Tag: emerging composer

inti figgis-vizueta: the ability to grow

Banner for SoundLives episode 23 featuring inti figgis-vizueta

Composer inti figgis-vizueta creates music that carefully balances experimentation and practicality. She likens her compositions to plants which have the ability to grow and change when different people perform them.

“We’re able to continue to revisit them and see how they’ve changed,” she explained when we met over Zoom in mid-June. “I’ll hear people come back and play something that I haven’t heard in years. I thought I had a stable sense of that piece in my mind and suddenly someone just blows me away with a completely different place that they go with it. And to me, that has to feel really exciting because the idea that like, we’re just writing something to exist in one form and then it just, you know, like time passes, just stops moving–it’s very strange.”

inti’s openness to collaboration and belief in interpretative agency has made her music particularly attractive to soloists and ensembles ranging from Andrew Yee and Conrad Tao to Roomful of Teeth, Ensemble Dal Niente, and even the Kronos Quartet who asked her to compose a piece for their 50 for the Future Project.

“I remember hearing about this project and being like, ‘God, I wish I could do that, but I’m never going to be in this thing,'” inti remembered. “It was kind of a short turnaround … I went through all of the other pieces that were up, because this project had been going on for five years and there was a gamut of pieces. There were ones that were so hard. Maybe a graduate string quartet could do it, with a lot of practice. To like very beautiful and simple and quite lyrical pieces with a 16th note pulse or something. … I ended up kind of going from this really complicated score to this very simple score of a single stave that everyone was reading from. … How it happens over time can be determined by the ensemble.”

Over the past few years, inti has gravitated a lot toward string quartets and percussion ensembles, two groups that might seem at oppositive ends of the sonic spectrum to some composers but not to her. “I do feel like there’s a certain level of a kind of shared musicality, a shared sense of tone and timbre and attack and all of these things that contribute to a group mentality of how to kind of play with and affect texture in like all of their kind of individual ways.”

But she is also interested in vocal music and has begun exploring it again after a hiatus of several years where she was mostly focused on instrumental music.

“I felt like instrumentalists were down to clown a little bit, where I just didn’t always feel that with vocal ensembles,” she acknowledged. “Then this year and last year has been this kind of a big resurgence of that in my music and in some ways, it’s teaching me things all over again, which has been really, really fun. … I get to kind of luxuriate a little bit in the quality of two people singing together, actually using all of the complexities of a word to push forward meaning. But to me it’s not narrative meaning, and that’s what I was afraid of, that when I had to engage language, I had to be tied to a narrative, instead of being tied to the complexities of thinking about something like love, or lots of other things.”

Ultimately, whatever the medium, inti is interested in constructing open structures that take performers and listeners to new places.

“For the most part my pieces are workshops in some ways,” she said. “It’s almost like a loose suit and then we fit it over the rehearsal.”

ASCAP Foundation Announces 2023 Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer Award Recipients

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

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

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

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

In addition, the following composers received Honorable Mention:

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

A Newly Endowed Residency Program for Underrepresented Composers

orchestra in a concert hall

Sitting in the Oberlin Conservatory’s large rehearsal room listening to the musicians of the Northern Ohio Youth Orchestra (NOYO) rehearse for the world premiere of Kari Watson’s Morning Music for Fish, their excitement in anticipation of the concert is palpable—and infectious. It’s a welcome sensation: the extraordinary variety and vibrancy of music-making in 2019 is undeniable, yet so is the constant hand-wringing that now seems to be a permanent feature of the classical music discourse. But if the futures of arts education and Western concert music are really as dire as they sometimes appear, why are the seventy northeastern Ohio high-schoolers in this room so psyched to be playing music nobody’s ever played before? The short answer: because of Arlene and Larry Dunn, whose most recent gift to NOYO has endowed its composer-in-residence program.

The NOYO Philharmonia Orchestra’s world premiere performance of Kari Watson’s Morning Music for Fish in Finney Chapel on March 31, 2019. (David Pope, conductor)

If you’re a jelly bean in the great glass jar that is New Music Social Media, it’s a near-certainty that you’ve encountered Arlene and Larry Dunn in the form of some virtual avatar or other. I first crossed their path as a graduate student around seven years ago; they must have seen my byline here on NewMusicBox and assumed that I was a bona fide member of the field (an extension of the benefit of the doubt that no student composer could forget). It’s safe to say Arlene and Larry are the biggest fans of contemporary music in the United States who are not personally in the business. To practitioners who inhabit our small world, that anyone not in it for themselves could be a fan can come as a mild surprise: it’s a difficult world to love sometimes, exasperating even when everyone is treating each other with civility (which they don’t, always). But Arlene and Larry are indefatigable advocates both for what new music is and—crucially—for what it should be.

Arlene and Larry Dunn are indefatigable advocates both for what new music is and—crucially—for what it should be.

The Dunns have found a vector for that advocacy in the Northern Ohio Youth Orchestra, on whose board Larry has served. “For us, it is essential that the NOYO composer-in-residence program is specifically focused on commissioning work from a composer of underrepresented status: people of color, women, LGBTQ,” says Arlene. “The only way we are going to move towards racial and gender equity in the arts, or anywhere else, is by taking such concrete steps.” Showing young musicians that composers are not found exclusively in the ranks of the white male dead is a vital part of NOYO’s mission to provide exceptional musical education through a variety of performance opportunities for participants of all backgrounds in an inclusive community of learning and growth. When NOYO’s artistic staff puts a composition on a high school musician’s stand by a composer who looks like them, that’s not just a way to broaden their sonic horizons: it’s a way to demonstrate that anyone can be a composer, that everyone has an aesthetic position to take, and that those positions warrant respect.

Arlene and Larry Dunn

Arlene and Larry Dunn. (Photo by Tina Tallon)

To that end, the Dunns decided to take action with a transformative gift to NOYO: a contribution to the organization’s 50th anniversary endowment campaign that will endow the position of composer-in-residence in perpetuity. Each season, NOYO solicits proposals from Oberlin Conservatory composition students—students, in particular, from underrepresented populations—to write a piece for NOYO’s advanced Philharmonia Orchestra to premiere on its March concert. The selected composers will now each be known as an Arlene and Larry Dunn Composer-In-Residence.

The Dunns’ transformative gift to NOYO will endow the position of composer-in-residence in perpetuity.

Why now? As it happens, 2019 doesn’t just mark NOYO’s 50th anniversary—it also marks Arlene and Larry’s. “It’s a delightful synchronicity that NOYO’s 50th anniversary and our 50th wedding anniversary are happening in the same year,” Arlene explains. “We were looking for opportunities to celebrate our 50th that benefit the community, and giving to the NOYO endowment campaign to secure the future of the composer-in-residence program was a perfect fit.” For NOYO’s part, the organization is readier now than ever for such a program. “[Former executive director] Mike Roest asked me to join the board in 2014 to help re-energize the organization after some lean years,” says Larry. “What NOYO has accomplished since then, under Mike’s leadership and the team that has succeeded him, is truly remarkable, in terms of number of participants and the growing breadth of program offerings.” And the position that NOYO has staked out with regard to new work is bold: in addition to the Dunn Composer-In-Residence Program, NOYO offers its high-school-age participants the opportunity to invent their own music in the Lab Group, a collaborative composing ensemble, and to hear their compositions played by Oberlin Conservatory musicians through a composition competition. “One of my ambitions as a board member was to encourage the organization to engage more with the music of right now, by commissioning and creating new works,” Larry recalls. “To see this come to fruition with the composer-in-residence program and the Lab Group is very gratifying.” Arlene concurs: “We’re proud to be supporting NOYO in two dimensions that deeply resonate with us: striving for social justice and equity in serving the community and sparking and unleashing young people’s creativity.”

But NOYO’s young musicians, who come to Oberlin from all over northern Ohio each week to rehearse, aren’t the only beneficiaries of the program. Oberlin Conservatory composition professor Jesse Jones can vouch for the residency’s value to his students, including current composer in residence Kari Watson and 2017-18 composer-in-residence Soomin Kim (retroactively included in the program):

I have witnessed first-hand the artistic and professional growth this incredible program has provided them; they are afforded the rare opportunity to workshop ideas and receive feedback on their works in progress; they build a professional working relationship with both the conductors and instrumentalists; they get to practice effective verbal communication with a large ensemble; they even gain first-hand teaching experience by mentoring budding composers within the ensemble. The Dunn residency is an indispensable part of our young composers’ education here at Oberlin, and I know Kari and Soomin both view it as a high point in their burgeoning musical careers.

Kari Watson

Kari Watson

Watson and Kim have approached the prospect of composing for NOYO’s Philharmonia Orchestra as an invitation to reflect on their own experiences as high school musicians and reacquaint themselves with the joy that youth music-making can bring. “When I went to rehearsals, it really reminded me of when I was young,” says Kim. “I used to play the piano when I was young, and my parents would come to every single little concert I had at school. [Attending NOYO rehearsals] just reminded me a lot of my family and how they used to support me, seeing the parents sitting at the lounge waiting for the kids.” Referring to the upcoming premiere of her Morning Music for Fish, Watson notes that “this piece was a very joyful thing to write. I started this year with aims to write a different dark piece, working slowly and not feeling that much excitement. This piece and the experience refueled my creative love for music making. Going to NOYO rehearsals made me so happy, and I haven’t felt as much joy surrounding music as I have there in so long.”

“The key to success for arts organizations is to make yourself essential to your community.”

The Arlene and Larry Dunn Composer-In-Residence Program is an initiative that weaves together the Dunns’ passions for contemporary music and social justice with NOYO’s mission of access and inclusion. “I’ve long thought that the key to success for arts organizations and other non-profits is to make yourself essential to your community,” says Larry. “And the best way to do that is to deliver something of value to their children, which is exactly what NOYO is doing.” In this case, the “something” is new music—and to the young musicians of the Northern Ohio Youth Orchestra, its value is self-evident.

There’s Still So Much to Learn, But I’m More Confident Now

Early in 2016, one of my friends asked me to describe my career aspirations. Where do I see myself in five years, or in ten years?

I’ve always found this kind of question to be extremely difficult to answer. Careers and opportunities—especially in the world of classical music—can change so quickly, and sometimes quite arbitrarily. Often, planning and setting goals can seem like futile exercises. I’m always concerned that long-term planning will lead to disappointment, or will get in the way of larger opportunities.

So, in responding to my friend’s question, I kept my answer somewhat vague. “I want people to hear my orchestral music,” I said. “I want to write more of it, and I want opportunities for it to be heard!”

The past year has been extraordinary for me.

The past year has been extraordinary for me. Last November, I was attending rehearsals with the Yale Philharmonia as they prepared Likely Pictures in Haphazard Sky for a December performance. The concert program only consisted of new works for orchestra written by composition students at the Yale School of Music. I learned so much throughout those rehearsals—not only from hearing my own piece, but from hearing my colleagues’ music as well. I didn’t imagine that Likely Pictures in Haphazard Sky would have an interesting life beyond the December concert.

In February of 2017, I learned that I had been chosen to participate in the American Composers Orchestra Underwood New Music Readings. Later in the spring, I received an invitation to attend the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute. I now had opportunities to rethink sections of Likely Pictures in Haphazard Sky and make revisions.

At this point, Likely Pictures is a strong piece, and it’s also a practical piece. The musicians of both the American Composers Orchestra and the Minnesota Orchestra seemed to understand what it was about fairly quickly. After several revisions, the notation is very clear, and there are very few questions regarding my intentions. I have been present at every performance of my orchestral music; ideally, a conductor and an ensemble should be capable of assembling my music without my presence and input.

A conductor and an ensemble should be capable of assembling my music without my presence and input.

In the spring of 2017, I learned that I had won a commission from the New York Youth Symphony. This was extraordinary news—I was receiving my very first orchestra commission! In my application, I had submitted Likely Pictures in Haphazard Sky as my work sample. In a significant way, Likely Pictures had made this new opportunity possible.

Hilary Purrington standing outside Carnegie Hall in front of the New York Youth Symphony November 19, 2017 Concert Poster featuring a photo of her and listing her world premiere performance.

This past weekend, I heard the premiere of Daylights, my newest orchestral work. Commissioned as part of First Music, the New York Youth Symphony’s commission competition, Daylights literally opened the NYYS’s 2017-18 season. The work is a short, active concert opener. When I began composing it, I knew I wanted to create moments that capture the sensation of staring into a brilliant light. The word “daylights,” most often found as part of the expression “the living daylights,” is an archaic idiom referring to an individual’s eyes or consciousness. The title takes on many meanings—personal awareness and perception as well as the brilliant light of day.

Very often, my compositions come in pairs. I discover a sound or technique while writing one piece, and then I seek to improve upon it in a subsequent work. In a way, Daylights is an expansion of what I learned while composing Likely Pictures in Haphazard Sky.

As I explained in a previous post, early drafts of Likely Pictures were extremely episodic, and my transitions between sections were less than graceful. My teacher, Christopher Theofanidis, encouraged me to revisit these sections and compose elegant transitions. Chris taught me to be thoughtful and deliberate when writing transitional material, and this new, increased awareness has impacted everything I have written over the course of the past year.

Similar to Likely Pictures in Haphazard Sky, Daylights opens with a very sparse, delicate texture. The violins sustain very high, fragile harmonics, and a solo flute sings out a melody. I add glockenspiel, a second flute, and—eventually—solo violin and a very rude bass drum. In the final measures of the work, the music returns to a thicker, more active version of the work’s introductory, chamber-like material before blossoming into a noisy, active conclusion. In both Likely Pictures and Daylights, I contrast moments of intimate chamber music with expansive orchestral passages.

When composing Likely Pictures in Haphazard Sky, I experimented with combining instruments to create percussive, staccato “hits.” It’s a defining characteristic of the piece, and I chose to incorporate this element into Daylights (although, in a less significant way). In this case, however, the “hits” are orchestrated differently, and I usually use something to lead into these staccato punches. For example, in one passage, a crescendoing snare roll and solo flute terminates with pizzicato strings and a choked suspended cymbal. This is an example of how I grow artistically: I find a musical element or effect that I like, and I experiment with it in different pieces and contexts. It then becomes something that I can keep in my “repertoire” of sounds and ideas.

I’m extremely grateful for opportunities to continue experimenting and developing.

Following the American Composers Orchestra Underwood New Music Readings this past June, I learned that I had been awarded the Underwood Commission. Every year, one of the UNMR participants is selected to receive a commission for a future season. This is an extraordinary opportunity and privilege for me, and it will be my first commission from a professional orchestra. And, this opportunity is arriving at an interesting time for me, both artistically and professionally. I have learned so much about orchestral writing over the course of this past year. I’m a lot more confident in my ability to compose for orchestra, and I have so many ideas I want to hear realized. I also recognize that I still have so much to learn, and I’m extremely grateful for opportunities to continue experimenting and developing.

Daniel Schlosberg, Charles Peck, Peter Shin, Nina C. Young, Hilary Purrington, Andrew Hsu, and Saad Haddad talk through details in their pieces at a session with Minnesota Orchestra musicians during the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute.

Daniel Schlosberg, Charles Peck, Peter Shin, Nina C. Young, Hilary Purrington, Andrew Hsu, and Saad Haddad talk through details in their pieces at a session with Minnesota Orchestra musicians during the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute. (Photo by Mele Willis, courtesy Minnesota Orchestra.)

Composing and Revising Likely Pictures in Haphazard Sky

For a while, I’ve claimed that clarity is the most important aspect of my music. I want musicians to know what’s going on so they can musically react and interpret their part, and I never want an audience member to feel lost or perplexed. For me, a large part of growing and improving as a composer involves learning how to more effectively communicate with both performers and listeners.

There are two sides to this. Musically, I strive to create narratives that both performers and listeners can follow. On a more practical level, I carefully edit my scores and parts so that performers and conductors know what I’m looking for. As simplistic as it seems, I’ve learned to notate my music so that it will sound exactly the way I want it to.

The process of writing and revising has been transformative.

The process of writing and revising Likely Pictures in Haphazard Sky for orchestra has been transformative for my writing. It’s my third orchestral piece, and it’s the only one I’ve been able to revise for subsequent performances. In its current form, the work is the product of important previous experiences and careful revisions.

I’ve been fortunate to attend schools that give composition students opportunities to hear orchestral works read and sometimes performed. In the summer preceding my second year at Juilliard, I began working on my second orchestral piece. I planned to apply to doctoral programs and, knowing that a reading at Juilliard would be my only chance to make a decent recording before application deadlines, I intended to compose something that could function well with very little rehearsal time. It needed to be simple and straightforward with the potential to sound polished by the end of a brief reading session.

This became Extraordinary Flora (2014). Composing a delicate, straightforward piece forced me to carefully consider how I presented and orchestrated my musical materials.  If I had composed this piece earlier, it would have felt counterintuitive, as if I was wasting the ensemble’s potential. But, this experience taught me that writing for orchestra with a sense of restraint can actually be more effective. Carefully controlling the energy of a massive ensemble allowed me to harness and focus it for moments that really mattered.

I began thinking about my next orchestral piece, Likely Pictures in Haphazard Sky (2016), early in the summer before my second year at the Yale School of Music. In a continuation of what I had discovered while writing Extraordinary Flora, I wanted to create delicate, chamber-like moments that would contrast with expansive, more “orchestral” sounds.

The opening texture of Likely Pictures was my first significant idea; before anything else, I knew how I wanted the beginning to sound. I imagined a dry, sparse introduction with solo pizzicato notes sounding from within the strings section. Then, I wanted a slow, simple melody (unison piano and vibraphone) to soar over the pointillistic activity. A low, indistinct rumbling noise (tremolo basses, very low piano, and rolled bass drum) would slowly emerge.

And then I had to figure out the rest of the piece. This is how I usually begin writing: I compose the opening, and then pause to consider what happens next. On a large sheet of paper, I create a timeline and draw out the trajectory of the piece, determining proportions and how important moments will occur. I continue to refer back to these initial, basic sketches, often changing my mind and adjusting my plan.

During the first phase of composing, I always write by hand, usually at a piano. I improvise and sing and play until I find what I’m looking for. I compose with paper and pencil until it feels counterproductive to do so—that is, when it becomes apparent that I’m notating, not composing. I then begin organizing my materials into notation software. For me, notation software allows for greater flexibility as I alter and rework. And, I like the idea that the final barline is always there, waiting for me to meet it at the end of the piece.

I think it’s important to experience the passage of time like an audience member might.

At a certain point, playback becomes valuable, and I know many composers who would disagree with me on this. But, I think it’s important to experience the passage of time like an audience member might. Playing through the music at the piano, or singing, or conducting, or just closing my eyes and imagining—these exercises force me to actively participate in the music, and this participation drastically alters my sense of time.

When school started in the fall of 2016, I had notated a nearly complete draft of Likely Pictures in Haphazard Sky. I brought what I had to my teacher, Christopher Theofanidis. In initial drafts, the piece was very episodic, and Chris advised me cover these seams and create smooth, elegant transitions between sections. This transformed the work’s continuity and overall cohesion.

We reworked individual sections as well. For example, I had initially imagined the solo pizzicato gestures of the opening section as coming from players within the section. Chris convinced me that the drama of seeing the individual players was important, especially as these subtle sounds recede. At a certain point, an audience member can’t quite hear the pizzicato notes, but he or she can see them. Visual cues can smooth over transitions, too.

Two months after the piece’s premiere with the Yale Philharmonia, I found out that I had been chosen to participate in the American Composers Orchestra’s Underwood New Music Readings. I took this opportunity to make some revisions, as I realized that my notation wasn’t always as clear as it could be.

The most significant and time-consuming change I made was to tie over sustained notes so that the pitch stops on a sixteenth note. Throughout the first section of Likely Pictures in Haphazard Sky, I ask the first violins to crescendo through sustained tones. I noticed that many of the players seemed to back away before the completion of the note value, causing a sudden decrease of energy. Tying these notes over to sixteenth notes conveyed that I wanted the sound to persist and grow for the duration of the pitch. It’s not the most visually elegant notation, but I think it better conveyed my point, and I was happier with the ACO’s treatment of this gesture.

A passage from Likely Pictures in Haphazard Sky

A passage from Hilary Purrington’s Likely Pictures in Haphazard Sky showing how she notated sustained notes in a way that maintained energy for their entire duration.

I made other, far smaller adjustments. Yale’s music library had returned my parts, so I was able to consider the performers’ notes. Aside from small notational changes, deciding exactly what to revise was tricky. The Yale Philharmonia usually performs in Woolsey Hall, Yale’s largest performance venue. Visually, the hall is an ornate, dramatic space; acoustically, however, it’s not unlike an empty water tower. Although I was happy with the performance and the recording, the muddiness and other acoustic peculiarities made it difficult for me to decide what actually needed to change.

The Underwood New Music Readings took place in the DiMenna Center. Aside from clarifying some notation, I wanted to leave many elements of the piece untouched because I was curious as to how Likely Pictures would sound in a drier venue. The change in acoustics made an incredible difference; – staccato notes were actually staccato, for example. Each performance had its strengths, and I don’t think I could say that I substantially prefer one recording over the other.

One of the most valuable experiences was receiving direct feedback from the musicians.

One of the most valuable experiences of the Underwood New Music Readings was the opportunity to receive direct feedback from the musicians. As regular performers with the American Composers Orchestra, these musicians have seen and played an unbelievable variety of new works, and they are quick to catch on and understand a composer’s intentions. The instrumentalists gave the same advice to all the participating composers: Make an individual musician’s purpose clear. And, beyond this: Make it clear that the musician’s role is necessary and valuable. If a passage is particularly tricky, at least make it gratifying for the player.

Hilary Purrington receives feedback from Underwood mentor composers Derek Bermel and Trevor Weston. Hilary Purrington receives feedback from Underwood mentor composers Derek Bermel and Trevor Weston (Photo by Jiayi Photography, courtesy American Composers Orchestra)./caption]

For me, generating material is the most straightforward part of composing. Using Western notation and occasional words to describe an abstract idea and a musician’s role within that is often a complex task. In November, I have the opportunity to workshop Likely Pictures in Haphazard Sky yet again, this time with the Minnesota Orchestra as part of the Minnesota Orchestra’s Composer Institute. The skill of effective and efficient communication can only be sharpened by experience, and I’m very grateful for another opportunity to continue learning and improving my craft.

Sky Macklay: Why I Love Weird Contemporary Music

Sky Macklay has been receiving a great deal of attention for her string quartet Many Many Cadences which, as per its title, involves a relentless chain of cadences—some of which are completed and some of which listeners who are acculturated to the canon of Western classical music perceive as such by being able to infer the missing sonic links. This piece fetched Macklay a 2016 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award and its premiere recording, by the Spektral Quartet, was nominated for a 2017 Grammy.  In September, it will be performed by the Utrecht String Quartet during the Gaudeamus Muziekweek in Utrecht, where it’s in the running for the 2017 Gaudeamus Prize, and in November it will be performed by the Bozzini Quartet during the 2017 ISCM World New Music Days in Vancouver.

Macklay first came to my attention five years ago after receiving New Music USA funding for a quirky orchestral piece she wrote to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the founding of Lexington, Massachusetts called Dissolving Bands, a work which earned her the 2013 Leo Kaplan Award, the top honor in the Morton Gould Awards. When I read the then 24-year-old composer’s description of it as a musical rendering of the “tension, instability, and unpredictability of life in colonial America on the cusp of revolution,” I knew I needed to hear it. The music she wrote is sometimes reminiscent of the sound world of the maverick New England composer Charles Ives, but Macklay is a maverick in her own right as I kept discovering the more familiar I became with the rest of her compositional output.

She’s made it very easy to discover her music on her own website, which offers audio recordings—and sometimes video recordings and musical scores—for 17 different compositions which range from a wacky sound installation comprised of industrial fans channeling air into either large heavy duty garbage bags or air mattresses stuffed full of deconstructed harmonicas to a provocative chamber opera whose three characters are two spermatozoa and a uterus.  As she acknowledged when we visited her New York City apartment just weeks before her move to Chicago, she usually comes up with a generative concept prior to creating a note of music:

Oftentimes it comes to me like a flash of inspiration. I then figure out the details of how that will work and can bring it to life. That’s the excitement of composing for me. I am a very conceptual composer.  I like structuralist ideas that I can flesh out formally; that’s really how I work.  It could be a combination of a sonic concept and a formal concept usually.  Maybe sometimes also an extra-musical concept.

Macklay’s extra-musical concepts are often highly charged politically. In Lessina, Levlin, Levlite, Levora, a speaking violinist (whom she requires to be male) simultaneous bows various figurations while reciting a list of FDA-approved female contraceptive devices and drugs, pharmaceutical companies’ advertising slogans for them, side effects from taking them, and user reviews.

“I think that’s a really common and traumatic experience in a lot of women’s lives,” she explained. “So making that into music was a way to share that experience mostly with men who don’t understand that experience on a deep level.”

Another work, Sing Their Names for unaccompanied chorus, was created in response to the recent police killings of black people. Its text is simply a list of victims’ names.

“I saw a poster that had a list of just pictures and names of people who had been killed by police, and I thought that I could make a memorial out of it,” Macklay said.  “I wanted to be abstract in that most of the time you can’t really understand the names in the piece, but maybe a few of them emerge in the end that you can hear. … The abstracted syllables of the people’s names is a metaphor for erasure and the lack of visibility of the humans involved, and then in the end it’s maybe a little more visible.  I think of it as a sacred piece that is supposed to be a requiem-like meditation on the people’s lives.”

Sometimes, however, the concept is purely musical, as in her stunning violin and piano duo FastLowHighSlow, in which fast and slow music are presented simultaneously as are the extreme registers of both instruments. She got so excited by the idea of exploring every possible permutation of those two binaries that after the work’s initial performance she added an additional optional movement which presents every possibility at the same time, although to do so ultimately required a second violinist and a second pianist.

“It’s definitely not the most practical movement, which is why it’s optional,” she acknowledged.

But despite Macklay’s love for esoteric concepts (read on to find out why she subdivided an ensemble into two groups tuned approximately a quarter tone apart), it all stems from a desire to communicate visceral experiences that can engage listeners. She is particularly excited by introducing younger people to the rich resources of contemporary music, which she does through teaching at The Walden School as well as creating music for student ensembles.

“I love weird contemporary music and sharing it with the next generation,” she explained. “I think a lot of it is sharing my own personal perspective on it—just show how much a particular sound excites me and how beautiful I think it is.  I think that’s sort of contagious, or at least let’s people perceive it as a beautiful thing, or something that some person thinks is a beautiful thing. I also think that exposure, experience, experiential education, and experiential pieces are really a great way to do outreach. … That’s something I think more composers should do: write music that has a participatory role for amateur musicians, or for just audience members.”

Sky Macklay in conversation with Frank J. Oteri
Recorded in Macklay’s NYC apartment
May 10, 2017—11:00 a.m.
Video presentations and photography by Molly Sheridan
Transcribed by Julia Lu


Frank J. Oteri: Thank you for including so much information about your music on your website, not just recordings but even scores for most of the pieces. It really helped me get to know your work and, because of that, there are so many details I want to talk about with you.

Sky Macklay:  I like to share all the information and be transparent. Sometimes you can make great connections through that. So I like to put the scores up there, at least for the pieces that I’m done with.  But sometimes I have a performance and I think I’ll probably make revisions, so I don’t put up the score.  In November, I was part of the NEM Forum with Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne in Montreal, and I wrote a large ensemble piece for them called Microvariations. It uses a lot of the same ideas as Many Many Cadences, but with two groups tuned microtonally apart from each other. I wasn’t very satisfied with it compositionally.  I thought I missed some opportunities to orchestrate in a way that made those microtonal harmonies more audible.  It was not as vivid as I wanted.  But somebody from the Society of Contemporary Music in Montreal heard it, and they’re going to do it again in Montreal.  So now I have a chance to totally revise it and perfect it. That’s a really great opportunity. How I love to work the most is to have a performance, have a chance to perfect it, and then that’ll be the real final version.

FJO:  So that’s why the score for Microvariations is not online. I really wanted to see that score.  Since you said it draws on an idea from Many Many Cadences, I’d like to find out more about that. In both pieces it sounds like you’ve taken a bunch of brief, disjunct musical phrases and stitched them together by implying relationships between them that people immersed in listening to common practice tonality would perceive. In a very extensive interview that Brendon Howe did with you for VAN magazine last year, you said that you were annoyed because a lot of people were so focused on the fast succession of tonal cadences in the opening of Many Many Cadences that they missed what you think is the most significant aspect of that piece. Of course, a composer can’t ultimately control what listeners are going to think a piece is about, and you did call it Many Many Cadences, so people are going to focus on that.

SM:  I don’t think that people in general misunderstood what it was about.  I’m happy with how audiences received it. I think most people definitely took in the whole picture.  I was just ranting about the way it was portrayed in “the media,” the publicity that that particular album got, how in so many reviews of the album the reviewers only described the beginning and didn’t describe the trajectory of the piece, what happens to that opening material.  I definitely feel for the reviewers, because I know they are trying to keep their word count down so they just describe it real quick in a way that people would relate to.

FJO: Both Many Many Cadences and Microvariations wind up not sounding at all like pointillistic music because the missing links between the musical phrases are implied and we’re somehow able to perceive them.

SM:  Our brain fills them in. I’m fascinated with perception and tapping into the habits that our brains have. But I don’t really think of them as disjunct moments in time.  They are connected by their staccato attacks, and they’re connected by our brain by their proximity and the historical idea of cadences.

FJO:  In terms of how Microvariations expands on this idea, it sounds like there are actual references to standard repertoire pieces in it, but I can’t identify any of them.

SM:  The timpani is referencing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with all the rhythmic octaves, so there are definitely references, but not any direct quotes.  If you took any common practice period piece and did a Schenkerian analysis of it and reduced it to its most foundational, tonal elements, that’s sort of what you would get.  Like Many Many Cadences, it would just sound like those chords.

FJO:  I’m curious about the way you used microtonality in Microvariations.  By dividing the ensemble into two groups that are not in tune with each other, you’re playing around with the notion of absolute pitch not being absolute.  Nowadays musicians are trained to play the A above middle C at 440 Hz, but it wasn’t always that way.  Pitch was lower. In certain places it has even gone higher. But how does that play out in terms of what you’re doing?

SM:  First of all, it creates clashes of approximately a quarter tone among them. Sometimes I have one person from the higher group and one person from the lower group playing in unison. It sounds like a de-tuned unison, and I think that’s a really great sound.  I want to definitely take advantage of that more.  But then, the way it coalesces in this piece is we have a motive in a pitch level, and then something in this other pitch level.  It goes back and forth, and then when they come together, they sound so spicy together. It also uses a lot of chords that are in just intonation, spectral chords that I orchestrated thinking, “Okay, this group is about a quarter tone flatter, so members of this group could play the seventh partial of the harmonic series.”  Of course there are lots of adjustments, but it’s finding the overlap where their pitch levels would be in tune in the harmonic series.

FJO:  Classically trained musicians have a real resistance to being “out of tune.”  How did you navigate that?

SM: In my experience in Montreal, the musicians were down for it. It definitely has a precedent. I had all of the winds tune their instruments down a quarter tone.  The brass players had no problems with it.  The clarinets and oboes maybe had the most trouble because their instruments are more affected by the extreme tuning.  It’s definitely a little wonky with wind instruments. If you pull out the tube, not everything is perfectly in tune all along the instrument.  It messes up the perfect adjustments that the players are used to making.  I play oboe, so I’m aware of that.  I embrace it and say, “If your timbre is a little wilder than usual, just go with it.  Don’t worry about a super refined tone.”  They definitely just went with it and adapted.  I think the tendency was they would get a little higher as the piece went on.  They would start creeping up to the strings, but I had the conductor remind them to relax and keep the pitch down.  It was a conscious thing they had to keep thinking about, but then they did a great job.

FJO:  But a lot of classical players dread that people are going to think they’re out of tune.  How do you navigate that—being out of tune is actually being in tune for this piece?

SM:  I try to make it a clear rhetorical reason in my music, something that’s obvious enough. The differently tuned pitches will play enough of a role that people listening to it will know this is obviously the way it’s supposed to be. In this day and age, so many people are doing microtonality, I think that attitude is definitely fading.  Pretty much every musician that I work with is very open to alternative tunings.

FJO:  But when you get a commission from the Berlin Philharmonic or the Vienna Philharmonic after your Gaudeamus and ISCM performances, you might encounter some resistance if you ask the players to veer outside 12-tone equal temperament.

SM:  Well, I don’t really work with orchestras that much at this point in my life.  I’m sure orchestras are generally more conservative than chamber music people who specialize in contemporary music.

FJO:  The first piece of yours I ever heard, Dissolving Bands, is an orchestral piece and it is not microtonal. So was microtonality not part of your musical language at that point, or did you figure that it wouldn’t work in the context of writing for orchestra?

SM:  I was definitely interested in microtonality at that point, but it didn’t seem important for what I was working with for that particular piece.  I was trying to write a successful piece for orchestra that would fit with the Lexington Symphony. I don’t remember being held back by anything that came to mind, but I suppose with an orchestra, I’d definitely be more conservative with microtones.

A work table with a closed laptop, an additional computer keyboard and large-scale monitor, headphones, and printed musical scores.

Sky Macklay’s composing desk

FJO:  As far as I can tell, Dissolving Bands is the earliest piece that you still put out there.

SM:  Well, if you go back through my SoundCloud account, you can find some earlier pieces.  But that one is my first mature piece.

FJO:  So that’s Opus 1?

SM:  Yes.

FJO:  It’s interesting that you begin your catalog with that, especially since it received a lot of recognition; it got the top honors, the Leo Kaplan Award, in the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards competition. Of course that makes listeners curious to know what came before it, how you got to that point as a composer, but they can’t if you don’t want those earlier pieces to be done at this point.

SM:  Oh, I would consider some of them maybe.  There’s actually one piece before that that’s on my website—Döppelganger.  It’s for two oboes and—

FJO:  —and organ.

SM: I actually made the version for two oboes and organ in 2014, I think. But the original version, for two oboes and chamber ensemble, is from 2012 or 2011.  Then I kept working with that idea in different instrumentations.

FJO:  But only Döppelganger III, the one for two oboes and organ, is on your website.  I was going to ask about one and two.

SM:  Well, Döppelganger I is on my SoundCloud.  An oldie, but goodie.

FJO:  So that piece you’d still encourage people to play.

SM:  Yeah.

FJO:  The Döppelganger pieces all involve oboe, so they’re very personal.  You’re an oboist.

SM:  Yes.

FJO:  What came first, playing oboe or composing?

SM:  Oboe came first.  I always really loved music, and when I was a kid I was in choir. I started playing oboe when I was ten, and I was really into it. Then I started getting serious about piano at 12 and studied pretty seriously in my teens.  I started composing when I was 17 or 18, not that early.  One of my creative outlets before that was that my friends and I had sort of a movie-making collective called AnimeSpoof.com; we did spoofs of anime, but also other funny movies.  I sometimes did music for that and then late in high school, I started writing songs.  I became serious about composing my sophomore year of college and became a composition major. But I always kept playing oboe and was serious about that, too, and kept studying it through my master’s degree.

FJO: And you still play oboe.

SM:  Yeah.

FJO:  So did you start out writing pieces for you to play yourself and then it gradually morphed into writing music for others?

SM:  Well, my earliest pieces were songs for voice and piano, but they weren’t always for me. I remember in my first composition class that my first piece was for oboe and accessories. My next piece was for marimba and voice. Then I branched out writing for all kinds of instrumentations. My final project for that class was for trombone choir.  That was a disastrous piece because it’s not very idiomatic for trombone.  It was very high and contrapuntal, so it totally fell apart in the performance.

FJO:  How many trombones?

SM:  I think there were maybe ten parts, but I honestly don’t remember. That’s definitely in the trash bin.

FJO:  But you went on to write a piece for multiple oboes called Inner Life of Song which I think is pretty incredible.  There’s no date on the score or in your notes, so I don’t know when that piece happened.

SM:  I think I wrote that in 2015.

The score for Sky Macklay's composition Inner Life of Song

FJO:  I love how open-ended it is. It can be for any number of oboists, and it’s a graphic, indeterminate, conceptual score.  It is instruction-based, rather than something with a lot of complex notation, so it seems like it could be put together relatively easily.

SM:  Definitely.  That’s the idea. It’s a communal experience. It’s very experiential. Of course an audience can listen to it, but it’s more about the experience of the performers and their listening because it’s a deep listening piece where I want them to really feel the collective multiphonics and get deep into the inner life of the sounds. It’s very approachable for students who’ve never played multiphonics before.  They can just try them out, and if they mess up in the performance, or they don’t speak in the performance, it’s okay, because there are usually other people playing at the same time.  I hope that wherever there’s a large group of oboists, like at a double reed festival or in studio class, they could play that piece.  It’s my offering to groups of oboe players who want to have a collective experience playing multiphonics. There’s an International Double Reed Society Conference.  And then there are also regional double reed days that a lot of universities have.

FJO:  I imagine it’s much harder to put together a performance of one of the Döppelganger pieces. I studied the score for the third one, and it looks pretty hard. That’s not something that could be done by a pick-up group.

SM:  That is a virtuosic piece for sure.  But I personally like to play that piece a lot, so I’ve played it with my teacher from Memphis and with lots of different oboe friends.  It’s a nice bonding experience with other oboists.

FJO:  Most of your other pieces don’t really involve the oboe, so you don’t really perform in them.  Even though you still play oboe, composing became your main activity.  So when did that happen?

SM: I really started identifying as a composer in my sophomore year of college. I’ve definitely liked writing for myself, but I saw that as a small part of my work as a composer.  I have written one more piece that’s oboe-centric called Sixty Degree Mirrors.  I don’t have that on my website, but I’m going to be making a recording of it with Ghost Ensemble in June, so I’ll definitely put that up when I have the nice new recording.

FJO:  What’s the story with that piece?

SM:  It’s for flute, oboe, accordion, harp, bass, and viola.  It’s called Sixty Degree Mirrors because that’s the angle of the mirrors in a kaleidoscope. All these little sound objects are played and repeated with slight variations.  It’s a very fractured form. Imagine different things in mirrors.  Then, at the end, a lot of it is based around multiphonic harmonies in the oboe and flute together.

FJO:  Your titles frequently seem to reflect a core structural element in the music. It seems there’s often a really intense concept which generates the music, so I’m wondering what generates those concepts. Does a title come to you before the music or perhaps a concept that you flesh out sonically and then title?

SM:  Maybe not exactly the title, but a little kernel of an idea. Oftentimes it comes to me like a flash of inspiration. I then figure out the details of how that will work and can bring it to life. That’s the excitement of composing for me. I am a very conceptual composer.  I like structuralist ideas that I can flesh out formally; that’s really how I work.  It could be a combination of a sonic concept and a formal concept.  Maybe sometimes also an extra-musical concept.

FJO:  When I was looking at your score for The Braid, I spotted something that really seemed like a musical parallel to the concept of braiding, which is the really detailed undulations of the dynamics. Each of the musicians start out playing super quiet, getting slightly louder but still quiet, then going back to being super quiet, but at different times.  It’s like contrapuntal dynamic levels. It’s a very strange idea, but I imagine it came from having an idea about braiding and then trying to figure out how to make it work musically.

The score for Sky Macklay’s composition The Braid which shows her extensive use of subtle dynamic fluctuations.

SM:  I have to give credit where credit is due and say that I got that idea from Ruth Crawford Seeger’s String Quartet. She has little dynamic fluctuations and intertwining voices. I also wanted to use different timbres that can really blend together. It’s a piece for cello, percussion, and clarinet. I wanted to hear the beating between those instruments and play with the subtle threshold of being able to distinguish them as different instruments.  I think I thought of the concept of the braid, but not the term braid, then I did it and I thought of the actual word for it.

FJO:  I should have recognized the connection with Ruth Crawford Seeger, but I didn’t. Although, to get back to Dissolving Bands, at times it sounds quite reminiscent of Charles Ives.

SM:  Definitely.  It’s a very New England-y piece, because it was for the celebration of the town of Lexington, Massachusetts.  So I definitely channeled some Ivesian ideas.

FJO:  And in FastLowHighSlow, I feel like you’re channeling Elliott Carter.

SM:  I wasn’t thinking of that at all, but I think that’s a perfectly valid connection to make.  What do you see as the connection?

FJO:  The superimposition of fast and slow music simultaneously, which is something Carter explored a lot in his string quartets.

SM:  Right.

FJO: Each of the movements is a different permutation of these fast/slow/high/low possibilities. So did the idea come first or did the music come first?

SM:  I knew I was writing the piece for violin and piano, but definitely the concept came first, trying to have very obviously slow music cohabitate with very obviously fast music.  I’m really into binaries and trying to explore extremes of musical axes like pitch and speed.  So I thought I could have this boundary of duration: in two minutes, I’ll have as much fast music and slow music as possible within the bounds of these two instruments. Then I knew I would name it something like FastLowHighSlow because, like you said, that describes the concept and the whole persona of the piece.

FJO:  Hearing music that’s simultaneously fast and slow is very disorienting.

SM:  Well usually the fast dominates, I think.  We hear that as the foreground because it’s very active. One of the reasons why I wanted to repeat the exact same material in the different movements is then I think it dawns on the audience that there’s this slow thing that was in the first movement but now it’s in the totally slow movement. They can trace that and have a deeper understanding of the form after hearing multiple movements.

FJO:  And then you have an optional fifth movement that requires two violinists and two pianists.

SM:  At the premier performance, my friend Susanna realized that there are these musical motives that are repeated, four musical things together in different permutations, but only with two instruments.  And she said, “You could have all four of them together if you had two violinists and two pianists.” I totally agreed. That really makes sense formally to kick it to the logical extreme. It would also be very climactic and exciting to have four people for the last movement—piano four hands and two violinists. There actually has been a performance with the optional fifth movement at my concert at Spectrum in October.  It was really awesome.

FJO:  So are these two additional people hidden somewhere?  How does that work?

SM:  The second pianist, Mila [Henry], was turning pages for Jacob [Greenberg], so the page turner became the second pianist.  And then Erica [Dicker] came up from the front row [and joined Josh Modney]. It probably wasn’t a surprise because it said their names in the program, but it could have been a total surprise.

FJO:  Yeah, I think it would be better if it was a surprise.  Maybe wait to give people a program after the concert’s over.

SM:  I like that idea.

FJO:  Or perhaps it could be done with pre-recorded tracks.

SM:  I don’t think that would be as good.  I think it would be kind of weird to add an electronic element.  It’s better live.

FJO:  It’s just harder to have two more people.  Violin and piano duos are very common, but there aren’t a lot of ensembles made up of two violinists and two pianists.

SM:  Yeah.  It’s definitely not the most practical movement, which is why it’s optional. Maybe not with an established violin and piano duo who do a lot of recitals everywhere, but any time it’s possible with piano and violin friends it could happen.

FJO:  So even if you weren’t consciously channeling Carter in FastLowHighSlow, you’ve also channeled Alice Coltrane in a piece you wrote for youth orchestra which you called—quite directly—Ode to Alice, and in White/Waves you very indirectly channeled Beyoncé.

SM:  Yeah.

FJO:  When the electronic component first appears [in White/Waves] it sounds a lot like a theremin, but then all of a sudden there’s a giant full-range sound. I thought it was really cool, so I looked at the score to see how you notated it and you simply have this phrase “convolved Beyoncé sound” which is something I don’t completely understand and never would have associated with that sound.

SM:  I’m actually glad that it’s not too obvious sonically, but the way I achieved many of those sounds in the electronics part is that I took a chord from “Pretty Hurts” by Beyoncé and used convolution to combine it with ocean wave sounds.  The Beyoncé chord is the impulse response. It’s like hacking the impulse response reverb to harmonize the noisy sound through the tone-filled sound.  Convolution is a reverb hack that you can do in a convolution reverb module like, for example, in Logic. The space designer is a convolution reverb, meaning that the reverb takes a replica of a space by using an impulse response—taking a loud sound in a space that can algorithmically be applied to the sound to make it sound like it’s in that space.  For an impulse response, you usually use a really short one-sample loud sound, but you can use convolution in a different, more creative way by instead of using just a one-sample loud sound for the impulse response, you can use any sound for the impulse response, like a chord from Beyoncé. Or you could convolve Michael Jackson and bees. Anytime you take a noisy sound and mix it with a sonorous sound, it sort of imbues the noisy sound with the tone of the harmonious sound.

FJO:  So you sampled a Beyoncé recording, but it’s almost the opposite of the way a sample is used in pop music. Those samples are usually about being audibly recognizable reference points, which is why rights need to be cleared in order to use them. But I can’t imagine that anyone would be able to hear that what you’ve done is based on a sample.

SM:  I hope not.  I hope Beyoncé doesn’t get mad. My justification for why it’s okay is hopefully that it’s not very noticeable.  People can’t tell that it’s Beyoncé.  It’s more like using her beautiful B-major chord as a harmonic tool.

FJO:  But if you’re going to sample something and people can’t tell, then what’s the point of sampling it?  Isn’t part of the point of sampling to reference something in order to make a commentary on it and turn it into something else?

SM:  But I’m actually not referencing Beyoncé in this piece.  It just happened that I wanted to use it sonically. I could have used a chord from many other possible places, which is why Beyoncé is not in the program notes or anything.  It’s just a sound that I made that happened to come from that place. I don’t know if it’s that important that it is that chord in a way.  I just was experimenting with different convolution ingredients and that one sounded great, so I went with it. I knew I wanted a big sonorous pop chord. That was the qualification that I was looking for and I found a good example of that in “Pretty Hurts,” so I tried it.  It worked great and I went with it.

FJO:  It’s funny because when I heard that chord it reminded me of the sounds that R. Luke DuBois got from collapsing the full pitch and timbral ranges of pop songs and distilling them into single chords in his piece Billboard. There as well, if you didn’t read his program notes, you’d probably have no idea where those chords came from even though they matter to him and also matter to the structure of his piece, which is derived from how long each No. 1 hit song stayed on the Billboard chart.

SM:  I’m very into the catalogue and big data-style pieces that Luke is doing. I think that’s really fascinating.  But in this case it is just all about the sound and I wasn’t trying to be referential at all.

FJO:  Pop music seems utterly removed from your own sound world as a composer. Do you actively listen to Beyoncé or anyone else in pop music?

SM:  I definitely love Beyoncé, and I’m really into that album. It’s part of my life for sure.

FJO:  But in a way, your use of that chord is an aberration. It’s not your usual method of working. It’s less about the sound following from a concept.  The sound is its own thing.  You put it in as an ingredient, but there’s no larger metaphor for why it’s there.

SM:  Right.

FJO:  But still, you’d never sit around playing the oboe or the piano and come up with something and think, “Oh, I want to turn this into a piece.”

SM:  Usually not, although that’s somewhat what happened with Döppelganger. I was playing a really high G to A-flat trill. I found a cool fingering that made it really easy to do.  But that was more of an outlier.

FJO:  Now the only other thing that I have heard in your music thus far that’s anywhere close to the lushness of that full-range convolved Beyoncé sample is what you’ve done in your sound installations with all the harmonicas, which you first did at the Waseca Art Center in Minnesota and then at Judson Memorial Church in New York City.

SM:  I consider Harmonibots and MEGA-ORGAN two different pieces. They have the same sonic and production concept, so they’re a part of the same series.  The concept is I create inflatable sculptures and I then affix deconstructed harmonicas to holes in the sculpture. You take off the outside case and the inhale reeds and just leave the exhale reeds, so the comb channels the air through the reeds properly.  I use heavy duty fans.  I have a bunch of them in my room.  I’m trying to get rid of them now, or find a place to store them. I’m very attached to them, but for logistical reasons, I think I have to get rid of them.

An orange-colored Ridgid Air Mover

One of those heavy duty fans.

All you have to do is fill the sculpture with a lot of air pressure. Then the harmonicas will play all ten notes at the same time.  Pitchwise it’s just three octaves of a major triad and then one extra tonic note on the top.  I organize the harmonicas into different keys, basically. In Harmonibots there’s a big section of C harmonicas, a big section of G harmonicas, a big section of A, and then a dissonant corner where there is a mixture of B-flat, D, and E-flat harmonicas.  Then I used a home automation system that I repurposed for the motion sensors.  When people trigger them, basically then it turns on certain sections of the harmonibots. It’s a very simple machine. The air turns on.  They fill up. They make a beautiful sonorous chord. Then, when there’s no motion, they deflate and make a sagging decrescendo. Because of the different tonal centers, you can create different harmonies by exciting different sections. So for Harmonibots, which I did in Minnesota, the sculptures were made of garbage bags and they were kind of tall. Part of the piece was watching them unfurl and grow upwards.  I thought of them like a fungus or like an animal, but they’re very fragile.

For MEGA-ORGAN, I wanted to make it more interactive. I wanted to encourage people to change the articulation by physically laying on, squishing, and touching the bots—in MEGA-ORGAN, I call them the bellow beds because it’s drawing from this metaphor of the organ.  People can play the beds like bellows.  And the timbre really sounds like an organ, so that really connected well with the idea at Judson. At Judson Memorial Church, their organ doesn’t work anymore. This piece was up next to the shell of the organ, and I visually integrated the mega-organ into the space and see it as a sort of revitalization and re-sonification of their organ.

FJO:  Since these pieces are installations, they have no precise beginning or end.  People can stay there for as short or as long a time as they want.  But I feel like it would have a lot more impact the longer you’re listening and the more details you hear, like the clashes of these different tonal centers overlapping.  Did people spend a lot of time wandering around the sounds, or just pass by?

SM:  I think it totally varied. Some people would just stay for a few minutes, but some people stayed for hours.  The most audiophile nerdy people stayed for hours and hours; it was very self-selecting. The nice thing about an installation is you can make it however long you’re into it.  And, of course, I agree that I think it’s more fun the longer you stay there.

Two of the sculptures in MEGA-ORGAN were like little tents that have a bunch of harmonicas inside. That was the most intense listening space, because if you put your head inside, they were blowing right at your ears.  It was really loud in there, and it would be a really big D-major chord. Then, when you’d step out, all of a sudden you were able to hear the rest of the chords, so you could sort of just design your own tonal adventure in a way.

My original concept was I was going to precisely tune them in some way to make it more microtonal, but then once I stared working with them I realized that I didn’t need to do that. They’re so unstable that it wouldn’t really stick anyway; the tuning of mass-produced harmonicas is not very precise.  Then I realized that because it’s not precise, it’s really complex and microtonal the way that I wanted it anyway, like, right out of the box.  If you have 20 harmonicas in the same key, they’re not going to produce a perfectly in-tune triad.  It’s a very detailed dis-chorus-y microtonal sound, which is perfect because then when you move your head around, you just hear totally different pitches popping out.  That worked out really well without me changing the tuning of the harmonicas.

FJO:  How many harmonicas do you need to build one of these installations?

SM:  Well, Harmonibots had I think about 80, and MEGA-ORGAN has like 110.

FJO:  Where’d you get the harmonicas?

SM:  From Amazon.

FJO:  Harmonicas are cheap, but once you start adding them up it can get pretty expensive.

SM:  Yeah, it is definitely expensive.  I had a commission from the International Alliance for Women in Music for Harmonibots, and I went over budget.  And then for MEGA-ORGAN, I had a project grant from New Music USA, and I went over budget again.  But it’s okay.  It’s worth it to me.

FJO:  You need to get rid of all the industrial fans because you’re about to move to Chicago, but are you keeping all the harmonicas?  They’re smaller, but over a hundred is a lot and since you’ve deconstructed them you really can’t use them as harmonicas again. They could only be used in another incarnation of this series of installations.

A deconstructed harmonica affixed to an air mattress.

A deconstructed harmonica affixed to an air mattress for Sky Macklay’s installation MEGA-ORGAN.

SM:  Well, all the harmonicas that I used in Harmonibots, I used again in MEGA-ORGAN, and now I’m planning to save them and use them again for the next installation. I don’t know when that’ll be, but I do plan to do another one, so I’ll definitely repurpose them for the next installation. I don’t really want to think about that yet. Doing an installation is so much work, and it’s such a headache moving all the stuff everywhere. I just need a break from that for a while, but I’ll definitely do it in the future again.

FJO:  Even though in these cases you don’t have to deal with the whole rehearsal process with musicians for really hard music, the amount of planning is massive and it’s laborious production work.

SM:  To build the mega-organ I made the sculptures out of a composite bunch of air mattresses that need to be connected together, so I cut them apart and re-melted them together using a technique where you have two strips of tin foil and you put them around the two pieces of plastic and use an iron to melt them together. And then you only get a little bit of it melted together.  You have to be very precise, so it’s a very long and laborious process.  I became like a craftsperson melting these giant sculptures together. It’s really fun, but it’s something that I can’t and don’t want to do all the time.

FJO:  And it’s another one of these things where you can’t completely know what it’s going to sound like until you’ve got them all there.  It’s very different than hearing, say, a string quartet in your brain and then fleshing it out on paper.  Instead these installations are very much in the spirit of Cageian experimental music.  We’re going to set all these things up and then we’re going to find out what it sounds like.

SM:  Well, before I did Harmonibots, I had the original idea and I just started making prototypes. So I sort of knew what it would sound like just from my experience making them in the past.  But definitely—the whole composite piece, the space, and how people would play with it, was definitely going into the unknown.

FJO:  We haven’t talked about pieces involving texts yet, but you’ve done a lot of very unusual things with text. When you have a text, it’s a lot easier for an audience to perceive the concept of the work because the words are something people can latch onto.  Take something as abstract and yet as direct as your choral piece Sing Their Names.  By just having the chorus sing just names of people who were killed, without any additional commentary, you’ve made a very powerful statement that’s also emotional without in any way being sentimental, which is very difficult to do especially when dealing with such a sensitive subject.

SM:  I knew that I had to be very careful if I was going to write a piece relating to Black Lives Matter. I saw a poster that had a list of just pictures and names of people who had been killed by police, and I thought that I could make a memorial out of it.  I know that a lot of other artists and composers are making music relating to Black Lives Matter, and so I saw this as a contribution to a genre that already exists and is growing.  I wanted to be abstract in that most of the time you can’t really understand the names in the piece, but maybe a few of them emerge in the end that you can hear.  Basically my musical material was octave leaps that go up chromatically and a melody in parallel fifths.  The process of the piece is that slowly, over time, the micro-polyphonic octave leap-y part morphs into the parallel fifth chorale part.  The reason I picked those musical materials is octave leaps are very energetic yet static.  So I saw it as a metaphor for the pace of progress, basically, the kind of almost futile feeling whenever you hear of another person being killed by the police feels like the octave leaps—no progress, basically.  Similarly the parallel fifth melody is static, but it’s a much calmer sound, maybe a bit of hope. The abstracted syllables of the people’s names are a metaphor for erasure and the lack of visibility of the humans involved, and then in the end it’s maybe a little more visible.  Those are the ideas I was dealing with. I think of it as a sacred piece that is supposed to be a requiem-like meditation on the people’s lives.

FJO:  I recently thought of your choral piece in the context of this huge controversy over the display at this year’s Whitney Biennial of Open Casket, Dana Schutz’s painting that was inspired by a photograph from the funeral of Emmett Till, a black man who was beaten to death and whose face was disfigured beyond recognition in the process.

SM:  I haven’t gone to it, but I know about the controversy.

FJO:  I find it troubling that many people believe Schutz had no right to make such a painting because she’s a white person and this is not her story to tell.  I think we all should be outraged that this man was killed this way.  This story belongs to everyone and everyone should pay attention to it.  I think a lot of people don’t know who Emmett Till was, certainly younger people who weren’t around when he was brutally murdered in the 1950s.  If this painting raises the public consciousness that this thing happened and that we should all be outraged about it, I think it’s making an important statement.

SM:  I agree that we should all be outraged about it.  I guess I’m inclined to listen to the people who are saying this is exploitive use of the black experience, because we should listen to black people if they say to white artists that that’s exploitive.  When I started reading about this particular issue, I started self-reflecting and thinking, “Did I do that?”  I hope not. I hope it’s a little less appropriative. Sorry, but I don’t really have a great answer to that.

FJO:  But as artists, we have to be able to tell the stories of what’s going on in our society.  I don’t think any one group of people owns that narrative. If anything, we need to embrace all of these narratives. I think both Schutz’s painting and your choral piece call attention to deep wrongs by abstracting them in ways which allows space for people to reflect and feel the weight of these tragedies.

SM:  Of course.  I totally get what you’re saying about everybody chiming in on important issues of our time.  But I think the problem that activists have pinpointed with the painting is that maybe this artist is profiting as an artist from using this highly charged image in a way that’s yuckily commodified. I guess that’s one way it could be seen as appropriation.

FJO:  But the artist made it a point to state that this painting is not for sale.  I don’t mean to put you on the spot with this, but there could be parallel scenarios for your choral piece. Let’s say it gets done all over the place.  You sell the sheet music and you also get performance royalties.  Someone could turn around and say you’re profiting from this thing.

SM: I would say that I see this particular work in the context of other works in a similar genre that other artists are contributing to this body of music about Black Lives Matter. If I actually did profit off this piece, which I haven’t so far, I would donate the profits to Black Lives Matter.

FJO:  To take this in another direction, it’s very clear that the text is very important even though for most of the time it’s not audible.  In Fly’s Eyes, you created your own language, which raises some interesting issues vis-à-vis text setting.  In both pieces, you’ve gone against the grain. For Singing Their Names, your music captures the spirit of the text by not making it clear. In Fly’s Eyes, the text setting is clear, but it’s complete gibberish. The music marries the text, but the text actually has no meaning.

SM:  The way that I actually made the text is I made a mixture of Latin, English, and animal sounds to give voice to different animals.  The meaning of the text didn’t really matter; it was more the emotive quality that a voice can give. Babies can portray a huge range of emotions with their voices; it’s not about the semantic detail.

FJO:  With Glossolalia, you were working with a pre-existing text.  But once again, it’s not really clear from the setting what the text is about.  And, in a way, the setting is about it not being clear.  Even the title, Glossolalia, means speaking in tongues, so it’s about obfuscation to some extent.

SM:  With that piece, the poem itself is very surreal and abstract. It’s just sort of a list of words and a list of malapropisms. It makes sense as a glossolalia, but maybe not as a narrative.

FJO:  With an opera, of course, there is a much greater expectation regarding narrative. You wrote an opera this past year and so you really had to foreground a text in a way that you had never done before.  But the story you foregrounded in your opera Why We Bleed is a very peculiar one. There have been a lot of very overtly sexual operas in the last decade, but I don’t think there’s ever been one where the three singers are two spermatozoa and a uterus.

SM:  The idea originally came from an article by an evolutionary biologist named Suzanne Sadedin called “How The Woman Got Her Period.” In that, she dramatizes the evolutionary reason why women menstruate—this concept of the zygote being an adversarial creature. The woman’s body has to vet and decide is this particular zygote is genetically a good investment. Considering all the risk and work that goes into pregnancy, is this particular zygote worth it?  The way that Suzanne Sadedin wrote this article was extremely evocative and character-driven. So I thought wow, this is very dramatic. There’s a lot of deep possibility for symbolically dealing with reproductive rights’ issues, so I just decided to go with that story. My friend Emily Roller wrote the libretto, so she and I worked together on that.

FJO:  So it was your idea but you chose not to write your own libretto, even though you’ve created your own texts for other pieces.

SM:  With something like an opera, I would prefer to work with a librettist. I really like Emily’s work and value her ideas.  I like to write a little bit, but I don’t think I want to write my own libretto.  That’s a whole different craft.

Why We Bleed – Macklay/Roller from American Opera Projects on Vimeo.

FJO:  The opera is relatively easy to put together—three singers and a piano—but I imagine if it had a full production, you’d want to maybe flesh it out more, orchestrate it and stage it. What would it look like on stage?  How could you represent it?

SM:  I definitely have plans for a fully-staged version of it.  I’m not sure how much it’ll stay the same and how much it’ll change, but I am doing an opera with the University of Illinois Opera next year that will have a full sinfonietta and be more staged. The main costume/set piece is the uterus’ costume. Imagine a dress that’s so long that it flows across the whole stage and becomes this giant tapestry and curtain that engulfs the whole space. That’s how I’m imagining her costume will be, her costume and the entire curtain-y tapestry thing that creates the whole set.

FJO:  So there’s going to be a staged production of Why We Bleed in Chicago next year?

SM:  Well, I’m not exactly sure if I will define it as the same opera.  It might be so different that it becomes a different piece.  We might have another character.  But I will be doing some opera that deals with the same themes in Urbana-Champaign.

FJO:  Another piece you did, Lessina, Levlin, Levlite, Levora for speaking violinist, is also super provocative in terms of dealing with sexual politics. But for that you used a found text.

SM:  I went through a process with the text first.  I looked up all the FDA-approved devices and drugs for contraception. The first text was just saying the names of them.  The second layer was adding advertising slogans for those particular devices and drugs.  Then the third layer was adding the side effects, like at the end of the ad, you know, they have “heart attack, cramps, nipple discharge, high blood pressure in a quiet voice.  For the fourth layer of text, I looked at reviews online of these devices and drugs, and added the users’ reports of their personal reactions and side effects.  The whole piece was inspired by personal experience and my own struggle dealing with the medical, industrial, pharmaceutical complex and the way that that intersects with or intersected with my own body.  I think that’s a really common and traumatic experience in a lot of women’s lives, so making that into music was a way to share that experience mostly with men who don’t understand that experience on a deep level.

FJO:  I thought it was really interesting that it wasn’t a piece, say, for women’s chorus.  It was a piece for a guy who’s playing the violin and sort of stating all of this at the same time.  I imagine it’s pretty hard to do.

SM:  Yeah.  I think Josh [Modney] definitely rose to the challenge, and he likes doing it. The hard thing was nailing the text expression.  The easy part was the violin part because the violin part’s very easy.

FJO:  Do you want it to always be performed by a man?  Is that the point?

SM:  Yeah, that’s part of it.

FJO:  You’ve pretty much written every piece we’ve been talking about in only a few years, which is a lot considering everything else you’ve been doing—completing your degree at Columbia, teaching at The Walden School, and now you’re in the midst of a move to Chicago.

SM: In the last five years I’ve pretty much written all those pieces.  I do have a really busy life. I’m stressed a lot.  I’m always behind on my deadlines.  I’m always scrambling to get the next thing done.  I have to just say no to some more things in the next few years and focus my time a little more intentionally on projects that I really love, that are really are good for my career and artistically satisfying.

FJO:  We’ve been talking about pieces emanating from getting an idea and then fleshing it out musically, but sometimes I imagine what happens even before that is that somebody wants a piece and there’s a commission involved.  We didn’t talk about Density Dancity, which I think is extraordinary—it’s nothing but chains of multiphonics.  It’s a crazy, crazy piece.  But I don’t imagine that you said, “Oh gee, I want to write a piece for tenor sax and piano.”  I imagine that the player came to you and said, “Could you write me a piece?”

SM:  Yeah, that’s what happened.  Jim [Fusik] and Karl [Larson]’s duo commissioned me to write that piece and I was very happy about it.  I play oboe with a lot of chained together multiphonics.  I wanted to work out a similar thing with tenor sax.  That happens a lot.  I love collaborating with people. Each new opportunity that comes with a musical relationship is amazing. I think that’s weaved into the whole process of getting an idea and fleshing it out which is usually before, “Will you write a piece for me? Here’s the instrumentation.”

FJO:  Sometimes saying yes to something maybe doesn’t get you a performance in Carnegie Hall, but it could lead to other things that might ultimately be more rewarding. For example, Ode to Alice, which is very different from most of your pieces, was written for a student group and perhaps because of that—correct me if I’m wrong—maybe you can’t do all the wild, crazy, extended techniques and microtones and things that you might want to do, but it allowed you to focus in another way.  Based on the performance you have up online, the students who did it put tons of work into making it happen and, looking at the score, it is not at all basic music by any stretch of the imagination.

SM:  I am very open to and excited about writing for student ensembles or amateur ensembles, because I think these are great opportunities for building community through contemporary music and just having great social experiences. This is why I love weird contemporary music and sharing it with the next generation.  So with Ode to Alice, definitely I felt like this was a piece that’s my music. Maybe it’s a little technically easier than other pieces, but it’s not an easy piece. Totally, like you said, they puts lots of work into it.  The students sometimes have these wild noisy solos and they really did a great job; they weren’t fazed by the extended techniques.  I definitely thank their teacher, Dan Shaud, for being a great advocate of contemporary music.  They’re going to play it in Niagara Falls next week.  So it’s going to go to Canada.

FJO:  I’d love to follow up on what you just said about liking weird contemporary music. I grew up in an environment where contemporary music was perceived of as this weird, off-putting thing, but I think there’s an attitude today that it’s not this weird, off-putting thing; it’s actually kind of cool and fascinating and actually more interesting than the stuff that isn’t weird.  So how do you convey that enthusiasm to somebody who hasn’t heard it and doesn’t know what it is? How do you present yourself as a citizen of the world to turn people on to all these crazy ideas—like two sections of an ensemble being a quarter tone out of tune with each other, which is a pretty kooky idea?

SM: I think a lot of it is sharing my own personal perspective on it—just show how much a particular sound excites me and how beautiful I think it is. I think that’s sort of contagious, or at least let’s people perceive it as a beautiful thing, or something that some person thinks is a beautiful thing. I also think that exposure, experience, experiential education, and experiential pieces are really a great way to do outreach. I participated in a workshop version of this new piece Pan by Marcos Balter that has audience participation with tons of people, and that’s something I think more composers should do: write music that has a participatory role for amateur musicians or for just audience members.  Doing Harmonibots and MEGA-ORGAN are really important parts of my outreach because people can engage with them on all kinds of different levels.  They can be the nerdy audiophile who likes to hear the different tones for three hours, or they can be the person who likes to just fall onto the mattress and hear the sound change, and that will maybe hook them to try other pieces of mine or other composers. The ideal listener for me is just somebody who is willing to go there with me, to listen deeply, to try to follow my trajectory for the piece, and who is willing to be surprised or be actively listening and making predictions or making inferences. That’s all I ask.

Headphones on top of a Columbia University notebook on Sky Macklay's desk

The Big, and Ever-Present, “What’s Next?”

On May 3, my opera, The System of Soothing, was presented at Fort Worth Opera’s Frontiers showcase. In this final installment, I reflect on the experience and plan my next steps.

I’m sitting at a bar two days after my Frontiers performance. It’s a bar where the Frontiers composers spent many hours socializing and talking technique, plans, and projects. Now, I’m alone; most of my colleagues have left Fort Worth and I am waiting for the shuttle that will take me to the plane to begin my journey home.

As ESPN plays on the screen above me, I’m flipping through the small stack of business cards that I collected in the previous days. I’m also making a list of the names of people with whom I’ve been speaking, but who didn’t have a card handy—Frontiers panelists, general directors, librettists. In a motion that has been well practiced during the last week, I reach for the interior jacket pocket that holds my business cards. I’m pleased to find only one remaining.

This is why I came. I came to meet people, to make connections, and to begin relationships with creative partners who are looking to build projects from the ground up. In my hands are the spoils of my experience at Frontiers.

Post-show blues

I’m heartbroken that it’s over, but by many accounts, my performance was a gigantic success. My singers—soprano Rachel Blaustein, tenor Brian Wallin, and baritone Alex DeSocio—were prepared, professional, flexible, and totally killed the performance both musically and dramatically. My music staff—conductor Stephen Dubberly, and pianist Matthew Stevens—dug into my score and found more than I had realized I had put into it.

The audience’s response to my music was overwhelmingly positive, I think. I actually don’t really remember the audience’s response as it got wrapped up with my choreography. (Don’t fall down the steps. Hug conductor. Shake pianist’s hand, then male singer’s. Kiss the soprano’s hand. Don’t knock over the stands or the microphones. Arms open wide to the audience and bow. Are my shoes tied? Yes they are! Drag it on as long as possible before the company bow…and we’re done!)

I scored points by describing the flexibility of the orchestration and casting options.

The next morning involved a discussion with six members of the Frontiers panel, a group of decision makers from across the country who had also selected the pieces that were presented in the showcase. I scored points by describing the flexibility of the orchestration and casting options, being told that the absence of “preciousness” in my work and presentation (defined as a reluctance to let go and let collaborators in) was evident. I felt the warmth of comments regarding my lyricism, the balance of my vocal and piano writing, and the creativity of weaving Poe’s poetry (what one panelist called “found material”) into the libretto and the multiplying effect it had on character development. A review in the local paper said about my opera (which takes place in an mental institution), “…needless to say, you wouldn’t want to be in this asylum – as either patient or caregiver.” I’ll take that as a positive.

Everyone involved in the 2017 Frontiers Showcase at Fort Worth Opera

Everyone involved in the 2017 Frontiers Showcase at Ft. Worth Opera.

The unseen impact

The day before my show, I went to a big-box grocery for a few items and gifts for my cast. And older woman waved me over to her to her checkout counter and we started talking, as strangers often do in this part of the country.

“Would you like to sign up for a rewards card?” No thanks, I live abroad.

“What brings you to Texas?” I’m here with the opera.

“What are you singing?” I’m a Frontiers composer.

This stops her in her tracks. “Isn’t that fabulous! What else have you done? I’m a choral singer, do you have any choral music?” I have quite a bit (handing over my card) if you wouldn’t mind giving this to your choir director.

She flips my card over in her hands and looks at me with wide eyes. “We HAVE done your music! It’s WONDERFUL!”

She looks a little star struck, and wants to shake my hand. I mumble a bit, but give in to the serendipity of the situation, accept her praise, and thank her profusely for her kind words. Leaving the store, I start laughing. This has NEVER happened to me in over a decade of writing and I’m a little unsure what to make of it. The basic reality sets in that when I send things out, either through my publisher, through my online and social media interactions, or through rare opportunities afforded by exposure like I experienced at Frontiers, I welcome the ripples of interactions they produce, and am grateful that something I have done has reached a complete stranger.

I was struck by this again the day after my showcase, when I went to Dallas to attend the New Works Forum at the Opera America Conference. Walking into the room, I immediately started recognizing faces I had only seen online – general directors, Pulitzer winners, singers, directors, librettists—a who’s who of leaders in the field. Everyone had their first names in large print on their ID badges, and I could see eyes darting towards my own as I walked around the room, trying to radiate maturity and positivity—or at least, not panic. Most moved on after glancing at my name badge, but a few stopped and came forward, saying that they had been at my show the previous night, or that they had seen my first essay on NewMusicBox two days before.

Hin und zurück (There and back again)

From the perspective of my relatively secure, European composer bubble, the amount of exposure I received between the announcement of, and participation in, Frontiers bordered on empowering and overwhelming, with a dash of terror for good measure. The response I received from audiences, colleagues, and the staff of Fort Worth Opera affirmed my Brand—“I am becoming a better opera composer”—for the foreseeable future. But no matter how well things turned out (or at least appeared to), it’s important for me not to believe my own “hype.” What I’m really left with, in the end, is an opportunity.

Just as important as understanding that opera is a collaborative art, opera is also a very slow burn.

In a previous incarnation of these essays, I mused that my goal would be coming home from Frontiers with more work than I could possibly handle. While this was a bit naïve, I do find myself with many avenues of communication on which I need to follow up, opera and non-opera projects that will keep me busy through the summer and fall. Just as important as understanding that opera is a collaborative art, opera is also a very slow burn. Projects develop over years, not months. The reality is that I put down roots during those two weeks in Texas, and every single one of them has the potential to develop into a new project. I just have to tend that garden. One win does not make a career, and a particular win does not necessarily mean I will be veering in the direction that win suggests. My immediate task is to kindle the relationships that I struck up, maximize the amount of time that I can spend on developing new projects, and be patient.

Preparing for Performance: What I Didn’t Know I Knew

On May 3, my opera, The System of Soothing, was presented at Fort Worth Opera’s Frontiers showcase. In these essays, I intend to chronicle my experience preparing for, and taking part in, this opportunity. For this installment, I recount the program’s rehearsal process and performance highlights.

On the plane, somewhere between Frankfurt, Germany and the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, I decided that I was going to crash the first rehearsal. It was explained to me that this was to be an initial, getting-to-know-you music rehearsal for only singers and music staff, but my excitement was such that I simply had to jump in to this experience as quickly as possible. Bleary-eyed, I asked my cab driver to drop me off in the 90-degree soup in front of the opera building at Texas Christian University. Unexpected as my presence was, dropped jaws and raised eyebrows quickly melted into warm greetings from the music and administrative staff who were collected to dig into my score.

In retrospect, perhaps jetlag and hubris played a role is this decision, but this initial greeting set the tone for the ten days that would follow. In that first rehearsal, any trepidation I had vanished in the face of the care and interest that the music staff—conductor Stephen Dubberly and pianist Matthew Stevens—had for my music.

The next day was “First Day of School,” as it is known in the opera world, and the composers and librettists assembled at McDavid Studio in downtown Fort Worth, which was to be both our rehearsal and performance space. Directly adjacent to the formidable and gorgeously designed Bass Performance Hall, McDavid is a sleek, multidimensional space, part of which had been transformed into a black box for Fort Worth Opera’s use.

Nervous, excited, and jetlagged out of my gourd (I had woken up at 4:30 a.m.) I was struck by a familiar serenity upon entering the theater. With lush, velvet black curtains hanging floor to ceiling, and rows of simple single chairs, this was the type of space in which I had worked for a decade as a musical theater director and conductor. What it lacked in acoustics (those hangs ate all the sound) it excelled at in terms of both intimacy and possibility. As for my new colleagues, we instantly got on like a house on fire. They brought a wealth of experience and a devotion to the art form, and for a week, we geeked out over performances we had attended, technique, our teachers, our “real jobs,” other projects we were starting, and what notation programs we used.

The excavation of artistic knowledge

The terror and exhilaration of having nothing to do in rehearsal is both a welcome and dreaded experience.

The terror and exhilaration of having nothing to do in rehearsal is both a welcome and dreaded experience. Once the double bar is printed, there is, theoretically, a point in time when a piece is handed over. My role in the process having come to a pause, I’m then overshadowed so that well-trained conductors, pianists, and singers may immerse themselves in the piece. In rehearsal, my dictum is “less talk, more music,” which puts the pressure on me to make sure that my score is impeccable. During the Frontiers rehearsal process (in which I was afforded more than four hours of rehearsal time—an embarrassment of riches for 20 minutes of music), I was able to allow the cast and music staff to explore the score, organically extending their interpretation throughout the process, and encouraging me to add dramaturgical and compositional nuance, when appropriate.

I’ve always been amazed how the rehearsal process produces in me a higher awareness of what I have written. To think that I know every motivation behind every note and gesture is, for me, conceit. I need another’s inquiries to drag out the nuggets of meaning and all the things I didn’t know I knew about the piece. The particulars of melodic gesture, harmonic choice, or rhythmic figure are made in private, worked out in the vacuum of the studio. While they are important to me as a composer, overt knowledge of these details, in my experience, does not necessarily inform the application or performance of the score.

Until it does. Case in point: at the end of the soprano aria, there is a section marked “suddenly cheery,” in contrast to previous sections. It wasn’t working, and I soon realized that it was because this marking had not made it to the soprano’s part. Further, I was able to connect this hopeful moment to a later arietta, in which she sings to her estranged father of her hope that he see the light, metaphorically, which presents blindness as another example of perception, the work’s general theme. Light bulbs went on across the rehearsal space and the impact on everyone’s performance was immediate.

The rehearsal in McDavid Studio

The rehearsal for the reading of my opera The System of Soothing at the McDavid Studio.

The joy of live performance

Arriving at McDavid Studio on show day came on the heels of an outpouring of support from the Fort Worth Opera staff and my composer colleagues. (Side note: The administrative staff at Fort Worth Opera is a typical collection of dedicated administrators, all of whom—each wearing too many hats—collectively bust their cans to put up a good product and engage the community. Their encouragement and handling of our Frontiers composer clique contributed to a relaxed atmosphere that made the work process easy and productive.)

While composing is a lonely endeavor, collaboration is not.

In the months preceding Frontiers, I admit that I obsessed over the gravity of the opportunity. While the upside of this manifested itself in intense and detailed preparation, especially in how I talk about myself and my operas (detailed in the second essay of this series), the downside for me dragged into the success or failure of the showcase itself:  whether anyone would come; whether anyone in attendance would be a decision maker in the field; and whether those decision makers would take an interest in my work. These thoughts exist in the bubble of the solitary artistic practitioner. But while composing is a lonely endeavor, collaboration is not. As the work with my cast and music staff progressed, my concern about the work’s impression dissipated. I became enveloped in the process of rehearsal, in the drawing out of character, in the communication between conductor, pianist, and singer that squeezed every drop of music out of my arias.

Some of the show is blurry in my memory (this is normal for me – thank God it was recorded), but most of it is crystal clear. Amanda Robie, who ably administered Frontiers, opted for a live, pre-showcase discussion of each work, in which my preparation and practice paid off. One by one, my cast nailed each aria, and when the cloudy penultimate chord of the last aria resolved to a ringing open fifth, I rose to hug my conductor, thank my pianist and cast, raise my hands to the audience, and bow in honor of the work we had done together.

Next week – the now, and ever present, “What’s next?”

Taking Tweed Seriously–Lessons for the Emerging Opera Composer

On May 3rd, my opera, The System of Soothing, was presented at Fort Worth Opera’s Frontiers showcase—a major step into the American new opera scene for an emerging composer. In these essays, I intend to chronicle my experience preparing for, and taking part in, this opportunity. For this installment, I consider how I prepared to present myself as an emerging opera composer, and how I fared putting those skills to work.

“I am becoming a better opera composer” is my brand, to borrow a word from the marketing world. When I was in non-profit administration, we would talk about this quite a bit. We were trying to distill our “soul”—what drove us, as an organization, to do what we did—and then make that into something recognizable to the public that we could, in turn, utilize at fundraising time.  While not my favorite term, The Brand provides a compass, an overarching explanation as to why I make my decisions regarding my work and how I advance plans that will hopefully lead to collaboration. Just saying it—identifying The Brand—doesn’t necessarily translate into anybody buying what I am selling, but it does remind me of my true north.

Opera is an inherently collaborative endeavor.

Opera is an inherently collaborative endeavor. My understanding of the inner workings of the writing and production of opera, and the collaboration required to make it all happen is the bridge that connects The Brand (which is theoretical and internal), and the reputation I want to develop in the real world: the impression I make on those around me as work proceeds.

It’s a bit of a tall order to get that across with a few website tweaks and a new set of headshots, but embodying The Brand is my responsibility, as is communicating it to potential collaborators.  I could easily represent myself as a safe choice, saying, in effect, “I’m not going to be a problem for you. I’m not one of those crazy egocentric composers who is going to make ridiculous demands and make you sorry you wanted to work with me.” I can assuage these preconceptions with a picture that pretty much sums me up: “I’m normal!  I’m a nice guy! I’m wearing tweed, for God’s sake!” But safe is not safe when so few opportunities exist. What The Brand demands of me—and the reputation I wish to establish—is to present myself as an engaging collaborative professional with a clear artistic vision and a solid understanding of the art form, while also demonstrating the leadership skills necessary to bring it to life.

Love in an Elevator

Frontiers was my first foray into the American opera machine. I met other composers, singers, conductors, and general directors both at Fort Worth, and later at the Opera America convention, which ran concurrently in Dallas. Everybody talked, networked, and traded experiences and plans. I knew this was coming, so I quickly had to prepare for succinct conversations about myself, every aspect of my portfolio, and every opera in my portfolio.

In my admin days, the “brand” discussion was always followed by the obsessive for the perfect elevator speech—a pitch given in less than 30 seconds to someone with undivided attention. Mostly used when approaching new donors, the goal was getting a check or a pledge of future support.  I actually followed quite a few marks into literal elevators, so the name wasn’t too misleading.

The same thinking applies when prepping myself to pitch completed, current, and dreamed-about opera projects. With these pitches, I throw things against the wall in hopes that either they will stick or result in a “positive rejection” (a pass on the project at hand, but an expressed interest in a potential future collaboration).

Who am I, anyway?

Pesci in a tweed jacket inside Bass Hall for a performance by the Ft. Worth Opera

I have a diverse background. My writing and performing experience spans rock, pop, jazz, funk-fusion, liturgical music, pit bands, musical theater shows, opera, lonely coffee house singer-songwriter stints where the only thing I was serenading was the coffee, and a smattering of orchestra gigs. On top of that, my work history includes teaching, working with special needs communities, administration, executive leadership, grant writing and fundraising, and restaurant work. I even sold women’s clothes for a while. I don’t exactly embody the traditional compositional pedigree. To practice talking about my musical self, I had to be able to talk to everyone about my musical self—not just other musicians, and certainly not just general directors, conductors, and dramaturges.

The pitch is about 50 to 100 words that could be delivered verbally in 30 seconds.

I developed one pitch for non-professionals, completely devoid of jargon. It was liberating! Crafting an easily understandable, yet engaging personal pitch became much less threatening. It focuses on the “what” of what I do, and less so, the “why” or “what I’m trying to accomplish.” I extended that technique into my opera pitches. I initially thought that I simply needed to describe what happens in the course of a show and could leave out leitmotivs, dramaturgical nuance, or what the piece “means.” I started big, by reverse-engineering a “treatment”—a scene-by-scene narrative format, complete with descriptions of arias, plot devices, and even some general staging recommendations. One size smaller is the synopsis, which is more general, focusing on what happens act to act. The show could then be distilled into the pitch, about 50 to 100 words that could be delivered verbally in 30 seconds, answering the question, “Why should I be interested in this opera?” The hardest-hitting part of the pitch is the hook—the first sentence that should set up what piqued my interest, and why I wanted to write the damn opera in the first place.

The best laid plans…

In the months ahead of Frontiers, I wrote and rewrote my opera pitches, and practiced with colleagues and friends. The feedback quickly coalesced into a common critique: I had written myself out of my pitches. I was pitching interesting shows that in no way could be traced back to me as the creator. I had followed my own advice so meticulously that my pitches were “correct,” but completely impersonal.  Also, I had somehow convinced myself that the show would be seen as more important than the work I had done to write the show. Two nail-biting weeks before I flew to Texas, I started from scratch, rewriting my pitches with myself, my skills as a composer, and what drew me to the subject as the hook. In doing so, I was now selling my craft and myself; in practice, I became The Brand, and The Brand became me.

The long view of a personal relationship is key to successful artistic collaboration.

In doing so, I averted a potentially fatal flaw in my presentation. This was made aware to me in my first meetings with conductors, singers and general directors. As I learned in my initial telephone outreach with American opera companies, the long view of a personal relationship is key to successful artistic collaboration. Leading with who I am, what I’m working on, and how (and why) I’m approaching my work is far more engaging, open and fulfilling.

Next week: Rehearsal and performance, or, “All the things I didn’t know I knew about my opera.”

Jessie Montgomery: Conjuring Memories

Jessie Montgomery standing against a red wall.

Although she grew up in a very culturally diverse New York City neighborhood that has also long been a hotbed for artistic experimentation and rebellion, composer/violinist Jessie Montgomery most strongly identifies with European classical music.

“I write for traditional classical instruments, and I actually feel the most comfortable with them because it’s the closest thing that I have [musically],” Montgomery acknowledges when we visit her East Village apartment, which is actually the same place she lived with her parents as a child. “I feel very connected to European classical music because of the way I have learned how to play the violin. The actual physical resonance of the instrument speaks to that language beautifully, and I think that tradition is so rich.”

Video presentation and photography by Molly Sheridan

Starting violin lessons when she was only four years old at the Third Street Music School (which, chalk it up to East Village rebellion, is actually on Eleventh Street), Montgomery wrote her first original compositions seven years later, her creative appetite whetted by her violin teacher at the school, Alice Kanack, who got her to improvise. She soon became totally immersed in the complex interplay of string quartets, playing in several ensembles as well as eventually writing for them, and received an undergraduate degree in violin performance from The Juilliard School. After her graduation, she performed for five years with the Providence String Quartet and then with the Catalyst Quartet. Since her late teens, she has been nurtured by The Sphinx Organization, a non-profit developer of young Black and Latino classical musicians, and she has been a two-time laureate in the annual Sphinx Competition. But she realizes that her deep involvement with this music is somewhat unusual.

“For me, it happened to work out because I studied violin in a school on the Lower East Side that had a really good teacher,” she suggests. “Neither of my parents were necessarily into classical music at all, though now they are. But it was by chance that this happened because there was something in place where I could go study and get really good at it. I think that should be the case for any kind of music or opportunity, whether it’s learning a classical instrument or learning to play rock guitar or gymnastics. If we increase the pool of what’s available by creating opportunities for young people of all backgrounds to have access to, let’s say, classical music, then the pool from a fundamental level is more diverse. If people are attracted to classical music, that’s great. But there’s no need to force somebody to like classical music. … There is this feeling that it remains in this elite world and that people need to be drawn to it and that that raises you up into this place of classical music. I think that’s a faulty idea when you’re dealing with people. I’m African-American, so I think about black people and black music. But I wonder if the jazz community is having the same conversation. That’s black music; it’s a traditional art form that has developed into this super sophisticated thing that hasn’t brought their people along with it as much as they would like. I think that has to do, again, with enough people having opportunities to grow in whatever areas they’re interested in.”

A bunch of instrument cases on the floor.

Jessie Montgomery’s violin and some instruments are always nearby.

While classical music has been Montgomery’s primary focus in life and the music with which she has the greatest affinity, she has never completely isolated herself from the many other kinds of musical activities that have been happening all around her.

“I happened to have come through it, playing a classical instrument and learning the repertoire, but I have always seen it as another reference point,” she elaborates. “My connection to that music has now became a part of this multifaceted language I’m drawing from. There’s European classical music, there’s jazz, there’s funk, there’s alternative rock, there’s African music—all these different kinds of music available to us now through recordings, etc., and also through just living in a place where there are a lot of different cultures just banging up against each other. … My dad ran a music studio so I was constantly surrounded by all different kinds of music. I would do drawings and my homework in the lobby while all these things were going on.”

Piles of LPs on the floor.

The floor of Jessie Montgomery’s apartment is filled with piles of jazz and pop as well as classical LPs.

Montgomery sees this polyglot musical environment as a quintessentially American phenomenon and something that has long served as a creative fuel for American composers. “The tradition of classical music coming to America and then what American composers have done with the music is so interesting,” Montgomery says. “There is this tradition in America with classical music to try and find other ways to connect to it. … People are starting to see American music as its own thing, its own unique voice, in relation to classical music.”

But what sets Montgomery’s own music apart from so many of her antecedents as well as peers is how deeply immersed she has been for most of her life in the performance of works by other composers. That insider’s knowledge has given her more than just an ability to write really idiomatic music, especially for strings. It has also helped her to understand the mindset of classical interpreters and to offer them music that allows for greater spontaneity and a little less formality.

“I really like the idea of adding elements of improvisation and chance and making the performers engage a little differently with the piece,” she explains. “Having played so much standard repertoire in String Quartet Land, there’s such a rigidity. There’s this expectation that things should always be executed a certain way. There’s a real beauty in trying to find your sound and your own voice in the way you interpret a piece of music that has all these expectations on it, but then I like to throw this other element in where it’s like screw all that stuff you just worked out and change the performance from one night to another.”

Interpretative freedom is a hallmark of Montgomery’s 2013 string quartet Break Away, a work she created expressly for the PUBLIQuartet, which she had previously been a member of when the quartet first formed, since the group is equally adept at performing standard repertoire, newly commissioned works, and open-form improv. Ironically it was inspired by the group’s performances of the Five Movements for String Quartet by Anton Webern, a composer revered as the spiritual forefather of total serialism, a compositional approach that tends to eschew a great degree of performance variance. In another string quartet, Voodoo Dolls (2008), which is being performed by Fulcrum Point in Chicago on April 29, 2016 as part of a concert entitled Proclamation!: The Black Composer Speaks, the players tap on their instruments before launching into cascades of ostinatos. In Color from 2014, scored for the unlikely combination of tuba and string quartet, was commissioned by jazz tuba giant Bob Stewart with whom the PUBLIQuartet premiered it in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, though Montgomery claims that when “jazz language comes into play” it’s more a result of her “memory of what jazz sounds like” rather than its being overtly informed by a deep immersion in jazz performance practice.

Another defining attribute of Montgomery’s music is that narratives are woven through so many of her compositions, even though—with the exception of a new piece that was just premiered by the Young People’s Chorus of New York City—she has written exclusively for instruments and mainly for strings. This is clearly because her compositions initially grew directly out of her playing, but now they are evolving beyond it. She obtained a master’s in composition and film scoring from New York University and credits that experience with taking her out of her comfort zone of writing only for strings. During the 2011-2012 season, while she was the Van Lier Composer Fellow at the American Composers Orchestra, she composed a quartet for four wind instruments. The Albany Symphony will premiere her second full orchestral work in June, and a piece is also in the works for the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Most of these pieces contain some kind of programmatic element.

“The practice of writing for films forced me to use a wider instrumentation,” Montgomery remembers. “But when I applied to NYU, I hadn’t written anything for films. I think I got in basically on the premise that I was writing from this idea of image. And I’ve been continuing to write from that point of view. My mother is a theater artist and storyteller and a lot of her work is based in family history. I think I’m starting to take that on in terms of finding a narrative in each one of my pieces. Words are the easiest way to tell a story, for sure, but sound can conjure lots of memories. There’s this collective memory that can be aroused through sound, and I like trying to get at that somehow.”

A reflection of Jessie Montgomery in a mirror next to a disembodied set of piano hammers on its side.

One of the ways that Montgomery has transcended the trappings of the inherently abstract, non-representational medium of instrumental music is by infusing her pieces with audible ciphers such as references to materials with which most of her listeners would be familiar and which conjure very specific associations. In the string quartet Source Code (2013), she made overt references to the sound world of African-American spirituals. The Isaiah Fund for New Initiatives, the work’s commissioner, requested a piece that addressed what it means to be an American, so Montgomery’s response was to attempt to musically convey her parents’ participation in the Civil Rights movement. For Banner, a string quartet from 2014 which was commissioned to celebrate the 200th anniversary of “The Star Spangled Banner,” Montgomery weaved in references to many songs in addition to our national anthem to convey her own complex feelings.

“I wouldn’t necessarily call myself a die-hard patriot,” she confesses. “We should celebrate, but also take note of struggles that have occurred in order for us all to be in this ‘land of the free’ which is the hard question in that song for me, as well as a lot of people. So that piece is all about songs. There are a lot of Civil Rights songs and also anthems from Puerto Rico and Mexico and a Cuban socialist song as well as ‘The Star Spangled Banner.’ Some were exactly quoted and some were just used as motivic devices. … Somebody asks you to write a piece based on whatever idea they would like you to write a piece on, and you sort of have to find a way to that place.”

Break Away, Source Code, and Banner are all included on Strum, the debut CD of Montgomery’s music which was released in October 2015 on Azica Records. In addition to these three string quartets and another from 2006 titled Strum, the disc contains a very energetic piece she composed for string orchestra in 2012 titled Starburst.

There’s also one track scored for violin alone, titled Rhapsody No. 1, which Montgomery plays herself.

“This is probably going to evolve as things go on, but I do consider myself primarily a violinist,” she admits. “That was my first love.”

A text-based painting with the text: "SUCK CESS"

A bit of advice from a text-based painting that is hanging in Jessie Montgomery’s apartment.