Tag: listening

Granting Audiences, Pt. 2

Posted on July 27, 2012 by Ratzo B Harris - Columns

One of the things about American music that I find fascinating is how effectively the American Culture Machine has eradicated the connection to human experience beyond the adolescent’s frustration with changing hormone levels. While not completely successful (as any of us who engage in a musical living know), the effort has managed to make musical morons out of the majority of Americans who listen to music. While this is no revelation to those involved in making music on a daily basis, the ramifications of this practice can be detrimental to the act of making music.

My post last week generated a comment that I feel the need to examine further because it goes to the idea of whether or not a work of art is temporally sustainable despite “shifts in ou[r] perception to existing artworks” that might render them irrelevant to a naturally evolving culture. The commenter’s argument rested on the predicate that art is “generative,” which is a pretty broad term that insinuates a degree of randomness regarding the creation (generative art) and perception (by different audiences and/or through the critical reception) of an artwork. I believe that the commenter was regarding the latter (perception) as key to a work’s relevance as acceptable art and agree wholeheartedly that an audience’s “experience of the art is to some degree a creation” of it. However, I don’t agree with the commenter’s suggestion that the bottom line is that “artwork,” or rather individual works of art, “cannot ‘survive’.”

The theme of building (or rebuilding) audiences for certain musical genres by their practitioners and aficionados is not, in my mind, one of trying to reverse a chemical process; just as art is not science (which is not politics or business). True, there are certain scientific methods, especially mathematical formulae, which can be used for the generation of art, and there are examples (most famously Albert Einstein) of scientists who play music to inspire analytical thinking, but this does not place physics and poetry in the same sphere. The arts and sciences can enhance one another, but cannot substitute for one another. There has been a pernicious fallacy that music sets up moods and can be used for the control of the masses, a tenet that equates the arts with government and/or religion. Again, the arts can enhance the methods used to shape the thinking and actions of groups of people, but cannot be equated as a method for doing so. Our binary of “major = happy” and “minor = sad” only works in a cultural context where the listener has been trained, as most Americans have been, since childhood. This is an aspect of American culture that remains in force (and enforced) and works that follow that dictum will survive as long as the paradigm does. It is a distinctly Eurocentric paradigm and is only a part of the overall American musical experience, but an important one to the American Cultural Machine, which is not an artistic, but rather a business institution. And art and business are not part of the same discipline.

The problem with American improvised music(s) is that they counter the Eurocentricity of the American Culture Machine. Even jazz and rock ‘n’ roll, genres that were identified and labeled by the music industry, are not examples of Eurocentric music or musicianship. What made jazz popular in Europe was the difference between its performance techniques, formal organizations, and sonic textures and those of European art music. In America, it was the dance steps that were associated with the non-Eurocentric cultures that produced the music. People didn’t Lindy or foxtrot to Sousa marches, but they did to James Reese Europe. This bespeaks a dissatisfaction with some of the Eurocentric aspects of the American Culture Machine (and the European Culture Machine as well). So-called “proper” Eurocentric American culture had (and still has) the need to disassociate itself from a highbrow bourgeoisie, which was well-educated in the arts. As the development of jazz (and later rock ‘n’ roll, funk, soul, etc.) offered musical experiences even more disconnected from the Eurocentric ones that represented the elite behind the American Cultural Machine, audiences flocked to these popular forms and their messages of discontent with bourgeois society. Jazz was closely associated with the Socialist Party up until WWII, when Glenn Miller made it the music of the American military, which marked the beginning of its decline as a popular music. It was in the 1970s, when rock, funk, soul, etc. were popular (and being countered by the cultural machine with disco) that music education in public schools began its descent into virtual non-existence. Now there are music programs in public schools, especially inner-city schools, that are little more than sing-alongs to popular tunes. The actual nuts-and-bolts of music making don’t enter the picture. It should be a point of shame that so many of America’s public schools don’t have musical instruments, since playing musical instruments helps students learn and function in the world.

With this in mind, the job of building an audience for a given music might become one of shaping the music into something more palatable to an audience that knows little of or about it, while educating that same audience to its distinct and vital elements; a kind of “watering down” of art in deference to America’s cultural machine. Another is to associate one’s music with forms and elements of non-Eurocentric musics, since American audiences prefer listening to them. I’d like to know of other ways that we think might foster better listening in America.

Out of Time

Posted on July 2, 2012 by Frank J. Oteri - Columns

The amount of time I spent in Turkey thus far in my life has been negligible; just a couple of hours waiting for connecting flights to Athens and then back to New York City, though at least it was enough time for me to buy a 9 CD set of Turkish pop at the Duty Free shop. But I hope I can return there soon and have a deeper experience of it.

I’ve been back in New York City for almost a week now, and for once I seem to have mostly dodged jetlag. Perhaps traveling through different zones on a regular basis makes it easier to adjust to different clocks. Over the last year I’ve travelled quite a lot, even by my standards: I’ve been in 32 different places in 12 countries on 4 continents. In order to get to most of these places, I’ve had to spend more than 140 hours—which is nearly six entire days—in flight. And while those 140+ hours were still technically in a time zone somewhere, psychologically they feel outside the grid.

I’ve often thought about time spent on flights as the most “free.” This might seem completely crazy since being on an airplane is so physically restrictive, but it is the only time that I am completely unreachable via email, phone calls, text messages, tweets, Skype, Facebook, etc. and so is everyone else around me. (I’m also presumably unreachable during concerts, but unfortunately folks who’ve forgotten to turn off their phones aren’t.) It is a real luxury to have a huge chunk of undisturbed time, and over the years I’ve taken advantage of this interlude to read large books that I otherwise would never get around to.

Back in January, during a flight from Paris to New York, I attempted to read Mathias Énard’s Zone, a 500 page novel published in 2009 which consists of only one sentence and therefore begs to be read in a single sitting. I’ve previously written here about merely getting one quarter of the way through before sleep got the better of me. But I’ve remained fascinated by this book because it aspires to the same condition as listening to music; it requires whoever experiences it to submit to someone else’s clock. (I once heard that Edgar Allan Poe eschewed novels in favor of short stories because short stories tend to be read in a single sitting and he wanted to have control over the reader’s time.) Or course nowadays, even music is rarely experienced without interruption; most people engage in other activities as they listen, and the music that they listen to is primarily on recordings which enable the ability to start and stop and skip at will. Curiously, how most people experience music is very similar to the way most people read books.

Anyway, since returning from France, I couldn’t figure out a way to carve out the requisite time for Zone. I tend to read about 30 pages per hour which means that a standard novel of 300 pages takes me about 10 hours. I was able to read the quarter of Zone that I completed somewhat faster than that, but I figured that I would still need at least 10 uninterrupted hours of reading time. I had the perfect opportunity flying round trip from Hong Kong two months ago (each way is a little over 16 hours), but instead I devoted it to reading—though not in its entirety—David Foster Wallace’s 1000+ page Infinite Jest, which I managed to finally finish shortly before heading to Greece. Being able to get through Wallace’s gargantuan multilayered narrative nevertheless encouraged me to once again attempt to tackle what is perhaps the most impossible reading assignment I have ever given myself. So I brought Zone to Greece.

Since I was doing a red eye from JFK to Istanbul to connect with my flight to Athens, reading Zone on the way there seemed doomed to failure. I didn’t even try. Instead I watched several movies and read a substantial portion of Jason Weiss’s fascinating Always in Trouble: An Oral History of ESP-Disc’, The Most Outrageous Record Label in America, which is my idea of light reading. I planned to save Zone for the return flight from Istanbul to New York, which was during daytime hours. I figured I needed to start at the beginning again, in order to fully experience the flow, so I did. This time, however, I only managed to get about 50 pages in; despite the uninterrupted time, there were just too many other distractions: flight announcements, meals, the person directly in front of me leaning back his chair to the point that I was barely able to hold the book in my hands, etc.

I’ve concluded that it actually might be impossible for me to read this book the way I had originally intended to. But it has also made me extremely grateful that it is so much easier to listen to most music uninterrupted.

Alien Music

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Isaac Schankler - Columns

In the course of my grand conference-laden tour of London this month, I attended the CHIPS Symposium last week, which explored the performance practices (and problems) of artificial performers in mixed human-computer ensembles. Too many fascinating ideas were presented to summarize here, but I’d like to zoom in on one provocative statement.

Most of the symposium was devoted to attempts to make artificial performers more closely approach human musicality, a certainly valuable endeavor (though not without certain controversies). Tim Blackwell of Goldsmiths University, however, proposed an alternative (though not mutually exclusive) goal: the creation of an “alien music” with rules and aesthetics separate and distinct from our own.

This statement immediately resonated with me, and seemed emblematic of the compositional endeavor as a whole. After all, isn’t anyone who writes music in search of something “alien,” or at least novel? Aren’t we driven to create because what we want to hear doesn’t exist yet? As a kid, this particular passage from the book My Teacher is an Alien by Bruce Coville made a big impression on me:

I flinched as another burst of horrible squawking and growling sounded above me… I shivered. That noise was like a tiger running its claws down a blackboard; it felt like aluminum foil against my teeth. What could be making it? … I had noticed that the horrible noise was coming from a pair of flat pieces of plastic hanging on the wall. But it wasn’t until Mr. Smith started ‘singing’ along with the sound that I realized the plastic sheets were speakers. That hideous sound was music! Or at least what passed for music wherever my alien teacher had come from.

A few years later, I discovered Iannis Xenakis, and ever since I have always imagined “Mr. Smith” singing along to Mycenae-Alpha.

I hated the piece at first; I could not imagine why someone would willingly subject themselves to it. And yet, something kept me coming back to it. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I wanted to understand something that seemed senseless. Maybe I had something to prove. Either way, the abstract “score” included in the liner notes provided a key, a guide. Hearing the sonic shapes transmute and transform in concert with the lines on paper…well, it changed me. And I found, to my surprise and astonishment, that I liked the piece. Was my musical taste really so plastic?

But then Xenakis isn’t really “alien” after all; Mycenae-Alpha is still the product of a human mind, albeit with some computer assistance. What about something more artificial, or even accidental?

In this clip, taken from a playthrough of a corrupted Super Mario Bros. cartridge, something like music seems to emerge from the speakers. But here the music is a byproduct, an incomplete representation of the information contained on the cartridge. And yet I find it weirdly compelling in the same way Xenakis was to me on first listen. (Not everyone feels this way, as made clear by one YouTube commenter’s plea to “KILL IT WITH FIRE.”)

When I listen to this kind of music, I imagine I am like an animal listening to human music, perceiving some dim reflection off a distant surface. Currently, the cognitive mechanism that allows us to perceive beat patterns is thought to be unique to humans, and one cockatoo named Snowball:

But maybe we don’t need to go into the animal kingdom for an alien understanding of music. On MetaFilter, user KathrynT captures one child’s remarkable reaction to Penderecki:

Some years ago, I was listening to music with my friend Emma and our respective husbands while her 5-year-old autistic son played elsewhere in my house. Well, we were trying to listen to music; every time we’d put something on, Philip would come rocketing out from wherever he was playing and shut the music off before rocketing back to playing the Star Trek theme on the piano, or whatever it was he happened to be doing. (Avenue Q didn’t make it through the first bar.)
But when I put on the Threnody [for the Victims of Hiroshima] as an illustration of how complex Penderecki can be, and how music can be extremely unpleasant to listen to but still a powerful work of art, Philip came creeping into the room. He walked up to the stereo, but instead of turning it off, he reached out and put his hand on the speaker. Then he reached across and put his other hand on the other speaker. And he stood there, transfixed, absorbing the music with his body as well as his ears, for the entire duration of the piece.
When it ended, he turned around and shot back to the piano without a word or gesture and resumed his previous activities. But he was clearly experiencing that piece in a very different way than most people do; I wish I knew what it meant to him.

But is it so different, when musical taste varies so much from person to person? I wish I knew what it meant to you.

Including vs. Excluding the Listener

Posted on June 1, 2012 by Ratzo B Harris - Columns

This was a week of little work and lots of errands. Playing an archaic instrument, such as the contrabass, necessitates frequent visits to the village luthier who specializes in large-scale instruments, and this week I’ve been fixing up two of them. (Next week I’ll have to work on another.) While I was sitting in my car, waiting for the legislated time that I could leave it unattended and drop off my bass without acquiring a request for money from the Department of Finance (really), a cellist whom I play with in the group Lyric Fury was walking by. I got her attention and we spoke for a bit about “what’s up?” and “this-and-that” and she handed me a flyer for a concert she was performing in with her husband at Le Poisson Rouge.

They have a group, The Fireworks Ensemble, that I heard a recording of playing the string quintets of Frank Zappa, which I think are fantastic. Their concert was a collaboration with C4, a mixed chorus of composer/conductors. The main piece on the program, Requiem (composed by bassist/singer Brian Coughlin), would be preceded by The Hounds of Spring (Jonathan David), Impermanence (Karen Siegel), and Dia | Logoi (Martha Sullivan). All the works were world premiers and will be performed again tomorrow night (Saturday, 6/2) at The Theater at MMAC at 8 p.m. I was excited to finally hear the music of Coughlin as well as David, whom I’ve known for several years without getting to hear his compositions. I was equally thrilled to hear the music of Siegel and Sullivan. But I think I would have preferred to hear it at MMAC, because Le Poisson Rouge’s seating is extremely uncomfortable for listening to lengthy performances, not to mention there is an air conditioner that randomly blasts wind-tunnel gusts across the room. (Perfect for reading music on-the-fly.) I hope their second concert goes well.

I’m using this as a preface to improvised music, somehow. There was very little improvisation in the Fireworks/C4 concert, most of it done by the drummer and electric guitarist during Requiem. There was one instance of some group improvisation in one of the movements—“Confutatis,” of Coughlin’s opus—but the rest was all written out. I know that the cellist is studying improvisation with Joanne Brackeen, one of the best I can think of, but she was given no solo space. This made me think of my meeting with Monika Herzig, which I wrote about last week, and the issue of studying improvisation.

After I wrote last week’s post, I had another meeting with Herzig that was an interview about my experiences as a house bassist for the jam sessions at the now defunct Ladies Fort, Joyce’s House of Unity, and Barbara’s Jazz Club in the previous century. It was a stimulating interview, possibly because Herzig had just spent a day listening and reading transcripts of oral histories at the Institute of Jazz Studies and had an idea of what not to ask! After my interview, I figured that I’d turn the tables and interview her about why she and Dr. David Baker (Indiana University) are writing a book about jam sessions.

She explained that one of the biggest problems she has with her students is keeping them playing and working on improvisation outside of the classroom. When she asked her students why they weren’t taking advantage of the jam sessions taking place near campus, a frequent response was that they did not know what to do at a jam session. So a large part of the project is geared towards preparing a jazz student for playing at a session. Certain tunes and their chord progressions have to be memorized and should be practiced. One should know when to play and when to stop playing and know the difference between practicing, improvising, and playing on a tune. One should treat the elder improvisers with a degree of respect. I came to realize that many people attending jam sessions look at them primarily as a place to perform, and not a place to listen and learn. It’s the latter attitude that is the key to appreciating, and making the most of, a jam session.

The lone comment from last week’s post posed a very good question and I want to answer it here, because it goes to the previous paragraph. I was asked whether my description of the jam session as “more important than subscription orchestra concerts, new music series, musical theater [etc.]” was meant to be merely “eye-catching”? The answer is: No. The performance situations I listed are all geared to exclude the listener as a participant in the musical act beyond the role of paying for a ticket, a kind of “angel.” It’s a paradigm that Isaac Schankler touches upon in his post this week in his mention and discussion of Cage’s composer-performer-listener dilemma. We all know that these distinctions probably didn’t exist in music’s original incarnation; nearly everyone in the tribe participated in music making as long as it didn’t attract predators or enemies. I can imagine that one could participate if one felt like it or not and that the distinctions were fluid. This is the spirit that the jam session accesses. It comes from the ring shout, a kind of circle dance, which was practiced in the 18th and 19th centuries by African Americans (mostly slaves) and probably Native Americans occupying the same space. The most well-known and documented ring shouts occurred regularly in New Orleans’s Place du Cirque, also known as Congo Square, and which Benjamin Latrobe chronicled in 1819. (This same location, according to Joy Harjo, is an ancient Creek Indian burial ground.) The spirit of the ring shout is that anyone can, at the right time, shift their role from accompanist to soloist, or take a break and observe.

One of the things that Herzig and I talked about was whether or not the culture of the jam session has been compromised by how academic jazz studies programs have replaced the sub-culture of apprenticeship/mentorship that was once the way that jazz was defined. My own feeling is that it did, for a while. I think that now, though, a new playing aesthetic is emerging and that it will have its hearing at jam sessions.

The Listening Ladder

Posted on March 12, 2012 by Frank J. Oteri - Columns

“It does not matter what we originally heard or thought we heard or wanted to hear way back when—it only matters what everyone else can hear.”
—Rob Deemer, “What is Real” (NewMusicBox, March 9, 2012).

“There is, no doubt, a strong sensual element in the musician’s enjoyment of music; but he is not content with this alone: his finely strung nature protests against yielding completely to the influence of music which he suspects of having a merely ephemeral hold on his emotions. He tastes it, as it were, and enjoys its flavour, but is careful to stop short when there is danger of intoxication, for that brings on headache and other undesirable discomforts. […] The simile between music and wine is an old one, and there is more truth in it than some recent theorists would have us believe. […] There is an enjoyment of wine that is not entirely sensual, for it calls into play the powers of comparison and judgment. The connoisseur and the boor enjoy it in quite different ways[.…] The connoisseur delights in the wine itself, in its flavour and bouquet, the boor revels in its effect; and the latter enjoyment to a certain extent precludes the possibility of the former. Substituting music for wine, we have a good example of the relative points of view of the musician and the musical layman. The difference between them lies not so much in the class of music they respectively enjoy as in the way they enjoy it.”
—William Foster Apthorp, “Musicians and Music-Lovers” (Atlantic Monthly, February 1879; later collected in Apthorp, Musicians and Music-Lovers, New York: Scribners, 1908)

“China has become the world’s fifth-largest consumer of wine, ahead of Britain, according to an International Wine and Spirit Research study. A particularly popular label in China, Chateau Lafite Rothschild […] can retail anywhere from $1,000 to $100,000 per bottle, depending on the vintage. [P]eople are willing to pay so much over and above the market prices for what they consider to be perfect stock.”
—“China’s faux Bordeaux stirs wine market” (Reuters, March 12, 2012)

Staying focused on one activity at a time yields better results than partially engaging in several activities at once most of the time, at least for me. And the most important of the activities I engage in is listening to music. Indeed, it is the fuel behind pretty much everything else I do: from my daily work to the essay you’re reading now to whatever precious little of my own music I get to create when I have the luxury of a small chunk of time to actually engage in creative processes.

Yet in our current society there is an overwhelming propensity for multitasking. One of the practices that has suffered the most, and seems largely taken for granted by many people, is the very act of focused listening. While I have long held the view that no genre of music is inherently superior to any other, and I have found music in just about every genre that I deeply believe is of intrinsic value and will enrich the lives of anyone who hears it, I still contend that you get much more from the music you hear (whatever it may be) if you completely submit to it.

Everyone realizes that if you are not reading a novel carefully enough, you might miss an important detail of the plot—in a novel by, say, a Henry James or a James Joyce, it is very easy to get lost if you’re not paying the requisite attention. But few, other than musicians and composers, would hold the same to be true for music, which has always struck me as somewhat odd. Admittedly as someone who composes music, I hold something of an insider’s view of it. But I still remember my first several encounters with live orchestra concerts and not really understanding what I was hearing because I was too distracted. Over time, the more I learned to focus, the more I got from what I heard, and that proved to be true no matter what I was listening to—whether a jazz group, a rock band, traditional Hindustani music, etc.

On December 31, 2010, I sampled the 2007 red and white vintages of Beaucastel’s legendary Chateauneuf du Pape with a group of friends; Beaucastel’s prices make their top wines prohibitive to experience on a regular basis. Before I got serious about studying wine, the quality of these classic Rhones would have been lost on me. And although we all thought both were wonderful, I’m still a beginner and I’m sure I wasn’t completely aware of what I was drinking. Might the same disparity between experience and perception also be true for most people listening to music?

The seeming polemic by 19th-century American music critic William Foster Apthorp which I quoted at the onset of this current essay (and which I discovered thanks to Daniel Cavicchi’s Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum ) might raise a few eyebrows in its attempt to distinguish between how musicians and ordinary people listen to music. I totally think it is possible for anyone to get completely absorbed in a listening experience, even someone who has never composed or performed music. In fact, I found Apthorp’s comparisons between musicians’ astute listening habits and the connoisseurship of discerning wine drinkers somewhat specious since he never claims that you’d be a better oenophile if you actually made your own wine. That said, winemakers probably taste more details than I ever could in a Chateau Lafite Rothschild, if I could ever afford to drink one. So then might I infer that there could be a very real sliding scale of discernment, one that would apply to music just as much as anything else, and one which ultimately affects everything we listen to, and why certain music ultimately becomes more popular as a result?

1. Step one would be that you will get more information from music if you are listening attentively to it. (I’m curious to hear dissenting views on this one, though it does crumble the rest of the ladder below, and please note, I’m not saying that you get absolutely nothing from music if you’re not completely focused on it; music can and does operate on a variety of levels, not all of them conscious.)

2. Step two would be that you can get even more from what you are hearing if you have had prior experience listening to music that is similar to it. Just as someone who has had numerous bottles of Bordeaux wine over the years will have a palette attuned to that style of winemaking, folks who for years have regularly attended a chamber music series or a jazz club—if they’re not the folks chatting all through the gig—are probably capable of getting more from the listening experience than a first-time concert attendee.

3. Step three would be that you’ve actually heard the particular piece of music in question previously and therefore have a deeper understanding of the work based on your prior encounters with it. The wine aficionado whose has sampled every vintage of Chateau Lafite Rothschild for the past 20 years will probably get more from, say, the 2007 bottling than I ever could hope to, just as someone who has listened to pieces in the standard classical music repertoire or in heavy rotation on golden oldies radio programs knows that music on a deeper level than someone hearing a Mozart symphony or an Elvis Presley song for the very first time. Unfortunately, of course, new music is by its nature always at a disadvantage in such an experiential paradigm.

4. Step four, would be to engage in the experience of either performing or composing music that is similar to what you listen to, which allows you to speak the language so that even if you’ve never had a particular conversation before—e.g. experienced a new piece in the basic style of the music you perform or compose—you can still understand it. Of course this is again a double-edged sword with new music, especially music that attempts to forge new paths. Often the most vociferous opponents of a new style (whether Schoenberg’s music of the early 20th century, Ornette Coleman’s free jazz of the 1950s, or the punk rock and post-punk of someone like John Lydon) are experienced musicians for whom adding any new words to the vocabulary is tantamount to destroying the language.

5+. Step five then would be to have performed the music you are hearing, and ultimately step six would have been to actually have composed said piece. I’ve always found it to be a tremendous insult to the academic new music community when people say that the only people in the audience for concerts of their music are their composer and performer colleagues. Yet it is undeniably true that certain kinds of music have a broader appeal to people who never even climb on to that very first step of the listening ladder I have just outlined (attentive listeners with, albeit, no additional relationship to the music). However, the curious thing about music (and art in general) is that it is possible to not completely understand or appreciate something you are deeply immersed in; whereas others with fewer degrees of relation to it, sometimes even folks who haven’t begun climbing that listening ladder, might instantly connect to it.

Before and After Listening

Posted on February 27, 2012 by Frank J. Oteri - Columns

“Music is all around us, it’s just that very few people actually listen to it. […] Actively listening to music may result in… more active listening. That might negatively impact precious hours spent on Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube.”
—Steve Guttenberg, “Does anybody really listen to music anymore?” (CNET, January 16, 2011)

“[T]he Western Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is a watershed moment, when attentive hearing became a newly marked practice. […] [R]elatively large numbers of people in a metropolis, often not known to each other, were asked to come together, not for light socializing or to affirm community but to seize an opportunity to exchange their accumulated cash for the experience of witnessing something novel and amusing. […] [A]ccess to the performances for the first time freed them from having to create their own music.”
—Daniel Cavicchi, Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum,
pp.21-22, 46.

Two weeks ago I mentioned that I had attempted and failed to read Mathias Énard’s 500+ page, one-sentence novel Zone during my flight back to New York City from Paris. It was the only possible way I could conceive of being able to read it in one sitting; anyone who writes a novel written in one sentence seems to be demanding his audience take such an approach. Even though I got a fourth of the way through it and was really fascinated by both the story line and the way the book was written, I have not been able to bring myself to pick it up again for nearly four weeks now since I can’t figure out how to recapture the appropriate concentration for an extended period of time.

Instead I’ve been catching up with a slew of recently published books about music. The one I’m currently in the midst of, Daniel Cavicchi’s fascinating Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum (Wesleyan University Press, 2011), has been blowing my mind. Ostensibly it’s an attempt at tracing the evolution of how people listen to music via retroactive field work, using diaries and other written commentary about encounters with music (in concerts as well as in other contexts—on the street, overheard from a nearby space, etc.) What’s been making my head spin is Cavicchi’s contention that attentive listening is a relatively recent phenomenon which is a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution and that in the United States such reverence for listening was partially inspired by the religious revivals that swept the country in the early 19th century.

In this 19th-century lithograph, Ossian E. Dodge is able to completely capture a listener’s attention through his music,.

For me, listening to music is a process that is very similar to reading a book. Ideally, it deserves the same level of concentration. While I listen to far more music than I have time to experience completely on its own, what I treasure most are the times that I am able to give whatever I’m listening to my undivided attention—not just concerts but also recordings at home. (I never listen to music on headphones in public places.) Sometimes I’ll listen to a recording with score in hand to keep myself on task, although I used to believe that to do so was somehow cheating—it’s using your eyes to help you do something you should be doing with your ears. But nowadays I often find it much easier to focus on listening (score or no score) at home rather than in concerts. Other people (and not just coughing etc.) can be distracting and early evening, especially after a long day at work, is not always an optimal listening time. I’ve found that the best time to process auditory information is in the morning, right after I wake up; it’s even better after some tea or coffee. (Early morning is a good time to read, too.)

An 1850 lithograph of Ossian Dodge being introduced to Jenny Lind by P. T. Barnum

In the 19th century, however, the luxury of recorded performances that could be listened to at any time of the day did not yet exist. In fact, even concerts at a specific time were a rare occurrence. Various anecdotes describing reactions to what would have been rare interactions with music are among the greatest delights in Cavicchi’s book. One of my favorite tidbits thus far is about a man who chanced upon a marching band and was so intrigued that he followed its procession, straying from his journey in order to keep listening. That’s quite a stark contrast with the indifference that violinist Joshua Bell met with when he busked outside a D.C. metro platform five years ago. But perhaps the strangest tale I’ve come across in the book thus far is that of Ossian E. Dodge (1820-1876) who in the year 1850 paid $625 for a ticket to hear a Boston recital by the touring Swedish soprano Jenny Lind (1820-1887). That purchase, the result of an auction, made newspaper headlines since it was so extravagant.

How much would Donny The Downloader pay to hear music?

In our era where downloading music for merely a dollar a song, or (as is too often the case) no cost at all, such an expenditure for music might seem beyond the pale, even for a once-in-a-lifetime live experience. Then again, according to SeatGeek, tickets for 2011’s iHeartRadio Music Festival featuring Lady Gaga averaged $1011.17 (and Cavicchi describes Jenny Lind as the Gaga of the 19th century).

But there’s more to the Ossian Dodge story than an overly inflated concert ticket. While Lind’s concert was presented by none other than P.T. Barnum, Dodge might have actually out Barnum-ed the world’s most infamous impresario. It turns out that Dodge was a musician and a composer in his own right and the whole affair was an elaborate publicity stunt designed to bolster his own career. And it worked! Dodge wound up earning five-digit figures for his performances—again, still an accomplishment in our era—and for the remaining quarter-century of his life, he was a celebrity. His obituary even made it into The New York Times, which describes him as “an excellent writer of comic songs” although none of his songs’ names are listed. (The Times, however, curiously misreports the ticket price Dodge paid for the Lind concert as a mere $500.) Dodge’s original songs are now forgotten, but several 19th-century editions of the still popular song “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie,” list Dodge as its composer. That attribution is likely spurious; Dodge was a notorious appropriator. The idea of making a big deal out of listening to music in order to encourage people to listen to your own music, nevertheless, is a curious M.O. that resonates strongly with me even at this late date.

This Should Be My Biggest Problem!

Posted on February 24, 2012 by Ratzo B Harris - Columns

One of the biggest problems I have as a working musician is going out to hear music. All too often when there’s a concert I want to attend, I have to work. This was the case yesterday when guitarist Bill Frisell, music presenter and producer Hal Willner, and visual artist Ralph Steadman performed Kaddish for the opening night of the Tune-In Music Festival. I was playing with vocalist Melissa Hamilton and guitarist Tom Dempsey at Studio 100 and so I had to miss Frisell’s musical take on Alan Ginsberg’s epic poem. In fact, I’ll miss the entire festival because the two concerts that will happen when I’m not working elsewhere are sold out (I’m at Trumpets, the club I mentioned a couple of entries back, tonight). (Well, I could attend the “Composer in Conversation” event if I rush back from New Jersey and don’t hit any traffic—and the idea is tempting…) I wanted to attend the ISIM conference this year, but my schedule didn’t allow for that, either. I would have been able to attend one afternoon, which coincided with my wife’s birthday (a sustained diminished triad with wide and rapid vibrato should be perceptible to the reader).

I was able to take advantage of some last-minute comps to hear the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra perform at Carnegie Hall and thoroughly enjoyed the performance. My favorite piece on the concert was Michael Tippett’s Divertimento on “Sellinger’s Round”, which was an opinion not shared by the rest of my party. I think his use of quotes from Purcell and Arne as a neo-classical device reminded me of how improvisers might quote passages from other pieces during their solos. I also think that as the evening’s opener it suffered from the ensemble’s settling into the concert, which might have contributed to my friends’ initial impression. But after the first minute, Orpheus found their “groove” and delivered a mesmerizing concert. I rarely lose my sense of place in a hall like Carnegie, but their performance of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings did it for me. Fortunately, it was a great concert, because that’s just about the only one I’ve been to for a month. I’m just too busy with rehearsals, gigs, and preparing for them.

Not that I’m complaining! I really like to play and can use the money (since my car blew up on me last month—now that’s a problem!). But I find myself in a bizarre inversion of Paul Matthews’s observation in his excellent article, The Cycle of Get , where he remarks, “To listen is not to compose. Composition asks more of us.” The first analogy might go, “To improvise is to not listen,” but that isn’t the case at all; one has to listen deeply to improvise. What is the case, what’s really happening, is that the act of being an audience to music performance places the listener into a unique and varied relationship to the music being heard. I think I’m paraphrasing John Cage by saying, “Composing music, performing music, and listening to music are three different experiences that bear little similarity to each other.” Yet, while music won’t make the same demands on the passive listener that it does on the improvising musician, it still demands that the musician commit to a passive role for balance. At least that’s what I get from going out to listen to others play music. I notice the imbalance when I find myself listening to music on my car’s radio more than the news.

When I go to hear live music, I experience one of the few healthy things that our culture offers us: a chance to connect with members of our species without our differences being at the fore. Wouldn’t it be great to play music the same way? It seems like that should be the way it is, but our culture isn’t small enough to unify music making. I know that there are occasions when extremely large groups of people will make the same music together, such as Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, but that only lasts for a short while. E. F. Schumacher hit the nail on the head when he said, “Small Is Beautiful.” Being too big to fail means that we can’t sing the same song at once, we have to take turns. Being too big to fail means that there are professional music-makers who are out to prove their music is worth listening to, at any price. But there is a beauty when diversity meets in the music crucible and it sometimes forges a new sound, a new beat, a new texture, that those whose business it is to listen to music are always on the lookout for, either to embrace it or to reject it. It’s then that we become like Mohammed Fairouz’s “fighting families,” who play the same music even though they didn’t learn the same music. Wouldn’t it be great if we were like that without the music?

But we aren’t, so I can’t complain.

Repairing Musical Blind Spots

Posted on February 9, 2012 by Alexandra Gardner - Columns

It seems the momentary topic of choice in the world of classical music journalism is musical “blind spots,” or rather, the music that you try to like—or at least appreciate—but somehow just can’t manage to get there. Justin Davidson writes about his ambivalence towards Philip Glass, while some staff members of NPR Music reflect on musical genres that simply don’t float their boats.

At the same time, a Twitter friend (and also a friend in real life) suggested that I subscribe to another unlimited, everywhere, all-the-time music service so she could keep up with new music by seeing my listening choices. My immediate reactions were, a) that I would be more than happy to just tell her what I’m listening to, and b) that if I sign up for another thing that involves a computer, my head will surely explode.

Little makes me happier than when people are naturally proactive about listening to new things, and especially about dipping into something completely outside of their normal experience. So many good things can come of that. While talking about whether or not we appreciate a type or a piece of music is not especially interesting, the deeper question it suggests is more compelling: Is something important being missed by succumbing to blind spots?

Undoubtedly the answer is yes. However, it’s not possible to listen to everything on earth (even though Frank J. Oteri is absolutely determined to try), so how can the task of keeping up with new music be managed? And how to avoid burying a personal experience of music underneath the weight and distraction of sheer volume?

Justin Davidson has devised his own “filtering” method in response to the comments from his Glass article, which you can find out about here.

Speaking of sheer volume! Have at that last link, people.

Bernard Rands: Complex Beauty

Posted on February 1, 2012 by Frank J. Oteri - Conversations, Cover

A conversation at Rands’s home in downtown Chicago: January 4, 2012—2:00 p.m.
Video presentation by Molly Sheridan
Transcribed by Julia Lu

Bernard Rands navigates a variety of dualities both in his music and in his personal life. For someone approaching 80-years old, he is amazingly youthful and vigorous. While this in some part might be attributable to his marriage to a much younger composer, Augusta Read Thomas, it is also because he is steadfast in his routines and is constantly seeking and engaging with new ideas. Every night between 2:00 and 4:00 a.m. he breaks up his sleep to read for two hours. He also constantly looks at art and listens to recordings as well as live performances. It helps that he resides in one of the world’s great cities—Chicago—and that he lives just down the street from both the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Yet his home is also bursting with shelves stocked with art monographs, scores, and books of all kinds; it’s the kind of place one could spend weeks in and never feel the need to leave. Despite his home seeming so rooted, Rands has never lived in one place for a very long time. Since coming to the United States in 1975, he has been based in San Diego, Philadelphia, Cambridge, and now the Windy City.

All of this inevitably shows up in his music, not just the intense love for literature (perhaps best manifested in his landmark Canti Trilogy) and painting (his Van Gogh-inspired opera Vincent, which was produced at Indiana University last year), but also his simultaneous adherence to traditions and the need to move away from them. On the one hand, his music clearly has come out of the milieu of European high modernism—he went through Darmstadt and was championed by Boulez and Berio early on. Yet at the same time he has a great love for earlier music and keeps his ear attuned to music of other genres as well—at one point in our talk he brought up the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour. At times, his own music can be unapologetically tonal.

Some of his European colleagues have claimed that coming to America might have somewhat softened his modernist rigor. But Rands will have none of that:

That acerbic rough-tough composer that I used to be in the ‘60s has gone to America and sold out. Not at all! I can write Canti d’Amor; why shouldn’t I? They’re for my wife. Why should I not make a love song for my wife of all people? I don’t think one has to feel obliged to the resonances of the Second Viennese School in order to be able to do that. These two [the non-tonal and the tonal] are interacting all the time, whether it’s a harmony or a rhythmic cell, a timbre or a gesture. Music has always been that way. Otherwise, we would have used up its resources a long time ago.

Despite such firm aesthetic convictions regarding his own music, he strives to always be completely open when he listens to other people’s music.

When people say, “I don’t care for that” or “I don’t want to waste my time on that,” it’s because they have a notion that somehow it should belong to them without any preconditions. And that’s not what the phenomenon of music is. […] I’ve been rewarded and surprised by being determined to be in the composer’s corner.

He deserves the same from listeners to his own music. While he never writes based on wanting to satisfy an audience (an audience isn’t monolithic after all), he is always aware of the listener.

Most things in human experience are accessible if you’re willing to access them. […] I believe that the person who’s going to come on that bitterly cold February night, pay above the odds for the ticket, to listen to my music, is coming toward me for some reason, which I don’t need to know about, and maybe they can’t define it. But when they come together with what I’ve made, I want them to hear another human being talking to them who’s not superior, not inferior, just another person who cares about beauty and expressivity, and spiritual things which, again, are hard to define.

My two-hour conversation with Bernard Rands completely raced by. I left wishing I could have talked to him for several hours more, but filled with ideas that will probably take me a lifetime to completely think through.

Frank J. Oteri: I was surfing around your website over the holiday break, and I came across a remarkable video interview with you done at the New York Philharmonic where you were talking about listening to music and being open to what you hear. You said something that really resonated with me. You said if you hear a piece of music and you don’t initially like it, you think that maybe you weren’t really paying attention. That’s a remarkable statement. It has taken me decades to allow whatever I hear to be what it is and not let my own ideas get in the way. So hearing you articulate this makes me very curious about your process of listening to music.

Bernard Rands: Augusta [Read Thomas] and I listen to a lot of music. She is an avid consumer of music of all kinds. I’m not quite as relentless in my listening as she is. But we tend to have a routine in the sense that we work hard during the day. We’re up early in the morning, working in our respective studios. And then come 5:00 or 5:30, we gather in the kitchen—I love to cook—and we put on the stereo. Since both of us are bombarded with CDs from colleagues and young composers who want us to listen to their music, I think we get a pretty good picture of the spectrum, including pop music and jazz. There are no restrictions on what we listen to in that sense.

Everyone on this planet has music of some kind, which suggests—or even proves I would say—that it comes from a basic human necessity. Music fulfills many different functions in people’s lives. The second thing is that if you and I go to a concert and sit next to each other, and let’s say that there’s a piece that we’ve both known since our childhood—whatever composer, it doesn’t matter—we can’t tell each other what we just heard. We got all the information. It was by this composer, it was for this instrumental ensemble, it lasted such and such, I’ve heard it this number of times, and so on. But after that, it’s a very private experience you’ve just had of that music, and it’s a very private experience that I’ve just had. I think outside of one’s God, there is nothing that’s more intimate and private than listening to music. This phenomenon, which is ubiquitous, is one of the most private aspects of communication that we can experience. [Sometimes] we don’t enjoy it the first time, or it may be couched in an aesthetic position which we’re not familiar with. So I’ve always made myself go back again and again. I’ve been rewarded and surprised by being determined to be in the composer’s corner. And if in the end I’m left hanging dry, I have a lot of other things to do, and there’s a lot of other music to listen to. But generally speaking, over the years, it’s been a very rewarding attitude to the way we’re involved with this phenomenon.

FJO: So when you talk about being in the composer’s corner—I love that phrase—what exactly does that mean as you’re hearing the piece of music?

BR: Let’s assume that it’s a new piece, first of all, because that’s where we come across the more sharp-edged sets of relationships. I go with an open mind, an open heart, and open ears, and what I mean by being in that composer’s corner is he or she is in charge. They are going to communicate with me, and I’m going to be willing to take whatever comes from them. And try to understand—as you well know, we don’t understand even the phenomenon of understanding in that sense. But I’m not antagonistic. I’m not irritated. I’m full of expectancy. I’m expecting to be pleased in the general sense, so I think the listening process becomes a much more enjoyable one. Now if it’s a repertoire piece that I’ve known since I was a boy, again, the fact that it still exists and is current in the sense of the performance repertoire suggests that it has a lot in it, much more than I’ve ever discovered before, even if I’ve played it, or if I’ve read every scholarly analysis of it. Because in the end, we never come to a performance or to the listening of music in the same condition ourselves. If I listen to something tonight, it’s very different from if I was listening right now in the afternoon. And as the years go by, and now I’m kind of rumbling my way up to 80, I find that this experience of music for me is so life giving. Well, it is my life. It’s what I do.

FJO: Now, what I find fascinating about how you describe the act of listening is that, in a way, you’re giving yourself over. It’s an act of submission.

BR: Yes, it is. That’s a good way of putting it.

FJO: But it’s an act of submission that you said at the onset of this conversation could even be done while you’re preparing dinner. How focused are you when you’re listening to music and doing other things?

BR: Well, I’ve cut my fingers a few times while chopping by not being attentive. But seriously, why I detest so much of the public bombardment of sound and music in all circumstances is that it trivializes it. If you’re going to put on a CD of your choice, then there’s a reason for putting it on—because you want to listen to it. The fact that you may be chopping vegetables and half your fingers with it, I don’t think gets in the way. We all have our favorites of what we prefer to listen to at certain times: what prompts us to take this CD off the shelf of the Chopin Preludes, as opposed to the Mahler 5th, or in my case some Tudor period church music, which I absolutely adore. Or it may be a CD that’s just come in that morning and Gusty says, “Let’s listen to it. Let’s listen to whoever it is and see what they’re doing.” Dylan Thomas once said in a sort of a prelude to a reading that his poems are dedicated to the glory of God, and he’d be a damn fool if they weren’t. You can imagine his bravado voice saying that. And therefore any willing listener is voluntarily cornered. But that’s basically what it is. You put yourself in a situation. Why I detest so much of the interference of music in public spaces is that it is an interference with one’s own state of being, and I resent that.

FJO: In that same Philharmonic interview, you said that it’s sort of a canard when people talk about audiences, because the audience is not a monolith.

BR: No, it is not. We don’t know who they are anyway.

FJO: But even if you can’t know who your audience is, what sort of expectations do you have for your ideal audience?

BR: That they would come in an open-minded, open-eared manner, but then they would listen intently. Of course that’s an art that one has to develop for oneself. When people say, “I don’t care for that” or “I don’t want to waste my time on that,” it’s because they have a notion that somehow it should belong to them without any preconditions. And that’s not what the phenomenon of music is. Listening is not just a casual affair. It’s an active process in which you set your mind and your attitude to being receptive. This ties very much into the compositional process, because what is it we’re doing when we’re putting down these hieroglyphs which are then turned into a whole sound world by musicians? We’re trying to create a—let me just put it so simply—a succession of sound events which have an internal logic, which, irrespective of the historical period, lead the ear. The best music that I know of any period is that which gets hold of the ear right in the first measure, and doesn’t let go.

FJO: Now two other realms that are beyond music (while we’re in this remarkable library of yours) that have a similar hold on the attention, although with different senses: reading literature and looking at visual art. Both are extremely important to you, and both inform a great deal of the music you’ve composed.

BR: That is right.

FJO: So using that same question I began with for music, I’m curious about the amount of time you devote to reading and looking at art, and how these other realms connect back to your music.

This is just a small portion of the art books in Bernard Rands’s home.

BR: Just because at an early age I decided I am a composer is no excuse for sitting around waiting for long distance calls to come from up there with inspiration. I’ve developed from a very early age and continue and will until I can’t do it anymore, a very strict, disciplined routine of work. I’ll elaborate on that in a moment. But once that’s in place, and I’m satisfied in the given time that I have in a day to address my work in the solitude of my studio, then I love to [look at art]. I live across from the Art of Institute of Chicago. I only have to walk 200 yards, and I can wander around there, whether it’s in the Asian section or the current exhibitions and so on. When I visit other cities, I’ve made an effort to see the treasures of the art world wherever I’ve been and I lived in Europe for many years in the early part of my life.

From the point of view of reading, I came from a very poor family. My father was a janitor, born in 1897, totally without any formal education, but he had a God-given gift for being intelligent. He served in World War I, which was when he was 16 and 17—my God, in the trenches in Belgium—and he came home. He joined what was a movement at that time called the WEA, Worker’s Education Association, and he would go to classes after his day’s work, which were long days very often. He would use the local library and read about politics, not much literature. Even when I, as an undergraduate, would come home from university at vacations, almost the first question he asked was, “What have you been studying?” because I read literature and philosophy at the same time as reading music. And I would say so and so. And he would say, “Oh, and what did you think of…” He’d read it! The other thing is that he read to me every night, although I’m sure he was dog tired after a long day of working hard. He read not only the boys’ stories that one might to a child, he read poems to me. I had no idea what the poems were about at that early age. But I loved the sound of his voice, and I could hear the difference between poetry and prose, a child’s story. My father was a good reader. You can hear and you can tell the difference when somebody reads it nicely. So it was inculcated into me. Then I spent the rest of my childhood years waking up in the middle of the night with a book half open on my chest, and I still do it. I read between two and four every night. I sleep and by the time I get to two o’clock now I have to read. I read for two hours and [after] I sleep for another two hours, then I get up and work two hours.

FJO: That’s extraordinary.

BR: It’s a crazy life. Augusta’s even worse. She gets up at three in the morning or four, when I’m still reading. I hope this is not too trivial for you.

FJO: No, of course not; I love this. But to bring it back to music, you talked about the sort of inadvertent exposure to music all around us and how people will put on a CD and it is a choice. And yet, they won’t focus on it. For me, there really is an exact parallel between listening to a piece of music, whether it’s on a recording or live, and opening a book.

BR: Oh, definitely. I absolutely agree. Yeah, there’s an interconnection. The idea of putting on a CD and then getting in the shower, it’s a little bit pointless. The CD plays on its own to an empty room until you come out and towel off and so on. It’s a waste of music.

FJO: But with a book, you can’t really do those other things at the same time. People think that it’s something requiring more attention just because it’s physically impossible to look at a book and, say walk. Although the pianist Richard Goode has often walked holding a book in his hand, reading it while attempting to go somewhere. I’ve done that myself a few times; it’s a good way to have an accident. But to connect this to the other things you were saying about music, you mentioned that two people sitting next to each other hearing the same music can have a completely different experience of it. I would argue though that two people looking at a painting are probably having a different experience, too, or people reading the same poem.

BR: Yes, absolutely. But in the literary world, it’s a little more constrained. There’s a preciseness of vocabulary: it means this; it doesn’t mean that. Even with all of the metaphor and poetic use of language, there’s still a relatively constrained aspect to the written word and to language in general. Whereas, yes, standing next to someone looking at the same painting, I absolutely agree that what one is seeing and what one is understanding of what it is saying can be varied and way beyond the obviousness of what’s contained within the frame.

My Le Tambourin Suites are about six paintings and drawings of Van Gogh, but I didn’t want to do another Pictures at an Exhibition. That’s not the intention. I analyzed those paintings and drawings to the nth degree in terms of everything that constitutes a visual art activity. That is: form, color, density, harmony of colors, counterpoint of movements—the same terminology we use in music. You don’t see sunflowers like that! What’s so fabulous about Vincent van Gogh, and why it’s been a lifelong preoccupation with me, is that he painted to see the world in his mind, not the world as it is, or in the reality of normal observation. The world in his mind made him so different, and made the paintings so different from anybody else’s. When you think of that in terms of the sonic domain in which we work: what is the sound in my mind, not what it ought to be but what is in my mind.

One of the things that sometimes bothers me about some new music is I find it generic, and I want to know who that person is. Why don’t you say something? Stravinsky never taught, and I’ve forgotten now who asked him—it’s probably one of the conversations with Robert Kraft—“If you had been a teacher, what would you expect of your students?” And he said, “That they would surprise me.” Now, to surprise that old bugger would be somewhat difficult. But you know, it has to leap off the page and be something other than what’s technically possible.

FJO: I want to get back to what you said about not wanting to create another Pictures at an Exhibition. Music being so abstract, the minute you give it a title or affix a program note to it, you are changing the way people perceive it since language has such an influence on how we experience things. I want to tell you a very silly and embarrassing anecdote. You’re originally from England, so when I first heard your London Serenade, I didn’t read the program notes and I assumed it was about London. I didn’t realize you had composed it for Ed London. This is what words do. And so as a result I assumed I was hearing allusions to things in your music that probably aren’t there, because I attached the wrong associations to it.

BR: Is that a sin? I take your point, but there’s something else I would like to say which may or may not lead us on. It so happens that one of the fundamental principles of my own aesthetic position is the juxtaposition of opposites. The history of 20th century music has been the fierce defense of certain positions. But in London Serenade, I begin with a completely tonal melody followed by something that is not essentially tonal, and juxtapose the two, transforming both of them as they go along until they resolve. And in a sense, it demonstrates that rather than being opposites, they are in fact totally related, because we only have 12 pitches after all.

I know that my music is being misunderstood in another way than the one you just described. That acerbic rough-tough composer that I used to be in the ‘60s has gone to America and sold out. Not at all! I can write Canti d’Amor; why shouldn’t I? They’re for my wife. Why should I not make a love song for my wife of all people? I don’t think one has to feel obliged to the resonances of the Second Viennese School in order to be able to do that. These two [the non-tonal and the tonal] are interacting all the time, whether it’s a harmony or a rhythmic cell, a timbre or a gesture. Music has always been that way. Otherwise, we would have used up its resources a long time ago. But it seems to be an inexhaustible phenomenon. I don’t mean to sound hokey, but I think there’s a spiritual quality about this phenomenon. In our listening, our relationship to it and what it does to us, maybe having to go through a juxtaposition of opposites, always implies, of course, a transformational process that’s leading the ear to wherever it has to go.

I know them more intimately than anyone else, but I think anyone willing to probe every work of mine, in both listening and in an intelligent assessment of what they are, would find that everything I’ve done relates to those two fundamental principles of an aesthetic. And they are not, in the way I use them, necessarily original. I don’t stay up at night worrying about being original in that sense. I’m much more interested to relate to predecessors in one way or another because the idea that somebody found it worthwhile to explore suggests that it maybe has more potential even now than it did earlier. And if people listen to my music with those thoughts in mind, I think they’ll very quickly at least be able to make contact. We hear so much about music being made accessible. Well, most things in human experience are accessible if you’re willing to access them. Commentators on my music have said that they detect a lyrical and often melancholy quality. I know in my own personality there is that streak of melancholy. But I don’t go looking for it, and I don’t go looking to be lyrical, or dramatic. I don’t find that lyricism and dramaticism are mutually exclusive. I think that’s a nonsense idea; as so many opera composers demonstrated, they’re beautifully integrated.

FJO: So this question of accessibility and lyricism versus a negative term that gets used all the time to describe music that isn’t lyrical—gnarly, I kind of like the word. I want to reclaim it. Gnarly is a positive word. But gnarly versus lyrical versus beauty leads us to an interesting area. I don’t know the music that you wrote when you were very young, the music you wrote in Europe. I’d love to hear some of it at some point. But I know that you composed some indeterminate pieces and some wildly experimental pieces and that you went through Darmstadt.

BR: Yeah, I did.

FJO: That’s coded language nowadays. When people say Darmstadt, that means scary new music.

BR: Right. Well, it’s become scary.

FJO: But, I think the other side of that is while there are some people who are afraid of that stuff, there are also people who are so immersed in it and who arguably might be afraid of lyricism, who might be afraid to write, play, or listen to something that’s beautiful. You’ve been speaking of opposites. In essence, what you’re talking about is complex beauty. It’s about finding the complexity in beauty and the beauty in complexity.

BR: It’s a very good question Frank, and I appreciate it because there’s no one simple answer. So I’ll try to address it in a number of ways. Part of my early study and training was through the mill of the avant-garde sectors in Europe: Darmstadt, Donaueschingen, Graz, and so on, and luckily in London. Though I didn’t live in London, I was frequently there and very well aware and friendly with many of the composers who were doing new things. So, yes, I was interested to explore aleatory possibilities as a part of an evolving aesthetic, which was not as well formed then as it is now. You called it indeterminate, but everything I notated is determined. How you juxtapose them becomes another question of performance practice.

I was attracted mostly to the Italians, at a time when the German thought in new music was dominant. Stockhausen, and even Boulez for all of his Frenchness, was nevertheless thought-wise coming very much from Adorno. I was attracted to Dallapiccola, Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna, Luigi Nono, because in all of their musics, as different as they are, there is a—can I use the term?—Italian lyricism. What is it? What does it mean? But it’s there, there’s no question about it, and maybe it stems from the operatic tradition, which has permeated Italian life for two or three centuries. These things are made manifest in a very overt way in the theater.

So I listened to the lectures and talks and so on in the various avant-garde centers, but I always kept my own attitude toward them, even when I heard something that really opened my ears and my mind. I remember once, at one of the lectures that Boulez gave in Darmstadt, he began in German. He was very fluent in German, but he said, “I’m going to have to give this lecture in French because everything that I want to talk about has…” And he began with a conjunction of a verb: je forme, tu transformes, il deforme, nous conformons, vous conformez, ils conforment. And from that, he just elaborated like he was composing at a high speed, like a brilliant jazz improviser. All of it, of course, notated and strictly written word for word. I loved experiences like that, even though he was not fundamentally influential on me musically, except that he performed my music, which was one of the greatest influences one can have with a person of that ability and dedication.

FJO: I’m a little surprised to hear you say that Boulez did not have a direct influence on you. I had certain associations with his music growing up; I suppose we all do at this point. But recently when I’ve listened to his music after so many years, I’m now hearing a lyricism that I think pervades all of it in a way that’s not Germanic at all.

BR: You’re right. It’s not Germanic in the musical outcome. It’s the theoretical stand, and historically, one has to understand what it was: the post-war years, total disaster in Europe, and the determination to start again. I agree that’s very true of Boulez. Now it’s a more leisurely, extrovert lyricism; Sur Incises, for example, is constantly flowering and blossoming in a Rimbaud or Proustian kind of way.

FJO: The other connection between you and Boulez is how important poetry is to both of you. I actually hear a connection in his works for solo singer and ensemble with your Canti trilogy.

BR: Yeah.

FJO: But you’ve done something very unusual in the Canti trilogy that is unlike most text settings of poetry I can think of by any composer. A composer will generally focus on one poet in a cycle, or maybe a set of poems that are connected. But what you’ve done is you’ve created this phenomenal encyclopedic collage of numerous authors, as well as numerous languages. There’s nothing quite like it and what’s interesting to me about it is I’m not fluent in all of those languages. So I’m left baffled by it. There’s a layer that’s incomprehensible, unless I’m following along with a translated libretto. Yet I can tell that if I knew the languages, I wouldn’t have to follow along, because I can hear every single word. So even though it’s a dense polyglot, intertextual thing; your music is in the service of the words that you’re setting.

BR: It’s true. Again, the juxtaposition of different languages is an aspect of the aesthetic: they are opposites, but then I try to find the linguistic components of each language, which actually relate the sound world of each. Many of the connections are carried through in the instrumental domain, not necessarily always in the voice. And of course, all of the texts in each of the three [cycles that comprise the Canti trilogy] do conform to the idea of the moon and the sun and eclipses, so there is a thematic narrative, in a sense. But my intention was not to just paint pictures of the moon and the sun and so on. Every poem that I finally settled on, I dismantled; complete destruction, if that’s the right word: all of its rhythms, all of its rhymes, all of its internal rhymes, and so on and so forth. And then I reassemble it, because then what I’m dealing with is not just a poem about this by this author or that author; I’m dealing now with musical material, which is inherent in the poem itself. There are many poets I love to hear reading their own work. As you know, quite a number of my years were spent in Wales and I speak the Welsh language. Why I love to hear Dylan Thomas read is because he makes it come alive like music.

FJO: I’d love to understand more about the differences between the chamber and orchestral versions of these three cycles.

BR: The vocal line remains absolutely the same in the chamber and orchestra versions, but they’re not the same pieces. One is not just an orchestration of the other, or a reduction of the other. Not at all. Let’s say in the chamber version, before there’s any intention to make an orchestra version, you have a five-note chord, which is perfectly fine for an orchestra. But what if you add one more note to that chord? Where does it go? Does it go here? There? There? There? There? There? If you add two, where do they go? And, if you add more, and you start to change the harmonic implication, you’ve got a very different environment for the voice to perform exactly as it would in the other version, but now we have an extension of the juxtaposition of, not opposites, but differences that are very important.

FJO: It would be amazing to hear all six together.

BR: What I really would like is all three orchestral versions in one program. That’s so far not been possible. They’ve all been done singly, and we’ve done quite a few programs in which the three chamber versions were done.

FJO: I want to go back to something you said much earlier in the conversation when I was talking about those early pieces of yours, which I had described as indeterminate, and you made a distinction between aleatory and indeterminate. Because, you said, everything is determinate. It surprised me that there could have been random elements in any of your music, because one of the things that seems to be a hallmark of all of your music is attention to precise details, perhaps more in orchestration than anything else. Your music seems to be very concerned with really precise sonorities, which now seems contrary to what you were just saying about the two different versions of each of the Canti pieces.

BR: Well, my early music, starting from Tre Espressioni in 1959, is very precise. But the third movement has this space-time notation; it’s not in a regular metric ordering. You know, you have to put yourself back in the 1960s. Although all throughout my college years I’d written 12-tone music and generally ascribed to that, I was never entirely comfortable that it could serve my purposes. In saying that, I’m not faulting it as a way of working because the evidence is very clear from those who espoused it from the beginning, but it didn’t suit my purposes. I found it constraining; possibly it’s an indication of my own lack of ability to be inventive in that way. But we were all in a sense looking for, not a way out of it, but a way of building on it somehow. And that involved an almost destructive element, which were the aleatoric possibilities of John Cage and Earle Brown. I was very close to Earle, and over the years became close to John. My music was going in an entirely different way than theirs, but I could search through that freedom for something else that I was looking for. What has happened since is interesting, because after that, I started to become more and more precise, but not necessarily completing the circle back to the earlier years; it’s a different kind of precision now.

A portion of a manuscript page from Bernard Rands

I love the orchestra. I grew up with orchestras as a child. I grew up with the Halle Orchestra with Barbirolli. And in my hometown in England, every week I would go to rehearsals. I went to every concert I could possibly get to. I was very lucky; my teacher in high school would get tickets for me. In a way, that formed the basis of what I do with the orchestra now. And that has evolved over the last 50 years.

When I was a student, one of the professors I had said that if I was going to be a composition major I had to play a string instrument. It didn’t matter how good a pianist I was, or if I played the organ. I had to learn a string instrument. So dutifully, every week, I went for my violin lessons. By the time I’d done a couple of years of very unwilling effort, I would sit in the back of the student orchestra. When it got difficult, I just rolled the air. Drop in on the whole notes, so as not to spoil everybody else’s efforts. But what it gives you from inside the orchestra is very different from sitting out and listening to it. I have an attitude, which is not to assign to these wonderful players things for them to do, but to engage them in what I want to do, which is why I’ve always had very good relationships, even with cantankerous orchestras and even when I’ve been conducting myself. They know that I respect what they’ve done since I was yay high and that I want to engage their abilities into my musical intentions.

We have a beautiful piano [in the apartment], but I just have a[n electric] keyboard [in my studio]. I don’t work at the piano. For me, it sounds like a piano, so I cannot write for orchestra by writing at the piano. I just cannot. That’s not what I’m hearing. I’ve trained myself to hear everything.

FJO: But if you were working on a piano piece, then would you work out things on a keyboard?

BR: I will, yes, but again, I don’t need it as prop for that. You start being pianistic.

FJO: There’s always the constant danger of being too idiomatic, or not idiomatic enough. Well, what does idiomatic mean? It means somebody can play it.

BR: You know Milton [Babbitt]’s definition? Idiot-matic.

FJO: And, of course, you know, if you haven’t practiced piano in a long time, you’ll be limited by your own pianism.

BR: Exactly. But if you write for a soloist, like I’ve been writing for Jonathan Biss, he’s going to be the person playing the music. So once I knew I was being commissioned to write for him, I listened to all of his recordings and whenever there was a chance to hear him [live]. I was sending him parts of the manuscript as we went along. Then he came here and we started working. Such a different, wonderful attitude, because he knows that I was talking to his strengths, as well as trying to find my own individuality in what I was doing.

FJO: Another aspect of how you create music is that sometimes ideas gestate over a very long period of time. This is an aspect to your composition of the Canti Trilogy that we didn’t really dwell on; the three—or actually six—works that comprise it span about a dozen years. Your opera Vincent evolved over an even longer time.

BR: Absolutely. It began in 1973, and it was only finally performed this [past] year, in April of 2011.

From the work desk of Bernard Rands

FJO: As I look at your studio table, I see it is filled with a variety of pieces of your music, all different kinds of things. Do you normally have a variety of projects that you’re in the middle of concurrently?

BR: No. Only one. I’ve enough problems dealing with one. I have a tendency to take things off the shelf, pile them up until they almost fall over, then I have to spend a week putting everything back again. Otherwise, it’s total chaos in here. I’m much more orderly than that in my thinking.

FJO: Well, if Vincent had a 30-year gestation period, you obviously worked on so many other pieces of music in between.

BR: Oh, in that sense.

FJO: So I’m curious about how your initial ideas morphed over time with the result of writing other pieces. Obviously the Tambourin suites foreshadowed Vincent. But then your musical ideas concerning Van Gogh actually evolved into what is in fact a narrative opera.

BR: Well, of course, one is bringing into play the literary. J.D. McClatchy’s libretto for this opera is, I think, superb. It was an inspiration from beginning to end. He’s a wonderful poet. I had done an enormous amount of research on the work, the life, and the letters of Van Gogh over the years. And I handed McClatchy a sheaf of thoughts and ideas which he used. But on the other hand, he went to a point which I think informs the entire opera, and that is that Vincent was a religious fanatic, which is something most people don’t know or don’t care about. The opening line is When I feel the terrible need for religion, I go out and paint the stars. Painting the stars was not for him just an illustrative act, it was searching for this spiritual connection with God which permeated his short life.

But, back to your point, an opera is all consuming. In this case, there were some aborted efforts to commission it earlier on. And being the stubborn person that I am, I turned down opportunities which, if I had pursued them, would have led to a production earlier. But I could sense in the conversations, and even in the near contractual talks, that we were not on the same page. This is the one piece in my life in which I will not make any compromise of any kind. And those opportunities passed, and so it took that length of time. Once the commission was issued, I sat down and started working as soon as J.D. had provided a couple of scenes from the beginning. And in 15 months of pretty hard labor, I wrote the entire opera, being able to draw on the reserve that had been built up over the years.

With the Canti trilogy, I did the chamber version of Canti Lunatici first with the intention of doing the orchestra version. This commission came shortly afterwards, so I did it for the BBC. Canti del Sole came the other way around; I’d started on the chamber version and Jacob Druckman, who was then the composer-in-residence with New York Philharmonic called me and said, “I know you have this project going, is there any chance we could have the orchestra version of Canti del Sole?” Now who’s going to say no to the New York Philharmonic? So I did them the other way around, which became fascinating. Since again, it wasn’t just what kind of reduction you can make, but which notes do you take out of this chord, completely the reverse process. With Canti dell’ Eclisse, I did do them almost simultaneously. That’s the only time that I’ve actually worked on two pieces, but then they’re not. They are two pieces, but they’re not. I know it’s crazy.

FJO: So then, working methods—you’ve got this wonderful, large drafting board that you work on. But I’m curious, in terms of not being able to do two things at once. You obviously are not going to finish a piece in a day, especially not a big piece. So there are distractions. There’s going to concerts, shopping, cooking meals, chopping your fingers while you’re cooking and listening to music at the same time, all this stuff that gets in the way. Life forces all of us to deal with a million things at once. The composer John Luther Adams has spoken to me about going on music fasts: when he’s working on a piece of music, he doesn’t listen to any other music. I find that impossible to do and we’ve had big debates about this over the years.

BR: Interesting. A large part of my so-called career has been involved in institutions and universities. So you devote part of your time to a specific activity, which may or may not feed back into your creative thinking and process. At its best, it does. And quite startlingly sometimes, but generally speaking, one doesn’t undertake it for that purpose; it’s a service one’s performing for a different function. That’s why I think a work routine of X number of hours, which would not allow other distractions in, is so important. It is for me, anyway. Even when I was teaching, I used to get in trouble with my colleagues because they’d say, “It must be Monday; Bernard’s here.” Well, that’s because the rest of the week, I’m composing. I made it very clear to all of my colleagues in all of the institutions that I worked in that I don’t live in the university. I will come in and I will teach my students to my utmost capacity, but I will not be distracted from what I do. So get used to the idea that I am a composer. But even when we listen casually at dinner-preparing time, I’m not distracted or influenced in that way. I don’t have models, but one of the shocks that I remember was when again, in an interview with Stravinsky, he said what you just hinted at. When he’s composing a particular work, he surrounds himself with works of the same nature. I thought, it was almost a blow to my adoration of him. Well, this genius, why the hell does he need all those other pieces? A mass, for example. So he has a mass from the 16th century, and a Haydn mass. His idea was that he wanted to condition his thinking about the spirituality of a mass. He wasn’t looking for a model. He didn’t want to imitate anybody else. And you know, his other comment, when he said, “I steal.” He didn’t steal a note of anybody else’s music. What he meant was that having understood the underlying principle of a work by another composer, that it is then public property. That it’s in the public domain. The rest is cheating. Get the principle, then make your own music.

FJO: This is reminding me of the piece you wrote for the centenary of Carnegie Hall [Ceremonial III]. You talked about how that music was a response to all of the music that had ever been played there. And I thought to myself, as I was listening to it: You might have done it, but I don’t hear allusions to any specific music; it’s completely yours.

BR: That’s the point I’m making. Whatever feeds into it goes through the grinder, through the mill, in such a way that it’s completely transformed. I was thinking Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Horowitz, but in the end, all that does is to help focus on the special nature of that commission, the location, and what would be worthy of that from my point of view.

FJO: But I don’t hear Judy Garland or Sinatra or even Horowitz in what you wrote.

BR: Well, I think there’s an essential difference between models and influences. Now, models tend to be something that one chooses to look at in detail and understand and, like Stravinsky, understand what the principle is. That’s a model. I don’t think Stravinsky was influenced by any of the composers that he was surrounding himself with. Except in the more general sense that there’s a contrapuntal nature to this, or there is a particular harmonic flow to that.

When I was young, I first got to know Luciano Berio, and lived in his house, and toured Europe with him and copied his music for him. There’s very clearly an input into me from that and from him. But while we remained absolutely close until he died just three or four years ago, I don’t think my music sounds like Berio. So that was an influence which helped me formulate my aesthetic stance rather than saying that, you know, Circles was influential on my percussion writing.

FJO: I’m standing on shaky ground here because I don’t know your earliest pieces. I only know the pieces that you’ve written since you’ve lived here. It was interesting to hear you describe people saying, “Oh, you moved to America and became softer; you’re not writing hardcore music anymore.” Because from what I can glean, your full flowering as a composer happened here in the United States.

BR: Yes.

FJO: But by the time you arrived in America, you were already an adult and already had a significant career as a composer. Yet you made the decision to come here. What’s interesting is you didn’t go to one place. You’ve been all over the place: California, Philadelphia, Cambridge, Chicago. So, in a way, where you happen to be based isn’t all that important to your overall identity.

BR: It’s a great question Frank, and it’s very observant in the sense that before I finally decided to settle here in 1975, I’d been coming back and forth. I was here for two years, ’66 to ’68, during which time I did travel. I did go to California. I did go to San Francisco, I did go to Chicago. What I liked about it was it is a very stark opposite from Europe. To put it rather crudely, if they don’t like you in San Francisco, you can go to Chicago. If they don’t like you in Chicago, go to New York. You just bugger off and go somewhere else. In Europe, the boundaries are still drawn very closely. So I decided to come back because I felt freer here in that sense. I didn’t have to pretend to want to be part of that. It still exists a great deal in Europe. I mean, if you’re not in Lachenmann’s group, you’re nowhere in Germany. I mean, forget it: You’re wasting your time.

FJO: I’m curious though, if they don’t like you in California, go to Chicago, but we’re one country and Europe is all different countries.

BR: Well, that’s true, but I’ve always felt here a freedom to do what I want, whereas, there’s not necessarily an immediate acceptance of that [in Europe]. I think there are European-conditioned elements in my music which don’t necessarily fit American sensitivities, but nevertheless I think it’s been good for me to be able to expand in ways that I wanted to.

FJO: Well, this takes us back to the Canti Trilogy, because American audiences aren’t going to understand all those languages. That’s a given. There’ll be a handful of people, of course, who will. The audience isn’t a monolith, but you know what I mean.

BR: But yet the audience responses to them have been fantastic. If you provide a program note, and provide all the texts with translations, I think it’s not—

FJO: Sure, but the thing that strikes me about that piece, and this is what I was getting at earlier, it’s the kind of piece where if the text setting wasn’t so completely idiomatic, and so sensitive to every nuance and every detail, people wouldn’t realize it wasn’t. If you’re just following the text, you’re seeing the words, but the thing is you don’t have to follow the text.

BR: No, it’s true.

FJO: You can hear them all.

BR: You can.

FJO: And if you did actually understand those languages, you’d get this amazing experience.

BR: Yeah.

FJO: But a lot of people here can’t, myself included, because we don’t have that background.

BR: It seems to me that every piece of music, irrespective of the historic period, has more than just the obvious. In Canti Lunatici, for example, every time the moon is mentioned, it’s a melisma; it’s a particular melisma which is always related, all the way through. It’s almost like a Wagner leitmotif in a way. There are no changes. That whole piece, with its 13 texts all about the moon, is constantly exploring a kind of lyricism, but it comes out of melismatic writing. The deliberate intention of Canti del Sole was to write an almost 99.5 percent syllabic piece. In Canti dell’Eclisse, it brings the two together because the concern is they’re as different as light to dark, both in the obvious physical world sense and in the terms of poetry: from light to darkness, and from birth to death. I’m biased, but I think if the pieces have claimed any kind of audience attention, it’s because they are more than just the notes on the paper or the texts or the cumulative effects of all of those. There’s an intention that goes beyond that.

All of the truly great music we’ve inherited is more than just the sum total of the parts in that sense. I mean the Jupiter Symphony, for example, which Mozart said he heard in a matter of seconds. Without making any comparisons, as a creative artist you know the totality, but you don’t know what it is yet. And so you have to linearly find it. That takes time, much longer than my definition of people saying, “Are you an intuitive composer, or are you an intellectual designer of sound, an engineer in the sonic realm?” The answer is, well, all of those things.

Precision fuels intuition: a page from one of Bernard Rands’s sketchbooks

Intuition has to come which strikes you with such an impulse that you grasp its potential without knowing what it is yet. Then when you go to work, to realize that energy and to discover and design what it is, intuition will leave you alone to get on with it until you become unfaithful to it. Why is it that you can go to your studio, have a wonderful day’s work, go to bed thinking “I’ve solved it!” and then you come in next morning and say, “What the hell, somebody’s been in here during the night”? That’s why I have two locks on the door. I had to stop that. Plus the fact that I’m married to another composer. In other words, what you thought was right, is not. And how do you know it’s not right, if it hasn’t been tested yet? I think that’s where the intuition says, “Bernard, that’s not what we intended.” And so you put it in the trash basket.

FJO: Being married to another composer; this is an area we didn’t really touch on. We talked about the distractions of teaching, or the distractions of hearing music, or the distractions of not being able to work on two things at once. You’re both engaged in a very similar realm: writing music that other people play. I imagine you talk about music all the time.

BR: We do, a lot, yes.

FJO: Are there influences that go back and forth. Is this a good thing? Is this a problematic thing when you’re in the middle of a specific piece?

BR: It’s a very reasonable question to ask of two composers who, without being immodest, are relatively successful during the time that we’re working. One thing that is crucially important is our age difference. I’m 30 years older than Augusta. From the very beginning, from virtually our first meeting, I recognized something in the work that she had completed to that point that was different from anything else. I went through dozens of scores for Aspen at that time, or for June in Buffalo. Who is Augusta Read Thomas? Man or woman? I don’t know. Could be either. When we met, I thought, not only is she talented, but she’s also very lovely. And from then on, the first thing she said was, “I do not want to make progress in this profession with people saying that you’re only getting that because you’re sleeping with Bernard Rands.” And I remember saying to her subsequently, a little while after we knew each other more, “You know, Gusty, I think there’ll come a day when people will say Bernard Rands only got that because he’s sleeping with Augusta Thomas.” She said, “Don’t be silly.” Now who’s more in the public consciousness? If you put the top ten American composers, Gusty will be in there somewhere because she has this incredible outgoing attitude to people and to music. I’m much more withdrawn, mysterious.

I was with the Philadelphia Orchestra in the early years that Gusty and I were together; I had a long relationship with Riccardo Muti, as you know. I would put scores in front of him, a pile of them. I put one of Gusty’s in without telling her. I said to myself, it is worthy of his attention. He doesn’t know anything about our relationship. And he got to that score, and he opened it, “Chi è questo? Chi è questo? Questa?” So I put it aside. He chose a piece without my saying a word about who it was. Gusty was all up in flames about it. I shouldn’t have done that. And she got quite—when it was performed—she got quite a lot of poison pen letters from composers who should know better.

What I’m getting to is that in our relationship, we sought out the difference between her professional concerns in any one day, and mine. You know, she’s a very good public servant. I’m a workaholic, but she’s in another realm. So we talk a lot about music, but we don’t talk about the pieces we’re working on until after they’re performed. Even after they’re completed, I would not say to her, “What’s this? I don’t get this bit here, or what are you trying to do here?” Because that would interfere with my willingness to go to the performance and let it be what it is. Once it’s over, she’ll say, “What do you think there, Bernard?”

FJO: It’s fascinating that you keep secrets from each other until the performances.

BR: Anybody who’s ever created anything, no matter how trivial or how distant from ever becoming a masterpiece, whatever that is, for the person who made it, it’s precious. And you have to be very careful not to trample on it in any way. I made that a fundamental premise of my teaching. One of the things that I don’t like, although I’ve done it a number of times, are those short-term residencies at a festival where you talk to students about this, that, and the other. You see them for only a few days. If you really want to be honest with them or critical—and, in a sense, flatten them—you have to be there to pick them up again and help them bounce back from whatever, and learn from it. So it’s much better to teach on a long-term basis. I’ve often said, the only students that I’ve ever really been able to teach were my friends. We were really close friends after a short period of time, because there’s something about the way in which they set about their work that intrigues me. And I want to be able to help them realize, if I can see, what the challenges are. It’s never a case of, “I think you should do this” or ”I think you should do that.”

FJO: Your comment about creation being precious brings us full circle to the very beginning of this conversation when we talked about submitting as a listener, that the best experience that you can get out of listening to something is when you really allow that other person to speak to you in his or her own way, and to accept it for what it is. So, to turn the question upside down what then is the function of the creator? Not to the audience, but to the work itself. What is the obligation?

BR: If you say, “I never think about an audience when I’m working,” people think, “He’s so esoteric.” I don’t mean that. I can only be honest to my instincts and my training and my thought process. I’m very self-critical, to the point of being suicidal sometimes, not in that [literal] sense but it’s so intense that it’s hard to describe. I do this because I believe that the person who’s going to come on that bitterly cold February night and pay above the odds for the ticket to listen to my music is coming toward me for some reason, which I don’t need to know about and maybe they can’t define it. But when they come together with what I’ve made, I want them to hear another human being talking to them who’s not superior, not inferior, just another person who cares about beauty and expressivity and spiritual things which, again, are hard to define. They feel when they’ve listened that they’ve been taken on a journey. I love John Lennon’s notion of a magical mystery tour. Let it go on and be that. I do it because there’s nothing about me that’s any different from any member of an audience in that sense. I may be privileged in this way or that, certainly in terms of training, but if they detect that this is something that’s speaking in an honest, unequivocal way, I think they’re likely to engage with it. It’s not the person who comes to the green room afterwards and starts blabbing, but it’s the person who comes by and touches you arm and says thank you and disappears. You know that they were into it.

What, Me Boring?

Posted on December 8, 2011 by DanVisconti - Columns

Last week, Colin Holter made a comment on these pages about boredom that struck me, in which he suggested that boredom has as much to do with what we bring to an experience as with that experience itself. This is a great point from which to begin a consideration of boredom, which has less to do with some quality inherent in the music at hand than with a certain relationship (or perhaps lack of relationship) between the listener and the music. When we say that music is boring, we typically mean that our listening experience failed to deliver what people turn to music for, which is above all a sense of connection.

In this respect, music is often boring when we are listening for something that is not there. That is why hard-rock fans looking for a physical connection might shy away from music that fails to deliver the desired visceral punch; or why academics looking for an intellectual connection shy away from music that does not yield to analysis; or why listeners seeking an emotional connection have difficulty taking interest in music composed via elaborate formal schemes.

When we say something is boring, we mean that it has become too familiar, or at least seems that way—the level of helpful familiarity has been exceeded, so that renewed contact deadens the experience rather than enriches it. This seems related to an essentially passive view of experience, in which we receive stimulation from a force outside of ourselves rather than a kindling of spirit within. The very perception of ourselves as passive observers rather than full participants in an experience defines boredom, which leads to the desire for novelty and fancy, which are poor cousins of newness and imagination.

Boredom is a message: it indicates our failure to appreciate certain kinds of experience, perhaps more than any failure of those experiences themselves. That’s why boredom ought to be cause for regret rather than smugness or gloating, or at least a force that challenges us to engage more deeply. There’s no joy to be had and no pride in not enjoying something; one does not attain a superior place “above” something else by putting it down. And it’s a well-known fact that affective non-engagement is one of the hallmarks of schizophrenic thought patterns.

Have I written any boring music? That depends on who you ask, but more often than once I’ve overheard the dreaded accusation in a restroom during intermission—and I was sure glad that I wasn’t sufficiently famous to be spotted as the offender! In one case, I kept an eye on one of my would-be critics during the second half of the concert, during which his PDA flashed noticeably. This eased my nerves a bit—until I thought about how much music I have personally considered boring, and made a pact with myself to make “boring” the start of a more serious exploration.

DanVisconti

Subscribe to our newsletter and never miss a beat!