Search Results for: entrepreneurship

Fred Ho: Turning Pain Into Power

Posted on December 1, 2008 by NewMusicBox Staff - Conversations, Cover

A conversation in Ho’s Greenpoint, Brooklyn apartment
October 8, 2008—4:00 p.m.

Transcribed by Julia Lu
Videotaped by Randy Nordschow
Video presentation by
Molly Sheridan

Few creative artists seem to be as completely rooted in the present than baritone saxophonist, composer, and bandleader Fred Ho. And Ho’s artistic vision has remained remarkably consistent over the past quarter century.

Ho’s music-making grew out of his personal struggles against the marginalization he experienced growing up as a Chinese American in suburban Massachusetts as well as the domestic violence he suffered through in his own household. He found a powerful role model when he encountered the Black Arts Movement and the Black Liberation Movement as a student in the late ’60s which ultimately codified his own aesthetic sensibilities and led him to the creation of a unique amalgamation of traditions spanning musical theatre, jazz (a word he eschews), and Chinese folk music.

An assertive but affirmational political agenda is the cornerstone of all of Ho’s music, which encompasses solos, compositions for his own ensembles, and his first orchestral work—a concerto for baritone saxophone and orchestra which he recently premiered with the American Composers Orchestra. A significant portion of his output has been a series of multi-disciplinary spectacles involving singers, instrumentalists, and martial artists. Ho describes these works as “popular avant-garde works” that can appeal to fans of “Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Xena, the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and the Ninja Turtles.”

Inside Pages:

Talking with Fred Ho about his own music is a sprawl through a wide range of topics, spanning history, sociology, socialism, and feminism. Like his music, it is a multi-faceted yet always impassioned journey.

Composing a Life, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dollar

Posted on September 15, 2010 by Ian David Moss - Analysis, Articles

Three years ago, I left my job at the American Music Center, New York City, and the two new music ensembles I had founded in order to begin a full-time MBA at the Yale School of Management. My friends at the time were thrown for a loop. A few clearly thought I was selling out, and many more were simply surprised that I would go to grad school to study something other than music composition, on which I had focused so much of my energies up to that point. In truth, I came to business school with the full intention of returning to the arts after graduation, and thankfully I’ve been able to keep that promise. I even chose Yale SOM in part because its liberal electives policy meant that I could almost have earned a shadow music degree during my time there, if the School of Music had been willing to play along. Yet after a year’s worth of required lectures and seminars in everything but music, it was clear that I had found a new calling. For better or for worse, business school transformed me into a different person.

What changed me the most was the exposure to an endless panoply of other areas of human life beyond contemporary classical music. Sure, I learned about assets and liabilities and how to read a cash flow statement, but I also learned about the auction for 3G wireless ranges, competition between Target and Wal-Mart, why Turkey is an emerging power player in the Middle East, and how colleges and foundations manage their endowments. We heard speeches from the president of the Ford Foundation, the former United States Ambassador to the UN, the CEO of Newsweek, the founder of an IT consulting firm that crashed and burned with the last recession and then rose from the ashes. I became a sponge for statistics, ideas, publications, whole disciplines that I hadn’t even known to exist until that point.

In the course of this sudden immersion into what the rest of the world thinks about and does on a daily basis, I came to realize that my former existence had been focused like a laser on about 0.00001% of everything that matters. It was like the veil had been lifted on my life: the choices I faced when I voted in an election or needed to buy produce or searched for an apartment to rent or, yes, chose a graduate school had all been determined by somebody, or more often a collection of somebodies acting in somewhat predictable ways. It became clear to me that I was never going to have control over my own destiny unless I had the capacity to see and understand the external forces that were influencing my circumstances. And if that’s true for me, it’s true for you, too. So here are a couple of vignettes from my own journey into the belly of the capitalist beast, which I offer in the hopes of connecting my experiences (and perhaps some of yours) to the bigger picture. After all, we are just variations on a theme.

The Pro-Am Shuffle

Back when I was playing bandleader in the middle part of the last decade, I had a six-piece electric chamber ensemble featuring some killer musicians who performed my compositions. Since they were professionals, I paid them for every gig—and if the money from the door wasn’t enough to make for a halfway decent payout for each, as it often wasn’t, I had to make up the difference from my own pocket. (This was on top of rehearsal space rental fees, recording costs, etc.) It wasn’t exactly a recipe for quick cash; my profit margins in 2005 were about -1000%. The low point was when I decided to take the band on “tour” to Philadelphia, driving half of them there in my car with their equipment while the others took a bus or otherwise got there on their own dime. Despite a prime Saturday night slot at a popular hangout with a well-known local band as the headliner, hardly anyone came. At the end of the night, the soundman came up and informed me I had a $10 bill to split up among the performers.

I was very serious about my work as a composer in those days, but the financial return I earned from that work was negligible, if not downright negative. I was not alone. Less than 10% of the 1347 composers who responded in 2008 to the American Music Center and American Composers Forum’s joint survey of composers, Taking Note, indicated that composing represents their primary income; even relatively wealthy composers who considered themselves professionals earned an average of only one-fifth of their income directly from composition-related activities.

Download the report

Researchers Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller (no, not that Paul Miller) came up with a term for these sorts of people in their 2004 monograph for the British think tank DEMOS, The Pro-Am Revolution. Defined as those who “have a strong sense of vocation; use recognized public standards to assess performance; …[and] produce non-commodity products and services” while “spend[ing] a large share of their disposable income supporting their pastimes,” Pro-Ams are seemingly becoming a more and more prominent feature of developed-society life as leisure time becomes a reality for a larger portion of the population and higher education becomes an increasingly attainable goal.

Needless to say, it’s wonderful that more people are interested in creative activities. But that trend has its downsides for composers who harbor ambitions of making a living through music, particularly when combined with the proliferation of technologies that make music easier to produce and distribute to a mass audience than ever before. It creates a new kind of hypercompetition in which composers are not only jostling for attention with greater numbers of their peers than at any time in history—upload a piece to the AMC Online Library, for example, and anyone in the world can hear it, that is if they choose it from among the 4,613 audio samples already available there—they are also competing with every composer who ever lived whose work survived to the present day. (Unfortunately, composers cannot similarly count on dead audience members to be a part of their fan base.)

Making matters worse, composition suffers from the same long-term structural economic challenges that affect the rest of the performing arts (as well as other sectors such as health care and education). As Matthew Guerrieri defined Baumol’s cost disease for NewMusicBox three years ago, “labor costs in the performing arts will always inexorably rise, and at a faster rate than other industries.” Put simply, new compositions are labor-intensive for creator and audience alike at a point in history when everybody’s time is becoming more and more precious. While innovations such as notation software and MIDI renderings can help us increase our productivity as composers somewhat, the productivity increase doesn’t help that much if there isn’t a clear demand for the extra music it makes possible, and even these tools can’t erase the need for countless hours of training and perfecting necessary to meet most composers’ standards of quality.

From an economic standpoint, then, assuming composers don’t want to compromise on the type of music they write, they would do well to live in the cheapest circumstances possible, learn as much of their technique as they can on their own, and look for ways to make their creative process more efficient so that they can use the rest of their time to support themselves with unrelated work. Instead, you’ll often see composers clustering in major urban centers with high costs of living and earning a succession of expensive graduate degrees in order to set themselves apart. Indeed, according to the National Arts Index, the number of visual and performing arts degrees awarded in this country rose an astonishing 51% between 1998 and 2007.

The Grad School Racket

As I mentioned, my friends were confused that I chose to go to business school instead of music school. In fact, I almost did go to music school—in 2003. A year out of college, I applied to six master’s-degree-level programs in composition and didn’t get into any of them. It was the best misfortune that’s ever befallen me.

My top choice that year was New England Conservatory. At last check, tuition and fees for the master of music program at NEC run nearly $50,000 per year. My conversations with the financial aid office in 2002-03 made clear that scholarships were not to be counted upon, so in all likelihood the only way I could have afforded my education would have been to take out loans. Ironically, my loan burden probably would have been far more intense for NEC than will turn out to be the case for my pricier business degree, because my business school offers a loan forgiveness program that reimburses up to 100% of the need-based portion of my loans in exchange for working in the nonprofit sector after graduation. No such program could ever exist at a music school. There isn’t a fresh stable each year of investment bankers, consultants, and marketers going out and making six figures after graduation whose fees can cross-subsidize the minority of us who take less in order to do good work for the world. At music school, nonprofit is a way of life.

Well, it is for most. Some lucky stars in the piano, string, voice, or conducting programs might go on to extremely lucrative solo careers. A few composers might score some film gigs in Hollywood and make a pretty penny. But for the rest, life after graduation and financial prosperity don’t often mix. The best one can hope for, economically speaking, is a stable but obscure home in academia—yet the competition for even third-tier positions is notoriously fierce. Those trying to make it on the DIY circuit in an expensive city like New York or San Francisco frequently find that while opportunities for artistic collaboration are plentiful, a day job (or a trust fund) is essential.

Regardless of outside employment (or lack thereof), nearly half of respondents to Taking Note reported a total annual income before taxes of less than $40,000 over the previous three years. Composers are not a wealthy bunch, at least as measured by their take-home pay. And if you have a heavy sack of graduate school loans weighing you down, that investment in your education could realistically be forcing tough decisions decades later.

This is not a theoretical matter. A landmark study of graduates of arts training programs found that only 37% felt that their schools had given them adequate leadership training, and just 3% felt that they had been well prepared in financial matters. Fully half indicated that their student debt burden had influenced their career choices.

That bit of inconvenient truth is the sort of thing one wishes academic institutions would communicate to prospective students before they make what is likely to be the second-most significant financial commitment of their lives. But it’s not in the interests of those institutions to be giving potential customers (because that is what composition students are, whether they think of themselves that way or not) second thoughts about purchasing their product. After all, the more students there are, the more money there is for faculty positions, which of course represent one of the few oases of job security for the composition field in general. Yet no one seems to talk about the fact that a typical composition department might send three or four newly minted Ph.D.s or DMAs out on the job market each year, but only hire a new professor into its own ranks a couple of times a decade. The viability of the academic job track assumes a continual and improbable expansion of composition programs at every university.

Perhaps all that wouldn’t be so bad if conservatories and music departments were proactive about giving students tools to succeed outside of the academy. A few have taken some admirable steps in this direction in the past decade; Eastman School of Music, for example, established an Institute for Music Leadership during the tenure of former Dean and AMC Board Chair James Undercofler in 2001, and the Manhattan School of Music just announced a new Center for Music Entrepreneurship to begin this fall. So far, though, these initiatives appear to be the exception rather than the rule. Where are the conservatory classes and workshops on writing grant applications? Doing your taxes? Copyright and intellectual property? Marketing and promotion? Time management skills from which any freelance professional can benefit? Like it or not, most composers graduating from these programs who are serious about their careers will need to be entrepreneurs and arts administration professionals of a sort. They should be trained appropriately.

The Social Stratification Blues

Download the complete survey

Some of you may be thinking to yourselves at this point, “So, you’re arguing that composers can’t make any money doing new music, and grad degrees are expensive. What else is new? And why should we care?” The major problem is that when success requires not only a daunting investment of financial resources to buy the right kind of training, the right kind of connections, high-quality recordings of one’s work, etc., but also thousands of hours of time not spent earning a living so that one can create and promote one’s own work, that field is not likely to have much in the way of socioeconomic diversity. Arts philanthropists consider lack of diversity in the face of changing demographics one of the biggest crises (perhaps the biggest of all) in the arts today. According to the 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, African Americans and Hispanics are between one-third to half as likely to attend a classical music event as whites and Asians, and people who make over $100,000 a year are more than three times as likely to attend as people who make less than $40,000. These broad contours hold true for most other disciplines as well. All told, traditional participants (i.e., ticket buyers) in traditional art forms represent a tiny, exclusive slice of the American public—in the case of classical music, a predominantly white, affluent, and highly educated 9.3% of adults. Meanwhile, the United States is projecting to be a majority-minority country by 2042, and California and Texas (among several other states) already hold that status. When philanthropists and politicians consider how they can best serve the public through the arts—and increasingly, whether they can serve the public through the arts—classical music is going to appear less and less compelling to them unless its artists and institutions, reversing a decades-long trend, can be more successful in reaching the other 91.7%. And make no mistake: those decisions WILL trickle down and influence the choices and opportunities you have to pursue your artistic ambitions. Are you going to be part of the solution?

Classical music is not alone in facing these dilemmas. Indeed, in some ways composers have it pretty good, relatively speaking of course. According to the NEA, the unemployment rate for actors in 2009 was a shocking 37%, far higher than for any other artistic profession. And in virtually every survey of artists’ incomes I’ve ever seen, dancers and choreographers come out looking like absolute martyrs compared to musicians.

Moreover, the technological changes sweeping industrialized society are affecting creators of all stripes, not just composers. The explosion of free content and the hypercompetition it foments is creating problems for journalists, movie studios, karaoke machine manufactures—even the porn industry! Whatever challenges our brave new world will throw our way, we can be sure that we won’t be the only ones who have to meet them.

The Composer as Citizen

Despite the doom and gloom that pervades the previous paragraphs, composers have the ability and the prerogative to take their situations into their own hands. But we will need to take several proactive steps to ensure that the 21st century does not pass us by:

- Broaden the focus. As mentioned above, other arts disciplines and creative industries are dealing with many of the same challenges that face composers. You’ll notice that at a number of points in this article I have switched from talking about “composers” or “classical music” to “the arts.” That’s because, in many more ways than not, the arts are all in the same boat. Accordingly, the bulk of the most relevant and important conversations for composers to take part in today have a much broader focus than one obscure subgenre within a small niche of a single discipline. Did you know that the National Endowment for the Arts along with a number of major national arts funders have begun to focus their resources on urban revitalization through the arts? Did you know that many of the country’s local arts councils, including perhaps your own, have engaged in cultural planning efforts over the past decade? Do you attend conferences or networking events or professional development workshops that don’t have “music” in the title?

- Read, read, read. Web 2.0 technology makes it easier than ever to keep up with significant developments, share advice, and expand your toolkit of ideas for your compositions and your life. While my blog has been helpful to me in a number of ways, perhaps the most valuable thing it did for me was to teach me how to read other people’s. Essential resources I recommend for any artist include ArtsJournal (the main news feed, that is), Beth’s Blog, GIA News, Michael Rushton’s Arts Admin blog, The Artful Manager, the NEA’s new Art Works blog, and Richard Florida’s Creative Class Exchange. For musicians, I’d additionally recommend Brands Plus Music and the Future of Music Coalition Blog. And if you’re feeling adventurous, you could try the Foundation Center’s news alerts, an economics blog such as Marginal Revolution, or hang out with the 2am Theatre crew (the conversations are often relevant to music as well). I strongly suggest that you learn how to use an RSS reader if you haven’t already—Google Reader works well enough for me.

Get involved. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had about the future of the arts in the past couple of years in which no actual working artists have taken part. Sometimes the absence is noted, but more often it isn’t, and one is left to conclude that the health of the field is something that only arts administrators care to talk about. (Perhaps that explains why only 11% of the money funneled through nonprofit arts organizations in this country actually goes toward paying artists.) For whatever reason, musicians—composers included—seem particularly removed from these discussions. For example, the Great Recession has put pressure on a lot of states to gut their arts council budgets, and there have been a number of frantic advocacy campaigns in the past 18 months—including particularly high-profile ones in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and New York State—to stave off drastic reductions in funding. I regularly read about such campaigns on theater- and visual art-focused blogs, but saw nary a peep on any online music publication. People need to know you exist if you expect them to care about your livelihood. Lack of attendance at national conferences is understandable—travel expenses can add up – but these days, thanks to live streaming, blogs, Twitter, etc., it’s often perfectly possible to be part of the conversation without being there in person. Meanwhile, there are probably numerous local panels, lectures, and networking opportunities at your disposal—and if there aren’t, what’s stopping you from organizing one yourself?

So seek out, show up, absorb, interact, speak up! None of the above advice will, on its own, guarantee either artistic or financial success. But I am a firm believer that knowledge is power, and power is not something that composers have historically enjoyed. If you want to be in control of your circumstances instead of letting your circumstances control you, it might well be time for a different kind of education.

***

Ian David Moss

Ian David Moss is Research Director at Fractured Atlas, primarily responsible for the development of the Bay Area Cultural Asset Map (BACAM), a new tool enabling better understanding of the arts ecosystem through the integration of multiple data streams. Moss graduated with an MBA in nonprofit management and strategy from the Yale School of Management. While there, he founded Createquity, a highly acclaimed arts policy blog, and completed an internship with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for which he developed the original blueprint for BACAM and co-created the Foundation’s first logic model for the performing arts. A composer since the age of 12, he was previously development manager for the American Music Center and founded two first-of-their-kind performing ensembles: a hybrid electric chamber group/experimental rock band and a choral collective devoted to the music of the past 25 years.

Courts and Conquerors: Thinking and Rethinking the Rethink Music Conference

Posted on May 2, 2011 by Matthew Guerrieri - Field Reports, Headlines

The potentates of the old world found no difficulty in convincing themselves that they made ample compensation to the inhabitants of the new by bestowing on them civilization and Christianity in exchange for unlimited independence.

—Johnson v. M’Intosh, 21 U.S. 543 (1823)

Waiting for Berklee College of Music President Roger Brown to open the Rethink Music conference in Boston this week, I overheard some small talk a few rows behind me. “They were afraid there’d be too many lawyers,” someone said, “so they told me to dress down.”

The Rethink Music conference enjoyed some heavy aegis: Berklee, the music trade fair organization MIDEM, the Harvard Business School, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. The nominal ambition was similarly impressive: “To talk about solutions to moving the music industry forward,” according to conference Executive Director Allen Bargfrede; to “foster creativity and a thriving music industry,” according to the conference website. Roger Brown offered as inspiration the British government’s 18th-century Board of Longitude and its competition to solve that problem of marine navigation. Since we now cross the Atlantic 360 times faster than they did in the 18th century, we should be able, Brown said, to solve the problems facing the music industry “360 times faster than it took to solve the problem of longitude.” In practice, though, much of the conference seemed to echo that overheard comment: the discussions could dress down to the casual cool of social media and digital connectivity, but it was in tension with the old industry, beholden to back catalogs and billable hours.

From left: Dave Kusek, VP, berkleemusic.com, interviews Metric.
Photo by Phil Farnsworth.

Thus there was, for example, Del Bryant, the president and CEO of BMI, opining on Tuesday morning that “giving things away for free” was “not building the business,” while the Canadian band Metric and their voluble manager, Matt Drouin, related on Tuesday afternoon how they built their business by giving things away for free. There was Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA, insisting that lawsuits against file-sharing end users had “clearly [indicated] to the public at large what was legal and what was not,” a day after the singer/songwriter Bleu had matter-of-factly said, “I don’t think there’s any way to go back to monetizing music.” The old system and the new system occasionally occupied the same host: Paul McGuinness, artist manager for, among others, U2, allowed as how “for a baby band, every Internet opportunity is something to be seized”—but, when allied with Bono et al., “we tend to be on the same side of the argument as the major labels.”

It was very much a music business conference. And it was very much a pop music business conference; classical music, experimental music, or the avant-garde barely rated mention, and the bulk of that came in composer Tod Machover’s Tuesday keynote (a breezy overview of gee-whiz technological advances his MIT lab has made on various fronts—performance, accessibility, music therapy—that seemed, in retrospect, like the keynote to a different, slightly more diverting conference). But there was one dominant topic that, for better or for worse, might have been borrowed from classical music’s long history: patronage.

To add to their misery, they had little hope of deliverance. For where does one run to when he’s already in the promised land?

—Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land (1965)

The lesson from the money guys and the artists was that the path to salvation was in using digital connectivity to enable ever-increasing engagement with fans. “Direct-to-fan,” everyone called it, the idea that if the bond between artist and fan is strong enough, the fan will gladly pay for access, for premium content, for the sense of a less-anonymous relationship with the artist and the process. Direct-to-fan, by this way of thinking, is the new driver of revenue in the face of the fact that recordings are, now, little more than promotional material. It is, in other words, patronage. “Essentially, paying for music has become voluntary,” said venture capitalist Ron Nordin. “Essentially, now everyone becomes a patron.”

From left: Amanda Palmer, Ben Folds, Neil Gaiman, Damian Kulash at the Berklee Performance Center.
Photo by Phil Farnsworth.

The financial justification—a balancing of customer-acquisition costs (free downloads, giveaways) with potentially long-lasting revenue streams (devoted customers)—is, as Nordin’s fellow VC Peter Gotcher astutely pointed out, one long-familiar to Internet companies but long-ignored by the music industry. And object lessons from artist-panelists pointed to the success and potential of such increased engagement. Metric leveraged incessant touring and a careful tending of their fan base into self-released albums and success far outstripping any they experienced with major labels (for which both the band and their manager displayed bemused contempt). Bleu, a notable beneficiary of Kickstarter success, characterized the possibilities to be unlocked with direct-to-fan connections via the conference’s best tautology: “People enjoy spending money on things they enjoy spending money on.”

Even the conference’s novelty act could be seen as a friendly, direct-to-fan-driven rebuke to the old models. Ben Folds, Amanda Palmer, author Neil Gaiman, and OK Go’s Damian Kulash got together on Monday night for “8 in 8,” a let’s-put-on-a-show recording project: write, record, and release eight songs in eight hours, a combination jam session and proof-of-concept stunt. In the end, they only finished six songs (and it took twelve hours), but they attracted a few thousand viewers to live, streaming video of the entire recording session (“We got a bad review even before the record was made,” Folds joked), and, sure enough, the album was ready for download Tuesday morning. The assiduous cultivation of online social connections provided a ready-made audience; the speed and casualness of the experiment seemed almost designed to show what the old record companies were scrambling to keep up with, the companies where, as Folds remembered it, “you were always told what wouldn’t work.”

Still, there was the overwhelming sense that deep, diligent, personal attention to building and maintaining a fan base on one’s own was not just an option, but, going forward, a necessity. As Tom Silverman, founder of Tommy Boy Records, noted, “Labels don’t want to start from scratch with an artist”—the fan base has to already be there before a relationship with a label is even possible. Bruce Houghton, the founder of Hypebot.com, proclaimed that creating, growing, and monitoring a fan community through social media and direct-to-fan entrepreneurship was “a required skill set for the modern artist.” Shy musicians need not apply.

A Wednesday panel on “DIY and Ancillary Revenue Streams” ended up being a combination of make-music-because-you-love-it poeticizations of the artist-fan relationship and visions of corporate brands savvy enough to want access to those enthusiastic fan email lists. A cynic’s takeaway could very well have been: spend a few years doing all your own legwork and marketing, and you too might be lucky enough to sell out. But what was the alternative? The labels were all touting their capacity for artist development, the skill to walk a nascent artist through the industry minefield—most cogent was Lyor Cohen, CEO of Recorded Music for the Warner Music Group, saying that “the only justification for a music company is A&R….We are reactivating the lost art of artist development.”

But wasn’t the minefield largely a creation of the labels themselves? And when Cohen justified 360 deals—the new contract standard in which labels take a cut of touring and merchandising revenue in addition to recordings—as, essentially, a replacement for lost recording revenue, necessary to maintain executive salaries, then admitted that, even in such partnerships, the label still maintained sole ownership of master recordings, one could only marvel that even a digitally-diluted siren song of fame remained a strong enough to keep such models going.

A Cloud withdrew from the Sky
Superior Glory be
But that Cloud and its Auxiliaries
Are forever lost to me

—Emily Dickinson

(From left) Rethink Music business model competition finalists Maxwell Wessel founder of Nuevostage, Executive Director, Rethink Music Initiative Allen Bargfrede, Fanatic.FM creator Ian Kwon, BigLife Music co-founder Eliot Hunt.
Photo by Phil Farnsworth

Direct-to-fan was the leading topic among artists, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs (nearly all the entrepreneur presentations and business-model-contest entrants were spinning variations on direct-to-fan, from RootMusic’s BandPage, a Facebook page customization application, to nuevoStage, the winning business model, a kind of Groupon for live shows). Among the media-company types, though, the buzzword was the “cloud”—music delivery services which would have consumers access, through the Web, music files on remote servers, rather than download those files to their own machine. Talk of cloud-based music services abounded: whether subscription-based, streaming services or “locker” services would predominate, whether there was any room for start-ups given the entry of Amazon, Google, and Apple into the cloud marketplace, whether the cloud would finally catch on with consumers or not. At the very least, it seemed a safe bet that the cloud would dominate music-industry jargon for the next year or so, if not longer.

Along with the cloud came the conference’s other mantra, the expressed need for a global copyright registry, a centralized, one-stop listing of copyrighted materials and their owners to alleviate the difficulties in tracking down unknown rightsholders and clearing licenses. Rights issues are “gravel in the ears” of music entrepreneurs, according to Peter Gotcher; a “tremendous impediment to everyone in the system,” according to Pandora CEO Joe Kennedy. After a while, it seemed that every panel, by some path or another, came back around to the idea of the registry, the great leap forward that would allow the industry to emerge into the sunlight of the 21st-century economy. The devoutly-to-be-wished registry was nearly universally supported, with the question mainly being who would create and administer the thing—existing rights collection agencies, some non-profit academia-industry consortium, some private, for-profit entity. (Nobody held out any hope that the U.S. Congress could ever be spurred to such action.)

Joe Kennedy, President and CEO, Pandora.
Photo by Phil Farnsworth

But it was the one dissent, at the very end of the conference, on the final panel, that crystallized a hazy sense of skepticism. Larisa Mann, a DJ and academic at UC Berkeley, provocatively framed the registry talk in terms of Johnson v. M’Intosh, the Supreme Court decision that established the foundation of American property law—and, in the process, facilitated the expropriation of Native American land. The points being: Who compiles the list? Who gets on the list? Who gets left off? I thought about, say, how poorly classical-music metadata—artists, track names, credits—meshes with a platform like iTunes, and then I thought what would happen if that was the model for a database governing rights, licensing, and royalty payments. Imagine an industry whose large-entity representatives view DIY or deliberately independent musicians with either puzzlement or a kind of hostile pity—both of which could be sampled again and again on industry-player panels—and then imagine that industry exerting its influence over the future structure of ownership and revenue.

It was mostly left to the academics to raise such objections, to note, explicitly or implicitly, that, at their core, the conference’s concerns were matters of power and control even more than creativity and opportunity. On a Wednesday panel concerning “Alternative Compensation Schemes”—a perhaps-pejorative term for fresh approaches to managing and distributing royalties—Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig, speaking of policy fights, might well have described the conference as a whole: “It’s not a battle of ideas,” he said, “it’s a battle between those who make money under the old system and those who might make money under the new system.”

The political and financial sway of the old system lingered in the background of a trio of papers presented on Tuesday: Peter Alhadeff and Caz McChrystal discussed the quirks of U.S. copyright law that have resulted in a steady erosion of the mechanical royalty rate vis-à-vis inflation; Kaya Köklü cast a wry, skeptical eye on the French three-strikes approach to online copyright infringement, an enforcement scheme of questionable effectiveness, and one, Köklü hinted, resulting from the superiority of corporate lobbying. Most intriguingly, Giuseppe Mazziotti’s study of the EU’s push towards a harmonized regime of rights collecting societies did not leave unmentioned such a move’s privileging of larger corporate interests and threat to cultural diversity. A marginal issue in this conference’s context, for sure, but also a reminder that, for all the talk of democracy and access, the very industry being reinvented or reestablished was always a little, well, colonial.

A few minutes later what remained of Bendicò was flung into a corner of the courtyard visited every day by the dustman. During the flight down from the window his form recomposed itself for an instant; in the air one could have seen a dancing quadruped with long whiskers….

—Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa, The Leopard
(1957, trans. Archibald Colquhoun)

Not that the industry paid much attention. At most, twenty people attended that Tuesday session; everybody else was down the hall, taking in the prospects of cloud-based consumption. And even that was at least partially an excuse. Kulash had jokingly asked, “Why does everyone pay a lot of money to come talk about how they can make money in music?” But, of course, they were also there to network, to make connections with industry executives and with each other, to meet and be met. (I was blessed with multiple iterations of the experience of having an attendee nonchalantly veer close enough to me to read my nametag, then just as nonchalantly veer away once they realized I wasn’t worth talking to.)

It was the engine of the old system, still humming—whether in counterpoint to the new reality or in defiance of it, whether out of determination or inertia, I couldn’t quite tell. The industry didn’t seem to be in denial about the spot they were in, but was the complementary confidence justified? When Thomas Hesse, the president of Global Digital Business for Sony Music, blandly touted the VEVO video streaming model as an opportunity to “reclaim the platform,” the tone of the old order trying to reassert itself was faint but noticeable. The corporate attitude might best have been summarized as a version of Lampedusa’s famous formulation: everything has to change in order for everything to stay the same.

Incidentally, remember that discussion of the brave new world of business casual I overheard at the conference’s outset? It was only a few minutes later that I learned, via the Internet, that Poly Styrene, the founder and lead singer of X-Ray Spex, one of the most indelible bursts of punk, rock and roll’s last great fury of innovation, had died.

***

Matthew Guerrieri

Matthew Guerrieri rethinks either too much or not enough.

New England’s Prospect: Looking Backward

Posted on September 28, 2011 by Matthew Guerrieri - Field Reports, Headlines

Maybe it’s the city’s surplus of heritage, maybe it’s autumnal reminiscence, or maybe it’s just a coincidence, but the start of the season in Boston brought a bumper crop of new music deliberately glancing off older music and/or styles. That’s part and parcel with contemporary music—the past is always present, even if only as something to deliberately ignore—and the new-old juxtaposition is practically orthodox in mainstream classical programming. But the sentiment was everywhere this month, in a way that sought to borrow a little of the past’s authenticity, rather like someone who enjoys ordering a classic cocktail as much for the accumulated history as the taste (raises hand). And while the ideal is a real discussion among eras, there were at least a couple concerts where the novelties were needed to clear away the past’s clutter.

The perpetual churn of students in the Boston area tends to create all manner of entrepreneurial new-music groups, be they opportunistic, evangelical, or just plain quixotic. Some of them are swept out by the matriculating tide—Zradci, a personal favorite, offered a couple seasons’ worth of Cageian fun, but then seemed to simply drift off—but some of them find more of a berth. Juventas is one of the ones that has stuck around, with a mission statement about “voic[ing] the musical culture of the present by featuring repertoire of composers age 35 and under” (a sentiment both laudably direct and vaguely disconcerting, in a Logan’s Run kind of way)—but this season, the group is actively promoting dialogue with the past. Their season’s first concert, “Spark! New Music and Its Origins,” was concerned with the mentor-student relationship, both direct and indirect.

The opener reached back far indeed: Mark Oliveiro’s Thunor’s Gate took its inspiration from Thor, the god of thunder. (“Þunor” was his Anglo-Saxon name.) The music itself aimed to conjure mists of time and long-reverberating echoes of mighty heroes in loose, drone-anchored fashion, David Balandrin blowing melancholy French horn calls into an electronic landscape of the sort of metallic-tinged feedback characteristic of the Max/MSP software used to generate it. When the music did move, it opted for mixed-meter grooves reminiscent of early prog-rock workouts—in fact, the entire piece had more than a little of that genre atmosphere: mythologically programmatic, melodically modal, formally meandering, indulgently long, and perhaps better experienced under the influence of certain mind-altering substances. Thor sounded more than a little hammered, anyway.

The mentorships proper began with the influence of György Ligeti. The man himself was represented by three movements of his early, snappy Musica Ricercata (as played by Julia Scott Carey, crisp and fluent but also curiously solemn and distant) as well as two movements from his Sonata for solo viola (which Emily Deans dispatched with abundant flair). Ligeti’s influence was illustrated by Jonathan Blumhofer’s 2010 septet …einfach/schwer…?, conducted by Avlana Eisenberg: aviaries of extended techniques, nimbly woven together, occasionally coalescing into folkish, foot-stompable melodies—down-to-earth content launched into floating, sonic clouds. Ryan Chase’s txts fm györgy, with clarinetist Marguerite Levin joining Balandrin, Means, and Carey, amplified Ligeti’s cheeky side into bright, pop-art saturation, quick-fire riffs (primarily on the late-period, ostinato-driven Ligeti of the Etudes and the Horn Trio) rendered with the cleverly concentrated familiarity of a good impressionist.

The other mentor was the Montreal-based Philippe Leroux, whose 1992 Air-ré was a terrific piece—a skittish exercise in heterophony and klangfarbenmelodie, compellingly spare and unfailingly sure-footed, for the surprisingly fertile combination of violin (Ethan Wood) and pitched percussion (Brian Calhoon). Leroux’s student Nicolas Tzortzis posited a program surrounding the process of learning in the notes to his quintet Amenable, a conceit that conductor (and Juventas music director) Lidiya Yankovskaya, in a short speech, somewhat irritatingly tried to connect to the topic of 9/11, the anniversary of which coincided with the concert. In the actual playing, both frameworks proved irrelevant, as Amenable proved a worthy experience based on sound alone, an astringently colorful, confidently decorated piece of post-serial modernism, walking a polished, refined line between tone and noise.

***

Opera in Boston, historically, has followed a classic pattern of overindulgence. The city was spoiled by the conductor/impresario Sarah Caldwell’s flights of irresponsibly grand fancy throughout the ’70s and ’80s; when her Opera Company of Boston finally collapsed in the early ’90s, having finally run out of financial duct tape and paper clips, the result was a hangover that has only recently begun to dissipate. Entrepreneurship, though, abhors a vacuum. Guerilla Opera, started by another recent-graduate cohort, now has six world premieres under its belt, with a seventh coming in the spring. (Their recording of Curtis Hughes’s cheerfully cracked mirror Say It Ain’t So, Joe, comes out later this year.)

Their latest project was Loose, Wet, and Perforated, by Nicholas Vines, which sought to update that staple of medieval entertainment, the morality play. The unscrupulous Loose (Adriana de la Guardia) and the conscience-stricken Wet (Jonathan Nussbaum) are run through a gauntlet of ordeals under the eye of a Master (Jan Zimmerman) and the blustering commentary of a Narrator (Rebekah Alexander). Wet’s defeats are perpetual, Loose’s triumphs are perpetually hollow, and the whole plot revolves back to its origin, a nihilistic combination of Vico and Brecht.

Nihilism does feel pretty modern, but the discourse includes an awful lot of alienating archaisms. (Surely there is a more immediately contemporary subject for the characters to blasphemously slander than a medieval abbot; surely there are more potent stand-ins for the downtrodden than those fairy-tale standbys, the baker and the cowherd.) And both Vines’s libretto and Jeremy Bloom’s direction were an odd non-mixture of the hermetic and the obvious. A production that has a main character sing, over and over, “Why must I climb the greasy pole?,” while fondling an actual wooden pole, is not exactly entrusting the audience with delicate allegories; but other machinations seemed arbitrary or curiously obscure. The plot seemed to want to channel the genre’s capacity for moral scolding while satirizing it at the same time. (An erotically comic, farcical “Ordeal of Fire” turned out to be the opera’s most focused scene.)

The music, though, was terrific—kitchen-sink expressionism, edgy, bright, and entertaining as hell. Vines makes an unlikely four-player orchestra—clarinet, saxophone, trombone, and percussion—pay seemingly endless dividends. And the cast was game, both vocally and dramatically. If the musical presentation didn’t quite fix the dramatic solecisms, it certainly carried the listener through them in cracking style.

***

The Longy School of Music, a Cambridge bastion of French-style musical pedagogy, has seen its affiliation with Bard College blossom into a full-out assimilation, with a merger scheduled to be completed this year. The move has hardly enjoyed unanimous support among the faculty; maybe, given the dissent, it was in a lemonade-from-lemons spirit that the school made “Transformations” the theme of this year’s annual faculty-and-student, five-concert Septemberfest mini-jamboree. At the very least, it lent some frisson to the fact that the new-music concert of the bunch, structured as another old-meets-modern affair, took as its jumping-off point the Renaissance lament.

Given the thriving early-music community in Boston, I always hold out hope for such combinations; the modern early-music movement and the modern modern-music movement both sprang from the same anti-Romantic reaction, after all. In this concert, though, the newer music, again, seemed to ride to the concert’s rescue like a relief column. The old laments were, on paper, choice: a selection of works both vocal and instrumental by John Dowland (with one interloper, Johann Schop). The performance, though, was mostly lamentable, unfocused and enervated. Refusing to submit to the discipline of Dowland’s rhythmic grid, it turns out, doesn’t make the music more expressive, it just makes it limp.

The historical kids, though, were alright. David Sampson’s 1995 brass quintet Morning Music (given a solid performance by the Redline Brass Quintet) comes by its lamenting honestly, being a memorial for his brother, one of the victims of this example of the country’s seemingly unlimited capacity for undermining its own rhetorical ideals. And Sampson does surreptitiously indict musical Americana a bit, setting up Coplandesque and Reichian moods only to rebuke them with jagged outbursts. But on the whole, Morning Music is more exploratory than confrontational, a twisting narrative of continual interest.

Paul Brust’s 1999 Lament worked its vein of chromatically garnished Romanticism with polish and ample opportunity for expressive display by cellist Ying Jun Wei and pianist Ester Ning Yau. (The piece did have, I thought, too many endings, although I have noticed myself having that complaint about so many neo-Romantic pieces that I am willing to consider it less a criticism than a personal failure to accept an essential stylistic feature.) There followed four settings of a Denise Levertov poem by Longy students, though nobody could quite agree on the title. Levertov called it “…That Passeth All Understanding,” and so did composer Tsunenori Lee Abe, but Erica Glenn left out the “All,” Daniela DeMatos left out the ellipsis, and Kwaumane Brown put the phrase back in its Phillippianic context, adding “The Peace of God.” (Even Longy itself got in the alterations, calling the concert “Thus Passeth All Understanding,” a different sentiment entirely.)

The settings, though, were quite accomplished. It’s always fun to hear student composers’ vocal works, because it reveals what the touchstones for vocal setting are from generation to generation—forty years ago, it would have been Pierrot Lunaire and Le marteau sans maître; twenty years ago, it would have been Nixon in China. Now, judging from this (admittedly small) sample, the stars of both Samuel Barber and the newer Broadway composers—Jason Robert Brown, Adam Guettel—are in the ascendant. All the songs were in a lyrical vein, solidly tonal, gently dissonant, with admirably clear and logical text-setting (given enviable professional attention by soprano Karol Ryczek and pianist—and Longy dean—Wayman Chin). My favorite was Brown’s, a hymn-tinged recitative against sparse, pointillistic piano, the line drifting in and out of motivic coherence.

The evening ended with a pair of electroacoustic works by Jeremy Van Buskirk, in which that default CSound-Max/MSP-ish tinge was again in evidence. (I swear, every piece of electronic music I’ve heard in the past ten years has had a section that sounds like locusts swarming around The Vibraphone at the End of the Universe.) Van Buskirk, though, has an awful lot of compensatory virtues: a solid sense of form and drama, an inviting, peek-a-boo approach to the way he handles his musique concrète found sounds. The Root of All Evil rang propulsive, growling changes on cascading coins and shuffling cards; For the Love of Laughter works ambient recordings of that sound into what the composer presented as an “aural scrabook of a wonderful experience.” Truth be told, my reaction was almost the direct opposite—with the laughs smeared into reverberant shrieks, over ominous rumbles, it was more like the disorienting terror of a bad trip. I still had a good time.

By that point, the call-and-response intention of old and new seemed to have been long-forgotten. The concert had, in fact, started with a friendly warning about the capacity for such dialogues. Benjamin Britten’s Six Metamorphoses after Ovid (given intimate scale by oboist Robert Sheena) take stories from the Roman poet and give them deliberately sketchy musical analogues—”Pan” noodles aimlessly, “Phaeton” and his fall are viewed as if from far, far away. The Metamorphoses turn out to be less about the events themselves than the distance introduced by the act of their telling.

Inmates Running the Asylum

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Rob Deemer - Columns

Entrepreneurship and a basic understanding of the intersection between art and life are becoming increasingly important in many music curricula around the country, but especially in composition programs. Between self-publishing, creating performance opportunities through the initiation of new ensembles and concert series, managing commissions, and balancing the various challenges that accompany the life of the freelancing artist, composers find themselves in need of a wide swath of experiences outside of the classroom. Slowly over time, programs have been experimenting with ways to incorporate these additional concepts into an already-packed list of requirements. As I am currently smack-dab in the middle of one of those experiments, I thought it might be helpful for me to describe, for your consideration, what one option might be: the student-run-and-organized new music society.

NOW Ensemble with Corey Dargel and Nathan Koci. Photo by Lori Deemer.

One thing I discovered when I began teaching here at the State University of New York at Fredonia was a long history of active student organizations; for many years, for example, the only jazz ensemble on campus was non-curricular and student-led, yet it had gained a national reputation back in the 1970s as one of the best of its kind. The reason why so many student groups have flourished is because of the university’s Student Association, which has independence and support from the institution’s administration, as well as a history of overseeing a large amount of money that is collected through student fees every semester. This type of organizational structure is not uncommon; most schools have some type of student government with various amounts of responsibility over the funding of student organizations, though usually these groups tend to be social, academic, political, or athletic in nature.

Michael Lowenstern in recital. Photo by Lori Deemer.

Back in the mid-1970s, my predecessor, Dr. Donald Bohlen, and his students had the idea of creating a student group to help put on student composer concerts. Over time, their group decided to invite a guest composer or performer every year to speak or to perform for the student body. Twelve years ago, the group, under the name Ethos New Music Society, had grown in size and budget to the point where they organized their first “NuSound” Festival over several days to great success. When I started teaching here, they had already amassed an impressive list of guest composers, performers, and ensembles that they had brought to campus, so I attempted to continue these traditions while expanding and diversifying where I could as the organization’s faculty advisor. We now currently sponsor roughly 12-15 events a year, including four student concerts, guest performer and ensemble concerts, as well as composer residencies, both in our NewSound Festival in February and throughout the year with our Overnight Composer Series (“emerging” composers are brought in from around the country for an evening of lectures and flown back the next morning).

Now many schools have some version of either student-organized composition concerts or faculty-organized new music festivals—these aren’t new. What is unique about Ethos is the extent to which the students have oversight of the Festival, Overnight Composer Series, and other events that are normally positions reserved for faculty. Built around an executive board of 8-10 elected students, the group helps to decide who’s coming, negotiate contracts, reserve venues, flights, and housing, create itineraries, manage technology (which can get complicated with some of our guests), write press releases and oversee social media publicity, keep the website updated, and many other “real-world” aspects of being a professional in music today. The experiences these students gain is extremely valuable and while many of our alums have gone on to continue their studies in composition, several others have moved on into arts administration because of their time in the group.

As I write this column, students are preparing for two trips to the Buffalo airport later today to pick up composer/violinist Cornelius Dufallo and composer Paola Prestini for their three-day residency here, which will include a concert, lectures, and a pre-concert talk. We’ve already had one concert last weekend with the Chiaroscuro Trio and have four more in the next two weeks, including a visit by Gabriela Lena Frank and the Chiara String Quartet as well as several contemporary concerts featuring our string faculty. Through all of it, the students will get to meet and work with professional composers and performers in a way that is more up close and personal than I’d ever seen before I came here and they will hopefully come away from the Festival with a much more nuanced idea of what it really means to be a professional composer and musician today.

Alexandra Gardner, Molly Sheridan, and Brian Sacawa. Photo by Lori Deemer.

I relate this to you in order to suggest that this situation is replicable at other institutions; by encouraging student involvement and building up a budget through the pre-existing student government on campus (which, by the way, is not affected by the whims of state government or departmental funding needs), I’m quite sure that a similar organization could be started at many universities. By placing more responsibility on the students themselves, especially in regard to time management, publicity, technology, and even budget planning, they will inevitably mature into well-rounded artists who understand the many pitfalls and challenges of surviving as a composer or performer in today’s society.

Teaching the Composers

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Rob Deemer - Columns

In my previous column I presented a few suggestions as to how the role of a composer in higher education could be expanded by integrating composition into the music education curriculum. I should point out, however, that as important as introducing the basic concepts of composing and musical creativity to budding music educators is, the primary goal for a composition faculty should still be the instruction and guidance of student composers. For many students and teachers in composition education, this primary goal can seem at cross-purposes with itself. It is this natural internal conflict that makes the teaching of composition so challenging—and yet there is currently very little focus given to preparing potential composition educators for that challenge.

One of the toughest parts of teaching composition—indeed, teaching any artistic medium—is not only teaching the subject, but guiding the implementation and ultimately the transcendence of the subject material; in other words, not only teaching someone how to compose, but how to be a composer. There are many nuanced reasons for this, but much of it has to do with the indirect nature of how we learn, and subsequently how many educators teach, composition. Regardless of the various processes that are available to composers that allow for the creation of material, at some point each artist is forced to make their own decisions, take risks, and hope that it will work. It is that aspect of risk-taking—to allow oneself or one’s students to make mistakes—that can often hold back both students and educators from doing their best work.

Earlier this week, my new NMBx colleague Isaac Schankler illustrated the strong effect that mentor composers have on their students. His description of how well-meaning instructors inadvertently triggered feelings of self-doubt must sound familiar to many current and former students as well as educators. The same self-doubt can be found in many composition instructors when they first start teaching. Even though they may have just finished numerous years of graduate study, once they start teaching they realize that their coursework never prepared them for one-on-one instruction with student composers with varying degrees of experience.

It is this gap in composition education that can and should to be addressed. A few years ago I decided to begin a graduate course in the pedagogy of composition to compliment the music theory pedagogy course that graduate students were required to take. In my preparation, I was dismayed to find very little current research on the subject (with the exception of music education research on composition in general education) and only one existing course in the subject being taught at the college level. Led by Jim Mobberley at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory of Music, it is an extremely well structured course that includes hands-on experiences with teaching in both individual and classroom environments (graduates teaching undergrads, undergrads teaching pre-college students) as well as discussions on assessment, curriculum, and methodologies.

While it may all sound a bit…well, academic…this topic is very important to the future of new music because the large majority of creative artists who will be shaping music will at some point study composition at the collegiate level and, whether or not their work will exist because of or in reaction to their experiences in academia, we as a community need to be aware of the deficiencies that exist and strive to improve them—not only in composition pedagogy, as I’ve mentioned here, but also in educating composers in entrepreneurship, which I will cover in next week’s post.

Stacy Garrop: With a Story to Tell

Posted on July 1, 2013 by Molly Sheridan - Conversations, Cover

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

Garrop explains the graphs she uses while composing.

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

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

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

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

MS: But you do feel comfortable writing music?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Garrop lecturing about various Chicago artists and their websites.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Music’s Quality Problem

Posted on April 7, 2014 by MarekPoliks - Columns

Photo courtesy of Eduardo on Flickr.

Whenever I come across a new music community post about the so-called “audience problem,” I think to myself: isn’t that a little entitled? What makes composers feel so deserving of an audience? It seems like the entire audience problem debate stubbornly looks outward, asking questions about marketing, “outreach,” and accessibility, all the while carefully avoiding some seriously necessary self-examination. Instead of an audience problem, I think new music has a quality problem.

I know this word might seem a little old-fashioned, conservative even, but its disappearance has left some still-unrepaired holes in our language. I’m not arguing for any sort of “objective quality”—it’s hard to defend black-and-white binaries after postmodernism. (Even those binaries one might put at either pole of a continuum.) Likewise, it’s fairly uncontroversial to say that quality is culturally constructed, and that its indices might change from generation to generation. However, though postmodernism afforded some suppleness and relativity, its norms were quietly and insidiously eroded by late-stage (or neoliberal) capitalism’s very objectivity-oriented standards.

The present antimodernism, at its outset so strongly critical of binary logic, has started to look an awful lot like its structuralist predecessor. Instead of good/bad, present mores yield to profitable/unprofitable or popular/unpopular.* Worse, because new music culture thinks it has left such binaries behind, it lost those rich discursive weirdnesses one finds orbiting around absolutes in an inabsolute world. Defensively, it lost the words to talk about quality and then, sadly, the energy to conceptualize its increasing fuzziness.

I hear the phrase “it’s a matter of taste” quite a lot. What a prohibitive position—it sounds like “our differences in perception present irreconcilable differences and we should stop talking now.” “Taste” and “quality” strike me as entirely different forces. Taste brings into the room all those alliances one makes with the world, the ways one forms an identity. Of course, I don’t really have control over my taste—I inherit it generationally, biologically, culturally, from role models and archetypes, and from social and political modes of control. I can, however, establish some critical distance between myself and my taste. If I can’t, if I am unable to separate myself at least a little bit from the things I identify with, then I must live in some kind of agenciless misread-Foucauldian nightmare. Quality means something different, something exactly about the agency one exercises between oneself and one’s identity. I can think of few things more subjective than this space, but at the same time I think it’s possible and important to talk about it.

Another prohibitive conversational barrier comes in directives to “focus on one’s own work instead of interfering in others’.” I find this particular rhetorical strategy absolutely incompatible with the way most composers justify their existence. If I tell myself, constantly, that my musical work is incredibly and unquestionably socially important, why is its content inconsequential? Like “it’s a matter of taste,” this also invites a conversation about agency. I believe that music wields its own power, separate from the human agency of its composition and performance. Because music affects people, albeit invisibly, the new music community must find a way to meaningfully address the responsibilities of composition, performance, and curation. As I see it now, the greater community I cherish lacks any mechanism of accountability—it proliferates discourse, tirelessly circulating around the unfalsifiable idea that subjectivity somehow means incommunicability.

Quality is an urgency and an intensity, a compositional concern and a social language to address it. Surely we can speak of musical necessity without reverting to old and bankrupt black-and-white. I will write three more posts for NewMusicBox, increasingly attempting to open doors to a “discourse of quality”—a mode of talking, abstractly, weirdly, about our musical agencies. Next week I will address elitism, power, and the broader structural impediments to music-world conversation.

* WQXR’s report entitled “In a Rough Job Market, More Conservatories Stress Business Skills” reveals this type of objective thinking better than almost anything. David Cutler, University of South Carolina Professor of Musical Entrepreneurship, proposes the following:

“[…P]erhaps part of the recital requirement might be: you need to get 200 people there to get an A, or 150 people there to get a B.” Students might also be graded on how they can rethink the presentation to include multimedia or other visual elements.

Note the quiet reintroduction of objective metrics, posed in the guise of postmodern flexibility, when it comes to evaluating art.

Marek Poliks

Marek Poliks (b.1989) writes chamber music at Harvard University, where he works towards a PhD. His music mines for expressivity in threadbare spaces, exhausted resources, and absolute vacuum. He studies with Chaya Czernowin, but recent primary teachers also include John Luther Adams, Rick Burkhardt, Roger Reynolds, Steven Takasugi, Hans Tutschku, and Amnon Wolman. Prior to this, he undertook the majority of his education with his mentor Josh Levine at Oberlin College and Conservatory.

Should I Start a New Music Ensemble?

Posted on May 15, 2014 by SugarVendil - Columns

Nouveau Classical Project HQ

A new contemporary music ensemble is born every 5.6 seconds.* Conservatories have tuned into this trend; for example, Oberlin launched a Master of Contemporary Chamber Music degree, and Manhattan School of Music, University of Missouri’s Mizzou School of Music, New England Conservatory, and other schools have launched music entrepreneurship programs in recent years. I would have loved these programs to have existed when I was an undergrad so that I could have had more guidance with my career early on and been aware of what my other options were aside from the only one I was aware of at the time: become a professor, play concerts here and there. I probably would have started The Nouveau Classical Project sooner and with fewer growing pains.

These days, many musicians are acutely aware of how to start and run a chamber ensemble, at least when it comes to the basics: gather musicians, perform the works of young composers mixed in with established composers, and launch a Kickstarter campaign to cover costs. Due to our friends and our friends’ friends launching their own ensembles, a wealth of information has been passed around in the new music community.

Here in New York—which I must note is the only new music scene I really know about—there are a number of performance opportunities that are accessible to startup ensembles. Smaller venues, such as Spectrum, won’t hesitate to program young groups, and there are many other venues that are affordable to rent. And as noted above, even academia encourages more musicians to launch new ventures.

But I’m wondering if anyone is asking: should you start another new music ensemble?

I’m not trying to be cynical nor am I trying to discourage, but it’s a valid and important question to ask oneself. Google “things to consider before starting a business” or “should I become an entrepreneur,” and thousands of results pop up. I’m sure many of us are aware that establishing an ensemble is essentially like launching a business. However, I do believe that the question of whether or not to start one is not often reflected upon first. I’m curious about this issue because there are so many groups and oftentimes musicians within these groups not only play in multiple ensembles, but also begin their own, and the differences between groups don’t seem to extend much beyond instrumentation.

So should you start another new music ensemble? Consider that our industry is saturated, audiences are small, and funding is limited. It’s essential to think about how you’re going to fit into the world of new music. Can you answer these questions: What makes you different? Will your ensemble convey a specific identity to audiences? Can you get people other than close friends and colleagues to your concerts with what you’re doing? (Because if these are your usual attendees, you may end up with a sad turnout if they are at a mutual friend’s ensemble’s concert on the same evening.)

There are so many emerging groups out there that you may already fit into a preexisting one that could use your skills and talents. Perhaps it would be more worthwhile to seek an ensemble where you can share your ideas and join an already fully formed team instead of pursuing a similar venture from scratch. I know from personal experience and from talking to colleagues that many of us artistic directors love having a team of musicians who are proactively involved behind the scenes. I am extremely fortunate to have built this with NCP over the last two years.

If you do decide to start an ensemble, ask yourself the questions that you would ask if you were to create a business. Your answers will inform your decision and provide a clear direction for your work. Playing concerts is fun, yes, but the work that goes into producing concerts and running an organization can be grueling. If you see things going nowhere it will be difficult to be creative and the whole experience will become discouraging. A few suggestions:

1. Why am I doing this? A simple question but it can reveal so much. Maybe it’s a personal passion or just an interest in the business of new music. You have to get to a place of no return, where you can only imagine yourself creating and being in this ensemble. When you’re consistently staying up until 1 a.m. looking into venues and rentals, this question will definitely come up!

2. What is unique about my ensemble? How will you define your ensemble as being different than the many others? Is it your music, your style, your performance? There needs to be something tangible that quickly provokes curiosity about your group.

3. Who is my target audience? This is difficult to answer but it’s extremely important. When I started NCP, I wanted an audience that had eclectic interests (makes for better post-concert conversation), so I aimed to target people who enjoyed culture, museums, fashion, and did not currently attend classical music concerts regularly (that is, until meeting NCP!). When I had entered the NYU Stern Business Plan Competition, one panelist noted that the way we were targeting our audience reminded him of the book Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. The book uses the metaphors of the red ocean and the blue ocean. The red ocean is where everyone is fighting for the same market share, turning the ocean bloody, while the blue ocean is the market space untainted by competition. Think hard about your target audience and how to get them!

4. Am I prepared to spend the time and money I need to get this done? Ya gotta spend money to make money. And I’m sure we’re all aware, this stuff takes time!

5. Am I willing to do this for the next ten years? It’s a long game. It’s going to be a while before you draw a salary. (Any day now!)

These are the questions I’ve found to be relevant to my experience with NCP over the past six years. It’s true that you don’t know until you try, but some thoughtful questions like these might provide a clearer direction for your artistic endeavor.

*This is not true because I made it up. But doesn’t it feel like it sometimes?

“Which of these Aaron Jay Kernises am I?”

Posted on September 1, 2014 by Frank J. Oteri - Conversations, Cover

A conversation in Kernis’s New York City home
February 11, 2014—10:00 a.m.
Video presentation and photos by Molly Sheridan
Transcribed by Julia Lu

When he was just 23, he was thrust into a kind of stardom that many dream of but few ever achieve. He reached one of the top levels of fame in a career which, at the time, rarely paid attention to someone so young—in fact, in a career that rarely paid attention to someone alive. He was aspiring to be a composer of orchestra music and it was the early 1980s. The name John Adams, whom he had recently studied with, had just barely started to register in the national consciousness. This was before the Meet The Composer Orchestra Residency Program was launched. Sure, Philip Glass and Steve Reich had already become familiar names, but it was certainly not due to orchestra concerts. But a major American orchestra played a piece by this young composer on a festival that was attended by critics from all over the country. The conductor of the orchestra attempted to show him who was the boss during an open rehearsal. He talked back. The audience ate it up and he became something of a cause célèbre. He was suddenly the next big thing, the person to watch.

He continued writing music and went on to receive a bunch of accolades for it. While still in his 20s, he was signed by one of the top music publishers. By his 30s, he was signed to a five-year exclusive contract with a major record label and he won the Pulitzer Prize. Not long after turning 40, he received the University of Louisville’s Grawemeyer Award, which is the single largest American award for composers. He was at the top of his game, so to speak. But at the same time that he was pursuing his craft and being successful at it, he decided to devote a significant part of his life to being a mentor to younger composers and help them attain the same kind of achievements that he has had. He founded the Minnesota Orchestra Composers Institute, one of the premiere programs for nurturing emerging talent, and oversaw its activities for over a decade. To this day he’s on the faculty of the Yale School of Music whose successful composer alumni nowadays seem ubiquitous.

He’s had a pretty complete life, so much so that later this month the University of Illinois Press is publishing a biography of him, a rarity for a living composer. But he’s only in his early 50s. What do you do with your life after all that? Where can you go from there? What’s life like after someone writes your biography? It’s a tough act to follow. But that is the conversation we were eager to have with Aaron Jay Kernis.

Kernis claims that his biggest epiphany after reading through the proofs of the book (it’s not an unauthorized bio) was realizing that there were connections between pieces he wrote that he originally felt had little relationship with one another. He thought he had abandoned post-minimalism in his youth. The angry angular pieces from the early ‘90s (like a symphony he wrote in response to the First Gulf War) also seemed worlds away by the time he was composing the vast soundscapes of the past decade. And how to explain how any of that related to the numerous laments he has composed for lost family members, friends, even John Lennon whose murder inspired a gorgeous rhapsodic piece for cello and piano, one of the earliest pieces of his that’s still in his active catalogue?

I did not have the reaction of wanting to flee but rather to explore that question of “which of these Aaron Kernises am I?” … For a long time I thought it was always a completely different direction, but now I see that there are circles; it circles back with new perspectives, new materials. … When I finished the book the first time, I thought about my newest work. Are these works related? Or are they something totally different? I don’t have the perspective yet. I don’t have enough distance from them to know quite where they fall on the continuum of cycling relationships. … I’m a different person than I was when I was 29.

But mostly he doesn’t worry about neatly sorting out these connections and just tries to balance teaching, raising a family, and writing music. When we visited with him in his cluttered apartment near the northern tip of Manhattan, where children’s toys freely mix with books and scores, he had just completed a viola concerto.

I have work time during the day and time with my kids at night. It’s very special time, unlike any other. And I don’t travel to performances as much, unless they’re premieres. I love to travel, but now it’s time to travel with my kids. Luckily I’m in a situation where I can teach one day a week and have the rest of the time to compose. It’s a full day. Sometimes it spills over to another day, or some students come down here and we have some extra time. But I try very much to fit it into one day. My composing time is really pretty sacred.

I’m glad he took some time out of his schedule to talk with us.

Frank J. Oteri: There’s a weird contradiction to your music. On the one hand, it’s very much of this time; many pieces are directly informed by mainstream popular culture. But, on the other hand, it seems to go against the grain of whatever our zeitgeist is supposed to be. Of course, to have your own voice, you have to fight against the zeitgeist.

Aaron Jay Kernis: But what is the zeitgeist? It’s always shifting, and it’s so large. That’s the thing about our time. The formative musical experiences I had were from college radio. And my worldview became one of just everything—‘20s jazz, minimalism, hard core, uptown stuff, lots of Irish folk music, all over the place. The idea of this multiplicity of possibilities was a great way to start. But the problem with that is that it sometimes makes choosing difficult for me, so I kind of move back and forth between things that continue to interest me.

FJO: But some things interest you more than others.

AJK: Oh, definitely.

FJO: So why are certain things constant recurring themes for you? You just mentioned ‘20s jazz, but ‘50s rock and roll and even disco have inspired you.

AJK: Right.

FJO: Everything figures in, but you eventually have to strip things away. It’s like you’re sculpting, chiseling at the musical universe to get at an essence, rather than adding to it.

AJK: Things appear and then they vanish for five or ten years. I’ve seen that very much with any interest I have. Actually, it’s kind of an interesting time now, because my daughter loves Top 40. So every morning, or pretty much any time she’s in the car, we’re listening to Top 40 together. I’m pushing her toward the independent rock stations, because I’m curious to see, in a language she’s most interested in, what cool stuff I’m going to hear. But mostly, any rock and roll, disco, or salsa influence appeared in a short period of time, and then pretty much has vanished and was replaced by the influence of jazz, which is a core kind of thing from my childhood. But I’m really curious about your provocation about not being of this time.

FJO: Well, one thing about your music that stands out is how so much of it revels in the long line and long forms. This is definitely at loggerheads with our era of limited attention spans and instantaneous gratification. I couldn’t imagine you on Twitter, for example.

AJK: And I’m not. You’re right. I’m not planning to be, but I have been kind of curious lately. I’m not really interested in poetry, but I am interested in looking for things on the internet, maybe on Twitter, to set as texts. I haven’t gotten there yet. I’m just kind of starting to see that for myself.

FJO: I’m surprised to hear you say that you’re not interested in poetry.

AJK: Not right now.

FJO: Not now, but all your life, you have been.

AJK: Yeah, all my life. But I’m very interested in prose right now and things that may not have started as poetry, but that can be extracted and be poetic.

FJO: That seems very different from Dominick Argento’s reason for setting prose to music, which he says he does in order to not be straitjacketed by the rhythms of the text.

AJK: Well, that’s another reason I’m interested in prose, exactly. When I’ve used poetry recently, I’ve started to sculpt it more. Rather than being completely respectful of exactly what the poet has to say, I’ve started shifting lines around. I use text where I can do that and feel comfortable not using all the lines or the exact structure that was laid out.

FJO: That’s very interesting, because one of the things I’ve always noticed about your vocal music is how respectful you are of the texts that you set; you don’t even repeat lines. You let the shape of the poem determine the shape of the setting of it.

AJK: That was true maybe until the Third Symphony [Symphony of Meditations], where I had this enormous text. For shorter texts, I did pretty much respect the structure and the number of lines. But the [Third Symphony’s] texts were so large, and there were some lines I didn’t like, and it was ancient poetry. My friend Peter Cole, who was translating, was completely willing to let me do whatever I wanted with the text, and that was very freeing. So I just made my own version of the text rather than feeling that I had to respect its totality at every second.

Kernis Symphony No.3 Score Sample. Copyright © 2009 by AJK Music (BMI) International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. All rights administered throughout the World by Associated Music Publishers, Inc., (BMI) New York, NY Used by Permission.

A passage from the score of Symphony of Meditations (Symphony No. 3) by Aaron Jay Kernis.
Copyright © 2009 by AJK Music (BMI)
International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.
All rights administered throughout the World by
Associated Music Publishers, Inc., (BMI) New York, NY
Used by Permission.

FJO: So you’re actually contradicting the earlier you. You’re becoming another you.

AJK: Yeah.

FJO: This makes you and history kind of a tricky thing. Of course, I bring this up because there’s a book that’s just been written about you.

AJK: Right.

FJO: Biographers always look for a through line, to try to connect the dots and to get at the essence of a person. But perhaps now that there’s a book out about you, you want to rebel against that and be somebody completely different.

AJK: I read the [galleys of the] book through without being so concerned with making corrections. I wanted to just see what the through line of the book was finally. This was about a week ago. And, you know, I did not have the reaction of wanting to flee but rather to explore that question of “which of these Aaron Kernises am I?” [The book’s author] Leta Miller very consciously wanted to draw the body of work together, rather than having it broken up into different areas. This was also my concern. We all remember having reviews that frustrated or repelled us. It was always incredibly frustrating if a critic would say, “This sounds like nothing else in his work.” Of course, I knew that. In fact, there were three or four other pieces that clearly the critic didn’t know that were part of a group. Sometimes they were three years before, sometimes just the month before. There always have been groups of works of different types. I kind of do one for a while, and leap over that and do something else, and then find my way back in a circuitous way. But there’s been a transformation, too, that usually happens.

The cover for Leta Miller’s book, Aaron Jay Kernis, published this month by the University of Illinois Press.
(As a complement to the book, UIL Press has also put together an extensive webpage of audio links for many of Kernis’s compositions.)

FJO: In terms of how your work is part of history, it’s interesting to ponder earlier versions of music you have revised—because you’ve revised work.

AJK: Not that much.

FJO: Perhaps I should say reuse work.

AJK: Reuse. Yes. That’s true.

FJO: But I was thinking of one of your earliest pieces, the Partita for solo guitar, which goes back to 1981. You were 21 years old at the time. What did the 21-year-old Aaron Kernis sound like? Since you revised the piece in 1995, it’s hard to know. How much of that piece is the you of 21, and how much of it is the you at the age of 35?

AJK: Let me see if I can remember. It’s a three-movement partita. That was more of a revision. It was awkward. Some of the sections were too long. Some of the guitar writing wasn’t sustaining as much as I liked and it was kind of working against the instrument. In ’95, I wrote 100 Greatest Dance Hits, and at that time I was able to work with David Tanenbaum and tried to work through the issues in the piece. But the voice in that piece—one scale per movement with a lot of nested processes like numerical forms going on—that was a lot of who I was at 20 and 21. So I think that really does reflect me until about 1983, until I was 23. Then I’d had enough of that. That’s often how it is. I get to a point and then I want to go off in another direction. For a long time I thought it was always a completely different direction, but now I see that there are circles; it circles back with new perspectives, new materials. For example, one of the circles back was after a comment that Russell Platt made about a recent piece, Pieces of Winter Sky, that I wrote for eighth blackbird that in certain ways feels like a new direction for me. I’m not sure if it’s going to be a direction, but it’s certainly a new place to go. But Russell said, “Oh, that seems more like the old you.” The “old you” that he meant was the Invisible Mosaic II world, which was much more strongly dissonant, not really process-like in any way but more moment form. Pieces of Winter Sky is definitely a series of moments. But even in Mosaic, there was a process going on. It has a moment form and process form. So I see the relationships, but it felt very different. At 52, I’m a different person than I was when I was 29.

Aaron Jay Kernis in the 1980s. Photo courtesy Aaron Jay Kernis.

FJO: Has reading the book made you see those connections or is this something that you have always thought about?

AJK: Leta and I talked a lot about the connections through the whole process of [her working on] the book. As I said, that was really a major focus for her. What I’m curious to see as I reflect on this more is what the connections are that I don’t perceive. Are there patterns? Which patterns am I less familiar with and are they more revelatory? Are there any or have I known all this? When I finished the book the first time, I thought about my newest work. Are these works related? Or are they something totally different? I don’t have the perspective yet. I don’t have enough distance from them to know quite where they fall on the continuum of cycling relationships.

FJO: Well, something you definitely have distance from at this point is dream of the morning sky. You mentioned being 23 and suddenly the process wasn’t as interesting to you and you were doing other things. There are certainly older pieces of yours that are still in your catalog and that people perform. But dream of the morning sky put you in a public sphere in a way that nothing else had up until that point. Getting a piece played by the New York Philharmonic at the age of 23 was huge for you. I think it ultimately not only shaped your subsequent compositional career, but also your role as a musical citizen and mentor to other composers.

AJK: I agree.

FJO: In hindsight having had such an experience so early on definitely seems to have been the initial impetus for you eventually founding the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute many years later. It also seems like something that planted the seed for your ongoing role as a composition teacher. So what happened at that time that ultimately led you to a lifetime of wanting to provide that kind of compositional nurturing to other people?

AJK: There were a couple of aspects. One was that Jacob Druckman was a very supportive teacher to his students and he was very beloved by his students. He was very engaged with the music of his time and how students fit into what interested him, and what he saw was going on in music as a whole. Definitely that experience with the New York Philharmonic came about because of him, and I saw firsthand how such an experience could change one’s life. So now, whether it’s a recommendation for a commission or for a residency, I understand how important—public or private—these steps can be for young composers. For some it will make a big life difference and also an aesthetic difference; for others it will just be a step along the way. In Minnesota, when I was given an opportunity to help craft that kind of experience for young composers, it was on a much bigger scale over many years. But it infuses my teaching as well, and my view of young composers.

A young Aaron Jay Kernis around the time of his breakthrough at the Horizons Festival. Photo courtesy Aaron Jay Kernis.

FJO: In terms of your teaching, I think there’s something that’s particularly practical about the training that people get at Yale, both from you and from the other people on the faculty there. A testimony to that is how many extremely successful composers have CVs that state that they went to Yale. Obviously, something’s happening at Yale that’s creating a recipe for composers to function so effectively in this field in terms of their practical skills.

AJK: There’s no doubt that they get some of that from what we relate of our experiences to them, real world suggestions about where to look, where to go. There are varying of degrees of entrepreneurship among the faculty but I don’t think by any means that it comes from the faculty all the time, or specifically from them. It’s an environment where these graduate students, if they’re so enthused, can get involved with the drama school or other productions around campus, and already find outlets for their entrepreneurial efforts. We certainly see composers who come in and they’re already raring to go to make concert series, to put together ensembles, to get involved in the theater world at Yale.

FJO: To bring it back to your experience as a 23-year-old having the New York Philharmonic perform dream of the morning sky: the other thing, besides serving as a model for your subsequent role as a mentor to younger composers, is that it placed you as a composer within a zeitgeist, for better or worse. The festival was called Since 1968, a New Romanticism? Suddenly there was this new label. Labels always simplify things and it definitely put your music in a context which it doesn’t completely fit in comfortably.

AJK: It never did. It was a strand in my work; it comes and goes. When I was writing a bunch of pieces using sonata form, should I have been called part of a new classicism? I don’t know.

FJO: Except when you were using those forms they were big and expansive, more like the way that the 19th-century Romantic composers explored those forms than the way, say, Haydn would have.

AJK: No. I definitely think it’s more toward the Romantic, looking both at the teeming inner world and nature and art and writing; the influences are very vast.

FJO: And certainly the long line, the idea of a long melody that grows and keeps developing—

AJK: I start with that for virtually every piece. Even if today I’m sitting down to write a short piece that is the antithesis of that. I’m always thinking of myself as wanting to create the long line through singing, through breathing; that’s the starting place.

FJO: Where did that come from?

AJK: I think it came from very formative experiences as a choral singer and the first lessons I ever had as a child. My mother started me with voice lessons, just completely out of the blue. I have no idea what inspired her to do that. I think she always wanted to be in the theater. She had a dream of herself somehow in show business. And so she started me at six or something with voice lessons. I learned to use my voice a bit, then choral music, then hearing Mahler, all kinds of ringing big bells, playing the violin, and long lines there. So it’s pretty central.

Cover of Cedille CD of Kernis orchestral music

Kernis’s love for Mahler pervades all of the music on a disc of his orchestral music featuring the Grant Park Orchestra conducted by Carlos Kalmar released on Cedille Records.

FJO: To take this back to teaching, this probably didn’t come from any of the people you studied composition with. I don’t really think of Druckman or Wuorinen as long line composers.

AJK: I don’t think anyone ever talked to me about that, no. I don’t have a memory of that being anything coming from any of them.

FJO: So what did come from them?

AJK: Different things from everyone, of course. My first teacher, Theodore Antoniou, was very important. He started me with kind of Hindemithian counterpoint and voice leading exercises, also some 12-tone row manipulation exercises, then a lot of looking at European avant-garde scores with extended techniques, both his work and the work of other Greek composers. And George Crumb, of course, was a great discovery of mine at 15. [Antoniou] always emphasized that if you’re writing for an instrument, the music you write should only be able to be played on that instrument. So he was always stressing the unique qualities of every instrument. I haven’t necessarily followed that all the time, but it was certainly an opening idea for a 15-year-old to really look at what the sonic and technical possibilities are that made each situation unique.

FJO: It’s interesting to hear about that from you since, by not following his advice and transforming your English horn concerto Colored Field into a cello concerto, you wound up receiving the Grawemeyer Award.

AJK: Well, of course, the cello version can’t be played on any other instrument. Though you’re right, and it’s both for practical reasons and feeling comfortable with, à la Bach, making various versions of pieces work on other instruments, sharing the love in a way.

Score sample from Colored Field (English horn version) Copyright © 1994 by Associated Music Publishers, Inc., (BMI), New York, NY International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

Measures 62 through 65 from the original version of Colored Field, for English horn and orchestra by Aaron Jay Kernis.
Copyright © 1994 by Associated Music Publishers, Inc., (BMI), New York, NY
International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

Score sample of the cello version of Colored Field. Copyright © 1994 by Associated Music Publishers, Inc., (BMI), New York, NY This arrangement Copyright © 2000 by Associated Music Publishers, Inc., (BMI), New York, NY International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

The exact same passage in the version of Aaron Jay Kernis’s Colored Field for cello and orchestra.
Copyright © 1994 by Associated Music Publishers, Inc., (BMI), New York, NY
This arrangement Copyright © 2000 by Associated Music Publishers, Inc., (BMI), New York, NY
International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

But that doesn’t work with many pieces. I mean, it’s not something I’ve done for more than maybe five or six pieces; it’s not an everyday thing. When I wrote Trio in Red, the clarinet part is a clarinet part. It uses the entire range and focus, just as Antoniou would have stressed, to make it special for that instrument.

So, that was Theodore. Then through Joe Franklin, I was exposed to Relâche and the Philadelphia new music scene—a lot of early post-minimalism and highly theatrical music. After that, [I studied with] John Adams for a very short time. Certainly it was really fundamental to hear Shaker Loops in a big loft space in San Francisco and to hear his first successes like Harmonium and Harmonielehre. It was just around the time that his life was really changing. But San Francisco didn’t quite match with my metabolism; I was antsy that it was so relaxed.

So I came back to New York and studied for a year with Wuorinen and just slammed into a confrontational way of teaching. It was scary. I was terrified for a number of weeks. I was like, before a lesson, “What is this man going to say?” I knew he was a master and it was a very important year. Very much to his credit, I think he saw that I wasn’t looking to study strict 12-tone technique and so we worked through other issues: structure and language to a certain extent. Very pithy, highly focused, and very important confrontations occurred.

Then Elias Tanenbaum—I already had all this stuff to process. Elias was a great teacher to be with. He was very supportive, but also—in his kind of needling way—he made me own up to what I was choosing to do and also recognize that the possibilities were large. Following that, rather than having specific techniques that they were imparting, the teachers from that point on were more generous in the sense of following what I was doing and making comments. After that point, I didn’t feel I had teachers that were trying to fundamentally change me.

FJO: So now that you’re teaching young composers, how do you balance the need to expose students to the wide range of techniques that you’re fluent in while making sure they don’t turn into clones of you?

AJK: As I teach for more years, the goal for me has been to learn more and more patience. At first, I came in with some expectations about what I was looking for. Over time, I just dropped those more and more. It’s about each student: the work they’re producing and what could be strengthened. It’s about what kind of exercises or tool-strengthening devices could be put in their direction that they can grow from, and trying—whether it’s over a half year or a year—to figure out more and more about who they are and what their work is doing and to help it be even more of what it already is.

FJO: In terms of who you are, your composing with long lines pre-dated any of your teachers, and it has stuck with you. Being very interested in process in your early years, on the other hand, is something that has slipped away, and you have grown more and more toward writing music intuitively. But intuition is something you really can’t teach. You can’t even teach it to yourself.

AJK: No, and it’s always so awkward to use that word because even if you’re using an absolutely rigid and unyielding series of processes that essentially make all the decisions for you, even then you’re using your intuition to structure those processes—unless you’re giving over choices to an external structure like the first computer that LeJaren Hiller used. Even so, intuition is always a part. What sounds good? What sounds good to you? What are choices where you think, “Oh this doesn’t quite work; I’ll change that to make it more internally satisfying”? So it’s always very difficult to talk about becoming more intuitive. But right now it’s true. My process feels quite different. I’m more interested in going where I don’t know what the next step is and how I get to that next step, rather than thinking, “Oh, I want to go here or go here. How do I go there?” It’s a different enough change and it’s frustrating to do that for too long; it gets very tiring actually. I can’t decide whether I want to go back to a more pre-compositional ordering of some elements or to play this out for a little bit longer. You have to be so alert at every moment to leave doors open and it’s very difficult.

FJO: When you say leave doors open, what does that mean structurally? Could you give me a specific example?

AJK: This is key to pieces like Winter Sky and Perpetual Chaconne and my new viola concerto, the last movement particularly, and even Color Wheel—that’s sort of where that began but I still had some big goals along the way. I’m very visual when I write. I’m seeing a path. I’m seeing a series of steps, or of textures, or coupled harmonies that are core harmonies, that I’m heading towards. In those more recent pieces I just mentioned, there is more a sense of a series of moments. There’s still a developmental long line in those moments, but a number of them were written as kind of blocks. It’s more an assemblage than writing in a through-composed way. So I’ll write things more out of order and not exactly know what’s the end, what’s the middle. It will develop out of—as I said—a kind of more intuitive process rather than an external idea of what was going to happen when it began.

1998 Photo of Kernis (left) and his wife Evelyne Luest with Kernis holding his Pulitzer Prize

Aaron Jay Kernis and his wife, pianist Evelyne Luest at the 1998 Pulitzer Prize Ceremony.

FJO: Everything we’ve been talking about has been really abstract. But one of the main things that’s served as a catalyst for pieces of yours throughout the decades has been responding to an external source, whether it’s history, current events, or something personal such as the death of your parents or the birth of your twins who’ve now been around for more than a decade. The Gulf War inspired your second symphony. One of the most heart-wrenching stories is the story you tell of your visit to Birkenau and how that triggered Colored Field. These extra-musical elements are often what draw non-composers into this music; it has emotional gravitas in a way that, say, a Symphony No. 12 does not.

AJK: Right. That’s something that hasn’t stopped, but the influences more recently are more internal and very personal. But all of the things you mention, all of the external reactions trigger emotions. And emotions then trigger sequences of ideas or ways of conceptualizing a musical form. That’s definitely what happened. I can still feel a relationship between the way I thought about big forms in Colored Field or the pieces that I consider the war pieces, and this emotional triggering of ideas and moods. Pieces of Winter Sky is crucial for me right now because it’s like those roughly 18 pieces were like 18 melancholy studies. I didn’t want to call the piece that. In fact, it almost reminds me of that black and white film that was done with Cage’s 101—you have what seems like an unchanging series of grays that are changing very subtly—or in the late work of Rothko. That was the experience of that piece, not looking at the sky when it was blue, but for days only a slightly changing gray sky. What would it be like to write different sections that reflected variations on that, how that affected me visually? The ironic thing is that it is an incredibly colorful piece, with all this metal percussion, and all this distinctive writing for each of the instruments, going back to what Antoniou said. Yet the experience of creating it had to do with finding differences in the similarity of a fairly unchanging picture.

FJO: But the medium you express these emotional responses in is this abstract form of music. You’re not writing short stories or poetry. You’re not painting the landscape. When people hear this music, they don’t necessarily get what’s in your head, especially what you were saying about a gray sky. They’re hearing all this color with the percussion. So how important is it for you that people get this? And how much do you feel people can get?

AJK: In the fall I had a performance in Princeton of Colored Field. Before and after the performance they invited a number of schools to bring their classes and expose the kids to the piece and to the background of the piece and to respond to it. I just got in the mail this incredible artwork and story writing that kids did through the experience of hearing Colored Field. It’s just amazing.

Art created in response to hearing Kernis' music by children 1 of 3

Colored Field by Shubha Vasisht (who last year was in the 7th Grade at The Hun School).

Art created in response to hearing Kernis' music by children 2 of 3

The Face in the Sky by Bailey Eng (who last year was in the 6th Grade at Montgomery Lower Middle School).

Art created in response to hearing Kernis' music by children 3 of 3

Bird’s Prey by Upekha Samarasekera (who last year was in 7th Grade at Montgomery Upper Middle School).
[Ed note: These three original art works were all created in response to hearing the Princeton Symphony Orchestra’s November 3, 2013 performance of Aaron Jay Kernis’s Colored Field by students attending nine different New Jersey middle schools through Listen Up!, an initiative of the PSO BRAVO! education program sponsored by the Princeton Symphony Orchestra. They were among a total of 36 art works that were part of the exhibition “Listening to the Colored Field” which has been shown at the Arts Council of Princeton and The Jewish Center of Princeton. All are reproduced with permission.

FJO: Did they just hear the piece or did they also get a program note about it or some kind of pre-concert talk by you?

AJK: They didn’t get a talk from me. They might have gotten the program note, from the CD. But some of what I described as my experience is deliberately left incomplete. The thing that fascinates me most is to see the variety of responses to it. The responses could be completely 180 degrees away from what my original experience was. That doesn’t matter at all to me. I hope that people will have their own experiences and will feel something special or deeply; that’s the power of music for me. Hopefully it will allow people to recognize things inside them and maybe they can give voice to in words or maybe they have no words for it.

FJO: Paradoxically the fact that music does not have fixed meaning gives it even more meaning.

AJK: Exactly. Very well said.
|
FJO: But because you’ve referenced synaesthesia in some pieces, you obviously in your own perception feel there is transference from one sense mode to another.

AJK: Definitely. The way I compose, too. Not all the time, but a lot of times, I’m just walking around and I’m not so much imagining notes. It’s hard to explain. It’s like I’m seeing textures. I think I was exposed early enough to Penderecki, Xenakis, Ravel, that those sonic worlds created a kind of visual relationship and a kind of emotional, textual relationship. I walk around and imagine things, but they’re not necessarily fixed notes, not necessarily tuned. It’s more like how I see shapes; it’s abstract. For a long time, I would come home and try to find a way to form those into something I could feel and grapple with. Now I’ve left that step out. I’m not drawing big structural plans out.

FJO: A lot of what you have written has been memorial music in some way. The earliest unrevised piece of yours I know is the Meditation in Memory of John Lennon, which is a gorgeous lament for Lennon. I can hear a through line from that all the way to your Ballad for eight cellos, and there are many other pieces of yours along the way that have this quality, too. Remembering the dead has brought out some of your most beautiful music, your most moving and most transformative music, at least to me. I find that an interesting through line in terms of what music can mean. I didn’t know your parents, but I have a sense of them somehow because of the music you wrote in their memory. It’s not a clear sense because music is abstract, but nevertheless there’s something in there that reached me and that can reach anybody who hears it and that makes it a more universal thing.

Hand written score sample from Meditation for cello and piano.Copyright © 1981 by Associated Music Publishers, Inc., (BMI), New York, NY International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

A passage from Aaron Jay Kernis’s handwritten score for Meditation in Memory of John Lennon for cello and piano.
Copyright © 1981 by Associated Music Publishers, Inc., (BMI), New York, NY
International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

AJK: The experience of writing those pieces was always very multi-faceted. In Lennon’s case, it was being around Central Park, being in very close proximity when it happened, and looking for both an element of the music of his that I loved and that affected me and finding some small way to transmit that in that piece. But any of those memorializing pieces have an element that is not necessarily one that people would hear, an element of what the importance of that person to me was in some musical way. I could tell you specifically what those are, but it’s richer than just that. There have been a lot of those pieces. My cousin Michael, who was just a few years older than me, died very young while the Trumpet Concerto was being written. And the Viola Concerto is also a kind of memorial; it’s not so much for anyone that’s passed away, but it’s about how we change over our lives, how things disappear and reappear, get together and get frayed.

FJO: Now in terms of the things that have shaped you, so far we have only talked about texts intermittently, but you’ve written tons of choral music and song cycles both for solo singer with piano and solo singer with ensemble. So text has been extremely important to you. And, when you set a text, that text already comes with its own narrative and set of emotions.

AJK: That’s a frame to hold the music.

FJO: At the onset of our conversation you were saying that you’ve started taking text and reworking it to suit your own needs rather than crafting music that will serve those text’s needs. I’d like to flesh that out a little bit more—what it means in terms of the kinds of narrative you’re hoping to tell using someone else’s words.

AJK: I’ve done this three or four times now. There’s a practical element where the texts are simply too long to set completely. Or I don’t like parts of the text. I recently did a setting of Psalm 104. That’s a huge psalm and I had nine minutes, so I chose the bits that I liked best and tried to knit them together so it didn’t seem like there was a huge hole.

One thing that made vocal music always a little easier is because the emotions are there [already in the words], and are something to respond to. And, as I said, it’s a kind of frame, a time frame to keep the whole work together that the text helps set. As my approach becomes a little bit less structured, it makes me feel freer to play both with musical form and more abstractly to not have a fixed container of the text as well. Another thing, too, is that I’ve missed having really successful collaborations with other writers and other artists. It’s something I really would like to do more in the future. In a way, this creates a kind of collaboration with the text. Even though it’s not with a person, rather it’s just taking a completely fixed form and making it more fluid.

FJO: Your mentioning collaboration with other writers immediately makes me think of opera.

AJK: Yeah, opera is something that has just eluded my grasp. The projects I had did not work out. They were very difficult, and at very difficult times also. For example, I had an opera for Santa Fe Opera. And it was not working with the writer, and in the middle of the process my mother died. Then a number of months later my father died. The kind of intensive pressure that was necessary to make that piece work in that situation was just too hard, so it just went away.

I’m not sure how this will happen yet, but I’m seeing more theater; I’m looking for playwrights. I want to keep open and not just sit here in my studio. In the future I hope that some collaborations will develop. I had a very nice collaboration with a choreographer last year, and I had at least one or two experiences with installations and that was great. I would love to do more of that.

FJO: In terms of doing things in order to put yourself in an uncomfortable zone—not having a structure, not knowing where it’s going to go, to go somewhere else. What would be maximum discomfort?

AJK: Maximum discomfort is different from finding your way without a form. The uncomfortable question is a different one, because the process of composing is always very difficult and no one is a worse critic than I am toward myself. Yet it can be extremely pleasurable when it’s going well, and when it’s purring along. I think I’m looking toward collaboration more with a sense of possibility, rather than a sense of creating more difficulty for myself, setting up invigorating challenges rather than wrenching challenges.

Kernis and his wife with their two young twins, one sitting on his lap, the other on his shoulders

Kernis, his wife Evelyne and their twins in 2004. Photo courtesy Aaron Jay Kernis.

FJO: Of course, the biggest challenge is balancing it all—the music you are writing, your teaching commitments, plus having a family, two young children and a wife who’s also a concert pianist. How do you squeeze it all in?

AJK: Well, it’s difficult. Some things have had to go. The thing that’s most clearly gone is concert going. I have work time during the day and time with my kids at night. It’s very special time, unlike any other. And I don’t travel to performances as much, unless they’re premieres. I love to travel, but now it’s time to travel with my kids. Luckily I’m in a situation where I can teach one day a week and have the rest of the time to compose. It’s a full day. Sometimes it spills over to another day, or some students come down here and we have some extra time. But I try very much to fit it into one day. My composing time is really pretty sacred.

FJO: Well I’m glad you made time to do this with us.

AJK: Me too.

keyboard of piano with pens and toy on top

This photo of the corner of the piano in Aaron Jay Kernis’s composing studio taken by Molly Sheridan during our visit probably shows the combination of worlds Kernis must navigate on a daily basis even better than our conversation did.

Frank J. Oteri

Subscribe to our newsletter and never miss a beat!