Tag: orchestra

Sounds Heard: Alvin Lucier—Orchestra Works

Alvin Lucier: Orchestra Works

Alvin Lucier
Orchestra Works
(New World Records 80755)


When David Lean’s 1962 epic Lawrence of Arabia was restored in 1989, one of the best shots rescued from the vaults was a seemingly inconsequential one, a shot showing exactly what it is T. E. Lawrence (played by Peter O’Toole) is doing in the dank Cairo office where he has been initially stationed during the First World War: he is drawing a map. In fact, a close look at the shot in question—Lawrence’s hand carefully laying down a line of blue watercolor along a coast—reveals that he is drawing a map of the Gulf of Aqaba. It is the capture of Aqaba that turns out to be Lawrence’s first great military accomplishment, a feat that sets in motion the movie’s whirlwind of triumph and trauma. The clean boundaries laid down on paper turn out, in cinematic reality, to chart a glorious, horrible, bright, dark, vast panorama.

I thought of Lawrence’s mapmaking while listening to this new recording of some of Alvin Lucier’s orchestral music. I can’t think of another composer who manages, again and again, to create such an inverse relationship between the bald simplicity of the compositional plan and the crazy richness of the musical result. The more basic Lucier’s hypothesis—the more abstract the map—the more inexhaustible the experience.


The three works on this new release are especially straightforward and, thus, especially grand. Diamonds (for one to three orchestras, or one orchestra divided in three) is nothing but the title shape: one group of instruments ever-so-slowly swoops up and then down, while another group mirrors it, a shape presented in three overlapping iterations over twenty-plus minutes. Slices presents a sustained 53-note chromatic cluster in the orchestra; a solo cello works its way through all 53 one at a time, switching the corresponding ensemble note off, then works through all 53 again, switching the notes back on—a process repeated, in varied order, seven times. Exploration of the House revisits the playback-feedback acoustic winnowing of Lucier’s most famous piece, I Am Sitting in a Room, but with the source material being a live orchestra playing fragments of Beethoven’s Consecration of the House overture. Each fragment is recorded as it is performed, then sent back into the hall and re-recorded, until the acoustic signature of the space is all that’s left. In all three pieces, as in so much of Lucier’s music, the schematic is so obvious as to immediately disappear, leaving instead the repeated opportunity to focus one’s attention on what is normally so plain in music—individual notes, phrases, timbres—and realize just how restrictively framed one’s normal perception of those artifacts usually is.
The Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra (conducted by Christian Arming, Petr Kotik, and Zsolt Nagy) gives Diamonds a near-constant shimmer and scintillation, the microtonal collisions of passing glissandi seeming to open up a kind of infinite zoom into the nature of the sound. Members of the San Diego Symphony fill in the pre-recorded 53-note cluster in Slices, with Kotik conducting and Charles Curtis on cello—in an act of added devotion, each of the 53 instruments were recorded individually, then mixed together to maximize the sonic redolence. Kotik fashions the fragments of Exploration of the House as brisk, starched Classical-era swatches, the better to contrast with their transformation into hazy bells.

We take a lot of what goes on in music for granted, and, often, with good reason: the abstraction to more hierarchical listening is the gateway to a lot of the large-scale dramatic conceptions—triadic progressions, standard forms, dialectic give-and-take among instruments—whose by now traditional nature sometimes can disguise their continuing effectiveness. But Lucier’s music is a counterweight to all that, a useful exercise that is no less dramatic in its own way. Music history has privileged the global view. But Lucier, sitting in a room, drawing maps, is showing travelers the path to landscapes that, once moved off the paper, prove unexpectedly limitless and uncanny.

Alone At The Top: What Conductor Susanna Malkki’s Success Means—and What It Doesn’t

Conductor Susanna Malkki

Conductor Susanna Malkki
Photo by Simon Fowler

Watching Susanna Malkki conduct the Chicago Symphony was moving in an unexpected way. It was moving in the way that I imagine the Northern Lights might be moving, or the Great Pyramids. It was like seeing a natural phenomenon that I had heard about, read about, but never actually observed in the flesh. My God, I thought to myself, like a pilgrim who has finally arrived at the holy site. So this is what it’s like!


I have been a musician for twenty years, and before Tuesday night, I had never seen a woman conduct a great orchestra. And unless you count the string teachers in my public schools, I’ve never worked with a woman conductor myself.

So I suppose it makes sense that every time Malkki presided over a roaring crescendo during Tuesday night’s Chicago Symphony concert, I felt a rush of unexpected emotion. Because, for all my years of playing, the sound of an orchestral crescendo has been associated with the sight of a man’s body on the podium. For my entire life, the sounds of timpani and brass seemed to be born exclusively from the waving of a man’s arms. But I now have living proof that this isn’t the case. And it matters.

Malkki’s program—Debussy’s La Mer, the Stravinsky Violin Concerto with Leila Josefowicz, Thomas Adès’s …and all shall be well, and Sibelius’s suite from The Tempest —was one of the most interesting of the CSO’s season. The young couple next to me were excited, enthusiastic, and fully engrossed in the concert.
“She’s only the second female conductor I’ve ever seen,” the woman said after the Sibelius.
“Yeah. Besides Marin Alsop,” her date replied. There was a long pause.

“That’s so cool, though,” the girl said in a hushed and excited voice. “She’s really good.”
Malkki is really good. She has an alert, intense podium presence and a clear and lively technique. For much of the program, her touch was perceptibly light; her years in the collaborative environment of Ensemble Intercontemporain were evident. Malkki allowed the orchestra to play. They seemed relaxed; principal string players often smiled at her as she cued their entrances. The Stravinsky in particular was transparent and enthralling: there was a sense of absolute assurance between Malkki, Josefewicz, and the orchestra.

At intermission, I circulated in the lobby, hoping to overhear an interesting comment or two about Malkki. But her presence felt like a massively successful non-event. Response to the Stravinsky was overwhelmingly positive. People were drinking champagne. A woman was on the podium, and everything seemed to be in order.

Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Mei-Ann Chen, conductor

Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Mei-Ann Chen, conductor
Photo by Todd Rosenberg

It is a testament to Malkki’s prodigious gifts that Chicago’s music critics wholeheartedly embraced her return to the CSO stage as they did her 2011 debut: with barely a whisper about her gender. Their focus, rightly so, was on the clarity and focus of her interpretive work and leadership. But I have no interest in pretending to be gender-blind. Malkki is unquestionably a master; she is also, statistically, a unicorn. In 2011, she became the first woman ever to conduct at La Scala; she remains the only woman who has. There is no sense in attempting to remove Malkki from her context: she is a brilliant musician who has rightly risen to the top of her profession, in spite of obstacles placed in her way by classical music’s persistent gender problems.
Alex Ross recently wrote about Marin Alsop breaking another glass ceiling at the Proms, and his welcome attention to the issue generated some thoughtful responses. But I find that the discussion over female conductors is often rife with false dichotomies. While one person despairs over how few female conductors there are, another protests that there are plenty and shows off a long list of them. While one person can point to misogynistic comments and despair, someone else can point to artists like Malkki and brightly insist that times are changing.

We could go down a rabbit hole of cultural differences, too. Why is it, for example, that fully half of the recently accepted conducting students at the Sibelius Conservatory in Malkki’s native Finland are women, while female doctoral conducting students remain a stubbornly small minority in the US?

Perhaps the most useful thing we can do as a society, and as a musical community, is to examine the causes of women’s low participation in conducting. Alex Ross’s most astute recent observation is that “the art of conducting is wrapped up in mythologies of male power.” At the moment, conducting and maleness seem almost inextricably linked. They aren’t, of course—but the deep historical and sociological bond means that women conductors may face subtle and complex challenges in rising to the top of the field.

As recent research out of Rutgers University shows, when women succeed at “male gender-typed tasks,” they are usually met with negative reactions that adversely affect their careers. We must also remember that there’s a likability tax paid by every successful professional woman. And in a music director role–on the podium, in the press, and at meetings with donors—likability is an extremely important factor.

Another major factor is the difficulty that female aspiring conductors may have finding role models and mentors who resemble them. A study from the University of Toronto, titled “Someone like me can be successful,” indicates that young women’s self-assessment is deeply impacted by the presence of a successful female role model. Without accessible role models, many young women literally cannot envision a life in conducting; for this reason, many talented potential conductors may never even consider the possibility.

Once a woman finally gets to the podium—no small thing in itself—we would also do well to consider sociologist Rosabeth Kanter’s research on tokenism in professional life. While the word “token” has some negative associations, Kanter used the term to refer to a minority that comprises less than fifteen percent of a workplace. Kanter’s work indicates that if you are a token minority—which women in high-level conducting absolutely are—you will endure three difficult conditions. First, you will be subject to unusually high scrutiny; second, you will have stereotypes attributed to you; third, your individuality will be compromised, and you will be viewed as a representative of the minority group.

So when the thought popped into my head that I didn’t care for the jacket Malkki was wearing, that was a perfect example of unusually high scrutiny. When we posit that female conductors are more collaborative and gentle than their male counterparts, this is a perfect example of attributing stereotypes to them. And when we conflate Malkki, Alsop, and Falletta—or even when we praise Malkki as evidence that “women can do this”—this is a perfect example of compromising the individuality of each artist, forcing them instead to Represent Women, to carry the mantle of Woman Conductor.

So in this thorny and difficult context—which we must acknowledge and actively fight against, in order to make things better—the example of Susanna Malkki is indeed a bright light.

This past Tuesday night she became, for me and probably for hundreds of other women in the audience, a role model. She steered expertly through the dangerous waters of programming, demeanor, wardrobe. She illuminated the music. She made us feel that success was possible for “someone like us.” And then, I imagine, she boarded a plane and flipped open a score, on her way to do it all again somewhere else.

Sounds Heard: Make It Big (Large Ensemble Edition)

Kevin Puts: To Touch The Sky, If I Were A Swan, Symphony No. 4 “From Mission San Juan”
Harmonia Mundi
Performed by Conspirare (Craig Hella Johnson, cond.) and Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (Marin Alsop, cond.)
Puts: To Touch The Sky
The works on this recording by composer Kevin Puts share common inspiration in that they are all treatments of spiritual concepts such as ideas of the “divine feminine.” The interconnected movements of To Touch The Sky: Nine Songs for Unaccompanied Chorus on Texts by Women are stunningly performed by Conspirare, featuring texts ranging from Sappho to Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Although the opening track, If I Were A Swan, with text by poet Fleda Brown (who also happens to be Puts’s aunt) was originally intended to be part of the sequence, Puts ultimately chose to have it stand on its own. Symphony No. 4 “From Mission San Juan” was commissioned by an avid listener and attendee of the Cabrillo Festival, who was especially enamored with the annual concerts that take place at San Juan Bautista. Puts took that opportunity to delve into the music of the Mutsun Indians, who, despite being baptized and taught to sing church music by the friars of Mission San Juan, managed to retain their own musical practices for some time. The first movement of Symphony No. 4 (featured in the track below), performed by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra with Marin Alsop conducting, uses the unique acoustics of the Mission space as an inspirational stepping-stone.



John Musto: Concertos and Rags for Piano
Bridge Recordings
Performed by Odense Symphony Orchestra (Scott Yoo, cond.) and Greeley Philharmonic Orchestra (Glen Cortese, cond.)
Musto: Concertos and Rags
Over the past ten years in particular, composer John Musto has been busy with opera productions and vocal music, but this recent Bridge CD features Musto’s two piano concertos—the first dating from 1988, and the second from 2006—with the composer himself at the piano. Throughout each concerto, Musto’s affinity for ragtime can be heard within the harmonic language and the melodic lines. In fact, sandwiched between the two big pieces are two short solo piano works from Musto’s Five Concert Rags, further inquiries into such musical connections. The third movement of Piano Concerto No. 1, Scorrevole (featured here), is a roller coaster ride for the ears, bustling with ever-shifting orchestra textures and rollicking percussion.



inscape: Sprung Rhythm
Sono Luminus
Richard Scerbo, director
inscape: Sprung Rhythm
This debut recording of the Bethesda, Maryland-based inscape chamber orchestra showcases the work of the three younger composers from the mid-Atlantic region—Nathan Lincoln-DeCusatis, Joseph Hallman, and Justin Boyer. The ensemble expands and contracts to adjust for the unique voice of each composer, from chamber orchestra for Lincoln-DeCusatis’ A Collection of Sand, to smaller mixed ensemble for Hallman’s imaginatively orchestrated imagined landscapes: six Lovecraftian elsewheres. For those who want to put their surround sound systems to work, the physical CD comes packaged with an additional audio-only Blu-Ray disc containing all of the compositions, plus additional bonus tracks featuring Boyer’s work Auguries for bassoon and string trio. Whichever recorded medium you decide to explore, these are all interesting musical works, expertly recorded, and performed by inscape with confidence and dexterity. The label Sono Luminus has smartly created a mashup of the works on this recording, which is presented below:


Wearing Two Hats: Stewart Copeland on Playing and Composing

Since the The Police disbanded in the mid-1980s, drummer Stewart Copeland has composed soundtracks for numerous films and television shows and has had works performed by such acclaimed ensembles as the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and Cleveland Orchestra. In May 2013, Copeland’s Edgar Allan Poe-inspired chamber opera, The Tell-Tale Heart, was performed by the Long Beach Opera, and in May 2014, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra will premiere his new percussion concerto. I reached Copeland at his home studio, the Sacred Grove—where he’s been recording jam sessions with a host of accomplished artists and uploading videos to YouTube—to talk about his approach to composition.

– DB

Stewart Copeland in his home recording studio, the Sacred Grove

Stewart Copeland in his home recording studio, the Sacred Grove.
Photo courtesy Stewart Copeland.

David Brensilver: Your drumming strikes me as rather impulsive. So I’m curious as to how necessarily different your approach to composition is, and whether you tend to capture and develop ideas. Or is your approach more systematic?

Stewart Copeland: Very different. Two different guys. Two different parts of the brain—almost unrelated to each other, although there is probably a connection somewhere.

DB: What about from commission to commission. I mean, do film soundtrack commissions come with specific parameters in terms of mood or attitude?

SC: Oh, absolutely. That’s why decades spent as a working-stiff film composer, I think, is the best education I ever had. Unlike an artist with a capital “A,” you are forced to learn things and go places that you would never go on your own accord. The professional film composer has had to deal with more types of music, more kinds of orchestration, a wider range of emotion, period, than any serious composer—than any serious Artist composer. And by the way, having had that education, I’m not in the film-score business anymore.

DB: Do you make a habit of revisiting and revising music after it’s been performed, like The Tell-Tale Heart?

SC: I’ll probably get around to fixing the score the next time it goes up. I’ll immediately reach for the score and fix a couple things—mainly, removal of percussion. I got a little carried away, because when I was writing it, I was playing it, to make sure it was playable. And the percussionists (would) look at me and say, “Well, of course you can play it.”

DB: You’ve been commissioned by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic to write a percussion concerto, and I imagine this feels a bit like a mad scientist being handed the keys to a well-appointed laboratory. Was there instrumentation requested or suggested?

SC: Well, yes. As a matter of fact, my last percussion concerto [Gamelan D’Drum] was for gamelan and orchestra. It was a gigantic piece with five percussionists who are actually an ensemble [D’Drum] and they do all kinds of cool stuff—they’ve got not just their Indonesian bells—[both] Balinese and Javanese—but also African stuff, South American stuff, just a really wide array of cool shit that they do. And so, next commission comes up, “O.K., guys, Liverpool, what do you guys do?” “Well, not traps.” “O.K., that’s fine.” “No improvised solos,” like I can’t just write, “Take it away, Bob.” They play the classic, orchestral percussion instruments. Actually, that’s a good thing. Limitations are so often—or, in fact, problems are so often—the seed of great inspiration. So many great ideas are the result of solving a problem. And, by the way, imposing these limitations makes the piece more of a square peg for a square hole as far as other orchestras are concerned. It’s just easier to program if I don’t call for exotic instruments.

DB: Is it fair to say that the “genres”—and that’s in quotation marks—that you work in are really dictated by the commissioning entity and the desired instrumentation, and really not coming from you so much?

SC: Well, it depends what you’re talking about. If it’s a film score, you’re absolutely right. That’s why I don’t do film scores anymore.

DB: But in other words, it doesn’t seem like you’re actively trying to adhere to stylistic traditions.

Stewart Copeland on tour with The Police

Stewart Copeland on tour with The Police. Photo by Lara Clifford, courtesy Stewart Copeland.

SC: Oh, absolutely not. And forms of music that demand that are just tempting for me to just trample all over. Reggae, for instance, absolutely does not demand adherence to its rules. You know, reggae musicians are the most accepting and nonjudgmental of all, I think. I learned that [by] playing with a complete reggae rip-off band called The Police. All the reggae guys really embraced us and were really welcoming. Whereas if, say, instead of reggae The Police had had a strong flavor of any other genre—country, jazz, or punk, for that matter—the other practitioners of that genre would be saying, “No, that’s not the real thing.” Whereas reggae guys just don’t have that attitude.

DB: Do you compose on a particular instrument?

SC: Yeah, it’s called a computer. For composing, it’s all about Digital Performer.

Stewart Copeland in his home recording studio, the Sacred Grove

Stewart Copeland in his home recording studio, the Sacred Grove.
Photo courtesy Stewart Copeland.

DB: Are there moments from the Sacred Grove sessions [1] that you take note of for potential future composition projects?

SC: Not really. The original material that I work with—[it’s] wildly inspiring, really cool, but rarely has there been like a tune or a theme or something. But I do rob myself a lot. A curious discovery is that when you work too hard and too fast, the work is actually better. I learned this on episodic TV, where you have a new show every week, for 24 weeks. Or doing a game, you know, Spyro the Dragon, where for the gig I’ve got to write basically a double album worth of backing tracks. And so you just get your game on and turn on the computer and get working. And I’ve found that some of the themes and melodies and chord progressions that come out of those seat-of-the-pants composing sessions, those are some of the strongest ones. And I tend to go back to those. And when I’m looking to write a big orchestral piece or a really important piece of music, I’m really drawn to that little three-note trick that I came up with on this television series or that.

DB: Are you usually working on commission?

SC: Yeah, I do work on commission, that’s my day job.

DB: So there are no ensemble pieces that you’re writing just for the sake of writing, in other words?

SC: No. I sometimes get a hint of a commission, or even a real commission, and, like I say, I don’t wait around. By the time they’ve sent the contract for signing, I’ve pretty much written the piece. One time I had a huge piece that I was working on and the person who commissioned it was fired, the new person just wiped the slate clean to bring in their own agenda, and before the contract arrived for signing it was over. And so I’ve got this piece sitting in the cookie jar.

DB: What about working with, let’s say, orchestral musicians versus the artists who work with you in Orchestralli [2] or the guys who come over and play at the Sacred Grove? I mean when you went to do The Tell-Tale Heart or when you did Gamelan D’Drum, is there a different sort of working style that the musicians have, in your experience?

SC: Absolutely. The Sacred Grove players are one category of musician, and The Tell-Tale Heart or Dallas Symphony or Cleveland Orchestra players are an entirely different category of musician. Separated at birth, these two enormous and richly varied families are completely distinct: readers and players. Players experience their instrument through their ears and their fingers. Readers, they get their music through their eyes, and the connection goes straight from the page to their fingers—using the brain to interpret the page, but basically it goes from ink to fingers, and that’s basically where the music comes from. All the musicality comes from expressing that ink and really interpreting it, and the ethos is worship of the composer’s intention.

DB: What are a few things that you’re working on now, in terms of compositions and commissions?

SC: Well, I’ve got the Liverpool piece, which I’ve pretty much written—I’ve got the music, I’m just working on the score, which takes me longer than writing the music, by far, but I’m getting faster at it as I do it more. When I was film composing, I had arrangers. But when I got out of that business, and there wasn’t that time pressure, I got into orchestrating myself. And since I haven’t done as much of it, it just takes me longer. But I’m getting faster.

 

Stewart Copeland behind the drums

Stewart Copeland behind the drums
Photo by Jean Carter Wilson, courtesy Stewart Copeland.

DB: What about performance indications?

SC: Oh, well that’s where all the fun is. That’s exactly the reason why I’m orchestrating myself now.

DB: So that when you get somewhere, it’s fairly all spelled out for people and there’s not a whole lot of ambiguity.

SC: No, no. As little as possible.

DB: And so rehearsals, I imagine, are—

SC: Much easier than band rehearsals. [Laughs] A band will take two weeks to get an hour set together. An orchestra will take one rehearsal or two.

DB: When you go back to playing the rock stuff, is all the work you’ve done in terms of writing—whether it’s film scores or orchestra commissions or what have you—do you find that you’re much more efficient and is it frustrating to be around people who aren’t working that way, especially after you’ve been doing so much of that?

SC: No, because that’s what you expect. When I’m hanging with my buddies and we’re rocking out, I have an expectation of what they’re good at and not good at. There are many things that they’re good at that I’m so thankful of, such as they groove, they play by instinct, and we can talk in a language that we each understand. And you can ask things that you just can’t ask an orchestral player, such as, “Give me a 16-bar solo,” or, “Just improvise this” But the upside of the orchestral experience is: two rehearsals and you’ve got it. But it is sometimes frustrating. It was frustrating to go back to The Police environment, which was sort of like a harsh combination of the worst aspects of both, but [with] rewards that transcend both. The music is sacred, the songs, which means that you can’t just make it up as you go along, because you’ve got to deliver what folks spent too much money on tickets to hear. And it’s very formal, The Police creative environment. Whereas when I’m jamming with my rock buddies, usually it’s very informal. And when I’m working with an orchestra there’s no debate at all, there’s no compromise, there’s no negotiation, it’s on the page. There it is, count it in.

Full interview audio:


1. Copeland invites musician friends to jam sessions (at his home studio, the Sacred Grove), which he records, produces, and posts to his YouTube page. Musicians who’ve jammed at the Sacred Grove include Neil Peart, Stanley Clarke, Ben Harper, members of Primus, Andy Summers, and Snoop Dogg, to name a few.

2. An ensemble with which Copeland has performed arrangements of his music.

hoto by Cheryl Albaine

Photo by Cheryl Albaine

David Brensilver is the editor of The Arts Paper (a monthly publication of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven, in Connecticut) and has contributed to a diverse collection of publications. He is a percussionist with performance degrees from The Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University and The Juilliard School.

On the Road with Mischa Zupko

Mischa at work on the bus

Mischa at work on the bus

For two weeks in June, Chicago composer Mischa Zupko did something that composers don’t often have the opportunity to do: he toured with an orchestra. Camerata Chicago traveled to the Czech Republic, France, and Italy and gave five performances of Zupko’s new Chamber Symphony: Pilatus. Zupko was on every plane and bus, at every soundcheck, in every audience, and an honored guest at every group dinner. I was lucky enough to be there too, serving as acting principal second violin.

During the drive from Marseille to Milan, I headed from my perch in the second row of the bus to Mischa’s seat towards the back. It was my shortest-ever commute to an interview. On those long bus trips, Zupko could usually be found hard at work on a new piece for Jeffrey Zeigler—that, or trading jokes with the wind and brass players. The conversation that follows reveals Zupko to be a humble, energetic, and constantly searching artist, thriving in his role of “embedded” composer-in-residence.

*

EM: Tell me about the experience of traveling with the orchestra. Have you ever been in such extended proximity to your orchestral collaborators?
MZ: I love it. I feel like one of the orchestra at this point! As a performer, I’m very much in touch with the performance aspects of my music. I feel viscerally involved with the performances of my music, or any other music for that matter. So the opportunity to learn about and understand every one of the individuals in this group is really an exciting process.
I’m getting a better understanding of how the orchestra works, those mechanics. It would have been nice to do this before I wrote the piece, too! But it serves a neat purpose of sculpting how this work grows within the context of each performance. And if we work together again, that will be so much more of an in-depth relationship to explore.

Mischa with orchestra members in Paris

Mischa with orchestra members in Paris

EM: I think the players feel an increased sense of commitment to your work because you are right here with us. You’re one of us, but you’re also special.
MZ: I’m having lots of experiences where people are starting to come up to me and ask about certain things. They’re curious about certain aspects of the piece, or what I meant with something. This is a very natural process with chamber music, but not something we often get to do with orchestral music. I wish that all compositions could be born this way.

I have a program at the Music Institute of Chicago that tries to advocate for this kind of thinking, this kind of collaboration between performers and composers. In this program, the performers really realize what is not on the page that they can do. There are these cliches, like “read between the lines,” or “look beyond the score,” but what the hell does that mean? It can be completely arbitrary, until you start to work with a composer and realize what could not be notated that was still trying to be expressed.
And you can apply that to so many other things. You can apply that to Brahms. All of a sudden, the personal aspect of the creative process becomes illuminated; it’s not such a third-person interpretation anymore.
EM: How does Pilatus, the chamber symphony of yours that we’re playing on this tour, fit into the context of your work overall?
MZ: I think it’s very visual and visceral. A lot of my orchestra pieces, for some reason, are very much visually inspired. Pilatus is inspired by various impressions of the great peak in Lucerne, and the mythology surrounding that.
When I first started writing for orchestra, it was very literally programmatic. But it has evolved so that I’m not trying to do a Berlioz thing anymore—not to create a direct narrative, but to take impressions from visual stimulus or poetic ideas and get in touch with how exactly that makes an impression on me, and how that can be communicated aurally.

As composers, we continually try to express things in the ways that we see them—but we refine that process to the point that the music actually expresses what we were feeling inside, not some thoughts that you can’t articulate in an abstract medium. I think that what makes great music great music is when a composer can literally bring others into an experience. It doesn’t have to be the same experience—that’s the beauty of it—but it guides people into a certain kind of visceral, psychological, emotional experience.

Mischa and Ellen on the tour bus

Mischa and Ellen on the tour bus

EM: You wrote Pilatus while you were traveling; now you’re traveling again. How does traveling connect to your creative process? What does traveling do for your writing?
MZ: The first thing that pops into my mind is actually thinking about my son, and what traveling is for him. We traveled with my son when he was very young—a year and three months old—and we spent most of our time in Tuscany. And watching what happened to his little brain during that time was remarkable. He went there with a couple of words, and he came back babbling. Traveling for children is really important because it stimulates the mind, in terms of being presented with new situations and having to problem-solve more frequently.

So when your environment is unfamiliar, it stimulates creativity. It’s common sense that whenever you go outside of your usual environment, your brain is outside of its routine. I think it’s important for unleashing a certain amount of daring and creativity within your work.

Jake Muzzy, right and Christopher Ferrer

Jake Muzzy, right and Christopher Ferrer

EM: Some of the musicians in the front of the bus have questions for you. This question is from Jake Muzzy, one of our cellists: “Tell us how writing by hand, which is how you work, shapes your composing?”
MZ: Obviously you’re talking in the context of a time when composers don’t necessarily start here [he gestures to the sheets of handwritten music]. They might record a fragment of something, start working electronically, and compose acoustic music around that. Composers might go directly to Finale and use playback to discern where they are in a piece. They’re “using the tools”—quotation marks—to try to get to know their own music.

I’m always encouraging my students to have the experience of doing the initial drafts by hand. Balances, performer dynamics—when you start working at the computer, you might not consider that stuff as deeply. You have to consider the performing logistics, the dynamics of how somebody’s going to react to a certain sound in the orchestra, and how they’ll play from there.

The handwriting process helps build that muscle, that mental representation of your own music, a mental playback where you understand what’s going to happen in an orchestra or a chamber ensemble. It’s really important for me personally to develop that imagination around sound.

Kate Carter

Kate Carter

EM: This last question is from another of our violinists, Kate Carter: “What kind of nonclassical music do you like to listen to?”
MZ: Sting is definitely at the top of my list. That reveals my age. There’s just something so unaffected about him. There’s subtlety and intricacy, but it’s never for show or for a self-conscious need to be more sophisticated. I love the nostalgia and the purity of the messages in his songs.

I’d also have to name Rush. That was what we used to call “hard rock”—it feels funny even saying that anymore. But they had this incredible imagination, and I always felt transported listening to them. Seeing them live, with Neil Pert and pitched percussion—at that time there was hardly anyone [in rock] doing pitched percussion, or thinking melodically about drums. Rush felt like a nice mix between my musical upbringing, with a father who was a serious Germanic composer, and riding to school and hearing bands like Motley Crue.

I love Radiohead. That’s a group where there is no excess—it’s all really concentrated on what they want to say. I love atmospheric kinds of music where it doesn’t break the sound environment you’re listening to, to get in an extra verse. It is authentically what it’s trying to be. When Radiohead sets the stage for a particular song, you’re there from the beginning to the end.That’s what I like about music in general—the concentration that allows you to enter something for the duration.

My kid is listening to Macklemore now, but I just find that entertaining. It’s always more fun to listen to something when you see your kid rapping all the words.

Stacy Garrop: With a Story to Tell


In the garden at the Church of the Ascension
New York, New York
April 17, 2013—2 p.m.
Filmed, condensed, and edited by Molly Sheridan
Transcribed by Julia Lu
Poster image by SnoStudios Photography

Stacy Garrop is a composer of remarkable balance and discipline. Her composition catalog neatly covers all manner of ensembles, and her subject matter has ranged from Medusa to Eleanor Roosevelt. She may not be one to aggressively sell her music at cocktail parties, but she won’t shy away from cold calling performers from her desk the next day. She teaches her students to identify their weaknesses and figure out how to manage them. It’s a lesson she applied to herself first, pinpointing personal composition hurdles and designing neatly efficient ways to combat them.

When we met during rehearsals for her choral work Love’s Philosophy in New York this past April, she moved between performance preparation with the singers in the Church of the Ascension sanctuary and on-camera conversation in the venue’s garden courtyard, fielding questions about her music and her career with an easy confidence but a notable lack of pretension. Those character traits are perhaps what attracted her to the Midwest, where she now makes her home. Though raised in California, her education brought her to the University of Michigan, University of Chicago, and finally Indiana University. She eventually settled in Chicago, where she now heads the composition department at the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University.

Stacy Garrop is also a composer with stories to tell. The role of narrative—whether indirectly or overtly applied to the final composition—is a central factor in her typical working process. In it, she had found a way to shape and chart the sonic image she wants her music to ultimately project to the world beyond her studio.

When all is considered, Garrop appreciates that it’s a mix of many factors that have contributed to the music she makes and the success she’s achieved, but ultimately it hinges on what she is willing to do for the work herself:

I think you not only have to have the discipline to write and to get back to people and to be on top of your website, but you also have to be disciplined about chasing down opportunities. You can’t just sit back and think that maybe a publisher will do that for you, or maybe your recording will get out there and, miraculously, everyone will want to do the piece. I just don’t know if one competition or one recording or one piece can change your path all that much….In general, these careers are slow building. They’re one step at a time, and you have to be organized to make that happen.

They are steps Garrop keeps taking. The evening following our interview, the Voices of Ascension performance of Love’s Philosophy won her The Sorel Medallion in Choral Composition.

***

Molly Sheridan: You’ve spoken often about the place of narrative in your work, so I thought we might begin by discussing how important that is in terms of your working method, and how vital it is for you to communicate that to the audience. Are you demonstrating that storyline to them in the music and the program notes, or is that simply a private part of your own working process?

Stacy Garrop: As a composer, I’m both a visual and auditory person. The visual part likes to see a story in my head—like a movie, basically. It’s not that I’m a movie composer, because I’m far from it, but I feel like if I can tell myself a story, and have myself follow that story as I’m writing, then that narrative will help me guide the shape of that piece. Sometimes I think it’s important to the audience: If it’s about Medusa, I want people to understand that Medusa is going from being lovely to being hideous. But other times the narrative is just mostly for myself. So I have a piece called Frammenti which is basically five miniature movements, but each is based on an abstract idea. For me, what was important was the narrative within each movement—Is it going to get louder? Is it going to get softer? Is it going to get boisterous?—whatever those characteristics were. In that case, I don’t care if the audience gets it or not. That’s not the concern of the piece.

MS: I heard you speaking about the working process surrounding Becoming Medusa in a promotional video, and you mentioned sketching it out and thinking about it narratively in a way that I would imagine a novelist might. What is your working process in that case?

SG: I do like to use charts a lot. In years past, especially when I was working on Becoming Medusa, I had a picture where she was half beautiful and half ugly. I put that up right in front of me as I composed. But I also have a line graph that basically shows tension along the y-axis and time along the x-axis. If it starts with Medusa being ugly, because it’s a foreshadowing, then I’ll have a big spike on my chart and that might say “introduction.” Then I get to the A material, and the tension is now very low. So I can track and write out the form of the piece before I actually start putting notes down. But usually I try to put a few notes down—at least get motives, some idea of what I want to play with. Then that starts to suggest more and more of a shape to me. Usually by the end of the first couple of days, I have the shape down, and more often than not, when I go back and look at it [after the piece is done], I’ve actually attained that shape. Earlier on, I wasn’t so good at that. But now I seem to be doing much better.

Garrop explains the graphs she uses while composing.

Garrop explains the graphs she uses while composing.

MS: What are you actually thinking about when you’re in that very, very early process and you’re making shapes and charts?

SG: The worst part of composing for me is the beginning of a piece. I can’t get settled. If the apartment is messy, I have to clean it. I feel like I have to get my mind in order. And if there’s anything distracting me, I’ll use that as an excuse to run away from the paper. But what I have learned over the years is to just get myself to sit down long enough to brainstorm on a blank sheet of paper—not even manuscript paper, just written ideas about what I want for the piece. So for Medusa, I wanted to tell the story that she starts off the piece as a beautiful woman, who then taunts a goddess. Then the goddess turns her into the gorgon that we know. That’s a slightly different story than the Medusa that we know about from the movies. That gave me enough to say, okay, this is what I’m going to do in words. Now I can sit down at my keyboard and start just noodling around and see what kind of ideas I can come up with from there.

MS: Because your attraction to words is coming up again, why not use words? Why use music to tell these stories?

SG: Actually I’ve started to try to write short stories. I take the El to and from work every day in Chicago, and it’s about a 45- to 60-minute train ride. I absolutely love science fiction short stories, so I started trying to write them. It’s really hard to have that kind of control over words. I have that control, I feel, over music, but not at all in words. So right now it’s a really fun, but kind of scary, side venture. I did try writing poetry much younger in my life, until I discovered Edna St. Vincent Millay and then realized I had nothing on her. That was pretty much it for my poetry days.

MS: But you do feel comfortable writing music?

SG: Yes, once I get past the problem I was describing about not knowing how to get started. Another thing that I do to really help with that is I have what I call a “minute a day” challenge: Every day when I’m starting a piece, I have to write a minute of music. It doesn’t have to be good. It doesn’t have to be bad. It just has to be a minute of music. And that way I feel like at the end of seven days, I’ll have seven minutes of music that I can choose from and start to say, “Okay, that’s a good idea over here, but that’s terrible”—and we just throw that part away. But that gives me some choices. Usually I start that within whatever genre I’m working in. So for instance, right now, I’m working on a piece for the Lincoln Trio, and I’ve been looking at a lot of piano trios. I’ve been looking at Joan Tower’s Trio Cavany and Aaron Kernis’s Still Movement with Hymn, which isn’t actually a piano trio. It’s a piano quartet. But I’m writing a 25-minute piece, and both of those pieces approximate that length. So I’m looking at their ideas, and then I’m brainstorming about what it is that’s important to me that I want to put in there.

MS: You’ve mentioned that you’re a visual person, and I know that somewhere you said that your studio was the mostly brightly decorated room in your home. What do you like to surround yourself with when you’re doing this work? You mentioned pictures and charts, but is there more to that visual comfort zone for you?

SG: My husband and I finally were able to get a condo. It was really great because we’ve been in apartments for so long where you can’t put any paint on the walls. So I painted my studio purple. Then, in addition to that, I went to a lot of colonies back when I was in my early 30s, and I kept meeting all these artists. That’s where I really started getting the visual interest going. So I started collecting pictures, both from trips I was taking and from colony experiences. I also began trading CDs of my music with other artists at colonies. So I’ve had visual artists draw pictures for me or paint something, and all the artwork I’ve collected is sitting on one whole wall of my studio. I also go to a lot of art expositions and things like that. I mean, I can’t really afford the art itself, but artists tend to make these little postcards that have a picture of their artwork, so that goes up on my wall, too.

I also have done pottery for ten years, and I feel like doing pottery helped me think about process in a whole other way. It’s the same thing I got out of going to artist colonies where you sit down with a filmmaker or a writer, and you talk about their process. Then you start to see, wow, they’re using a different language, but they’re also talking about how you get from point A to point B and in a way that’s convincing. Pottery has also taught me a lot about patience. If you are at all trying to force a piece to happen, you’re going to nudge the clay, and then it’s going to be forever ruined. So I think that kind of patience actually has helped me back in the composing world: To just take a deep breath, do my thing where I write a minute of music a day at the beginning and know at the end of that week, I am going to have options. I think all those things are processes that let me know that I don’t have to go with my first impulse. I can really take my time and find the ideas that I feel very strongly about.

MS: That’s a very tactile thing to engage with, too. I suppose composition can be, depending on your working methods, but it’s not quite the same thing.

SG: I think composing is such an isolated thing. Obviously, we have our concerts with performers and all that. But the creation itself, the process for me is sitting in a room by myself, working at my piano. So to be surrounded by 20 other potters and hearing all these conversations going on as you’re trying to work, it’s the utter opposite experience of being a composer. Also, it teaches you that it’s okay to mess up. I think we all get to a level in our careers where we feel that it’s scary to mess up. If we mess up, someone’s going to notice and they’re going to write a review that isn’t positive. In pottery, I feel like I can just mess up all the time, and no one will ever know. I just stomp it back down into a lump of clay and try again. So it’s given me some freedom that I don’t have in the musical world.

MS: What is your musical background? You were a pianist originally, right?

SG: I did play piano, although I was never very good. I can admit that. I sang in choirs starting in third grade and all the way through my master’s. I absolutely loved singing in choirs. I was an alto, and I think that’s why I write such good, juicy bits for altos in choir pieces, because I always felt like we got cheated. I also played saxophone in marching band for three years in high school. So I started off doing all that, but then in my junior year of high school, there was an AP music theory class. The teacher was a jazz trumpet player, and he said one night to go home and write a piece of music. I’d never before thought that anybody wrote music. I was pretty naïve as a kid. I’ll admit that, too. I mean, I know I was naïve because I thought all the history had already been written. But in this case, the minute he said go home and write a piece of music, it was like this door opened that had always been shut. Suddenly there it is and you’re looking at a whole new room, and all these colors are there. I just didn’t want to leave it. So, after that assignment, I just started writing more and more pieces. Then a friend of the family hooked me up with a composer in the Bay Area, and I studied privately with him for the rest of high school.

MS: Voice is obviously something you’ve spent a lot of time with, but overall something that stood out to me about your catalog is that you’re a very balanced composer. You have all the bases covered. It’s a very neat though broad package.

Garrop with the the Capitol Quartet after the premiere of Flight of Icarus March 2013

Garrop with the the Capitol Quartet after the premiere of Flight of Icarus March 2013

SG: I think that was maybe more a result of the schools that I went to. The first was University of Michigan, and they had a really good percussion program and very strong saxophone program. That’s also where I saw composers writing for orchestra and I began experimenting with string quartets. I went to the University of Chicago after that. That was a research school and I really didn’t have as many performances. I discovered that I was probably a happier person if I’m at a performance school. So, I got my master’s, and I went on to Indiana University. They had six orchestras, choirs everywhere, and, once again, they had a strong saxophone program and a strong percussion program. So that really helped open some doors that otherwise I might not have considered. All the saxophone writing I had done is because of the saxophonists that I met, especially Christopher Creviston who is teaching now at Arizona State University, Tempe. We were students together at Michigan, and he asked me to write a piece. Fifteen years later he found me and said, “Do you remember this piece?” And from there, that’s led to a commission with his current group, Capitol Quartet, for saxophone quartet.

But I do feel like I try to be balanced. I want to have orchestra, choir, and chamber, and in particular within chamber, I want to have piano trio and string quartet and saxophone music at all times. I really do want that kind of diversity. The problem I feel like is that there are certain pieces I want to be writing and I’m not necessarily getting the opportunities to yet. For instance, solo piano. I can’t believe out of everything I’ve done, I only have two solo piano works. There was one more at one point, but I didn’t think it should last the test of time so I destroyed it. But other than that, it really is quite funny that I’ve gotten this far without more solo repertoire.

MS: I was curious about another aspect of your works list because there is one piece from ’92 listed in your catalog, and you can the count on one hand material from the late ’90s, and then this huge body of work explodes from there. I’m trying to do the math on your age and where you might have been at that point in your education. Did something concretely shift for you in there, artistically or circumstantially?

SG: It’s funny you noticed that because I feel like, as a composer, I have a sliding scale of what I think works. I call it seeing the holes. When you’re writing a piece, you think it’s perfect. You’re thrilled. Maybe four to five years later, you start to see the holes in it, and realize, okay, that’s not as strong. Maybe it can be two years. But as I was going through school, I was changing and evolving so quickly, that the seeing-the-holes period was only about six months to a year. It really started lengthening after I finished my training or was getting close to finishing my training in Indiana. So what I took out were almost all the student works.

The reason why the one from 1992 is in there is because it’s my first string quartet. I didn’t want to eradicate it. I’ve gone on and I’ve written three more string quartets, and you can’t call something number two if there’s no evidence of a number one. And honestly, for a student piece, it’s not that bad. So I’m okay with it being out there. Actually, that piece helped get me onto a concert series that helped change and shape my entire career. So it’s not bad to have these student works out there, as long as you’re okay with it getting performed. There have been a few other pieces along the way, like the piano solo I mentioned. It took about a year to realize that it wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on, and I should just remove it from my catalogue. So I think for me, the test of “Am I getting better as a composer?” is, “Do I have less of that happening? Is my catalog staying steady, or am I taking things out?” So at this point, I think I’m doing pretty well.

MS: I was wondering if that was the direction you were moving or if there was a danger you could just become increasingly hypercritical of yourself.

SG: I’m really not that worried about it. There are certainly a lot of areas that I’m very comfortable in now, like the chamber world and the choir world especially. Orchestra writing is always a little trickier because you try to get the balance as well as you can between the woodwinds, the brass, and the percussion and everything, but it takes going to the rehearsals to really start to sort out what’s really going on. But I feel like now, if I know I’m writing badly, I stop myself much sooner. That was my mistake years ago. I wouldn’t do that one minute a day trick, I would just go with my first impulse and, more often than not, I knew along the way that something was wrong. But it was too late. The commission was due, etc. So, what I’ve done is start each piece with just brainstorming for a week. No pressure to just delve into it. That really helps, as well as having a big buffer zone on commissions. If a commission deadline is, let’s say, September 1, I will actually have that score due a month or two before that in my own calendar. Then I have the pressure that I need to make the work happen, but if I’m unhappy with the piece, I know that I’ve got the time to fix it.

Garrop lecturing

Garrop lecturing about various Chicago artists and their websites.

MS: Every time I speak with you, I take away the impression that you are a very disciplined person, both in building your career and making your art.

SG: I feel like going for the doctorate really teaches you how to organize your head. I think that’s the biggest thing anyone can learn going through school. All the time I’m telling my students, you have to figure out how your mind works, and then figure out where your strengths are. If you know where you’re weak, like you’re a procrastinator, you’re going to have to work around that. So I feel like for me, the challenge of all the years of school was figuring out all those issues, so when I graduated, I could really hit the ground running as a professional.

In addition to being organized, as much as I can be, I took on some campaigns earlier in my career. So I wrote a choir piece. I would cold call 30 choirs, and I would send out a recording and the score. I did campaign after campaign like that, but they paid off. It only takes one person programming that piece to then lead to four more commissions. So I think you not only have to have the discipline to write and to get back to people and to be on top of your website, but you also have to be disciplined about chasing down opportunities. You can’t just sit back and think that maybe a publisher will do that for you, or maybe your recording will get out there and, miraculously, everyone will want to do the piece. I just don’t know if one competition or one recording or one piece can change your path all that much. I mean, granted if you were to win something like the Pulitzer or the Grawemeyer, perhaps. Or even the MacArthur. But I think in general, these careers are slow building. They’re one step at a time, and you have to be organized to make that happen.

MS: You don’t strike me as a particularly aggressive self-promoter. So, for you to have started cold calling ensembles in such a strategic way is unexpected. Where did the idea even come from?

SG: The funniest part is that growing up in California—not that California has anything to do with it—I was just very laid back and shy. I guess in my undergrad years, I learned to make friends with musicians. But it wasn’t until my doctorate that it finally hit me: If I was going to take control of my career, I had to do it myself. No one else was going to do it. There was one defining moment where I put this all together. I was staring out my window and realized I could keep staring out that window forever, or I could get off my rear and start making phone calls and get a recital together. And I went with option two.

The campaigns though, I think it’s because I watched too many people in academia who had wonderful music, but it wasn’t getting out there anywhere. And I would ask, “Well, what are you doing about it?” And they would say, “Oh, you know, just getting it published,” or “Just getting it recorded.” It didn’t seem like that was the best strategy for me. I would need to start to push it out there further. I didn’t go to any East Coast schools, and I wondered perhaps if I had, if maybe some more connections would have been presented. But nonetheless, I felt like, okay, I can do this. I just looked at Chorus America, ACDA, the North American Saxophone Alliance. You look at some of these big websites and see who their members are. Chamber Music America is a particularly good one for that. Actually, I did a campaign in the last year or two using Chamber Music America. I got [a list of] all their member string quartets and piano trios, and I sent them all information. This time through email, since now it’s become more acceptable.

MS: You have written a lot of text-based or text-inspired pieces, which makes sense to me considering your narrative interests. It surprised me when you said Edna St. Vincent Millay’s work squashed your own poetry ambitions, because you’ve actually set a lot of her work!

SG: It started because one of the very first artist colonies I went to was the Millay Colony in Austerlitz, New York. While I was there, I was working on a piece for saxophone and piano called Tantrum, but I came across a book of her poetry, of course, and thought, since I’m here, I should give it a whirl. I began reading her sonnets, and they were just so eloquent—14 lines long and having a rhyming verse, but still relevant today. I just thought, okay, I would love to do some massive project, where I set—I think I was aiming for originally about 30 of her sonnets. As the years went on, I think I wrote one sonnet set per year from 2000 to 2006. I got around number 17 or 18, and I finally had to call it quits because a very wise conductor, Christopher Bell of the Grant Park Chorus in Chicago, said to me, “You should really set something other than Millay. You should have more in your portfolio.” And he was right. I was just so thankful that he was blatantly honest with me. Composers need to hear that honesty every now and then. And that’s when he said, “You really have to get past the Millay and move on.”

It’s been really tempting to try to go back and finish the project. I had actually paired up a bunch of sonnets into particular sets. So there’s a set about love, and there’s a set about war, and so on. Maybe someday I’ll go back and visit that. In the meantime, I’ve done other big projects involving text. One is The Book of American Poetry. That’s about an hour of music, and it’s four volumes of poetry. Each volume contains five poems by five different poets. I set the first ten for baritone and Pierrot ensemble, and the second ten are for mezzo and Pierrot. But then I’m also making piano arrangements of all of them.

MS: You’ve done that in a few places, right, offering options on work to give it a broader life?

SG: Yeah, I wrote it for Pierrot ensemble because it was for the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. They had a competition, and I won and they said, “Okay, what do you want to do?” I said, “I want to do a Book of American Poetry.” Once they understood the scope of my project, they were on board. But then I discovered that it’s really hard to get Pierrot ensembles together elsewhere with baritones. So to give the piece more life, my husband is doing the piano arrangements for volumes one and two, and I did the arrangements for volumes three and four.

I’ve done it the other way, too. I wrote a piece called In Eleanor’s Words, about Eleanor Roosevelt; that’s a big song cycle. It started off as a piece for piano and voice, but then David Dzubay at Indiana University and I were talking, and he said, “I’d love to have you come out for a residency. What pieces would you like to have done?” And I said, “How do you feel about an orchestration of In Eleanor’s Words?” So that’s when I created the larger version. That’s also when I discovered that it’s much easier to go from large down to small than it is from small out to large. At least for me it is.

MS: In all these examples of your interest in stories and setting text, it strikes me that these are not your personal stories, but very often items of historic importance or mythology or poetry. What about that speaks to you so strongly?

SG: I wish I knew. I mean, some of these things happened because of commissions. In Eleanor’s Words was a commission by Tom and Nadine Hamilton. They’re residents of Washington, D.C., and they commissioned a piece in honor of Tom’s mother who had been in public service all her life and who liked Eleanor Roosevelt. Since I teach at Roosevelt University, it made sense to put it all together, and what do you know? Out comes a piece. I think that it’s easy for a composer to just see what the flow of the commissions are and to just go with that, whereas if you really have your own agenda, you have to start to force that every now and then. So in the case of the Millay sonnets, I felt so strongly about that project. When I did that cold call many years ago, where I sent out my music to 30 choirs, Volti in San Francisco was the choir that answered. They not only performed the piece that I sent them, but they commissioned three or four others over the next decade and many of those were the Millay sonnets. I said to them, “I want to do Millay. I want to do this big cycle.” And they said, “Great! Let us help you out.” So it’s great to have commissions, but it’s also great to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve and make sure that you work that into your commissioning schedule, if you can.

Photo by Don Fogg

World premiere of Garrop’s Songs of Joy and Refuge by PEBCC’s high school mixed voice choir Ecco, conducted by Clifton Massey on March 23, 2013. Photo by Don Fogg

MS: Where did you get this business sense? It seems like you have a really smart way of approaching your career, and I’m curious where you learned this.

SG: I don’t really know. I think part of what happened is I saw how other people handled their careers. For instance, there was a guy at Michigan when I was there. He was very talented musically, but he also had this incredible gift to be able to walk up to anybody and sell his music to them, to basically say, “Hey, I’ve got a performance tonight. You should go hear it.” He would walk up to performers he’d never met and hand out his music. I tried to emulate it, and I just felt sick to my stomach. I couldn’t do it. It was not in me. About 12 years ago, as I was getting out of school, I just made the decision that if it took me a little longer to have a career, then that’s the way it was going to be. I’m not the person that’s going to be really in your face all the time. So that’s where I started getting very good at campaigns, and getting good at having a web presence, and doing a lot of business through email. If someone emails me, I answer within 24 hours. So all those parts put together I think eventually started to fill out the bigger picture. Sometimes I do wonder, maybe my career could have moved a little faster if I’d been a little bit more aggressive, but I would not have been comfortable doing that.

MS: Yeah, but on the other hand, you clearly have found what does work for you.

SG: Right, but I think it took all that experimentation back in school and trying to emulate the behavior of others to realize, “Oh, I can’t do that,” or “Okay, that worked.” I think it was observing that really helped me figure out what I wanted to do.

MS: Very early on you mentioned specifically that you’re not a film composer. I was curious about that. For as diverse as your portfolio is, and as much as you love exploring storylines, I don’t believe there are any film scores or video games in it. In a way, that seems like it would be a natural affinity, but you stayed away from that.

SG: It’s not so much staying away as it is that I really haven’t stumbled across the opportunity yet. I have to admit I know a little more about video game music than I should. My husband plays these games, and I realize the music is getting quite, quite advanced. I would love to go into writing movie music, but I’m in Chicago. I’m not on the right coast. Although I do think it would be hard for someone like me. The things that interest me the most in music are form and tension and relaxation. So if there’s not a strong formal structure, then I’m not happy with the piece. What can be hard about writing for movies is that you’re constantly having that formal structure ripped out from under your feet. If you have to extend it by five seconds or they don’t like a theme that you wrote and you have to rethink it overnight—that can be hard if you’re used to having final, set structures that you really feel good about. So, I’d love to explore it someday, but you know, sometime in the future. Not any time soon.

MS: You mentioned not being on “the right coast.” How important is Chicago to you? What made you decide to build a career and life for yourself in that place?

SG: People used to say to me when I was in school, “You should pick your last school carefully, because that might be where you end up.” And I thought, “Ha-ha, that’s really funny!”, but I actually did end up in the Midwest. All my schools just circled the Midwest area.

I feel like Chicago has been really good for me. In the last 15 years, maybe even the last 7 years in particular, there’s just been an explosion of ensembles. So we have new music ensembles. We have choirs. We even have a new opera company that has formed. It’s a great time to be in Chicago. So for someone like me, it’s been a perfect city to not have to go to New York—no offense to New York. It’s a great place to visit, but I’m more of a Midwesterner I would say at this point.

MS: That’s interesting because you came from the West Coast, right?

SG: I’m from California, and I have to admit, every time I go home and visit it’s like, “Why did I give this up? It’s so beautiful out here.” The weather is nice almost the whole year through. But I think at that time, there weren’t enough composition teachers in the West Coast area. Almost all the schools I looked at were in the Midwest or on the East Coast. I have also really enjoyed building a composition program at Roosevelt University. After going to two very large performance schools where there’s a faculty of five or six people, it was a little bit surprising to go into a program of just two people. But that also allowed me to shape it a lot faster than I probably could have if I had been at a major performance school. So my colleague Kyong Mee Choi and I have really tried to focus on giving opportunities that you might not get in a regular college setting. We bring in people like Timothy McAllister, the saxophonist from Prism Quartet, or Timothy Monroe, the flutist from eighth blackbird, and they do workshops with our composers. They sight read the works; they give feedback. We have a competition, and they choose a couple winners and perform the pieces on concerts at Roosevelt. We do the same with Gaudete Brass Quintet—all the students have to write little fanfares. We’ve been having the Vector Recording Project with the orchestra, so students don’t just get a piece read, they actually get it professionally recorded.

Particularly with continually rising costs for a university education, I’m asked by prospective students about the value of a college degree as a composer. In looking back over my own training, I couldn’t have learned all the skills I needed to outside of a university music school—my high school music training had been weak, and I had many, many skills to acquire before I could call myself a composer. I feel that attending a university as an undergraduate is very important to one’s development as a composer, as you get a complete, well-rounded experience over the course of a four-year program. Depending on what you wish to do next, you may have enough skills to exit straight into the real world and carry out a career, or it could be that taking the time to get a master’s first will help you obtain even more skills that you’ll find useful. People who wish to teach at a university need to earn a doctorate in order to have the credentials schools are looking for when hiring, but if you’re not planning on doing so, perhaps you don’t need to go any further if you’ve developed your skills far enough. So it is important to start thinking about what it is you truly want to do when you graduate. Is it to teach? Write music for movies? Start a new music ensemble and write music for it? Investigate what skills you need to attain your goal, and work on developing those skills while still in school so you’ll be ready to hit the ground running when you get out. Play to your own personal strengths. Hopefully you’ll discover a path to a career that will make you feel excited, enriched, and rewarded.

I think a lot of schools are coming around to the fact that they need entrepreneurship programs, and Roosevelt at the moment doesn’t have one yet, but I believe they’re moving in that direction. Nonetheless, I know a lot of us have integrated ideas into our courses. For instance, in my composition seminar last year, all my students had to get into groups of three or four and create new businesses. They had to have a mission statement, a five-year plan, a ten-year plan, and then had to have a website up or something to show that this is what they do. It was really exciting for me to see just how creative they got. It really taught me that they want to be able to put this together before they leave. A part of my job is to really give them professional opportunities that hopefully bridge the gap as they’re leaving the school. They are starting these conversations with professionals. They know how to build their own website, and how to write their own CV or how to go knock on doors and hand out scores. I’m hoping that gives them an edge—that they have not just the compositional skills, but when they walk out the door, they have the business side somewhat already going. Hopefully that will increase their chances of being successful.

MS: How do you make enough room for your own music and your own career in the midst of that work?

SG: It can be a bit of a challenge. I feel like I have to choose my commissions very carefully in terms of when I write what. This past fall at the very beginning of the semester, I wrote one choir piece, and then I wrote a piece for two trumpets and piano and then two art songs. That took me up to probably mid-January. Then I started a piano trio, and that was my downfall, because I got all those short pieces done while teaching—it doesn’t take as much concentration to do a six-minute piece here, or a five-minute piece there. But to do a 25-minute piano trio while teaching, especially during audition season, I learned I’m not capable of that. So that’s one thing: Strategize your year. The other thing is I don’t go into Roosevelt all five days. I try to go in just four, and some lucky weeks, I may just get in three, depending on how many meetings we have. But I find I’d rather work longer days downtown so I have a full day to compose when I’m off. I’m not the type of person who can just turn around after a long day of teaching and somehow have energy left to start composing. I can answer emails. I can send out scores. I can do that other business work, but I can’t actually be creative.

MS: Do you need a specific time of day or routine, or do you just need an actual day where you don’t have to separate the administration from the creativity?

SG: It is better if I just have a whole day, or a week, or a month, or a year. I think that’s why the art colonies were so fantastic, because it removes you from paying bills or anything else. You just sit and you compose all day. I have an 88-key synthesizer, but it’s right next to my computer. So if my computer is turned on and dinging at me as email comes in, then of course you stop composing. I’ve learned I have to just turn everything off. Pretend nothing else exists and just get myself into the space. I mentioned earlier, I think starting pieces is always the trickiest for me and I do a whole thing where I have to straighten up the condo and all that. But once I’m into the process, it’s really quite comfortable to move in and out of it. So I can get up and answer an email, or go get the mail, or whatever, and then come back and be right back into the piece wherever I left off. And that usually lasts up until I finish the piece.

MS: You mentioned the period when you were going to a lot of those colonies. Is that something you had the freedom to do just because of where you were in school or is that something you expect you’ll do throughout your life?

SG: I think I started going to colonies because one of my teachers, Claude Baker from Indiana University, said I should take a look at them. I applied to a few, and I actually got into the ones I applied to. So that’s when I just strung them all up in a row and colony hopped for the year after I finished my coursework but before I’d actually finished the dissertation. One of these was the Banff Center for the Arts in Canada. Another one was the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, where I got to meet Aaron Jay Kernis and we worked together. Then there was the MacDowell Colony and the Millay Colony, and other ones in between.

That’s where I just finally put it all together. When you’re in school and you’re reading books, you’re writing papers, you’re certainly obtaining the knowledge, but you don’t necessarily know how to apply it yet. I felt like that was the first time I learned how to take all that information I’d been collecting and apply it in whatever facet I wanted to. So for me, it was a really great eye opener. I think it gets harder though as you get more responsibility to be able to carve out the kind of time that you really need to go to a colony. I seem to have stopped going for the moment, and that’s fine. Maybe someday I’ll feel the need to go again, but I also have a home studio situation now, which is pretty quiet and which works very well. That hadn’t always been the case in past years. That was another reason to go to these colonies—to have the space and time where I really wouldn’t be disturbed.

MS: You’ll have to go back to the Millay Colony and finish the settings; it’s the perfect application.

SG: Well, that’s just it. When I started the whole process, I had no idea I was going to compose all these sonnets. So I really want to go back and actually write the final sonnets up there. That would be really cool. I think they have a policy where they don’t want people to return, but they do have these small residencies in January, where you can just go with maybe a specific project. It’s not necessarily the actual colony stay. So what I need to do is get my act together and put in an application for that particular type. The thing I regret when I went to the colony is that you’re supposed to get a tour of Millay’s house. It’s left pretty much intact from the day she died. But the day that we were supposed to go, the caretaker’s wife went into the hospital. So part of me feels like I want to go back and get that tour, man. I want to just confront whatever ghosts might be there and just say, “I set your poetry. Don’t be mad at me.”

MS: For as interested in narrative as you are, as a listener, I’ve never felt overwhelmed or emotionally manipulated by that aspect of your work. Instead it’s like being a third-party observer. Is the audience in your mind when you’re composing and is there ultimately a reaction you’re looking for, that you’re listening for in the lobby after the performances? Or is that not a part of your process?

SG: I think there have been moments where I’ve been genuinely concerned how an audience might react. Most of the time I’m not. I think that my language tends to be more accessible than not, so I guess I’m kind of lucky that way, or I’ve made the choice to be that way. But there’s a moment in my String Quartet No. 2, the third movement called Inner Demons, where you’ve heard four themes presented in a scherzo-trio form, and then they all begin to mix together and it’s chaos for about a minute straight. I was panicking before that first performance and wondering if people were just going to tune out or get disgusted. Will anybody do the ultimate “stand up and storm out” thing? When it premiered, I did see a lot of heads turn and people look at each other at that moment. But it passed. They all got through it. The rest of the quartet finished, and it turned out to be, I think, the strongest movement of that piece. So I feel like it was a really good risk to take. Sometimes you just have to not worry about how the audience is going to react.

What is interesting, though, is a lot of times people won’t tell the composer what they really think, but they don’t know who the composer’s husband is. So, there’s been many times where my husband has been circulating in the lobby after and he’ll just hear bits of conversation, and that gets hysterical. So that’s how I really get my feedback. It’s nice when people come up who are supportive, but I would love to occasionally get someone who says, “This part was great, but this other spot didn’t do as much for me.” It’s great to get past that first level and say where’s the feedback? I really need to shape this piece into something stronger. Because I do feel like the first performance is really just a debugging session. It’s not a perfect piece by any means. I’m lucky if I get it 95, 96 percent right. And it’s the second performance where you get it to about 98, 99 percent. And finally, by the third performance, that’s where I think it should be completely settled.

MS: Do you have any reservations about doing serious editing after the first performance?

SG: I will absolutely do it if it needs it. In the case of Becoming Medusa, it was [originally] a minute and fifteen seconds longer than it now is. There’s a minute in there, and another 15 seconds elsewhere, where I just felt that this is not doing anything for the piece. It’s wasting time, and it’s taking away from the rest of the moments. So I had to butcher it, but I think it made for a stronger piece. It is hard to do; it is hard to face up. I think it can also be harder the longer you wait. There’s a piece right now in my repertoire, and it needs a revision, but it was written so long ago now that it’s hard to rip apart. I’m no longer there as a composer. I don’t know what was important to me necessarily that I want to preserve, and what things I should put in that are important to me now in the re-write.

MS: Considering that evolution, when you look back, do you feel like the career that you’ve had so far is the one that you expected to have, either when you went into undergrad, or when you left your Ph.D. program? Have things turned out the way you expected?

SG: I guess the funny thing about me is, I knew I wanted to be a composer, but I didn’t really know what that would be. I knew I wanted to be successful, but I didn’t know what that would be. The one thing I was sure of is that by the time I was 30, I would be married and have kids. I turned 30, and I wasn’t married, and I didn’t have kids. So the one thing I was so sure about did not happen. In a way that freed me up—anything’s on the table. I can go out and do anything I want. I’m not sure if I’ve really attained all the success that I thought I’d have at this point, but I’m very happy with what I have achieved so far. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have more goals, and I have plenty of projects that I want to be doing. So I’m not quite where I want to be in the future, but for as little as I knew when I was getting out of school, I think I’m doing quite well.

D. J. Sparr: Playing Well With Others


Composer and electric guitarist D. J. Sparr draws energy and inspiration from interacting with other musicians. “That’s why I compose,” he says, “to get to the point where I can be actively working with other musicians.” A full schedule of composition commissions, performances of his own music and that of other composers, and educational residencies ensures that he gets his fill of that vitality.

Sparr grew up playing electric guitar (à la Eddie Van Halen), but put down his axe for a time during studies at the Eastman School of Music. Then, inspired by the composer-performer faculty members at the University of Michigan, he started performing again within the realm of classical music. He has since performed the music of Michael Daugherty, Paul Lansky, and others, as well as his own compositions, such as his electric guitar concerto Violet Bond, written for the California Symphony where he currently serves as Young Composer-in-Residence.

Beyond the electric guitar, Sparr has built a varied catalog of works for chamber ensemble, orchestra, and vocal music. His short-form opera Approaching Ali, commissioned and recently premiered by the Washington National Opera, is based on the book The Tao of Mohammed Ali by author Davis Miller, with a libretto by Mark Campbell. It tells the story of a writer at the brink of middle age who visits his boyhood hero in person in an effort to rekindle the spirit and enthusiasm of his youth. This poignant and charming work could serve well as an introduction to opera for people of any age or background.

Educational outreach is a substantial part of the composer’s work with the California Symphony, as it was during his three-year residency with the Richmond Symphony’s Education and Community Engagement Department and while he served as a faculty member at The Walden School. He takes cues from the performance and creativity workshops of Michael Colgrass for his own educational work, employing exercises such as drawing graphic scores and conducting on the spot. “It’s fun to work with kids, and it’s nice to get to know them,” explains Sparr, “and then some of them show up at [my] concerts, so it’s pretty cool.”

Early on in his composing career, Sparr found that what he needed to realize his own artistic goals was not located in Los Angeles, New York, or other large cities, so he left the urban landscape, moving first to the mid-Atlantic coast, and then to Richmond, Virginia to build a life that focused on the more basic needs of, as he puts it, “shelter, food, and writing.” He continues:

The combination of finding the people who support you, writing as much music as you can, and being as nice to everyone you meet as you possibly can, including being happy for their successes—there’s a saying that “A rising tide lifts all boats”—is really the key to making it work. And the composing world looks pretty great right now.

With Approaching Ali under his belt, a new large orchestra composition in the works to wind up his California Symphony residency, and a debut CD of his chamber music works coming out on Centaur Records later this year, it looks as if Sparr is reaching musical high tide. Hopefully his electric guitar case is waterproofed.

Arlene Sierra: The Evolution of Process


Conducted at The Yale Club in New York City
April 2, 2013—11 a.m.
Filmed, condensed, and edited by Alexandra Gardner
Transcribed by Julia Lu

The music of composer Arlene Sierra is significantly focused on creative forms of process. Whether structures from the natural world such as beehives or flocks of birds, or human-made maps of war game strategy, sturdy foundations ground the musical content of her works for orchestra, chamber ensemble, chorus, and opera. She uses these phenomena as inspirational stepping-stones, not to create a “story” for a composition, but rather as a way to harness raw musical materials and determine their eventual shape and progression. “If you look at the natural world,” Sierra explains, “You have predators, you have prey, you have plants, you have different living things all trying to find and keep their place and survive in relation to all these other things that have other goals. How does that relate to music? Well for me, it was a very interesting way of mapping relationships between different instruments.”

Sierra grew up studying piano, and later discovered how fulfilling composition was through her involvement in the Technology In Music and Related Arts program (TIMARA) at Oberlin College, where she was a student. “Electronic music was a way of getting ideas down, manipulating musical materials without having to worry about notation,” she says. ” For someone who studied piano, and didn’t study composition, that was really a relief and a wonderful opening to ways of manipulating sound and making new things without all the business of getting the notation right.” She very quickly got the notation right and has been composing for varied instrumental ensembles ever since, including the New York Philharmonic, the Seattle Symphony, and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Upon completing her doctorate at the University of Michigan, she spent a two-year stint in Berlin, and after that moved to Britain. She now lives in London with her husband, composer Ken Hesketh, and their baby son, and serves as senior lecturer and director of the MMus program at Cardiff University School of Music in Wales.

During our hour together, Sierra spoke animatedly about a new chamber opera she is creating along with three other composers for soprano Susan Narucki, the differences in working with American and European orchestras, her approach to teaching composition, and her recent return to electronic music. She maintains a dizzyingly busy schedule of composing and teaching activities. As she put it, “Like a fish, you have to keep swimming!”

*

Alexandra Gardner: You just spent the past week at the Yellow Barn Festival in Vermont, workshopping a very interesting chamber opera project. Shall we talk about that first?

Arlene Sierra: Okay. So I’m part of a collaborative project called Cuatro Corridos, which is a chamber opera inspired by the soprano Susan Narucki. She’s a distinguished contemporary music soprano, currently at UCSD, who I’ve had the privilege of working with before; she recorded some of the settings of Neruda for my first CD. She had the idea of putting together a chamber opera with four composers, each writing a scene for four different characters, all part of the same story. The story is about human trafficking on the Mexican-American border. Each character plays a part in the destruction of a crime ring where young women from Mexico were trafficked into the U.S. and used as prostitutes by the undocumented workers in strawberry fields outside San Diego.

I’m doing the character Dalia. Lei Liang is doing another character, as are the two Mexican composers, Hilda Parades and Hebert Vázquez. So among the four of us, four different points of view on this story are put across. It’s all sung by Susan Narucki. It’s an amazing vehicle for her, as well as an opportunity for us. My character Dalia is the one character who is complicit in this crime ring. She started out as victim, and then married one of the criminals, and became the madam basically—the woman who kept the girls in line and forced them to be prostitutes. She starts off making excuses for herself, saying, “I was like them. You know, I used to be an angel.” And then she says, “But I’m a devil, and I’m going to hell.” All of this is in Spanish; beautifully written by the poet and novelist from Mexico, Jorge Volpi. He really brings out the complexities of the characters. Dalia was forced to be a part of this, but like many victims, when they’re given power, they become abusers, and so she’s acting out things that happened to her. And the way that she psychologically makes peace with this, or doesn’t, is a really interesting part of the scene that I’ve written for her.

I was drawn to this character. She’s the oldest, the most complex, and the most conflicted. She’s like the main character from my grand opera, Faustine; an older woman who is obsessed with what she was when she was younger, which I think taps into so many important issues today in terms of how women see themselves, and how society sees and treats women. So this very rich, very conflicted older character is really interesting to me.

AG: So the monodramas will be presented back-to-back in an evening-length concert?

AS: Yeah, it’s an evening—about an hour-plus of music. And each scene is presented separately, but they are going to be knitted together with video and projection of the text, so it will be fully staged. The ensemble is really interesting. The instruments are piano, guitar, and percussion, plus the soprano. So it’s sort of a mini-percussive orchestra. It makes me think of Boulez’s Marteau Sans Maître, because it’s kind of that alto range with the guitar and the mallet-oriented percussion instruments; it was decided that marimba would be a part of it specifically. It also helps that Steven Schick is the percussionist, so we’re all sort of invited to write as much as we want. Though it’s a limited number of instruments, it’s pretty unlimited in terms of virtuosity. So that’s exciting. Aleck Karis is a Professor of Piano at UCSD and a distinguished contemporary music specialist, . And the guitarist, from Mexico, is Pablo Gomez, an excellent player as well. It’s a very unusual instrumentation, but I think it gives the project a sense of place and a very particular color. To hear what the other three composers have done as well as me, of course, with these instruments is really interesting too, because it’s a very challenging group to write for. I think we all dealt with the challenges in our very own individual ways. Also, we all have a very international point of view on issues of borders, where one’s place is, how one deals with oppression, views of different countries, and things like that. But the power of the story, because it deals with current events and with crimes that nobody really knows what to do about, and something so emotive and so horrific really… it’s just a very powerful piece. I’m really, really excited to be a part of it. We presented a workshop performance at Yellow Barn just this week, and we had a chance—the four composers, the four performers, and our writer—to work together very closely and really try out a lot of things. The premiere will be in San Diego in May.

AG: Did you find any big surprises when you were working out the material? Maybe things that worked better than you thought, or less well than expected?

AS: Oh, yes. Well, it’s a new thing for me; I’m trying to figure out how to make this absolutely gorgeous soprano voice become terrifying and nasty. So, I talked with Susan about different ways that she can alter her voice so that she can translate herself from Dalia’s angel of the past—her remembered self—to her current self who’s this ugly old demon, basically. Of course, Susan will never be those things, but to make her voice have something of that quality, especially when she starts to reveal the awful things that she’s done to keep this crime ring going. It’s poetic language, so it’s not too explicit, thankfully. I don’t think it needs to be, but she just says, “I brought these girls to heel. I discipline them.” And you know, it’s a really shocking thing to hear, especially from a character who says, “They’re so beautiful, and I used to be like them. I was innocent. I had no malice.” It’s the perfect opera aria, because you get a real transformation of character. You get a moment to really look into the soul of a very disturbed person. It says something about the composer, maybe! [Laughs] But you have to admit, writing opera, you want these kinds of characters. You want this kind of drama. And as a composer, it is the richest challenge to what we can do musically to make these layers come out of a character.

AG: So how does the soprano feel about having to alter her voice in that way?

AS: Working with a soprano like Susan—I mean, she can do anything. I thought that being low in her voice would be harsher, but we’re going to think of more mid-range ways to get a kind of nasal, witchy voice. Because the thing is, it’s not just what the voice can do. It’s also what is comfortable and workable over the arc of a big piece, which has a lot of virtuosic stuff in it. So you want to get a sound that is different, but isn’t going to irritate the voice. It’s a learning curve.

AG: Does this piece employ any of the process-oriented things that have inspired you in other works, such as concepts of game theory and natural selection?

AS: Yeah. It’s an interesting thing to consider because when you’re writing a dramatic piece or a vocal piece, something to do with poetry, obviously that’s what the piece is about. And that’s what you’re engaging with. But you also want it to connect with your other work. I think for any composer, once you’ve written a few pieces, you have your technique. You have the way that you write. And as much as you want to change it and make it more versatile—and hopefully you do—that’s a challenge in the interest of keeping writing. You want things to be consistent from piece to piece and to be part of the same language. So what I’d done with the character Dalia in this piece is to focus on a part of the text that has a kind of physical connection. Dalia talks about these young women as flacas potrancas. Potranca wasn’t a word I knew before, because it’s specific to a region I’m not so familiar with. But what the phrase means is “skinny fillies,” which is kind of interesting because she’s this trafficker. She’s seeing young women as animals, you know, she’s trading them. It’s a funny phrase, but it’s also a very harsh phrase. And then also these women, these fillies, are trying to run away. They’ve escaped, and that’s the point of the story. So I thought of this kind of nervous, sort of galloping music that had a physical sense of what that phrase is, and of what these women are. They live in this harsh, horrible, physical world, which is about their bodies, and about trying to escape the abuse of their bodies. So the sense of running, of nervousness, of escape, is a big part of the piece.

Also, the aria that I’ve written is for this criminal woman who’s been caught. So she’s in the situation of extreme nervousness where she’s confessing. She’s making excuses. She’s reflecting. So the music has this very nervous sort of dotted-rhythm kind of energy about it. In that way, it relates to some other music that I’ve written which has been about combat, which has been about the natural world, which has been about physical creatures in environmental space. That had something to do with the way that I was able to construct the instrumental music of this piece. But the vocal music is really all about the text and about the characterization. I think that’s what keeps composition interesting—that we can switch from instrument to vocal, from objective to dramatic, and try to make it part of an individual voice.

AG: So in the case of Cuatro Corridos, the story is obviously the primary point of inspiration. Could you give an example of how the other ideas you’ve focused on in the past—about combat, the natural world, etc.— manifest in a piece?

AS: A big part of how I work is applying extra-musical ideas to musical structures. The extra-musical ideas that I’ve been most interested in in the last few years have been connected to two disparate, but actually quite related things. One is game theory, and the other is natural selection and evolution. Connected to game theory is also military strategy. Basically, what they have in common is the idea of agency—different points of view: different characters potentially, but not necessarily, having different interests and different goals, and having to interact. If you look at the natural world, of course, it’s full of that, too. You have predators, you have prey, you have plants, you have different living things all trying to find and keep their place and survive in relation to all these other things that have other goals. How does that relate to music? Well for me, it was a very interesting way of mapping relationships between different instruments. Sun Tzu’s Art of War is a book of inspiration for me for different pieces. For my piece Surrounded Ground, I read a part of Sun Tzu which describes a situation where a large army is being attacked by guerilla fighters. The idea of Surrounded Ground is where this army is: They are on the ground, and they’re surrounded by agencies that know the ground better than they do.

I was commissioned to write Surrounded Ground for sextet—for piano, clarinet, and string quartet. And interestingly, as a companion to the Aaron Copland Sextet from 1933, which is an interesting piece in terms of mixing his kind of more approachable style with more cerebral aspects of his work. So when reading Sun Tzu, I thought about the string quartet in this ensemble as the large army, and the piano and the clarinet as the guerilla fighters. Not because I needed a story, but because in thinking about instruments and about the way that they relate, obviously you have a mass of four instruments that are homogenous, that sound perfectly together, that we associate as something completely free-standing. And then we have these two outliers. Thinking about how they relate got the piece going for me.

It was a really useful way of tackling this mixed ensemble. It was also a way of adding a layer of drama that wouldn’t exist otherwise. If I had written a piece that was like Copland’s—just a pure sextet—it would be about motifs, rhythms, and colors. But there’s a dramatic edge to thinking about a piece as being about agencies in conflict, about being surrounded and escaping. It gave a sense of urgency, a sense of drama, to the music that I wrote. I wouldn’t say that the piece is about anyone winning or losing, and it doesn’t have a story in the way that Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique has a story.

Mind you, I think you can listen to that piece and enjoy it without knowing the story, and I know a lot of composers from his time up to now have private programs that they don’t reveal. I guess I’m more candid about the process and the inspiration for my pieces, but I have to tell you very honestly, it’s not a program. There isn’t a set ending. There’s no hero. It’s something that helps me write, because I set up a process of different relationships, of conflict with or without resolution and the types of motion that go with those sorts of musical ideas. For me, it is a way of organizing, of mapping, of writing types of music that interact.

AG: I think it’s a really interesting way of dealing with your raw musical materials. It’s a good example of one way to approach composition, and of course it demonstrates that there’s more that can be done to generate material than to just think about pure melody, harmony, and rhythm. I have visions when you talk about this approach to composing that are like, for instance—imagine a comic book scene—the tuba taking down the flute in performance! Ka-POW!

AS: Funnily, I have a piece like that! It’s the horn and the trumpet beating out the woodwinds and the strings. Game of Attrition is my “Darwin” piece. It was written for the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth in 2009. What Darwin describes in The Origins of Species is not just the things that most of us learn in school, about how natural selection means that the best adapted creatures will survive where maladapted ones perhaps won’t. It’s also about different kinds of strength evolving that allow different species to survive. What he makes very clear is that there’s a competition for each tiny strata within every environment. So if you eat only seeds, you have to compete with everything else that eats only seeds. It’s very specific in terms of the levels of competition that go on in the natural world.

I was commissioned to write the piece for chamber orchestra, and I thought, well, you can map that onto instruments by thinking about tessitura. So if you had a viola versus a clarinet, versus a horn, versus a marimba, they all live in that same strata of “alto-ness,” where their strongest ranges are. So who would win? And what does winning mean? Who’s louder versus who’s more agile? Those are interesting things to consider. The piece is a succession of competitive duos where instruments of the same tessitura are kind of battling each other. Finally, the last battle is the strings versus the brass. And of course, you’d think the brass would be the loudest, but they run out of air. The strings don’t run out of air. So it’s a kind of counter-intuitive ending, that the strings get the last word. Setting up these conditions, this way of thinking, got me the structure of the piece. It wasn’t that I decided that the strings had to win because I love the string instruments, or that I really had to finish the piece with a particular chord on the strings. It was something that emerged from my process; by setting up patterned music where there are different gestures with instruments vying against each other, the brass are just not going to last as long as the strings. So that was the ending that evolved from my Darwin piece.

AG: I like the idea of questioning the meaning of “best adapted.” It’s not always the biggest, or the most colorful, or even the strongest. It might be that tiny little brown bird over there…

AS: Right! And what we were from? A little mammal that survived in the undergrowth when the dinosaurs were disappearing… not the most promising start.

AG: Exactly. So okay, this is clearly a very personal approach that you bring to your work, and that has shaped your musical identity. We were chatting before this interview about creative authenticity, and I’d love to know more about what the notion of “authenticity” means to you personally.

AS: It’s interesting how identity is important for a lot of artists. I think there are a lot of different ways to interpret that. For some colleagues, it’s about maybe music that they heard as children. Or about music from a country that they feel connected to, or were born in and then have moved away from. Or feeling that their music needs to fit into a cultural or national idea of identity. For me these issues have always been pretty complicated. Like a lot of Americans, my background is very mixed. I have a Latin American surname. Spanish is my second language, not my first language. I think having a voice as a composer, having a point of view as an artist, is deeper even than that. That thinking of one’s roots, one’s identity in terms of geography or nationality, is perhaps a little stereotyped, or potentially can be. So if I say I’m half Puerto Rican, you know, am I obliged to be using Puerto Rican music, or writing music that is like composers who are from Puerto Rico?

I don’t think so, because my experience is very different from theirs. My connection is to New York, really, not to Puerto Rico. I have really affectionate ties to New York and to Ellis Island even—I know which of my ancestors went through there. And I’ve actually never been to Puerto Rico (though of course I’d love to visit)! As an artist, there are so many other things I’m interested in. I love Latin American culture. I love the Spanish language. I’ve set it a lot of times, including in my most recent project. But I’m also interested in visual art; I’m interested in science; I’m interested in dance; I’m interested in the natural world. I would be interested in these things no matter what country I grew up in, no matter what my first language or second language happened to be. I think what makes us individual is that combination of interests and how that filters through us as individual artists, rather than some external pigeonholing of what it means because you’re from this country or that country, or this state, or that city. I think I’ve had an opportunity to reflect on this, too, because I’ve been living outside the United States for a long time now. I moved to Berlin in ’97, and to London in ’99, so I’ve basically lived my whole professional life as an ex-patriot. That makes me more affectionate toward things from home. Thanks to travel and technology and professional opportunities, I’m really engaged with music in the U.S., and I feel that I’m an American composer. I was born in America. But that’s not the limit of what I am as a composer. And I think it helps my work to stay open and to not think of my identity as being limited to one country.

AG: Since you’ve been living in the U.K. for a long time now, are there differences between the musical worlds of the U.K. and the U.S. that you’ve found surprising? Obviously, the U.K. is a smaller, more condensed scene. Everybody really does know each other, I imagine.

AS: Yeah. And they’ve all known each other since they were twelve, that’s the other thing, because they have music schools for children.

AG: If everybody else has known each other since they were small, how did it feel to enter into that scene as an adult?

AS: Starting off in a new country—and I found this in Germany, as well as in the U.K.—is very interesting. The first thing people identify with is nationality. So as a composer, if you say, “I’m an American composer,” well, that has very clear preconceptions to our European colleagues. So, do you write like Copland, or do you write like Phil Glass, or like Elliott Carter? You know, it’s that limited and that divergent. But then you dig a little bit, and you find that actually a lot of colleagues on the other side of the pond have a very nuanced view of American music. Certain American composers are done a lot in Germany, and others are done a lot in the U.K., and maybe they aren’t done so much here. So it gives you a very open point of view of what American music is. Outside of the U.S., you don’t have the divisions. People don’t really understand that this composer is the exact opposite of that composer. They’re all seen as just more American composers. In a way, it’s easier to forget about the polemics when you’re abroad. You’re not arguing the same issues. But if you want to work abroad as an American composer, I think what you have to convince people of is that you’re going to stick around. There are so many American students who come for a semester and then go back home, or come for a year on a Fulbright or something, and then go back home. It was even articulated in Britain—it was, “Are you sure you’re going to stay?” Yes. I am staying. It’s showing that you have a role to play, that you are engaged with the music and with the community where you live. That’s important for any composer anywhere. For me starting out in London, I went to every new music concert; I got to know people. If I thought a piece was terrific, I introduced myself to the composer—especially as a young composer, getting to know senior composers and seeing if they’re teaching at a festival. If I thought their piece was terrific, well, I’d try to go to that festival. Just getting to know people in a very sincere, simple way. If you like someone’s music, well, talk to them. See what they’re about. If you don’t like someone’s music, no problem. You know, next.

It was a really nice way to get started in London, because I had finished all my studies. I was starting to develop my own voice and have my first opportunities, and I was in a place where I could do so away from the arguments of the places where I studied, and around a lot of other people who were from other places. I think London is maybe even more like that than New York, but it’s certainly similar to New York in that everybody there is from somewhere else. I met a lot of Russian composers, French composers, Polish composers, Czech composers, as well as British composers. We all mixed, and we were all at the same festivals and doing the same master classes and things. Being American was just another point of view. And it was an advantage to have that to talk about and maybe disabuse some people of their preconceptions of American music, too.

AG: Since you are quite focused on large musical forms, what has your experience been like dealing with orchestras and opera companies and big institutions in the U.K. Is there, for instance, more rehearsal time for orchestras? Are they structured very differently, or not so much?

AS: As a composer—as a younger composer, particularly—dealing with big institutions, I think we have a lot to do, treading carefully, to make sure that our work is well represented without losing sight of the fact that institutions are full of people who are working very hard on a billion things. So when I work with orchestral players, anywhere, I’m very respectful of the amount of time they have, and what they have to do to get, you know, nine concerts on in five days—the sorts of things that professional orchestral players do. I think my experience working with large institutions helps me to be as efficient in getting my ideas across as I possibly can be; to be as clear with my notation, articulate in my way of describing what I want, as I can be. Because they don’t have time to learn all the nuances that I may be dreaming of, and they certainly don’t have time to know all the really neat ideas I was thinking about when I came up with that phrase. They might want to know if we have a few drinks afterwards, in a post-concert talk, or whatever, but the players’ business is to execute something as well as possible in the shortest amount of time, because that’s what they’re given. It’s not their fault. It’s just the way that things are scheduled. So, our job as composers, in my experience, is just to get our ideas across in a way that people say, “Oh, I get it.” Play it. And talk about it afterwards. Talk about the nuances and the ideas with the conductor, and with the audience, and put things in your program notes. There’s a big difference between what a big institution can do with their schedule, and what a small chamber group can do with their schedule. You have to be respectful of the circumstances, and tailor what you want and what you can expect of people accordingly.

One of the things I’ve learned about working in Britain is that there’s a kind of national pride in sight reading ability over there. The British are famous for being incredible sight-readers. What this gets you is a fantastic first reading of a piece. Then things can dip a little, and then they get better again. But the thing about working with people who can read like that is you’ve got to make sure your material is absolutely clear, because it really makes them very angry to be tripped up by something silly that you’ve done. So that efficiency, that sense of professionalism, is sort of a sense of pride; this player can look at any number of nested tuplets, any number of quarter tones, special effects, and all sorts of things you can think of, and play it. It’s wonderfully liberating in some ways because a lot of new music techniques are expected there that were not so expected when I was a student working in the U.S.

So there’s a kind of level of expectation that yes, oh, you’re a composer. You write new music. You can do these things. I found that very liberating. At the same time, there’s the expectation from players that if you’re going to ask me to do this, you better get your point across perfectly. If I’m going to read it perfectly, you have to give me something to read perfectly. That gave me a sense of a new level of professional standards. Also, I was very impressed when I first moved to Britain, because students start working professionally much earlier. So while composition students in their early 20s in the U.S. were writing student pieces for student groups, in Britain they’re already expected to write for professional groups. And they are already expected to have that level of technical ability and professionalism. It’s quite intimidating at first, and it really gave me a sense of the reality of professional life. Because I had just finished my last graduate degree, and I was meeting people a few years younger than me who didn’t have as many degrees as I did who were producing absolutely polished new pieces. And they were thoroughly professional.
I think in the U.S. we’ve been catching up the last few years. There’s a sense now that you really want to know who you are and make your way as a composer as soon as you really can, and there are more institutions and competitions and things in place to help you do that. But when I first moved to Britain, I was really amazed at how much those things are a part of the infrastructure there. I think it has some disadvantages, too, because you don’t maybe know as much about your point of view at age 22 as you do at age 32. I do think a composer’s voice needs time to develop. But that level of professionalism in terms of creating legible parts, knowing your notation, understanding the instruments, getting across to players clearly and respectfully what you want them to do, and knowing that they can do the things that you want them to do—those are all things that any composer needs at any age.

AG: I think it’s worth mentioning that a British composer was one of the forces that brought you to the U.K.—your husband, Ken Hesketh. Those of us who are coupled up with people who work in different fields are always curious to know what it’s like being married to another composer. Do you discuss your pieces with one another while you’re working on them? Do you listen to music together?

AS: Sometimes, yeah. We’re almost exact contemporaries. I think our partnership has been helpful in that we grew up in different countries, in different education systems, and in different musical education systems. It’s been very interesting to compare notes and talk about the advantages and disadvantages of things that we were exposed to as we were growing up in music. The British have this incredible choral tradition, for example. But I also learned a lot about jazz and a lot about Latin music, as well as the words to old standards and things like that, which is a kind of American music education that Europeans don’t really have. So, it’s been nice to get a perspective on what is different and what is valuable about what you have compared to a contemporary in another country.

Living with another composer who’s just as busy as I am is very, very helpful because we spur each other on. It’s really about having that implicit encouragement that creative work is serious, and it’s time to do it. It’s been really helpful actually, especially when I was finishing my degrees; I was engaged to somebody who was already getting his first commissions and working on the highest level. It just made me think, you know, I got those degrees for a reason, so I could be as serious, as professional, as this colleague is. It helped me to make a strong start professionally, where I might otherwise have been tempted to slack off for a few years and think, oh, I’m done with all that coursework and it’s time to relax. So as a result, I’ve written a lot of music, and not done a lot of relaxing! It’s also helpful in discussing professional issues, professional problems, but I think this is a larger point—that if you’re writing your first commissions, or in your first teaching job, or talking for the first time with publishers and agents, you really need to talk to colleagues and compare notes on these things, because they’re hard and you want to get things right. You want to develop the good relationships and stay away from the less helpful ones. If you have colleagues that you confide in, who you can be really honest with, that is an immeasurable help.

So if you can’t fall in love with and marry a composer-colleague, I would say stay close to your favorite classmates, the composer-colleagues that you knew coming up. Do that anyway. I mean, I do very much like to stay in touch with people I was in school with, in festivals with, people I got to know through the first steps of professional life. Even if we were only in the same place for one month one summer, and that summer was ten years ago, hey, there’s a lot to reflect on and talk about. Those connections are personally rewarding. Whether or not they lead to more work or whatever, you’ll see, but that’s not the point. The point is the connection and having that common ground, and having that professional advice and encouragement.

AG: Speaking of school, you both hold teaching positions, but at different institutions. You mentioned earlier that a composer’s voice needs time to develop. How do you see your role in guiding that process through teaching composition?

AS: Teaching can be such an important part of how we start to compose. I don’t know how many composers feel like they were taught to compose. I’m not sure it’s something that you can teach—at least in the most important context, which is the creative impetus. You can’t give that to somebody else. But then I find with lots of students, everybody’s got ideas, but it’s how you execute them. If you can’t bring them to fruition, then you’re nowhere. So, I’ve been teaching for about eight years now, and I think teaching has become more interesting to me as I’ve done it longer because I’m trying to help students to make their ideas into pieces and that’s a really hard thing to do the first few hundred times! I mean, it’s so hard for all of us starting pieces, even if we have a lot of experience. But I do feel that teaching is important to me in terms of helping students to realize their ideas—giving them ideas to work with that can become their own. Giving them the space to figure that out, and giving them encouragement without telling them how to do something. I like to give a rather light touch with my advice when I’m teaching. To give a sense of direction, rather than to say, this is the way it must go. Because I feel that my music belongs to me, and students’ music has to belong to them. What is this for if it doesn’t feel owned by the person who creates it?

AG: You say you have a light touch when giving advice. What is that like?

AS: It’s really tricky. I ask a lot of questions about what they want to have happen next. Or at least what sort of affect they’re after overall. Or what they see the piece doing—whether it’s to do with how the instruments are being used, or what the architecture is over time. I like to give options, because when I look at a musical idea, I can always see several different ways that it can go. A student may not see that. That gets easier with experience. I really enjoy giving students a lot of options that they can then manipulate and make their own in a certain way. So I love to say, “Okay, you have this idea, well, if you take it this way, then you can do this. If you take it that way, it will be more like this. Come back next week and show me what you’ve chosen!” Because they’re not my pieces. They’re their pieces. I’m just excited to see what they come up with and, hopefully, how individual it is. I really try to give them technical help to write like themselves—really objective advice on how to use musical materials and how to make them work.

AG: I know that it was the study of electronic music that first started you on the path to composing, but once you got involved in writing for acoustic instruments, the electronic music dropped off.

AS: After a childhood of playing the piano, I actually started composing through electronic music. It was a way of getting ideas down, manipulating musical materials without having to worry about notation. And for someone who studied piano and didn’t study composition, that was really a relief and a wonderful opening to ways of manipulating sound and making new things without all the business of getting the notation right. So my first pieces were musique concrète pieces, as well as pieces for analog synths and digital synths. I was part of a wonderful major at Oberlin called Technology In Music and Related Arts (TIMARA), where basically we were shown a Moog one week and digital programming software the next week. Each week we were shown something new and told to figure out how it worked, or helped to figure out how it worked. Then the assignment would be to make a piece with that thing, whatever it was. It was a fantastic training ground, not just in terms of technical matters, but also as a composer, because this is essentially what we do all the time.

If I’m commissioned to write a piece for an ensemble including a cimbalom, or a piece for two string instruments, or for a singer and guitar and percussion, basically I’m taking those machines, figuring out what to do with them, and making a piece. It’s just a way of being really flexible, using your resources, and making something new with them. So the creative side of how the TIMARA program worked was really useful, basically every week figuring out how to make a new little piece. The one thing that made it stop working for me was when the concerts came around, because the concerts were sitting in the dark and somebody pressing play. While it was interesting to sit around and listen, I had played piano from the age of five, and played in competitions and all sorts of different kinds of ensemble things, and I just missed the excitement and suspense of performance. I realized that the classical music love that I had for all the instruments and orchestral music—that I had to marry these two things. I had to use the manipulation of sound and get that energy of live performance together somehow.

It just meant I had to learn a lot of stuff super fast in order to learn how to notate my ideas: how to deal with sophisticated rhythmic notation, how to orchestrate, and how to handle harmony. I took lots and lots of (hugely useful) counterpoint, which was like getting my teeth drilled, but I did it. These are all the tools that a composer needs if you want to write for classical instruments. And that’s what I’ve basically done for my whole professional life—writing for everything from solo pieces to full orchestral pieces, to grand opera scenes. I’ve written about half an hour now of a grand opera (grand opera just meaning singers plus orchestra), as well as works choral, large chamber, small chamber, including all sorts of instruments that I had never played, that I’d never had any contact with before, just learning what they could do for specific projects as they came along.

So in thinking about a return, I’ve been asked many times, would I consider writing for electronics, but I just couldn’t figure out how. I think I was afraid of the dark room, and pressing play, and sitting there again, and just having that kind of anti-climactic sense of the performance. But now I have a new project coming up which is for three pianos: two pianos plus a digital piano—a Disklavier—and those instruments will be combined with digital processing, samples, and percussion, and so I’ll have three incredible pianists will be also using percussion and electronics to create other sounds that I will have set up for them. Two pianos is already like an orchestra, as far as I’m concerned. Plenty of notes for sure. And with the Diskavier, basically you get three pianos plus, because the Disklavier is basically a player piano that you can also play at the same time. Urban Birds is a piece I’ll be composing to tour in the U.K. and U.S. next year, with Kathleen Supove, Sarah Nicholls and Xenia Pestova—it’s a really great way to bring these international soloists together, and we’re all really excited about the project. For me it’s an ideal way of getting back into electronic music, following on from having written a lot of big acoustic pieces over the last few years. It looks like this will be my orchestral-electronic piece – more news soon!

AG: I’m so glad to hear that.

AS: Thanks. Me, too. It’s all about performance, and about pianos, so it’s kind of a return to my roots in that way, too, you know. And it will be fun to watch. That’s what I’m excited about.

AG: Well, I think that over the years it has become so much easier to integrate electronics into performance, and we don’t really need to worry so much about the dark room, or staring at two (or sixteen) speakers, with no performers in sight.

AS: They’ve become more and more interactive over time. It’s really true.

AG: Do you have very specific long-range goals for yourself as a composer, particular projects that you aspire to? For instance, I assume that you are interested in creating a full-length opera.

AS: I wouldn’t be a composer if I didn’t love all the old forms, you know? I never wanted to be Beethoven or Mozart, but I love the old genres; those collections of instruments, those sounds. But it’s also the appeal of creating really big, monumental works. I think about genres like opera, and large-scale orchestral pieces, as climbing Everest. Why do you want to work in those forms? Because they’re there. Because other composers have done them, and when you find your own voice, you think, yeah, what would my voice and my style look like in this huge wonderful form?

So yeah, it’s a kind of creative ambition, of course, to make larger and larger statements. I’m working on Faustine now—that’s a long-term grand opera project. I’ve had some wonderful support along the way, most recently with New York City Opera. But how that’s going to end up in terms of where it’s produced and by whom is something that has yet to be seen. You need the patience of Job for this stuff. That’s okay. I’ll look forward to writing Faustine and having that staged in the next few years. That’s a big one. The concerto form is something else I really love. I’ve written a piano concerto. I’d like to write a cello concerto as well as a violin concerto.

But this new large-scale electronic project is really something I’m excited about. I would do more with electronics if I could keep doing it on that kind of scale, so maybe ensembles with electronics. I like doing more with the keyboard, with the piano, because that’s where I come from. That’s what I’ve done since the age of five, so writing for amazing pianists is just a thrill. They can do all sorts of stuff I could never do. I love that. I’ve worked a decent amount with choreographers So I’d like to do more of that. And I have a series of new scores for two films by Maya Deren that I’m planning. I made a score for one of her films called Meditation on Violence, which was premiered by Lontano in London last year. It was a beautiful film of a kung fu master doing exercises that turned from something very peaceful that looks like tai chi, to something really combative. It fits very well with my work, obviously. She worked in the ‘40s and ‘50s principally, and is one of the first important American women directors of avant-garde film. She created these beautiful quasi-feminist surrealist films in black and white. What I hope to do is create new scores for a few of her films, using chamber music genres. So a string quartet, a woodwind quintet, various mixed ensembles, all playing live with each film. That’s something I’m planning over the next few years.

AG: It all sounds great.

AS: Thanks! Yeah it’s lots of stuff. Like a fish, you have to keep swimming!

Making Something Work vs. Doing Whatever You Want

Chalk it up to some strange celestial alignment, if you’re into those sorts of interpretations, but over the past couple of weeks I have spent a disproportionate amount of time listening to orchestral music. It’s somewhat ironic considering that, as a composer, I have had little to no interest in writing orchestra music for a variety of reasons—a personal disinclination to tell people precisely what to do, the lack of rehearsal time, a seeming resistance to experimentation among orchestra players and administrators. But what gets me into a concert hall most of the time is a premiere, and there have been quite a few orchestra premieres this month. Luckily, much of what I have heard at these orchestral concerts has been specifically about defying expectations. You may recall my post about attending the American Composers Orchestra’s extremely inspiring concert, coLABoratory: Playing It Unsafe at Zankel Hall back on April 5. That program, in which the composers were given free reign to re-imagine the orchestra however they saw fit, seemed an ideal model for how to approach this medium.

The following week, the New York Philharmonic presented an all-American program: Christopher Rouse’s brand new Prospero’s Rooms—an exciting concert opener with a particularly powerful ending—was paired with Leonard Bernstein’s Serenade (a de facto concerto for violin and strings) and what might still be my all-time favorite symphony after all these years, Charles Ives’s Fourth. The work is a massive sprawl of a piece, defiant in its impracticality. It had to wait for eleven years after the composer’s death to receive its first complete performance, and at that 1965 premiere by the American Symphony Orchestra Leopold Stokowski shared podium duties with two assistant conductors in an attempt to untangle the labyrinthine layers of cross rhythms in the score. The symphony is practically a text book of how not to write for orchestra: cryptic instructions (the score includes a chorus but it is marked “preferably without voices”), impractical passages that are impractically notated (in the second movement the strings are required to play passages in quartertones which are notated with square note heads), under-utilized instruments (the piece requires an organ but it only plays for a few measures in the third movement, there’s a trumpet part that has just a single note in the final movement, etc.). But nevertheless, the NY Phil totally nailed it and miraculously—though it rarely surfaces on concert programs—Ives’s 4th is being done in New York again next month: the Detroit Symphony will play it as part of a Spring for Music program featuring all four numbered Ives symphonies at Carnegie Hall. So while the piece seems to go out of its way to make matters difficult for orchestras, it is somehow finally entering the repertoire.

Of course, the accepted wisdom (at least here in the United States) for getting music in front of an orchestra—and getting the players to do an effective job with it—is to streamline what you write: make it relatively easy to sight-read, avoid pitch and metrical things that are out of the ordinary, etc. That message got drilled into my head most of last week when I participated as a moderator for the Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute (JCOI) readings by the Buffalo Philharmonic. (The event was the second phase of JCOI, a project initiated by the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University and the American Composers Orchestra in cooperation with The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, and EarShot, the National Orchestra Composition Discovery Network; more details can be read here.) Five composers with predominantly jazz backgrounds—Gregg August, Anita Brown, Joel Harrison, Ole Mathisen, and David Wilson—got to hear their first pieces for symphony orchestra during two days of readings. Although if any generalization can be made about the music (it was quite a varied lot) it is that most of the time it was not particularly apparent that these composers came from jazz backgrounds. This sparked a bunch of lively debates with the participating composers, as well as with mentor composers Anthony Davis, Nicole Mitchell, and James Newton, plus Jazz Journalists Association president Howard Mandel with whom I co-led the discussions.

BPO Composer Panel

BPO Composer Panel (left to right): Howard Mandel, conductor Matt Kraemer, Ole Mathisen, Anita Brown, Gregg August, David Wilson, Joel Harrison and FJO.
Photo by Greg Evans, American Composers Orchestra.

Before I heard a note of anyone’s music, I thumbed through the five scores and was very excited to see quintuple and septimal meters in several of the pieces. Sadly, this detail was one of the aspects of the scores that section leaders in the orchestra were quick to point out made the proceedings more difficult for the players than they needed to be: “You’d save a great deal of rehearsal time if you rewrote those bars of seven into alternating bars of three and four.” I was crestfallen. What would those players have said about Ives’s Fourth? I hope these composers ultimately decide to keep their scores the way they originally wrote them, although it’s difficult to resist the lure of making something more navigable, especially when you’re dealing with a medium in which every second of time spent on a new piece of music is something of a luxury.

BPO Feedback Session

Following the first day of the reading sessions, section leaders from BPO met with the participating composers and the mentors for a feedback session in which the musicians suggested ways to make each of these scores more suitable for orchestral performance.
Photo by Greg Evans, American Composers Orchestra.

Before I trekked off to Buffalo, I attended the three nights of the 2013 MATA Festival at Roulette, which was much more in keeping with my own personal compositional aesthetics and a performance practice that allows for such aesthetics to be effectively realized. Each concert was a non-stop rollercoaster ride of challenging new works that defied practical considerations. The players of the various invited ensembles—including Israel’s Meitar and NYC’s own Talea Ensemble—seemed to completely revel in it: whether it was making a variety of sounds on the backs of their instruments (as in Mexico-born and Netherlands-based Hugo Morales Murguia’s Tonewood), creating an effective counterpoint for the sound of rain (as in Seth Cluett’s ambient Cloud-to-Air scored for three clarinets, water-filled metal tray, sine tones, and projections), or attempting to convey what it’s like to live on the planet Mercury (as in Christopher Bailey’s fascinating Mergurs Ehd Ffleweh Bq Nsolst).

Meitar Ens plays Chris Bailey

The Meitar Ensemble with Sukato navigating through Christopher Bailey’s Mergurs Ehd Ffleweh Bq Nsolst during the 2013 MATA Festival at Roulette. Photo by Alex G. Knight/courtesy MATA Festival.

Rain Piece

Seth Cluett finds the music in rain in Cloud-to-Air. Photo by Alex G. Knight/courtesy MATA Festival.

While admittedly there’s a huge range between making something work and doing whatever you want, I’ve always been more of a “do whatever you want” kind of guy—and I’ve been usually lucky in finding fellow travelers who have been willing to try things that might appear to be impossible. Last Thursday, I flew back from Buffalo just in time to hear clarinetist Michiyo Suzuki play a solo piece of mine from 2009 that I had previously been convinced was actually unplayable. She not only played it, she made it musically compelling. But that’s because she devoted a ton of time to making it her own.

The current working model for orchestras does not allow musicians to spend a great deal of time on anything, not even the tried and true orchestra standards that they usually sound great playing—those pieces sound so good most of the time because the players have had numerous experiences playing them as well as listening to them over the course of their professional lives. Yet there’s something really exciting about hearing a live orchestra perform a new piece of music. Until we find a way to create more time for composers and orchestra musicians to experiment with new ideas, however, the possibilities for new orchestra music will ultimately be stillborn.

Later this week, I will travel to Cleveland to be the master of ceremonies for two Cleveland Orchestra concerts at the Cleveland Museum of Art featuring music by maverick California composers. One program will pair Henry Cowell’s unrepentantly gnarly 1928 Sinfonietta (a work that was once conducted by Anton Webern) with Dane Rudhyar’s 1982 Out of the Darkness (a world premiere 31 years after it was originally composed and 28 years after its composer’s death!) and Lou Harrison’s Suite for Violin with String Orchestra. The other concert joins John Adams’s career defining Shaker Loops (in the version for string orchestra), Terry Riley’s 1990 string quartet concerto The Sands, and James Tenney’s indeterminate 1972 Clang, which has never been commercially recorded. As a grand finale, I have been asked to participate in a performance of John Cage and Lejaren Hiller’s wild HPSCHD, in which a group of amplified harpsichords is pitted against a barrage of electronically manipulated sounds. Of course, all of this will only further my commitment to all these crazy, recalcitrant sounds!

Tonewood

Basically all I want to do is mess around with the backs of instruments after hearing Hugo Morales Murguia’s Tonewood at the 2013 MATA Festival. Photo by Alex G. Knight/courtesy MATA Festival.

When Worlds Collide

Since 2013 started I’ve been working on a new piece through the American Composers Orchestra’s “Playing it Unsafe” initiative, which allows composers to develop pieces that combine the orchestra with all kind of experimental approaches through a collaborative workshop program that ACO aptly calls “coLABoratory”. The other composers working on “Playing it Unsafe” projects have been cooking up all kinds of phenomenal sonic ideas, involving unconventional instruments, spatial placement of musicians, and innovative use of video. It’s been really cool to witness these pieces developing as the creative process takes the participants through all kinds of twists and turns.
Speak & Spell
My piece will combine the instruments of the orchestra with the glitched sounds of obsolete electronics, all in various states of disrepair and several circuit-bent especially for the project. Below is a toy that many children of the ’70s and ’80s will remember, the Speak & Spell—an educational toy that’s been modified to create maximal sonic mayhem.

One of the most interesting aspects of trying to combine the sounds of glitched electronics with the symphony orchestra is the clash of aesthetics. The Western orchestra is based on ideals of precision, balance, and unison playing, whereas the raw and frequently warped sounds of glitched devices are largely uncontrollable, as glitches are by definition unwanted mistakes. To elevate these sonic “mistakes” to desirable effects flies smack in the face of what the orchestra is all about: presenting tightly controlled and carefully rehearsed moments that in fact vary only slightly from performance to performance. By exploring musical beauty in the random and the transient, I’m hoping to at least momentarily break the orchestra from its normal mode of operating and default aesthetic point of view.
Playing it Unsafe
It’s been interesting trying ideas out in workshop sessions, because trying to make a somewhat controlled outcome from an inherently impossible to control sound source is something of a fool’s errand, the kind of doomed attempt at conciliation only a composer would suffer. Along the way, it’s become clear to me that the piece will work best if I build in a certain amount of flexibility and freedom to react into the orchestra parts, trying to make the orchestra looser while controlling the wild glitching more closely in an effort to cultivate that narrow middle range where all the sounds can happily interact without sounding like some electronic sounds fused onto an unrelated orchestra piece.

Another part of the project involves a live video that will pulse and react to the rhythm of the music, the work of an experimental filmmaker who is figuring out how to get microphone input to drive certain kinds of changes in the video over time. Combining performance with projected images or video is such a nice balance, and it’s fun to explore the ways the motion of the video can compliment (or run contrary to) the motions created by rhythmic bow strokes and other physical gestures from the performers. It’s a wonder that more orchestras don’t make an effort to include pairings of images and music, as it’s one of the truly effective ways to help draw an audience into a new sonic experience.
Visconti video
Seeing the carved wooden curves and traditional craftsmanship of the orchestra musicians’ instruments against the abstract pulses of color and light on the video screen, I was reminded how one of the orchestra’s greatest strengths is its ability to adapt to new approaches and ends for which it was not originally intended. There are few artistic institutions that would take the addition of so many experimental elements in such stride, and when given a chance the orchestra is absolutely capable of rising to the occasion, even in a straight-up collision with musical approaches and aesthetics that run quite contrary to the orchestra’s traditional role.

If anything gives me hope for the orchestra’s viability as a contemporary expressive idiom, it’s that. I hope that this country’s major orchestral institutions will pay attention to how much the orchestra can be expanded given just a little extra rehearsal time, and throw their immense budgets behind the kind of initiative that the American Composers Orchestra has bravely supported.
(The next coLABoratory session will be on January 22 at 10 a.m. at Flushing Town Hall, in case any NYC-area readers care to stop by; all session are free and open to the public).