Tag: setting poetry

A Primer on Collaborating with Authors

Poetry books

Introduction

I could wax poetic about why composers should set texts by living authors. Some big reasons include texts that stand out amid the sea of well-worn Public Domain poems, topics and style relevant to today’s audiences, more diverse voices and viewpoints, the ability to interact with the author, the possibility of tailor-made texts, and supporting another art form as a living tradition. I’d happily go on in detail about each of these, but I’d rather focus on actionable information you can use to start (or improve) your journey setting contemporary texts. So I will skip the justifications and assume you like working with words and are at least cautiously interested in setting text by a breathing human being.

While it is possible to find interviews where composers talk about specific projects working with authors, there is fairly limited information out there about the nuts and bolts of how to actually start doing it. Dale Trumbore has written about why and how to collaborate with writers in No More Zombie Poets, Part 1: Choosing Better Public Domain Texts and Part 2: Finding Writers Who Aren’t Dead. Aside from that, Stephen Paulus’s Before You Set Those Words to Music includes a clear introduction to copyright, Public Domain, and text-setting permissions. ASCAP and BMI each have some posts about such permissions as well.

My articles will draw on those sources along with my own experiences to explore the process of working with living authors. By authors, I mean writers, poets, librettists, playwrights, or any other creators of words. I’ll cover critical logistics such as finding collaborators, assessing compatibility, creating a text-setting agreement, and navigating the remainder of the process. My purpose is to provide a primer for composers who haven’t yet worked with living authors and to offer another veteran’s perspective to those experienced in collaborating with writers.

Finding Authors

A common question about working with authors is where to find them. If you want to set contemporary text but don’t have a specific author or work in mind, the prospect of finding someone whose writings you like, with whom you are compatible enough to have a good working relationship, and who is also interested in collaborating with you can appear daunting.

Finding contemporary writers is very much possible. It can take time, though…

In reality, finding contemporary writers is very much possible. It can take time, though, so this is not something best done when you have a project with an impending deadline. Rather, think of finding authors as a lifestyle and incorporate some or all of the suggestions below into your normal activities. Eventually, you’ll discover authors whose work interests you and start building relationships with them.

Poet Athena Kildegaard

Poet Athena Kildegaard reading her work at the Art Song Lab 2019 Poetry Reading.

You could find contemporary texts and authors by browsing manuscripts at your local bookstore and perusing literary journals or similar periodicals. If you don’t want to leave the comfort of your couch, the American Academy of Poets’ website is a great resource. It allows you to search for poems, poets, keywords, poetry activities in your area, and more. They also offer a poem-a-day email subscription and frequently share poetry on social media.

Facebook, Twitter, and other social platforms are wonderful for connecting with potential collaborators. You may already have writers in your immediate network. Or, you could ask friends or colleagues for suggestions of writers to check out. Finding the social media account of an author you respect and seeing who they follow or whose work they share could also introduce you to new possibilities.

Additionally, some platforms include groups where you could find possible collaborators. I’ve found the following Facebook groups very helpful:

Composer Writer Connection
Contemporary Opera Connection
Librettist Network

Searching for keywords like writer, author, poet, playwright, or librettist bring up many other groups that you might want to check out.

Meeting Authors

Discovering writers in person limits you to those in or at least coming through your area, but it also allows for more personal contact.

Discovering writers in person limits you to those in or at least coming through your area, but it also allows for more personal contact. Your local bookstores or libraries may have upcoming readings by local authors or those touring a book. Area colleges may have Creative Writing programs that sponsor events, or you may be able to contact faculty to seek possible collaborators.

A Google search for events near you may also be fruitful. When I searched “Connecticut poet,” I found there is a Connecticut Poetry Society. Their website had information on readings and other events, links to local poetry groups and independent bookstores, an annual publication they sponsor, and more. There is a network called the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, which lists other state societies. Yours may have one, too, and there may be a city or regional group nearby where you can meet authors. If you travel, you can also look for events in your destination.

Poet Delali Aviyor

Poet Delali Aviyor reading at The Atlantic Center for the Arts (2018).

Some organizations specifically focus on connecting composers and writers. A few examples include:

Art Song Lab
American Opera Projects’ Composers & the Voice
Nautilus Composer-Librettist Studio
Tapestry Opera’s Composer-Librettist Laboratory
Washington National Opera’s American Opera Initiative

The programs listed here are primarily educational. Some are tuition-based, while others may be free or include financial support. Some are highly competitive, others less so. All provide the opportunity to meet and work with authors from a variety of locations on new projects.

Artist residences are another place you might meet writers if you can participate in one or attend their open studio days or similar events. As with the educational programs above, you are more likely to meet authors outside your local area at an artist residency.

Now What?

It may seem obvious, but once you’ve found someone you think you might want to work with, the next step is getting to know them. Get very familiar with their work and try to connect with them either online or in person. Start thinking about whether you might want to collaborate with them and in what capacity.

If you don’t have a pressing need to collaborate with them on an upcoming project, this process can happen naturally through building a friendship. Then you can bring up the possibility of collaborating once you have a project that feels right.

If you already have a specific project in mind—for example, you think something they wrote would be perfect for an upcoming piece—then skip ahead to proposing… a collaboration, that is. Express your interest in setting their text and describe the potential project to see if they might want to work together. If that writer is not familiar with your music, provide a small number of samples similar to the proposed collaboration.

Informed Consent and “The Talk”

Regardless of whether you find a willing partner through an extended courtship or a direct proposal, the next step is to have “The Talk.”

Regardless of whether you find a willing partner through an extended courtship or a direct proposal, the next step is to have “The Talk.” This is the phase in which you’ll discuss artistic goals, working process, and the logistics of your partnership including permissions for using the text, your financial arrangements, and any other necessary details. It’s akin to taking a big step forward in a romantic relationship, hence the capital letters.

And as with personal relationships, informed consent is the foundation for a successful artistic collaboration. Both parties must understand how the collaboration is going to work and agree in writing before starting the project.

Arriving at informed consent depends on self-awareness and clear communication. Each person should know their preferences in working with others, their creative process, and their artistic goals or intentions. They must also be able to articulate those elements to their partner, understand how their needs relate to those of their partner and the project, and negotiate any conflicts.

Some of that may happen informally as you and your partner are getting to know one another. Other items will need a focused discussion, either oral or written. Discussions in person, on the phone, or via video conferencing have the benefit of real-time responses and a clearer perception of tone. Both of which reduce the chance of miscommunication. However, this may be uncomfortable for some people.

Typed discussions have the advantage of ensuring that everything is written down and easily referenced. Email and other asynchronous methods may also be easier for scheduling. But the participants should be especially conscious both of their own wording and how they are reading the other person’s responses since typed communication can come off colder and harsher than intended. I typically use oral discussions for big issues and email to finalize details or give straightforward updates.

Regardless of how you do it, having The Talk is essential in setting the collaboration up for success. It will be the foundation for your written contract and a roadmap for navigating your partnership. These discussions also help you to get further acquainted and make sure that you really want to work together before you commit.

The next two articles in the series will go more into the interpersonal and legal issues that should be covered in The Talk.


Support for the writing of this article was provided by the ASCAP Foundation Irving Caesar Fund.
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Poetry and Community in Guangzhou

Poetry 

While I have been pursuing compositional projects and researching Chinese instruments, so much of the learning that has taken place for me in China has come from extra-musical sources: the environment, the language, and the conversations and interactions with people whose life experiences do not match my own.

Upon returning from my first stay in China in 2016, I began to seek out works by living Chinese writers in order to help enrich my understanding of the country beyond the music I had studied. Librettist Kendall A. suggested the poetry of Zheng Xiaoqiong’s (郑小琼), and I was struck by both the power of her words and the evocations of a side of China I had only seen hints of. Zheng was a former migrant factory worker in Southern China; her poetry captures not only the daily life of workers and their conditions, but transforms it into a sort of music which dances on one’s tongue. (The Chinese noun for poetry is shi ge 诗歌, consisting of the characters for both poetry and song).

I was struck by both the power of Zheng Xiaoqiong’s words and the evocations of a side of China I had only seen hints of.

At the start, my Chinese was too weak to grasp the full breadth of her imagery in its original form. There were a few assorted poems available in translation online, and from there I began corresponding with her translators, who graciously sent along several others which they had finished but not yet published. I asked one if he might be able to connect me to Zheng Xiaoqiong; a few weeks later, we became WeChat contacts. From that time, her poetry was always on my mind. I returned to her work in Chinese last year, and began copying, memorizing, and reciting it to myself. After falling in love with one specific poem, Zheng Xiaoqiong gave me permission to set fragments of it, and invited me to come visit if I had a chance. In late April of this year, I arrived in Guangzhou to spend a weekend with her.

Zheng Xiaoqiong is full of life. She phoned just after I landed, the words spilling out of her mouth at a pace I could just keep up with. We had dinner that night before heading to her building, where she works as an editor for a publication about modern Chinese literature containing poetry, critiques on poetic theory, short stories, and essays. The beauty of the situation is that everyone employed by the publication lives and works in the same complex. This allows them some flexibility with time to pursue artistic endeavors, while maintaining the practicality of a consistent day job. (She was leaving for Germany for a week as a guest on a poetry exchange on the same day I left.) The proximity to one another allows the writers to have salons and readings to share their work each week. As Zheng Xiaoqiong said, one of the most important things to her as a writer was the access to consistent jiao liu (交流): exchange.

In fact, it was exchange which led Xiaoqiong to first become a poet. Because she was from a rural village in Sichuan Province, she had no chance to attend university; the sole option for leaving her hometown was through entering the factories. There she took solace in books which were passed around covertly after hours, and, at 22, she began to write poems which drew upon her experiences in spite of opposition from the factory managers.

When she asked about my plans for setting her poem the next day, I shared my ideas. As a composer and a non-native speaker of Mandarin, I knew that my readings would not match her own. Yet, to learn that she often reads her work in her native Sichuan dialect gave me a freedom to present her words in a way which would not be so strictly tied to one interpretation of the text. I then asked the obvious question: what does a factory sound like? Her eyes grew wide, and she said that it varies immensely depending on what it was the factory produced. Then she began to recall… disorderly crashes… electronics humming… drones…

She thought for another moment, and asked if I would like to go.

Later that day, we arrived in Dongguan, a city an hour and a half outside of Guangzhou. We first went to their library and museum, where we met two of Zheng Xiaoqiong’s close friends. One, Sai Ren (塞壬), was a novelist and the librarian in Dongguan; the other, Zhan You Bing (占有兵), was a photographer and documentarian who had been studying Chinese factories for the past decade. We first sipped tea and looked over his books before entering the section of the museum used as storage for his collection. There were clothes, tickets, rolls of film, work schedules, and books and books of photos with covers hand-sewn from denim jeans.

At dinner we were joined by a poet based in Shenzhen, Xue Fang (雪芳). She explained to me one-on-one that what set Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poetry apart was not its subject matter (“actually, there are many migrant worker poets… ”), but her use of language and her unstoppable vision. “Of all the workers in Chinese factories, how many are able to leave? And then to create artistic work of that depth…”.

We visited five factories… It was a sonically overwhelming experience, accompanied by an emptiness.

We visited five factories as a group the next day: a hardware factory, an electronics factory, a factory which produces the plastic wrapping material for children’s toys, a chemical factory, and a shoe factory. It was a sonically overwhelming experience, accompanied by an emptiness. I remembered a hollow feeling I had encountered once before when I exited the subway in Beijing at the wrong station, walking out into a wasteland of construction sites. At one point we sat drinking tea and eating cherries with a factory boss (lao ban 老板) while he watched CCTV displays of the workers in the sweatshop behind him sorting plastic in the dark.

A worker sorting through silicon molds at an electronics factory in Dongguan, China. Photo by the author.


Community

Zheng Xiaoqiong is no longer a migrant worker, but she is connected to a community of writers who share those experiences, as well as a larger community of writers and editors across China and a community of poets and translators abroad. Her poems are sourced in the lives of real people, but not in some tangential way: she returns on the weekends to talk to the workers and then amplifies their experiences through her writing. This connection is the lifeblood of her work.

 Zheng Xiaoqiong and the author in an electronics factory in Dongguan, China. Photo by Zhan You Bing 占有兵.


Zheng Xiaoqiong and the author in an electronics factory in Dongguan, China.
Photo by Zhan You Bing 占有兵.

Community is created through exchange. Zheng Xiaoqiong finds this not only at her publication, but in her friends who accompanied us to the factories. She explained that while they only have the chance to meet in person a few times a year, they stay in touch through phone calls and WeChat, encouraging one another in their writing pursuits. The conversations I shared with everyone in the group that weekend were passionate and covered both the situations of factory workers and the shared challenges we face as writers of words and of music.

Community is created through exchange.

My weekend with Zheng Xiaoqiong informed my understanding of her work, and built a connection between us past words on a page into friendship. Exchange with China is not simply reading a poem from the Tang Dynasty and setting it. Rather, it is based in personal connections and requires a coming to terms with the complexities of modern life in China today.

An excerpt of 辜月 Gu Yue (2017), another work from the same set of voice and percussion works containing Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poem. Composed by the author for percussionist Yongyun Zhang 张永韵.

An excerpt of 辜月 Gu Yue (2017), another work from the same set of voice and percussion works containing Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poem. Composed by the author for percussionist Yongyun Zhang 张永韵.

Eleanor Cory: What I Really Want To Do

Eleanor Cory sitting in front of a sculpture and trees on a park bench

Eleanor Cory is one of the most unassuming composers I have ever encountered. I had seen her at new music concerts all around New York City for many years before I made the mental connection that she was the same person whose music I knew from recordings on CRI, Soundspells, and Albany.  When I finally started having conversations with her during intermissions at some of these concerts, I was struck by how much she valued listening to other people’s music. This prompted me to revisit her music, mindful of that devotion, and as a result I began to hear the subtle interplays between instruments in her carefully crafted chamber music in an entirely different way. It turns out that it is the way that she hears her own music.

“There is dialogue in my music; the instruments are people in some way,” Cory explained when we finally had a chance to talk to each other in the presence of a video camera in her Upper West Side Manhattan apartment on a mid-July afternoon.  And as far as being influenced by other composers goes, she never lets her ego get in the way of where the music needs to go. As she elaborated, “I like to put things that don’t immediately seem to belong together into the same piece.  From [listening to] one piece I may get a dramatic shape, and from something else I might just get some great chords.  There are many ways of using the same chords.”

A passage from the score of Eleanor Cory's String Quartet No. 3.

A passage from the score of Eleanor Cory’s String Quartet No. 3. Copyright © 2015 by Eleanor Cory. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.
All rights administered throughout the world by American Composers Alliance (BMI). Used with permission of the composer.

One of the biggest inspirations for her has been jazz, even though she has never aspired to be a jazz musician:

I didn’t think that I have a natural ability to do it.  I came from a very typical suburban family. … I wasn’t the kind of person that could hear jazz and then reproduce it.  Maybe that’s what I thought had to happen. … I heard this music when I was teenager.  I lived in New Jersey and my brother would bring me with his friends to all those clubs, like Birdland, so I had all that music in my ear.  But you couldn’t do that at Columbia University.

Her years of compositional training—first at Sarah Lawrence College with Meyer Kupferman then with Charles Wuorinen at NEC, and finally at Columbia with Bulent Arel, Chou Wen-chung, and Mario Davidovsky—gave her a very deep immersion in the 12-tone method. But despite this meticulous grounding in sets and combinatoriality, Cory’s phrases echoed bebop. And then she had an epiphany that encouraged her to go deeper in that direction from a seemingly unlikely source: the doyen of 12-tone composers, Milton Babbitt, with whom she had never studied.

“A piece of mine was on a concert at Merkin Hall and a piece by Milton was on the same concert,” she remembered.  “At the intermission, we were on stage talking about our pieces.  At one point, he looked at me and he said, ‘What I really like in your music is the bebop jazz influence.’  He knows that music so well.  And this whole part of me just relaxed.  I can do this!  … Suddenly I found these kind of overlappings. I could go from one to the other. Then I began just saying to myself, ‘Okay, I’m going to sit at the piano and I’m going to play chords.  Chords that I like.  Period.  I’m just going to play whatever’s in there.’  And so many of them came out. I wasn’t using rows anymore.  This was really exciting.  Then I realized, if you took them apart, many of them were the same chords that might be 0-1-3-9s—you know, this stupid language—or 0-2-5-8. I could practically play all these chords and they would be the same chords, but in different inversions.  My ear was in both places, but they were coming together.”

Last year, Naxos American Classics released a disc featuring some of Cory’s most recent works. Her compositional language has grown even more eclectic. There are suggestions of minimalism in the frenetic conclusion of her Third String Quartet from 2009 and there’s even some effusive neo-romanticism in her 2012 Violin Sonata No. 1. (“I can’t believe I never wrote a violin sonata!  I think maybe I was scared to do it because there were so many great ones.”) But the jazziest of the pieces is, fittingly, Things Are, a 2011 duo for flute and piano written in memory of Milton Babbitt.

The cover for the 2015 Naxos American Classics CD of music by Eleanor Cory

The latest CD devoted exclusively to Eleanor Cory’s music was issued last year on Naxos American Classics (8.559784).
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A conversation at Eleanor Cory’s apartment in New York City
July 8, 2016—3:30 p.m.
Video presentation and photography by Molly Sheridan
Transcribed by Julia Lu

Frank J. Oteri: You seem to place tremendous value on listening to other people’s music. I’ve seen you in the audience for so many different concerts I’ve attended, for probably nearly 20 years.

Eleanor Cory:  Wow, that’s a long time.

FJO: It’s always made me curious about how many performances you attend.

EC:  Maybe one or two a week.  Occasionally there’ll be some crazy week where there will be more than that.  But sometimes there are big spaces where I don’t go to any; there just isn’t anything in particular that I want to hear.

FJO: And yet you seem open to a really wide range of music. I’ve seen you at many performances by the more established new music ensembles uptown, but I’ve also run into you at some more experimental things either downtown or in Brooklyn.

EC: I like getting ideas and just being there.

FJO:  I also know that you’re a big fan of jazz. Somehow, I can hear all of that when I listen to your music, even though you’re not composing in those styles. You’ve absorbed these other musical languages and have made aspects of them part of your own vocabulary.

I think that by nature as a composer, I like to put things that don’t immediately seem to belong together into the same piece.

EC: I think that by nature as a composer, I like to put things that don’t immediately seem to belong together into the same piece.  From [listening to] one piece I may get a dramatic shape, and from something else I might just get some great chords.  There are many ways of using the same chords.  But I also just like going and seeing people, then talking to composers right after their pieces are played, just to ask them questions on the spot, or to tell them how much I liked the piece.  I’m curious and, by nature, I’m always asking people questions.  People say, “You ask too many questions!”  Sometimes it’s interpreted as butting in or stepping on someone’s privacy.  I just like to be aware and maybe I’ll get some ideas.  Maybe I’ll try something that’s out of my box.

FJO:  In terms of out of your box, it was interesting seeing you at National Sawdust during the New York City Electronic Music Festival, since as far as I know you don’t compose electronic music.

EC:  But my husband [Joel Gressel] does.  He wasn’t on that particular concert, but he wanted to go to some of them.  Alice Shields was on another concert, and she’s a friend of both of ours. And Tuck [Hubert Howe] is an old friend.  They went to Princeton together, so we’ve known him a long time, too. So we figured, let’s go hear his piece.  And there aren’t too many purely electronic music concerts these days, I don’t think.

A portrait of Joel Gressel and Eleanor Cory sits next a sculpture in Cory's composition studio.

A portrait of Joel Gressel and Eleanor Cory sits next a sculpture in Cory’s composition studio.

FJO:  So has electronic music influenced you as a composer in any way?

EC:  I think it has. Back when I was at Columbia, I took one course with Mario Davidovsky and it was so wonderful.  He would just dance around.  It was the old days where you had to cut little snippets and then tape them.  I had no ability.  It just wasn’t my thing.  And computer music with Charles Dodge—not at all.  I had another teacher for a while who’s been dead for a long time named Bülent Arel, and he did a lot of that.  There was something about the notelessness of some of it.  And I’ve heard a lot of it.  Of course a lot of people do it with real notes, but it was mostly those guys that were doing these interesting sounds that I thought was very interesting—that wildness, things really fast that are not playable by human beings.  Maybe part of it, for me, is getting that feeling, that energy, trying to get the instruments a little bit out of what they usually do.  Maybe that’s analogous to these electronic sounds.  Maybe living with my husband. He does all kinds of strange sounds, although he tends to use electronic sounds more orchestrally.  That’s another whole story.

Joel Gressel and Eleanor Cory laughing while playing on a piano together.

Joel Gressel and Eleanor Cory playing piano four-hands on June 16, 1973, the eve of their wedding (photo courtesy Tamar Cory Gressel).

FJO:  Now, if you’re really deep into working on a piece, do you feel the need to create some kind of separation between you and other people’s music?

EC:  I don’t think so.  Sometimes if I’m deeply into a piece, it’s really nice to get away from it and go to hear something else and not think about it.  I think I compartmentalize like that.  And I do a lot of other things to put the piece aside.  I may do some reading or some physical activity.  I may sit with friends and talk about music or not music.  Then I come back to the piece.  And a lot of times, I do think that a lot of other things that I do feed into the music. If I’m having a really animated conversation, I might just have an animated conversation with a bunch of instruments. I also go to poetry readings pretty often, and that’s all musical kind of thought—to me a lot of it is.  So I think that’s also something that has an effect on what I’m doing.

FJO:  That’s clear even in the titles of your pieces.  You wrote a really nice piano trio which you called Conversation, and it does in fact sound like one to some extent.  So was there an actual specific conversation you had with people that inspired you?

EC:  I don’t think so.  It was just thinking about how people interact with each other. So I just thought of the instruments as talking to each other, then picking up ideas from each other and giving them back, or talking at once—you get a sort of more chaotic thing.  Slowing down and speeding up, little time to think, then getting back into it.  A sudden wait.  Those kind of moments. It starts maybe as words and then suddenly they’re notes.  There is dialogue in my music.  The instruments are people in some way.  Not for every piece, but I want the people playing those instruments to connect with one another as though they were people in a conversation.

FJO:  Of course, there’s a delicate balance between being mindful of the musicians for whom you are initially writing and creating something that could go on to be performed by many other musicians.

EC:  If I know the actual players I’m writing for, then of course I do kind of think of them playing it.  And I definitely think, “What does this one do really well?”  And I think of something I may have heard them do.  But I don’t think it goes too far.  It’s just a way of getting started with an idea.  Then you’re back to notes, rhythms, range, tempos, and the usual stuff of music.

Joel Gressel and Eleanor Cory on a bench in a park.

Joel Gressel and Eleanor Cory (photo by Tamar Cory Gressel).

FJO:  As to the usual stuff in your music, I certainly hear elements that are clearly tonal or modal and others that seem dodecaphonic. And, in particular, harmonies and phrasings that bear a strong resemblance to jazz even though your music does not incorporate improvisation.

I’m going to sit at the piano and I’m going to play chords that I like.  And so many of them came out. I wasn’t using rows anymore.  This was really exciting.  Then I realized, if you took them apart, many of them were the same chords that might be 0-1-3-9s—you know, this stupid language—or 0-2-5-8. … My ear was in both places, but they were coming together.

EC:  Well, I had such a heavy dose of 12-tone stuff with Charles Wuorinen—rows and retrogrades.  So that was in my ear. And Babbitt’s music, but I didn’t study with him.  In fact, I’ll tell you one very relevant story.  A piece of mine was on a concert at Merkin Hall and a piece by Milton was on the same concert.  At the intermission, we were on stage talking about our pieces.  At one point, he looked at me and he said, “What I really like in your music is the bebop jazz influence.”  He knows that music so well.  And this whole part of me just relaxed.  I can do this!  It’s what I really want to do, because I heard this music when I was teenager.  I lived in New Jersey and my brother would bring me with his friends to all those clubs, like Birdland, so I had all that music in my ear.  But you couldn’t do that at Columbia University.  Suddenly I found these kind of overlappings. I could go from one to the other. Then I began just saying to myself, “Okay, I’m going to sit at the piano and I’m going to play chords.  Chords that I like.  Period.  I’m just going to play whatever’s in there.”  And so many of them came out. I wasn’t using rows anymore.  This was really exciting.  Then I realized, if you took them apart, many of them were the same chords that might be 0-1-3-9s—you know, this stupid language—or 0-2-5-8. I could practically play all these chords and they would be the same chords, but in different inversions.

My ear was in both places, but they were coming together.  I was comfortable with using them, and then I could choose my own order.  I didn’t have to have the I chord then the IV chord; I could just say, “Well, let’s try this one. I’ll change the range, and I’ll put this note up an octave.  Then I’ll scrunch them all together.”  I wasn’t writing any melodies, just putting together a progression based on my ear basically to see what would happen.  And I liked it.  Other people liked it, so that was good.  Then I made melodies out of chords, and put things on top of each other.  I often write words before I start writing music.  I’ll write a story that I want to tell, which isn’t really about people or anything; it’s just the moods that I’m going to have and then interruptions, people arguing, etc. I’ll just have these thoughts of what I want the music to be like.

A Steinway grand piano with an open score on its music rack.

An old Steinway grand piano resides in the middle of Cory’s living room.

FJO:  These narratives seem so important to your creative process, and sometimes you’ve offered hints of that with titles like, as we spoke of before, Conversation. There are many other pieces of yours whose titles allude to this same line of thinking—Interview, Pas de Quatre, even pieces like Play Within a Play and Chasing Time. But it’s less apparent when you title something, say, String Quartet No. 3, which just tells people it’s the third somewhat long form piece you’ve composed for two violins, a viola, and a cello, or Violin Sonata No. 1 which is pretty recent so I was surprised that it was your first one!

EC:  Isn’t that amazing? I can’t believe I never wrote a violin sonata!  I’ve done bigger groups, or smaller, just not a violin sonata.  I think maybe I was scared to do it because there were so many great ones.  If you write a sonata for solo bass, that’s different.  So I just decided to do it, and that’s why it was number one.

A passage from the score of Eleanor Cory's Violin Sonata No. 1


A passage from the score of Eleanor Cory’s Violin Sonata No. 1. Copyright © 1991 by Eleanor Cory. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.
All rights administered throughout the world by the Association for the Promotion of New Music (BMI). Used with permission of the composer.

FJO: So if there is a back story to any of these more abstractly titled pieces, do you feel it’s important for listeners to know about it?

EC:  They can read my program notes, but I don’t think it is.  I have program notes that are poems, if a piece is written about a poem.  But I hope it doesn’t matter whether they get “the” story, whatever it was. I want them to enjoy the piece, and to feel emotional things. So I don’t think I care, although I will sometimes put in a program note something about voices interacting and sometimes I don’t.

FJO:  Now, along those same lines, using rows versus not using rows—once upon a time, it was very important for composers to say this is based on such and such a row, and now people tend to shy away from talking about that because that way of thinking about music somehow got vilified. Very few people these days seem to acknowledge that they’re writing 12-tone music.  You even said you were happy to escape the row but, from what I can hear at least, these compositional techniques—or at least the melodic and harmonic possibilities that they open up—still inform your language to some extent.

EC:  Oh, that’s interesting.  I don’t think so.  I think of it as being quite separate.  I associate it so much with being a student, and being a brand new composer, and being just happy to be a composer and being told what to do by Charles Wuorinen.  This is what everybody’s doing now.  You better get to it.  This is what everyone’s doing, and so I’m going to do this, too.  Taking my own chords, using my own ears, and getting jazz in was a big rebellion for me against what I had been given.

FJO:  It was interesting for me to read in the autobiographical essay that you shared with me the other day that when you first started writing music at Sarah Lawrence College, Meyer Kupferman told you not to worry about theory or harmony, and that your initial reaction was that you didn’t know what to do. But you had to do something because the piece was due the following week.

EC:  Right.  Don’t come in here unless you have one.  It was very scary. It was really just a “one note, then another note, what am I going to do now” kind of thing. But I think that was wonderful. I somehow wanted to do the class. I didn’t have to take that class.  I just thought maybe I’d like to try composing, because we did all this improvising. Everybody had different instruments.  There was nothing about “now we’re going to be in G major.”  It was just “now we’re going to have a fox going up a tree” or “now we’re going to have a flame.”  Then we would have to listen to each other, and if the bass started doing something, then I’d have to do this on the piano to respond to her.  And a violin would come in and do a line over it. It’s just as though we were dancing almost.

We were just kind of improvising with our bodies and whatever instruments we played.  Some of them were scratching on their instruments, or playing them upside down—people doing funny sounds, some of what now happens all the time, these strange sounds from flutes, and there was no judgement.  We just did these things.  And then they got more and more specific, and we began to have piano concertos or flute concertos, and the rest of us would be the orchestra.  So it got you feeling about how music goes.  We’d all heard music, but to have actually tried to write in the style of Mozart or something would not have been possible at that point, especially without knowing theory.

FJO:  So you started out as a pianist, and your initial background in composing came out of improvisation.  And you also have a deep love of jazz. It’s interesting that you did not pursue being a jazz pianist. You probably could have.

EC:  I don’t think so. It would have been so far from my imagination because I don’t think I knew of any women jazz players, not that I was thinking about that too much.  I just thought it was something you were born with.  I still almost think that.  Some people can just sit down and improvise jazz.  I don’t have that.  Does that make sense?

FJO:  Yes and no.  Because you also wrote in that essay that you were initially not aware of any women who composed music and that did not stop you from becoming a composer.

EC:  But I never gave it a thought.  I did with jazz.  But maybe that was just another way of saying I didn’t think that I have a natural ability to do it.

FJO:  But you do. I think it’s worth talking about this in greater detail because I think it speaks to what leads people down certain paths. Role models are extremely important. In the year 2016, there are tons of prominent female composers—though of course women have been writing music for thousands of years.  But most concerts of older classical music still feature music exclusively by men. There’s also a tremendous gender disparity in jazz. As a young person wanting to engage in these kinds of activities, it can be difficult to find a way to identify with it.  Yet you still found a way to identify with being a composer but not with being a jazz musician.

A childhood photo of Eleanor Cory.

A childhood photo of Eleanor Cory. (Photo courtesy Tamar Cory Gressel.)

I knew the words to all the songs. I listened to it all the time. I always had Dave Brubeck and all these people on my machine. And I just loved it. But at that stage in my life I also wasn’t really thinking about being any kind of composer.

EC:  I came from a very typical suburban family in New Jersey.  Music was in the house all the time because my father loved music, and we went to concerts.  So I got reinforcement for playing the piano and for loving music. Then I went to a girls’ school because a lot of people from that culture went to girls’ schools.  So I went to a boarding school that was a girls’ school and then I went to Sarah Lawrence.  While it didn’t occur to me to write music—because all composers were men—as soon as this was presented to me, I was very happy with it.  I mean, I think I was nervous and afraid, but I didn’t think about not doing it.  I very much wanted to do it.  So why didn’t I want to do jazz?  I don’t think that was really anything to do with being a woman.  I wasn’t the kind of person that could hear jazz and then reproduce it.  Maybe that’s what I thought had to happen.  I guess I could have just started studying it or however people start to do it.  I don’t know why I thought that I loved it so much but I couldn’t do it.

FJO:  But then decades later, that love came out in your music in your own way.

EC:  Because it was in there.  I knew the words to all the songs.  I listened to it all the time.  I always had Dave Brubeck and all these people on my machine.  And I just loved it.  But at that stage in my life I also wasn’t really thinking about being any kind of composer.  Maybe I thought I was just going to graduate and not compose anymore.  I was going to teach music to kids.  That’s what I would do with a music degree.  So I was teaching in this school and I wasn’t really composing.  Then I started to take other classes in other places, and I started composing again.  I had a teacher at the Longy School and then I went to NEC.  But I think it was just something that was in my life; I was still more of a pianist.

Eleanor Cory sitting on a bench in Straus Park

FJO:  So in terms of finding mentors, at some point you learned about Ursula Mamlok and Joan Tower and I know that connecting with them was very important to you.

EC:  When I got to Joan and Ursula, I really liked their music. That was the first time that I felt in synch with composers in general, and women composers in particular.

FJO:  What was interesting about Meyer Kupferman being your first teacher was that even though he was a 12-tone composer, he was also deeply interested in jazz. Every piece of his was based on the same tone row, which he used because it yielded particular jazz progressions.

EC:  That’s what I learned to do, too.  I learned to do collections of pitches that would yield these kinds of jazz things.

FJO:  So long before Babbitt said that he liked the bebop influence in your music, which you said gave you the license to really explore that direction, you had already been exposed to a model for doing that.

EC:  Yes, exactly. And Meyer was part of that, definitely.

FJO:  This also brings us back to your whole conceptualization of music as a dialogue between different musicians, which is a common trait both of small combo jazz and classical chamber music. It’s perhaps no surprise that you’re predominantly a chamber music composer.  You’ve written a few orchestra pieces, but it seems to be less of a focus for you. I’ve only heard one of them, Canyons.

EC:  They just haven’t been recorded.  It’s such a big deal to get them [recorded].  There are two others.  I should be better at sending them out.

A passage from the score of Eleanor Cory's orchestral composition Canyons

A passage from the score of Eleanor Cory’s Canyons. Copyright © 1991 by Eleanor Cory. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.
All rights administered throughout the world by the Association for the Promotion of New Music (BMI). Used with permission of the composer.

FJO:  But certainly the orchestra is less amenable to the kinds of dialogues between equal participants that are so central to your personal aesthetic. The structure is much more hierarchical.  It’s almost more like military formation. So maybe your sensibilities are not necessarily there, which might be why you haven’t done more.

EC:  I don’t think that would be a reason why I wouldn’t write for orchestra.  The orchestra has all the colors and all the interesting doublings, and all that spatial stuff. But how things come along are that people say they want this piece; you have a deadline and you have to finish it.  And it’s not as though orchestras are coming along.  Although Composers Concordance has an orchestra, and they just asked me write a piece.  I had never been asked to write an orchestra piece by anyone.  And I would like to have it played.

FJO:  But perhaps, dare I say this, much as I like that one orchestral piece of yours I know, Canyons, it sounds very different from the rest of your music.

EC:  You think so?  That’s interesting.  How?

FJO:  It’s dealing with massed sonorities so it doesn’t engage in the same kind of interplay that your music usually does.

EC:  Oh, I see what you’re saying. But I think of the crux of my music as being so harmonic, and the harmonies are there.  And I was thinking of instrumental groups interacting with each other.  The violins are going to talk to the horns. I probably was thinking in those ways as well as building up big sounds; it’s always about something kind of dramatic happening.  Maybe it’s not always analogous to human beings. But I see what you’re saying. I’m going to listen that way to the orchestra piece and see how that’s different.

FJO:  You’ve written a band piece, too, but I’ve never heard it. I’m curious about it.

EC:  Well, I was teaching at Kingsborough Community College, and at the point that I got there, they had a huge music program. They had a band and good players.  It was amazing.  They had a whole orchestra, too, and I wrote for that orchestra, too. So that was why I wrote it.  I had to make it easy because there were students playing. It was a fun thing to do.  But I don’t think I would say I want to write a band piece now, though I’m sure if I did I could have a better time getting it played than orchestra pieces.

FJO:  You’d have a much better time, I think. The band world is much more conducive to doing new pieces than orchestras are, by and large. You managed to get a solid recording of one of your orchestra pieces, but you had to go to Poland for it and, I imagine, to pay for it.

EC:  Well, that recording was conducted by Joel Suben.  He connected with the orchestra and got a very good price.  Then I had faculty grants from the City University of New York, so I could finance it. That really helped a lot.  And he knew the piece; it wasn’t some guy just reading it off.  That made a huge difference.

The cover for Eleanor Cory's CD Images.

A CD devoted to the music of Eleanor Cory on Meyer Kupferman’s Soundspells Productions label (CD-116) featuring her orchestral composition Canyons performed by the Polish Radio Nation Symphony conducted by Joel Eric Suben
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FJO:  They’re fabulous musicians and it’s great for our music to cross international borders, but this is yet another example of this huge body of orchestral music by American composers that has never been done by an American orchestra. The whole structure of how an orchestra operates makes it so much more complicated to bring new pieces to life—the limited rehearsal time, the budget, the basic things that go into making orchestral music happen at this point in time.

EC:  It’s just impossible.  We can blame the audiences.  That’s what people do.  Nobody wants to hear this crazy new music. Orchestra-going people just want to hear the same old, same old.  Isn’t that the usual line that you hear?

FJO:  But is it really true, or is it something else?

EC:  I don’t know, because now we’ve got a lot of European orchestra composers.  Kaija Saariaho, for instance.  Her music’s just crazy wild, and people love it.  She’s very successful.  And I’m really happy about that.  That gets back to this co-existence of very different kinds of music. People are not saying you have to do this kind or that kind. Everyone’s finding a place for themselves in different places.

FJO:  In terms of finding a place in different places, you mentioned that you go to lots of poetry readings. I know that you write poetry as well, and you’ve been working on publishing a book of poetry.

Wall to wall bookshelves surround a work station with a laptop and a chair.

Just a couple of the many bookshelves in Eleanor Cory’s apartment.

EC:  I’ve been doing that for a while. I’ve always had little notebooks and have written in them when I was on the subway. It was not really a diary—like, today I did this—just ideas.  And then, I don’t know why, all of a sudden I just decided I’ll take a poetry class at the 92nd Street Y.  I was writing more and more poems.  Then I went to the MacDowell Colony, and there were some poets and we were all talking about poems. Finally I said, “Well, I’ve written a few poems.”  And they said, “I want to see your poems.”  And I said, “Well it’s so hard, because I’m already doing one art. How could I possibly be a composer and also write poems?”  They said, “That’s ridiculous.  I also do something.  I’m a painter, but I also whatever.”  So they looked at my poems and they said, “These are good.  You should keep writing poems.”  And I think that’s what did it—them saying, “Don’t worry that you are never going to be as good a poet as you are a composer.  Don’t even think about those things.  It’s just another side of you.”  Then I really had some good teachers.  I met all these other people, and we all got to be friends.  Most of them had not been poets before, and we just all get together once a month and read our poems to each other. We have little readings and they say, “You’ve got to send your poems out.”  So I’ve had a bunch of them published.  And now I’ve got this book ready and I’ve got to figure out how I’m going to get that published.  But it could happen.

FJO:  Now, in terms of your setting other poets to music, you wrote a piece for chorus and brass ensemble with a text by Wallace Stevens, whose poetry can be very tricky to set because of the irregularity of his phrases.  You made it very musical.  I wonder if the experience of being a poet affects you as a composer when you treat someone else’s words, if perhaps you have a greater sensitivity.

A passage from the score of Eleanor Cory's composition Of Mere Being

A passage from the score of Eleanor Cory’s Of Mere Being (poetry by Wallace Stevens). Music copyright © 1987 (revised 1997) by Eleanor Cory. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.
All rights administered throughout the world by the Association for the Promotion of New Music (BMI). Used with permission of the composer.

It was interesting the first time when I was setting my own poem to music. I had to be the subjective outsider.

EC:  I think so. It was interesting the first time when I was setting my own poem to music.  I had to be the subjective outsider.  It had to be somebody else over here who wrote this poem.  But then I did a piece last year for Ensemble π, where they had this theme. So I set one poem written by a prisoner who had gotten out of prison, and then the other poem was one of my own.  I think I was hearing the music a little bit as I was writing the poem.  I think I knew my instruments, and I was just hearing a line every now and then as I was writing the poem.  You know, the violin would like to do this.  I’m much more conscious of doing more metrical poems than I used to.  They used to be sort of abstract, because those were the poets that I knew.  But now I feel like I should study meter just like I studied key signatures and scales. So I’ve learned more about poetry and now sometimes these musical things are in my head as I’m writing.  It’s much easier to mix them. Or I don’t have to worry about it as much.

FJO:  It’s funny because we initially were talking about the breaking down of styles and pluralism in today’s music world.  Besides this rarified world we find ourselves in, in almost every other musical genre—whether it’s punk rock or bluegrass—there isn’t such a separation between writing words and writing music. People either collaborate on songs together or they write songs by themselves, words and music.

EC:  Yeah.  I’m going to write a song.  That’s what they’re doing.  And the words and the music come together for these guys.  For me, this is sort of a new thing.  But I see it’s kind of ass backwards because I wrote this other stuff for such a long time.

FJO:  Now once you have a published book of poetry out there, there’s a possibility that some other composer would set some of your poems to music.

EC:  That would be great.  I’d love to see it.  I’d be really curious to know what they would do with it. This is a fun idea to think about.  If there were other composers who wrote poetry and they set each other; I’m setting your poems and you’re setting mine.  It could become a whole new thing.

FJO:  You’ve got visual art all around this apartment.  You don’t paint as well?

EC:  Oh, gosh no.  I totally could never do that.

FJO:  But one of your daughters is a painter.

EC:  She paints live at people’s wedding for a living and makes a huge amount of money.  But she also does her own art.  You knew it the minute she started putting things on paper.  Everyone would say, “What? She can do that?”  She would make people that looked like people.  It’s just like a musician that sits down and plays something and you just know they’ve got it.

A sculpted head

A sculpture by Cory’s daughter Tamar Cory Gressel.