Tag: emerging composer

Saad Haddad: It’s Not Going to Be Exact

Posted on March 23, 2016 by Frank J. Oteri - Conversations, Spotlight

Most first rehearsals of a new piece for orchestra begin one of two ways. The conductor either spot checks various potentially tricky places in the score or attempts a full run-through until something goes awry, which makes everyone stop to focus on what made everyone stop. But guest conductor Steven Schick did not do either of these things back in November when he began rehearsing with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra for a performance of Saad Haddad’s Kaman Fantasy (one of five pieces by emerging composers performed during the 2015 Milwaukee Symphony Composer’s Institute). Instead, Schick asked the string section to play a pitch that was halfway between E and Eb. It took a while for them to find the pitch, but once they did, he then asked them to begin to play the piece. Kaman Fantasy was like nothing else on that program; indeed, it was like few things ever performed by orchestras.

Even during this first somewhat tentative reading, a magical and extremely beautiful microtonally tinged tune emerged amid various melodic fragments chock full of swirling embellishments in the strings and winds. Although the sounds were clearly being made by members of a symphony orchestra reading from parts on their stands, what they played sounded uncannily like the orally transmitted large ensemble music of North Africa and the Middle East.

When we spoke to Haddad in New York City in early March, the 23-year-old composer reflected on the Arabic music ensembles that served as a model for Kaman Fantasy. “There are like 10 to 12 violins and they’re all playing the same line in a different way, with different embellishments and slightly different bowings—sometimes completely different bowings,” he explained. “There’s no [sheet] music at all involved; it’s all done by ear. I’ve never heard a string section sound like that in any tradition and, of course, not in the Western tradition … but I was trying to do that kind of thing in an orchestra piece. The problem with working with Western musicians; you want them to be not exact, but to do that you have to show them something exact on the page and then warn them—be careful, it’s not going to be exact, that’s how it should be. But once you get the musicians to be on board with that, then you can create something really unique and really special in an orchestral environment in which it’s usually really difficult to do anything outside the box.”

Born, raised, and compositionally trained in Southern California, Haddad had never previously written anything like that for an orchestra. But his incorporation of Arabic aesthetics into contemporary Western performance practices in this eleven-minute 2015 composition was something he had been pursuing on a smaller scale in his music since 2012. In fact, Kaman Fantasy began as a duo for violin and piano in which the violin simulates the sonorities of the traditional silk-stringed spiked fiddle common throughout the Islamic world (an instrument called kemençe in Turkey and called kamancheh in Iran and throughout the Caucasus). And, encouraged from being able to make such a synthesis work on an orchestral scale, it is something which has continued to inform his subsequent forays into composing for large ensembles: Manarah for two digitally processed antiphonal trumpets and orchestra, which the American Composers Orchestra will premiere at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall on April 1, 2016; and Takht, which the New Julliard Ensemble will premiere at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall on April 21. However, Haddad was quick to point out that he still thinks of himself as a beginner and even somewhat of an outsider when it comes to having a deep knowledge of Arabic musical traditions.

“I’m an American for sure,” he admitted. “I’ve never even gone to the Middle East … so I’m not going to pretend that I know everything there is. I have a lot to learn. The only thing I hope I can contribute is that I can really showcase the beauty of the culture and the beauty of the music. There’s a lot of stuff in it that’s really cool.”

While he is currently pursuing a master’s degree at Juilliard under the tutelage of John Corigliano, Haddad has yet to find a parallel mentor who can offer him a deeper knowledge of the arcana of maqam, the complex Arabic modal system. Most of his knowledge of this music has come from surfing websites and carefully studying YouTube videos of the iconic Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, whose 1975 funeral attracted more than four million mourners. Although his grandparents were huge fans of Kulthum and Farid el-Atrache, a popular singer-songwriter originally from Syria, Haddad never had any direct exposure to this music in his formative years.

“I never thought I was going to use this music until a few years ago,” he acknowledged. “When I was growing up, I was listening to a lot of Bee Gees and ‘80s music because my mom was really into that stuff. And then I listened to Mozart and Beethoven and all the big classical giants.”

Once he started creating his own music, he initially followed a path typical of many young American composers. He wrote a Michael Jackson-inspired composition scored for a post BoaC All Stars-type ensemble of soprano sax, electric guitar, keyboard, and drum-set, a few short orchestra pieces, and two lovely settings of poems by William Blake for unaccompanied chorus. He even dabbled in film music under the auspices of the John Williams Scoring Stage at USC, which instilled in him a deft command of musical narrative that would later inform other kinds of collaboratively created work, such as his Nekavim, a very effective dance score for two percussionists and live electronics created for choreography by Sean Howe. But an epiphany while he was back at home over the summer only a few years ago is ultimately what led to his current compositional direction. It began with something completely mundane: his mother asking him to transfer his family’s home movies off of aging videocassettes. As he explained:

We had like 200 twenty-year-old home videos and you can’t burn them like CDs; you have to watch the whole thing. So I’m sitting there watching … and see all my older relatives twenty years younger and I started getting really connected to it. So I thought, “Why don’t I write a piece using this material?” I went in with ProTools and tried to take the snippets that I liked. I had no idea what I would do with them; I was just making a catalog of interesting sounds from my childhood. And then I thought, “If I’m going to use my family as an influence, I ought to use their music, too.”

The resultant piece, Mai for string quartet and live electronics (2013), would serve as a blueprint for everything he has composed since then.

The microtones and all the embellishments that are really typical with Arabic music are really easy to get with a string quartet, especially when you’re working with them. So I worked with the Argus Quartet on this and we played it a few times at USC. Then it won a BMI Award the next year, and it was kind of a confirmation for me. So I started to explore this even more.

But Haddad is not at all dogmatic in his transfer of Arabic music theory to pieces that are designed to be interpreted by musicians trained in Western classical music and performed for its usual audiences. For example, while the microtonal gradations that occur in traditional Arabic music are extremely subtle, Haddad is content with limiting himself to quartertones.

Splitting the scale into 24 notes is the easiest way to think about it without going into it so in-depth. If you’re asking a bunch of players to do it, you have to tell them to play this quartertone, because if they’re all playing different shades of it, it doesn’t sound like what you want. It sounds like a cluster or it sounds like it’s wrong. How do you make it sound like it belongs? That kind of approximation, I think, does a big thing for it; you still have the feeling that it belongs to the maqam when you’re using quartertones. … There are certain things you can do that make it easier for an orchestra. Have the microtones in first or second position in each of the strings. Have them a little lower so you can really hear them; if they’re really high up, sometimes it sounds like a wrong note. “How do I make it idiomatic for the orchestra?” is something I’m always thinking.

The way that Saad Haddad has forged a balance between being practical and a desire to take risks is almost as seamless as his balancing of Western classical and Middle Eastern musical traditions. It is particularly surprising considering that he has come to such realizations while still a student. But even here, Haddad balances a duality: a desire to always be a student but never to be held back by thinking like one.

It’s only in name that I feel like I’m a student right now. No matter how old you are, you’re always learning things. You’re always going to be a student. But I’ve never said, “I’m a student, so I need to act like a student.” The more that you think you’re a student, you’re going to be writing “student music.” You need to think outside that kind of shell and say, “What do I want to do?” and don’t worry about anything else.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FJO: Is that what’s on your iPod?

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

FJO: Slanted and Enchanted is a wonderful record.

CS: Oh yeah?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CS: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CS: Punctum, contrapunctum?

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

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

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

CS: Oh yeah?

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

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

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

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

CS: No, it didn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

Excerpt from Caroline Shaw's score for Taxidermy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Caroline Shaw at home.

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

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

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

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

Shaw’s pet fish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CS: March, in Cincinnati.

FJO: Fantastic. How long is the piece?

CS: It’s 17 minutes or so.

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

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

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

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

A passage from Caroline Shaw's orchestral score for Lo

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

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

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

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

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

CS: Oh really? That’s very cool.

FJO: Yeah, so I love the word composer.

CS: Me too.

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

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

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

FJO: So it’s not baked.

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

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

CS: Yes, Roomful of Teeth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CS: They just brought in another violist.

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

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

FJO: You don’t want to think that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CS: That’s amazing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CS: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Mason Bates Appointed Kennedy Center’s First Composer-In-Residence

Posted on January 28, 2015 by NewMusicBox Staff - Headlines, Ledes

Mason Bates standing in front of a brick wall

Mason Bates. Photo by Ryan Schude, courtesy Kennedy Center

The Kennedy Center has announced that composer Mason Bates will join the Center in the 2015-2016 season as its first Composer-In-Residence. During his three-year residency, Bates will compose music across artistic genres and curate a new contemporary music series. He will also advance initiatives that use technology to educate audiences and will encourage the inclusion of local artists and DJs in performances at the Kennedy Center.

“The Kennedy Center’s astonishingly diverse programs played such a crucial role in my early education in Virginia, so it thrills me to join this great team as Composer-In-Residence,” said Mason Bates. “With its rich variety of art forms, the Kennedy Center is the perfect place for new art to impact not only the surrounding communities, but the national conversation as well.”

Planned Kennedy Center commissions over the course of Bates’s residency include works for the National Symphony Orchestra, Washington National Opera, the Fortas Chamber Music Concerts, and performances of contemporary dance. He will also be featured as a performer at many Kennedy Center performances across genres.

The new contemporary music series will present the works of living composers using Bates’s signature re-imagining of the classical music experience. His innovative ideas for integrating traditional symphonic works with new music and performing them in alternative venues have attracted large and enthusiastic crowds to new music concerts throughout the United States and abroad. More information on Bates’s work as Composer-In-Residence—including new commissions, the contemporary music series, and other performances during the 2015-2016 season—will be announced at the Kennedy Center’s season announcement in March.

(—from the press release)

Lainie Fefferman: Strength In Numbers

Posted on October 15, 2014 by Alexandra Gardner - Conversations, Spotlight

Lainie Fefferman is very much the opposite of the solitary, Romantic-era figure that many picture when they think of a composer. Describing herself as a “funny, nerdy, energetic person,” Fefferman freely admits that she doesn’t work well at home alone and is far more productive working in a bustling coffee shop or on a train. In fact, she gathers so much energy from being around other artists that she founded Exapno, a community center for new music in Brooklyn. For a monthly membership fee, musicians are given 24-hour access to the space, where they can compose, rehearse, and perform in a community-oriented environment. While she claims that she started Exapno for purely selfish reasons—so that she could have a place to work in the company of other artists—it continues to generate collaborations and serves as a point of entry into the New York City new music scene for musicians representing a great diversity of backgrounds and influences.

Fefferman’s other great love besides music is math; she teaches a “Math and Music” course at St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn and revels in introducing her students to the music of composers such as Steve Reich by revealing the numeric patterns inherent in the pieces. While she doesn’t necessarily use math to create rigorous formal structures in her own work as Xenakis might, she says that “there’s an aesthetic to the math that I like, and I think it’s the same (on a very meta-level) as the aesthetic to the music that I like. I like things that are minimal, unexpectedly simple, and surprisingly powerful… In math and music I think it’s really striking how you can take these tiny little ideas, and they can explain huge reactions.”

This aesthetic can be heard clearly in Here I Am, Fefferman’s most recent large-scale work (not to mention her Princeton Ph.D. thesis). Written for the ensemble Newspeak with Va Vocals (Martha Cluver, Mellissa Hughes, and Caroline Shaw), it features nine settings of what Fefferman considers “the wonkier bits of the Old Testament.” She says she chose the texts that she has been thinking about over and over for years, and that writing pieces is for her a way to dig deeper into the material in an effort to figure it out for herself. She pulled freely from her own varied musical tastes to create Here I Am, and the combination of beautifully uncluttered music with simple yet effective staging and lighting creates a powerful musical—and theatrical—experience.

Befitting her personality, Fefferman’s own music is highly movement-focused, and all of her compositions, whether scored for bagpipe and electronics or string quartet, radiate a sense of joyfulness. “Whenever I start writing, I think I get frustrated with myself if it doesn’t have motion and energy. Even in still passages I like having a sense of tension and release that translates in the ear to a forward-thinking feeling. Someday I’m going to have to write a sad, slow, hopeless passage, but I’m not there yet!”

Paola Prestini: Following Her Vision

Posted on October 1, 2014 by Frank J. Oteri - Conversations, Cover

A conversation in Prestini’s Brooklyn home
September 8, 2014—2:00 p.m.
Video presentation and photography by Molly Sheridan
Transcription by Julia Lu

Paola Prestini combines wild imagination and controlled practicality on an almost molecular level—it’s as if both are fused together in her DNA. Whether she’s talking about her own multimedia operas or VisionIntoArt, the interdisciplinary arts production company she co-founded 15 years ago, she tends to think big but she always manages to make it happen.
Paola Prestini combines wild imagination and controlled practicality on an almost molecular level—it’s as if both are fused together in her DNA. The first time I met her, back when she was a composition at Juilliard, she was already talking about creating genre-blurring discipline-blurring audience experiences and, together with her then-classmate Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum, had formed a non-profit organization in order to make these experiences happen.

“We wanted something that, when shortened, would sound like a woman’s name—so VIA,” she explained when I talked with her last month in her Crown Heights apartment. “Then we liked the fact that ‘via’ was a street, a way to go. And we knew that it was to be a multimedia company; we wanted to really integrate new music with other forms, other structures, other disciplines. And so VisionIntoArt became a very perfect word for the kind of art that we wanted to help create and that we wanted to create ourselves.”

That was 15 years ago. Since then, VisionIntoArt has collaborated with Lincoln Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, as well as with a number of international festivals. One of the composers associated with VIA early on, Nico Muhly, became a phenomenon. Nora moved to Los Angeles and Paola became VIA’s sole director. Two years ago, VIA had a staff for the very first time. And after a decade of functioning as a presenter and a performing ensemble, VIA morphed into being predominantly a production company.
But that doesn’t mean there’s any less work for Prestini. VIA just launched a record label. And, in addition to running VIA, she is also the creative director for Original Music Workshop, a new performance venue that is scheduled to open early next year in downtown Brooklyn. And on top of that, of course, she’s a composer and is usually in the middle of several different projects at any time.
“We generally don’t have weekends,” she acknowledged. “I have certain days where I just write, a day where it’s just VisionIntoArt and meetings, and other days where there just are meetings for Original Music Workshop or my own compositions, etc. I balance it that way. It’s definitely not a hundred percent fixed, but it seems to be working for now.”

In terms of her compositional projects, she tends to think big. Her Oceanic Verses, which was showcased during New York City Opera’s VOX readings in 2010, blurs the distinction between opera and oratorio as well as various world music traditions. Aging Magician, which was presented as part of the 2013 PROTOTYPE Festival, is a cross between a music theatre piece and an art installation. Her latest opera, created in collaboration with Cerise Jacobs, is a modern retelling of the ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh.

But she plans to get back to writing more chamber music, which is what she was principally doing back when we first met each other. “I see myself taking some time off from the large-scale works and doing smaller-scale works,” she predicted. “Going back out and having that kind of inner play allows you to clear your mind and refocus and then want to embark on the large collaborations again.”

Paola Prestini has an uncanny ability to realize her goals, so no doubt she’ll find a way to make time for everything.

Frank J. Oteri: This seemed a perfect time to talk with you because this is the 15th anniversary season of VisionIntoArt and later this month you’re launching a record label, plus the Original Music Workshop, at which you’re the creative director, opens next year. So there’s a lot of stuff going on and I want to talk to you about each of them, and what you do in all of these different contexts, but before I go there, I’m so curious to find out how you balance all of that with writing your own music.
Paola Prestini: Well, it’s something that I’ve been working on for a while, to find the balance between all of those different activities. I found that the more regimented I am, the better I am at being able to achieve a sense of balance. So I have certain days where I just write, a day where it’s just VisionIntoArt and meetings, and other days where there just are meetings for Original Music Workshop or my own compositions, etc. I’d say that I have about four days a week of writing and the rest of the days are meeting days. I balance it that way. It’s definitely not a hundred percent fixed, but it seems to be working for now.
FJO: That means you don’t get a weekend.
PP: Yeah, we generally don’t have weekends.
FJO: You can schedule meetings to have on different days, but if you’re in the thick of writing a piece of music, sometimes an idea might come when you least expect it. If it comes on one of the non-designated composing days, what do you do?
PP: I found that when I’m on a deadline, I tend to focus much more on writing, and so I’ll assemble my schedule so that it’s much more about writing. But I’ve also become aware that I’m really flexible in terms of writing ideas down and then getting back to them. So it never feels like a do or die situation. I can pretty confidently get back into a state of flow. I’m also finding that I can balance one or two pieces at the same time, because the vocabularies are very different or they’re very different collaborations. It’s taken a long time to find this kind of flow for my flow, but it feels like it’s working out.

FJO: Once upon a time, the common wisdom was that in order to devote yourself to composing or performing, you had to clear other things away from your mind so that you could be pure in the pursuit of your artistry. But there really has been a seismic shift that has happened in our lifetimes where composers have become extremely entrepreneurial. There are loads of debates about whether artists should be entrepreneurs; we had a whole series of articles in NewMusicBox about that this summer which sparked a ton of commentary.
PP: Yeah. I followed them.
FJO: From the first day I met you, about 15 years ago, I got the sense that you were extremely entrepreneurial. For you, it doesn’t seem like there’s a separation between your compositional and entrepreneurial aspirations.
PP: I think that every composer draws their inspiration from many different places. And every composer most likely either teaches or mentors, or directs an ensemble, or conducts. You see this pretty regularly amongst all our peers. For me, the idea of producing and mentoring feels like a very natural extension of who I am. It never felt like I needed to explain that or hide it, or shy away from it, because these were natural properties that I wanted to develop and it felt really natural to mix them into my life as an artist. I like to say that in order to be a 21st century artist, of course you have to have talent, but you also have to have some kind of a mix of entrepreneurship and activism, and a desire to educate. More and more I think that you don’t have to have all these properties, because everybody’s different, but you do have to have some sense of consciousness in terms of your musical ecology, your peers, and what you can do to help affect your surroundings.
FJO: This seems to largely be a generational thing and also a very American thing which grew out of the way the arts are supported—or rather, not as adequately supported as we need them to be—in this country. But you weren’t born here.
PP: No, I was born in Italy and raised on the Mexican border, first in Nogales and then Tucson. But for all intents and purposes, I am American. I was raised by a single mother who raised me very much with American principles. I had an example of what it meant to reinvent yourself, to have a blank slate and create the world that you want to be in. I feel like those are very American principles, so I think that— because I grew up on a border and speaking different languages—what I had is a desire to constantly interact with different cultures and find ways to bring that into the musical world and the artistic world that I inhabited. So that kind of—if you want to say—openness, or desire to interact with other cultures, definitely comes, I think, from immigrating to this country at a young age and being a new American.

FJO: Before we begin talking about how various world musics have played such a key role in a lot of your recent music, it seems somewhat unusual, given your background and subsequent career, that you have a degree in composition from Juilliard, which offers a very different model for how to shape a life as a creative artist or certainly did at the time you were there.
PP: Well, I think the most important thing for me at the beginning of my compositional career was to secure what I felt at that moment was the best training I could possibly get. And I definitely felt that the teachers I studied with and the classes that I took prepared me for the compositional life that I wanted to have in terms of technique and the exposure to great performers, and just by nature of it being in New York. It felt like the perfect place while I was there. However, it was there that I started the non-profit that I still direct to this day. I co-founded it in 1999 while I was a student because I was acutely aware that it would be very difficult for me as a composer when I graduated. Those years in between when you graduate and when you’re considered an established composer—those emerging years which can really be 10 to 20 years—are extraordinarily difficult. So I wanted to be able to create some kind of next steps, some kind of organizational process that would help me bridge those years and do it with some kind of grace.
FJO: I still remember having lunch with you and Nora [Kroll-Rosenbaum] talking about your having just founded VisionIntoArt.
PP: Yes, I remember that.
FJO: I thought it was pretty remarkable because at the time this wasn’t something common. Now every student starts their own ensemble. And while you weren’t the first students to do it, it seemed weird coming out of Juilliard of all places. I don’t mean to rag on Juilliard in any way, but that’s a conservatory that historically epitomized the notion that to be an artist, you try to tune out the outside world and that’s how you become the best at what you’re doing, whether it’s writing music, playing an instrument, acting, or dancing ballet.
PP: That’s absolutely right.
FJO: That’s why it’s so peculiar that you were planning for what was going to happen after you left. I would image that those kinds of thoughts haven’t usually occurred to students there.
PP: No. Now they’re very active with a mentoring program and with an entrepreneurship program. But when I was there, those words were not uttered. In fact, there was very little cross-disciplinary work being investigated. Yet at the same time, we were living in this incredible, fertile time in New York City where we could have access to the best visual artists and film makers of our time. So it felt crazy to Nora and I to not embark on creating our moment. Why wait until after school? In a way, I would say that school is the perfect time to launch any idea because you have some kind of safety net that allows you to test things before you really launch. A big point for me was receiving the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, because at that time, at Juilliard, it didn’t seem so natural to embark on creating a non-profit. We had no money. It seemed crazy. But once I received that fellowship, I had access to unbelievable minds that were doing huge things. They were affecting their communities in profound ways in medicine, in law, in business, and all of a sudden it felt crazy to not be doing my own thing. I was very fortunate to have that, and at the same time, that also opened our world to tons of contacts. Nora and I took meetings with hundreds of people, and that’s how it all began, with the energy of 20-year-olds.
FJO: You’re both composers, so why did you call it VisionIntoArt?
PP: We wanted something that, when shortened, would sound like a woman’s name. So VIA, and then we liked the fact that “via” was a street, a way to go. And we knew that it was to be a multimedia company; we wanted to really integrate new music with other forms, other structures, other disciplines. And so VisionIntoArt became a very perfect word for the kind of art that we wanted to help create and that we wanted to create ourselves.
FJO: But to play devil’s advocate with you a little bit, to the general public the word art means visual art. She’s an artist? Oh, she must be painter or a sculptor. They don’t automatically think: Oh, she’s a composer or she’s a poet. Those kinds of associations are not quite as immediate. On the other hand, it’s also the thing that the music community is lacking: the world we live in is so visually oriented and we’re the one group of people who create work that is not necessarily visually based.
PP: Right. The way we present ourselves obviously isn’t—for the most part—visual. And yet the way we market our works is entirely visual. When we came up with the name, we were in our early 20s, so it just seemed like a fun name. And the visual arts have always played a huge role in my music, visual arts and literature. So that didn’t feel strange to me. But as you’re saying this, it absolutely seems like a natural connection because we present our worlds visually, and we live in a hyper visual world. So, it makes sense.
FJO: The problem with the concert going experience is that it is often not terribly compelling from a visual point of view. You might hear something that’s completely transformative, but there’s really nothing to look at. They’re just seeing a group of folks wearing tuxedos or funeral black or jeans and t-shirts—I’m not sure which of these outfits is the least interesting. But from the beginning, you wanted to offer a multimedia experience to audiences.
PP: I think there are two ways to look at it. When I think about curating music, I think about how to incorporate the technology we have, and the kind of tech elements we have to create a seamless performance with a visual flow so that what the audience is concentrating on is really just the art. But when I’m creating deep collaborative process works, I’m looking to really transcend certain boundaries. I’m looking to learn from an astrophysicist or a conservationist, or to work deeply with a visual artist and understand how to communicate across discipline. There are many ways to create multimedia settings; it can be from a very simple angle of curation to a deep process of collaboration.

Prestini score overlayed with butterflies

A score by Prestini that has been transformed into a work of art.

FJO: VisionIntoArt has been an important outlet for many composers. The first real public awareness of the music of Nico Muhly happened through VisionIntoArt.
PP: Yeah. It’s exciting.
FJO: It’s also been a wonderful launching pad for your own work as well. You say it’s exciting to be a mentor to others and to provide a platform, and that presenting has always been an integral part of your way of thinking about things. So in terms of carving up a season, where is that balance between focusing on your own work and advocating for other composers?
PP: Well, now we have a staff. That’s something that just happened two years ago. So my life has become imminently more plausible; it’s doable now. We have an incubation series call Ferus that we just inaugurated. That’s really our place to discover the artists we want to work with. We put up money to record it, to take photographs, to help them then pitch to presenters, or pitch to other producers. Sometimes we take the work on ourselves. It’s once a year and there are about seven to eight slots. And the curation happens honestly in so many ways. We go listen to a million things, and we get a lot of submissions, and we really try to develop relationships and see who’s going to really benefit the most from the opportunity.
Then we have Liederabend, which is the festival that we co-produce with Beth Morrison, and that happens every two years. And there we have two to three nights of works that are specifically for the voice and multimedia. So that’s another platform where we can discover new voices, specifically composers who like to write for the voice. Then we have our new VIA records, which is specifically the dissemination angle of the company.
I like to say that in VIA we try to incubate, produce, and disseminate. The dissemination angle came from the fact that some of the works we were doing really don’t exist as powerfully without the visual component. They’re gorgeous musical works, but why have it without the visuals when that’s the way the composer conceived it? So we decided to have a company that specifically nurtures the multimedia canon of 21st-century works. Those are the three larger programs that we have. And then we have our production company, which has done many of my works and can only do one or two works a year. We’re really focusing on the sciences, on collaborations that really aren’t happening elsewhere.
FJO: And one of the first two releases on the new label will be your Oceanic Verses.
PP: Right. Our first two releases are Anna Clyne’s The Violin and Oceanic Verses of mine. Both of those will come out as a CD and a DVD in a specialty box. It’s a special release of 500 CDs and DVDs, plus a poster. When you’re buying the box, you’re getting an experience of what that piece is in its multimedia format.
FJO: It’s a strange time to start a new record label.
PP: I know. Why now? Because the health of the industry exists in options. And we are yet one more option. It’s not about stepping on toes; it’s about collaborating. It’s about adding to the pie instead of taking from it. And the reality is, it’s also for me. I haven’t had a tremendous amount of bites for recording my music, but I need to have my music recorded. I’ve always believed in commissioning myself in tandem and in context with other composers. So it will be that way also with our own record label.
FJO: So far, we’ve focused on how you balance your composing with the other hats you wear, but I want to go into the actual music itself and how your multifaceted life has shaped you as a composer. Going back to that meeting we had 15 years ago, I remember you passed along to me a score of a brass quintet and some other pieces you were working on. They were formidable pieces of music, but they’re light years away from the kinds of work that you’ve done in the last 15 years. In terms of what the outside world might be aware of, I think the only example of stuff that’s even remotely like it might be Nightsong, the five-octave marimba piece that’s on your first CD released on Tzadik or possibly your solo piano piece, Limpopo Songs, which is also on that disc. Both of those pieces, like that brass quintet, could exist very effectively on a typical contemporary music recital program. They’re contained units and clearly fall under the rubric of “contemporary classical music,” whatever that means. But everything else on that recording and the stuff you’ve been doing since then is way more open ended.
PP: I guess I would start by saying that the change occurred through the kind of artistic channel that I was taking. And that artistic channel included certain muses, and those muses definitely affected my music. Oceanic Verses came about because I really love folk music and I really love improvisation. So how do I really bring this into my language in an authentic way? That became a beautiful exploration of found sounds and my discovery of the southern part of Italy, deepening my own understanding of my cultural heritage. So the sound samples that I recorded while I was there mixed with the talents of these two muses that I had met recently: Helga Davis, in terms of improvisation, and Claudio Prima, who was a young folk singer from the southern part of Italy. That became an extraordinary exploration and it was out of my curiosity to discover their talents and to bring in what I found to be wonderful musical tools into my own writing. That doesn’t appear in all of my writing, although improvisation and structured improvisation has appeared more regularly.
Then I embarked on the installation concertos for Maya Beiser and Neil Dufallo. Those became really deep process works in terms of live electronics and electronic resonances. They’re concertos, and so there’s very virtuosic writing and structured improvisation for both. There was also the creation of a musical instrument, the LED cello for Maya Beiser. Those became deep explorations into visual worlds and live electronics with the K-Bow, which is a Bluetooth bow that Keith McMillan created and that Neil is one of the sponsors for. So each new work brought me into a journey that deepened my compositional language and that helped bring deeper levels of compositional technique into my music.
FJO: You had already worked with Helga Davis on As Sleep Befell.
PP: And on Sounds and Traveling Songs.
FJO: And for Body Maps, you worked with another really extraordinary vocalist.
PP: Hila Plitman.
FJO: All of those pieces are quite a bit more than just setting a text to music. They’re about treating the voice as an instrument in all its possibilities, and also using the possibility of language, what it means to put a language with music and what it does to the music. Music in and of itself has no specific, readily perceptible meaning, but as soon as you attach language to it, all of a sudden you’re referencing something. I think when a lot of people set text that they’re not always so conscious of that aspect of it.
PP: It’s interesting because now I’m writing more opera, but where I came into writing for the voice was using my own voice—not actually really setting text at all but making up languages, like I did in Body Maps, in As Sleep Befell, complete vocalize. That became an exploration of how to use the voice for timbre, how to use the voice in terms of virtuosity and leaps and skips and you know, that kind of writing that appears more in Body Maps. Then, slowly, I got more into word locution and really text setting and how to do that in operatic settings, which I’m really interested in now.
FJO: Oceanic Verses has gone through many permutations. I remember attending a performance of some excerpts from it at the New York City Opera’s VOX readings, but it’s evolved quite considerably since then. At one point, you called it an oratorio, at another a cantata. Now you’re describing it as an opera. Of course the wonderful thing about the word opera is that it really can mean anything you want it to, despite people immediately associating it with Puccini or Wagner.
PP: Oceanic Verses was my first foray into writing in an operatic form. It was definitely a hybrid piece, and it definitely doesn’t have a specific narrative. It follows four characters and their trajectories, but not in a linear form. The film plays a very important role to me in the performance, which we were finally able to include when we were at the Barbican with the BBC Symphony. I’m not one to say what is or is not opera. But I definitely played around a lot with what to call it because I found it really falling in between lines. The piece has been in a way my own learning about operatic form, learning how to write in some style that I was approaching, and so it’s been a piece that’s morphed with me for the past four years. Now I’m very happy to let it sail off and do its thing and move on because I don’t believe in staying on works for too long. I think it’s better sometimes to learn through new pieces. But that specific piece definitely had a long evolution.
FJO: Well, I don’t want you to let it go just yet. We’re not done talking about it! There’s a very loaded social message to this piece, which I think is one of its key ingredients. It’s about how to deal with traditions that are disappearing, how to deal with globalization, modernization, immigration, socio-economic changes, how a military presence alters a place—all these things than affect an environment.
PP: Yeah, extreme communication. Absolutely. [Oceanic Verses] touches on that. It started with a personal need to discover my own internal geography and the geography of this land, and the implications of this land as a place of immigration, of flux. And then by placing Helga Davis as the protagonist, I feel like it did a profound job of exploring not just archetypes, but the struggles that permeate that land as well as using that land as a metaphor for different borders and different places that are experiencing change. So the songs, I feel, can paint the picture of many different experiences, but it’s very much musically based in that region, and in that kind of lost language, lost Italian songs, and with all the influences that it has—from African influences to Byzantine influences to the Greco language that only 400 people speak now. It was a fascinating piece for me to discover my own roots, but to put my own kind of musical understanding of that experience into that kind of a package was also a beautiful experience.
FJO: Discussions nowadays about influences and tradition are very complicated. You spoke earlier about growing up on the US border and then having a very formal education at Juilliard based on the tradition that comes out of Western classical music, which is a very specific thing. In the 21st century, in terms of who we are and what our music is, all the world’s music is available to us, from all eras, from all over the place. Music from a certain place that is more than likely not related to the Western classical tradition might actually resonate more. The Western classical tradition is just as foreign to most 21st-century Americans as gamelan, or West African drumming. So to incorporate any other tradition into your own music is no more culturally appropriative than, say, writing a string quartet would be at this point.
PP: It’s absolutely true. And what I did in my 20s, after Juilliard, was really try to explore different traditions—different vocal techniques, from Inuit calls to south African choral music to actually going to Zimbabwe, collecting sound samples in southern Italy. It was very freeing. Now I feel like my music incorporates those things in a very subtle way, whereas there were certain pieces that I’ve written that were much more obvious. I wanted them to be obvious. Now I find that they’re deeply entrenched in my own language, and they come out in very different ways. So I feel like it was a journey that I definitely wanted and needed to go on to arrive at where I am now, which is just having all these different influences affect my music.

FJO: To stay a bit longer on Oceanic Verses, is that that piece is probably the largest manifestation to date of where the world music influences have gone in your own work. And yet it was also about discovering your own roots. It’s both things at the same time.
PP: When I first started the piece for VOX, it was very personal and based more on my own experiences. Then as the piece evolved with the filmmaker, Ali Hossaini, and the librettist, Donna Di Novelli, we took it out of my hands and really made the main character an archeologist. That archeologist then goes on to discover the different traditions and to have her own epiphany, a personal epiphany that happens and manifests itself through the discovery of different songs and different experiences that allow her to uncover her own past. So it becomes a journey for one woman, meeting these different archetypes, uncovering this music, and then uncovering her own American identity.
FJO: One of the things that convinced me that we absolutely needed to talk to you this year, aside from the anniversary of VIA, was that when we ran into each other at ASCAP you were telling me about a project you’re working on based on The Epic of Gilgamesh—something with which I have long been fascinated.
PP: Yes. Well, it’s a piece that’s really driven by the librettist, Cerise Jacobs. Cerise and I met very briefly at VOX during Oceanic Verses, when her husband Charles was still alive. Cerise had been working at the time on the Ouroboros Trilogy, which my opera Gilgamesh is part of, and they were looking for a composer. Charles then passed away. When Cerise came together with Beth Morrison to try to assign that opera to someone, Cerise and I met again and it was a perfect match. I feel really lucky to be able to write something in memory of her late husband, and of course the topic was extremely exciting. It’s actually a trilogy with three different composers for the three different operas. And the three operas can be executed in any order. On the opening night, when it’s in Boston, it will be done with all three operas consecutively.
FJO: The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest surviving epic poem, but it tells a story that’s strikingly contemporary about coming to terms with mortality.
PP: I’ve been reading about AI [artificial intelligence], and just today in the New Yorker, there was a fascinating article about the future of everlasting life and robotics. It’s a right-hand turn, but it’s definitely an extension of that.
FJO: The other really timely thing about Gilgamesh is that he was the King of Uruq. Uruq is in Iraq. I just checked the maps to see if it is anywhere near where the ISIS folks are. Luckily they’re not near where that is yet, since there have been such significant archeological finds that have taken place there and are still going on. It is the source of a lot of both Western and Eastern culture. The earliest board games and the earliest surviving musical instruments are from there, as well as the earliest documentation of a seven-note diatonic scale. Even the earliest known portrait of a woman was found there.
PP: That’s fascinating.
FJO: And now this place is in everybody’s consciousness again, although for all the most horrible reasons. A lot of ruins are getting destroyed in other parts of Iraq. How much are you paying attention to the news that’s been coming out from there and how much of your approach to Gilgamesh is informed by what’s going on there now?
PP: I pay attention to it very much in my everyday life because I read and I have connections to Iraq that are personal, so I pay attention to it in that way. But musically it’s not something that, at the moment, is infiltrating the work. Every text when it has historical, deep connections psychologically draws from a different fountain of music within you. So I wouldn’t say that there’s no connection, but it’s not like Oceanic Verses, where I went and I studied and made sound samples. It’s not that kind of a work. The way that Cerise compiled the text has a very international bent to it. So it’s a reevaluation and a retelling of the Gilgamesh myth. So in that way, I really felt the freedom to musically tell a story that was very relevant to my musical voice right now. And because it’s also the first opportunity I have to really write in an extraordinary, extreme operatic form, I’m allowing myself to just think about acoustic instruments. The setting is—I wouldn’t say traditional, but—a little bit more conditioned by the opportunity I have.
FJO: So no electronics?
PP: No electronics.
FJO: Wow.
PP: Long story short. I love how you get to the point. I was trying to do a roundabout way of answering that. That’s great.
FJO: No samples?
PP: No samples.
FJO: Wow.
PP: Cerise was really intent on not having any microphones, not having any amplification, no extreme electronics, really focusing on the pure sound of the orchestra, the choir, the children’s choir, and the soloists.
FJO: When you say there are three operas by three different composers, I’m trying to wrap my brain around this.
PP: It’s very Wagnerian. That’s what she’s going for, a real epic.
FJO: But Wagner was all about controlling everything and all the music was his, whereas this project, by design, involves multiple compositional voices and composers who write very different music from one another.
PP: Scott Wheeler wrote the music for Naga and Zhou Long wrote the music for Madame Whitesnake which won the Pulitzer years back.
FJO: The idea that these operas could be done in any order is also not very Wagnerian. I mean, there’s no Gotterdämmerung!
PP: That’s the idea of Ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail and the idea of the cycle of life. The cycle of these characters, their stories, and how they reappear can actually be told and understood in different directions.
FJO: In a weird kind of way, being involved with a project like this is about a lot more than just you. To spiral back to the beginning of our conversation, snake eating its own tail style, this project ties very neatly in with what you do in the rest of your life as a collaborator, sharing programs with others’ work, presenting others’ work. Though she came to you and it’s an outside project, it seems completely like everything else you do aesthetically.
PP: Totally, and I really have to credit Beth and Cerise for that, because their vision was to really create a community amongst the collaborators. It’s been the most magnificent process. Very, very fruitful, very supportive, and I think that that will seep into the interconnectivity of the works. Even in an abstract way.
FJO: So, to bring it back full circle to the Original Music Workshop, which will be up and running a year from now. Maybe these operas could be done there?
PP: Yeah. I do think that certain works can be done there. But lately the works I’ve been working on are quite extensive and large. The other work I have is at the Park Avenue Armory, Aging Magician, which is with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus and will go on to several different venues. But my hopes are to eventually do smaller works and to have more fluidity with the compositional process. For OMW, what’s really exciting is that we’ll have different groups in residence; we’ll have different partnerships with ongoing organizations—Beth Morrison Productions, VisionIntoArt, and a few others that will develop festivals, and that will really help provide a breadth of programming.
The groups in residence will benefit from subsidized recording rates, free rehearsal space, and also connection with all the partnerships that we have, which are quite extensive. The space will operate like a club, in many ways, but it will also have a nonprofit side of things. So it’s both a club with a restaurant and an incredible recording venue. I think it’ll provide the community with a space for mentoring those next steps into professional life: a place where you can really easily get a recording and easily film your work. I wouldn’t say that it’s the place where you would do crazy multimedia or deep, long process, setting-type work, but I think you can absolutely do extraordinary film and music or deep electronics. I think it will really serve a large body of artists focusing on music in all different styles. OMW is really about the fluidity of music that composers and groups and artists and songwriters are writing today. It’s perfect for a single piano. In fact, the acoustics were designed to perfectly fit a solo piano show. And with acoustic treatment, it can perfectly accommodate the most complex electronic shows. So that space will really serve many different styles of music, and my hopes are it will really be a place where you want to go to discover things.
FJO: So in terms of the kinds of things that you might find yourself doing there, because I imagine that you will have a role there as an artist as well, might there be a sequel to Limpopo Songs?
PP: I think as I get to know more musicians and as they desire my work, it’s exciting to be doing these smaller collaborations. I have a piece that’s coming out on [my husband] Jeff Zeigler’s new album Something of Life. That’s a piece for him and Jason Treuting, and it’s called Listen Quiet. That was a fun collaboration, so yeah, absolutely. I see myself taking some time off from the large-scale works and doing smaller-scale works, going back out and having that kind of inner play allows you to clear your mind and refocus and then want to embark on the large collaborations again.
FJO: Dare I say, to further bite the tail of the snake, might working on some smaller projects instead of yet another large collaboration also allow you to have a weekend sometimes?
PP: That might be nice. As artists, we all really enjoy what we do and so oftentimes going to see a show, or doing things that might seem like work, aren’t really work. And I can include my family in it, and we find our times, but it’s definitely a compact time of life right now.

Du Yun: No Safety Net

Posted on September 17, 2014 by Frank J. Oteri - Conversations, Spotlight

Video presentation and photography by Molly Sheridan

I still remember the first performance I ever attended of Du Yun’s music. It was a vocal piece on an ICE concert in an East Village performance space. She was the vocalist and at some point she was crawling around on the stage. This might sound somewhat gimmicky, but there was an element of vulnerability to it that gave it a completely different context. It was actually somewhat unsettling. Du Yun likes making herself, and often her audiences, uncomfortable. And for her that discomfort means constantly taking risks.

It’s a far cry from her intensive childhood training as a classical pianist in her native Shanghai where the goal was to interpret standard Western classical music repertoire as precisely as possible. As she explained when we spoke in her apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, despite her proficiency on the instrument, or perhaps because of it, she actually avoids it when composing.

I practiced piano eight hours a day when I was a kid. … My challenge to myself is to write music without the aid of a piano ever, not even checking things. I don’t want to be too comfortable when I write music. When I create, I don’t want to fall back to the safety net that I’ve acquired. So I love feeling like I don’t know how to walk and then find the platform to focus on the next step. There’s a sport where you essentially climb rocks without roping using just your bare shoes. It’s so dangerous, but it’s all about focusing on the next step. My survival mode has always been trying to find my way around things. I was not your typical Chinese good student at all. I got myself in a lot of trouble with teachers. The subversive is always something I’m attracted to, the danger, working against people’s expectations.

This desire to constantly search for that next step and to go against the grain is probably why she’s always exploring different musical directions. When we visited with her, a Takemitsu orchestral score sat on her piano alongside a collection of Ray Charles songs. She’s so stylistically omnivorous that attempting to apply genre distinctions to her music is a frustrating exercise in futility. While she has written works that have been premiered by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and Montreal’s Nouvelle Ensemble Moderne, she has also created numerous works involving electronics, a series of uncategorizable performance art pieces, and she’s even released a dance pop album called Shark in You.

Most of the time, the various elements are not clearly delineated. The score for her otherworldly Angel’s Bone, a “chamber opera” she created with Royce Vavrek about a pair of fallen angels who are forced into prostitution, is an idiosyncratic amalgam of church motets, punk, and quasi-European post-expressionism. (In fact, describing it as chamber opera somehow misrepresents it, since it fails to convey that it is also extremely effective musical theatre as well as sacred oratorio, as contradictory as being both at once might seem.) In it, moments of extreme beauty co-exist alongside harrowing sonorities. While her music is a very appropriate soundtrack for Vavrek’s disturbing supernatural story, Du Yun is attracted to all of these sonorities and so it felt perfectly natural to her to combine them.

Many composers her age create music that seamlessly blurs genres. But unlike composers who grew up in the United States where just about any kind of music seems part of our tradition, Du Yun approaches all traditions as somehow exotic, whether classical, pop, avant-garde, or even the traditional Chinese music that deeply influences so many other Chinese émigré composers. How she first became aware of different musical traditions has allowed her to remain an outsider and has enabled her to absorb a wide variety of influences while remaining completely unique.

I did not grow up completely with Chinese culture, so if my music were to have Chinese culture in it, it would not be a genuine reflection of who I was. I do not want to use that without understanding it. But now it’s something I want to completely explore further. … I grew up with all the Hong Kong pop which was following American pop. But I also practiced a lot of Bach, Mozart, Chopin, and Beethoven. When I was just coming of age, the pub idea was just coming to Shanghai. I was in a reggae band with exchange students from Kenya playing Bob Marley cover songs. Then by 1995, China really opened up. We were totally following American culture. Radio played the Top 40—we knew what was number one on the Billboard chart. But we didn’t hear indie-pop. So I got all these bootleg tapes on the street. You don’t really know if Pink Floyd is cool or not. I bought it just because of the cover and then my mind was blown away. … There was a professor who was very instrumental in bringing contemporary music to us, but there was no collection of new music in the library. Stravinsky would be new. Bartók would be new. Penderecki would be like “Woah!” There were tapes of Penderecki and John Corigliano’s Clarinet Concerto, but we didn’t know those names and didn’t know the hierarchy of who comes earlier and who comes later. It all came at once so it seemed like anything goes. You could just pick what you like and your teacher is not going to tell you what is good and what is not.

While her Asian heritage did not have a dominant role in her development, she acknowledges that her outlook on life is a direct result of Asian philosophy which offers a more fluid alternative to the either-or mentality that is so dominant in American and most Western societies. According to the traditional Asian world view, there isn’t a right way vs. a wrong way, there are many ways and therefore you can combine them in any way you want.

I don’t see the world in binaries. … Ancient Asian philosophy is about three points. You have this extreme and that and then the middle. The middle is something that is very attractive and intriguing. In life there’s a binary in that you have a birth and you have a death, a beginning and an end, but the process of [living your life] is the third point. If I believe that, how can I believe it’s just a binary? … The world is more of a continuum. I don’t feel the urge to see what is or what is not.

This way of thinking allows for an open-ended aesthetic sensibility that has enabled her to identify with both the “good” characters and the “bad” characters in Angel’s Bone—actually she doesn’t think of any of them in terms of good and bad. Her latest “opera” in progress, Women: The War Within, arguably blurs and ultimately transcends binaries even more than Angel’s Bone has done. It also blurs lines of chronology as well as geography—its four protagonists are Cleopatra, the 7th-century Chinese Empress Wu, Burmese Nobel Peace Prize-winning activist Aung San Suu Kyi, and Hillary Clinton. In the process of working on the music for this she has been immersing herself in Kunqu, one of the oldest surviving forms of Chinese opera, and it has been extremely inspiring to her. “I want to see if I could write like that; it’s so beautiful,” she explained. “My challenge is how I can adapt that.” But don’t expect her music for this to be an amalgam of various Asian traditional musics and Fleetwood Mac. That would be too safe!

Robert Honstein: Oblique Strategies

Posted on August 20, 2014 by Frank J. Oteri - Conversations, Spotlight

Video presentation by Molly Sheridan

Someone inadvertently picking up a copy of RE:you, Robert Honstein’s debut CD released earlier this year by New Focus Recordings, might initially assume that it’s an indie rock album. The stark plain white cover features only Honstein’s name in small caps in the corner and the large black letters of the title are strewn across the center, the colon an eye-catching green. The back is a similarly minimalist white, only instead of the title, large gray punctuation symbols form an emoticon-like image resembling two people facing one another: “(‘}{‘).” The CD itself does not even feature Honstein’s name; the perimeter is surrounded by exclamation points, the sequence only broken with “RE: you.” Then there are the titles of the eight tracks, listed in the gatefold of the digipack: e.g. “My friend I understand 100%, I have no girlfriend,” “Better find those little blue pills if you plan on giving her more than lip service,” etc.

The initial phrases of the opening track, with their gangly electric guitar and foregrounded percussion, also suggest an alternative pop album, as do the openings of just about every other track. But the vocals never come. Instead, the instrumental textures get manipulated in ways that are more reminiscent of contemporary chamber music. So while this is music that is clearly informed by indie rock songs, it is ultimately something else entirely. In fact, eschewing today’s common parlance where every kind of musical utterance is described as a song, Honstein—when we spoke with him a couple of weeks ago—described these pieces of music as “song-like” compositions. They reference many of the identifiable tropes of songs, but they are not quite songs:

A lot of them are A-B-A and they’re short (though a couple of them do get kind of long), so I think in terms of concision and formal clarity they’re song-like. And also, some of them have this melodic thing that maybe evokes the sense that maybe it is a song. But I didn’t want it to be something so concrete as a song. I wanted it to be more oblique—a little bit strange, a little bit more misleading. In a sense they’re cinematic, I’m just not showing you the film. I don’t want to micromanage your experience.

As for the provocative titles he gave to those eight pieces, they derive from lines that were contained in over a hundred emails sent and received through an online dating site that were then accidentally transmitted to a friend of his. They hint at a dysfunctional and ultimately tragic relationship, but if there’s more to the story, Honstein has no intention of revealing it:

How I came across these emails, who these people are, and what may or may not have happened—that to me is like a footnote. You can read a book and you can read the footnotes or not and you’ll still get something out of it. I don’t personally feel obliged to explain everything; those pieces are intentionally oblique. I’m merely suggesting what might have happened; I don’t want to give the answer. I think that’s a more interesting experience—to be confronted with something without an answer and then fill in your own blanks as to what it means. There is a line between what is for me and what is for the listener.

While the backstory of this usual digital correspondence served as a catalyst for his music, usually the Boston-based composer takes a more intuitive approach when he begins working on a piece. “I try not to think too much when I’m just generating ideas and material,” he claims. “There’s a good chunk of time where I don’t intellectually know what I’m doing and I think that’s important. So, a lot of the time I’ll get pretty far along in a piece and won’t have a clue of what it’s about, but then there’s this simultaneous process where I’m finishing the piece and trying to articulate what is going on.”

But one of the themes he frequently comes back to in his pieces is technology and how it impacts on our lives, which is the obvious subtext for the eight pieces collected on RE:You. The text for his choral piece, Hello World, I love you, emulates how a computer processes the English language using the words “hello world” which were the first ones translated into C programming language back in 1972. The text begins with a sequence of 0s and 1s, then moves onto x86 machine code; eventually the recognizable English words emerge. His orchestra piece 200 OK takes its name from how HTTP queries are served up.

Yet ironically Honstein’s music thus far has been anything but high-tech. Aside from the occasional electric guitar or electric bass, his timbral palette consists predominantly of acoustic instruments. If that somehow seems contradictory, it’s more a by-product of his being attuned to the world we currently live in but not feeling straitjacketed by it. He explains it during our conversation in a 19th-century Brooklyn brownstone where he arranged for us to meet (which somehow felt strangely appropriate):

I’m really interested in responding to the world around me and obviously technology is pretty much embedded in everything we do now. So I can’t ignore it; for that reason I feel compelled to deal with it in what I write. Then the other side to that is that what I think is most interesting about the technology is not necessarily the technology itself, but how we interact with it and how it affects our experiences of emotions, relationships, and being in the world. So rather than writing a piece about technology and then build a fancy robot that is super high tech, I think a poetic impulse is more interesting. The end result is kind of anti-tech because it’s all for older instruments and, in certain respects, it’s old-fashioned.

But if Honstein’s way of responding to the present is to create lush music (albeit in what is frequently a post-minimalist, indie-rock influenced idiom) scored mostly for instruments that many people associate with the past, he has also re-imagined the past in a very contemporary way in other works. In 2007, he arranged a responsorial chant composed a millennium ago by Hildegard von Bingen for soprano, cello, organ, and wine glasses. One of the most unusual projects he has been involved with was creating series of short pieces meant to be inserted in between the six concerti in Antonio Vivaldi’s L’Estro Armonico during a performance by the Sebastian Chamber Players, a New York City-based period instrument ensemble. While Honstein’s predominantly consonant, pulse-oriented steady-state compositional vocabulary would seem an ideal fit with Baroque music (and in keeping with such illustrious precedents as Bang On A Can’s Lost Objects or American Baroque’s collaboration with the Common Sense Composers’ Collective, The Shock of the Old), the end result aimed instead for an “extreme juxtaposition” to maximize cognitive dissonance.

I really didn’t want to compete with Vivaldi, so I had to do the opposite, which led me to the backstory. Here’s this pillar of Western music who wrote a lot of famous pieces, particularly L’Estro Armonico, for these orphaned girls, and they were premiered behind the metal grilles of a church. It’s just so weird to me that that’s where that music came from and I got drawn into that story. So I wound up writing scratch tones and really long glissandi. It sounds like nothing I’d ever written before.

An excerpt from the score for Robert Honstein's Three Night Scenes from the Ospedale (2011)

Of course, putting new music right next to old music is what happens most of the time whenever a piece of new music is performed by an orchestra, unless it’s written for a contemporary music-focused group like the American Composers Orchestra or the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. Although Honstein’s Rise was among the pieces chosen by the ACO for their Underwood New Music Readings this past June, the other performances he has received for his orchestral pieces thus far, like most composers, have been on programs that consisted predominantly of older, standard repertoire, “right next to Beethoven, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky,” Honstein points out. “But I’m not trying to beat them at their own game; I’m just trying to be true to my own style and my own voice.”

However next season, Honstein, along with five other composers—Timo Andres, Christopher Cerrone, Jacob Cooper, Ted Hearne, and Andrew Norman who together comprise the Sleeping Giant Composers Collective—will rework one of the most treasured masterpieces of the classical music canon, the Mozart Requiem. The project is the centerpiece of an unusual joint composer residency with the Albany Symphony Orchestra funded through Music Alive, jointly administered by New Music USA and the League of American Orchestras.

“That I will not speak of in too great a depth because it’s still in formation,” Honstein says cagily. “If you go to that concert you will hear the Mozart Requiem, but you also will not hear the Mozart Requiem. You’ll get what you’ve paid for, but you’ll get a little something extra as well.”

An excerpt from the score of Robert Honstein's An Index of Possibility for three percussionists (2012)

Visconti Chosen as California Symphony Young American Composer-in-Residence

Posted on July 17, 2014 by NewMusicBox Staff - Headlines, Ledes

The California Symphony has named Dan Visconti as their latest Young American Composer-in-Residence. Selected from a pool of over 80 applicants from across the country, Visconti will be given the opportunity to work directly with the orchestra and its music director Donato Cabrera over three consecutive years to create, rehearse, premiere, and record three major orchestra compositions, one each season. Visconti’s residency will begin in the fall and his first commissioned work, Power Chords, will premiere on May 1, 2015.

Dan Visconti

Dan Visconti (born 1982) composes concert music infused with the directness of expression and maverick spirit of the American vernacular. His compositions often explore the rough timbres, propulsive rhythms, and improvisational energy characteristic of jazz, bluegrass, and rock. Visconti studied composition at the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Yale School of Music, primarily with Margaret Brouwer, Aaron Jay Kernis, Ezra Laderman, and Zhou Long. Recent concert seasons have showcased several Visconti premieres, including a work commissioned by the Jupiter Quartet for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s international string quartet series; a work featuring experimental video commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra for premiere at Zankel Hall; an extended work for cellist Joshua Roman and pianist Helen Huang commissioned by Town Hall Seattle; and a work for soprano Lucy Shelton and the Da Capo Chamber Players for premiere at Weill Recital Hall. His compositions have been honored with the Rome Prize and Berlin Prize fellowships, the Bearns Prize from Columbia University, the Leonore Annenberg Fellowship in the Performing Arts, the Barlow Prize, and the Cleveland Arts Prize; awards from BMI and ASCAP, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Society of Composers, and the Naumburg Foundation; and grants from the Fromm Foundation, Meet the Composer, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Chamber Music America. He has also been the recipient of artist fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Copland House, the Lucas Artists Program at Villa Montalvo, and the Virginia Commission for the Arts. Visconti has additionally been awarded a 2014 TED Fellowship and delivered a TED talk at the 30th Anniversary TED Conference in Vancouver. Visconti was a regular contributor to NewMusicBox from 2008 to 2013.
Seven composers have previously completed residencies with the orchestra since the program was established in 1991: Kamran Ince (1991-1992); Christopher Theofanidis (1994-1996); Kevin Puts (1996-1999); Pierre Jalbert (1999-2002); Kevin Beavers (2002-2005); Mason Bates (2007-2010); and most recently D. J. Sparr (2011-2014).

(from the press release)

New Commissioning/Publishing Initiative Names First Composer

Posted on May 23, 2012 by NewMusicBox Staff - Headlines, Ledes

Zosha Di Castri. Photo by David Adamcyk, courtesy Boosey & Hawkes, Inc.

“New Voices,” a new creative partnership between the New World Symphony, the San Francisco Symphony, and music publisher Boosey & Hawkes designed to identify and nurture emerging composers from the Americas, was officially launched today. Each year, a panel of judges will choose one composer who will be guided through the process of being commissioned and then preparing a new composition for performance. The first composer selected is Zosha Di Castri, a Canadian-born composer and pianist living in New York and currently pursuing doctoral studies in composition at Columbia University. Di Castri will be commissioned to write two new works, one for a chamber ensemble and one for full orchestra. Both of her new pieces will be workshopped and premiered by the New World Symphony and then rehearsed and performed by the San Francisco Symphony in the fall of 2013. Both performances of her orchestral work will be conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, who is artistic director of the New World Symphony and music director of the San Francisco Symphony. During the process, the composer will receive editorial guidance in the preparation of scores and parts from Boosey & Hawkes as well as learn about commission contract preparation, copyright registration, and licensing procedures, plus how to promote the music through publicity and marketing strategies. Additionally, the composer will have significant access to, and guidance from, the presenters’ artistic teams.

Zosha Di Castri (b. 1985) composes both instrumental, mixed, and purely electronic music, as well as interdisciplinary works. Di Castri’s orchestral work Alba received its world premiere at the 2011 Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, commissioned in honor of Marin Alsop’s 20th anniversary there by composer John Adams and funded by a special gift from him and Deborah O’Grady. Her compositions have additionally been performed by the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, the Internationale Ensemble Modern Akademie, l’Orchestre de la francophonie canadienne, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, JACK Quartet, and the Orchestre National de Lorraine. She has also participated in residencies at the Banff Center, the New Music Session at Domaine Forget, and the National Arts Centre’s composition program. Di Castri was recently named a laureate of the 3rd International Composer’s Competition for the Hamburger Klangwerktage Festival, and is currently composer-in-residence for Ensemble Portmantô. Upcoming projects involve a performance by members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic through the Green Umbrella Series, a vocal work for the New York-based Ekmeles singers, and a commission from the Electric Noise duo for flute, piano, and electronics to be premiered at Cluster Festival 2012 (Winnipeg, Canada). Prior to moving to New York City, Di Castri lived in Paris where she pursued further musical studies after completing a bachelor’s degree in composition and piano performance at Montreal’s McGill University. Her composition teachers have included Brian Cherney, Philippe Hurel, Fabien Lévy, and Tristan Murail; she is currently studying with Fred Lerdahl.

“For a young composer, having the opportunity to work with two such forward-looking orchestras and a renowned publishing company on both a new orchestral work and a piece for chamber ensemble is practically unheard of,” notes Zosha Di Castri. “I’m particularly interested in investigating the vast sound potential of the orchestra, a medium that is relatively new for me, and am looking forward to digging into a chamber work of substantial length. It will also be very productive to be able to revise my works between the East and West Coast premieres; young composers rarely have the chance to hear their orchestral works played at all, let alone twice. Most of all, I am excited to meet the musicians, work under the baton of Michael Tilson Thomas, and learn more about the publishing world.”

To select the composers chosen for the “New Voices” initiative, a preliminary panel identifies composers and invites them to submit portfolios. The panel is made up of: Zizi Mueller, president, Boosey & Hawkes, Inc.; John Mangum, director, artistic planning, San Francisco Symphony; and Doug Merilatt, senior vice president for artistic planning and programs, New World Symphony. The final selection, however, is made by Michael Tilson Thomas and a panel of American composers and industry leaders. For the inaugural panel, Tilson Thomas was joined by composers John Adams, Steven Mackey, and Steven Stucky.

(—from the press release)

NewMusicBox Staff

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