Tag: repertoire

To Shape a Nation

Posted on August 17, 2012 by - Columns

Earlier this week, NPR broadcasted an illuminating story about an exhibit at the Library of Congress titled “Books That Shaped America.” For the exhibit, the LoC has gathered 88 books—ranging from Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos—which in some way “encapsulated and reflected a moment of time in America that Americans understood and recognized in themselves.” Historians, curators, poets, scientists, and literary experts all took part in the culling and selecting of the titles, and during the segment it doesn’t take long for the host to bring on a book critic from the Washington Post to point out what books did not make it onto the final list.

In any case, a story like this immediately begs the question: “What about music?” One could argue that music has had as strong of an impact on this country and its people as books have had, and over the years there have been quite a few attempts at addressing that question. In 2000, for instance, NPR went through a similar process as the Library of Congress and put together an initial list of 300 works that they subsequently reduced down to the “100 most important American musical works of the 20th century.”

On that initial list of 300, the selected concert works were as follows:

1. Adagio for Strings (Barber)*

2. African-American Symphony (Still)

3. Amahl and the Night Visitors (Menotti)

4. Appalachian Spring (Copland)*

5. Ballet Mechanique (Antheil)

6. Drumming (Reich)*

7. Ebony Concerto (Stravinsky)

8. Einstein on the Beach (Glass)

9. Fanfare for the Common Man (Copland)

10. “4:33” (Cage)*

11. Grand Canyon Suite (Grofe)*

12. Hymn and Fuguing Tunes Series (Cowell)

13. In C (Riley)

14. The Incredible Flutist (Piston)

15. Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (Barber)

16. Moby Dick (Mennin)

17. Nixon in China (Adams)

18. Piano Sonata No. 2 “Concord Sonata” (Ives)

19. Rhapsody in Blue (Gershwin)*

20. String Quartet No. 3 (Carter)

21. Susannah(Floyd)

22. Symphony No. 1 (Zwilich)

23. Symphony No. 2 “Romantic” (Hansen)

24. Symphony No. 3 (Harris)

25. Symphony No. 3 (Riegger)

26. Symphony No. 3 (Schuman)

27. Symphony of Psalms (Stravinsky)*

28. Symphony of Rage and Remembrance (Corigliano)

* works that were selected for the 100 top works list

During the NPR segment I mentioned above, they took several calls to hear about how this or that book affected a particular person’s life, and it’s here where I think this exercise might be valuable and/or enlightening. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that a very few of these pieces actually resonated with the majority of the country as a whole (Appalachian Spring is probably as close to a publicly recognizable national concert work as we have). However, I would think that at least a few of these works (and many others) were important in shaping the lives of individual composers and performers here in the U.S. today.

To take that one step further, the idea of discovering what works of American origin have become shared experiences between American composers that transcend generation, education, and environment is an interesting one. Yes, one could rightly open up such an exercise to works from outside the U.S., but, as with the Library of Congress’s exhibit, there is value in discovering what effect art has on the native population where it was created—especially in such a heterogeneous population such as ours. We in the arts have prided ourselves on being so open to influences from around the world that I’m afraid we haven’t taken enough time to look at how we are affected, with certain exceptions (various popular/vernacular genres, etc.), by home-grown influences.

When I speak of influences, there are many different ways that a musical work can influence a composer or performer. In my own career, I can distinctly remember listening to Michael Torke’s CD Javelin in 1996 and being very surprised by it, especially the chamber work Adjustable Wrench. I had primarily had experiences in jazz and I was living in Los Angeles becoming immersed in the film music scene, so my concept of what concert music was at that time was till pretty “crunchy.” After listening to the CD several times, I realized that all those angular, dissonant associations I had with concert music might not be the only option any more. Soon I came across other composers who were writing more diatonically—Lauridsen, Pärt, Gorecki—and while most of my music today has no relationship to any of those works or composers, discovering those works did ultimately help to convince me that I might want to try my hand at being a concert composer.

Below are two questions to readers—feel free to answer either one or both. I’m not looking to create a ranking or a “Best Of…”, but rather to begin to build a picture of which American works have been influential to composers and performers active today. Thanks in advance for taking part!

1. What American concert work or works have somehow influenced you personally, artistically, or otherwise?

2. What American concert work or works would you add to NPR’s list of music that you think has had an important impact on the country as a whole?

Moondrunk for a Century: A History of the Pierrot Ensemble

Posted on July 25, 2012 by - Analysis, Articles

Hanns Eisler’s Palmström—for speaker, flute (doubling on piccolo), clarinet, violin (doubling on viola), and cello—is easily mistakable for a better-known work. Thirteen years after the premiere of Pierrot Lunaire, at the request of his teacher Arnold Schoenberg, Eisler composed a companion piece for the same instrumentation (minus piano) as that modernist masterpiece. Pierrot itself is a deeply ambiguous work, full of biting satire and mocking seriousness; Palmström takes this a step further, parodying the parody. The forty-five second “Notturno” mimics the bloodrush of Schoenberg’s “Galgenlied” (“Gallows Song”), but with comically low stakes:

Palmström takes paper from his drawer.
And spreads it artfully round the room.
And after he’s made pellets out of it.
And spread it artfully, and at night.
So that, when he suddenly awakes in the night,
He hears the pellets rustle and a secret terror
Strikes him
Of the spectre of wrapping-paper pellets.

Besides being a fine bit of Second Viennese School homage, Palmström is an early participant in a hundred-year musical heritage, one still unfolding today: the Pierrot ensemble. Composers from Philip Glass to Karlheinz Stockhausen to Missy Mazzoli have all written music utilizing slight variations on Schoenberg’s original Pierrot Lunaire instrumentation. Some grapple with the legacy of Pierrot Lunaire head-on; others creatively misread the work. Many ignore Schoenberg’s piece entirely and take the instrumentation as a given—a modern updating of the string quartet or piano trio.

As we approach the Pierrot Lunaire centennial, its instrumentation, once reflective of Viennese weltschmerz, has been internationalized, turned timeless, and endured both modernism and postmodernism. Briefly tracing its legacy, as this essay will do, reveals a story of artists grappling with modernism and tradition, but also with practical realities. The Pierrot ensemble acts as a panorama of the musical 20th century, and one that bridges us into the 21st—earlier this year, the Pierrot-derived group eighth blackbird took home their second Grammy.

Pierrot Lunaire Excerpt

This excerpt from the score of “Madonna,” the sixth song in Arnold Schoenberg’s 1912 Pierrot Lunaire, shows the first occurrence of a quintet consisting of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano. It has happened many times since then. (The public domain score of Pierrot Lunaire is downloadable from IMSLP.)

Let’s begin at the beginning. We traditionally think of the Pierrot ensemble as a miniature orchestra—the grand Romantic afflatus stripped down to its bare bones—but Schoenberg actually did the opposite in Pierrot Lunaire. He originally planned the work, a melodrama comprised of 21 short texts by Albert Giraud, for speaker and piano. In the process of composing, Schoenberg asked actress Albertine Zehme to add a clarinet—a reference back to Brahms’s chamber music, if anything—then a violin, a flute and, finally, a cello.

Maximizing the musicians’ potential, Schoenberg requires the flute to double on piccolo, the clarinet on bass clarinet, and the violin on viola. He utilizes the novel instrumentation in various, smaller groupings throughout the work, and the combinations match the spirit of each song—the hooting piccolo and clarinet of “Der Dandy,” the sickly, limpid solo flute of “Der Kranke Mond.” And if Pierrot Lunaire’s Pierrot ensemble is a miniature orchestra, it is a miniature cabaret orchestra, adding a populist snarl to Schoenberg’s hyper-chromaticism.

Pierrot Lunaire premiered on October 12, 1912, and immediately caused a sensation. Schoenberg knew he had a hit, and the work had a run in Berlin before the musicians embarked on a five-week tour of twelve cities. Artistic responses followed quickly. Sabine Feisst has documented the work’s impact in America, which was immediate: Universal Edition published a pocket score in 1914, which inspired Henry Cowell’s 1915 Red Silence, a Japanese-influenced monodrama for speaker, flute, violin, cello, and piano. Charles Griffes followed suit with the similarly exoticist Sho-jo and Kairn of Koridwen of 1917; evidently, when American composers heard sprechstimme, they thought druids and samurai.[1]

Back in Vienna, Schoenberg sought out companion pieces for the Pierrot instrumentation to fill out an evening concert: thus, Palmström, but also Anton Webern’s re-orchestration of Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony for a Pierrot contingent (1922-23). With Webern’s piece, we see one of the earliest examples of an instrumental Pierrot ensemble, with the role of the speaker removed—a precedent (though a virtually unknown one) for many later works which would abstract the concept of the ensemble entirely, removing the elements of melodrama to focus strictly on the possibilities of the instrumental combinations.

For the next several decades, works for Pierrot ensemble pop up throughout Europe and America. The American premiere of Pierrot, in 1923, was a major event with a wide impact. Cowell felt the Schoenbergian influence again, leading to his 1924 Four Combinations for Three Instruments (playing off of Schoenberg’s shuffling of instruments); Carl Ruggles wrote his Vox Clamans in Deserto, for mezzo-soprano and a more expansive chamber ensemble than that of Pierrot Lunaire.

Then there are early examples of the Pierrot ensemble as a convenience, a choice made as much for financial practicalities and logistics as artistic vision. In a fascinating article published in the volume British Music and Modernism, 1895-1960, Christopher Dromey discusses re-discovering the Pierrot ensembles of a young Benjamin Britten, who apparently “reveled in the romanticism” of the original work, and scored several films for Britain’s General Post Office Film Unit for its instruments.[2] His 1936 score for the film Dinner Hour may be the first instance of what today is called the “Pierrot-Plus,” with Pierrot instruments augmented by percussion. The day-to-day reality of the Film Unit meant that Britten often gathered random assemblages of musicians—Pierrot as pick-up band.

Still, these are not the pieces you think of when you think Pierrot ensemble (if you even knew they existed). They remain outside the repertoires of the major Pierrot groups, like the Da Capo Chamber Players, eighth blackbird, and the Fires of London. The real cottage industry of Pierrot music would come with the codification of the ensemble, the transformation of an unusual instrumentation into an institution.

Fast-forward to 1967. In London, young composers Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies banded together with several instrumentalists to form the Pierrot Players. Their first concert consisted of Pierrot Lunaire, Maxwell Davies’s Antechrist, and Birtwistle’s Monodrama, with the new pieces scored for Schoenberg’s configuration as well as percussion (the true dawn of Pierrot-Plus). Reflecting back on the ensemble in 1987, Maxwell Davies said that:

The Pierrot Players were founded because the performances Harrison Birtwistle and I were receiving of our music in the sixties were less than satisfactory—under-rehearsed and uncommitted….There emerged a group of friends, willing to spend many hours of unpaid time with two inexperienced conductors, rehearsing difficult new works. Thanks to The Pierrot Players/Fires of London I learned the basics of instrumentation as never before, and the rudiments of theatrical craft—not to mention, out of frightening necessity, how to conduct….The group has been the most important music experience of my life to date. [3]

The founders felt that tying their legacy back to Schoenberg would also connect them to Schoenberg’s own tradition of new music concerts in Vienna’s short-lived Society for Private Musical Performances. Here, Pierrot becomes a kind of foundational text, the modern moment around which one can fashion an ensemble to progress Britain’s contemporary music scene.

The Pierrot Players’ seminal early work is Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King, a heaving gloss on Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire swapping out moonstruck female reciter for crazed baritone (and adding percussion). Like that of Pierrot, the instrumental ensemble acts as a psychological manifestation of the work’s insane protagonist. Maxwell Davies takes it a step further, noting that the instrumentalists are “projections stemming from the King’s words and music, becoming incarnations of facets of the King’s own psyche.” (The musicians performed from within cages at the premiere.)

Where Pierrot Lunaire built upon the antiquated device of melodrama, Maxwell Davies crafts a full-on pastiche, juxtaposing several hundred years of historical references. The instrumentation becomes a kind of desiccated relic—the flute and clarinet mimic wind consorts, while the piano bangs out a “smoochy” country dance; the baritone quotes Handel’s Messiah over a Baroque harpsichord (yes, Maxwell Davies ups the ante on Schoenberg’s doubling, giving us a dual-duty keyboardist), singing alternately “in style” and “like a horse.” Figurative deconstruction, as the king’s madness reaches its forte, becomes literal destruction: Maxwell Davies indicates that the violin should “break apart.”

This maximalizing snapshot is only one aspect of the Pierrot ensemble’s grand postwar history. With the inception of the Pierrot Players (disbanded and reformed as The Fires of London under Maxwell Davies’s direction in 1970), as well as other groups around the same period—the Da Capo Chamber Players in 1970, Amsterdam’s Schoenberg Ensemble in 1972, the New York New Music Ensemble in 1975—the format is set in stone. As those groups actively commissioned and encouraged young composers, the Pierrot ensemble transitioned from a scattered tradition of Schoenberg-inspired works to a key player in new music.

With this shift, we see works emerge which tiptoe around Pierrot Lunaire while utilizing its core instrumentation—anyone writing for the ensemble was aware of Schoenberg’s piece, but many composers wished to avoid the association of Viennese modernism, abstracting the instruments from their Expressionist origins.

We see this in the slew of new works that accompanied the premiere of Eight Songs for a Mad King in 1969. For the 80th birthday of Alfred A. Kalmus, who ran the London wing of Universal Edition and championed contemporary music, twelve composers wrote pieces for the Pierrot Players in his honor. The result, A Garland for Dr. K, is a series of short, mostly pointillist experiments by Stockhausen, Boulez, Berio, Bernard Rands, and others for the Pierrot set-up. (Berio’s The Modification and Instrumentation of a Famous Hornpipe as a Merry and Altogether Sincere Homage to Uncle Alfred, a goofy riff on Purcell, stands out among the pack as sounding particularly not like post-war Pierrot ensemble music.)

That these works stood alongside the Maxwell Davies shows the burgeoning interest in music that took advantage of Pierrot Lunaire’s instrumentation without reprising Schoenbergian melodrama. (None utilize a vocalist.) This echoes, loosely, what Boulez wrote in his famous 1952 polemic “Schoenberg is Dead”: that the late composer’s music, despite its explorations of new musical languages, displayed “the most ostentatious and obsolete romanticism.”[4] A Garland scrubs Pierrot of its hyper-Expressionist roots, putting it in line with the pure, mathematical abstraction of the postwar generation.

Pierrot, of course, did not die. Works utilizing the ensemble to back a mad narrator coexist alongside ones that treat the instruments as a modern day string quartet. As we move towards the end of the century, this trend continues. Elliott Carter’s Triple Duo, a 1983 BBC commission for The Fires of London, is a classic example of Schoenberg avoidance. A review of the premiere noted that Carter “averred that Pierrot Lunaire and the legacy of expressionism had little importance for him as he was dreaming up fresh deployments of [Maxwell] Davies’s personalized, Schoenberg-inspired ensemble.”[5] Carter’s skittish instrumental writing is an entirely different kind of mania from Pierrot—it begins with a Haydn-esque joke, with the instrumentalists pretending to warm up. (His divisions of the sextet into duos, though, does echo Schoenberg’s chamber-groups-within-the-chamber-group concept.)

Carter seems to be deliberately stepping around Pierrot. Other composers forget it entirely, treating Pierrot’s ensemble just like any other. Morton Feldman’s The Viola in My Life 2 makes a Pierrot-Plus ensemble the miniature orchestral accompaniment to a solo viola.

Joan Tower, who co-founded the Da Capo Chamber Players and served as its original pianist, has written several Pierrot-scored works that have no particular connection back to Schoenberg. Tower re-arranged the 1977 Amazon for full orchestra (Amazon II), indicating that her original Pierrot instrumentation may have been merely a practical matter; her 1980 Petroushkates, another Da Capo work, pays homage not to Schoenberg but to Stravinsky (along with, strangely enough, ice skating).

These two pieces also demonstrate that there’s nothing odd about writing a tonal Pierrot piece—we shouldn’t forget about the Da Capo commissions of Philip Glass and John Harbison. Just because Schoenberg wasn’t terribly lush doesn’t mean that his ensemble can’t be.

The Pierrot parody genre, launched by Eisler, trudged on as well. Donald Martino, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning Notturno is a classic example of postwar Pierrot ensemble music, ends his From The Other Side (for flute, piano, cello, and percussion) with a movement titled “Das magische Kabarett des Doktor Schönberg.” A tango slides into the opening piano lick of Pierrot Lunaire’s “Mondestrunken,” and a czardas erupts into a section titled “The Wrath of A.S.” with shouts of “Nein!” under the piccolo trumpet solo from Petroushka. In The Death of Klinghoffer, John Adams mocks an Austrian woman by accompanying her sprechstimme testimonial with a Pierrot-esque subgroup in the orchestra.

Perhaps the best bookend to the Pierrot tradition is Martin Bresnick’s 2002 My Twentieth Century. Another Da Capo commission, My Twentieth Century is what Bresnick calls a “descendant of Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire—without the chanteuse and in a more vernacular musical and poetic idiom.”[6] Its title is a sly annexation of musical modernism, utilizing the Schoenbergian ensemble for an alternate history of the past hundred years. A laid-back series of piano chords opens the piece, soon joined by gauzy strings repeating short, postminimalist patterns. The musicians themselves alternately intone Tom Andrews’s text: “I played hopscotch in the twentieth century. I lived in a country of fireflies in the twentieth century.” Just as the music steps around modernism, the text transforms the 20th century from world-historical to personal, giving weight to individual actions instead of grand narratives. Pierrot Lunaire is a piece of extreme economy and brevity, doing the maximum with the minimum; Bresnick transforms economy into expanse, suggesting in his open harmonies the sparse lyricism of Appalachian Spring. The instruments blend, rather than prick.

And where is the Pierrot ensemble today? Its most famous proponent is, of course, eighth blackbird. Timothy Weiss, who heads the Contemporary Music Ensemble at Oberlin, brought together several conservatory students in 1996 to tackle the more difficult works of the Pierrot lineage—pieces like Martino’s Notturno or Charles Wuorinen’s New York Notes. The repertoire of eighth blackbird quickly expanded to include pieces like Joan Tower’s Noon Dance, Wendell Logan’s Moments, and Peter Maxwell Davies’s The Bairns of Brugh. The blackbirds even tackled one of the earliest Pierrot configurations—Webern’s arrangement of the Schoenberg Chamber Symphony.

This origin story points out a crucial aspect of today’s Pierrot tradition: the ensemble did not perform Pierrot Lunaire for the first five years of its existence. Whereas the Pierrot Players centered their repertory around Schoenberg’s piece, by the end of the 20th century, Schoenberg’s ensemble stood on its own, independent of the work that launched it into existence. Asked why the Pierrot configuration has endured so long, eighth blackbird’s flutist Nicholas Photinos wrote in an email:

Many reasons: it’s a great, small, economical mini-orchestra. It can have the sweep of an orchestra, the groove of a rock band, yet is small enough to be a finely tuned sports car like a string quartet. I think one of that orchestration’s greatest assets, and what sets it apart from other standard small ensembles like string quartets and woodwind and brass quintets, is that there is so much variety of timbre, so the ear never gets bored. Though of course, a composer can also write in a way to achieve a great blend across the group.

Today, eighth blackbird tours Pierrot Lunaire regularly in a theatrical production with soprano Lucy Shelton.

Their commissions include works as varied as Steve Reich’s Double Sextet, Steve Mackey’s Slide, and Jennifer Higdon’s On a Wire—a concerto for Pierrot-Plus plus orchestra.

Most of these new Pierrot works don’t tackle the historical legacy directly, and many have that rock-band groove. In 2012, the burden of Schoenberg’s status as founding father seems to have been lifted. Not every string quartet needs to refer back to Haydn; not every Pierrot ensemble needs to refer back to the Second Viennese School. Instead, Pierrot Lunaire hovers in the background—in its centennial year, the moonstruck clown has taken a back seat in that finely tuned sports car.

***

Notes


1. See Sabine Feisst, “Echoes of Pierrot Lunaire in American Music,” in James K. Wright and Alan M. Gillmor, eds., Schoenberg’s Chamber Music, Schoenberg’s World (Hillsdale: Pendragon Press, 2009), pp. 173-192.


2. Christopher Dromey, “Benjamin Britten’s ‘Pierrot Ensembles,” in Matthew Riley, ed., British Music and Modernism, 1895-1960 (London: Ashgate, 2010), p. 230. Dromey has written a full-length study of the Pierrot ensemble tradition, which will be published later this year by Plubago.


3. Peter Maxwell Davies, quoted in Grenvile Hacox, “The composer-performer relationship in the music of Peter Maxwell Davies,” in Kenneth Gloag and Nicholas Jones ed., Peter Maxwell Davies Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 200.


4. Pierre Boulez, quoted in Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), p. 394.


5. Paul Driver, “‘Triple Duo’ and ‘Image, Reflection, Shadow,’” Tempo 146 (September, 1983): p. 53.


6. Martin Bresnick, Program Notes for My Twentieth Century” accessed from Martin Bresnick’s website on May 4, 2012.

Many thanks to Frank J. Oteri, who has taken on the herculean task of compiling a massive and comprehensive list of works which utilize the Pierrot ensemble or its variations.

Judith Shatin: Multiple Histories

Posted on July 1, 2012 by - Conversations, Cover


At the home of Cecile Bazelon, New York, NY
June 7, 2012—3:00 p.m.
Video presentation by Molly Sheridan
Transcribed by Julia Lu
Homepage image by Mary Noble Ours

Many ingredients go into Judith Shatin’s music. While it is informed by a deep sense of musical history, it is just as much a by-product of her profound desire to search for new sounds. It is also deeply inspired by history itself, but not as an artifact. Rather it is something that is malleable and very much alive, something that we in the present can continue to engage with to better understand ourselves.

A good example of this is her piano and percussion duo 1492, a work commissioned to mark the quincentennary of Columbus’s maiden voyage to the New World. Shatin is quick to point out that also during 1492, England invaded France, the Jews were expelled from Spain, and the Spanish Inquisition began. But her duo is not a direct narrative about any of those things, nor is it in anyway a rehashing of music of that era. Rather, those historical events serve as a starting point, inspiring her to investigate her fascination with the malleability of timbre. In fact, she’s somewhat ambivalent about whether listeners should be aware of these associations as well as any of the techniques involved in forming her compositions.

The ability of Shatin’s music to transcend both its original context and any formal procedures that may have been used to create it is perhaps this is why her music can sound perfectly at home in concert programs alongside standard repertoire whose specific reference points have receded into the past. At the same time, she is completely enamored of the possibilities offered by electronic music and unusual instrumental combinations. And in addition to her works for standard ensembles like piano trios and string quartets, she is not afraid to write pieces for less practical configurations such as shofar, brass ensemble, and timpani or percussionist and six percussion robot arms. Although don’t assume the works for the more common groups are all that common. Her piano trio Ignoto Numine is filled with elements that have made players slightly uncomfortable.

Shatin’s compositions involving electronics also often involve unlikely sound sources. One of the timbres that appears in Beetles, Monsters and Roses was based on recordings of her munching on potato chips. As she explains it, “I just sort of go through life with my sonic antennae up.” But no matter what novel sonorities intrigue her, Shatin still finds the greatest satisfaction in creating music involving live performers that is experienced by an audience in a concert hall in real time.

I personally really love the experience of the live. The other thing about performances that involve live performers is the theatricality of it—there’s delicacy, and there’s the possibility of failure. It’s really a much more vivid kind of experience.

***
Frank J. Oteri: I know that you’re in New York City this week because there is a concert here featuring your music.

Judith Shatin: I have actually two pieces: Widdershuns, which is an ancient English word that means counterclockwise, and a piece called To Keep the Dark Away, which is inspired by lines from Emily Dickinson poems. They’ll be sandwiched between Debussy, Beethoven, and Villa-Lobos.

FJO: That’s very good company to be in. But I’ve been thinking a lot lately that perhaps one of the reasons some audience members who attend classical music concerts react so negatively to a piece of new music is because the sound world of that lone new piece is completely unrelated to everything else they’re hearing on that program. A concert of all new music, on the other hand, could sound like anything at this point and as a result the expectations are very different; people are prepared to hear something that is unfamiliar. But your music works effectively in both contexts and in fact is often presented on programs that are predominantly standard repertoire. The music that you write is clearly music of our time, its harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary would not have been possible before the late 20th century, and your works involving electronics are very much of the right now, but nevertheless it doesn’t seem to have, at least to my ears, an irreconcilable sonic disconnect with the music of the past. So I don’t think it’s too much of a leap for listeners familiar with the classical music canon to take. I wonder if that is something you consciously think about when you’re writing pieces. What obligation do we have as composers, in your mind, to connect with the larger arc of history? How important to you is having your music be performed alongside a broader range of repertoire rather than just as “new music”?

JS: I think that’s a really good question and one that has very individual answers. In my own musical world, I like to roam both in the past and across the present. So I have music that connects back; a piece called Ockeghem Variations is inspired by Ockeghem’s Prolation Mass. I think that one of the amazing things that we have now is the opportunity to think of the past as present. I’m reminded of an exhibit that I saw earlier today, the absolutely amazing retrospective of Cindy Sherman’s work, and how she uses self to explore the present and the past. I think that one can do something of this same thing in music. One can look to the past as a kind of lens on the present, as well as looking at music from different contemporary places in the world. So I think we live at a really fascinating time when the past as prologue really seems to be operational.

My music has evolved certainly from a long and deep interaction with music of the classical era and earlier, and also various contemporary threads. But I think it really depends on the piece. There’s a recent piece of mine called Sic Transit for percussionist and six percussion robot arms that were created by some of our wonderful grad students at the University of Virginia. It involves some improvisation by the robot arms, in conjunction with this percussionist, and that might seem a little different in a concert that had traditional music. So I think that one of the things I’ve really enjoyed is exploring quite a range, from pieces that do have more of a connection to music of the past and that have inspired me, to electronic works where the cracks between pitches become relevant and where intonation is quite different and there are different types of continuities, discontinuities, than one would find in more traditional music. But drama always inspires me, and I think that maybe that’s one aspect that people can pick up on who aren’t exposed to a lot of contemporary music.

FJO: Yeah, the robot piece probably wouldn’t work with Debussy, Beethoven, and Villa-Lobos. And yet Villa-Lobos was a contemporary composer. He lived until 1959, much later on into the 20th century than, say, Webern did. But you know, Webern’s works are not necessarily going to appear on a standard repertoire concert programmed the way that, say, Villa-Lobos or Prokofiev would. Some composers fit better within that canonic trajectory. But I think another aspect of your music fitting in is that you’ve written quite a lot of music for standard instrumental combinations: piano trios, string quartets. There’s a whole wonderful disc of your repertoire for violin and piano. Plus you’ve written concertos and other works involving a standard symphony orchestra. Every one of these combinations is a kind of loaded historical time bomb in a way.

JS: They are, in a way. For instance, my piano concerto, The Passion of St. Cecilia, is about the relationship between Cecilia and her society. It’s also about a mistranslation, purposefully or not: the fact that Cecilia, although she is portrayed as the patron saint of music, had nothing to do with music. My piece is actually about her martyrdom, and it’s an extremely violent piece. It opens up with this huge orchestral explosion, and it ends with quite a violent shriek actually. It’s a three-movement piece, the second of which is much more contemplative, so it’s a piano concerto, but certainly not in a traditional mold.

FJO: And you gave it another name instead of just naming it Piano Concerto. So you’re not conjuring up the association as much. I think when you use a name like Piano Concerto, Piano Trio, String Quartet, or Symphony, you’re entering a realm that has very specific associations for listeners.

JS: My most recent string quartet is called Respecting the First, and it’s for amplified string quartet and electronics made from readings of and about the First Amendment: from JFK, to Pete Seeger, to Mayor Bloomberg, to various newscasters, etc. One of the reasons I wanted to make it about the First Amendment is that I think people are so unaware of what the amendments actually say. I also have Gabrielle Giffords’s reading of the First Amendment from the floor of the House. The piece is dedicated to her. It’s a string quartet, but with quite a different kind of twist than you might anticipate. The other thing that I did, which I love doing, is to record a number of friends and students from different parts of the world reading the First Amendment. So these are woven throughout the piece as well. I talked to Ralph Jackson about it, and I said, “I’ve been assured that all of this is fair use.” And he said, “Well, at BMI, we don’t believe in fair use. You’ve got to get permission from everyone.” So I got a letter of permission from Pete Seeger, which I thought was pretty nice.

FJO: Another place where I really wanted to go, in talking about composing for standard ensembles, is that if you write for such combinations, there are so many groups out there that could theoreticaqlly play what you’ve written. So on the level of practicality, it’s a smart idea to write a piece for, say, string quartet, since there are a zillion string quartets out there. But when you do, you’re also dealing with the legacy repertoire of that ensemble.

JS: That’s absolutely true, but I will say that it’s not so easy anymore as soon as you add electronics. You’re dealing with having to have sound checks, a playback system, etc. Often you’re dealing with having to have extra union people around. So working with a traditional ensemble, but with a twist, sometimes creates other kinds of difficulties.

Last fall I did a graduate seminar on the string quartet because our graduate students were composing for the ensemble. That issue of historical weight was certainly very much on everyone’s mind. What is there still to say for this ensemble? But they came up with all kinds of fascinating takes on how you can use the instruments in different ways. One of the students created a piece where he used handwriting to create the score, and wrote a program that interpreted the handwriting, and did a beautiful, interesting graphic score. Braxton Sherouse did that. So there are still people thinking very creatively. Another of our students, Chris Peck, took endings from a number of string quartets and put them together and created a kind of historical mirage quartet. So they did it very much in clear thought of the history and yet what one could still do now. Of the string quartets I’ve done, two of them have involved electronics. Elijah’s Chariot is for amplified string quartet and electronics made from processed shofar sounds, so that was also a very different kind of use of the ensemble.

FJO: That’s the piece that Kronos did.

JS: Yes it is.

FJO: Well, even though Kronos is a string quartet, writing for them is usually quite different than writing for a standard ensemble, since they are so adventurous and their audiences always expect something new. I’m curious about the pieces you wrote for other standard ensembles, like piano trio or wind quintet, and the pieces you have composed for Pierrot ensemble, a configuration that is now a century old and has become a contemporary music standard, like your lovely Akhmatova Songs. How often do pieces written for more standard combinations get done versus, say, a piece like the one you mentioned involving electronically processed shofar and string quartet? You also have a piece for actual shofar and brass instruments. I love that sound, but how many shofar players are there out there who will play this piece?

JS: Let me first say that I did this piece called Teruah for shofar, brass ensemble, and timpani, which was commissioned by the Jewish Music Festival of Pittsburgh, and was played by this wonderful horn player Ron Schneider, who’s in the Pittsburgh Symphony. Ron had a number of shofars, so I asked him to record them and send them to me. And there was one that happened to be an E-flat shofar. It’s a beautiful, long, curly Yemeni shofar. Finding shofars that play in E-flat is not necessarily so easy. It turned out a year ago, the Washington Symphonic Wind Ensemble wanted to play this piece. I went and the performance was wonderful, and I said “How did you find the shofar?” So listen to this. The fiancée of one of the members of the group lived in Pittsburgh. They had contacted Ron Schneider and driven the shofar from Pittsburgh to Washington.

As far as piano trios go, I have two. One of them is called Ignoto Numine, Unknown Spirit, and it’s about exploding traditional form. The ending of the piece came to me in a dream, and it’s very explosive. I dreamed that the performers were screaming while they were playing. And my first response to that dream was, I can’t really ask people to do that, can I? And then my second was, well, why not? And so the piece does wind up with the performers using their voices. And some piano trios got very excited about that, and some said, “Are you kidding? I’m not playing this.” They did not want to have to scream in a performance. The other thing is the pianist uses timpani mallets and snare sticks on the strings. So it’s a piano trio, but it does require that they do some things that traditional piano trios wouldn’t do. The other piano trio, View from Mt. Nebo, is more traditional in its approach. I don’t ask them to do anything quite that unusual.

FJO: So which piece gets done more?

JS: View from Mt. Nebo gets done more. Funny you should ask.

FJO: So how important a factor is the practicality of writing a piece that could be done many times in determining what you are going to write?

JS: What’s been more of a factor is what’s come along as commission opportunities, or groups that I’m excited to work with. I’ve written a fair amount for Pierrot ensemble and groups within that because I have a long-standing working relationship with Da Capo Chamber Players. I love working with them. So I think part of it is about who you’re working with and what the opportunities are. That said, I’ve never been able to make either a distinction or decision about my preferred ensemble. I’m not a choral composer, or an electronic composer, or an orchestral composer, or a chamber composer. I love it all. To me, it’s all about sound and exploration. Every ensemble I think really has its voice. I also think that Pierrot ensemble is ubiquitous. But now what we’re seeing is the emergence of different ensembles, especially with electric guitar which I haven’t composed for yet, but I’m hoping to because I think it’s really a fascinating instrument that bridges the worlds of electronic and acoustic.

FJO: Also the saxophone quartet, a combination for which you also haven’t written yet.

JS: I haven’t, but I have written a piece for soprano sax and electronics that’s gotten done a fair amount. There are some really ace players around.

FJO: In terms of this getting multiple performances, I’m curious about your experiences with writing for orchestra. There are definitely fewer opportunities for the greater composer community to write for an orchestra, so a lot of composers don’t. And many of the ones who do have only had their works played a few times and sometimes never recorded. But there’s a whole disc of your orchestral music out there, which is a fabulous CD. Some composers who don’t write for orchestra but who want to write for large ensemble have had great experiences writing for concert band: multiple performances and sometimes multiple recordings. But you’ve only done that once so far.

JS: Actually I would love to do more of that. And I love writing for orchestra; I think it’s just such a fascinating timbral world. But you’re absolutely right. Not only are there few opportunities, but the amount of rehearsal time that’s expended on new pieces is typically so vanishingly small that it’s really kind of traumatic. On the other hand, it’s such an exciting ensemble to compose for. So there is really a kind of struggle there. I would love to do more.

The most recent piece I did is for orchestra and narrator. It’s called Jefferson, In His Own Words, and it’s about Jefferson’s struggles in his life. The first movement is called “Political Passions,” and it’s about how he was drawn into the world of politics. The second movement is called “Head and Heart”; I found this amazing monologue that he wrote between his head and his heart. He was basically a very cerebral person, but he had a big crush on Maria Cosway. And he wrote a very long monologue, of which I could only use a little bit, but it’s very romantic, and it ends by him saying to her, “I promise that my next letters will be short, but if yours are as long as the Bible, they will seem short to me.” I also used a brief excerpt of a letter to his daughter where he tells her how she should spend her time on her education, and that if she does she will warrant his affection. It’s a very interesting and affectionate but withholding letter at the same time; it’s conditional love. The third movement, called “Justice Never Sleeps,” is about his struggle with slavery. I intercut his high sentiments about slavery and the importance of the abolition with his farm books where he talks about slaves as property. You get a real sense of this struggle. Then the final movement is more of a look back at his life, his founding of the University of Virginia, the importance of the freedom of reason, and his hopes for the future. It’s about a 25-minute piece.

FJO: To make an investment of almost half an hour is huge for an orchestra. And then to throw in a narrator of top of that…

JS: That’s true.

FJO: So dare I ask how many times that piece has gotten done?

JS: Actually, fortunately, it was a co-commission of four orchestras, and they each did it a couple of times: the Charlottesville Symphony, the Illinois, Richmond, and Virginia Symphonies. And the Virginia Symphony had as its narrator Bill Barker, who is the Jefferson impersonator for Colonial Williamsburg and a master actor. In Richmond and Charlottesville, Gerald Baliles, who was the former governor of Virginia and is a lawyer himself, was the narrator.

FJO: Does this piece at all reflect Jeffersonian-era music, or is it completely music of now?

JS: There are two spots where I refer to pieces that he is said to have liked. There’s a Scottish air, and there’s a dance. There’s a bit of Corelli. But most of it is music of now, and in fact, probably my favorite is the third movement which is extremely intense.

FJO: The slavery movement.

JS: Yes.

FJO: Using history as a jumping off point for creating something that sounds contemporary, rather than attempting some kind of reenactment, reminds me of how you approached the commission to write a piano and percussion duo called 1492 about the quincentenary of Columbus’s discovery of America—actually, it was Columbus’s discovery that there were people here in America. And as you have pointed out, it was also the year the Spanish Inquisition began, England invaded France.

JS: The expulsion of the Jews from Spain.

FJO: It was a really bad year, in a lot of ways. And, of course, the Columbus “discovery” of America led to some incredibly bad things. We’re all here now probably because of it, but Jefferson debating the pros and cons of slavery can be traced back to that voyage. To take it back to the music, what you wrote really has nothing to do with the music of 1492.

JS: No, no.

FJO: But it begs a question about what it means to you and to listeners to reference history in your music, the St. Cecilia piano concerto we talked about a little bit is another one. In all of these cases, how much of the narrative is important for listeners to know?

JS: I think they really need to have very little. I would be very unhappy if my music didn’t stand on its own without people knowing any back story about it. But I think it can add. I guess I think of it as a way of sharing my inspiration more than telling someone what and how to listen. And it does have its dangers. For instance, there’s one piece I wrote, Icarus for violin and piano. It’s inspired by the myth, and I think, as you traverse the piece, if you wanted to listen to it from that point of view, you could get a general idea. However, I remember one time, someone came up to me after performance and said, “Well, when does the wax melt?” And that just showed me the problem of somebody being a little too literal about their interpretation of it.

FJO: So in 1492, there aren’t episodes that represent the different events of that year.

JS: No, not at all.

FJO: But the Jefferson piece sounds like it does that.

JS: Well, it’s a texted piece, so in that sense, the music embodies some of that meaning and there are these two quite small places that sort of tie more into the period, but they’re very isolated moments. It had to do with creating a way in that was related to the text at those points.

FJO: So in terms of what listeners should know and what they don’t necessarily need to know. There was an article by Kyle Gann about your music in Chamber Music magazine, and he talked about the language of your music employing 12-tone techniques. I’ve listened to so many of your pieces over the years and have looked at scores, but it’s not something I ever thought about. Not having done rigorous analyses of any of them, I was quite surprised by this, though of course composers have done all sorts of things with 12-tone techniques.

JS: But people actually don’t think of it that way. They also assume that if something sounds quite chromatic, or involves a lot of leaps, that’s probably 12-tone music. I’ve had that response as well. I think that’s really a back story that isn’t that important. But in the music of mine that came out of that tradition, I always was more interested in collections that give you harmonic location and the particularity of sound. I thought one thing that Kyle Gann picked up on that absolutely rings true for me is the particularity of sound in register. I never bought the octave equivalence idea because it just doesn’t sound equivalent, and so I never wanted to treat it as equivalent. So register and how things sound in their particular place has always been really important to me. And how the sound is made, both in terms of the traditional sound production and also what the more extended ranges are.

FJO: So I think it’s probably fair to say though you’ll use different techniques, your music is not about those techniques and therefore a listener does not really need to be concerned with how you put a piece together.

JS: I want to use those techniques to express something. I’m not using them for their own sake. That’s true. But I think that the more one knows about music, the richer one’s experience is. I get into these arguments all the time. My husband, Michael Kubovy, is a cognitive psychologist and studies visual and auditory perception. He is very perceptive of musical design, but is not well schooled in it. We frequently get into this discussion about how much you need to know. My contention is that the more you know, the more you will enjoy it, but it’s not essential to your ability to enjoy or empathize with or be moved by music. I mean I certainly have experienced music and performance, like East Asian music, that I’m not schooled in, but I’ve been moved by it. I think it’s a very interesting question, and one that also reflects what so many students say about studying music theory: “Oh, this is like putting it under a microscope and I’m not going to like it anymore because I’m going to understand too much about it.” I’ve always thought the flip side of that is true. It’s fascinating to know how people think about music and design it and structure it. So I think the more one knows, the better. But can one respond to music without having a deep theoretical knowledge? I think the answer is yes.

FJO: I can clearly hear East Asian music in your piece Dream Tigers for flute and guitar. There’s a portion of it that almost sounds to my ears like shakuhachi and koto. So something from this tradition has obviously seeped through into your compositional language, even if you’re coming at it from intuition rather than deeply immersing yourself in its music theory.

JS: It did not come out of any analysis of East Asian music. I’m laughing because I had never written for guitar before, so I borrowed a guitar and bruised and calloused my fingers trying things out on it, and it was really a fascinating experience to work that way. I like getting physical with instruments and trying things out myself, even if I don’t play them, and then of course I check with people who actually can play them to make sure they’re doable.

FJO: Well, I know you were playing piano before you ever started composing.

JS: Right. I had composed some as I was growing up, but it was really not until I was well into my undergraduate career that I became really fascinated by it. I grew up playing piano and flute, mainly piano. And when I was an undergraduate at Douglass College, I spent my junior year abroad in Jerusalem at Hebrew University, and it was very hard to get to a piano, and I studied other things that I was interested in at the time. When I came back, I was not at all interested in doing a senior piano recital, which would have been the norm. I asked to do a composition recital and was told that if I found the performers, wrote the music, and organized it all, they would let me do it. So I did, and that was what really started me off on the path into composition.

FJO: Was there a lot of music around when you were growing up?

JS: I was very lucky in that when I grew up—mainly in Albany, New York, and South Orange, New Jersey—there was terrific music in the public schools. I played flute in the school band and orchestra. I sang in the special chorus. So I had a lot of live music experience, though much less concert music than I did later, having become a very avid concertgoer in high school and after.

FJO: So I’m curious to learn how you wound up in Virginia; you’ve been based there since 1979, right after you got your Ph.D.

JS: Actually, what led me there was a job. I was graduating, and I applied for this job. It was a one-year job at the time. And it became a four-year job. And then it became much more. And I’m now a chaired professor there, which is really a wonderful position. There were certain major advantages. I was not in a situation where I was held back by people having an idea about how things should be. So when I started the Virginia Center for Computer Music in the late ‘80s, there wasn’t anyone there who said you should do it this way, you should do it that way. Actually, I had been very intrigued by the idea of computer music while I was a graduate student, but it was in the dark ages where you had to type out your note cards and it was mainframe computing, and you’d get to use the digital analog converter in the middle of the night at the engineering school. If you made one typo in your cards, your job would blow up. When I had the opportunity to start the VCCM, I went to a couple of stores in New York. MIDI had just come out, and I sort of camped out and learned enough about it to write a grant application that got funded, and started it with a couple of Mac SEs, a Mac 2, and an Amiga, and it really just sort of developed from that point on.

FJO: Amiga. Wow. That’s a computer I haven’t heard anyone talk about it quite a while.

JS: I know. When I look back, what I was even thinking? I just can’t tell you. It just seemed like a fascinating idea at the time. And it was. One of the problems is that the technology keeps changing. My first piece in this medium was a piece called Hearing Things for amplified violin, MIDI keyboard controller, and a bunch of peripheral devices: a sampler, a voice processor, effects processors, etc. And within two years all of those pieces of equipment were obsolete. That was a real wake up call to how we think about these things. Do we care whether our pieces are ephemeral or not? And I guess for the most part, I kind of do because I spend a lot of time working on them. It’s still an issue; operating systems change. You create programs that work, and they may not work on a later date. It’s not like writing for piano. That probably is pretty settled at this point.

FJO: That leads back to the beginning of this conversation, talking about writing for instruments that have a long repertoire history and the practicality of writing for established ensembles. At this point, electronic music also has a long history, but it’s a history of constant change and flux. There are no standards still, even after all these years. You started this thing 25 years ago. That’s more than a generation. If anything is in dire need of a period instrument movement at this point, it’s the electronic music compositions from the ‘70s and ‘80s.

JS: I know. It’s really funny when you think of an instrument like the DX7, which was absolutely ubiquitous. When I ask my students now, they’ve never heard of it. They just have no idea about it.

FJO: And no doubt the instruments people are working with now will also be obsolete in another decade, probably less. So what’s the point in making such a composition investment in something so precarious?

JS: It’s really a fascination with the malleability of timbre, and the world around us. I’ve composed using the sounds of the animal world, in a piece called For the Birds, for cello and electronics made from bird song from the Yellowstone region. The piece was commissioned by Madeleine Shapiro, who loves to hike in that region. I did another piece called Singing the Blue Ridge: crazy instrumentation, totally impractical. Mezzo, baritone, orchestra, and electronics made from indigenous wild animal sounds. And I worked with the wonderful Macauley Natural Sound Library at Cornell University. They’ve done a fantastic job of collecting sounds from all over the world. There’s a soundscape artist, Erik DeLuca, who always goes to a place to record animals. However, in this piece, I knew that I wanted to use the indigenous sounds of animals, such as wolves and river otter, and I knew that I was not going to be capable of going and recording the sounds myself, but I thought they were particularly appropriate for a work that has poetry that was newly commissioned from Barbara Goldberg. It would be very easy to do a piece about how humanity is destroying the world, but I wanted it to be about more than that, what the world might have been like before humanity, what kind of interactions we have with that world, and thinking about ourselves as animals in relation to that world, and how that all adds up. I’ve used the sounds of a contemporary weaver on wooden looms. I’ve used the sound of a hand-held egg beater, of the chink of a fork on a cup. I just sort of go through life with my sonic antennae up.

FJO: So for you it’s not restricted to sounds that are electronically generated, but also taking sounds from the real world and processing them.

JS: I’ve done both. Beetles, Monsters and Roses is a piece commissioned by the San Francisco Girls Chorus for treble chorus and electronics. In one of the movements called “The Wendigo,” which is a setting of a poem by Ogden Nash, all of the accompanying sounds sound like traditional string instruments and they’re all totally synthetic. And then the sounds of the monster, I made from sounds I recorded myself while munching on potato chips.

FJO: You usually work with a live soloist and electronics or a chamber group and electronics. Writing for electronics with larger ensembles seems very risky. I think part of the problem with folks in the so-called classical music community—not just the performers but also the folks at the venues—is that many of them are terrified of electronics.

JS: That’s true. I think that there are two issues. One is the practicality of the venues. Most of them are not set up to deal with electronics, and they make it extremely difficult. I mean, places where if I go in and I want to deal with my own electronics, I’m not allowed to. It’s made into something much more complicated than in fact it needs to be. And there’s also the fact that most performers don’t have the equipment. They’re not set up to do it, and so it feels sort of scary and confusing. Even though at this point, there’s a lot of music that combines chamber ensemble with electronic playback. And if you have a CD player in your apartment, you can probably find a way to at least practice it. It’s more complicated if you’re dealing with interactive electronics and there are certain performers who have taken that on, but most don’t come from backgrounds where it’s taught. Most conservatories don’t really deal with teaching people how to work with electronics. I know some of them are making some efforts in that direction now, but it’s still something that’s not the norm. Until that changes, I think that we’re going to continue to run into those issues.

FJO: This is in a way a slightly anachronistic conversation because so much of how music is disseminated these days is not through live performance at a venue. It’s through recordings, whether it’s somebody listening, as you said, to something coming out of a CD player, or on the web. But I imagine that for you the ideal musical experience is still a live one, especially since almost all the pieces you have done involving electronics also involve a live musician.

JS: It’s very interesting, even for ones that don’t. I have a piece called Hosech Al P’ney HaTehom or Darkness Upon the Face of the Deep; it’s totally electronic. And I’ve had a number of discussions about why we should bother going into a hall to listen to a piece through loud speakers. And my answer is two-fold. One, the sensation of sound in a large space is radically different. It can envelop you in a completely different way, so that psychologically, I think the impact is quite different. And the other is the sociality of the live experience, the sort of group interaction that happens. So yes, I personally really love the experience of the live. The other thing about performances that involve live performers is the theatricality of it—there’s delicacy, and there’s the possibility of failure. It’s really a much more vivid kind of experience. That said, I listen to lots of music that’s recorded, as well. And I’m happy to have this incredible largesse of recorded music that I would otherwise not experience. But to me, if I have the opportunity to hear something live, I enjoy that more.

FJO: At the very beginning of this conversation, you said we’re at this unique point in history where all time periods can co-exist for us. The past is the present. That’s because of recordings.

JS: Absolutely.

FJO: You’re not going to hear Ockeghem live in most communities. But anyone can now hear Ockeghem anytime and anywhere on a recording.

JS: That’s true. That’s an advantage. Do I wish I could hear it in live performance readily? Yes. But I think it’s an incredible advantage that we can make the acquaintance of this music in a way that is not just trying to read from the score. So I think it’s fabulous that we have these recordings. That doesn’t take away from what the meaning is of the live performance.

But I think music is changing. There are really fascinating experiments and pieces that use the web. There are people like Jason Freeman or Peter Traub, one of the graduate students who completed our program who has done net-based music. He did a piece on MySpace where he used sounds from commonly found objects and then created ItSpace, where people could add to them and change them and mix with them. I think what we’re seeing are whole new strands of possibilities for interactive creation that are very exciting. But I don’t think of them as replacing the live experience and the kind of interaction that you have working with live performers and being in the environment where you have that kind of exchange.

FJO: So you wouldn’t see yourself doing an interactive web piece?

JS: I certainly don’t say no. I like to remain open to the possibilities that the electronic media offer us. And as I become enthralled with them or inspired to create something, I very well might want to do something that is web based. I haven’t done it yet, but that doesn’t mean I won’t.

The Seemingly Less Elusive Orchestra

Posted on March 26, 2012 by - Columns

Orchestra Hall

An orchestra hall in Zagreb. To many composers, every orchestra hall seems equally far away.

While I listen to music from all time periods on recordings, when I attend a live concert it is almost always because it features contemporary American music, and usually a premiere. After all, time is limited and much as I might want to be able to, I can’t possibly hear everything; a concert featuring a premiere at least contains music I wouldn’t be able to experience without having to travel to an appointed place at a time determined by someone else’s schedule. So it might seem strange that between last Thursday and this coming Friday, I will have attended a total of six orchestra concerts, all of them presented by Carnegie Hall. What’s even stranger about that is that all six programs feature nothing but music by American composers.

Last Thursday, I attended the latest installment of Orchestra Underground, the American Composers Orchestra’s series at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall. Of course, it is the mission of the American Composers Orchestra to present concert programs devoted exclusively to music by American composers, so it’s not particularly unusual for them to feature such a program. Although the variety in their latest concert offering was off the charts even by their standards—Michael Daugherty’s Trail of Tears, one of the most substantive flute concertos I’ve ever heard; Aaron Copland’s classic Clarinet Concerto; and composer/singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane’s Crane Palimpsest, a song cycle performed by Kahane (on vocals, guitar, and piano) with the ACO combining stanza’s from early 20th-century American poet Hart Crane’s To Brooklyn Bridge with Kahane’s own lyrics. If that wasn’t variety enough, the concert opened (again, opened!) with a piece by Milton Babbitt—From the Psalter, a relentless setting of Elizabethan poet Sir Philip Sidney’s versions of three Old Testament psalms for soprano and strings. Any concert that opens with Babbitt is making a statement, and this dedicated performance—especially enhanced by the assured singing of Judith Bettina—is hopefully a sign that his extraordinarily thought-provoking and challenging music will remain in the repertoire even though he is no longer with us.

Saturday night was an all-American program by the conductor-less Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in Carnegie’s main hall, though admittedly all was not new. Although it’s a piece I love, I certainly didn’t need to be at Carnegie Hall to hear yet another performance of Copland’s Appalachian Spring; I believe I’ve even heard Orpheus play it live before. And Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti is also not terra incognita, although Orpheus gave the premiere performance of a newly created instrumental suite arranged by Paul Chihara. What was completely new, however, was Clint Needham’s When We Forget, a world premiere that is part of Orpheus’s ongoing Project 440 initiative, and Chris Thile’s mandolin concerto, Ad astra per alas porci (named after John Steinbeck’s personal motto, a corruption from Virgil’s Aeneid meaning “to the stars on the wings of a pig”), a work which Thile has performed with eight orchestras all over the United States but never before in New York City. When Thile played a passage from a J.S. Bach partita as an encore, despite how excitingly he played it, it was old music that sounded like an interloper—quite a change from the usual paradigm of new music at an orchestra concert.

And starting Tuesday, the San Francisco Symphony will be in residence at Carnegie Hall for four concerts devoted exclusively to the music of American mavericks—Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, John Cage, Morton Feldman, plus the New York premieres of new pieces by Meredith Monk, Mason Bates, Morton Subotnick, and John Adams.

Now if only there was this much contemporary American music on orchestra concerts all year round. But then again, if there was, I’d never have time to be at home to work on my own—decidedly non-orchestral—music. Then again, with all this new orchestra music filling my ears, I might eventually find myself wanting to write for this extraordinary ensemble which I’ve loved the sound of for decades but which has always seemed somehow unrelated to my own personal life and times. Of course, if American orchestras featured a work by a living American composer on every single one of their programs, perhaps I and countless other people I know would not think that the orchestra somehow does not belong to us. Then again, given the current business model and infrastructure for orchestras in this country, there’d be no way for them to perform all the music all of us would write if every composer suddenly felt inspired to do so. There’s already so much great contemporary American orchestral music that already exists that rarely if ever gets performed, so why add to that pile? There are currently a staggering amount of new music-oriented chamber groups which offer myriad possibilities for getting one’s music played. Were it possible for there to eventually be a similar flowering of new music oriented orchestras, there just might finally be a golden age for new American orchestral music.

Blogging from NASA (North American Saxophone Alliance): Final Day

Posted on March 19, 2012 by - Columns

Sedona

The trails around Sedona

I always try to schedule some down-time when attending conferences to help keep my ears and mind from turning to putty. Arizona is a beautiful place for down-time, and a day on trails near Sedona was the perfect restorative. I returned to the 2012 Biennial Conference of the North American Saxophone Alliance eager to see how things wrapped up.

One of the most important facets of a conference like this is that it presents opportunities for students to perform and compete. Since I hadn’t seen this side of things yet, I decided to spend my morning listening to recitals by student soloists and quartets. Amid the admirable performances of pieces by Martin Bresnick, Francis Poulenc, and Ernest Bloch, one new piece stood out for its theatrical presentation and unusual score. I was immediately intrigued by The Kokila Quartet’s premiere of Patrick Peringer’s Inter(re)actions II: Created when I saw ten or twelve stands spread out around the stage and an obviously graphic score on the front one. The piece began with one player coming onto the stage alone, and then the others following one by one as the music grew. They progressed their way around the stage—sometimes at different stands, other times all at one—as the timbral materials evolved. Traditional tones were intermixed with pitch-bending, multiphonics, and wind effects in an engaging tapestry. Finally, all the players converged on the front stand and circled it with slow steps until one led them off the stage. I took the opportunity to talk to them shortly after the performance and ask them a few questions.

The next few hours became very “hands-on” for me as I helped prepare, rehearse, and present a lecture recital with the XPlorium Ensemble. I’ve been really fortunate to work with these exceptional musicians on a number of occasions recently, and today’s recital included my own work Mount Rainier Search and Rescue as well as Mark Engebretson’s Compression and Michael Young’s inventive reimagining of Saint-Saens’s Carnival of the Animals. By combining saxophones (the Oasis Quartet) with percussion, XPlorium not only represents a new instrumentation in contemporary music, but joins the two instrument groups that are most active in expanding their repertoire. It was gratifying to see how exceptionally the group played, and how well the pieces were received.

With that behind me, I found myself reflecting on what I have learned here. I’ve used this blog to highlight those that were outstanding, promising, or memorable in some way, but there were also quite a few pieces about which I was ambivalent. A conference such as this must, by its very nature, involve a good bit of showcasing a player’s technique. It sometimes has the subtle feel of a gathering of body-builders all flexing for one another. This being the case, there is a built-in tendency for the works presented to lean toward the technical and showy side. While this is sometimes done extremely effectively, these successes are more the exception than the rule. Many of the pieces served as little more than vehicles for the players—very challenging and impressive, but forgettable or (in the worst cases) vacuous. I also found myself wondering exactly how many of these world premieres will enjoy second, third, and fourth performances. Once the prestige of being first is gone, will the players continue to champion them? Or will they immediately turn their attention to the next premiere? Anecdotal evidence seems to suggest the latter.

These are not new questions. Certainly Weber and Liszt wrote some pieces that, while mostly bling, still hold the stage. Likewise, music history is littered with kleinmeisters whose new pieces were eagerly premiered and then disappeared into the ether. So, taken in perspective, this conference is simply a microcosm of a perennial process that is endemic to our discipline. The bottom line is that I’d far rather see lots of new music and have some poorer pieces mixed in, than the alternative. Just before the conference ended, I had a chance to pull conference host Timothy McAllister aside for a quick chat.

Thanks again to NASA, ASU, and Tim for his great conference! It was such a pleasure to watch, listen, and learn from. I have a feeling this will not be my last saxophone conference.

Searching for a Song

Posted on January 31, 2012 by - Columns

One day last week, I was trying to think of a place to meet a friend on our way out for the evening. “Let’s meet on West 56th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues— you know, where Patelson’s Music House used to be,” the friend said via cell phone. As I turned north on Seventh Avenue, happy memories flooded back of visits to this historic music store. Long gone are the days when you could actually go into a music store in New York and rifle through shelves, binders and bins, browsing and looking for classical and choral scores. My score browsing afternoons are now limited to occasional trips to The Schott Music Shop, Great Marlborough Street, London, a haven for choral treasures and information.

When I look at the scores we’ve accumulated at Melodia Women’s Choir, I marvel at the different ways we’ve come across them. When we started, all we had was a crumpled box of treble scores that had been left for our artistic director in the basement of the church where she was music director at the time. The box proved to be a valuable source of material, with some real treasures among the pieces inside.

Now, almost ten years later, what we still lovingly refer to as “the box” is a library that overflows from several large filing cabinets. Scores have found their way to us through recommendations from the online choral forum choralnet.org; and they’ve arrived in the mail and by e-mail from conductors, composers, and singers. We’ve also sought them out by browsing the repertoire lists of peer choirs online, digging into dictionaries and catalogs, and scouring programs and websites.

In addition to the Melodia library of scores, our audio collection has become a valuable resource for finding material. The CD browsing situation in New York is not as dire as the sheet music store scene since a handful of specialty music stores carry an eclectic mix of recordings and J&R on Park Row has a wide selection of choral recordings. In addition to choral CDs mixed in under composers’ names, a specialty choral section carries compilation choral CDs and some collections by individual choirs. While waiting on the long check-out line at J&R last Saturday, my fellow shoppers were voicing how vital it is to be able to really look at an actual CD before buying it—the internet just didn’t work for them.

Although shuffling through CDs is definitely productive and exciting, many of the CDs in our choir’s audio collection have come from other places. Conferences and concerts have yielded up some good material, and Primarily A Cappella’s Singers.com has become a great resource for rarely-heard material performed by choirs from all over the world. Some gems in the Melodia collection have also come from direct orders to choirs throughout the US, in Canada, and the UK, and from rummaging in used CD stores and market stalls during travels around the US and England.

Some music publishers are also adding audio to their choral catalogs. Hal Leonard’s Voices of Distinction 2011 catalog is a good example. Titles with the “Closer Look” icon frequently include an audio sample in addition to a score excerpt—a great way to discover composers whose work we’re not familiar with.

Once repertoire has been selected for a concert using all these resources, the next project is to find out where to acquire multiple scores and find any instrumental parts that are needed. Read more about that in my next post.