Composer inti figgis-vizueta creates music that carefully balances experimentation and practicality. She likens her compositions to plants which have the ability to grow and change when different people perform them.
“We’re able to continue to revisit them and see how they’ve changed,” she explained when we met over Zoom in mid-June. “I’ll hear people come back and play something that I haven’t heard in years. I thought I had a stable sense of that piece in my mind and suddenly someone just blows me away with a completely different place that they go with it. And to me, that has to feel really exciting because the idea that like, we’re just writing something to exist in one form and then it just, you know, like time passes, just stops moving–it’s very strange.”
inti’s openness to collaboration and belief in interpretative agency has made her music particularly attractive to soloists and ensembles ranging from Andrew Yee and Conrad Tao to Roomful of Teeth, Ensemble Dal Niente, and even the Kronos Quartet who asked her to compose a piece for their 50 for the Future Project.
“I remember hearing about this project and being like, ‘God, I wish I could do that, but I’m never going to be in this thing,'” inti remembered. “It was kind of a short turnaround … I went through all of the other pieces that were up, because this project had been going on for five years and there was a gamut of pieces. There were ones that were so hard. Maybe a graduate string quartet could do it, with a lot of practice. To like very beautiful and simple and quite lyrical pieces with a 16th note pulse or something. … I ended up kind of going from this really complicated score to this very simple score of a single stave that everyone was reading from. … How it happens over time can be determined by the ensemble.”
Over the past few years, inti has gravitated a lot toward string quartets and percussion ensembles, two groups that might seem at oppositive ends of the sonic spectrum to some composers but not to her. “I do feel like there’s a certain level of a kind of shared musicality, a shared sense of tone and timbre and attack and all of these things that contribute to a group mentality of how to kind of play with and affect texture in like all of their kind of individual ways.”
But she is also interested in vocal music and has begun exploring it again after a hiatus of several years where she was mostly focused on instrumental music.
“I felt like instrumentalists were down to clown a little bit, where I just didn’t always feel that with vocal ensembles,” she acknowledged. “Then this year and last year has been this kind of a big resurgence of that in my music and in some ways, it’s teaching me things all over again, which has been really, really fun. … I get to kind of luxuriate a little bit in the quality of two people singing together, actually using all of the complexities of a word to push forward meaning. But to me it’s not narrative meaning, and that’s what I was afraid of, that when I had to engage language, I had to be tied to a narrative, instead of being tied to the complexities of thinking about something like love, or lots of other things.”
Ultimately, whatever the medium, inti is interested in constructing open structures that take performers and listeners to new places.
“For the most part my pieces are workshops in some ways,” she said. “It’s almost like a loose suit and then we fit it over the rehearsal.”
When you're sitting around and you have a lot of thoughts and emotions, it's helpful to have an outlet.
inti figgis-vizueta
The psychology of string quartets is some of my favorite material in some ways to encounter with different groups that I'm writing for, kind of figuring out what feels good under their hands, what feels good, what sounds they kind of lean into.
inti figgis-vizueta
The kind of music that I write ... is really in some ways trying to hold a mirror to ensembles and their own kinds of musical tendencies.
inti figgis-vizueta
Maybe I'm showing my barista roots, but I love the idea of having something appear in one way, tasting it, adjusting a little bit, having it appear again, shifting out of the parameter.
inti figgis-vizueta
The idea of a shared score is extremely important because it feels like we're all reading from the same thing and therefore are able to make decisions from the same kind of mutual gaze or perspective.
inti figgis-vizueta
I kept being given drums in elementary school as part of our music lesson and then they would take them away pretty quickly because I wouldn't be doing what was being tasked of me.
inti figgis-vizueta
The music program at the high school I went to wasn't great. We watched Amadeus like maybe three times a week out of this class. So it was a very chill class. I really didn't do much. I learned the note names. I learned about Mozart maybe, depending on how we feel about that movie.
inti figgis-vizueta
I see them as vessels, but I also see them as plants, that we're able to continue to revisit them and see how they've changed. I'll hear people come back and play something that I haven't heard in years. I thought I had a stable sense of that piece in my mind and suddenly someone just blows me away with a completely different place that they go with it. And to me, that has to feel really exciting because the idea that like, we're just writing something to exist in one form and then it just, you know, like time passes, just stops moving--it's very strange.
inti figgis-vizueta
The reason that the work exists is that it's in some ways trying to kind of push at the notion that there has to be a separation between an interpretive artistry and a creative artistry
inti figgis-vizueta
When there's this kind of mutual investment that everyone has, then suddenly we can get past this the sense the score is something to be achieved versus the score is a tool to create really beautiful music in whatever that feels like for the people who are in the room.
inti figgis-vizueta
A lot of the ways that I started to first send out my music was through calls for scores and all of my instrumental music got picked up really, really quickly, and no one wanted to touch the choral vocal music. Probably because it was using techniques and ways of orienting them that just was outside the practice and I've come to now know that there's an entire industry based on music that's being written in a certain way for this ensemble. So I'm not surprised now.
inti figgis-vizueta
I felt like instrumentalists were down to clown a little bit, where I just didn't always feel that with vocal ensembles.
inti figgis-vizueta
How do you give permission for disalignment in an ensemble context? Because it often feels very wrong to people.
inti figgis-vizueta
There was a time pretty early where anytime anyone reached out, I just put everything into the piece that was being asked for.
inti figgis-vizueta
With string players, I hear them think about intonation a lot. With percussion ensembles, I hear about timing a lot, and I hear about unison and groove and pattern and beat.
inti figgis-vizueta
I am strategizing about what engaging creativity and openness means in a context where people want to be together. The philosophy of all of this exists at the mercy in some ways of who's playing it, because it's music that requires a level of sympathy to go along with me, to agree to my rules and my ideas.