“I like to think that people could walk into one of my pieces, like you can walk into a painting or a video installation,” says Jeffrey Mumford, a composer who started off pursuing a career in the visual arts before music completely took over his imagination.
“I fully thought I was going to be an artist,” he explained during an hour we spent with him when he was visiting New York City for a performance last month. “I did lots of work in high school and I went to college as an art major. Then I got one of my paintings sabotaged. … I was working on it and then one day, there was white paint splattered all over it. Someone obviously didn’t like it. So I kind of ran to the music department for solace, because I was always interested in music anyway. … I came to realize that that was the best way I could express myself.”
Expression and, in particular, expressing himself his way, are paramount to Mumford, who has always rejected such binary polarities as atonality vs. tonality, Uptown vs. Downtown, or gnarly vs. lush. And he is particularly opposed to the belief that someone’s race, gender, or any other social categorization could or should determine the kind of music that person creates. According to him, “Being a black composer is itself a very subversive act because you offend both sides. You offend these people who in the white community think that you’re encroaching on their turf and you offend people within your own community, unfortunately, who think that you’re writing white people’s music. I think I write my music. I write what I hear. I have many influences. … There’s no one such thing as black music. … If you’re a black composer, anything you write will be black music.”
In Mumford’s lexicon, Elliott Carter, with whom he studied for three years, “is a Romantic composer.” Yet at the same time, growing up “hearing Sarah Vaughan singing made a big impression” on him. Mumford’s eclecticism and refusal to be typecast might explain why his music was presented on one of the earliest Bang on a Can marathons.
Being a black composer is itself a very subversive act because you offend both sides.
Jeffrey Mumford
I think Elliott Carter is a Romantic composer.
Jeffrey Mumford
I fully thought I was going to be an artist. … Then I got one of my paintings sabotaged.
Jeffrey Mumford
I like to think that people could walk into one of my pieces, like you can walk into a painting or a video installation.
Jeffrey Mumford
Increasingly the world we live in is not acceptable. So I want to create a different world.
Jeffrey Mumford
Eleisha Nelson should be much better known than she is …. She’ll never complain about a note. I can’t say that about everybody.
Jeffrey Mumford
Elliott Carter … was someone I felt very comfortable with. This legend and this little black kid from D.C.
Jeffrey Mumford
This Uptown/Downtown thing, when it was happening, I was always annoyed by these distinctions. Music is music.
Jeffrey Mumford
There are pieces where I’ve had to tear up several versions before I could get to the place where I wanted it.
Jeffrey Mumford
I really imagined the piece I wrote for Lina as a symphony for solo violin.
Jeffrey Mumford
I’m just so appreciative that I’ve had the privilege of working with some of the most amazing players.
Jeffrey Mumford
There’s no one such thing as black music.
Jeffrey Mumford
It would be nice if maybe you might want to program this piece in March and not February.
Jeffrey Mumford
With all due respect to “We Shall Overcome” … I wanted to write a piece that asked harder questions.
Jeffrey Mumford
Part of Mumford’s strong desire not be beholden to any particularly stylistic silo is that he wants “to create a different world” through his music. A through line, however, that connects a lot of his creative work is its evocation of clouds, which has fascinated him since his youth:
I used to look out the window in the summer time. There were thunderstorms all over the place in D.C., and the sky would turn purple and green. And you’d see these masses of clouds splitting off and recombining. That was so inspiring to me. Then still thinking I was going to be a painter, I just wanted to grab them, bring them into my room, and play with them. But those images have never left. So musically I want to recreate this sense that you can create an environment that you can live in among these clouds.
Certainly the beautiful aphoristic titles of Mumford’s compositions—e.g. her eastern light amid a cavernous dusk or of fields unfolding…echoing depths of resonant light—evoke cloud imagery as well as poetry, and in so doing perhaps encourage a different kind of listening approach than if he simply gave his compositions the generic names based on instrumentation that so many other composers do, e.g. for the two examples cited above: Wind Quintet No. 1 and Cello Concerto.
But in addition to all of this ethereal inspiration, Mumford is also deeply rooted in humanism and wants his music to be a galvanizing force for making the world a better place and for people to think beyond simple answers. He was particularly passionate when he recounted the story of the Cleveland Orchestra premiere of the comfort of his voice, a work he wrote in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:
An usher who’d been there for a long time came up to me and said, “Thank you for your piece. It wasn’t ‘We Shall Overcome’ again. It was much more complex because the man was so much more complex.” … With all due respect to “We Shall Overcome” and “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and the numerous other anthems that inspire our community, I wanted to write a piece that asked harder questions. Does that make sense? Then this usher came up to me and said thank you. “This piece for me meant a lot, to hear that you took a different approach than a lot of composers have taken when given this opportunity to do that.”
Frank J. Oteri in conversation with Jeffrey Mumford at the home of Bärli Nugent in New York, NY
May 22, 2019—11:00 a.m.
Video Presentation by Molly Sheridan