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I briefly ran the science club during my senior year of high school. Ironically I wasn’t all that into science at the time, but I had just started becoming obsessed with musique concrète, the harmonic series, and Stockhausen-brand serialism, all of which had an aura of laboratory experimentation and sci-fi. But it was ultimately a bad fit—while I tried to get the science nerds who joined up interested in building new instruments that could play intervals derived from pi, they kept asking when we’d start dissecting frogs.
One rainy afternoon, though, a couple of us had a deep think about why sophisticated art forms developed for some senses (seeing and hearing) but not for the others. Was it based on the limitations of human perception or did we just not have the proper tools? (To me, decades later, these questions feel like they’re straight out of Samuel R. Delany’s extraordinary novel Babel-17, which unfortunately none of us had yet read at the time.) Could there be a way to capture aromas the same way that Edison captured sounds with the phonograph, so that an olfactory experience could be readily accessed the same way as, say, Charles Ives’ 4th Symphony or the original cast album of Sweeney Todd? Or barring reproducibility, could there at least be a way to coordinate the one-time release of specific aromas into the audience, the way the instruments in an orchestra release specific sounds? My involvement with the science club ended soon thereafter—I couldn’t deal with vivisection—but I never stopped thinking about the possibility of “nose music.”
Fast forward to yesterday afternoon when I showed up at the Guggenheim fresh off a plane from Hong Kong to experience Green Aria – A ScentOpera, created by “librettist” Stewart Matthew in collaboration with perfumer Christophe Laudamiel and co-composers Nico Muhly and Valgeir Sigurdsson. I had no idea what to expect and was frankly worried I’d pass out as soon as the lights were dimmed. But I remained completely attuned to what was going on the whole time, though now I find myself uncharacteristically at a loss for words to describe it using written language, so bear with me.
This “scent microphone” housed in the perfumery museum in Grasse, France, is very similar in both appearance and function to the devices that were attached to the seats of the Guggenheim for their presentation of a “Scent Opera.”
Each seat in the Guggenheim’s basement concert hall was equipped with what looked like a gooseneck microphone. But rather than amplifying sounds, these Rube Goldbergian devices transmitted different aromas pumped into them from a “scent organ” designed by the ventilation manufacturing company Fläkt Woods. In under an hour, the audience was bombarded with a sequence of various scents—some extremely satisfying, others quite intense and difficult to take for long—to the accompaniment of parallel musical motives to help in their identification. While I wasn’t completely able to follow the pre-explained narrative exclusively through my nose and ears, it was still one of the most extraordinary experiences I’ve ever had. And like the greatest works of art in any medium, it asked way more questions than it answered.
I began to wonder if it could it ever be possible to comprehend narrative meaning through the sense of smell. They called it a “ScentOpera,” but to me it was less dramma per musica than nasal symphony. But if it is somehow parallel to music, could there be aromatic analogues to things like harmony? Combining aromas frequently leads to a new aroma, more like mixing colors, rather than a perceptible simultaneity like a major triad. During a pre-“concert” talk, Stewart Matthew acknowledged that in order for aromas to be perceived they have to be emitted slowly, since one’s ability to smell something is predicated on one’s breathing cycle. So there could never be fast-paced odorama. But does that mean there can never be an olfactorily perceptible rhythm?
I already mentioned that some aromas were less than aesthetically pleasing to me—one called “Funky Green Imposter” was actually unpleasant at times, but it’s the one I still remember the most vividly one day later. But none was an out-and-out stinker. One of the most unforgettable memories of my entire life was the inescapably wrenching putrefaction of the tanneries of Fes, Morocco, but could such an aroma ever be incorporated into a bona fide “work of art”? Contemporary visual art is rather “anything goes”. And in music, Schoenberg began the emancipation of dissonances that Cage subsequently took to its logical sonic end. I love looking at many abstract expressionist paintings and to my 21st-century ears things like tone clusters, wildly out of tune collections of intervals, and even white noise are sonic joys. But I will never learn to love the stench of sewers.
After the performance, I wandered through Central Park in a daze which I think was more a result of the aroma overload than the jetlag—I was constantly distracted by the smell of people’s perfume, cigarettes, various leaves, etc. Things I normally took for granted and tuned out had heightened meanings but there was no overarching context for them beyond what they were, so it was all somewhat confusing to me. I was looking for (actually smelling for) meanings that weren’t there. Pauline Oliveros’ deep listening teaches us to appreciate sound as all-encompassing, but is deep smelling possible or even something we’d want to engage in?
When I finally returned home, I still couldn’t get certain Green Aria aromas out of my head: like Chaos, which to me smelled heavenly; Evangelical Green, which was cloyingly plant-like; and the aforementioned Funky Green Imposter which smelled somewhat burned. I drank a beer hoping to make these aromas go away, but it tasted funny to me. I later went out for dinner but the flavors of my meal were also totally altered. If aroma intake is that powerful an experience, it would be difficult to experience more than one work created to be experienced that way since the first one would inevitably influence all subsequent perception.
I’m not sure where to take it from here, but I kinda wish I was back at the science club and that we all had access to that Fläkt Woods contraption.
I must confess that imagining stuff in the abstract is not one of my strong suits. Looking at recipes in cookbooks rarely gives me a firm idea of what the eventual meal will taste like and my reading of books about perfumery—e.g. Mandy Aftel’s Essence and Alchemy—has frequently left me completely baffled. Recently I’ve been in the process of contemplating moves, both for my office and for my mother, and it has frankly been extremely difficult to wrap my brain around details: e.g. I can’t really visualize what things will look like from a diagram. Today I visited the new office space for AMC which helped a bit on that front, but without furniture etc. it was still a bit of a leap for me.
Paradoxically, though, as a composer I’m constantly put in the position of having to imagine sounds before I can ever hear them in the corporeal world. Basically that’s what composers do. Whereas most recipes, aromatic formulas, and SmartDraw diagrams are as comprehensible to me as Ancient Babylonian cuneiform tablets, I can usually decipher a musical score and have no problem creating scores of my own.
This discrepancy between my senses puzzles me somewhat. Shouldn’t the mental ability to fathom any of these ciphers be roughly the same? Admittedly the chemistry required to understand perfume making would probably throw most people off, but the others are not rocket science, or even Labanotation (the elaborate notation system for dance first proposed by Rudolf von Laban back in 1928 which few choreographers understand to this day). In fact, musical scores are way more cryptic than food recipes, which after all just use words, or SmartDraw diagrams, which present reasonable two-dimensional simulacra of physical layouts. Music notation often does not look all that much like what it is supposed to be representing, so it requires even more imagination to ferret out meanings from it. But perhaps, ironically, the extra layers of abstraction in music notation are what make it more coherent to me. Music notation coheres in much the same way as the abstract letter configurations you are currently reading in order to form syntactical coherence in your mind, which are generally way more malleable and universal than pictographic communication. Why is it then that so many people find music notation completely unfathomable? And are folks who can’t read music better able process floor plans or to taste complete meals in their minds just by reading through a cookbook? Oh, to be able to equally make sense of all of these things!
Of course, even if all of these codes made equal sense, ultimately they’re all inexact. Great chefs can make a so-so recipe into an amazing meal. Adept interior designers can similarly take abstruse makeshift diagrams and work wonders; other people on AMC’s staff are taking on that role with gusto, not me. And every composer knows that an interpreter can take a score and go somewhere with it that can be completely different from what the composer originally intended. It’s something that gives many composers—myself included—quite a bit of anxiety, although sometimes composers can also be overjoyed when something sounds great even if it was not quite what they had originally imagined.
“No one knows a thousand odours by name. Even I don’t know a thousand of them by name, at best a few hundred, for there aren’t more than a few hundred in our business, all the rest aren’t odours, they’re simply stenches.”
—18th century Parisian Master Perfumer Giuseppe Baldini to the young Jean-Baptiste Grenouille in Patrick Süskind’s novel Das Parfum (1985), translated as Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by John E. Woods (1986), published by Penguin Books (2006)
Colin Holter’s post about whether or not horrorcore rap has or can actually inspire violent crimes seems to have hit a nerve with a lot of our readers. I too have found the debate to be of extreme interest on aesthetic as well as societal grounds. Indeed the notion that art (to use this term in its broadest possible definition) is capable of affecting human behavior to positive or negative ends is a deeply romantic notion, and one that tends not to sit well in cynical postmodern “been there, done that” discourse. But the belief that we can somehow transform the world around us through the words, brushstrokes, noteheads, etc. we introduce into the world remains a very powerful incentive for artistic creators in many disciplines to this day. It gives what we do some kind of meaning and purpose.
Ironically, the belief that an artist should not be in anyway restricted from any means of expression is also a romantic notion, and one that is ultimately at odds with the belief in art’s societal powers. If a certain type of artistic expression is capable of causing great harm to humanity, mustn’t it be forbidden? But perhaps in a world where any form of expression is not only permissible but regularly occurs to the greater ambivalence of the world for which it was presumably created, the impact of such an expression is somehow muzzled, both for good and for ill. In a world where we’ve heard it all before, art cannot make us kill, but perhaps it also cannot uplift us.
Over the weekend I watched a DVD of Jean-Luc Godard’s Week End (1967), which in 2007 was cited by Premiere magazine as the most dangerous movie of all time. I found the film to be an extremely effective metaphor for the ills of materialistic society, filled with Godard’s typically brilliant use of panorama and witty dialogue. There are elements of the plot which are undeniably disturbing—not a single likable character, lots of gratuitous violence including a matricide and cannibalism—but it’s pretty tame compared to other things I’ve seen both in motion pictures and on evening news telecasts.
To show you how my brain works, the episode I actually found most disturbing in Week End was a rant by a concert pianist who traveled through rural towns with his piano to perform for entranced locals:
There’s music you listen to and music you don’t. Mozart you listen to. Just imagine the royalties the poor man would get nowadays. Music you don’t listen to is what’s called modern “serious” music. No one goes to the concerts. Real modern music, paradoxically is based on Mozart’s harmonies; you hear bits of Mozart in Dario Moreno, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, or whatever, fundamentally Mozart’s harmonies. Modern “serious music” looked for others, resulting in what is probably the biggest disaster in the history of art.
Could Week End incite a riot nowadays? I’m reminded of Bertolt Brecht’s quip to a reporter who was baffled that he remained in East Germany after government authorities censored one of his plays: “At least they read what I write over here.” Might Godard’s pianist be telling us that if no one is listening to the radical ideas we think we have, and therefore is not responding to them, that maybe these ideas do not have the power to change anything? Phil Fried mentioned, correctly I believe, that most of what we’ve been debating concerns words, and certainly images have proven very provocative over the millennia. But other than as a byproduct of the vagaries of personal taste, can music in and of itself be either a source of societal transformation or a dangerous threat to peaceful cohabitation? It is true that Plato recommended banning certain modes, and that Medieval clerics considered the tritone to be sonically evil. The ancient Chinese philosopher Mo Tzu actually suggested outlawing all music since it ultimately could not be controlled by the state. But is anything in music truly an absolute from a perceptual standpoint or is the way we respond to sonic stimuli just a byproduct of our acculturation which varies from culture to culture and even from peer community to peer community? However, if our attitudes about music solely result from such acculturation and peer pressure, any music that goes against the accepted and presumed norms is somehow a threat to the status quo. And if that is the case, music might actually be capable of greater good (and greater evil) afterall.
Few things are more valuable to the careers of composers and performers than the sonic proof of our inspiration’s existence. We spend a great deal of time and money producing high quality recordings of our music. We must. They are our artistic legacy, and our best promotional tool. Yet in this digital age, these recordings, regardless of how precious they are to us or how much we’ve invested in musicians, engineers, and studio time to create them, are no longer especially financially remunerative. The millionth copy is virtually identical to the master file, and as either physical objects, or endlessly duplicable audio tracks, these recordings have little intrinsic worth.
But there does exist something uniquely valuable and not reproducible: the artists themselves. This is particularly true for any performer, because nothing can duplicate the experience of a live concert: feeling the sound waves travel though physical air to your body, seeing the interplay between the musicians, and watching beads of sweat flung sensuously off the brow of a beautiful performer while hoping she’ll have an unexpected wardrobe malfunction and bare all at the height of the cadenza’s crescendo. Oh yes, live concerts are unrivaled. But this uniqueness is also the case for those of us who are not performers, because we can find ways to interact with our fans and clients, offering a value-added aspect to what we do (usually with our clothes on). If something can’t be digitized and widely distributed, it remains special. That, in turn, is worth far more than an iTunes download or a (soon to be obsolete) CD.
The New Sonic Paradigm
This is an era in which artists must evaluate each of their creations with a heightened awareness of how the public will experience it. Years ago we listened to scratchy LPs, much of the time hearing Side A in its entirety and, after expending some physical effort to put down the beer and walk across the room to flip the record, then enjoying Side B. Recording standards were not examined under today’s digital microscope, and the order of tracks mattered a great deal as they took the listener on a carefully planned journey. Today’s journey through individual digital files is as likely to take listeners from our track to the second movement of a Brahms trio to the beginning of some West African drumming, until they suddenly click over to U2’s latest hit. And like it or not, unless we’re doing a low-fidelity bedroom podcast for raw promotional purposes, our track needs to sound as well mixed and mastered as U2’s, in this new world of instant comparative listening.
Along with the expectation of higher production values, the way people hear has also been significantly affected by the way they see what they’re hearing. Most of us spend many hours peering at video monitors stimulating our eyes with brightly lit content from computers, mobile devices, and televisions. Audience’s brains have been trained to expect something to see, and music artists know that pairing their work with video may not only enhance live performances, but will give them further exposure on YouTube and social networking platforms that will in turn broaden their concert attendance.
Is It Theft or Promotion?
On one hand, technology has given artists welcome control over their product and their careers. On the other hand, it has taken much of the control away and granted it to the user. One gain and loss of control is over the distribution of our work. We have the tools to bring anything we do to anyone within reach of a computer. Conversely, anyone within reach of a computer can choose to make a digital copy of our work—including that for which we expect to be paid— and upload it to a server from which an endless parade of visitors can choose to download our music for free.
There is no preventing digital piracy if the culprits are ripping tracks off of commercially released discs. But one way to thwart theft and wrest at least some control over the free distribution of our work, is that when we are the ones posting our music to our website, blog, and social networking presences, we are best protected if we only upload lower quality MP3 excerpts of our pieces, rather than full-length, uncompressed tracks. Sure, these short clips of our music will show up on many free MP3 download sites hosted on servers around the world. But the people grabbing the illegal downloads will be disappointed once they hear what they’ve got, since just as the music gets interesting, it fades out. Other download sites simply link back to the artist’s own server, in which case they act as a free promotional tool, since the artist posted the files themselves with the expectation of people hearing them.
If someone is determined to download music for free, they will find a way. They cannot be stopped. Complaining to the owners of the illegal sites, or placing an anti-theft notice on ours (apart from a general copyright indication) will rarely get us anywhere, as the perpetrators are unlikely to respond with cookies and a friendly apology. This is illegal behavior that we simply cannot control. It is global and currently not policeable. But in the spirit of making lemonade out of lemons, there is much we can do to exploit the very act of being exploited, and can in fact benefit by taking an entrepreneurial attitude.
The Economy of Exposure
We’ve entered an entirely new paradigm, in which it is not only money but distribution that is the payment which leads to…money. I’ve coined this phenomenon “the economy of exposure.” I’ve come to view freebies—be they my own offerings or, more often, the unintentional ones taken from my server or others and proffered by the gazillions of MP3 download sites out there—as promotion. I treat these instances of unexpected charity as part of my advertising expenses. Department stores have what they refer to as “loss leaders”: items that they sell at cost or less, in order to get shoppers in the door and, usually, buying other things as well. Since I receive my commissions from the act of people hearing my music, I need the advertising! All it takes is someone hearing a few clips of my work and loving it, to lead to them giving me thousands of dollars to compose a new piece. If they hear my music via an illegal site, it ultimately doesn’t matter if I can then say a new commission was the end result. Two of my most recent five-figure commissions have come from the web, out of the blue through my MySpace page, from people who had never met me nor bought a CD of my music. I posted only excerpts of my work, but I posted them in as many places as I could, where people could hear them free of charge. The response has been as effective for me as any promotional campaign.
A sense of perspective is important. In the concert music world, the uncomfortable concept of file sharing is easier to absorb because our sales numbers are so much smaller than those common in the commercial pop music realm. I would not be as relaxed in my attitude were I making my living in that field. But in my case as a composer in a genre that, optimistically, represents three percent of the market, I just can’t tremble at the thought of people…uh, all eleven of them… stealing my music for contrabass flute or bassoon duo. Nonetheless, I sell my music aggressively on my own sites and through many distributors and record companies, and almost never give anything away, so if something slips through the cracks in my happy little micro-cache of music that the vast majority of the population doesn’t care about to begin with, well then, perhaps that will do me some good and create some new fans who are then willing to pay for more. The economy of exposure, without the wardrobe malfunction!
Speaking as a composer, publisher, and owner of many copyrights, let me be clear: the fact that the world’s new digital paradigm often results in unauthorized uses of intellectual property does not mean that those uses are acceptable. They are a symptom of a problem that needs fixing. Just like electricians, teachers, and attorneys, artists must be paid for their professional efforts; their copyrights must be honored. Likewise, just because we now have the tools to engage in a manner of digital bartering whereby we benefit from viral networking, in no way does that negate the importance of also being paid real money for the real work we do. I view the two aspects of payment as working seamlessly with each other, not against each other.
I am keenly aware of the new world in which we operate, and believe that every artist should be encouraged to examine this rapidly evolving frontier of art, commerce, and technology, and their place in such an unfamiliar landscape. To best protect ourselves we must absorb the truths of how things are, and not allow our thinking to be clouded by how we think things should be. If we do not view a problem from all possible angles—including those that uncomfortably contort our beliefs—then we only do ourselves a disservice.
Mash-Ups and Downs
The work of a remix artist from Israel named Kutiman offers a fascinating example for this “economy of exposure” concept. Kutiman chooses videos others have uploaded onto YouTube and creates new pieces of art with them. Juxtaposing the offerings of music-makers around the world who have neither met nor tuned their instruments together, he makes an additive recipe that can be quite compelling in its unexpected grace. It’s interesting to use one of Kutiman’s videos titled “I’m New” as an example of the new digital paradigm, because it blurs the contextual distinction between the amateur and the professional, and deeply challenges our assumptions of copyright.
Kutiman’s video mash-ups are filled with fresh faces, open to the world, wanting very much to share their talent and appearing eager to please. Just like me, on my MyFace and SpaceBook pages. Except in this case, probably also a bit unlike me: I’ll assume for the sake of argument that most of these art-makers do not make a living from their art. At least, not yet. Some may in the near future, while others…well…probably not. Regardless of professional aspirations, however, they each took the initiative to post their videos and share something that mattered to them with complete strangers. But they did not have a proactive hand in ending up as part of Kutiman’s art. He happened upon them, and happened to them.
And by happening to them with a multimedia vehicle that viewers enjoy (his video mash-ups, which are as much about the visuals as they are about the music he derives from these sources), and most significantly, by including links to each one of these amateurs’ YouTube pages, Kutiman set the laws of viral marketing in motion for them all.
Take one person in the credits: Elexis Trinity. She has gone from being relatively unknown to having almost 70,000 YouTube views of her video, and over 200 very encouraging and complimentary comments posted underneath it. By the time you finish reading this sentence, those numbers will be even greater. (As of April 2016, that number has indeed increased, to nearly 1.5 million views.) Not only is this an inspiring example of how the web works at its best, but if Ms. Trinity can figure out how to use this platform to interact with her new fans, and if she devotes the necessary effort to following up on this unexpected break, paying opportunities may very well arise for her if that’s what she seeks.
In the view of copyright, Kutiman is using material he does not own, using it without explicit permission, and using it without paying for it. Instead, he offers his human source material the carrot of 15 seconds of e-fame. I am assuming that he is not making money directly from these creations (I see no ads), but that premise is a slippery slope, if indeed exposure is the new economy. Just as his work provides his sources a springboard from the dry land of anonymity into the inviting pool of recognition, so it provides for him, as well.
Kutiman makes it clear on his site that should anyone ever request to be removed from his artwork, he would oblige (no doubt, while gritting his teeth and thinking of all the work he will have to do to fill the slot with another suitable video in order to preserve the creation). His site includes a disclaimer that reads:
“THROUGH-YOU IS A VENUE FOR MUSIC AND ART APPRECIATION. THE VIDEOS AND MUSIC IS [sic] SHARED OUT OF LOVE AND RESPECT, AND IS ONLY MEANT TO HELP EXPOSE AND PROMOTE THE FEATURED ARTISTS. IF YOU WISH TO REMOVE OR HAVE CONCERNS, QUESTIONS, THOUGHTS, OR IDEAS PLEASE EMAIL US.”
So Kutiman’s sources are tacitly agreeing to have their material used without remuneration. Some may not care one way or the other, because they’re quite happy with their job as a dental technician, thank you very much. But surely, a few others may well see this as a potential big break that could launch a professional career.
The Freedom to Expose Yourself
It’s easy to be conflicted about the attractiveness of viral marketing vs. the serious ramifications of unlawful use of copyrighted material. In this Kutiman mash-up scenario, no money is exchanging hands, but the artist is crediting his sources, giving them as much of a chance to be discovered as he gives himself. And yet in the eyes of the law, Kutiman is considered a digital thief. It can be argued, however, that Kutiman is operating on a traditional barter system of sorts: in exchange for the material, he pays with the currency of global exposure. This, I must tell you, can be powerful compensation even in the worst recession. As a professional composer with a noticeable web presence, I experience the positive reality of this kind of economy every single day. It works.
On one hand, when anyone tells an artist that doing something for free is an “opportunity,” it smacks of the same insult as when a gigging musician is asked to play a wedding gratis and is baited with the “there will be some important people at the function who could be good for your career” line. Yech. Yet we all know that there is also some truth to this: 80 percent of success is just showing up, as Woody Allen is credited with saying. As for the other twenty percent? We’d like to think it’s mainly talent, but it’s probably…a lot of pure luck.
The point that many among us discussing the future of intellectual property and artists’ livelihoods are making is that no longer is the specific creative product the thing with intrinsic worth. It is not. What is of worth is the buzz, the vibe, the doing of the art and the collecting of the fans who dig our doing of it. What is of worth is the person doing it. I can speak to all this directly: my web presence, which offers a good glimpse of my personality, is my largest portal of income. It makes me and my work available 24/7 to people around the world who broadcast, perform, and record my music, purchase my scores and CDs, and yes, commission me. I spend a fair amount of time speaking around the country and encouraging my peers to take a page from my e-book, because I believe in the power these new tools directly give artists.
So what am I doing to achieve this positive result? The exact same thing that the YouTube amateurs featured in Kutiman’s videos have done: I posted material for the world to stumble upon. For free. In my case, excerpts of my music rather than entire tracks, but the upshot is the same. And just like the amateurs, I am ever hopeful that just maybe, someone will like me.
Amateurs and professionals are using the new tools the same way. Neither group needs to be vetted by PR agents or record company gatekeepers. Pro or non-pro, we have a similar probability of experiencing positive results. The difference, whether we are raw or honed at our craft, lies in the experience we are offering. But each one of us has the chance to find a unique fan base that resonates with what we do. This is why the concept of net neutrality and an open and accessible internet is so crucial to artists: equal access gives us complete access. It allows us to compete with anyone, be they an amateur, an indie artist, or a mega-company. I find this exciting and a very good thing for art in general. The more people who are able to create and share, the better for art. And the better for society’s aesthetic health.
Taking and Giving Control
Many of us who are creators of music, visual art, writings, and other contributions to society create as professionals, with an eye to earning money from our efforts. In some cases, that money is the bulk of our income. We are deeply invested in the current system of ownership and remuneration because we either already benefit from it, or eagerly hope to. We believe that what we create has worth, and is worth others paying for in order to experience. The concept of copyright matters very much.
However, a static interpretation of copyright as it pertained to creators before the digital age is a vestige of a previous era in which the end result of our creation—and in this case, we are talking about recorded media—was unique. It is no longer unique. But take heart, and remember that there is something unique we offer: ourselves.
We may think that we’re in the music-making business, but ultimately—if we intend to make money from our art—we are in the relationship-making business. This has been a truth since the first artist ever sought the first paying patron. Now this truth is under a bright spotlight, brought to the fore by the advent of digital media. Our recordings and videos are advertisements for us, because we are the product. The tail is wagging the dog. Take a moment and feel your brain squirm as it tries to process this. Then take a deep breath, and know that to be able to reach the world with a single click of a “send” or “upload” button is a very wonderful thing. And that yes, it can directly lead to real income.
Look around at the new technologies. Physical CDs, and perhaps books as well, will eventually become obsolete as internet speeds increase and connection points become ubiquitous, accessing media that easily streams. Landlines will soon be nonexistent because everyone will use cell phones. Laptops will become irrelevant because the cell phone/PDA/MP3 player device in your hand will do everything your computer can. Already, to many people email is quaint, because they’re instantly sharing information on a mobile platform in 140-character increments via Twitter. And all of this just captures the trends of this moment. In another year or two these tools, too, will be quaint, replaced by new and different ones.
Copyright distinctions are blurred to the extreme because everything is published. Everything, from your cute kitty pix to your third symphony. And if it’s floating out there in any digitized form, it is instantly obtainable by anyone in the world, 24/7, as fodder for his or her next mash-up or to be enjoyed, unaltered, by someone who’s a pure fan of what you do. Everyone who participates in online media is living what I call “the published life.” So it is our duty as artists to wake up to this not-so-new-anymore reality and use it to our advantage.
Rethinking Everything
Rather than delineate between delivery methods, perhaps we should force ourselves to think holistically about how information is shared. The money may no longer be found in having control of the owned information (i.e., a specific MP3 file), but instead be amassed through the exploitation and use of it (the posting of the MP3 to garner fans willing to pay for other things). How can we track individual usages for payments, when everything that’s ever been recorded can be flung around the world from phone to phone? Zeroes and ones–the plasma of digital life–present challenges to piracy prevention because they are indistinguishable from each other: the binary digits that comprise a sweet .jpg of your grandmother are the same digits that comprise a stream of unlawfully obtained music. Copyright protection groups and performing rights organizations are avidly addressing this by developing watermarking techniques and tracking systems, but as of this date these are regrettably imperfect technologies with notable gaps in the swath of their reach. With a billion or more internet users around the planet, has the scale exceeded the capacities of our old system of protecting intellectual property? Rather than try to expand the scope of the same historic methods—created eons before anyone could say “file sharing”—might we need to entirely reconsider the way media is used, and how best to now remunerate content owners whose ball is in play on a vastly different field? And while doing so, might we also need to examine what the currency of the exchange really is?
The web is where serendipity meets initiative, especially for copyright holders. Doing business in the digital age means being highly proactive about every opportunity because we now have the ability to be so, from the comfort of our desk in our pajamas. It is currently impossible to prevent the spread of digital files. Period. No matter what kind of copy protection can be applied, the next morning a brilliant 13-year-old will have devised a way around it. But we can aid and abet the spread of the buzz about our digital files. It stands to reason that the more popular a file is, the more fans its creator has gained— and that many of those fans will be inclined to participate in some financial way in the creator’s future output.
If we want to succeed in the open market, we need to proceed with an open mind. I enjoy the succinct advice of Seth Godin, who appears to have a clear view into many businesses, including ours. In his essay, “Music Lessons,” Seth observes, “You used to sell plastic and vinyl. Now, you can sell interactivity and souvenirs.” That’s right. It’s the experience of what we create that compels people, not just what we create.
When we play through a piece of music, we don’t focus on every 16th note in a measure, we express the sweep of the arcing phrase, and that can often be several measures long. The new paradigm of digital uses is not dissimilar. Unless the copyright infringement could result in a significant financial claim, rather than bolting off in a desperate chase after individual files, might it be wiser to adopt a broader perch perspective? We could consider what the digital-era worth of that file might be: an attractive phrase that draws in the listeners. The very thing we would like to be paid for is the very thing we give away in order to be paid for it. Becoming a successful music entrepreneur in this new era requires the same Escher-esque savvy that long has had restaurateurs giving away free hors d’oeuvres, liquor companies hosting free drink promotions at popular night spots, and perfume counters offering free dabs of their choicest scents from tester bottles. Can this become a viable strategy by which to exploit creative content? Or is this economy of exposure merely a mirage that devalues something we view as precious?
Just as Kutiman’s mash-ups are art and publicity rolled into one, so is what any of us create and publish. We know that we can’t buy groceries with publicity alone. But it is increasingly difficult to rely solely on the inherent worth of our art to generate income. We wouldn’t be artists unless what we created was intensely important to us. But to be an artist is to be a communicator, and the tools of the 21st century have forever altered the way in which we reach our audiences. I’m compelled to keep asking myself uncomfortable questions that challenge my previous assumptions. Whether or not artists—a.k.a. content providers and copyright holders—are ready for it, the revolution is upon us. In the economy of exposure, perhaps our strongest currency is not our creations, but rather, we, the creators.
***
Composer Alex Shapiro aligns note after note with the hope that a few of them might sound good next to each other. Through her website, her MySpace and Facebook pages, and her blog, she experiences the rewarding results from the advice she shares. In early 2007 she moved from Los Angeles to live amidst nature on remote San Juan Island off the coast of Washington State, and thanks to the internet, her musical life has never been busier. Alex currently serves on the board of directors of the American Music Center.
In conversation with
Molly Sheridan
at the American Academy of Arts and Letters
New York, New York
May 18, 2010—3:00 p.m.
Transcribed by Julia Lu
Condensed and edited
by Molly Sheridan and John Lydon
Filmed and recorded
by Trevor Hunter
Presentation and photography
by Molly Sheridan
When asked what defines her artistic journey, Augusta Read Thomas doesn’t hesitate even for a second. “Those are probably the ten words that leap to my mind about this 30 years of writing music so far,” she says.
Later, I go back and count them. Ten.
I have no idea how she did that, but after a few hours in her company chatting about her life and work and the inspiration that drives it all, this level of attention to detail and clarity of purpose are not surprising in the least. Descriptors like “extremely specific” and “incredibly nuanced” become touchstones as we talk. Like her music, Thomas speaks in clear, concise paragraphs that reveal her voracious appetite for sound, both consuming it and creating it. Perhaps most fascinating are the warring tensions inherent in her own work: she is prolific yet perfectionistic, a composer of carefully notated music but also one seeking the energy of spontaneous creation.
Thomas possesses a sharp musical intellect but also a remarkably unjaded perspective on the value, need, and potential of concert music in 2010. For her, music has always been the pulse driving her life, and though she is also a committed educator, standing at her drafting tables and creating scores one after the another remains the unrelenting core instinct. “I have all sorts of things I want to make,” she says. “So I do it, I just get up and do it. No matter whether anyone likes it or not.”
—MS
***
Molly Sheridan: The sheer amount of music you’ve created is really impressive. That said, however, I don’t get the impression that you are just banging out piece after piece. I know that perfection is really important to you, so it seems like those two traits must be a little bit warring. I’m curious how that works for you.
Augusta Read Thomas: One of the things I’ve tried to do is to write music for lots of different genres. So for instance, I’ve written quite a lot for large orchestra, but I also write for children’s choir, for high school band, for opera, and so on and so forth. And I find that when one writes in one genre, let’s say an orchestra piece which is followed by a solo piano piece which is followed by something for 12-year-old girls to sing and then followed by a piece for the Cleveland Orchestra, it’s so invigorating to move from one to the other. So I’ve really tried to have a wide reach for the music that I’m making.
MS: What keeps you coming back to the table again and again? Where do you look for the inspiration and the motivation to keep creating?
ART: When I was really little, I used to lie underneath the piano and listen to the sounds coming over my head and I just fell in love with it. And that desire to make sound or the curiosity for the sounds that other people are making is so alive in me, as if I was still a child. So the thought of being able to get up in the morning and go to my drafting table and make a new symphonic piece or a new solo piano piece or whatever it might be, it comes from that original love affair. I think that’s what brings me back to the table every day.
MS: Growing up, was music a whole family endeavor then?
ART: My mother supported the family—she taught kindergarten—and music was a big part of the household. I come from a really large family, actually ten children, and I’m a twin. So I’m number ten and my twin brother is number nine. And inside of the ten children, there are a lot of people involved with the arts. For instance, I have one sister who’s a poet; one sister who spent a lot of time dancing; my brother is a ceramicist, and he’s actually a dean of fine art at a university; I’m a composer; another brother plays rock and roll drums. And in addition to composing, I also paint as well. So there was a real emphasis and interest in the creative arts.
MS: You must have been able to put on quite the family talent show.
ART: I remember growing up, one of my older brothers would be playing the Beatles and my sister would be playing Simon and Garfunkel, and then my father would be listening to, like, the B-minor Mass of Bach. There was all this different music in the house all the time, and it really affected me. Of course, I was playing an instrument the whole time, as well. I started very young playing piano, and then I was playing trumpet.
When I was little, I also used to just make up tiny little songs that would be, like, two bars long and really bad—really, really, really bad. But I would make them up and my piano teacher would say, “Oh, that’s good, write it down.” And I started to learn how to write down the notes and things. I mean, I must have been five or six, but I was constantly making sounds up or painting, making things. And little by little, that developed and by about ninth and tenth grade, when I was in high school, I became very involved with composition. I began to find that really enriching and challenging. I went to college as a trumpet performance major actually, but ended up graduating as a comp major.
MS: Clearly you’ve come a long way from writing in two-bar chunks. What is your working process now? I know that you like work at a drafting table, but what happens once you are at that table?
ART: For me, to get up and get to my drafting tables and to make up, let’s say, a whole new symphonic piece, it really has to come from a desire to create things—a deep, deep-down inside passion or vision of something that has to be said. And without that kind of pure love and passion for it, it’s very hard to keep going for years or for decades. It really starts with that kind of creative spark, I think. And then from there, I work into the pieces. I usually improvise quite a bit at the piano, actually, and sing quite a lot, and try to create for my pieces different arenas of material. It might be chordal ideas, or motivic ideas, or character ideas, colors, timbres, whatever it might be for a particular piece. I usually sketch these out on different pieces of paper. So for each piece, I’ll have several sketches and maps of the piece. And then I actually write the pieces standing at a drafting table. I have three very high, large drafting tables, and I stand at those drinking tea, usually in sweatpants with my hair sticking straight up early in the morning. I just go right into creating things. And I basically work from my sketches into the full scores.
You get very attached to the paper and to the physicality of doing it. I’m really picky about my pens. I have certain pens that the tip is very soft, and harder, and harder, and fine lines, and my rulers. If somebody comes over and they’re like, “Oh, I’ll borrow your pen to write down that phone number,” I leap, you know, because I have them all lined up exactly where I know where they are. There’s a certain Zen about it, in a certain way. To constantly just spend your whole time standing there in total silence making up big sound worlds.
MS: How many pens do you go through when you write a piece?
ART: Well, I press too hard, so I buy them by the box. I think there are 16 in a box. So I probably go through 32. Maybe more. It’s hard because they get moved around and then some get broken, but yeah, my drafting table is basically an array of pens, rulers of different sizes, Wite-Outs of different types, you know, the brush one, or the nib one, and tea.
MS: Your music does sound very clean and precise. It’s not sharp, but it’s very specific, at least to my ear. Do you do a great deal of self-editing or is that just how you think and that’s how it comes out?
ART: I’ve always admired composers with clarity: the idea was clear, the conception was clear, and the execution was clear. In my own work, there’s this balance between clarity and complexity. If things get complex, I don’t want them to become muddy and unfocused. They should always be crystalline and clear. Even if I have different objects interwoven or crosscutting one another or in a certain kind of contrapuntal configuration, the clarity is really important to me. I like it clean.
One of the things that interests me a great deal is for the music to be very nuanced. So the notations are extremely specific, and I think that lends itself to a clear and crisp execution of the piece. Yet on the other hand, I want the pieces to sound really spontaneous—”There it goes! The orchestra’s playing, and the train has left the station! Or a pianist can sit down and play my piece Traces, and it almost sounds as if they’re improvising but it’s incredibly nuanced in the notation. That’s something I’ve been working on for about 30 years to refine and refine and refine.
MS: I’m interested what you found to be the solutions to getting some of those outcomes, because they seem like they’re at opposite ends. How do you have extremely detailed notation that still allows performers to appear as if they are spontaneously creating?
ART: Performers these days can play anything, and that virtuosity really excites me. So I feel that if I can give a player a very particular text that says this is what I want to hear, they’re like, “Okay, that’s no problem.” In a way, giving them an articulate poem, or an articulate sentence, allows them to then deliver it with their own sense of it and take it one step further. Then it becomes a little magical, like what I made plus what they made becomes something else. And I like that synergy and that kind of—poof!—when the sound comes out just right.
MS: It seems like that’s maybe one of the things you take the most pleasure in—exploiting virtuosity and seeing where that can take you.
ART: I’ve always been interested in exactly how the sound is made, what the player is physically doing: where is the finger on which harmonic; what kind of bow speed is being used; exactly how much air is being passed through the instrument; that kind of thing. I’m very sympathetic to what it is they have to do because I spent so much of my life practicing to learn how to do it, and I think that’s very characteristic of my work. I grew up as a player, and I think you can hear that in the compositions to a certain extent.
MS: Are there particular things that you’re mindful of because of that? Are there little pet-peeve things that you’re careful about because you come from that performer’s experience?
ART: I like my music to be fun to play, so that people go, “Oh, I love this bar here,” or “That was such a groove. I really thought that was great.” When players tell me things like that, I can see that it was fun. In a way, I feel that a lot of my work has sort of a whim about it, or a caprice, or a certain kind of wink of the eye, or sunshine. It’s not dark, heavy, somber; it’s not at all.
Another thing I’ve been working very hard at for about 20 years is to make my works very concise: to say a lot in four minutes; to say a lot in two minutes; to be very articulate in what I’m saying. So the pieces are generally short, very colorful, and capricious.
MS: You keep mentioning what the music “says.” And since I have had at least a handful of conversations with you and have a sense of your personality, I’m curious if there are things that you say in music that you wouldn’t or couldn’t say in words.
ART: Although this sounds kind of corny or hokey, when I’m writing my music, I’m writing it from the heart. I really am. Like somebody might not like a particular piece, but I feel incredibly naked. I feel like I’m completely exposed. There’s no artifice. I feel that when I’m writing my music, I’m able to reveal some little glimpse of what’s really happening in my heart. I’m aware that this sounds corny or it might sound a little bit odd, but it’s the only way I can really express what it is that I’m trying to say in the music.
MS: Because you have had so much conventional success, does that make it any easier to be vulnerable in that way, or not really?
ART: It’s really interesting, because sometimes when people hear a piece of mine on the radio, they’ll say, “Oh, that’s Augusta Read Thomas. I’m sure that’s Augusta.” You know, so there’s some kind of signature sound. On the other hand, I’m not writing the same piece over and over again—all kinds of different genres, sizes, durations—and every piece for me is a new adventure. And as such, I feel completely vulnerable. You have to just have the courage to break the silence and to make up a sound and try to make a form that’s very organic and has a beauty and also a deep honesty and character about it. That’s such hard work. So I think that being creative every day, the vulnerability or the honesty is definitely there for sure.
MS: Do you get emotionally tougher as the years go on? Is there a point where you had to come to terms with the fact that you have a creative life in the public eye, and this is a piece of it?
ART: Throughout music history, I’ve always loved the composers who really put themselves on the line. They absolutely were who they were to the maximum. So when you think of Mahler, or Bartok, or Debussy, or late Beethoven, or early Stravinsky, or whoever you would like to pick, there’s just no turning back—these artists showed us complete iconoclastic vision. I really like it when composers are able to dig deep and come out with who it is that they are: highly characterized music that isn’t derivative; that has a personality; that invents its own kinds of risks. And for me as a creative person, those role models are really important. And of course, we all have had pieces that people don’t understand, but you have to really dig deep and believe in what it is that you’re searching for and what you’ve been working at for a long time. In a way, I think of my works as kind of chain-linked. So you maybe make a string quartet, and then the next piece you make might be a piece for orchestra, and then the next piece might be for oboe and six players, or whatever it is. They’re all independent pieces, but you learn from one how to improve for the next. And in that sense, it’s a chain link of growth: a search for “excellence” or a search for “clarity.”
MS: Are those the words that you use to describe the journey that you’re on: excellence and clarity?
ART: I think the journey I’m on has to do with integrity and soulfulness, the attempt to make things of beauty, of great proportion or beautiful form, elegance, a certain kind of grace, balance, flexibility, spontaneity. Those are probably the ten words that leap to my mind about this 30 years of writing music so far.
MS: It is almost never easy to put artists into camps and categories, but where do you see your closest kindred spirits in the music that you’re writing?
ART: I’ve always loved the spontaneity of jazz. And jazz is a big word, I’m aware, but there’s a certain kind of turn on a dime flexibility and instant creation that’s going on that I’ve always tried to retain in my own sound even though my music is highly notated. I’ve always loved Debussy for this refined, very velvety sonic palette, harmonically and timbrally. And of course, those are very much related. I love Varèse for his colossal kind of industrial sound fields. My favorite composer is Johann Sebastian Bach. I listen to Bach every day. He’s always inventing, and his concision and the deep spirituality of his sound and the immense imagination that’s taking place everywhere—that is so enriching and beautiful to me. And there are so many others. I mean, it just goes on and on. I love everything Brahms wrote, and, boy, the early ballets of Stravinsky have directly, clearly influenced everything I’ve ever done. So there’s a million grandparents.
One of the things I feel really strongly about is that we should really be looking at somebody’s exact music—the exact piece, the exact sounds. I think we tend to put people in boxes too much. Okay, this one is a such and such and that one is a something-ist. You know, I have young composers saying, “I’m a such and such-ist,” and they’re, like, 18 years old. From my point of view, one can easily grab something from a vocalization of Ella Fitzgerald and have it make complete sense in relation to, let’s say, a Debussy prelude. And they’re very different musics, and they’re both fabulous, but they can both enrich someone who knows that music. So I really don’t like boxes and categories, and I always listen carefully to what it is that the piece is saying.
MS: With all the lessons you’ve taken from listening to music, what’s the “equation,” if you will, for how this then shakes out to equal music where people would say, “That’s Augusta Read Thomas. I’d know that sound anywhere”?
ART: I just had the chance to work with the Juilliard Orchestra, and the fourth movement of my piece is this kind of mad gambol or some kind of like bebop-meets-Varèse kind of thing, you know, just very jazzy with all these weird hits and things coming in and out. Yet when you put it in a big orchestra, it starts to sound like, oh, a little bit Stravinskian, but then it’s kind of like rock and roll, but it’s not—the harmonic fields are more chromatic than rock and roll. So where do you draw the line? Where can you say, okay, there’s the bebop bit, and then there were the jazz harmonic fields. It’s also extremely concise. So then it’s kind of almost Webernesque. This huge orchestra playing this romp that’s only four minutes long. The transformations that are happening inside of it actually come from listening to Bach. So there are all these kind of weird rivers and grandparents of different kinds of music that are all being digested. And, hopefully, what pops out is this movement of orchestral music by Augusta Read Thomas. It’s completely its own honest thing, but it does clearly understand or have the perfume of other kinds of music in it.
MS: Can you point to what is the Gusty part, or are you too close to it to know?
ART: There are certain things that are very characteristic of my work. One is that I love pitch—I love the notes. I spend enormous amounts of time at the piano playing for every piece. And if you change a note, or if you hit a wrong note, my ears catch it instantly. So I think that’s one thing. I think another one has to do with rhythmic contexts and rhythmic syntaxes. Not that everyone else should do it—everyone has to do it their own way—but for myself, I’ve always liked rhythms where they are slightly unpredictable. I’ll set something up [sings], and right when you think you know where you are, you’re interrupted. You can actually feel the groove, definitely, but then there’s a hiccup. And I like those little spontaneous rhythmic twists and turns. I stand at my drafting table and I tap, I conduct, and I sing the whole thing out and feel exactly where the rests should be, or exactly how long that note should be before the next thing comes in. So basically I’m singing it and feeling it, and so that certain kind of rhythmic syntax comes up in a lot of my works. And sometimes that’s related to the meter. It depends on the context and the particular piece, so it’s not just the actual rhythm, but the metrical structures as well. I think that in general I’ve always liked a colorful palette. I think of certain painters like Van Gogh or Matisse or Picasso or Turner, their different use of color. It’s very interesting to me, and I think in general one would say that my palette, the big palette, is colorful.
MS: What is on that palette? When you speak about that, what are you thinking of? Instruments? Timbres? Rhythms? All of these?
ART: If I could try to describe the way I think of music, I would draw a big circle. Then inside of it, I would put a lot of words, such as counterpoint, harmony, rhythm, harmonic rhythm, pitch, flow, flux, density, tessitura, balance, and so on and so forth. For me, it’s a big huge gestalt. So you can’t actually separate it out and say, okay, this could be moved, because if you’re talking about harmony, you’re also talking about pitch. And if you’re talking about pitch, you’re also talking about tessitura. And if you’re talking about tessitura, you’re talking about instrumentation. If you’re talking about instrumentation, you’re talking about color. They’re all connected with this beautiful web, and so while I could talk about rhythm independently, or I could talk about harmony independently, for me, they instantly plug back into that gestalt.
MS: When you’re at that drafting table, is there an imagined audience for this music in your mind at that point? Have they entered that into the equation at that point?
ART: It’s a very difficult question to answer because so much of this is about this very internal process of making things. You’re standing alone with your drafting table for months on end with paper. No one can hear it, except for yourself. Then all of a sudden, 3,000 people are in a huge concert hall. I’m aware that there is an audience out there, but when I’m creating the pieces, I’m really trying to listen deeply and make up the sounds for my own ears. It’s a very tricky thing to balance because it’s commissioned, let’s say, by the New York Philharmonic, or the Chicago Symphony, or the LA Phil. I know there’s going to be thousands of people that will hear it. So I already can project that audience. But at the moment of creating it, for me it has to stay more private.
MS: When you came on with Schirmer, you already had some 400 works in your portfolio, but I read an interview that you gave around that time in which you said that you reviewed them all, selected about 25, and withdrew the rest. Now, you’ve gone on and created quite an impressive catalogue of music since then, but I want to dig around a little bit in what the motivation was for pulling back so many works.
ART: When someone goes to Schirmer and they say I’m interested in Augusta Read Thomas, I want that person to find a piece—a string quartet, or an octet, or a piece for chamber orchestra, or large orchestra, or chorus, whatever it might be—that at least I like. There’s a certain kind of Gusty quality control that’s going on so that I feel the pieces are something I really stand by. I don’t want to waste anyone else’s time with a piece that I didn’t even like. It doesn’t make sense in this day and age. But also, if they then decide, “Oh, we didn’t like it,” at least I liked it. In other words, it just keeps it a whole lot cleaner. For me, it’s very important to keep my catalog at G. Schirmer what I would call clean and organized and very much edited, as it were.
MS: Do you still pull things out?
ART: I would like to have the option to withdraw some very early works. I think probably all composers would like that, but before I went to Schirmer, I pulled back tons of the works that I had written really early and then all through college because I felt that they weren’t strong enough. Like, one piece might have had a nice idea here, but the whole piece didn’t work. Or another piece might have had a really cool harmonic field there, but the piece didn’t work. What’s interesting to me now is that the whole gestalt works. The form is the right length for the materials and the character shifts within the piece, the balance, the sense of flow, the inevitability of sudden shifts. Just getting it all right, you know, and that’s really hard to do in any art form. So the works that I have with Schirmer, I’ve been trying over many, many years to have them be as refined as possible.
MS: It seems like that’s something that would be even harder to do going forward—maintaining complete control over access to anything that has been published in the digital age.
ART: It’s really true. I’ve always admired Brahms, because he only left exactly what he left. He pulled back everything else and burned it, or threw it out, and he leaves us just a blockbuster piece after blockbuster piece. I thought, “That’s a smart man.” Usually composers are pretty good judges of their own work. A tailor knows how well he or she made the suit, how beautifully the lining was or wasn’t done. And the same with the composer: You know how beautifully you made that symphony or not. At least, I think so. There’s a huge Gusty self-editor. Major. Very often, for instance, I’ll write a piece, let’s say the piece is 15 minutes or something for orchestra. I’ll write 19 minutes, and I trim myself down. Is this absolutely essential? How can I make it tighter, so that I really have this chance to pull my listener’s ear through the piece in a way that’s logical, but that isn’t self-indulgent? That really has something to say at every moment? I’ve always liked articulate music.
MS: Let’s talk about the orchestra, because that was clearly a big part of your career establishment. Was that sound palette already a central focus of your internal musical imagination? Were your ears already focused in that direction, or did that come with the opportunities?
ART: I grew up with two different kinds of experiences: playing piano alone and practicing, practicing, practicing for years, and playing trumpet in an ensemble, in a chamber orchestra, in an orchestra, in a big band, in the church brass quintet, in various large ensembles. As a composer, it was very useful for me to have both. And here, fast forward 30 years, I’m still writing for solos and for large ensembles because I grew up in that, and I can feel exactly how it feels. So writing for orchestra, really, is a natural outcome of having played trumpet for so long and falling in love with the repertoire as a trumpet player. And the inspiration of what, let’s say, early Stravinsky made and how one can move forward or sideways or in any direction from that seemed very natural to me.
I think also when you grow up playing an instrument in an ensemble, you learn a lot. For instance, when I was, like, 16, I probably knew a lot about clarinets and oboes and flutes and snare drums because all of my friends were playing those and I heard them every day. So you soak in like a sponge all of this knowledge without realizing it. And therefore, when you start to write for an oboe, or a bassoon, or a euphonium, or whatever it might be, there is ten years of stuff that’s already in the ears. I found that very useful.
I’m still madly in love with writing for orchestra, and I can’t wait to write my next orchestral piece. It’s very labor intensive, obviously. Most of my orchestral pieces are about 150 pages of hand-written, very large manuscript. It’s very physical. That’s why I have bad posture. But I still want to get up and make the next orchestral piece. Definitely. It is a certain art.
MS: And a lot of pens.
ART: A lot of pens, a lot of Wite-Out.
MS: You do have this amazing insight into the world of the orchestra as a composer who was a performer, who worked intimately with both the administration and musicians of a powerhouse orchestra in America. So if you were asked to kick in your ideas, as this person who has all this experience, are there things that you see that orchestras might do differently? If you could take any risk with such an ensemble, what would you like to see tried or implemented?
ART: For an audience member at an orchestral concert with a world premiere—let’s say the piece is 20-minutes long, and they’re hearing it performed once—there’s an enormous amount of information that’s being transmitted. It’s almost like reading an entire novel in 20 minutes. And it’s a lot to digest, even for the specialists. Even for the performers. I mean, there’s this big, very thoughtfully created work, and it takes some time to get to know. As such, I feel that we really need recordings. If orchestras could literally record everything they do and get it up on radio, make it accessible, make it downloadable, allow people to hear it many, many times, I think if you multiply that out by 30 years, 50 years, it’s going to make such a huge difference to the education of the audience, and the enjoyment and the beauty of the art form. For instance, let’s say a composer has a premiere in a certain city: no one can hear it unless they happen to be there. So even great pieces are being made that nobody ever gets the chance to hear. I mean, that’s just crazy.
The other thing that’s interesting to me is how much music people are listening to. I have a ton of nieces and nephews, and they’re all plugged in. They all have their handheld. They know how to get the music off the Internet. They know how to steal it off the Internet. They’re listening to it nonstop, maybe three hours a day. On the way to school. On the way back. On the bus. At the gym. Listening, listening, listening. So you have these young people listening to hours of music a day—not minutes, hours. And yet, how do we get to them this new orchestral piece that was just performed? We’re not going to get it to them if we don’t allow anyone to get to it.
So thinking of how many hours of music people are listening to every day is quite exciting in a certain way. But how can we make sure that they’re listening to a huge array of musics, not just only one type. I think one of the categories that’s left out is classical art music. So large organizations, such as a large orchestra, really need to figure out a way to reach all these people who are listening for three hours a day. I don’t have an answer, but I believe that it’s possible.
Having taught orchestration for many years, and having written for orchestra for most of my life, I actually believe that the orchestra’s really young. I mean, when you actually think about it, the orchestra for which we are writing today was developed by Strauss, let’s say. We’re talking, like, 100 years old! This is incredibly young when you think about music history. Where will this be in 200 years? Or 300, 400, 500, 800 years? We need to keep this vibrant, alive, young, flexible, wonderful instrument moving forward as opposed to making it stiff and like a museum. And I think when we as a culture start to only play older works—and lots of them—and not enough new work, it can be very, very dangerous.
MS: Is it ridiculous to think that those attendance graphs will start going up again, or do we need to be more optimistic about the future? Are there possibilities in front of us?
ART: I’m a complete optimist. I may sound like a fool, but I have a lot of hope because I basically get up every day and I write orchestral music. And to do that, you have to be either crazy or have a lot of hope. So I really believe in the instrument. I believe in its past repertoire. I believe in what tons of composers are writing for it today. I think it’s vibrant and vivid, and there’s nothing like a great orchestra performing a great piece. We just have to be willing to keep going forward. And it’s so interesting because many people want a new car. They want a new cell phone. They want the latest in brain surgery. They want the latest technologies. Then, when it comes to [classical] music, they’re like, “Well, I only like Mozart, please. That’ll be fine.” But they want new of everything else: new theater, new cinema, new video games, new rock music. So I think there’s a disconnect. For me, I want new orchestral music. And so I worry when people get really stiff about wanting something that’s 200 years old only. I think, with all due respect, that that’s a mistake in any genre. Architecture, gardening, medicine, you name it. We have to keep moving forward.
MS: I’ve got to believe that your students look to take something from you that they can emulate—not the music that you make specifically, since they make their own music, but how you lead your life and how you have had success in your career. Do you have ways of guiding them, or thoughts that you offer them to help them along with their own dreams?
ART: I’ve taught for many, many years at Eastman, Northwestern, Tanglewood, and lots of residencies every year, where I go in for a week and do intensive teaching. I love it. And actually, I’m still in touch with Eastman students that I taught 20 years ago. I mean, I build real relationships with people. Like, I’m the godmother of lots of their children. They become like family to me.
I really care about what they’re making, and they send me all of their recent pieces. The one thing that I care a lot about is that they be who they are. I always say, “Let’s look at what you need to do. Look inside. Be yourself.” What I don’t want is to create a whole bunch of Augustas. The more honest people are, the more I’m enthralled with their work. So none of my students sound the same; they’re all doing completely their own thing. And that’s what I like. There are other styles of teaching where there’s sort of a guru and people follow in that system, or with those methods. And that’s also very valuable for certain teachers and certain students. But that’s not me. I’m much more about really having people be who they are. And so the things that interest me in their work are the same things that interest me in other people’s work, which is a certain kind of honesty, and integrity, and risk taking on their own terms.
MS: Do you suspect that teaching will always be an integral part of your career then, or will you eventually give it up so you can devote yourself exclusively to composition?
ART: It is my dream to found and direct an institute for advanced studies in composition. The institute would have fellows, who would be young composers, recently having finished a DMA or a Ph.D., who would come to work with me for two years, have all their compositions performed and recorded, would receive a yearly stipend on which they can live, and have the opportunity to teach. Being a fellow would provide them time and space to compose with concentration, closely rehearse and hear all their works played, make a wonderful portfolio of scores and recordings, and grow as artists. There are many more aspects to my dream, but that’s a quick summary. I just need some financial help building it!
MS: What about when you look back at your own career. It’s far from over, obviously, but at this point, if you turned around and looked over your shoulder, what are some of the milestone markers for you?
ART: For me, the actual, very specific sound that I want is very important. Like the difference between whhah and whhhhhaaah. They’re very similar, but they’re actually profoundly different, if we were to analyze those two. To just really have such a clean idea of the sound that one wants, and then to notate it and to hear it performed with the perfect bow speed, great intonation, beautiful blend—every time that happens, that’s a huge joy for me. This certain sound was imagined and executed. And hopefully captured on a recording, but that’s rarely the case. If you ask me about my career, what’s important, I would say that’s important. That really matters to me.
I think it’s also very helpful and meaningful to me to have real discussions about real music with people that know the same music. Where you can actually say, “Did that little thing work right there?” or “How could this little thing have been better?” It’s sort of like if you’re a young poet and you need advice, you really need to go to a great poet who will say, “You know, if you move the comma one word to the left, your whole poem will have this extra double meaning,” or you know, something really technical. Those conversations that I’ve had with people over the past 30 years have been really meaningful and really helpful. And those are the kinds of conversations I try to have with my own students. Like, let’s really get into it here. Let’s not just drink coffee and chat. I like to get into the sound and talk about it.
MS: When you first got on this path to being a composer and sort of looked down the road and thought about what that was going to mean, how does that vision mesh with where you’re actually standing today?
ART: I was totally infatuated with music as a young person and then I practiced for, you know, five hours a day, and then I played, and then I started writing, and then I kept writing, and now here I’m writing. I mean it feels very natural, very integrated. It’s just a path that I’ve been on, and that I’ll keep walking. You have to know your own truth. You have to get up every day and face another piece of blank paper and create a piece. I’ve always admired painters. They make a painting, and they get up and make another painting. And for myself, that’s very much been part of my process. Sometimes my husband will say, you know, “Why don’t you take a morning off?” But I’m so on my path that I want to make the next one. I have terrible insomnia also just thinking about the next sound. So it’s really just this huge, long, ever-extended journey.
MS: Do you think it will ever end? Will you ever stop being a composer? Will you retire?
ART: For me, I think it would be impossible to not be a composer. It’s just so natural to who I am. It takes a lot of physical health to have the strength to stand there for eight hours, ten hours, get on an airplane and fly halfway across the world and then do a rehearsal, then get back on the plane and then teach all day. So I suppose at some point if I become very sick, it would be very hard to do. And that’s why I feel, while I am in good health, I should be so thankful for that. I have all sorts of things I want to make. So I do it, I just get up and do it. No matter whether anyone likes it or not.
Whatever value societies may put on gold or silver, high end perfume, or the Pomerol wine produced by Château Pétrus (I saw a bottle for more than € 4000 at the Nice airport back in January), it is ultimately arbitrary and can only have meaning based on societally agreed upon norms, perhaps even more than scarcity or inherent usefulness. If value were only based on scarcity or usefulness, fossil fuels would be phenomenally more expensive than they currently are since they are able to make so many things in our society run and are apparently a finite resource. Yet, the fluctuations in the price of oil seem to have little to do with either how much of it there is or what we need it for.
From that perspective it is erroneous if not downright disingenuous to claim, as some folks do, that various forms of intellectual property cannot be appropriately monetized in a society where they are no longer tied to physical commodities which are limited by their very nature (e.g. 300 copies of a CD or 500 copies of a book). We as a society ultimately deem what something is worth no matter how much or how little of it there is. Perhaps the best proof of that is how we completely devalue our only completely non-replenishable resource—time. Amazingly people can’t even agree on whether or not we should even have a minimum wage let alone how much it should be. Yet the one thing we can be certain of—unlike the price of gold futures or how much a gallon of gasoline will cost at the pump in the year 2017—is that once we spend time it is gone, forever. And none of us have more than a century and change to spare; in fact, most of us have much less than that. To take this line of thinking to its logical conclusion, music is a complete waste of time.
Each CD that I own represents a little more than an hour of my life, an LP only slightly less. A live concert performance is a couple of hours, plus there’s the time spent getting there and waiting for it to begin as well as getting out and trekking back home. Since most subway lines were being rerouted due to track work in lower Manhattan over the weekend, my attempt to sample only a small portion of Sunday’s Bang on a Can marathon at the World Financial Center almost turned into a whole-day affair. (I would have spent much more of the day at this always exciting and joyous new music event if I wasn’t on a really pressing deadline for an article about—big surprise—music.) Between listening, studying, and creating some of my own, I’ve easily devoted half of my waking hours to music in some way, which at the recently arrived at age of 47 (not counting the first 8 years of my life for a more statistically probable hypothesis and allowing 8 hours per day for sleep though I usually get much less) is approximately 13 entire years. That’s 13 years that I no longer have.
There are people who have probably spent even more time on music than I have, from musicians who spend 10 hours a day in practice rooms in order to hone convincing interpretations, to folks adorned with earbuds, music accompanying their every action. To what end? If indeed time is the only thing of value, music is the greatest heist of resources the world has ever known and the folks who make it and promulgate it (composers, performers, impresarios, record producers, and other folks who either sell it or write about it) would therefore be the absolute worst criminals on the planet.
Yet I can still think of no better thing to do with one’s life. Sure, scientists can discover things that profoundly change the world and doctors save lives every day, but there would be no reason to want to exist in this world if part of that time—though not all of it—did not involve experiencing music.
Tahiti is the latest recording released by Michael Torke’s Ecstatic Records, the label he founded in 2003 in order to release his new material and to distribute his older recordings. The current trend of self-publishing/recording composers was still a fairly new and rarely implemented concept in 2003, and the number of established composers leaving the safety of traditional models to set out on their own was virtually non-existent. After the demise of Argo Records in the late ’90s, Torke tried for some time to get the rights for his recordings, but it wasn’t until 2001 that he gained some traction. Andrew Cornall (his former producer) approached Torke with an offer to assist him in acquiring the rights for those recordings, and it was at this meeting that the seeds of Ecstatic were sown.
Launching Ecstatic Records showed that while Torke was already thoroughly established as a composer, he was still looking forward—not only in terms of the music he wrote but also in terms of the life and business of composing. Torke currently spends the bulk of his time in Las Vegas (far from the influence and trappings of contemporary concert music culture), and it’s in this environment that his work on Tahiti began to take shape.
Performed by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic’s contemporary music group, Ensemble 10/10 (led by conductor Clark Rundell), and coming in at just over 17 minutes, the album’s first track, Fiji, quickly reveals itself as a Torke joint. Calling for five percussionists and utilizing a variety of Latin-centric instruments (congas, bongos, and claves, oh my!) to create a virtually non-stop bed of percussion, Fiji relentlessly percolates, pausing only during the occasional breakdown and turnaround before returning to a constantly shifting texture that just won’t sit still. Joining the percussion are pairs of oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, which are matched with pairs of violins, violas, and cellos, respectively. While the result is five percussionists and six (x2) other instrumentalists, this description does not really convey the weight of the result. The aforementioned are truly paired, as they double every note and rhythm throughout the piece, resulting in a sound with the density of a chamber orchestra but the clarity of a smaller chamber group. Adding to the effect, never have so many percussionists played so little. Joining the drums are a variety of shakers, bells, and the like, but given the simplicity of the lines, the impact is that of a single percussionist (perhaps with an extra arm) working with a very thick group of other instrumentalists to create a deceptively simple texture derived from the rhythms played by the percussionists.
Following Fiji is the eight-movement title track, Tahiti. While the movement titles are drawn from the Society Islands of French Polynesia, Torke points out in his liner notes that they do not directly speak to characteristics of their namesakes. Instead, they are meant to give a more general impression of “the idea of humidity: they attempt to capture the perfume of leisure time in a very warm and sunny beautiful place.” By and large Torke captures this, especially in the second movement, “Moorea—green cliffs.” Here the percussion again mimics a single drummer, but one languidly playing a half-time groove while strings and winds wistfully trade lightly syncopated melodies. “Bora-Bora—lagoon” also calmly leads the listener along with high winds and bright percussion, the only wrinkle in the journey being the 3 + 5 grouping in the chorus giving a slight disturbance to an otherwise balmy trip. “Tahaa—white sand” takes the listener in a new rhythmic direction, notably with straight eighth-note lines that move around the orchestra accompanied by long flowing string lines, which then trade to pizz. strings and long wind lines. While this direction is new, the movement is also notable in that the percussion is almost non-existent.
“Maupiti—by the reef” takes the “drum kit approximation” concept to its most fully realized state. Listeners of a certain vintage might be called back to any number of TV theme songs of the ’70s and ’80s (many of which were fantastic, thankyouverymuch) which featured drum kits along with studio orchestras. Music starting with two bars of loud, staccato, tutti eighths followed by two quieter measures would fit in any number of pieces and could go in as many directions, but the use of the toms and snare to give a pick-up (anacrusis, for those keeping score[1]) into the main theme is the first sign that we might be settling in to watch the ABC lineup of 1983. A straight rock beat (complete with tambourine playing eighths in a spot-on impression of a closed hi-hat, along with complementary eighths in the orchestra that are begging to be played by guitar and bass) accompanies a lovely theme that actually features some of the most rhythmically adventurous and involved music on the disc. This is accentuated (in the ears of this listener) by the harmonic and melodic choices that I can’t help but hear as TV theme-song-ish.[2]
“Huahine—under the moonlight” returns the listener to the islands with slowly pulsing rhythms and a haunting clarinet solo line. The only problem with this movement is that both the clarinet line and the piece end too soon. I could have gone around once or twice more. Finally, we hear “Farwell” which aptly wraps up Torke’s trip to the islands, complete with cymbal crashes (there are those downbeat accents…) seemingly mimicking crashing waves.
In the liner notes, Torke says (not about Tahiti in particular), “I have always wanted to write a composition that would inspire a woman, coming home from a long day of work, to draw a bath, light candles, and listen to it on her pink iPod.” Whether that goal played a role in the development of these pieces or not, he may very well have achieved it in places on this disc. Torke was an unapologetically “listenable” composer before that was fashionable, and in many ways Tahiti shows a continuation of that ethos. While there is plenty of substantial and interesting material here, this is clearly music written with people in mind, not composers. Its overall impact is thoughtful, approachable, and decidedly Torke.
***
1. In college I went to a local CD shop (ask your parents) to pick up a few CDs. On my way to the counter I noticed a CD for a thrash metal band called Anacrusis. While I was checking out the CD cover, the shop owner walked over and noticed my prospective purchases were a bit different than what I was presently checking out. When he asked me why I was having a look at the disc, I told him what anacrusis meant. He didn’t believe me and said he was going to call his mother (who was the staff accompanist for the local university) to confirm. I said that not only was I right, but I was willing to bet the purchase price of the CDs I’d planned to purchase.
And that, my friends, was how you got free music in the early ’90s.
2. The only movement that is more adventurous is the first movement, “Tahiti—Papeete,” which features three against four polyrhythmic elements that when played straight are quite effective. And when Torke carves out the occasional beat, even more so.
John Harbison interviewed by Alexandra Gardner
American Academy of Arts and Letters
October 3, 2011—4:00 p.m.
Transcribed by Julia Lu
Videography by Stephen Taylor
Condensed and edited by Alexandra Gardner
Composer John Harbison says that he is trying to “defeat the idea of style.” That is, he tries to approach every new composition with completely fresh ears and eyes, working with totally new musical material and strategies well apart from anything that preceded it. While the idea of constant musical reinvention may seem daunting, it obviously serves Harbison well, given his ongoing success in music spanning operas, symphonies and choral works, to wind quintets and pieces for solo piano.
Jazz inflections can be heard in much of the music, stemming from his early years as an active jazz pianist. At that time Harbison was also playing viola and conducting, and for a time he traveled down somewhat parallel pathways in jazz and classical music. Eventually the classical side won out as he became increasingly steeped in choral conducting—first with the Cantata Singers, and then as the principal guest conductor for Emmanuel Music in Boston. These experiences played a crucial role in shaping his compositions and his life as a composer, and in fact he considers the Bach cantatas a primary inspiration for his work.
Harbison has a clear view of both the forest and the trees—he seems to find equal delight in the nuts and bolts of composition, as well as in tackling broad-reaching, sometimes archetypal themes in his music. Again the Bach cantatas come into play as he talks about both the importance of line and narrative in many of his works, and of the importance of the listener’s experience and the sense of community that can be created through musical performance. The phrase “good musical citizen” is an apt description for the composer—whether teaching at Tanglewood or MIT, premiering a new composition, or running and performing in the Token Creek Chamber Music Festival on his family farm in Wisconsin, he is eager to share musical knowledge and insight with those around him.
His good-natured conversation reveals a smart, funny, and generous person, as well as a dedicated teacher. As he says to his students, “It’s about everything that you do; it’s about your taking in what’s out there in the world. It’s about getting out and walking in the woods. It’s a highly intricate ensemble of things that go into what you want to do as a composer.” Harbison possesses a deep understanding of music, but the richness of his music is also a byproduct of his broad interests beyond music—such as poetry and history—as well as his untiring curiosity about and appreciation for the world in which we live
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Alexandra Gardner: Although I knew that you’ve been involved in jazz music in the past as a pianist, I had no idea that jazz was essentially your first love, and the beginning of your life in music. How did that come about, and when did classical music enter the scene for you?
John Harbison: I was originally just learning instruments and improvising, and I had a pretty big resistance to actually learning pieces. I just would go to the piano and make up pieces. I would have little fragments that I would play over and over, which my parents found pretty annoying, and so they suggested that maybe I should take up a string instrument. So they got a teacher for me—I remember her very well. She was a woman from New York, and I still kind of remember her perfume, which was very powerful—it was almost overwhelming. I associate it with playing wrong notes.
From going to concerts I was interested in viola, because it seemed like it was kind of in the middle of everything. It’s a good spot. But I began by studying violin because they said I had to get large hands to be able to play the viola. So I just did violin very provisionally, and I waited until I was given the green light to switch to the viola. In the meantime, I began to hear some jazz on the radio. I was pretty young. At about the age of 11, my closest friend at the time, Tom Arden, and I discovered that we’d been listening to the same jazz. We had been teaching ourselves to play based on what we were hearing, and we were hearing really old traditional players like Louis Armstrong. So we put together a band in junior high school. I think it was sixth grade. We tried to teach the other players the music. They weren’t too interested, but we got the necessary instruments, and we played for quite a long time in that band. It was a Dixieland group, playing really loud, extremely powerful stuff. Both Tom and I got quite good at jazz.
In high school I played piano as a sub on weekends, like at Princeton University reunions. I played maybe for a few hours with some of the great jazz players of the time, and I had a few unsolicited pretty hard lessons. I was in a band one afternoon when the piano player had dropped out, and they somehow knew that they could call me up. I was maybe 15, and Buck Clayton was playing trumpet and Vic Dickensen was playing trombone. It was a great Basie assignment. Buck Clayton came back after I’d played behind his solo and said, “Real nice chords kid.” And I said, “Thank you.” He said, “You know what the problem is, they’re not in the tune.” I thought, what does he mean by that? You know, I was playing what I thought were very sophisticated kind of alteration things, showing off a little bit. But that was useless to him because what he was thinking, as really all great jazz players are, is they’re not just playing chords, they’re playing that tune. And the inflections of the chords in that tune are what they want the rhythm section to be putting out. So obviously, I never forgot that. People who talk about jazz come back to that point over and over. I mean, Monk always said, “You don’t play changes. You play the tune.” In fact, you play the words. So that was a very strong guide point from playing with the players at that level.
Then we graduated. I played with a lot of college groups and really did some quite interesting jazz stuff. I was also at the same time interested in concert music. I played the viola finally—I was allowed to switch. I spent a whole summer learning the viola; my teacher just said show up every morning at ten, and we would read a Haydn quartet. And he and his wife, who was a violinist, and my friend John Sessions—who was the son of the composer Roger Sessions, sort of beginning my connection—would play these Haydn quartets every day for about two or three months. By the end of which, I played a lot of Haydn quartets, and I could pretty much play the viola. Or at least understand the clef and all that. So that was going on at the same time, and I was a little bit split between where I was going to wind up at that point. In college, I did a lot of jazz work because I was earning a pretty good amount of cash. I was in a couple of bands, one of which played things like Dartmouth Winter Carnival and a lot of big college festivals that, you know, you go for the whole weekend and sleep on some floor, and play about six or seven times. It was pretty close to a professional commitment in terms of the way we thought of ourselves.
We entered a big intercollegiate contest, which is one of the things that jazz players liked to do in those days. Our band went in and we didn’t win, but our bass player won the best player award and was sent to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, which was in those days a big deal. He got off the plane and was met by his band mates, who were a bass player and a drummer, at which point I think it was realized that some kind of problem had ensued. Bass, bass, and drums would be nowadays a pretty progressive kind of combo, but I think in those days….
By that time, I was really weighing applying to the Lenox School of Jazz, which was starting up for its first year. But I also thought, well, our band had played this contest, and maybe we weren’t at the top rung. So instead I applied as a conductor to Tanglewood because I had been conducting an orchestra at Harvard College called the Bach Society Orchestra. I was I think a junior in college, so it was a crucial decision point. Then the word came from Fort Lauderdale, that I was the one who was supposed to be down there—I had won this performer award. But by that time, I was at Tanglewood in the conducting program. So I just kind of assumed that a rather large-scale decision had kind of been made for me.
I kept playing jazz for a while—I played with some really good people for a few more years. Eventually I decided that I was going to drop out, but I’ve stayed in touch with a lot of jazz people. One in particular, the guy I formed the band with in junior high, we’re now back playing together in a band every summer. So I have actually tried to recover as much of my jazz connection as I could at this point, having only very sporadically kept in touch with it all those years. I imagine that my goal is to play as well as I played the year I didn’t go to the Lenox School, which is of course unmeasurable but still interesting. I think my playing now has incorporated a lot of issues that I wouldn’t have been thinking about back then, particularly about constructing a solo. I’m getting a lot out of the jazz playing right now in terms of line and just the excitement of a very free form, high initiative kind of band that plays hard, that is not polite sounding. I’m still addicted to this sort of Charlie Mingus or Monk ethic of, you know, you just take a real shot. For me, that’s why it’s still worth doing jazz. It’s something that in concert music there’s not much space for, that kind of improvisational thinking.
I’ve been taking advantage of the jazz playing to explore certain composers I’ve always been interested in as tune writers: Vernon Duke, and Jimmy Van Heusen, Arlen, a huge series of really great composers.
AG: People that you hadn’t had a chance to explore.
JH: Well, when I was a real jazz player in high school, I wasn’t aware of who wrote anything. I probably had in my head about three or four hundred tunes that I could play if they were called, but I didn’t know who wrote them. It was of great interest later on when I was really not playing jazz much, just finding out how these voices really cohered. I would have known in my ear 30 or 40 Irving Berlin songs without knowing they were his songs. So that’s been an interesting thing for me, to reassemble that repertoire that I used to play in terms of who wrote it. Finding out that, say, a Jimmy Van Heusen song is a very particular thing with certain kinds of strategies and certain very clear compositional points of view. It was really interesting to me to find how strongly profiled all of those writers of that era were in terms of how they approached their craft and, of course, it’s much more than a craft for most of them. I’ve always been very admiring of what those writers did. They did it all, the ones I’m interested in—did it all in a very short timeframe of less than 30 years. And, they were apparently very generous with each other because there was so much room for them all, commercially. There was a sense of a very functional culture, which I think we in concert music can look at with some profit, and some amazement, because there’s no genre within concert music that is as receptive to what I would call truly innovative explorative writing of the kind that so many of those composers did.
I remember 30 or 40 years ago when I used to say to my concert music friends that I thought Jerome Kern was a songwriter that we needed to think of in terms of Schubert and Schumann and people like that. They all were very dismissive, but I would only say that maybe they hadn’t spent as much time thinking about his collective work as a set of coherent, highly articulate pieces, which is really what they are. The more I think about jazz now and play it again, I feel like the claims for its importance in American music can’t be exaggerated. I mean, it’s just a huge thing, a very highly self-contained and complete language, and ideally it takes a couple of lifetimes of work to absorb it.
AG: So how does that color your view of the concert music world, given that it’s not as receptive to that sort of experimentation?
JH: Concert music has some areas where that kind of high refinement of a certain genre can work. I’ve noticed certain composers who craft their lives in terms of trying to bear down on something very specific. Dave Rakowski writes 100 piano etudes—something like that makes a lot of sense to me in terms of what I learned about pop song writers and theater song writers. They had one specific occasion for which they wanted to write over and over, and they simply brought their skills right down on that. The great jazz arrangers of the big band era are also interesting to me in that way. They developed a very wide range of sonorities, lots of very fresh ideas, but all dedicated to a quite self-enclosed culture, which had an economic logic to it of some sort. Not much, because most of those bands were hardly making any money, but they at least had audiences, and they had a sense of purpose. I think that’s one of the things that we have always to try to be looking for in concert music: Where can we make an enclave that seems to have a sense of purpose?
AG: Do you have a vision of what that would look like?
JH: Well, I think that’s a very important thing. The composer has to find some sort of community that they can write for and be listened to in some reiterative way. My solution to that quite accidentally has been a very arcane one—essentially for 40 years I functioned as a church musician. This would be at Emmanuel Music in Boston, where I was the leader; I was actually for many years called the principal guest conductor. The head of the ensemble, Craig Smith, was my very close friend, and I had actually been in that field a few years before him, conducting a group called Cantata Singers. We did some quite recent choral music as well, but pretty much, we did Bach cantatas. So I was regularly performing music mostly at both ends of the repertoire scale—like before 1750 and since 1950. When I began to write for the choir, which I began to do quite extensively after I’d been there a long time, there was an ongoing audience connection because I was connecting—or re-encountering them—many, many months and years in a row. So that became both a laboratory for me to work with the choir, but then with the audience also. There were many members who had been steeped in Bach cantatas and had heard, week after week, a literature that is very community oriented in its origins. The idea was to bring together, in the case of Bach’s original situation, a couple thousand people every week who had studied a certain text, who were interested in a certain story and then would hear a composer’s rendering of this material. They were essentially pre-warned what the subject matter was going to be, because they’re following a church day, which is going to be focused on certain subject matter. So what I learned from this experience I think was the value of a set of exchanges with certain listeners who had drawn a number of impressions from other encounters of what to expect, and what not to expect.
Emmanuel Music itself was a kind of community in that it was also a group of players and singers with whom I functioned at many other levels. Recently, there was a recording of a very early opera of mine from the early ’70s, and I would say that two-thirds of the cast members are Emmanuel choir singers. Craig Smith, my friend the music director of Emmanuel, was the conductor of many, many first performances of my pieces. So it was a church music community, but also a very flexible performing instrument. Eventually some of the Emmanuel performers are people that I wrote for, for very different circumstances. For Sanford Sylvan, Jim Maddalena, and Lorraine Hunt, I wrote pieces that were based on our experience together at Emmanuel. So I think that’s what I would mean by community, but it can take all kinds of shapes. I have a couple of recent Tanglewood fellows who studied with me in the last few years who have made performance ensembles in which they perform and lead and do all the real entrepreneurial work and so forth. I think that’s another way to generate some sort of a sense of community. That people are performing together and working on some sort of goal that they believe in. I think it’s pretty necessary because the larger institutions are much more changeable; less likely to be there from year to year in terms of a given composer’s interests. So I think it is part of what we need to do.
At Emmanuel, I also wound up, for three years after Craig Smith died, as the full-time music director. That was an experience of the community at a much more fundamental level, and I think it was valuable for me; a kind of summation of what a kind of collaborative musical enterprise is really about because one of the things that we were doing in that period was trying to secure the future and find the right new conductor, find a way to move on without a founder who had been there for 40 years. Which means trying to analyze what holds it together: What are the people after? Why is it a place that people want to come and work for, in many cases, way below what the market should bear, over many, many years? That’s an interesting set of questions. And we had to face a lot of them. And we had to go through a lot of division and strife and hardship to try to sort out answers.
AG: So you created for yourself a really strong, large community and that experience as a church musician begins to explain the use of narrative in your work. Whether it’s using a religious text or some other storyline, your music seems to always convey a strong sense of narrative, and also a sense of ritual.
JH: Oh, absolutely. I believe that’s part of what is so amazing about those Bach cantatas, which were the only body of music that I ever felt I had to study complete. As a young guy when I was in my late 20s, I auditioned for this job as conductor of this group called Cantata Singers in Boston. I got the job, and I thought, “What is my requirement for doing this job? Well, I’d better look at every Bach cantata.” So I spent a whole summer—I was living in Madison, Wisconsin—and I went into the library every day. I took down a volume of the complete Bach works—and the cantatas are the first 20 volumes—and I read through them from like morning to night. I’ve never read through all the Beethoven quartets that way, but this is the one thing I actually really studied. One of the things that struck me as I got to the end of that was this thing about narrative, and about the way the same archetypal story is told and retold with amazing musical invention, but also with this sense that some elements of it are foreknown. That is, the point of view is foreknown. So what happens in Bach and in Stravinsky and certain composers I really have great admiration for is that you find available for them a certain kind of elevation, and a certain kind of almost trance state which comes from the listener having bought into a bunch of very almost earthy, early premises that are holding the pieces up. That is for me in great part why the cantatas have remained always in my head. It was actually around the same time that I went through those cantatas that I had the experience in Santa Fe of being out there when all the Stravinsky operas were done. Taking them all in, in sequence like that, there was something about that whole aesthetic that was tremendously impressive—that whatever the subject matter was on the surface, what he’s after is always in some ways the same kind of thing. He wants to have people investing in this collective sense of celebration, of some sort of known set of values, or ideas, or whatever. That seemed to be something that happened in certain Bach cantatas in a very strong way. Because you knew, for instance, in a Bach cantata that most of the time, out of these very dire straits, some sort of hopeful elevation would occur. That seems to me the essence of ritual. It’s one of the reasons I’ve remained so interested in these pieces, and I’ve had the real privilege of performing certain cantatas many, many times. It’s a repertoire that very few people get a chance to do even once or twice, and at Emmanuel, certain pieces are kind of repertoire pieces. We do them a lot.
AG: Would you say that your interest in the cantatas affects your choice of text for other works?
JH: Yeah. Sometimes I’ve explicitly looked for Bach cantata texts. There’s a piece of mine called Simple Daylight which is for soprano and piano. My idea was that I would shape a bunch of poems by a poet I know—one esteemed very highly, Michael Fried—into a sequence which would be very like a Bach cantata sequence. Actually I did the same thing again, also with his texts and Martin Luther’s, in a piece called Chorale Cantata where again, I had this idea that I could have things that stood for the kind of chorus collective statement. Then there could be the individual uncertainty and self-questioning and so forth. Then there could be a kind of light that breaks through and then some kind of enlightenment. That pattern certainly interested me on various occasions. And I got interested very recently in how much quality difference there is in the Bach cantatas in terms of the way that the librettists manage those structures. The very good texts are very helpful to Bach in terms of what he’s trying to do. This guy’s a week-to-week composer—if he has to, he can do a menu from a restaurant. But it makes a huge difference to him if the texts are really good. And when he gets a really good one, something really happens. Which is why I’ve always been advising students I’m teaching that the texts that they take, they need to get haunted by them. Looking for them is not as good as noticing what’s sort of sticking to you.
AG: That’s good advice for how to choose a text.
JH: Yeah, I think it really is important to let it grab you. More and more, I’ve become interested in a certain moment in Bach’s life in Weimar where there happened to be a guy who wrote very well—better than anybody he ever had again. The character of those pieces is just different. There’s something about what Bach discovers in the sound of the pieces, and in the uniqueness of the inspiration, that is entirely I think about responding to the poems. So we composers, we need that kind of help. We definitely should be always alert for it. I’ve found that lately, in working with the Bach cantatas, that I’m more respectful for where the words are coming from.
AG: All of your works are so very different from each other, and there’s a quote from an interview with you from years ago in which you said that your main interest was to make each work different from the others—to reinvent traditions and to create fresh new designs. Do you approach each new piece in a completely different manner?
JH: I’m trying to. And I’m trying to defeat the idea of style. I think the composers that I’m interested in also were more interested in finding the character of the piece, or the peculiar circumstances of the piece, and defeating the idea of the style. Bach does it in a peculiar manner really because he’s someone who developed so many resources for how he could write that in his case, it’s really just a lavish kind of equipment. If you track him from one week to the next, right in those two years when he’s writing a piece a week, the astonishing thing is that he’s not working off the previous week at all. You walk away completely thrown by how unreliant he is on where he’s just been, which is staggering to me, particularly because the timeframe is so small. If you were to say, well, Wagner writes Tristan and then he writes Meistersinger, and his vocabulary is so wildly different. I mean, it’s incredible self-discipline that he makes the sound of those pieces so different, but you’re also talking about six year gulfs there. For Bach, it’s like six days. So I think that trying to re-attack is really important. I try to set up situations where I kind of have to do that. Like when I wrote this piece for the Vatican, and they looked over a bunch of my motets in this little committee, and they sent me a commentary sheet. The pieces where I use triads are all identified as something they like. That’s the way they were in the 14th century too, so I thought the premise for the piece then ought to be that there’s nothing in the piece but triads. That became a really interesting premise because if you then try to write seemingly linear textures, actually they’re up and down. They’re constantly registering triads. It becomes an interesting set of problems, to not make the listener or even the analyst aware of this, but if you are crazy enough to actually look at it moment to moment, you notice that’s what happening. That seemed like a great opportunity to clear the air, and to be doing something completely unlike whatever I’ve been doing. So I look for chances like that. I did a piece years ago called TheMost Often Used Chords, and a couple of my friends in California said, “That didn’t sound like anything you would write.” I said, “Well, I’m really happy to hear that because given the a priori sort of games that I laid out, movement to movement, there wasn’t much of any way for it to sound like things I’d written before.” There are a number of peculiar things that go on in that piece, based on not exactly musical principles, like almost statistical; say certain chords will be around a certain percentage of the time. To me it was what music would be like if a bunch of really goofy theorists thought you should do things according to the way you could actually describe them. I think it’s fun to find places where you have to do it in a way that you don’t really know how to do it.
AG: It’s wonderful that you are able to do that, given that you tend to write one enormous, progressive piece after another—a huge orchestra piece, and then an opera—very large forms. You’re not really a soprano and piano kind of guy.
JH: No, I tend to write a lot of big pieces. The key thing for those big pieces is to space them out and get enough time in between. Having had this amazing experience in Boston with the orchestra playing all of my symphonies—I heard three of them last year, in a really short time—I was thinking I was very fortunate that there were a lot of years between each one, because I had pretty much shaken loose most of what I’d been hanging around with. By the time I started the second, the first was not available, and the third didn’t seem to be hanging much in the second. The hardest was the fourth because the fourth came after two very large pieces, and they were big efforts, and they kind of wanted to cling a certain amount. I had difficulty with that feeling, as if I couldn’t shake off as much as I wished I could.
AG: You obviously find great joy in the nuts and bolts details of the compositional process, in addition to being absorbed in very universal, archetypal thematic material.
JH: It’s funny, one reason I don’t conduct my pieces when they’re new anymore is that the nuts and bolts things are too interesting at that point. Later on, you know, I was able to do much better because I didn’t care about that stuff anymore. Your engagement with elements of the piece changes so much. It’s a very strange evolution, but I have to watch out for that. I watch out for it by not conducting stuff when it’s new, because I know that I’ll be off on a bender somewhere.
AG: You said a long time ago—and it’s a very interesting statement—that you have to be careful that your music doesn’t look easier than it is.
JH: Yeah.
AG: Do you still think that?
JH: Yeah, I worry about that.
AG: How so?
JH: It’s a strategic issue, but you know, if a player looks at a piece right away, and graphically they take an impression that they can absorb it immediately, that’s not good for you. Right? And I’ve discovered it’s not good for a quartet to look at one of my pieces and say, “There’s gonna be no problem.”
AG: How do you overcome that?
JH: Well, normally I’m unsuccessful in overcoming that. I at least try to make sure that the things that I know are hard about the piece are pointed out in some way—either something in the way that the piece is described verbally, or something to just say really you may have to work on this piece. I’ve had a few unpleasant surprises where groups have showed up, and they’ve said, “Oh my God, we didn’t realize this piece was so hard. So sorry for what you’re about to hear.” I’d love to know how to guard against that, but I’ve really never discovered the absolute way to do it. I know some people say you just write something that looks impenetrable, but I think our job as composers is in a way the reverse: to do something that’s quite unusual but doesn’t look crazy at all, but then when they play it, they realize they’re doing something much more involved than they thought. But one has to be a little wary of performers who go too much on their ocular overview and are not seeing anything too scary.
In the chamber music world—where rehearsal is really possible, in principle—it is important to send the message that the visual picture may not be the whole story. I now sometimes just say that. The orchestral world is different, because it is so bounded by strictures of time that there’s not going to be much stretch anyway. The orchestra is just going to do the best it can with a very finite chunk of time. So in a sense almost anything that you present to an orchestra, given the number of minutes they have, is going be some sort of challenge. I think with chamber music, what I’ve tried to do is just say—particularly if I know the players—don’t think it’s quite as transparent as it looks, because I do love the idea of delivering something that is not too gnarled in appearance. Sometimes that means work you do by yourself to present something that might be fairly unusual, in which you’ve reduced the complexities visually or found ways to render a rhythm that is not the most clotted thing that you could put down. I’ve been very struck listening to the late music of Milton Babbitt and looking at his scores, since I knew his music when he was in his middle years. It sounds on the surface very much like it always did, but it looks on the page about 75 percent easier. I think one of the things he must have decided is, “I can get these rhythmic effects without having to send everybody down to their calculators and, you know, spending hours counting with themselves.” I think there are ways to suggest all kinds of density that don’t have to put the performer back to school. As a coach at Tanglewood, I’ve sometimes felt a little upset about the hours of preparation I’ve put in on some scores, trying to make sure that when the players get there that I can do these rhythms. And the composer then comes in and wants something much more extemporaneous and casual in sound than what the picture suggests.
That’s a really interesting question; we ask as composers for a lot of solitary long-distance runner time from players. And I think one of the things we always have to calculate is when they come out at the other end, are they going to feel after those many hours where they played the same line of music 400 times, that the reward is there for having gotten it. It’s just a very delicate balance. Some of us who also perform, we stay close to the world of those problems. Because as a performer, I still get some scores, and I sit there for hours and hours and hours thinking, “I’ve got to figure this out!”
AG: Well, I think that also a lot of the challenge with music that may appear simple at first glance comes when it’s time for the ensemble to put it all together. The individual parts may be completely manageable in and of themselves, but the work places virtuosic demands on the ensemble as a whole.
JH: I think it’s good that we need to still be writing music that requires the performer to understand it and live with it, and that is done differently when people know how it goes. All of us are expecting, for instance, that our college students—the advanced ones—can play the notes of a Haydn quartet. But it takes them a long time to play the music of the Haydn quartet, and to play the stresses and everything in the right natural place. The hierarchy of events, the pacing, all those things are very difficult. And that’s probably what I would wish that we would be able to assert about the music that we’re writing now, too. That eventually it needs the comprehensive issues solved just the way difficult classical music needs it. I think we ought to all go to hear the All-State or the high school orchestra reading the Brahms Third. To hear that their balances are not too good and a lot of the notes are hard, and some of the places are rather lumpy and not particularly soft, to get a better sense of what we’re hearing when we’re hearing a new orchestra piece. Because we’re hearing something rather similar to that, in that we’re hearing something at a very early stage of its eventual evolution.
AG: Exactly. I wanted to ask about your perspective on this, given that you do write so many large works that can be difficult to program. Many of your compositions have been recorded, which is another way for large works to have long lives, and preparing a new work for recording is certainly a good way to learn a piece in a very deep way.
JH: Yeah, in this area, I’d have to say I’ve been incredibly lucky because a couple of conductors have conducted a lot of my pieces and have come back to them—particularly James Levine, but also David Zinman and David Miller. And they’re played better for no particular reason other than it is another group, and it can be another venue, and it can be another time. The very fact that they’ve been around longer is somehow very helpful. Of course, if the same orchestra plays something twice in two years, the way they do big standard pieces, the effect is so different it’s startling. That happened to me a long time ago in San Francisco, where Mr. Blomstedt brought a piece back the next year. I looked at the program, and I thought this is too difficult, they’ll never be able to play it; they’ve got such hard music. But they played the piece the way they play pieces that they have met, and the upgrade was far more exaggeratedly good than I could have thought. I’d always guessed it would make a big difference, but this kind of difference was just—you couldn’t predict it. It made me wonder about the whole world of orchestral performance. That is, we lavish a lot of care on these pieces, and it really does take a lot to understand whether they deserve it or not, because we don’t hear them go out of the sketch level for a while. It’s not the fault of the conductor, or the orchestra, if it’s still in the sketch level. It’s only that the amount of time to absorb it is so small. What Beethoven’s Eroica has now—it’s not that it’s easy to play. It’s really hard, but it’s that it’s been around a long enough time, and has been absorbed in a number of places and most specifically by good orchestras on enough occasions, that it starts well up the track. We’re not starting right at the first square at all with that piece.
But the audience doesn’t have much stake in Beethoven’s Eroica. I’m always trying to convince audiences that the interest of a new orchestra piece is that their ears matter there. If they’re there for the 9,000th performance of the Eroica, it doesn’t matter what they think. Like it, not like it, it’s completely immaterial. But it’s very material what they think, what they react to or how they react, with a new piece. For some listeners when you really secure that message, it makes it exciting to be at a concert. Part of the kick of going up to Albany, where the audience hears a much higher diet of new music than from just about any orchestra in the country, is that the audience is there to hear the new piece. They’re there to meet composers, and they’re there because they’re ground floor people. They love the idea that their attendance is making a difference. And you get such a feeling of exhilaration being in that audience because all of those people who are there are invested. They feel like, “We’re the people who decide whether this stuff will ever go anywhere.” They’re as important to that event as anybody on stage, and that is probably almost like a re-creation of a time when pieces that are now standard were new. People showed up to hear Beethoven Three, thinking, “What’s he got for us this time?” And that’s the Albany feeling. It comes about by years of persistence—of saying the real central purpose of this orchestra is that we play new things. That’s why any time I get a call to come up to Albany, I’m there like a shot because it’s just the experience of being there. It’s like an audience that is alive to the weight of their own presence. They have to be there; it doesn’t matter without them. That’s pretty exciting, and hats off to the series of managements up there and conductors who have kept a long tradition going. It’s David, but it’s people before him, and hopefully people after him.
AG: Are there particular things you feel that younger composers should be thinking about and/or working on?
JH: I had this idea, which really came from an account of Luigi Dallapiccola teaching, and it has resulted in my instituting at Tanglewood every summer what I call the “Luigi Dallapiccola Reading Project.” It has to do with how musicians are educated. Dallapiccola, when he was presented with some work at a lesson, if he liked what was there, he would go out on the veranda with the student and smoke. This was the ‘60s or the ‘70s in Italy…you can imagine. If he wasn’t too happy with it, he would go to his edition of the Divine Comedy, which is all in separate cantos, and he would pull out a canto, give it to the composer and say, “I want you to read this for next week, and we’ll talk about it.” Now, what was he driving at? Well, my sense of it is that he was feeling behind the music some lack of a life, or let’s just say, a wider support fabric that went beyond music, which of course was very important to him and very important to his own work. I’ve sometimes had this feeling too, that maybe composers need to think a lot about what goes into their music besides what they know about music. I’ve started giving them round robin reading, that they just pass to each other every week. This year we learned and recited Italian poems. The whole idea of it is just to say that it’s about everything that you do; it’s about your taking in what’s out there in the world. It’s about getting out and walking in the woods. It’s a highly intricate ensemble of things that go into what you want to do as a composer. And sometimes, during the incubation of graduate schools particularly, it’s possible to lose sight of that because it becomes all about what your teachers think about what you’re doing, and what sort of musical environment you are creating for yourself. So thanks to Luigi’s example—though we don’t do the smoking on the balcony because nobody smokes—we are doing the reading, and we’re doing it independent of looking at any music because we think he was right, that this is probably a very important ingredient.
A conversation at Rolnick’s home in New York City
March 11, 2013–2:30 p.m.
Transcribed by Julia Lu
Video Presentation by Molly Sheridan
Neil Rolnick is extremely soft-spoken and self-effacing, but for over 30 years he has helped to create a much changed musical landscape in the United States in terms of musical aesthetics and the application of technology in concert performance. Next month he will retire from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York, where he has taught since 1981, founding the institute’s influential iEAR Studios shortly after his arrival. Yet Rolnick’s attitude about musical composition is the antithesis of an academic approach. While he deeply respects and loves a lot of modernist 20th-century music, he realized relatively early on that his own mind didn’t work that way.
Studies with Darius Milhaud at Aspen and Fritz Kramer, a musicologist based at the Manhattan School of Music, gave him his initial grounding in the fundamentals, but as a Harvard undergrad he chose not to study music and took literature classes instead, playing in rock and folk bands in his spare time. A conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, his earliest jobs after getting an undergraduate college degree were as a community organizer and counselor for teenagers in Vermont and as a hospital worker in Wyoming, where he got fired after attempting to unionize his co-workers. This was around the same time that commercial synthesizers first appeared on the market, and Rolnick was totally entranced by the possibilities of electronic music. So he went back to school, first studying with John Chowning, the legendary pioneer of FM synthesis, at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), and then later at IRCAM working alongside Pierre Boulez, whose musical worldview was less than simpatico. According to Rolnick:
It was like dropping into a history book. . . . Then I got there and realized that they’re all real people, just like you and me, doing things that they feel are right, and I’m actually capable of saying, “Well no, that’s not the right thing for me. No, I think some of those ideas are not O.K.” . . . They had designed the first digital synthesizer at IRCAM, and [Boulez] called me in to ask what I thought should happen with it. And I said, “Oh, well, it’s obvious. You should make this available to 15-year-olds.”—I was 30 at the time—“They will do things that you can’t imagine, and things that I can’t. This will be what they learn to make music on, and it’s going to change everything.” And he said, “No, no, no. It should go to Luciano [Berio]. It should go to Hans Werner Henze. It should go to Karlheinz [Stockhausen] and to Jean-Claude [Risset].” Those were the people who were going to make real music on it. And it didn’t matter really what anyone else did. And I said, “Wrong,” and he said, “You’re just too American.” And of course what I suggested is what Yamaha did. And I think it did change everything. . . . In fact, the stuff that I built at RPI was in direct reaction to what I saw at IRCAM.
Despite his deep immersion in technology, the human element has always been central to Rolnick’s music. He emphatically claims that he has never composed a piece of music that did not involve a live interpreter in its performance. (He acknowledged that he has done a few studio compositions to accompany live dancers.) And, as soon as it was possible to do so, the electronic components of his pieces were realized in real time as well. The way Rolnick has handled this aspect of the music has evolved along with the technologies he uses—ensembles featuring electronic instruments alongside acoustic ones, processing acoustic instruments electronically in real time, using laptops in a performance. But whereas there are detailed instructions for other musicians to perform whatever he asks them to play—whether precisely notated musical phrases or improvisation—the electronic component to his music has proven to be elusive to convey to others.
Perhaps an even more important human element to Rolnick’s music is the fact that many of his compositions have been a direct by-product of his life experiences—whether mowing the lawn for the legendary architect Walter Gropius, being overjoyed when his grandchildren moved into his neighborhood, losing the hearing in his left ear, or his extensive travels to places ranging from the People’s Republic of China to the Former Yugoslavia. Now that he is retiring from teaching, he’s hoping to have more time to spend with his grandchildren as well as to travel, but above all, to keep making music. Given his track record thus far, it will be very exciting to hear what he comes up with next.
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Frank J. Oteri: In the booklet notes for one of your CDs, you made a statement that really resonated with me: you claimed that music, for you, was ultimately about communication. I thought that would be a great place to begin our conversation, because I’m curious to learn precisely what that means to you. How can you ensure that your music is communicating? Is some music more communicative than other types? What qualities make the music communicative?
Neil Rolnick at work.
Neil Rolnick: It has to do with putting things that really stick in people’s minds and that they can identify with into the music. The big jump for me had to do with having studied lots of 20th-century music and feeling like it was very important to be deep and difficult, but then realizing that my mind doesn’t really work that way. I seem to have a knack for writing melodies that stick in people’s ears, and after lots of studying that made me very embarrassed. But I figured that if I can express what I really hear, get it down on paper, and have it be played, that’s really the best that I can do. So communicating is really about being honest about what my feelings are, honest about what my ears hear, honest about what comes out musically, directly from heart and mind.
FJO: What’s interesting about you describing writing what you’re hearing in your head is that a few years ago you lost most of your hearing in one ear and it has changed the way you think about how other people perceive things. As somebody who is so sensitive about sound and hearing, that experience has fundamentally changed the way you hear. But you’re still writing music, and I personally don’t hear a before and after.
NR: I don’t think that there is, except there are some noisier processing things that I tend to do now that I didn’t do so much before. But that’s such a teeny-tiny change. I think the interesting thing is that it didn’t change the way that I hear in my head; it changed the way that I hear what’s outside my head.
FJO: There’s a wonderful passage in your piece Gardening at Gropius House where all of a sudden there’s this cluster that comes in. That sounded to me like the din you have described that you now hear all the time in your left ear.
NR: Yes, more or less. It’s partially what I hear in my left ear. It’s the din, but it’s also sort of symbolic for me—a distilling of this kind of modernistic reliance on texture without really having a melodic and harmonic content that compels me, this counterweight, which I don’t entirely discount because I really love some of that music.
FJO: I’d like to talk more with you about your relationship to modernism, but before we do, I’d like to know more about these recent pieces, which are essentially about the perceptual idiosyncrasies that distinguish experiences for people. You created a piece about your own experience of hearing loss and how you’ve dealt with it, MONO Prelude, but then you took it further in Anosmia, which is about other people’s sensory irregularities. To bring it back to wanting your music to communicate, how is it ever possible to know if something is communicating when, as you have explored in these recent pieces, everybody hears, sees, smells, tastes, feels differently from each other? What you are trying to communicate to others might not necessarily be the way they receive it.
NR: What I’m trying to communicate is what it is. What they receive in terms of how they hear, how they smell, how they see, is going to necessarily be different and that’s actually what’s so fascinating to me. The thing that I came away from this experience with is this realization that all of our perceptions are really different. MONO Prelude, the piece in which I tell the story of losing my hearing on my left side, is kind of the beginning of the frame. A project which includes scenes from the MONO pieces and Anosmia will hopefully be a whole evening with lots of emphasis on seeing as well as listening, framing how our different perceptions work and how our senses are never the same. I’m kind of picturing it as a staged oratorio or a non-linear opera. I’m talking to a director, Caden Manson, who has a group called Big Art Group, about working together.
FJO: What about the other three senses?
NR: Well, they’re in there. I haven’t figured out how to make them work in a performance situation, but I’m interested. FJO: There are things that have certainly been done with wafting scents.
NR: I’m not sure that they really work. Taste and touch are things that I could imagine figuring out a way to do online where you’re not dealing with a proscenium situation, but rather where you come into peoples’ homes. People take their computers to bed to read; you know, you get very intimate with people. At that point, I can easily imagine really thinking about involving senses.
FJO: That’s so interesting because with a computer you can see any image and hear all music, but there’s no such thing as digital wine. And there’s no such thing as digital perfume, either. And then touch—
NR: —There are people working with haptic interfaces where you can have something that is a surface which is a lot of little points that can tell how strongly you press against them. I’ve seen some demonstrations of things like that. But at the same time, I don’t think that the digital-ness is really so important. The fact that we get these cool little pictures on our phones is as important as the fact that they’re ubiquitous and that they really do reach into the intimate parts of your life. So that’s much more interesting than this sort of high-tech aspect of the sound or of the sight. It’s more the fact that it comes into your life and your life is where you touch, where you smell, and where you drink stuff. It’s a connector. That to me is much more interesting than that you deliver it all through the screen.
FJO: So you’re willing to let other people have their own experiences rather than trying to control what experience they’re having?
NR: I don’t know that you have much choice. People have their own experiences. You may try to control everyone’s experience, but that’s ultimately not very successful.
FJO: So to take it back to that Gropius piece—I love the essay you wrote about it that’s online. What a phenomenal story! There was a whole generation of people who felt that they could and perhaps should change the natural order—whether it’s a wildly growing lawn, or how pitches are organized, or how sentences are constructed, or how colors combine on a canvas.
NR: And I think for anyone who’s going to be a musician, or a composer, or a poet or writer, or an artist of any sort, some of that is there. Right? Because otherwise you’re not doing anything. Even John Cage finding chance procedures. Although he said he’s not really controlling anything, he’s doing something; there is some result. There is some control—some arrangement for something to control something. At the same time, what Gropius was interested in doing was taking this field behind his house and really making it into a formal garden. And I, as a 19-year-old student who was his gardener, thought that the field was much more beautiful than the gardens he had around his house, or the dorms he had built at Harvard, or anything else. So why would I take this natural harmony and beauty and mess it up?
Neil Rolnick in Paris, 1977
I had a similar musical experience when I was a graduate student. I spent a year and a half working at IRCAM. I was working with Boulez closely, and also with Berio, Jean-Claude Risset, and Vinko Globocar; it was like the heart of European modernism. When I left, it was partially because UC Berkeley said if I wanted to get my degree, I better come back because they weren’t going to give it to me from Paris. But it was also partially because Boulez finally said, “You’re too American. You should go back to America.” At first I took offense, and then I thought, “He’s right!” They had designed the first digital synthesizer at IRCAM, and he called me in to ask what I thought should happen with it. And I said, “Oh, well, it’s obvious. You should make this available to 15-year-olds.”—I was 30 at the time—“They will do things that you can’t imagine, and things that I can’t. This will be what they learn to make music on, and it’s going to change everything.” And he said, “No, no, no. It should go to Luciano. It should go to Hans Werner Henze. It should go to Karlheinz and to Jean-Claude.” Those were the people who were going to make real music on it. And it didn’t matter really what anyone else did. And I said, “Wrong,” and he said, “You’re just too American.” And of course what I suggested is what Yamaha did. And I think it did change everything.
FJO: What’s interesting is at that point in the development of electronic music, there really were two electronic musics. There were these laboratories at universities, research centers like IRCAM and Stanford where John Chowning, whom you also had worked with, has discovered the FM synthesis algorithm—really high-level scientific inquiry. And then there were pop musicians who played on synthesizers, like the Moog and the Buchla, which had recently become available on the commercial market. And for them, it was gear that enhanced their sound world. They created some weird, odd sounds that weren’t heard before, but it wasn’t really about scientific inquiry; it was about making something really cool.
Rolnick with his gear in the mid 1980s
NR: It actually started out as scientific inquiry with Moog and Buchla because they were working with analog machines and they were trying to figure out how to do it. The work I did when I was a student working at Stanford, with Chowning and Andy Moore and other people there, was with computers; you had to run the math to figure out what really happens when you do FM synthesis in terms of being able to put out the equations. But when I finished that and finished IRCAM and got a job in 1981—the one I’m just leaving at RPI—the first thing I did was go out and buy a synthesizer. And I bought some analog stuff. I think I bought a Prophet-5 and some things. Then someone told me about the Synclavier. So I sold my analog gear and got a Synclavier for about ten thousand dollars; I convinced the bank that it was like investing in a violin. It was going to gain value, and boy was I wrong. But I got the loan and I had a job. Some of the people that I had worked with at Stanford came out to visit me and they saw this Synclavier, and they said, “Well, this is just a toy. You can’t do everything on it.” Because on the mainframe computer at Stanford, we could do everything. And my response was, “What I can do is practice on this. I can use it every day. I can spend hours practicing, just as though it were a violin or a piano or anything else. And so even though it can’t do everything, I can do a whole lot more with it, because I can really get to know it.” Again it’s that it sort of has an intimacy because it’s in my life on a daily basis.
FJO: You had this interest in communicating that goes all the way back, and you had this desire to get to know an instrument intimately, but you also had a fascination with studio electronic music which doesn’t exactly seem simpatico with those other things.
NR: I have two memories. One is when I was in college or shortly after college, playing in rock and roll bands, and listening to a recording and the tape being stretched. We’re all sitting around listening and then, all of a sudden, it gets really strange. And I was fascinated. I thought, “What’s going on here?” What I had played was interesting, but then what I heard back was completely different. I didn’t major in music in college—I was a literature major—but I played in rock bands and folk dance bands all the way through. Then I worked at different things, including being a rock musician for about four years, and then went back to school and was formally introduced to electronic music, and it was just the easiest thing I could ever imagine doing. I completely got how to do it, and I could immediately go in and make things happen that seemed fascinating and interesting. I was always a pretty bad piano player; I can play a bunch of instruments pretty badly. But as soon as I started working, first with analog electronics and then computers, it was just like, oh right, this is what I’m supposed to do.
FJO: You mentioned playing rock and folk. I also remember reading somewhere that your earliest musical memory was hearing Western swing—after all, you were born in Texas. So there was all this music going on in your life. But you weren’t really immersed in classical music. Then, all of a sudden, you were in an academic environment doing really heavy, experimental music. Now, many years later, you’re writing for orchestra and writing for string quartet, sometimes even without electronics. So you’re coming at it from having done these other things, rather than returning to it.
NR: Well, there’s a little place in the middle there, when I was—I don’t know—14 to 17. I studied with a music teacher who lived right around the corner from here, up on 187th Street and Fort Washington. His name was Fritz Kramer. He was a musicologist at the Manhattan School; he gave lectures for the Philharmonic on Wednesday afternoons. We lived in Connecticut, and I would come in and spend all Saturday with Mr. Kramer. We would do a piano lesson, 16th-century counterpoint, 18th-century counterpoint and chorale harmonizations, listen to Hindemith. I would do exercises in Hindemith-like counterpoint. And I would have to do imitations of whatever I was playing in the piano lessons—Bach fugues, Mozart sonatas, and what not. Then I would have to do 12-tone exercises. And my grandfather got me a small subscription to the Philharmonic, so I had to do an analysis of whatever I was going to hear at the Philharmonic.
The last year I did that, that summer I went and studied with Darius Milhaud at Aspen. So I had done some folk music before that, but I got really immersed in this heavy-duty music theory that sort of took over my life for about three or four years, then went to college and had an extended case of adolescence and played in rock bands a bunch. I had to learn to play simply, which really was the difficult thing. And then when I went back, it was sort of like “Which world am I in?” I remember when I played in rock bands thinking, “Well, that stuff I did with Milhaud and with Mr. Kramer—no one listens to that, no cares about it. It’s just all this heady, high-brow stuff. Being able to play in clubs and festivals where people bounce up and down and really obviously dig what you’re doing—that’s what it’s all about!”
But then I said, “Well, O.K., what do I really hear?” I was much more interested in something that was more intellectual and more challenging and more interesting to me than what I was doing with rock bands or with jazz groups. But I feel like I don’t really fit in the classical music world either, in some ways, because I think a lot of people listen to my stuff and say, “Oh, well that’s just like jazz, you know.” There’s improvisation sometimes, and there’s beats, constant rhythmic things. I guess that’s what I think about when I am communicating, it’s just a matter of saying what I really hear. Forget about the ear that doesn’t hear.
FJO: Yeah, we’ll get back to that later, but let’s stay with your earlier experiences a bit longer. You had these role models. Milhaud was a really solid composer who had a firm grounding in the Western classical tradition—counterpoint, sonata form—and he wrote tons of string quartets and symphonies. And the guy who did these composition exercises with you was also completely entrenched within old-school classical music.
NR: Absolutely.
FJO: But you abandoned that path. Instead, you do the rock and jazz thing and don’t even major in music as an undergrad. But then you decide to go back into music and so you work with John Chowning and then Boulez. That seems to me like the other extreme.
NR: I’d been living in Vermont. I was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, and I started out working in a hospital in Wyoming, where I got canned for organizing hospital workers. Then I moved to Vermont, and got a kind of community organizing/counseling job with teenagers there. I was playing in rock bands this whole time. Then I met a guy who was the local music teacher; he organized the school chorus, and they did plays and musicals. And I thought, “Gee, that’s what I want to do.” I tried to be a counselor. I tried to be a mechanic, or a taxi driver, or a carpenter. With all of these things, I discovered that if I really particularly wanted to do something crafty, like being a carpenter, it’s going to take me five or six years to really learn how do any of that really well, anyway. And, if I was going to take all that time, I might as well do what I really wanted to do, which was to be a musician. So I thought, “O.K., well, if I go back to school and I get a degree in music, then I can move out in the country and you know, teach at a high school or something, and that would be great. That would be wonderful.” So then I went to Berkeley and got swept up into all the interesting new music things that were happening in the Bay area.
Then I got this opportunity to go to Paris and work at IRCAM, and it was like I was dropped right in the middle of all these things I had been reading about from the time I was in high school. It was like dropping into a history book. I remember reading Boulez articles when I was in high school and studying Stockhausen. It never dawned on me that since they were the people that I read about in books that I could actually reject things that they did. Because that just wasn’t an option, you know. Then I got there and realized that they’re all real people, just like you and me, doing things that they feel are right, and I’m actually capable of saying, “Well no, that’s not the right thing for me. No, I think some of those ideas are not O.K.”
Neil Rolnick in the late ’80s, photo by Gisela Gamper
In fact, the stuff that I built at RPI was in direct reaction to what I saw at IRCAM. IRCAM was really based on the idea that there is this great musical tradition. Someone once asked if I was going to hear Boulez here because he was probably the last musician who saw himself as directly descended from Wagner, through Debussy off into the great future of contemporary music. But I really feel like music is about communication. It’s about doing something. It’s not about making great masterpieces. It’s about making music for people. I’m much less concerned about the great masterpiece problem, and much more concerned about making events happen, where people listen to music, and making music that people want to listen to.
FJO: At the same time, I wouldn’t sell you short; you’ve written some really terrific, formidable pieces that deserve to be widely appreciated.
NR: Well, I hope so, and that’s actually one of the things that I really am hoping that I can do now that I’m getting rid of academic life for myself—to really focus. I have a lot of pieces that I really like and that I feel should have much bigger audiences. And I have a lot of pieces that I’m intending to write, that I think should have bigger audiences. Even though I’ve been very productive all the time I’ve been a teacher, now that I don’t have to be a teacher, I think that I can maybe be productive on a level of getting the music out more.
FJO: To take it back one place before we bring it more into the present, one of the things that I found so striking about your earliest pieces—I’m thinking about Wondrous Love (the trombone piece for George Lewis) and Ever-Livin’ Rhythm—is that even though you were writing pieces with tape, there was always a live performer as a part of it. You didn’t do these tape pieces where you go to a concert and you’re sitting in the audience looking at just the two loudspeakers.
NR: I’ve never done that. At the very beginning, I wrote a couple of pieces like that, but they were for dance—one for Margaret Jenkins and one for a friend when I was in graduate school. It’s never made sense to me, that idea of acousmatic music where there’s no connection to what’s making the sound. It just isn’t interesting because it seems to me that when you play something and you make something, you want to have someone say, “Here is my gift. Here is what I can give you. And it’s beautiful, I believe it’s beautiful, and I hope you’ll think it’s beautiful also.” That requires a person, and so every time someone has tried to get me to do something like that, it’s not interesting to me. And I thought that from the very beginning. The first piece that I wrote with the computer was a percussion piece, Ever-Livin’ Rhythm, and it was about making a virtuoso. It was kind of thinking in terms of what would Zyklus be if Stockhausen could hum a melody? So there was all this sense of how to really make a virtuoso percussion piece that had one person playing–there were 42 instruments—and yet make it work. A lot of the early pieces took melodic material from other things and this actually used material from a recording of Ba-Benzele Pygmies from Central Africa that had an interesting nose flute hocketing rhythm. I used that as the basis for it. But it was something where you hear the rhythms, and you hear the melodies, and there’s the spectacle of the person playing it and making it work. I always think of electronics and technology as being a little gloss of magic on the sound. We all know that you can get anything out of loudspeakers, right? You can make any sound that you want. But if you have a live player, and the speakers are doing something that just makes it so what the player’s doing isn’t really possible, then that’s really kind of exciting for an audience.
FJO: I think there have been several important moments of transition for you. As I said to you before, I don’t really hear a before and after in your music as a result of your hearing loss, but I do hear a before and after between those early pieces and the pieces Real Time and À la Mode that were released on LP by CRI in the 1980s. I want to talk about that LP a bit because the cover is so striking.
NR: It was one of the very last CRI LPs.
FJO: CRI was a label that tended to have pretty staid covers. Sometimes, there wouldn’t even be a picture on the cover, just the names of the composers—usually three different composers. And maybe if you knew one of them, you bought the record for the one you knew. But here was a record of just your music with a picture of you on the cover in a suit, wieldng an AX-Synth and sitting on top of a fake, oversized piece of cake. NR: Yeah. Cheesecake. I’ve always felt humor is important, not taking yourself so seriously. One of the wonderful things that I’ve always loved about John Cage is that he was always smiling in his pictures. You know, you had Schoenberg, who was always frowning and looking very serious. And then you had Cage, who always had this big, silly grin on his face. You don’t have Shakespeare plays without Falstaff. If you’re going to really reflect life, you’ve got to have some humor. It’s too much to have without humor. That’s why we have it. So there’s that. And then it’s also using graphics and colors to frame what I’m trying to do. Real Time and À la Mode are an interesting pair of pieces because they’re where I got away from using samples of other people’s melodies and said, “I can just make my own up, and it’s O.K.” I started doing that with these ensemble pieces and then actually moved into doing that with electronic pieces and pieces with all sorts of different kinds of groups.
FJO: There’s another aspect to these pieces which is different as well. In the earlier pieces with electronics you had an acoustic player performing in real time with a pre-recorded tape of electronically generated sounds. But in these pieces, the electronic sounds are happening live alongside the non-electronic ones. Eventually you would find ways to integrate what the performers on the non-electronic instruments play with the electronics by having those performers trigger the electronics or having the electronics alter those acoustic sounds in real time. That’s a very different way of thinking about electronic music.
NR: Well, it all comes from the idea of performance and communication. I can play electronics as well as anyone. I can get on a stage and play things now using a computer or whatever, and feel like I can give as a good a performance as anyone can. And so it puts me in the place to communicate. One of the things that I learned when I was playing rock and roll and jazz was that it was great to be able to sit in with the band and have your role that you played. But at some point, if you really were trying to communicate your own ideas, you had to be able to get up and do it yourself without all the support. There was a point, I guess around the time that I did À la Mode and thereafter, when I did a bunch of solo pieces, some of which I still play now—things like Balkanization and Robert Johnson Sampler—and a bunch of others that I don’t play so much anymore. I could just go give a concert where I get up and play. Doing that really helped me define what my musical ideas are. Because if I can get up and do it, that’s what it is. I’m actually making it happen.
Neil Rolnick: A Robert Johnson Sampler performed at EMPAC (Troy, NY) on Feb 27, 2013.
FJO: Another part of it that I think speaks to how performers/interpreters of this music have evolved over time is that in the really early days of this stuff, you’d have the ensemble or the soloist who would do his or her thing—they didn’t touch any of the electronics—and you’d have the tape that’s playing those sounds. The next step is having players who are doing their thing, and you’re doing the electronics live with them. Then the next step is you’ve got the group and then you’re manipulating their sounds in real time. You’re affecting their sounds as well. But then the final part of that is working with players who are comfortable doing the electronics as per your intentions. They can do it without you.
NR: Well, there’s a before-ness in terms of setting it up for them. I have to make the stuff that processes them. But in the iFiddle Concerto that I did with Todd Reynolds, we actually set it up so that he controlled it. That was great. He’s going to play Gardening in Gropius House for the recording of it we’re doing in June. We haven’t really talked yet about whether I’m going to control things or he’s going to control things. So that’s a discussion that we have to have. The trade off is that while I actually love to give all the control over to him and let him play and switch things using foot pedals that I can set up, I also want him to be able to put his full focus on playing the violin. So I don’t know what the answer will be to that. But that’s always a sort of an interesting question to me.
The other thing I think about is how all of what I do is really about live performance. So when I croak, no one gets to perform this anymore. What happens? I’ve taught a lot of people, but I’ve really never taught anyone how to do what I do. So, I don’t know the answer to that one.
FJO: How much of the details of the electronic components in these pieces—which I imagine can’t really be conveyed via noteheads on staves—is actually notated? Is there a system?
NR: There is nothing notated. Well, not quite nothing. There are notes to myself—move to this preset, that set up—but what the things actually are is stuff that I do and I’ve never figured out how to notate it. So for all the big ensemble pieces and large pieces with single instruments or small groups, everyone else’s part is completely notated in great detail, but my part is just little numbers. I know how to do it, so I’ll do it. But I have no idea how to notate it; I’ve never figured it out.
FJO: Well, that’s not completely true because you sometimes include improvisation in your pieces.
NR: But it’s notated as it needs to be. Things go from places where I give some sort of parameters and just say, “Go!” to things being minutely notated. I’m very comfortable notating them as much as I need to. But I’ve never figured out how I notate what I do, so I don’t know what happens with that.
FJO: In terms of control versus lack of control versus improvisation: when you do the electronics for a piece versus somebody like Todd manipulating it himself, how much leeway does the performer have to manipulate sounds in a way that’s different from what you had originally envisioned? Because it’s not precisely notated.
NR: It’s pretty much the same kind of difference you would have in a completely notated piece. There’s phrasing and how you shape the gesture—I’m usually pretty clear about what I want the sound to be, or the overall gesture to be. Todd is the only person I’ve worked with who can do the manipulation all by himself. I’m pretty directive, but there’s some flexibility. Overall I kind of think my job as the composer is to tell everyone what to play, even if that means improvise some here.
FJO: There’s still something of a leap of faith involved in how performers will interpret what you tell them to play, as you point out in the program notes for the piece you wrote for Bob Gluck. You actually called it Faith, riffing on the double entendre since he used to be a rabbi. When you give a piece to somebody else, especially one that is somewhat open-ended, you’re kind of hoping they do something that’s in the spirit of your intentions.
NR: Well, that’s an interesting piece. There are two different kinds of processing that go on in it. One is that he plays and I process the sound; I do it all live on my computer. Then there are some sections where I give him a little controller which I’ve set up so that he can bring different synthetic sounds up and down, and he can trigger and play different loops and fade them in and out of each other. Then he’s supposed to be playing some on the keyboard, too. When we worked on that, it was a matter of me giving him directorial advice in terms of thinking about it as phrases and gestures; don’t think about going three or four minutes without stopping, make a phrase, explore one of the particular things I’ve got in there. You can select different ones each time. So he developed a way that he plays it. I’ve also done the piece with Kathy Supové and with Vicky Chow. They all play it really differently. Kathy really gets into the improvisational parts with the controller, completely different from Bob’s approach. And I like them both. I don’t have favorite children. But they’re really dramatically different. It’s partly because Bob is very enmeshed in the world of jazz; he plays a lot of jazz stuff and just did this book on the Mwandishi period of Herbie Hancock. Kathy is sort of more in the new music and free improvisation world. I don’t think any of it makes it any less of my piece as long as I’m comfortable with where they’re going with it.
Neil Rolnick: Faith, performed by Bob Gluck (piano) and Neil Rolnick (laptop computer) at EMPAC 2/16/2010.
FJO: But you said that you feel it’s your job as a composer to tell them what they’re doing, whether that means play these precise notes and rhythms or improvise here for a designated length of time. But you’ve also played alongside other improvisers in a more open-form type setting; I’m thinking of the group Fish Love That, which sounds very different from everything else I’ve heard that you’ve done, because it is a collective thing rather than just you.
Neil Rolnick’s Fish Love That: “Calypso” featuring Neil Rolnick, Todd Reynolds, Steve Rust, Andrew Sterman, Ron Horton, and Dean Sharp performing during a 1998 recording session for the Deep Listening CD. Video by John Jannone.
NR: That was a really interesting period. I initially got the group together that became Fish Love That to do a project called Home Game in the early ‘90s. Then I went away and spent about six months in Japan and got involved in playing with some traditional musicians there, and was suddenly feeling this lack of improvisation in my life. When I came back, I got the group together again with the idea that we would just meet once a month on stage and play. And that’s what we did. We started out doing monthly things at the old Knitting Factory, and then we moved to HERE and we kept it up pretty regularly for about, I don’t know, four or five years. Everyone brought pieces in. I brought pieces. Todd [Reynolds] brought pieces. And Andy Sterman would bring pieces in. So it was this slightly amorphous thing, but it wasn’t the main thing for any of us. It was just something that we all enjoyed doing. I really wanted it to be everyone’s, but then Todd and Andrew at several points said, “You should just be doing stuff of your own. You should be putting together this group to do your own work, instead of whoever’s work. Actually that would make more sense.”
The other thing that was happening is that I was working on a music theater piece for that whole five years with a group in midtown that supposedly produces things that go off-Broadway and Broadway. So at the same time I was writing this very tonal, directed stuff for people, many of whom couldn’t read music because a lot of Broadway people can’t. They just learn it all [by ear]. It was about the discovery of a drug that makes you feel like you’re in love and want to act on it. And how much money you could make on that, putting street drug dealers in competition with big pharma. The book and the lyrics were written by a friend of mine, Larry Beinhart, who wrote the book that the movie Wag the Dog was based on. He’s a quirky, wonderful writer.
Neil Rolnick’s desk in his New York City apartment which looks out toward the George Washington Bridge.
I was also doing stuff at RPI. But that kind of all came to an end when I moved to New York City in 2002 and took very seriously the idea that what I want to do is just forget about this group that I’ve been trying to maintain and forget about the theater thing, just take a deep breath and say, “What do I want to write?” I had some money from a grant and I actually contacted a bunch of people that I had wanted to write for—Kathy Supové, Joan La Barbara, Tom Buckner, ETHEL—and said, “O.K., I got this money. You want a piece? If I write a piece, will you play it?” That’s kind of where I took the direction to what I’ve been doing ever since.
FJO: So the theater piece never happened.
NR: No. It had a lot of staged readings. It was a wonderful experience. I would love to see it happen. I think it’s a really cool piece. FJO: Did you finish the music?
NR: Not only did I finish the music, I finished two or three times the music. I probably wrote about 50 songs for it, and it maybe has 20 in it. I keep trying to figure out places where I can get that done. But I also don’t know that I ever want to get into a situation where I’m not in control of the music, as was the case of developing this thing where there were group meetings. Does this piece work? Does that piece work? As we worked through it, I felt like the music got dumber and dumber, and less and less interesting. But it would be interesting to me to go back and try to make that really happen.
FJO: On your own terms.
NR: On my own terms.
FJO: So it was all straight-up musical theatre songs with a pit orchestra. No electronics?
NR: No electronics.
FJO: We keep coming to these places in your career where there’s a before and an after. This might sound utterly ridiculous, but I was aware of a before and after in 2002 because up until then you were Neil B. Rolnick and since 2002 you’re just Neil Rolnick. I’m particularly attentive to this kind of detail since I obsess over my own middle initial, so I have to ask you about it.
NR: That’s right. That’s because you don’t call me Neil B. Everyone calls me Neil. I got the feeling that I was just being pretentious. Again, it’s this feeling that what’s important is really directly communicating. At that point I also started referring to what’s going on in my life in my notes about the music: my grandkids being born, my feeling about being in New York City. That’s what’s important; that’s what I’m spending my time thinking about. I think that whatever you spend your life in comes out in what you write; at least for me it does. When I first moved to the city, I wrote a piece called Uptown Jump, and it was about the fact that my daughter and her family, including one grandson at that point, had moved from Brooklyn up to Washington Heights. So they made an uptown jump, and it changed my life in terms of interacting with a new generation in my family.
Rolnick’s grandchildren are always present at his workstation.
But that’s why the “B” got dropped. At a certain point, when I moved here, I said, “O.K., from here on, it’s real. No one calls me Neil B. Everyone calls me Neil.” I’m 65 now. I was 55 then. The move here was a lot about saying I wanted to start pulling away from academia. If I don’t put my full energy into making music, when the hell am I going to do it? This is my time. I think what I’m doing now is making another step in that same direction, saying, “O.K., I’m crossing my fingers that I’ll be able to keep eating and keep putting a roof over my head.” Assuming that I can make that work, I should be able to spend the next however many years I’ve got making as much music happen and writing as much music as I can imagine. And at least at this point, I feel like I can imagine a lot.
FJO: A big challenge that could have gotten in the way of this, but actually hasn’t gotten in the way, was what happened with your hearing.
NR: I don’t think it’s in the way. You know, I would love it if I had my hearing back in my left ear, but everyone has things that challenge them, whether it’s physical or perceptual things, relationship things, or money things. There’s no prize for having problems. We all have problems. There’s only what you can do to react to them and grow out of them and make them into something positive in your life. I’d rather it didn’t happen, but stuff happens. I feel like it expanded things. I feel like the loss of hearing made me really have a whole new perspective on how we perceive the world. I never really thought about how different our perceptions were. I’ve built this whole piece that I hope will actually get produced in the full way that I imagine it. I keep feeling like the music I’m writing out of each of the changes that I go through is getting better, and more interesting, and deeper, and funnier, and more joyful, so that’s O.K.
FJO: After the hearing loss, you also finally wrote a string quartet with no electronics, Extended Family, which is an extraordinary piece but also a very extraordinarily traditional piece. It harkens back to centuries-old traditions in ways that a lot of your other music doesn’t. It’s multi-movement and the last movement is even a fugue.
NR: I love fugues. I love the way that they sound and the idea of them coming out of these other textures that I’m working in. But it’s something that I learned how to do when I was in high school. It’s just like playing with electronics. I can just do it.
FJO: I was wondering if hearing in mono has somehow realigned your musical priorities. Electronic music is all about exploring a very detailed level of distinctions with textures, timbres, and directionality. Perhaps other musical parameters are now rising to the forefront in your music. We all know what the sound of a string quartet is. You can’t necessarily make a new timbre with a string quartet, but you can do wonderful things within that timbre and emphasize other aspects of the music making. I’m wondering if there’s something to hearing the world a different way that now gives you the opportunity to say, “I appreciate this just for what it is.”
NR: When I started the piece, I thought it was going to be about my extended family, meaning my daughter’s family that lived here in Washington Heights with me, and the kids I saw all the time, and the community that I have around me here. Then it became about my actual extended family, as I spent a lot of time with my brothers and my sister, and my mother dying. Actually the previous string quartet that I wrote was about my father dying. I hope I don’t have to write too many more quartets about those sorts of things. But they were both very strong experiences for me. I was with both of them when they died. My hands were on them. Life and death are so much more interesting than thinking about electronics or not—the details of how the piece is going to come together. Often, when someone approaches me about writing something, they say, “And of course there’s a computer part.” And I say, “Yeah. There’s a computer part.” I was really interested in the idea of not working with electronics, because I’ve done so much.
With Extended Family, ETHEL wanted a multi-movement piece, so the five movements were the way it worked. Besides the fugue, which I think of as sort of bringing all the parts of the family together, the part of that piece that I really love the most is the central movement which is slow and basically has one chord that just hangs there. We get a very halting little melody that traces its way through it. That’s not a texture that I really think about. I’m sure that there are lots of string quartets that do that, but I wasn’t even thinking about texture. I was just thinking, “How do I capture this in sound?”
FJO: I imagine another factor that might have led to your writing a piece for ETHEL that doesn’t involve electronics is that a non-electronic piece is probably much easier to tour.
NR: Absolutely. The first string quartet that I wrote for ETHEL is Shadow Quartet. In cleaning out some stuff at school, I found a quartet I wrote when I was teenager, so it’s not quite the first, but it’s the first one that I would want anyone to listen to. When we put that together, it was at a weeklong residency up at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, and I had it all set up, so they were all controlling everything. I had them all with pedals, and they were bringing things in and out, controlling how much everything was happening, and switching between things. Then when it was done, they said, “Great, we would love to take this piece on tour, but we can’t take you on tour. So you have to figure out a way that we can do it without you.” And I said, “I can’t do that because it’s got to be interactive and I’ve got to do all this stuff,” and they said, “Then we don’t have to tour with it.” And I said, “But, but, but…” So since we were going to do a recording of the piece anyway for CD, we recorded it. We used a click track and we multi-tracked everything. Then I extracted their parts from the recording, and left only the effects. So if they played with that click track, it sounds exactly like I’m processing them live. And I had these wonderful discussions, particularly with some more doctrinaire electronic music people, about cheating. You really can’t do that. On the other hand, they probably did a hundred performances of Shadow Quartet. No one had a clue that it was not being processed live. And, in fact, it was processed live, because if I hadn’t processed it live, we wouldn’t have had the recording to put the click track on. So ultimately it doesn’t really make any difference to me; what I’m interested in is the music coming out.
Neil Rolnick: Shadow Quartet, First Movement: “Western Swing” performed by ETHEL (Cornelius Dufallo & Mary Rowell, violins, Ralph Ferris, viola, Dorothy Lawson, cello) at EMPAC (Troy, NY) on Feb. 16, 2010.
FJO: So you actually turned it back into one of those old school pieces for ensemble and tape.
NR: Yes, exactly. But it’s very different from the old school ones, because it’s got the impression that it’s all being generated by the instruments.
FJO: It’s sort of a Milli Vanilli approach to electronic music.
NR: Well, maybe. But if we go back to the idea that I can’t notate the things that I do when I’m playing and then what happens to this music, it is so important. The communication doesn’t happen because I’m sitting on stage mixing what’s going on with the electronics; it has to do with the instrumental performers up there playing for the audience and then these magical things coming up around them. I can make that happen so that they can take the piece out and tour with it.
FJO: You’ve traveled around the world a great deal over the years. You mentioned Japan during our discussion, but you also travelled extensively through former Yugoslavia as well as China and these travels have inspired quite a few of your pieces. Some of the remoter parts of the world that you’ve visited don’t have the same level of access to electricity that we have.
NR: When I was in China, one of the places that I played The Economic Engine was in this art area in Beijing called Qī Jiŭ Bā [“798”] which is in an area of old munitions factories. Artists moved into it, then the government decided it should become the official art area, so there are now lots of high end galleries from all over the world there. These people produced this thing and it was in one of the old buildings there. There was thick dust on everything. It was just this abandoned place that hadn’t been renovated. We had the whole top floor of this building, but there was no electricity. There was electricity in the plaza down below, so we ran an extension cord up four stories on the outside of the building and plugged in the sound system. I don’t need much electricity to do what I do. A laptop doesn’t take a whole lot and speakers don’t take a lot. But I also feel like I need the electronics for me to perform. If the music doesn’t require electronics, then like the string quartet, it can happen without me.
Of all of the places that I’ve been, the recent trips to China have been particularly interesting because China is not a kind of backward third-world country anymore. It’s got lots of really sophisticated things, and it’s been really interesting to see a kind of underground electronic music scene growing up there. I’ve gone there to do something with the conservatory or an official conference, and then there are these guys who are in their 20s and early 30s in clubs that are completely non-academic. It’s almost like two different worlds happening. I find the freshness of the young non-academic things really invigorating and exciting.
FJO: So now that you no longer have to do the day job of being at the RPI, you can actually travel even more.
NR: I hope so. That’s my plan. I’m in the midst of trying to see what comes up next. I’m working on saxophone and electronics pieces for Demetrius Spaneas. He’s done a lot of work traveling to Central Asia, so I’m looking forward to an opportunity to take that piece to Kurdistan and Tajikistan and all these places I’ve never been.
I’ve opined before about friends’ claims that I have no sense of humor. I have to concede—despite having occasionally laughed out loud in response to something that’s really funny—that there’s some truth to the allegation. As a result, today’s annually designated day for pranks is something I’ve never participated in much over the years. I’m not really able to dupe anyone most of the time (I’m a lousy poker player), and I’m also not that easily conned. But since a number of websites invest a lot of creative energy in posting outlandish content on April Fools’ Day, I fear that any music-related narrative that I’d attempt to relate today might be misinterpreted as some kind of joke. So, in that spirit, I thought I’d ponder a couple of the hoaxes that made it into my web browser today.
I have no intention of entering the World’s Greatest Living Composer Competition, but then again I pretty much have never tried my luck with any competition. That said, I was intrigued by the competition’s required submission of a composition scored for “one piccolo, one violoncello, and three contrabasses”—talk about no middle ground.
I also didn’t fall for Google Nose, although I might have done worse than fall for it—I’ve been thinking about it all day. If such a thing actually did exist, it would not only revolutionize internet communication, it would fundamentally change the world. At this point, just about anything we are able to see or hear can be digitally simulacrified, distributed, and replicated ad nauseum. As a result, the music, film, book, and magazine industries have faced serious economic challenges. Now with personal 3D printers a reality, if the costs drastically came down (as you know they will) similar challenges could eventually come to the auto industry and architecture. But imagine if it were possible to digitize the information we receive through our other three senses and have it be freely available 24/7 anywhere in the world provided there was an internet connection.
Last year at JFK Airport en route to Greece via Turkish Airlines this food kiosk caught my eye, but the plane started boarding before I could order something. Who knows when I’ll be back at that terminal? But if these delectables could somehow be digitally synthesized…
Virtual perfume? Chanel might go out of business. Digital food and wine? No need to ever order take out again, or perhaps eat period. A 24-year-old Atlanta-based electric engineer named Rob Rhinehart is already experimenting with a way to chemically generate all the nutrients in food necessary for one’s survival and has given up conventional eating. What additional scientific breakthrough would it require to infinitely replicate the atoms in those chemicals? And, if such a thing were possible, to enhance them via digitally transmittable taste and olfactory information for those of us who want a slightly more aesthetically rewarding experience than Rhinehart’s less than appetizingly named substance, Soylent, offers? Within a few years the Napa Valley would become barren. Not even such corporate behemoths as Budweiser or McDonald’s could ultimately survive this technological breakthrough. Or would those companies find ways to prevent the inevitable triumph of distribution services over content creators that have thus far eluded the music and film industries? Or would people within the latter 21st century Technorati eventually become bored by the absence of scarcity and find new ways to simulate it—as did Alastair Porter, who unveiled Ephemeral Playback during MIDEM Hack Day 2013 (something that actually would have made a good April Fools’ Day gag)?
Have you been fooled into believing anything today that somehow could change the course of music history or any other history for that matter? If so, please share.
Frank J. Oteri is an ASCAP-award winning composer and music journalist. Among his compositions are Already Yesterday or Still Tomorrow for orchestra, the "performance oratorio" MACHUNAS, the 1/4-tone sax quartet Fair and Balanced?, and the 1/6-tone rock band suite Imagined Overtures. His compositions are represented by Black Tea Music. Oteri is the Vice President of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and is Composer Advocate at New Music USA where he has been the Editor of its web magazine, NewMusicBox.org, since its founding in 1999.
