was just done last week by Camerata Nova in Winnipeg. It was the first time [another group performed it]. I went out there to work with them, but ultimately they still did things their own way. Tempos were a little bit different. Pauses were a little bit different. The sound of the breath was different. Because every person—every instrument—is different. It’s not like a standardized clarinet, which everyone plays a little differently but the instrument itself is more or less the same. All eight instruments of the eight singers are different.

FJO: This is why I think most listeners really identify with singers more than they do with instrumentalists and why, certainly in pop music, a singer’s performance of a particular song has such a stamp of auteurship on it to the point that we call someone’s version of a song a cover. But we don’t call it a cover when a group performs a Mozart string quartet that tons of other folks have played.

CS: It’s fascinating to hear other versions of a similar thing. I love covers. I mean, that’s another thing. I love YouTube covers of people just doing pop songs. I love this song so much; I just want to sing it myself with my guitar for you. And then it’s a slightly different version.

FJO: You’ve done what are essentially covers of some really classic American folk tunes, like “I’ll Fly Away.”

CS: Sort of. That is part of a set of four songs. It was a slight subversive dig at the commercial country music industry. It’s like: please, everyone stop making this glitzy. Just strip everything away. So I wanted to do my cover of it.

Going back to Mozart string quartets, you’re just doing this cover of this thing that somebody else’s band did a long time ago. But I love that there are slight differences. That works if it’s a musical community that enjoys hearing a mix of new things and old things. At a certain point, there’s not enough time in the day to hear all the older things and older new things and newish old things again and again and then also hear more new things. So how do we find a balance between enjoying different versions of stuff, but also embracing things that are entirely new? It’s hard. I think about this a lot, because I would love for there to be more repeat performances of new music. It’s such a shame, whether it’s orchestral or chamber music or electronic pieces, there’s one instance where it’s premiered and then there are very few instances that are shared communal experiences of that piece being done again, either by the same person slightly differently or by another group.

FJO: One way we can hear pieces again and again is through recordings, either hearing a physical CD or LP, hearing it on the radio, or now—more and more—hearing it online. And of course, it was through a commercially released recording of your piece that you won the Pulitzer.

CS: Yeah.

FJO: Thankfully you have SoundCloud embeds of several of your other pieces on your website, since nothing else is out on CD yet. Is there anything else in the works?

CS: There’s a cello and percussion duo, New Morse Code, that has a Kickstarter campaign. [Ed. note: They plan to record Shaw’s piece for them, Boris Kerner.] They’re really great advocates for new music. But that’s the only one I know of that’s going to be officially recorded.

FJO: Having multiple opportunities to hear a piece of music live is probably something that you’ll be addressing in your role as composer-in-residence for Music on Main, since I know that the artistic director, David Pay, is very interested in experimenting with performance modalities and how people hear stuff.

CS: David is definitely interested in how people hear new music and how they have conversations about it, whether it’s before the performance or after. I think the idea of the composer salon, having people just be able to talk about their work and ask questions, is great. There’s a chamber series in Manchester, Massachusetts, run by a couple of friends of mine from school. Every summer they’ve done a new work. They play it at the beginning of the concert, and they play it again at the end. So you hear it twice at the same concert, which I wish was done more often, especially if it’s not a very long piece. That’s something I’ll talk about with David.

New Music and Globalization 3: Embodiment and Mobility

Posted on December 18, 2014 by Tim Rutherford-Johnson - Columns

Pamela Z performing at Ars Electronica 2008 in Linz, Austria
Photo by rubra (Courtesy of Ars Electronica)

In many ways, the composer-performer-electronic artist Pamela Z is a quintessentially 21st-century musician. Her work is created from digital and prosthetic technology, in particular the BodySynth^TM MIDI controller;[1] it moves fluidly between genres and media; and it often addresses the subject of global mobility. Her titles Voci, Baggage Allowance (an example of the sort of net-music discussed in my last post), Parts of Speech and, in particular, Gaijin, all point towards topics of travel, language, and foreignness.

In Gaijin (2001), written after a six-month residency in Tokyo, Z explores the theme of foreignness. (“Gaijin” is Japanese slang for foreigner.) In “Nihongo de hanasoo” (“Let’s speak Japanese”), she reads headings from a Japanese language textbook against a sonic backdrop of Japanese phonemes and other (non-verbal) vocal loops. Other movements include an application for a United States green card and texts in multiple languages about identity and alienation. Across the piece, the key is the gaijin’s awareness of her fundamental outsidership, and her attempts to mitigate this. Where true assimilation is not possible, encounters become negotiations between relatively opaque entities.

Rather than attempting a synthesis, Z’s music highlights—and perhaps even celebrates—difference. Through her use of digital delays to loop and layer her own voice, and her virtuoso changes between vocal styles (a particular feature of Voci), she presents identity as a matter of polyphony, sometimes between irreconcilable parts. Considered on an intercultural level, this is a view in which places and people retain their unique definition, regardless of the difficulties this may entail.
In her study of site-specific art One Place After Another, the art historian Miwon Kwon characterizes the life of the contemporary artist:

Typically, an artist (no longer a studio-bound object maker; primarily working now on call) is invited by an art institution to produce a work specifically configured for the framework provided by the institution (in some cases the artist may solicit the institution with a proposal) … There follow repeated visits or extended stays at the site; research into the particularities of the institution and/or the city within which it is located (its history, constituency of the [art] audience, the installation space); consideration of the parameters of the exhibition itself (its thematic structure, social relevance, other artists in the show); and many meetings with curators, educators, and administrative support staff, who may all end up “collaborating” with the artist to produce the work. The project will likely be time-consuming and in the end will have engaged the “site” in a multitude of ways, and the documentation of the project will take on another life within the art world’s publicity circuit, which will in turn alert another institution to suggest another commission.[2]

Kwon is talking here about visual artists, but replace the words “site” and “institution” with “performer” or “performers” and she could equally be describing the activities of many contemporary composers, whose outputs are often determined by the series of musicians they engage with or are commissioned by to produce new work.

It seems that the increasing prominence of one-off grants, residencies, and so on within the economy of new music—as opposed to more stable sources of income from publication, performance, and recording rights (or, looking further back, patronage)—is encouraging a certain nomadic practice among composers, much like that of visual artists, especially among those unwilling or unable to support their work with full-time academic positions. Z’s own CV, like that of many of her peers, is full of references to exhibitions and awards given across the US and internationally. Such nomadism is in turn contributing to an increase in works that are composed for specific performers or ensembles (as well as for specific locations or occasions, although these are less common). It is then a logical step for the composer to work closely with those performers, in a more or less collaborative spirit. And at this point the performer starts to take on the characteristics of one of Kwon’s sites.
The rise of the performer as “site” is a product of several late-century forces: as well as the economy of new music that I have just mentioned, there is also the increasing autonomy of new music ensembles and their need to establish a unique brand (read: repertory) for themselves; the legitimacy that performer collaboration suggests—a seductive riposte to the stereotypical ivory-towered modernist and a more general turn across the arts towards an interest in site, collaboration, and process as practice.
The rise of these forces since the late 1970s or so has paralleled an increase in the number of composer–performers. The template was largely established in New York from Fluxus, through the early minimalists, and on to Downtown artists from Laurie Anderson to John Zorn. Yet despite its local origins, it became a model that has proved useful to composers in the more nomadic 21st century. If composer–performer collaborations have become a paradigm today, it should be no surprise that as their careers become more globalized and decentered, many composers and performers are combining the two roles: becoming their own “sites,” in fact.

This revived relationship of composer to performer may in part be a consequence (and often a welcome one) of the pressures and enabling vectors of modern-day globalization, but what does it mean when an artist like Z takes on the role of both composer and performer, when she becomes the “site” for her own work? What happens when her compositional work is guided by the particularities of her own biography, the grain of her voice, the movements of her body?
George Lewis has connected Z’s work to that of the West African griot, a sort of oral historian, musician, poet, and storyteller:

Z is part of a generation of women sound artists, including Laurie Anderson, Hildegard Westerkamp, and Sarah Peebles, who reassert the human need for exchanging stories in a logocentric culture that has privileged written over oral modes of discourse, and that, reflecting its valorization of land and property rights, has favored a transient, atemporal notion of space over historical time.[3]

Lewis describes a world comprised of difference and exchange, one that is made out of histories and the personal, rather than the grand narratives or formal structures determined by (largely masculine, capitalist, Western) societies. By making herself the site, Z, and artists like her, not only captures something of the transnational mobility of contemporary artists (as well as, in much less comfortable terms, that of the exile, immigrant, or refugee), but also embodies (and highlights) its temporary resolution in this place or the next. She becomes the site, the site itself becomes transient. Z’s work, suggests Lewis, articulates a critique of our age’s obsession with space and location over time and story, and thus of globalization and its ideal of mobility itself.

***
[1] An electronic performance device that uses electrodes attached to the skin to read muscle movement and effort, which can then be translated into MIDI commands. See http://www.synthzone.com/bsynth.html for further details.
[2] Miwon Kwon: One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), p. 46.
[3] George E. Lewis: ‘The Virtual Discourses of Pamela Z’, Diaspora Memory Place, ed. Salah M. Hassan and Cheryl Finley (Munich: Prestel, 2008), pp. 266–81, at p. 268.

Derek Bermel: Context is Key

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Frank J. Oteri - Conversations, Cover

A conversation at the New York Office of ASCAP
July 12, 2013—1:00 p.m.
Transcribed by Julia Lu
Video Presentation by Alexandra Gardner

He is equally comfortable composing music for cutting edge chamber music groups and symphony orchestras, playing clarinet in a variety of contexts (whether performing a wide swath of repertoire in the resident ensemble of Copland House to jamming with musicians from Jazz at Lincoln Center), singing and playing caxixi in his R&B-tinged band Peace by Piece, or even rapping upon occasion. But whatever genre of music he is engaging in, Derek Bermel is always mindful of its context. Part of this mindfulness comes from Bermel’s deep respect for an extremely broad range of music making, but it is also the by-product of first-hand knowledge about music from many different traditions which he acquired both through extensive academic study and while traveling all over the world.

Derek Bermel. All photos courtesy Dworkin & Company and/or Derek Bermel.

The key epiphanies along Bermel’s path to becoming self-aware as a musician reveal a wide array of influences. As a child, seeing the unfamiliar and, at the time, strange-looking name Messiaen on a concert program at a music camp made him hope his own name would be displayed similarly one day. Picking up a copy of Thelonious Monk’s LP It’s Monk’s Time at a local record shop in his home town of New Rochelle (just north of New York City) opened the door on a world of jazz that was even more eclectic than the Bennie Goodman album his grandmother had given him. Hearing Rakim’s “I Ain’t No Joke” for the first time (a rap he can still quote by heart) convinced him that it was possible for music to still be vital, urgent, and innovative at a time when a lot of the new music he heard was, as he describes it, “kind of sleepy.” But perhaps the episode that left the deepest impression on him and gave him the determination to pursue musical composition was having his clarinet teacher Ben Armato, who played in the pit at the Metropolitan Opera and was no fan of new music, tell him: “[E]very note you write is more important than everything I’ve done in my entire life.” While this collection of memories might initially seem completely unrelated, and some of them did not even appear to have direct consequences, these episodes compositely served to codify Bermel’s outlook. As he explains:

[A]s a teacher once said to me, “It’s all grist for the mill.” There’s beauty in so many things, and they don’t have to be the thing that I’m doing. … But I would say that you can’t predict how things will change you. I think it’s just important to keep learning and taking stuff in. Because when you stop learning, if there’s no input, there’s not going to be such a great output either. I hope that I can keep learning.

Bermel’s insatiable musical curiosity is arguably an even more defining attribute of his persona than either his compositions or his clarinet playing. This trait, couple with an adventurous spirit, eventually led him to explore Ireland, Bulgaria, Israel, Ghana, Brazil, and China. All of these journeys have left a deep impact on him that continues to surface in different ways through the numerous channels in which he expresses himself as a musician. But it never degenerates into pastiche because of his concern for context.

There’s something about seeing music in context that is very important for me, and that means playing music in context. Being there and experiencing not only the music, but the things around it: the dance, the way people talk about it, what they’re doing when there’s music. Are there chickens in the background walking around? What’s the situation? Who’s there? What language are they speaking? What is that all about? And I think the reason is because, for me, in this world that we’re now living in—where you can go onto the Internet and find just about any type of music or dance or life experience you want—context is lost. You can see incredible stuff and hear incredible things, but you lose that original meaning. We’re so much closer to everywhere in the world and to so many different styles and ways of thinking about music, yet we’re also much farther because we’re seeing everything through the scrim. I think there’s something dangerous about that because we lose the humanity of making and experiencing music.

An overriding humanism has been at the heart of everything that Bermel does, which extends beyond playing and composing to being an exemplary musical citizen, a quality he has shown in his dedication to mentoring younger composers and in spearheading a variety of innovative programs at the American Composers Orchestra where he was appointed artistic director earlier this year. Bermel’s hands-on approach has made him a fixture in the contemporary music scene for decades. It has also fueled his sense of experimentation, which he describes as “problem solving.” Yet despite his predilection for trying out unusual things, whether it’s exploring the possibilities of a complex rhythm or getting string players to mimic the sound of blues vocals through a combination of slides and microtonal notations, Bermel is ultimately both practical and pragmatic. This is perhaps why he is completely accepting of the reality that certain kinds of musical ideas work better in certain musical situations than others (e.g. you can’t expect an orchestra to play well in 13/8 time under most circumstances). Yet since he is involved in so many different musical genres and curious about so many things, inevitably things sometimes blur.

I do think that genre sometimes does create interesting notions, if only just that it gives you something to rub up against. Because I think the rub is good … I think genre can have uses like that where you can try to push the edges of it and, in doing so, you get kind of a strange, hybrid creature that doesn’t have a name exactly.

***
Frank J. Oteri: Listening again to the recent discs of your music which contain mostly orchestra pieces, I was actually struck by all of the Charles Ives influence I heard in it; he’s the king of impractical music for orchestra. The last time we ran into each other, you mentioned that you strongly disagreed with what I wrote about having to compromise important elements of one’s compositional voice when writing for the orchestra. We couldn’t really talk about it then, but now we have a perfect opportunity to engage in that debate. Part of what triggered what I wrote was witnessing orchestra musicians discouraging the use of unusual meters during a workshop I had attended. I also know what usually happens when someone attempts alternate tunings in an orchestra context. But I know that you have also written quite a lot of music that explores oddball meters and even microtonality at times. Yet you are totally comfortable working with an orchestra and you are able to get them to play what you write.

Derek Bermel: It’s a tough nut to crack. It’s like one of those Russian dolls which you keep opening and there’s another doll inside. Artists of all types have had to deal with the imagined ideal versus the reality of making things happen in real space and real time, and with real people. Sometimes it creates unique challenges, I think. Sometimes it allows us to find things out about ourselves that are unusual that we didn’t know were there. But those compromises can be painful; they’re like the compromises you make in life, you know. When you find a partner or when you have a kid, or when you have a pet, or when you make friends and think you have irreconcilable differences, somehow you find a way to navigate those. I think that it’s something built into the human condition. So we as artists have to tackle that as well.

You mentioned Charles Ives. One of the things that’s incredible about Ives is how visceral his music is and also how immediate. It’s so much about everyday life, yet at the same time, there’s this abstract quality to his music as well; it’s asking so many difficult questions. It’s hovering on the edge of playability as well as knowability and identifiability as music. It’s out there, yet at the same time, it’s so immediate, especially to Americans, I think, but also to people all over the world. I think now his music has come to that place where he is recognized internationally as the father of a kind of modern school of composing in America. Ives sometimes made a lot of compromises in his music, but sometimes he didn’t. There are two versions of The Unanswered Question. One of them is completely notated and the other is much more spatial. When you look at that, you see that he was struggling with the pieces that he really wanted to have a life and the question of how to make them playable. I learned a lot by studying Ives’s notation of the songs where he chose to leave things free and where he chose to keep things very rigorous.
Same with Gershwin. I mean, there’s that incredible spot in Porgy and Bess where they start to sing to Doctor Jesus. There’s a whole chorus singing and it’s notated freely; he doesn’t write out all the kinds of inflections that he wants. In my own music— more anally some might say—I try to write out all those inflections. But I found inspiration in the fact that Gershwin just left things open, it’s just the note heads. American composers were really trying to figure out how to bring in so many other types of music, other sounds, flavors, and experiences, from the very start. Ives, Gershwin, and Ellington are composers who were really stretching the boundaries of what it meant to write concert music or jazz or anything else. They weren’t really giving it labels. I find that very inspiring. But they were also immensely concerned with being practical, with having their music played again and again, and with finding a way of notating it that meant the most to the players that they were dealing with. In Duke Ellington’s case, of course, you see the names of the musicians written right into the music, which you see in Wynton [Marsalis]’s music, too. They’ve written things that meant something directly to those musicians. If I’m dealing with orchestral musicians, I want to write something that’s going to have the most immediate meaning to them in that moment yet allow them to make the sound that I hope they’ll make, and hopefully with purpose as well. There are so many things that are contradictory that we have to juggle in that moment of allowing what’s in our head to become a reality in sound.

FJO: In terms of those sonic realities, you’ve been deeply influenced by Bulgarian meters, which are really complex. In your solo and chamber pieces, you’ve used these meters all over the place. How do you reconcile how you hear those rhythms in your head when you write for an orchestra, considering that some musicians in orchestras will balk at, say, 7/4 which is a relatively simple time signature compared to the rhythmic groove of some of those Bulgarian folk melodies?

DB: Well, when I studied with Louis Andriessen, one of the things he told me is, “There’s only one real five and that’s Stravinsky in the The Rite of Spring.” I’m not sure I agree with that exactly, having been in many places where people dance in five and seven and all kinds of things. On the other hand, Louis was very concerned with getting things down to an essence. He was not a simple thinker about music. His music, as you know, contains all kinds of polyrhythms, and he loves Bach. And he brings all that to bear in his music, which is very complex. But at the same time, he was very interested in making sure that notation was the simplest that it could be. And he never wanted his students to confuse notation with music.

Derek Bermel engrossed in a score.

Notation is a means to an end. The question you ask is very germane when you want someone to feel a seven which is not really a three plus four or a four plus three, but it’s really a seven. In Bulgaria [sings a few measures here to demonstrate], it’s not really this and then that, or that and then this. It’s kind of a flow between the two. Yet—when dealing with musicians who are trained a certain way out of a specific historical style and who feel music in a certain way, and when there are 70 or 80 of them, and there’s a conductor standing in front of them who’s beating a specific way—if you beat a seven, that means one-two-three-four-five-six-seven, or ONE-two-three, FOUR-five-six…. That’s very confusing. They’re going to have to probably beat that in a way that is intelligible rather than beating it one-two-three-four-five-six-seven, which is really a four and a three. Even though there’s still a big beat there, they’re going to be sub-dividing anyway. So the question is how can you get these musicians to subdivide the way you want, instead of the way they want? Because they will subdivide! It’s kind of like there are certain political issues—which I won’t get into—where I feel like we’re dealing with an abstract question which actually doesn’t address the reality of the way things actually are and what people will actually do in a given situation. Maybe I’m being too vague, but I can think of one very strongly. And I think you know that we as musicians have to deal with the reality. This is how things are and people will subdivide.

I have this orchestra piece, Thracian Echoes, where I notated it one way, then I notated it the other way, and then finally I said, to hell with it. I’m going to make that decision because I found that other people were doing it for me. So one time I did it in 7/8, another time I did it in 7/4, then I finally I said, no, it’s going to be four and three or three and four. And I’m going to have to make that tough decision. And it works better. On the other hand, with a string quartet, I go for it. In chamber music, you can do so many things that you can’t do in orchestral music because you just have more time.

A passage in 7/8 from Derek Bermel’s Thracian Echoes (2002). (Although not every phrase played herein subdivides the measure the same way, Bermel has notated it all as 3/8 plus 4/8 and there is an instruction when this time signature is introduced, on an earlier page in the score, for it to be conducted as 3/8 plus 4/8.) © 2002 by X Pyre Music. All rights for the world exclusively administered by Songs of Peer, Ltd. Used by permission of Peermusic Classical.

I’ve heard people say, “Mahler had 21 rehearsals; why can’t we go back to those days?” Well, first of all, we can’t. That’s an economic reality. But second of all, I think that it’s up to us. It’s exciting to find answers to those pressures. We have to embrace the challenges, or not. But if we don’t embrace them, then we get to the side of Ives that maybe is the toughest part, which is the Ives that’s really hard to play, that people still don’t know how to play, or don’t know what to do with. Maybe that’s the part of Ives that was just too stubborn to change. That’s not so bad. We should have some stubbornness as composers. I’m sure I do. But I think as much as we can, we have to put ourselves in the shoes of the people who have to play it and who want to play it well—who are dying to play this well; whether they’re on the clock or not, they want to do the best they can.

FJO: You also used a lot of microtones in your first string quartet, which is another thing that you can’t really do with an orchestra most of the time.

DB: Well, I actually I think you can! When you say microtones, it makes me think of when I heard Grisey for the first time. I was very intrigued because something really interesting had happened in France which I thought had not happened in a while. Much as I respect Boulez, the music doesn’t speak to me at all. Most of it feels very distant to me. With Grisey and Murail, something was going on, and it was with microtones, but it’s a simple concept, and it’s so beautiful that it took so much complexity to get to realize it.

An excerpt from the score of Derek Bermel’s String Quartet (1991-92) showing his extensive use of quartertones. © 2002 by X Pyre Music. All rights for the world exclusively administered by Songs of Peer, Ltd. Used by permission of Peermusic Classical.

Remember we were talking about the Dr. Jesus section in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, which is very open. One thing that I thought about when I saw that is that I bet I could notate the kind of stuff that they would be actually singing. But it would be a challenge to try to come up with a notation that expresses what people are actually singing, as opposed to Gershwin, who said, “Sing in a gospel style.” If you have string players and they have no sense of what that means, or they have no curiosity about it, you’re not going to get very far if they’re just conservatory trained. But I thought the challenge is interesting because even if I fail—and I will fail—to make a string player sound like a gospel singer, you make a leap and you go to an interesting place. It’s a “What if…?” question. What if you could actually notate what a gospel singer is singing or might sing at that time? I felt like I had absorbed enough of the style from just growing up and sometimes staying over at a friend’s house and going to a black church and taking the music in when I was little. So I had that sound in my ears, and I had been listening to Stevie Wonder and analyzing what he sang. [He sings to demonstrate.] It’s not just the quarter tones, and all those other tiny microtones; he’s actually changing the vowel and the sound is changing. It’s complex, what’s happening there rhythmically, pitch-wise, and texturally. Going into that was very important for me, and it was a way of coming up with a certain kind of musical language. So I did that in the string quartet, and later on I expanded it in a piece like Soul Garden, where I was trying to get the viola to sound like a gospel singer with a background responding, which was a slightly bigger kind of vision of that.

Then the piece that I did for myself with Fred Sherry, which was called Coming Together, has no fixed pitches. It’s just glissandi, although, as Fred said, the pitches matter. I mean, he said, “Well, what I like is that the pitches matter, but you never stay on pitch.” It’s about taking your mind off that, as I would say my clarinet concerto is. There’s no way to listen to the clarinet and hear the pitches. You have to hear the contour. And the orchestra’s playing clusters, so you can’t hear the pitches they’re playing. You can only hear the contour where they’re moving. And that is about pitch, but it’s not about pitches, it’s about areas of pitch and larger gestures of sound. What I was interested in developing was a language that did that, and I did that for a certain number of years, and it’s still part of my musical vocabulary somewhere. But I guess I respect composers like Ligeti or Stravinsky who just move on, as did Debussy. You know, they come up with an idea, and they do it, but then move on to another exploration of something else. Hopefully it all remains in my cookbook, but maybe it’s a different kind of food in the next chapter.

The last page of Derek Bermel’s 1999 clarinet and cello duo Coming Together. © 2002 by X Pyre Music. All rights for the world exclusively administered by Songs of Peer, Ltd. Used by permission of Peermusic Classical.

FJO: There was a great comment you made in the talk you did on SoundNotion which I’ll quote: “Almost everything that’s worth it is problematic. What gets me going in composition is having a problem to solve.” I think you hit the nail on the head with what you said earlier about having restrictions. Having to decide if it’s four plus three or three plus four is a problem, but you use what some people might think of as a restriction as a launch pad to create something.

DB: I just take it as a challenge. I don’t know that any of these problems are solvable, but they do bring us somewhere. Attempting to solve a problem may just bring you into the next cul-de-sac. But maybe that’s an interesting cul-de-sac, or it’s an interesting place to be for a little while. And so I probably view composition in that way. I view it as problem solving or a game because, first of all, it’s a way to stop being bored by it. And it’s a way to push myself to explore, to become better, and to try to stay relevant, too. Mathematicians and scientists do this well; they want to stay on top of real problems that a lot of people are dealing with. I try to push myself to find some kind of situation that’s a little uncomfortable. I’m better when I’m slightly uncomfortable. So maybe trekking to all these different places has been partly [about] allowing myself to view things from a vantage point of being an observer because it puts me a little bit as an outsider and makes me have to deal with some uncomfortable truths.

FJO: Taken at face value, that’s a very experimental kind of a statement. But I think you’re more of an adventurer than an experimenter. To some people those words might mean the same thing, but I think they’re quite different. To be an experimenter is to be in a laboratory and chart what happens. Being an adventurer, on the other hand, is going out in the field to see how something plays out. You mentioned your travels, which I want to get into more specifically later. But traveling in a more general sense strikes to the heart of this. Tell me if I’m wrong on this, but I wouldn’t think of you as an experimental composer per se. But I think of you as an adventurous composer. Another aspect of this comes from your being active as a player as well as being a composer—you’re physically involved with performing music as well as creating it. It gives you a different approach. They’re not just notes on a page; you know what’s going to happen with them.

DB: I can’t really say because I don’t have perspective on what I’m doing. I have this skewed perspective of being me, so for me things feel experimental when I don’t know what’s going to happen. I try to put some aspect in every piece that I’m unsure of—unsure of how it’s going to turn out. At least that’s what I strive to do. I think in my better pieces that is probably the case. Although, in the same way, I don’t know which pieces are my better pieces, because—as they say—only time will tell. There are probably some composers who thought that they were experimental who actually were not, or that other people thought in their age were experimental, who actually turned out not to be, and vice versa. So it’s very hard to say. I know that I like challenges, but I don’t have much perspective on whether I’m an experimenter or an adventurer, or both, or neither.

Derek Bermel playing clarinet, 2009.

I like to get my hands on the music. I’m kind of a tactile type of musician; I like to feel the way it feels on an instrument. So probably some of that wandering around has to do with wanting the experience of context in performance. I like working with musicians. I’m a social guy, as you know. I can also be very reclusive, too. But I do like the experience of feeling the way music bounces off of other people and the way they respond to it. I think that that’s partly what making music is about as a performer, and for me it’s also true as a composer to a certain extent.

On the other hand, sometimes performance hampers the idea. I like a certain amount of working with musicians, getting in there with them and playing. But then I like to be by myself for a while to try to figure out what happened. I’m a chronic reviser of my own music; sometimes I over-revise if it’s going to be in my catalog. I’m trying to create a catalog of work that says: “This is who I am.” It has many different types of music, but I think in total, it says something. I don’t really want to put anything in the catalog that I don’t feel really good about, so that’s what makes me chronically revise my music until I really don’t have too many problems with it.
As far as being a performer, there’s something about seeing music in context that is very important for me, and that means playing music in context. Being there and experiencing not only the music, but the things around it: the dance, the way people talk about it, what they’re doing when there’s music. Are there chickens in the background walking around? What’s the situation? Who’s there? What language are they speaking? What is that all about? And I think the reason is because, for me, in this world that we’re now living in—where you can go onto the Internet and find just about any type of music or dance or life experience you want—context is lost. You can see incredible stuff and hear incredible things, but you lose that original meaning. We’re so much closer to everywhere in the world and to so many different styles and ways of thinking about music, yet we’re also much farther because we’re seeing everything through the scrim.

I think there’s something dangerous about that because we lose the humanity of making and experiencing music. There’s something that creates this level of irony around music and around life in general when we’re seeing it through a screen. So there’s a lot of work that’s ironic. I appreciate irony as much as anybody else. I mean, life is ironic—period—when we’re living it. And I guess we can live through The Onion and see everything as ironic, but while irony can be powerful, it’s also not very lasting. It means something different for every generation. I don’t know that irony is the answer. One of my friends said to me once, “Irony is cheap.” I don’t know if that’s exactly true, but I think that we’re in danger when we become self-consciously ironic about work, or see it through the screen too much, even if we’re being genuine about experiences that we’ve only seen through the screen. I need to experience things live as much as I can.

And I’m saying that here on a video. Isn’t that ironic? But those are the ironies built into life. I don’t know how much more self-conscious irony is needed. For me, the human experience is something kind of gritty. That can mean gritty like urban gritty, like here in New York, or it can mean gritty like on a farm, or in a cave, or in the air. I don’t know. It’s just that the real experience of life is messy. It’s full of contradictions and complications. It’s not neat on a screen like it’s packaged. And so I want to get at that in music and to get all that messiness of life. I want to be there, not viewing it through another medium.

FJO: For you, being there is also physically playing the music as well as writing the notes. You’ve always done both. You’ve written music that other people play. You play music that was written by other people. And then you play music that you wrote yourself. We always like so say, “Well, once upon a time, all the great composers were also great players and then there was this point where this terrible divide happened.” But in a way it’s a little disingenuous, since most probably identified more as a composer or as a performer. But you’ve always been both. You’re a fantastic clarinetist; you’re fabulous when you’re playing other people’s music. You’re totally on as an instrumentalist, in addition to being a really terrific composer. So do you think of it as a divide? Has it always been that way? Were there periods in your life that you felt you identified more as a player than as a composer, and now do you identify more a composer than as a player? How do you navigate those two identities? Are there two identities?

DB: I probably have more identities than that, but whenever people ask me what I am, I usually say musician. Inevitably the follow up question is, “What’s the name of your band?” I don’t know how Bach identified, but I have a feeling that he might have also identified as a musician. But I won’t speculate about the way he thought. I think that the break occurs with Beethoven where the composer becomes more self-consciously a composer, although he was also supposedly a great performer as well. I wish we had recordings of him playing. Berlioz was not a performer and you can think of other examples, but they’re more isolated. I don’t even know if they thought of themselves more as this than that; they didn’t really think that much about that separation. That’s more of a 20th-century phenomenon, and it probably has to do also with the economics of it all. Before then you just didn’t think about it because there wasn’t really a way to make money as a composer. There was no copyright. And there was no Stephen Foster yet, or a printing press running 24/7. Maybe Brahms was the first who was really making money independently. And then in the 20th century it just accelerated with the advent of composers at universities where they didn’t really need to perform to make a living.

For me personally, I just love being in a room with other musicians and making music. Sometimes I’ve been lucky enough to get a commission from a great performer, but I’ve met most of the best musicians I know by performing with them. I can give an example of just working with the JACK Quartet. I have enjoyed getting to know them by making music with them. We played the Brahms [Clarinet Quintet] and I wrote a clarinet quintet for them. It’s a lot of fun to play with them. That was a real bonding experience. There’s nothing else like it.

Derek Bermel performing with the JACK Quartet. Photo by Wiek Hijmans

I would say that having a great performer play your music is a different experience than performing with them. There are so many wonderful musicians that I’ve met, like Nick Kitchen and the Borromeo Quartet, Maria Bachmann, Fred Sherry, or all of the folks I’ve met through playing at Copland House. The act of performing with somebody is something you can’t compare to anything else. I’m leaving so many people out. When I wrote for Jazz at Lincoln Center, just getting up there and playing with the guys in the band—it also means something to the players when you get up and play with them. You are coming into their space, and you’re saying we’re all together. We’re all on the same plane, and we’re listening to each other at the same time. It means something very different than them interpreting what you wrote. But I’d say they’re both very deep experiences, and I wouldn’t really want to live without one or the other.

FJO: Though at this point in time you can’t imagine life with one and not the other, but I’m sure that when you were growing up and first learning about music, particularly if you were studying classical music, that playing had to come before composing.
DB: I started playing clarinet when I was seven. But I was playing other things earlier. According to my mom, I was picking out tunes on the organ when I was one or two or something. I don’t remember any of that. But I do remember starting clarinet when I was seven, and then starting to work on jazz piano after that.

Back in the day…

I had started writing when I was eight or something. I think my first pieces were called symphonies, and they were for clarinet and trumpet because my brother played the trumpet and I played the clarinet. I think what I was doing was copying him because he had started composing something. I don’t know why, but of course I just copied him, like you do when you’re a younger brother. But it may have always been in my blood to compose. My dad was a playwright and a translator, so I had this theatrical kind of background. And my mom had studied drama and was a good singer. She could sing a lot of show tunes. The first record I got was Benny Goodman; my grandma gave it to me. When I was 11, my grandmother bought this very beat up piano from a relative. She paid like $400; I think she way overpaid. In any case, I started composing on it immediately. It was actually my cousin’s piano. And he also became a composer later in life. So it was a charmed piano.

But my first real great teacher was my clarinet teacher: Ben Armato, who played for the Met. He taught me so much about paying attention to detail in music. I used to go down to Patelson’s in New York and buy tons and tons of music when I was kid. And one of the things that I bought was the Copland Concerto. I brought it to him; I was going to impress him and play the Copland. I was 14 when I went to work with him. He listened to me play and after about three bars, he stopped me. Then he said, “Let’s work on that.” And we spent the whole lesson on the first four bars—getting them right, thinking about the phrase and the breath. How was I playing it? Was I supporting it? Was I thinking about the line and where the important note in the line was? All these kinds of things. That had a huge impact on me, because it gave me a kind of seriousness and attentiveness to music.

Although he was my clarinet teacher, he was the first person who really made composing music serious for me. When I started to think critically about what I was doing, Ben took me aside one day and said, “I know you want to be a composer. It breaks my heart, because I would love for you to be a clarinetist. But I want you to know that every note you write is more important than everything I’ve done in my entire life.” And that was very moving to me, that a guy who played clarinet in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra would say that to me. And that he felt that way so strongly, even though he didn’t like modern music. I liked Verdi, Puccini, and Bellini, you know, all the great opera composers. But he felt so strongly that the composer was the center of everything. I think that had a great impact on me. Maybe to hear it from him was even more important than hearing it from a composer because he didn’t need to say that.

Derek Bermel (center) singing in The Baker’s Dozen as an undergrad at Yale.

I kept playing throughout high school. And I played in rock bands. Then when I got to college, I didn’t make the orchestra. When I got to Yale, which was where I went to school, I was very upset because I thought I was a great clarinetist. But I didn’t know how to play excerpts. I had no idea. I just went in there and played very expressively and did whatever I wanted. And they said “X.” So then I was left without a major musical thing to do at school, since I thought I’d be doing the orchestra. It left me in a strange place, but again, I think sometimes those limitations bring out something interesting. Everybody was telling me I should try out for an a cappella group because that’s a big thing to do at Yale. So I did. I tried out for a group called the Baker’s Dozen, which ended up being a terrific experience. I didn’t know what I was doing when I went in to audition for them. I think I played and sang “Just the Way You Are,” or something like that. But singing opened up a whole new world of making music to me; that being the primary way of generating sound was very influential for me. I ended up doing lots of arranging, all kinds of stuff from Queen to The Cars to jazz standards, even kind of delving into some folk songs and classical stuff. I was singing with people who sometimes didn’t know how to read music. Or if they read music, they only barely read music. Some of them were quite excellent musicians, too. In my class, by the way, was Lisa Bielawa. We were there at the same time. She was singing in a different group at school. So we’ve known each other for a long time.

FJO: When did you start studying composition? Was composing already at that point a thing you wanted to do as a career path?
DB: Yeah, I had decided when I was 11 that I was going to be a composer. I had already been composing little pieces. I think that I had also been writing poems from when I was very young and doing all those creative things that kids do. But somehow I just thought musically. I was always a kid who didn’t notice what he was wearing, but I remembered what I was hearing. And I would imitate sounds and imitate singers. I was a by-ear person. But then I remember that I went to this music camp, and I went to see a pianist play several movements of the Vingt Regards of Messiaen. I remember looking at the program and seeing Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jésus, and then over here, it said Olivier Messiaen. It was a slightly unusual spelling, with all those vowels together. And I remember thinking, “Wow, I don’t know who that is, but whoever that is, I want to do what he does.” It’s a very clear moment to me. It’s funny because people say, “Well, I’m sure you don’t remember when you decided to be a composer.” I say, “No, I remember the exact moment. It was when I saw that guy’s name: Olivier Messiaen. I never forgot it.”

FJO: So you’re 11 and you see Messiaen’s name and think, “I want to do that.” Then you have a clarinet teacher who says, “Any note you write is more valuable than anything I’ve ever done in my life.” And that sort of seals the deal. So you go to Yale and you study music.

DB: Well, there’s one other moment I remember from when I was growing up. I think I was about 12 or 13. I walked into Paul’s Record Hut in New Rochelle. In the bargain bin, I saw a record of a guy who had his head back. He had a hat on, and he was playing piano. He looked like he was almost in pain, and he was sweating. The record was Thelonious Monk’s It’s Monk’s Time. That had a huge impression on me. I had the Benny Goodman record that my grandma had bought me and a couple of other odd jazz records. But Monk was a revelation. So you have this European master Messaien on the one hand, who himself is an incredibly eclectic composer who takes in sounds from everywhere, from birdsong to Hindu chant to Japanese gagaku, then Monk, who had absorbed so many different influences and styles from Debussy to gospel music. Yet both of these composers expressed things in such plain language. It was very simple and straightforward. I think that’s why kids are drawn to both of these composers. And, of course, these were both piano composers, so it was there at my fingertips. I could kind of hear it and imitate it, which I did a lot. I think those were my biggest influences as a kid, as well as listening to a lot of hip hop, which was what was happening in New York. That’s what everybody was listening to growing up, and imitating.

FJO: Hip hop and punk rock. Punk was everywhere.

DB: I think punk was everywhere, but somehow the kids I grew up with in my neighborhood were listening less to punk than to hip hop. My friend Dave knew everything about punk rock. He was listening to the Bad Brains and the Clash. Even the Police had a kind of punk rock sound when they started, and INXS. And when I was 14 or 15 I went to see Suicidal Tendencies at the Ritz in Manhattan. I remember these guys stage diving and I got hit by a boot in the head and went down while people were slam dancing. All my friends had pulled to the back, but I was still there like a dork. And when I was in high school I saw Fishbone. So that was happening at the same time as early hip hop, for sure.

FJO: Both punk and hip hop were movements that started out being all about rejecting any kind of authority and just doing your own thing. Don’t listen to what anybody tells you. But you already had an important mentor, that clarinet teacher. And then you went to Yale, an Ivy League school, which would have been anathema to the whole punk and early hip hop gestalts. You entered into the establishment, and then from there met other people who became very powerful mentors to you, in very different ways, and they informed different aspects of your music. You already mentioned Andriessen, but certainly William Bolcom when you were in grad school, and André Hadju, with whom you studied ethnomusicology when you were in Israel. All of them became a very big part of your identity. And a big part of your own life now is about being a mentor to younger people. You’ve been at Bowdoin all summer.

DB: I always had mentors, and I think actually most people do. It might seem like punk music is DIY, but I’m sure if you ask anybody coming out of that movement, like Iggy Pop or David Bowie, or the guys at Fishbone, or anyone from hip hop, you’ll hear that they have mentors. They may not be obvious mentors. They may not be academic mentors. The mentor may even be someone who is three years older than them, or two years younger than them. I mean, was John Lennon Paul McCartney’s mentor in a way or vice versa, in some cases? It’s hard to say. Jazz musicians all have mentors, same with dancers. And no matter where you find a mentor, whether you find it through kind of a more traditional way like the academy or you go out and seek out somebody that has something that you want, I think it is very important.

Derek Bermel with William Bolcom

My mentors have been some very well-established composers like Bill Bolcom, Louis Andriessen, and Dutilleux certainly, and I got some great moments of wisdom from William Albright. They were my composition teachers. On the other hand, as I said, Ben Armato, who was my clarinet teacher, was a mentor. And I followed Mick O’Brien, the pipes player, for several weeks in Ireland, just transcribing what he was doing. It was for a short amount of time, but he had something that I wanted to hear and to get more deeply involved with. And my teachers in Ghana who taught me the xylophone, those are mentors. They had something I thought was beautiful that I wanted to connect with through music, but also the context in which they worked. That was as important to me as the music.

Henri Dutilleux with Derek Bermel

And sometimes that also goes for composers from the past. As much as Nikola Iliev, the Bulgarian clarinetist that I went to study with, is a mentor, so is Debussy. You know, I try, I read what he writes and I try to get into the way he thought about his writing because it’s not that far from what we’re doing. They were also just people trying to figure out how to make music, how to do what they wanted to do, and how to solve those tough problems. When I’ve read Bartok’s letters, I felt there was a kind of commonality with some of the questions that I had. So I try to get deeper into their music.

And hip hop, too, because when I heard Rakim for the first time, that was a revelation, too. I mean, the first thing on that album you hear is:

I ain’t no joke, I used to let the mic smoke.
Now I slam it when I’m done and make sure it’s broke.
When I’m gone no one gets on cuz I won’t let
Nobody press up and mess up the scene I set.
I like to stand in a crowd and watch the people wonder damn.
Think about it then you’ll understand.
I’m just an addict, addicted to music,
Maybe it’s a habit, I gotta use it.
Even if it’s jazz or the quiet storm,
I hook a beat up, convert it in a hip-hop form.

I mean, he just goes and goes. And that’s coming right on top of “King of Rock, there ain’t none higher / Sucker MC should call me sire,” which itself was revolutionary five years before and now sounds elementary. It’s also very powerful, but elementary compared to what Rakim did. And so Rakim just raised the bar. For me, what was so exciting about hip hop was that new revolutions were happening every couple of years. That same year as Rakim is KRS-One, and Public Enemy the next year. Things kept dropping that were incredible and which were moving the genre forward, and that was exciting. As a musician, I gravitated toward it because it was innovative. And it was vital and urgent and vigilant. I think a lot of other music was kind of sleepy. And hip hop was not sleepy. It was just bubbling up. It couldn’t be stopped, you know.

FJO: But you didn’t become a rapper.

DB: No, but as a teacher once said to me, “It’s all grist for the mill.” There’s beauty in so many things, and they don’t have to be the thing that I’m doing. But maybe what I can find in listening to hip hop is something very deep and complex that then I can channel into something else. Or maybe not, but it all comes in and it’s hard to predict how it will come out or to control it. David Gompper went to Nigeria and spent three years there. You don’t hear it on the surface of his music, but he will tell you that it greatly changed his life. And what changed his life was not exactly some of the musical structures, but maybe some of the things he learned there and the speed and time—things that might be hard to quantify and might be hard to immediately see on the surface. In my music, those things are more on the surface. But I would say that you can’t predict how things will change you. I think it’s just important to keep learning and taking stuff in. Because when you stop learning, if there’s no input, there’s not going to be such a great output either. I hope that I can keep learning. I know that for some people, teaching itself is a way of learning. I just think that there’s all different ways of learning. And I think we really need to keep that input going.

But I hear what you’re saying, that some people seek mentors out through means that are way more traditional. I didn’t really understand yet what studying composition was when I was at Yale, for the most part. My first composition teacher was Michael Tenzer, who was an ethnomusicologist as well. He studied the Balinese gamelan. And he, like Evan Ziporyn who had been a classmate of his, got very interested and went to Bali. Although I appreciated it, I was less interested in the gamelan and much more interested in African music, having played a lot of jazz by that time. I knew a lot about classical music, but I felt like African music was the other side of jazz that I didn’t understand and didn’t know anything about. I think I always had something in me that very much wanted to go to Africa at some point. So when I found a way to do that, that was important to me.

Working with Michael and seeing the way he had created opportunities for himself, whatever way he could, to get over to Bali and get that beautiful music was the signal to me to go to Africa. I went to study with André Hadju in Israel after my undergrad years. Even though I was studying Jewish music with him, he knew my heart was set on going to Africa. And he really encouraged me to go because he said if you feel very strongly the kinds of impulses as you should, as an American having been steeped in jazz and knowing a lot of black American music, this is important for who you are. And I respect the fact that rather than try to push me towards something that he loved, he wanted me to go toward what I love. I really learned what a great teacher is: somebody who can move you toward most fully realizing who you are and toward most fully getting what you need in order to be whole as a human being and—therefore—as a musician.

Ghanaian gyil master Bernard Woma playing gyil duets with Derek Bermel

FJO: You’re describing Africa as your main focus and priority at that time, but it ultimately became much bigger than that. You spent time in Ghana, which you’ve mentioned, but you also described wandering around with a piper in Ireland, and we touched on you being in Bulgaria. And you were in Israel. Plus you’ve spent a lot of time in Brazil as well as China. You’ve been all over the globe, and all of these things have somehow gotten inside your head and your soul and have become a part of your identity. You talked about wanting to experience these things in their own context. There was also an interesting comment you made somewhere on your blog that’s a further elaboration on that—that you have to find a way to make it your own music. You can’t just take it; you’ve got to make it yours. I’m curious about that process, for African music as well as music from everywhere else.

Júlio Góes and Derek Bermel playing caxixi in Salvador, Brazil.

DB: We’re in an unusual age now because it’s an age where people talk about appropriation and mixing up things, and then putting it back out there. I guess I’ve always thought it’s important to digest the music that you take in, rather than kind of chewing it a little and spitting it out. It has to somehow become part of who you are. And it has to go through your own particular digestive system. It’s getting a little gross, but for lack of a better word, you’ve got to shit it out. Or let’s put this more delicately, you want to sweat it out. If it hasn’t become a part of all the garbage that you are, and then comes out in that form, it remains at arm’s length from you. Maybe I’m a little less interested in music where I feel that just the surface has been touched and then kind of repackaged into another form. It’s a complicated subject. It’s the subject of our age really, because it’s tied in with all the stuff about YouTube and immediate access to everything and the Internet. Again, it’s that question of viewing things through the screen versus actually going and touching them. I feel like I can make some generalizations about it, yet at the same time I am only speaking about myself, because I can’t look through anybody’s eyes besides my own. So it’s a personal thing. I suppose maybe I shouldn’t make it general, but I should say, that’s what I do. Maybe there are ways of just taking the surface and making something beautiful out of that. I don’t know. But I haven’t been able to find that for me.

FJO: But now there’s an entire generation for whom the entire gamut of the world is the past and it’s not clearly differentiated, whether it’s classical music, jazz, rock, hip hop, traditional African music, bluegrass, salsa, klezmer, Peking opera, you name it.

DB: It’s all available.

FJO: And because of that there are many people creating music now who don’t really make a distinction between, say, alternative rock or jazz or contemporary classical music. Yet you do all that stuff, too, and you came to most of those different kinds of music at around the same time. But because you come from an earlier generation, it’s somehow still in different pockets. You write for orchestra and there are the things that you know you can do with an orchestra. And then you write as well as play chamber pieces where you can wig out in, say, 11/16. But then you also put together a soul band in which you sang called Peace by Piece and you’ve written a bunch of songs for that group. But when you write vocal music that’s performed with an orchestra or a chamber ensemble, the vocals in those pieces don’t sound like the vocals in Peace by Piece. So it’s like your albums would still be in different places in the record store that used to be across the street from here before the Apple store moved in.

DB: Well, I do think that genre sometimes does create interesting notions, if only just that it gives you something to rub up against. Because I think the rub is good, both on the musical level—the rub that you have when you have that third that’s kind of flatted from African music—and also the rub that exists when you’re up against certain kinds of fixed notions of what music should be or is, as Duke Ellington was. Or someone like Meredith Monk, who came out of dance yet created this beautiful kind of very humanistic minimalism—I don’t know how else to express it, but it was like genres rubbing up against each other. Someone like Ellington had so much to say but felt constrained, and he was also trying to make his ensemble stretch and grow. I think genre can have uses like that where you can try to push the edges of it and, in doing so, you get kind of a strange, hybrid creature that doesn’t have a name exactly.

Alan Pierson, Derek Bermel, and Yasiin Bey (a.k.a. MosDef)

I had originally conceived of my piece Three Rivers for a hybrid project at The Kitchen that John Schaeffer commissioned for WNYC; it was one of these strange groups which had people from different genres playing in it. And that was exciting. Sometimes you get pushed into a weird place when you’re working with artists in different genres. And it can be good or bad. I revised that piece many times in order to get it where I wanted it, where it is now. It’s strictly notated, but there’s a kind of malleability to it. Working with Alarm Will Sound and having some of those players improvise at different spots has been exciting for me. But it still feels like it’s in a strange zone, an I-don’t-know-what-you’d-call-it kind of music.

An excerpt from the score of Derek Bermel’s Three Rivers (2001) containing both fully notated and improvisatory parts. © 2002 by X Pyre Music. All rights for the world exclusively administered by Songs of Peer, Ltd. Used by permission of Peermusic Classical.

Genre can be challenging. I’ve worked a lot with Wendy Walters, the writer, and we’ve written art songs together and an oratorio for the Pittsburgh Symphony. But we also wrote this musical, Golden Motors, that’s now making the rounds. Wendy’s a kindred spirit. She has a kind of flexibility and interest in so many things. She’s a poet. She’s a lyricist. She’s a playwright. She’s an essayist. And she likes poking around between the genres, too. I feel like musical theater is another problem to solve: how to deal with musicians who think of music in a very particular way, in a very beautiful way, in a very structured way, sometimes in a very free way, but yet you have to figure out how to write it down and how to express it to them in a way that makes sense to them, with their background and who they are, which is slightly different from who I am. To me that’s really exciting. I embrace the challenge, although there are maybe disappointments along the way. I mean, Beckett said, “Fail again. Fail better.” You keep failing, but hopefully you do a little better each time.

FJO: You say musical, so are you thinking Broadway?

DB: Well, I don’t know what Broadway means anymore. Broadway means you have to have a lot of money.

FJO: Or someone else does.

DB: And they have to keep putting money into it. So for me, that’s more of a kind of tactic. But yeah, it’s musical theater, and it’s within that genre of singing and structure. That will be the only genre category I would give it. I think it probably has a number of things which will make people say that it’s not musical theater. But that’s true with most of my music, so I don’t worry too much about the labels.

FJO: I was intrigued by something you said earlier about being very careful about your catalog and constantly revising pieces, which you alluded to again when you talked about reworking Three Rivers. But at the same time, I’m overjoyed that unlike many other composers historically who have weeded out some of their earliest pieces, there are some very early pieces that are still in your catalog, like your solo piano piece Turning, which won the ASCAP Leo Kaplan Award for young composers. I also thought it was very brave for you to write on your blog about your very first commission, the band piece, and once again you’ve kept that piece in your catalog.

An unmetered passage from “Nightmares and Chickens,” the second movement of Derek Bermel’s solo piano composition Turning, which was written during his studies with Henri Dutilleux at the Tanglewood Music Center. © 1995 by X Pyre Music. All rights for the world exclusively administered by Songs of Peer, Ltd. Used by permission of Peermusic Classical.

DB: For better or worse. As a composer, pieces that I’ve written are kind of markers in my life. I suppose my life has probably taken different turns than those of some of my friends who are not composers and who’ve had more normal jobs and lives, who’ve had families and all kinds of things that I haven’t had. So when I think of a certain piece, I think of a certain period in my life. It has a lot of resonance and meaning for me that goes beyond the notes on the page because I remember something about what I was like and what my music was like. Some of that is personal.

Derek Bermel in mid thought during our conversation for NewMusicBox. Photo by Alexandra Gardner

As long as people want to play something, I’m basically O.K. with it as long as I don’t think it’s a bad piece. I’ve done revisions on those older pieces and I think they’re the best they can be. People continue to publish and play these pieces, so I feel like I can’t be the architect of my own story. Other people will have to be. I can’t choose which of my works is the most significant. I may like certain pieces better than others, but those are probably, you know, the bad child that nobody else likes, and so I feel defensive and protective of those pieces.

But there are other works that I have not let out there, which are even earlier, because I’ve been writing since I was 11. I mean, you don’t see A Pig up there. A Pig, opus 1, is not there. Nor all the pieces I wrote for my woodwind quintet in high school, nor my first four orchestra pieces which I wrote in high school, where I didn’t even know where to put the violins. I put them at the top of the page. I remember showing that piece to John Corigliano when I was about 21 or 22; he was kind enough to give me a lesson. And he said, “The violins are at the top of the page. Did you know that?” And I said, “Oh.” And he showed me some scores, and I realized. Again, I’m not visual. I had looked at a lot of scores, but I had never picked up the fact that the violins were supposed to be down at the bottom. So a lot of it was just trial and error. I’m just failing better and better.

FJO: Well, I’d like to hear A Pig, opus 1.

DB: I still have all that music somewhere. I’ll try to have DJ Spooky mix it.

Caleb Burhans: Inner Voices

Posted on August 14, 2013 by Frank J. Oteri - Conversations, Spotlight

It might seem surprising—given all of Caleb Burhans’s accomplishments within multiple musical scenes as well as his notoriety—that it would take so long for a disc devoted exclusively to the musical compositions to be released. Yet when we spoke with him in late July, it was on the very day that Evensong, the first CD to have his name on the spine, was released on Cantaloupe Records. It was also just a few days after his daughter Fiona was born: “It’s rather insane; they’re obviously the two hugest things in my life thus far.” That’s saying a lot for someone who has appeared on stages ranging from Carnegie Hall to Madison Square Garden, has had works performed at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall as well as the Darmstadt International Music Institute, and was the subject of a New York Times profile nearly five years ago.

But after our conversation, it became clear that Burhans does not particularly seek the limelight, preferring to be—as he put it—“a cog in the machine” rather than “standing out front.” This attitude informs his approach to being a performer (he’d “rather play second violin or viola than first fiddle for the most part”) as well as how he creates material for most of his more popular music-oriented endeavors, such as itsnotyouitsme, his ambient indie rock duo with guitarist Grey Mcmurray, which has released three albums thus far. But the rarified world of notation-based music is inherently a non-collaborative process and its denizens expect compositions to come from a singular auteur. Yet while others might feel that writing a fixed score for other musicians to play is a very different process from creating music with others either in real time or in a recording studio, Burhans doesn’t draw distinctions between these modalities and is able to make music effortlessly in each of them. At the same time, however, the lessons he learned from his immersion into so many different kinds of musical experiences have also made him extremely meticulous about the material he puts out into the world, whatever the genre. So for him Evensong had to be far more than merely a collection of music works he composed over the past decade; it had to cohere and flow from track to track as an album.
While being open to such a broad range of stylistic aesthetics, both as a co-creator and as an interpreter could have yielded a compositional voice that is all over the map, Burhans’s approach to the music he commits to the page is remarkably singular and almost austere in its sonic purity:

“I made a conscious decision when I was in my early 20s to write the music I write now. … Because I have so many different outlets for playing different styles of music, I decided that at the end of the day I want to go home and write music that I want to listen to and create on my own. Because I do get to play some really thorny contemporary music and free jazz, when I go to write I want it to be very pristine and very simple.”

Simple, however, is something of a misnomer. Admittedly—compared with a great deal of contemporary music—a typical Burhans score looks relatively straight-forward on the page and a performance of it sounds relatively simple, but appearances can be deceptive. While pieces like his 2005 Iceman Stole The Sun or oh ye of little faith (2008), both scored for chamber orchestra, are largely created from cycles of repeated phrases, the musicians often stress different beats from one another and the various phrases frequently begin in different parts of the measure resulting in an ambiguous sense of downbeat. (See score sample below.) While in his Magnificat and Nunc Dittimus, both for treble voices and organ (2004), the voices mostly move in parallel motion with one another (in Nunc Dittimus they’re actually mostly in unison!), they often go against the rhythmic flow of what is being played on the organ. And then there are the glissandos that permeate all of Burhans’s music and give it a heightened sense of instability. When musicians pull it off it comes across as otherworldly, but doing so requires a high level of concentration as well as musicianship—an attention to subtle details, particularly pitch and rhythmic clarity:

“I’m very, very specific about everything. One of my pet peeves is that people think of glissandi as portamentos and so they do them at the last second; a glissando should last the entire duration of a pitch it’s coming from. I used to write much more dense microtonal music, but I got fed up with having to play pitches for people and say, ‘This is a sixth tone.’ I found that very inaccurate; it would never be the same across the board from player to player. But I found that if I say glissando from this note to this note within this duration, that’s the only way you can actually control that. … I’m very rigorous about keeping things precise…
“It can kind of put me in a bad position with some new music ensembles. When they have a million pieces to learn, they’ll see my piece and think, ‘Oh, It’s in D major and in 6/8—all right, fine; we’ll play through it once.’ Then they get to the concert and totally mess it up, either play it out of tune or forget a repeat. I get that; I’ve been there before. It looks simple, but it takes a different type of focus.”

One of the things that has helped Burhans get what he wants from performers who play his music is that he is so active as a performer himself, so there’s a lot of mutual empathy. As he acknowledges, “Being on the same page with someone else can really open things up not just in terms of execution but also in terms of interpretation.”

But it goes much deeper than that. Three of the seven tracks on Evensong feature Alarm Will Sound, a group he helped found and which he remains very much a part of. Another three feature the Trinity Wall Street Choir, a group he sang with when he first moved to New York City and in which his wife—soprano Martha Cluver—still sings. In fact, the only group featured on the present CD with which Burhans does not have an almost familial relationship is the Tarab Cello Ensemble, who commissioned his lush The Things Left Unsaid which they perform on the disc. But, of course, as an active violinist and violist (plus he also played cello as a teen), Burhans is completely in his element working with string players.

The week we spoke with him was definitely an auspicious one, but the best is undoubtedly yet to come. Aside from a series of eight caprices for electric guitar he created espressly for Mcmurray more than a decade ago that clock in at approximately 90 minutes in total, Burhans’s compositions have tended to be smaller scale. Most of his pieces hover between 5 and 15 minutes. But given his love for the Anglican choral music tradition and his adeptness at writing for voices, a large scale work for chorus seems inevitable at some point in the not-too-distant future. He also expressed interest in writing a full length concerto for itsnotyouitsme and orchestra, an activity that would bring some of the disparate parts of his musical universe even closer together. It will certainly be worth the wait.

oh ye of little faith... (do you know where your children are?), page 7

Page 7 of the score of Caleb Burhans’s oh ye of little faith… (do you know where your children are?)
© 2008 Burning Hands Publishing (ASCAP). Reprinted with permission of Caleb Burhans and Good Child Music.

Cynthia Lee Wong Selected as Second New Voices Composer

Posted on June 3, 2013 by NewMusicBox Staff - Headlines, Ledes

Cynthia Lee Wong.
Photo by George J. Kunze, courtesy Boosey & Hawkes.

Cynthia Lee Wong has been selected as the second composer to participate in New Voices, an annual collaborative project between Boosey & Hawkes, the New World Symphony, and the San Francisco Symphony which aims to develop the professional careers of emerging composers in the Americas. Each year, one composer is chosen from a selection of invited applicants to participate in a multi-organizational residency that covers areas in career development including, but not limited to, working with a publisher, work-shopping new compositions, and premiering their works on both coasts with the New World Symphony and San Francisco Symphony in orchestral and chamber settings. After receiving hands-on experience in the preparation of score materials and contract negotiation at the New York offices of Boosey & Hawkes, Wong will collaborate with the New World Symphony in the work-shopping, rehearsal, and performance of two new works in the 2013–14 season—commissions that make up the performance-related aspect of New Voices. These New Voices commissions consist of one work for chamber ensemble and one work for orchestra, to be premiered by the New World Symphony in November 2013 and April 2014, respectively. The works will then receive their West Coast premieres by the San Francisco Symphony during the 2014–15 season.

Wong (b. 1982) was selected by a panel of judges consisting of conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and composers John Adams, Steven Mackey, and Mason Bates. A recipient of accolades including three ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Awards and several prizes from The Juilliard School, City University of New York, and Columbia University, Wong has studied composition with Samuel Adler, Milton Babbitt, David Del Tredici, David Olan, and Larry Thomas Bell, and is currently on the faculty at CUNY’s Baruch College. Current commissions include compositions for the League of Composers/International Society of Contemporary Music and the New York State Music Teacher’s Association. She is also collaborating with librettist Richard Aellen on two musicals: Nemo, an adaptation based on Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and No Guarantees, a romantic comedy set in the future where a secret attempt to use an android as an understudy has unexpected consequences.

Canadian-born Zosha Di Castri was the first composer chosen to participate in New Voices. Her new work for percussion quartet, Manif, premiered at the New World Symphony in March, and her new work for orchestra, Lineage, premiered at NWS in April. Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony will give the West Coast premieres of both works next season.

(—from the press release)

Upon learning about her selection, Frank J. Oteri met up with Cynthia Lee Wong and spoke to her about her music and what her expectations are about participating in the New Voices project.

(In additional excerpts from this conversation, Wong spoke about her formative musical influences–which includes a description of her teacher Milton Babbitt’s reaction to her music being described in the press as “shamelessly beautiful”–and her other artistic pursuit, drawing cartoons. Special thanks to Patrick Gullo for help in filming and editing the video.)

Exponential: The Music of Zoë Keating

Posted on June 1, 2012 by Molly Sheridan - Conversations, Cover

The Center Stage auditorium at the Reston Community Center
Reston, Virginia
April 14, 2012—6 p.m.
Video presentation by Molly Sheridan
Transcribed by Julia Lu
Homepage photograph by Jeffrey Rusch

When Zoë Keating takes the stage, her charismatic presence—a perfect balance of focused performer and welcoming MC—exerts a magnetic attraction. If you have heard Keating’s music on recordings or encountered it in TV commercials, you are already familiar with the immersive worlds she conjures with her cello, using digital technology to build up an entire orchestra of sound out of the timbres of this one instrument. In live performance, however, her stage persona (which I strongly suspect is not all that different from her real-life self) adds a beautiful gloss to the work she is presenting. Anecdotes about the genesis of the music, life as a touring musician, her love of pancakes, pull the audience into the experience, a background on which Keating then lays out her compositions with a serious intensity. Hearing Zoë Keating’s infectious laugh is in no way essential to appreciating the powerful music she creates, but it is perhaps crucial to best appreciating the artist who makes it.

This combination of compositional prowess and generous personal spirit may also be integral to understanding the successful DIY career she has built, which includes a largely self-managed touring career (she only began working with a booking agent a year ago), the sale of more than 45,000 copies of her self-released albums, and the astounding (as of this writing) 1,268,864 member community of followers she has attracted on Twitter (she’s on Twitter’s “Suggested User” list). Writers often refer to her as a one-woman orchestra, an avant cellist. It might also be effective to think of her as a composer who, with a chair, a cello, a bit of software, and some amplification, hopes you’ll join her inside the evocative aural spaces she constructs. To help you feel welcome there, she’s not afraid to introduce herself first.

As a result of her methods and her success, a lot of people want to speak with Keating about the business of making music, and she has been incredibly transparent about this on both her own blog and in industry conference sessions. However, with so much reporting already out there devoted to such topics, we chose to focus here on the music-creating side of this equation, digging into the “whys” and “hows” of her private work in the studio and her public stage performances.

***

Molly Sheridan: When I speak with classically trained musicians, it often seems that the longer they study and the deeper they get into the repertoire, the more uncomfortable they become with the idea of making their own music. When you decided to make the transition away from being the classical cellist you had been trained to be, how did making your own music fold into that? Was composition something that was already part of your life?

Zoë Keating: One thing that happened to me, and I think it’s true for some other people who are trained classically, is that there’s this long period where you have to give yourself permission to play your own music. It doesn’t seem valid somehow; it doesn’t seem like real music. It’s like, “Well, I’m just playing. I’m making up this stuff.” And I had a really long period of that, of feeling like there were all these different buckets. There was the music that I would play that was classical—the stuff that I was learning, or that I was being judged on, or graded for. Then there was music that I listened to, which was mostly popular music, that I would sometimes try and work out on the cello. And then there was the music that I would improvise or that was just my own. And they were all very separate.

It was when I was in college and right after for a couple years where I started feeling like making my own music was maybe actually a thing. It wasn’t just this way to let off steam. Initially, you know, I had this terrible stage fright, and I found that I could calm myself down by just playing open strings. So I would sit at the cello and I’d close my eyes and just play open strings until my hands stopped shaking. I would play patterns, because patterns were this great way to sort of cancel out all the chatter in my brain—it’s almost like a meditation.

My composition really came out of that. I realized that the thing I was doing didn’t have to just be this way to calm myself down so that I could play this other music. It could actually be this thing I could develop. Eventually that happened. But it wasn’t like one day I woke up and said, “Egads! I’m a composer.” I think I didn’t even start calling myself a composer until a few years ago.

MS: Really? What shifted that for you?

ZK: It was actually a reaction to being described as a cellist. When I was trying to describe myself, I realized I wasn’t just a cellist, I was also a composer. I think there’s this idea that composers write music down, and I think I thought, well, I don’t write it down, so I’m not really a composer.

MS: Well, you weren’t writing it down as a score, perhaps, but at a certain point you did begin developing and capturing your work using various technologies. I don’t want to ask you to rattle off a complete list of all the gear you’re using on stage, but since this is such a significant part of your identity, I would like to know what some of the most important items have been as you’ve developed your sound.

ZK: Well, like everything else, it’s an organic process. I started out wanting to have maybe two cellos playing, and so I had some gear that would allow me to double what I was doing, like a delay pedal. I explored the limits of that box. Then, I was like, now I want four. So then it’s four; and then it was six; and then it was eight. Everything I do, I’m just exploring the technology that I have on hand.

The vision I have in my head, the music that I want to make, is so vast and multi-dimensional, and the tools in this three-dimensional world are so much smaller than the music that I want to make. So it’s a never-ending process; I’m still not there. Right now, I’m using a computer. I can do up to, like, 24 tracks of cello. I can sample things and store them, and throw them back at the audience later. Now, I need to make it more fluid so that I can really improvise more with the computer. If I think about it in advance, I can structure it so that I have places where I can improvise. But it’s still very structured. The technology creates a box for you to work in, which is a good creative tool, but then you reach the limits of it. Then you’re starting to add new technology and it’s very much a part of the writing. I think that struggle to make technology do what you want it to do, and to make it maybe do something it wasn’t designed for, there’s something interesting there. But then, I don’t like the technology to overwhelm the music. I need it, but I’m always changing.

MS: Do you find that you go looking for technology to match the sound in your head, or do you use the parameters of what the technology can and cannot do as a starting point, a creative challenge?

ZK: Usually I go looking for something that will allow me to do a problem. I have a problem: I really want to be able to have 16 tracks of cello. What will allow me to have 16 tracks and record them and not have too much latency? Things like that. So I’ll go looking for a tool, and I’ll use the software program that will allow me to do that. But then as I’m learning how to use this program, I might discover something interesting that I wouldn’t have thought of. So it’s definitely both. That’s what I mean by “I need the technology”—as a creative challenge. But at the same time, I’m using it to problem solve.

MS: One of the things that’s interesting to me about what you’ve done with it, though, is that even with all the sounds you could make using the technology, you haven’t buried the sound of your primary instrument. You’re using it to amplify the cello exponentially.

ZK: Well, I love the cello!

MS: Can you talk about your relationship to the instrument and your attraction to this sound world?

ZK: I think the cello is the best instrument, I’m sorry. Bassoon is pretty great; I love French horn—you know, no offense to other instruments! But I just love the cello. I was really influenced when I was in high school by this disc that I got—it was The 12 Cellists of the Berlin Philharmonic—and they were playing a whole bunch of stuff. I heard that sound, and I was like, “Oh my god! That is the sound to end all sounds.” It was this big, big sound. Also, when I was in high school and just taking lessons and classes at the Eastman School of Music, every Saturday all the cellists would be there and we would play ensemble music. We would play Klengel’s Hymnus, or we’d play the Bachianas Brasilieras by Villa-Lobos, and that was really my favorite thing to do. I could just do that all day. So I just want to recreate that feeling of lots of cellos.

Except, I have my own musical vision that I’d like to make, and initially I didn’t have the finances or the ability to get a bunch of cellists to do this. I couldn’t figure out how to translate my ideas to them. The little experiences I had of saying, “Okay, just play it like this for like four bars and just vamp that, and then we’ll do this.” Total blank stares—”No, you have to write it out, please.” And I felt like that was really limiting. The idea of writing something out, and then playing it, it just was all wrong. I wanted it to be about feel, like this other emotional world that was more flexible. So I just found it easier to do myself. So when I’m layering up all those cellos, I still want them to be cellos. When I’m doing the actual recordings for an album, I have a lot of microphones all around me and I’ll put a microphone closer in a certain place to get a certain kind of tone. Or when I’m playing live, I’ll bump up the EQ on some particular phrase so that it stands out. Because the thing is when you have 12 cellos, you have to sort of differentiate, or you just have a wall of sound.

I just find it really interesting. The cello can make an infinite number of sounds, and I infinitely prefer them to anything electronic.

MS: I know musicians and composers who work with technology and then struggle to keep playing works in their catalog as hardware and software continue to develop or break down. Some hold tight to keeping things as set as possible, but I’ve heard you say that you actually change your gear quite frequently. How do you keep playing the music that you’ve already written in that case?

ZK: Well, the music that I’ve already written is always evolving on stage. I have a piece called Frozen Angels. If you were to listen to that piece two years ago, and then listen to it today, they’re pretty different. That’s because I have different technology I’m using. I have different microphones. My microphones change really frequently. Again, the cello has this beautiful sound, and the microphone is taking, like, a picture of it, and then giving that to the audience. When I started out using Piezo pickups, that picture was like a photocopy. Then I was like, “Okay, this isn’t working,” so I started using contact microphones and that was like a color copy. Now I have some different microphones, and those are pretty good digital photographs. I want the audience to feel the sound of the cello the way that I feel it, and I’m still trying to get that.

Every time I even just change a microphone, that changes so much the kinds of recordings I make that then, of course, I want to change all the parts that stack up against those recordings. It’s like the butterfly flapping its wings, and everything down the line changes. I’m playing a certain way because it sounds better or worse with the microphones I’m using.

MS: So you are actually going back and re-making pieces?

ZK: Definitely. Oh, sure.

MS: That’s quite a volume of work.

ZK: Yeah, it’s never ending. It also keeps it interesting, though. When I make a piece of music for an album, I spend a lot of time making it the perfect thing ever that I want to hear. And it’s really difficult to choose the one version that is the piece, because there are so many permutations. At some point, I have to just choose one and develop that because it’s very time consuming. The thing that makes me choose that one is usually some sort of artificial deadline, like I have only two weeks. That’s how I get things done because that crystallizes all your decisions and I do that. And I always feel sad about all these other little musical children I had to leave by the side. Some of them will turn into whole new pieces. Other times, they’re just kind of like variations, and when I go on tour, I just let them develop. So I’ll have an album version of a piece. Then, tonight I’ll play this piece called Lost and this piece called Seven League Boots and those are very different than the album versions because I’m just exploring other areas with them. Also, because my technology has changed since I wrote them, I can make different kinds of sounds, or things like that.

I feel that there’s no reason for it to be stuck in time. A piece of music is a snapshot of all of my past, with whatever is going on right now. And it’s going to be different each day.

MS: I wonder if that would be surprising to a lot of people. Looking at the gear you use on stage and how clean the presentation is, the audience could assume that you must be playing tightly to a set script for it to come off. But what is really happening in performance? How much flexibility do you have?

ZK: I have a lot of flexibility. Sometimes it’s about how confident I’m feeling. If I’m feeling confident, I’ll really go far out there, you know, and the pieces will be vastly different today than they were yesterday. Other times, I’ll have sort of a “this is the way that I’m doing them right now in this period of time” [version]—meaning this tour that is lasting three months. There’s also this authenticity thing where, if I’m playing a piece and it’s not risky for me to do it, if it’s so easy because I know it so well that there’s not risk involved, I feel like I’m cheating the audience and I’m cheating myself. I’ll have a piece, and for a long time, I’ll try to make it as perfect as possible, this endless quest for perfection. I’ll really get into that, and I’ll make all the little parts as perfect as I can possibly make them, within the constraints of this one composition without changing it. Just making the phrasing better and better and better and better. It’s kind of like what we do as classical musicians. Eventually I’ll have improved every little thing in there. They’re all improved now. They’re all where I want them to be. And I’ll play it that way with great pleasure for a while, just enjoying that I’ve made it perfect now. And then some day I’ll wake up, and I’ll be like, “This is boring!” It’s perfect, but it doesn’t move me anymore. And I want to be moved when I’m playing the music. Then I start changing things.

MS: Since you’re not writing your pieces to short score and then orchestrating them out for an actual orchestra, would you briefly walk us through what is involved in making a new piece, either starting in the studio or even backing up further, depending on how it typically unfolds for you?

ZK: Well, when I’m making a piece of music, there are multiple places that I start from. I would say a good half of my work starts from me improvising. I’m just messing around, improvising. I’ve got all my technology around me, and I’m sampling things. I’m just playing, and I’m having a great time. Usually when I do that, I don’t actually go back and listen to what I did. I’ll have some memory of what I did, and that will stick with me. So a couple days later, I’ll have something in my head, which is a memory of what I did, which might not actually be it. That memory becomes a foundation for everything, so it’s sort of this thing in my imagination. Then I just try to make that thing. I might go back to the original recordings that I made and take some of them in, and put them into my software that I’m using, and then start playing against them. I make a ridiculous number of tracks—like, 60 tracks of cello, just a huge thing. I make this big cathartic mess, which is totally overwhelming. I get totally swept away—I just love it. I love it. I love it.—And then I start taking it away, and that’s the process.

MS: How long does that take?

ZK: I tend not to do things very linearly, and I’m often working on multiple pieces at the same time.

MS: So you might have 180 tracks floating around and any one time.

ZK: Yeah, I have drives and drives and drives of material. Often then I start sort of pillaging and putting them in other projects. I have this one piece called Last Bird. There’s actually only eight parts in there. I made this piece over the course of two weeks and recorded it. That’s a great example: I had a deadline, because it was something I had to write for a movie, and I had two weeks to do it, so I did it. Other pieces, like Escape Artist, that one was made for a performance. I had to premier a new piece on a certain day, so I made it. I made it to be a live work. That one took me about two months to figure out the piece, and also how to program it so I could perform it live; that was done simultaneously. Other pieces are very much studio creations, and then I figure out later how to do them live. And in the figuring out, I might change it.

MS: Then is the digital file—for whatever software you happen to be using—the score essentially? When you have to go back to older material, is that what you refer to? Or, considering how you like to work, are all your scores more like memories?

ZK: They’re just memories, which is why sometimes they’re different. I like that feeling, when you hear something on the radio, and then you’re left with a memory of it and you’re like, “Oh, that was such a great melody,” whenever you’re singing it. Then, when you actually someday go back and listen to the song, it might actually not have been that melody. That’s definitely how sometimes I interpret my own work. I have a memory of the recording that I made two years ago and I’m going to make a live version of it, so I’ll do it based on my memory of it.

Actually, for my last album, I did all of this recording and made all these pieces, and then I moved. We moved from San Francisco to Portland, and we were staying with my husband’s parents because we were trying to find a place to live. Then we moved back to California, and during that process, I lost a drive. I was on tour with Imogen Heap at the time, so I was just all over the place, and I lost my main drive of music. It was funny because I use Ableton Live, and you have to be really careful to collect all your samples. If you don’t collect all your samples into the same location, you open the file, and you can see the lengths of them, but the samples are not there. In my haste, I had put everything on a drive, and I had not clicked on all the samples. The shells were there, but there was no audio in them. I was really devastated by this. Then in 2009, I was like, well, I’m just going to have to recreate them all from scratch. So I recreated these six pieces from my memory of what I had done two years before. Then, when I had a studio—because during that time, 2007-2009, I didn’t have a studio to work in—that was my album. Then after I released the album, I went back and I found the drive. Those pieces are nothing like what I made. So that’s my next album!

I did have an interesting experience a couple of weeks ago. I played with ODC Dance in San Francisco at Yerba Buena, and we had five performances with the ballet dancers. When you’re doing something for dance, it has to be the same every time, and that’s what’s hard about it. I can’t just be doing my usual self-indulgent thing of playing music, because they need to hear it—they’re getting ready to launch themselves across the stage on this particular phrase. That’s where I practice the most sometimes. I had to practice for like for a week straight, just every single day, to make it the same. Half the performance was me solo, and for the other half, I hired a string ensemble. So I had six string players and a marimba player with me. And that was a real big challenge because they had sheet music. They absolutely were not able to just riff or just do it from the recording. It had to be written down.

MS: They had sheet music that you provided. So you can work that way.

ZK: Yeah, they did, but that was a very strange experience—to go out there and play the same piece every night, exactly the same way, off of music. I was like, “Wow, that’s so weird!” though that’s what I always used to do [as a classical musician]. But it felt very odd for my own music to be written down on a piece of paper.

MS: You mentioned Imogen, and I know that you said when you were on tour with her that you knew you would lose the audience if you didn’t quickly convince them at the beginning. Your performer side and your composer side might have had different needs in a situation like that. How did you navigate?

ZK: Often I trust my own judgment with things, but I do feel like live is a very specific situation. It’s all about the environment that you’re playing in, and that the audience is in. In certain situations, you just cannot take a million years for a piece to develop. It’s just not going to happen in that format. So I saw it more as a fun challenge: Okay, how could I keep my artistic integrity, but also make it more interesting for the audience? What would be fun to do? So it was another little artistic challenge, just like having a new piece of gear. It was like, “Oh, okay, I’ve got an audience full of 15-year olds with cell phones and I only have 60 seconds to win them over.” I definitely saw it that way.

Because I decided not to go the standard classical path, usually playing in a concert hall was not open to me as an option. I had to play in rock clubs. If I wanted people to hear me, I had to be in an environment where I’m opening for a pop star, perhaps, and I’m playing in a nightclub. And those are different artistic parameters. I didn’t feel like it was a non sequitur for me, also, because I grew up in the ‘80s. I listened to songs. I felt like it was actually more of a challenge to make something short. On my own in the studio, I can make a 20-minute cello extravaganza, but it’s actually harder to make short things, I think. So it’s like, “Okay, I have to do this all in seven minutes; that’s my boundary.”

There are times though when I make something, and I’m just like, you know, take it or leave it: this is the piece. For a live performance, I definitely think about what makes a good show, because it’s not just me up there, in my own world. We’re having this whole experience, and so it really, really matters to me that you have a good time. Or not “have a good time”—that makes it sound too light. It’s more like I want us to escape time; that’s my goal. Music is this thing happening over time, and when it really works, you lose the sense of time. Was that a minute, or was that an hour? That’s a good musical experience, and that’s what I’m going for. I want to take you out of your little linear path along time. I’m doing that for myself as well as for the audience.

MS: Does the fuel for that creative impulse tend to come from extra-musical stuff, or is it you in your studio with those bits of pure musical experimentation that you’ve already described? Is there something larger than that that you’re drawing from, or looking to communicate?

ZK: No, I’m not. It’s definitely very abstract. It’s more of an experiential kind of thing.

MS: You’ve said you have trouble even titling pieces, because you don’t want to make them concrete in that sense.

ZK: Yeah, because I don’t know what they are, and I change them all the time. Also, if I say this piece is this, well then that piece is going to have to be that for me tomorrow, too, and it might not be. It’s like I’m an abstract expressionist, except that it’s not very abstract. It’s very specific. I’m just expressing this sort of thing, and I try not to get too big about it.

MS: You might have too much groove to be an abstract expressionist.

ZK: Yeah, that’s what I mean. I think of my emotional landscape that way, but it’s much too organized. I’m really drawn to the minimalists, and I love that sort of order, but I’m not that ordered. I’m too messy to be a proper minimalist. Sometimes I feel like I have the most in common with a sort of instrumental post-rock, like Sigur Rós or that kind of stuff. I think if you were to cross that cathartic, instrumental post-rock with minimalism, maybe that’s where my landscape is.

MS: Many of your previous interviews focus on the business side of the career you’ve built for yourself and the ways in which you’ve leveraged technology and DIY methods to connect with fans and sell records. [Readers who want to dig into that further should check out Keating’s online talks, such as this one, which she delivered at MIDEM in 2012.] We’re focusing more on the music-making side of your work in this conversation, but I did want to ask you one DIY question: You’re obviously a very charismatic, bracingly honest person, and that’s reflected in things even as simple yet as public as your Twitter feed. But unlike most people, you have a million plus followers—a huge audience to be regularly interacting with! Do you feel the need to set certain boundaries to protect yourself emotionally or is that kind of exposure the price you have to pay to be an independent artist in 2012?

ZK: I get that question pretty regularly—how to manage all that stuff—and I feel like I don’t ever give really good answers because I don’t think about it. At the same time, I’m actually really private, so I do have some sort of unspoken rules. I try to reveal as much about me as a person, doing my job here in the world, but at the same time I don’t want to expose my family to constant scrutiny. I think that I’m sort of lucky, in that the kinds of people who are interested in me are very respectful, and so I don’t experience any sense of intrusion from anyone else. It’s more like, “What do I feel like sharing today?” I try not to over share; I’m not going to talk about crass things. I’m just not going to go there. So it’s definitely curated, but it’s not over-curated.

I feel like in order for me to exist, I need to interact with other people. I’m too isolated otherwise. I’m just this woman in her studio with a cello and a computer, and it feels kind of lonely. The act of sharing things with other people, and then they’re participating, I need it in some ways. When I was making my last album, and I was pregnant and trying to finish it before my son was born, I was spending hours and hours and hours down in my studio, just mixing and mixing and mixing—it’s a really laborious process. I found that I’d have a really intense mixing session, and then I would let off steam by using Twitter to interact with people. I totally needed it, and then I would feel refreshed and inspired, and I’d come back. However, if I would go down to hang out with some friends in person, that would be so draining for me that it would sap all of my energy, and then I wouldn’t go back into the studio. So it’s this thing, forward and backward, where I want to tap into the stream of human consciousness and interact, but then I want to get what I need from that and go back to being creative. When you’re creative, it is kind of an isolating thing, because you have to figure out what is you. Often having lots of dinner parties is not conducive to that, even though, left to my own devices, I might have dinner parties at home almost every day. I think we’re really lucky that you can have these tools, but I do know people and it gets in the way for them, so that they can’t be creative. That’s just not how I am. For me, it’s the opposite: they allow me to have interaction with people, but without getting in the way.

MS: Speaking of being left to your own devices, you’ve had the opportunity to play in so many unique situations. However, where do you most like to make your music?

ZK: Well, that is an interesting question because I feel like I’m really struggling to find the right venue. There’s sort of these two extremes. We have the concert infrastructure of America that was built for the Baby Boomers, the concert halls with the seats. Then we have clubs, with the bar in them. I don’t really feel like either of those fits for me. I feel like there’s some whole other architectural environment that I need to be in. This is my next project; I want to try to make the perfect performance environment. My ideal space, it’s almost like everybody’s just sort of reclining on bean bags. We’re going to talk, and I’m going to play music for you. Then we’re going to have an intermission and we’re going to hang out, and then some other artists are going to play, and it’s going to be really interesting. And because it’s this relaxed environment, people can maybe be a little more experimental as musicians. Then I really want it to be about community. I often find that a lot of the people who come to my concerts are people that I wish we could just hang out, out in the lobby, for like an hour or something. But it never really works out that way.

I was just talking with someone actually about the amount of wasted space that there is in America, places that don’t necessarily have places to hang out or cafés, and it might be kind of neat to go into town with your semi trucks. You’ve got the bean bags in one truck, you’ve got the portable café in the other truck. Take over the abandoned strip mall and make it a place for art and ideas where we can listen to some music and then talk about urban planning—lectures and music and that kind of thing. I feel like that’s the place where I exist, but I don’t know if it exists.

Molly Sheridan

Subscribe to our newsletter and never miss a beat!